127 Hours
The story is based on a book, and therefore, even before watching the film, you know two things: The guy will spend 127 hours in agony and he will survive. But how does it happen? Can you really tell a simple story like that in 90 minutes? More than anything else, this film is a proof of concept. There is no such thing as a story too thin to make a good movie out of it (a criticism that goes towards many stories, like Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel’s love story, or Julie Powell’s “Julia” project to make all recipes from Julia Child’s book in one year). Under the hand of a skillful director and screenplay writer, every story can be turned into something great. As long as humans are involved, there is humanity in it.
This film’s greatest strength is indeed its focus on the main character. The way he reflects upon his own life through those hallucinations are amazingly gripping, and when it comes to the question of cutting off that arm, I felt… alive. It was a feeling of blood rushing through my veins, beautifully orchestrated by the fitting music. I kept wanting to look away, but it’s a bad idea to run away from such an experience. And I know that, if it happened to me, I would have given into the pressure. I also liked how the guy is just a simple, normal human being, a little weird (like we all are, right?) but ultimately from a fairly normal family with a normal life, running into the biggest experience of his life. It’s brilliant.
I think that James Franco did a good job, but considering how everybody hails him as the new star in the acting world, I was perhaps less impressed than I could have been. There are not many young actors who could have pulled off this role, that is for sure, and he is very believable indeed, but I thought he was even better in “14 Actors”. And oh God! I think he looks like Joseph Gordon-Levitt. XD
Note that I have updated my “current top 30 movies” list. Since the previous lists were from 2005 and 2008, this year marks the date of the next list. So far, there is 1 movie from the 20’s, 3 from the 40’s and 50’s respectively, 2 from the 60’s and 70’s respectively, 1 from the 80’s, 4 from the 90’s and a total of 14 from the new millennium. The majority are still American films, with 14 films, followed by Japan with 4 films. Instead of Jarmusch and Wilder, Lubitsch is now the only director with 2 films in the list. In comparison to those, “127 Hours” has no chance to figure on a list like my personal favorites, even if I do think that the film was very good and preferred it over Black Swan. At this point, a movie has to make such an impact on me that I have obsessed about it for awhile before it can appear there. But when it comes to the other important criterion for the list – whether a film tells us something about humanity (and why “Some like it hot”, of all films, has fell out of that list) – as I mentioned before, “127 Hours” absolutely excels at that.