I saw another good movie in DVD this weekend: Spielberg’s The Terminal. Without giving too much away, the story is about a man who gets stranded in JFK airport (New York) for many months due to bizarre bureaucratic problems. Without any money and speaking almost no English, he has to figure out how to survive in the airport.
Frequent travellers will recognize the Twilight Zone unreality that airports have, of “neither here nor there” places. Denied both entry and extradiction, Tom Hanks’ character is in the USA, but not really there.
Hanks is excellent, playing a man who conceals his thoughts and feelings instead of sharing them with us (perhaps trying to protect what’s left of his privacy). But the best acting in the movie is not by him, but by Indian actor Kumar Pallana, as the paranoid janitor who rules the airport as his very particular kingdom. Catherine Zeta-Jones provides eye-candy.
The story functions as a fairy tale (in the real world, they’d just send him to Guantanamo – where he would provide important information about Al-Qaida – and be done with him). It’s a very good film, almost a great film. Like most Holywood films, it goes for the easy ending and completely misses its point. A good effort, nevertheless.
Are DVDs coming out quicker than ever Glaub? I thought I saw that the Infernal Affairs DVD was out already and that’s still all over in movie houses. That’s one of the several recent critically acclaimed Chinese movies that I’m dying to see.
I just saw this movie this weekend as well. I am still amazed at how good of an actor Tom Hanks is. He pulls it off wonderfully. When I watched it with my fiance, at the very end she said, “Really makes you dislike America, huh?” In some ways, yes, the way we deal with foreigners especially and our indifference to people who need help…so that stuck with me…
The answer to this won’t help me, as I’m sure I don’t have a future in screenwriting…but what ending would have worked better? Closer to the story on which it’s based?
IMHO (as always): the main problems with the ending are that it is too long and wacks you over the head with sentimentality. It’s more than a little implausible (guy from poor country spends what could be months of wages to come to the US to do what?), but most of the movie is implausible anyway (sure, they’d let him rearrange the chairs or make artistic fountains out of urinals).
The story is implausible, but it works as a fairy tale. But, at the end of a fairy tale, you expect something to change: the frog becomes a prince, the king learns a lesson, whatever. Fairy tales are about transformation. But here, nothing happens. Nobody changes, nobody learns anything.
The subplot with C. Z-J. goes nowhere. It could have been left out of the story without any loss (other than eye-candy) to the audience.
So basically, to turn from a good movie into a great movie, they should have cut about half an hour of sub-par material, and tightened the end. Make it mean something, or at least make the audience thinks that there will be meaning and then disappoint them, if you want to be post-modern.
