Hottoceame The Age of Commercialism

NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

ThurstonHunger There may not be much dialog in this, but that's offset by a desperation that is anything but silent. In addition, this film is almost always shot in the most grimy light; so as one reviewer already wrote you have the recipes for a "miserabilist's" delight.Unlike that reviewer though, I was quite captivated by this. Some of it surely was the lure of a look into a foreign culture, granted a somewhat lurid look. Still the poverty they are trapped in comes with a fantastic view, and the constant flow of wind helped to keep a somewhat fresh feeling to the trapped dwelling for the main family. I supposed that wind is to remind us of forces we cannot see and we cannot control but yet are constantly at play.I also think the casting was crucial here, via the dual nature of the faces. The son who wanting to project street tough, often looks like a sheepish 13-year old. The father whose macho exterior belies the fact that he's powerless. And the mother, who was a tremendous choice, the make-up and lighting help to accentuate that she is worn-out, but the glimmer of her beauty in decline and her desire for some joy to shine out of her tired eyes make her as stark a contrast as the lighting in the film. Her cell phone ring cries out for her, a long gone Turkish love pop song souring.And I'm leaving off Ercan Kesal as the political functionary who connects all three as each member of the family makes a bad decision involving him. His weasel-y nature is communicated also without words.I like that the filmmaker does not need to cement the unity of this family with specific on-screen action, even as their mistakes push the family towards fragmentation. Blood remains thicker than water in every nation, although an aquatic apparition is summoned. It connects them but does it also condemn them to fragmentation? A film about scary sacrifices in gorgeously ghastly light.

timmy_501 The three monkeys in the title of this film refer to both the classic "See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil" maxim and to the compact family of three depicted in the film. These three characters are Eyup, his wife Hacer, and their son Ismail. Each of these people seem to live by the maxim of the monkeys so much that they hardly talk to each other at all. Events unfold with a tragic inevitability after Eyup agrees to confess to a crime committed by his boss Servet to shield him from political disgrace in exchange for a large payoff. The shattered family then attempts to go on about their lives as if nothing had ever happened, even when more things do happen. Problems that normally would be relatively routine when faced by a united family thus become a devastating cycle that threatens to destroy their lives.The material here is good but it likely would have devolved into histrionic melodrama in the hands of a less restrained director. Ceylan is a minimalist and as such he tends to allow the actions of the character to speak for themselves. In a way the lack of exposition puts the viewer in a similar situation to that of the family; we don't know exactly what they are thinking either.Ceylan's greatest strength is in visuals: his landscapes look unlike anyone else's. The colors are often desaturated; I generally think this visual technique is a mistake but it looks great in his films. Like all Ceylan films, Three Monkeys is worth seeing for the indescribable visuals alone, but this film in particular also offers a perfectly executed family tragedy. Ceylan really outdid himself this time, this is one of the best films of the decade.

Polaris_DiB Most of the Eastern European cinema that makes it over the ocean to US theatres is of the depressing and brutally color-washed variety (see 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days), and this is no exception. Cannes winner for Best Director award, the Turkish film Three Monkeys features a family breaking down from one bad decision following the next. It all starts out with the father deciding to take the fall for a politician involved in a hit-and-run. Then, as the mother gets involved with the politician and the son gets sick, the three of them begin to slowly lose themselves in dysfunction and mis-aimed hatred, building long and subtly into a dramatic tension that never really bursts, but does begin to fill each frame with uncomfortable alacrity. This is the type of movie where you get so involved in the long, methodical takes that you don't notice when it suddenly becomes nearly unbearable to watch these people being so self-destructive, and you realize that, unaccountably, you're completely hooked.An interesting device running throughout the movie is of visitors--not visitors of the neighborly "come over and hang out" variety, but trains, weather, and phone calls interjecting each scene like an unwanted guest, stabbing into the (typically) non-conversation the characters are having and eating away communication like corrosive acid. Then there's the visitor of the dead brother, who comes to comfort the characters at various, incredibly uncanny, points.This is the exact type of movie that most audiences would have a hard time with because it's "slow", but nevertheless there are some scenes so filled with dark energy that it's hard to remember the movie as much more as an electrifying experience. Of particular interest is the mother, whose face reaches the scowling limits of the term "if looks could kill" almost literalized. As much as the cinematography and blocking were fun to look at, this movie eventually became the actors' movies, all considerations of what's going on otherwise lost in the way each one of them somehow managed to have expressions that wouldn't move all while the muscles under their faces writhed and twitched like snakes. Watch that scene as the mother stares over the sea-side again and note how she is not moving at all, but every muscle in her body is going haywire.

bartekfm As a kind of cultural globalization takes over world cinema, one should be grateful for directors such as the Hungarian Béla Tarr, the Romanian Cristian Mungiu, the Iranians Abbas Kiarostami and Bahman Ghobadi and the Turkish Nuri Bilge Ceylan who keep alive a personal, regional and stylistically individual form of film-making. Their work is never likely to become widely popular at home or abroad, but they're beacons of hope for the future of a troubled art.A photographer by profession, Ceylan turned to film-making in the mid-90s and works largely with non-professional actors and small budgets. He belongs in the tradition of Tarkovsky, Bergman, Antonioni, Angelopoulos and other masters that seemed in the 60s and 70s to be on the point of becoming a new or, at least, parallel mainstream but has now been marginalised. His new film, The Three Monkeys, like its two predecessors, won a major award at Cannes, in this case the prize for best director, and it begins with that familiar dramatic device for the creation of tension, guilt and dangerous consequences - the hit-and-run accident.Here, a man kills a pedestrian at night on a country road. It transpires that he is a politician, Servet, and in order for the event not to affect a forthcoming election he bribes his driver Eyüp, who wasn't with him on this occasion, to take the rap. He'll go on getting paid during his nine-month sentence and at the end will receive a decent pay-off.The title is a reference to the Sino-Japanese image of the three wise monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, suggesting this film is a moral fable about the consequences of evasion, corruption and suppression. Servet thinks he's doing what's best for his party and the country: he's a supporter of Prime Minister Erdogan and the occasion is the 2007 general election that ended in a landslide victory. Eyüp believes he's acting like a good servant, but, more important, he's getting the money that will get a better home for his handsome wife Hacer and provide for the education of his teenage son Ismail.Nothing good comes of these actions. One way and another, everyone's life is affected, indeed in some measure destroyed, but like much else in the film the judgments are left to the viewer. Are we dealing with national problems of widespread social corruption, with the weaknesses of a set of individuals or the operation of a malignant fate of a kind that stalks us all? From the start, Ceylan draws us into the very narrative fabric. In the opening scene, using silence, long takes, available light and dramatic compositions, he makes us ask questions about what we are seeing. Who is this man? What has he done? How will he react? There are long gaps in time between individual sequences and seemingly important facts are never made plain.Ismail comes home with a badly cut hand and a bruised face, but he never reveals to his mother, or to us, whether these wounds came from brawling or from political demonstrations. They have the effect, however, of persuading her to visit the politician and seek an advance on the bribe to buy a car for the boy. This in turn leads to an affair, which is only discovered when Ismail returns home early to find his mother making love to Servet. When Eyüp emerges from jail, he's furious about the car and his suspicions over his wife's infidelity seem confirmed by a message on her cell phone. For most of the film, the images are desaturated, but during the scene of reunion, Hacer is wearing a red slip, which both excites her husband and drives him to violence.In the family's background is the death of another son, some 15 years earlier, and his father and surviving brother are haunted by visions of this loss. In the future lies a repetition of the incident that launches the film, only here the conspiracy is initiated by Eyüp. Though perhaps not quite as good as Climates, Ceylan's last picture, this is a film of formidable power that sticks in the mind.Two sequences in particular stand out. In one, the politician rejects the obsessed Hacer with great brutality, but the camera is placed nearly 50 yards away across a field. In the other, the film's closing long shot, the husband stands on the balcony of their ramshackle apartment block to the south of Istanbul, his back to the camera, looking out over the Sea of Marmara as an electric storm begins to stir.