Rendering 9

The article under the headline OBLIVION-REVIEW was taken from The Guardian.co.uk and was published on April 10. The author of the article was the Guardian's film critic Peter Bradshaw. He devoted his article to the review of Oblivion, a 2013 science fiction film co-written, produced and directed by Joseph Kosinski and based on his unpublished graphic novel of the same name edited by Radical Comics. Then the author pointed out that the film starred Tom Cruise, Olga Kurylenko, Andrea Riseborough,Morgan Freeman, Melissa Leo, Zoë Bell, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.

The author started by telling the reader that the main character of that film was Tom Cruise, who played Jack Harper, a tough and self-reliant soldier in the late 21st century after a victorious but desrtuctive battle against alien invaders. Then Peter underlined that his mission was to repair automated drones that exterminate the remaining alien scavengers ("Scavs") hidden on Earth. Jack and Victoria report to Sally ( Andrea Riseborough), a military commander stationed in a tetrahedral structure in Earth's orbit called "The Tet", which controlled the Hydro Rigs, machined that were extracting vital resources from the surface, and were being targeted by the Scavs. But Jack But Jack iwas plagued with weird mental images of a romantic encounter in pre-war New York and when he found a beautiful human survivor, Julia (Olga Kurylenko), she stirred intense memories, and it was clear that there was something the authorities are not telling him.

In the second part of the article( in a key one) Peter Bradshaw expressed his point of view, sayinng that on the one hand, this movie had some beautiful images of planetary, but on the other hand the story itself felt numbed, derectionless and dull.

As for me, I can't share the author's view as I have not seen Oblivion yet. Anyway I found this article very useful and of good value. The message of the author was clear to understand a plot and character characteristics of the film.

Summary 51-58

The narrator lived at the Hotel de la Fleur, and Mrs Johnson, the proprietress, had a story to tell about Strickland, who lived in Tahiti.Strickland reached Tahiti about six months after he left Marseilles. He had a few pounds in his pocket, and he took a small room in a native house outside the town. There he married Mrs Johnson's housemaid Ata.They lived in Ata's house, which stood about eight kilometres from the road that ran round the island. In the following chapters we got to know that Strickland and Ata had two babies. One of them had died, when Strickland caught the dead illness-lepra. Later Strickland himself had been blind and died from that desease. The time came for narrator's depature from Tahiti. A month later he was in London. He went to the trim little house on Campden Hill which Mrs Strickland then inhabited. Then the narrator told her what he had learnt about her husband in Tahiti.  

Summary 41-50

One day, when the narrator was walking along, he passed Charles Strickland and they arrived at the narrator's house. Strickland spoke as though the narrator were a child that needed to be distracted. he was sore, but not with him so much as with himself. He thought of the happy life that Blanche and Dirk had led in Montmartre, their simplicity, kindness and hospitality. But Strickland was indifferent to that, he had just found his hat and proposed me to look at his pictures. The narrator welcomed the opportunity. The final impression he received was of a prodigious effort to express some state of the soul and in this effect the narrator fancied. A week later he heard by chance that Strickland had gone to Marseilles. He never saw him again. In the next chapter they were told about a lofty gree island Tahiti, where narrator spent his time, writing the book. In his first day he met Captain Nicholas, who was acquainted with Charles Strickland. He told me how they had spent four months at Marseilles and how their days were occupied in the pursuit of enough money to get a night's lodging. The story-teller narrated all this as best he could, because he liked the contrast of those episodes with the life that he had seen Strickland lived in Ashley Gardens when he was occupied with stocks and shares.

Summary 31-40

The narrator did not see Strickland for several weeks. But one evening he met him, accompanied by Blanche    Stroeve, and they were going to the cafe to have a game of chess. The meeting had been devoid of incident. No word had been said to give the narrator anything to think about and when they finished to play, he left Strickland and Blanche. One morning, Dirk entered the narrator's room quickly and said that Blanche was trying to commit the suicide and then she was taken to the hospital. After that Dirk went twice a day to the hospital to inquire after his wife. Late one evening Dirk came to see the narrator to tell that Blanche was dead. The narrator understood that his chance was to put all the past behind him. Dirk agreed with narrator and set off for Amstardam. 

Review (Theatre)

Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Scott Coffey
Produced by	Scott Coffey Naomi Watts
Written by	Scott Coffey
Starring	Naomi Watts Rebecca Rigg Scott Coffey Mark Pellegrino Chevy Chase
Editing by	Matt Chesse
Distributed by	Strand Releasing
Release date(s)	November 11, 2005
Running time	95 mins.
Language	English

Ellie Parker is a 2005 American drama film, written and directed by Scott Coffey. The title character, played by Naomi Watts, is a young woman struggling as an actress in Los Angeles. The movie centers on a quote from the prologue to Shakespeare's Henry V:

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention,

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

Ellie Parker began as a short that was screened at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. Using a handheld digital camera, writer-director Scott Coffey expanded it into a feature-length film over the next four years. It was released in 2005.

Plot

Ellie Parker is a semi-autobiographical story of an Australian actress struggling to make it in Hollywood. Ellie is young enough to still go to auditions back and forth across L.A., changing wardrobes and slapping on makeup en route, but just old enough that the future feels "more like a threat than a promise". She lives with her vacuous musician boyfriend (Mark Pellegrino), who leaves her just about as dissatisfied as any other part of her life, and has a loose definition of the word "fidelity". Helping make sense of their surreal and humiliating Hollywood existence is her best friend Sam (Rebecca Rigg), another out-of-work actress trying her hand at design, who attends acting classes with Ellie to stay sharp. When Ellie gets into a fender bender with a guy who claims he's a cinematographer (Scott Coffey), her perspective on her work and the dating world starts to change. Chevy Chase also makes an appearance in this series of Hollywood vignettes, playing Ellie's agent.

Review

Well, Ms. Watts does shine in the title role, and she's in every scene, but somehow the film still falls flat. I'm not a big fan of film-making on digital video -- it always comes across to me like I'm watching someone's home movies, an experience I should be paid for, not that I should have to pay for -- but I understand why it's done in certain cases. In this case, it was a mistake.

Writer-director Coffey appears to be going for verite-style realism (I'm assuming he's not so arrogant as to place himself in the uber-pretentious Dogme 95 school), but he doesn't seem to realize that in order for any film to work, the result shouldn't come across as a home movie or, in this case, a student film.

Too much time is spent on Ellie in her car, doing all the things that Angelenos do in their cars because they're just too busy to do them elsewhere (applying makeup, changing clothes, practicing their lines, and the universal asshole-identifier, talking on their cellphones) and too self-absorbed to care how it affects their driving or those around them. This works as satire for one scene -- the next four times it occurs it feels just like being stuck in a car behind one of these narcissists, and it's not an enjoyable feeling. There's a related scene about halfway through that's amusingly ironic, but not worth the endurance test.

Just as with the interior car shots, much of the satire is overripe, pushing the irritation factor of nearly every character to its limits, testing the thresholds of both humorous exaggeration and simple tolerance. No satire should leave you wanting to burn the characters and their milieu to the ground (apart from "Day of the Locust", in which Hollywood does in fact burn, deservedly, but in context).

For all its drawbacks, though, this is a showcase for Naomi Watts to show how versatile she is, with the verisimilitude of her having to switch between characters, accents, moods, etc. The overall comment, that she doesn't really seem to be herself very often and has no idea who that self really is within the realm of all her "performing," is funny and worth exploring, but Coffey (or someone else) needs a vehicle that's more engaging, clearer about its objectives, and at least somewhat watchable.