Thursday, January 2, 2014

Cine-therapy

Back to work for Jake.

After trading the chance of near 80 January days in LA for the cold and wind and snow of winter in NYC, (remember he's a New Yorker now), he is heading to where winter is not just a season this weekend.
Jake will be joining Denis to discuss An Enemy as part of a showcase of 10 Canadian made films. They will be discussing the movie on Sunday, Jan 5th.  (Hopefully the airports will be back on schedule - it will be a heck of a winter road trip - and that's without the Ford Focus factor).

There is a recent review of  Enemy from Film.com.

Giving it a great review it also reveals it has one of the scariest endings on film, but it goes on to describe the crux of the movie.


 "its strange but simple narrative almost exclusively devoted to pitting male fear against male desire in a horrifying war of attrition. Likely to prove far more compelling for thirtysomething men than any other demographic, “Enemy” is first and foremost an extended allegory for male infidelity and the permanent residue of guilt that it can leave in its wake."

The review also addresses how well Jake carved out the two distinct characters who dominated the screen without making them into caricatures of the extremes of life. 

Reading the review it seems like making this movie might have been less about filmmaking and more about an exercise in analysis that you would work through on Freud's couch. 

Could that be what drew Jake to the project?

While dark and flawed the movie seems to tap back where Jake started in his career, those complex flawed characters into complicated movies where the endings might not be the resolution with a happy ending that you would expect. (Donnie Darko, Good Girl, Lovely & Amazing) Those films that brought him to the forefront as an indie movie darling.

“ 'Enemy' is a deviously sneaky success – a blundering B-movie with a wicked bite, Villeneuve’s seedy wank resolves itself as a venomous and universally relatable portrait of how self-analysis can be the quickest road to self-harm. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but it sure is easier to live."

7 comments:

  1. Is there a release date for this movie? I wonder why it has not been released yet, especially since it was filmed and completed before the filming of Prisoners.

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  2. Hi wondering

    The release date for Enemy is March 14th for the US. I'm sure that it will be a limited release and will most likely be in more art house movie theaters.

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  3. it's great to see Jake wade back into these types of heady, dark roles. can't wait to see this one.

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  4. Enemy isn't appealing to me at all. There's got to be a reason why it had such a hard time getting distribution. And the more I read about Denis V., the more he kind of bothers me. I don't like it when someone shows signs of pleasure in messing with people's minds and going for shock value.

    And why is this movie's screenplay veering so far off from the original written story? It just sounds like the Love and Other Drugs scenario all over again to me.

    Color me very skeptical.

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  5. Enemy isn't appealing to me at all.

    Since Brokeback have there been any Jake movies that appeal to you?

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