Never Let (This Piece of) Me Go

It's hard not to lose your heart a little to Never Let Me Go at the start. Carey Mulligan, making good on that An Education promise, stares through you with big caring soulful eyes. She even confirms that look with dialogue about being a "carer". Andrew Garfield stares back, through glass, with an uncomplicated smile on his face. He's prone on an operating table and obviously in need of her caring. Never Let Me Go uses a definitive plea as title. Not to be to cruel when faced with so much neediness but can we do some haggling first? May we keep parts of you and discard the rest? Never Let This Piece of Me Go? Consider it a deal.

Cathy H, Tommy D, and Ruth ???

I'd personally like to keep the actors. I've even written up a "Best in Show" column on Andrew Garfield for Tribeca Film. The set decoration has its moments, too. I'll even keep the screenplay so long as I can jettison at least a third of Cathy H's redundant narrated bits and a truly atrocious final speech which ruins the heartbreak of the scene preceding it. You know the type of final speech I'm talking about "Let me spell out the theme for you in case you were two hours late to the movie or took a really long bathroom break." The narration is actually a bit baffling for a film that does, in fact, trust you to fill in some of the blanks. If you're trusting the audience to infer meaning on several occasions, haven't you already decided your audience is a smart one?

More than any film this year, I want to fuss with everything. The first donation needs to be Rachel Portman's score. Give that away immediately. One can half imagine the creative meetings "This is the climax of the film. Make it important." ...only they forgot to mention which scene. The score even treats transitional bits like cars pulling up to buildings as perfect moments to remind you that this is an ominous dystopian tale that is Breaking Your Heart. For all of the inherent power in Never Let Me Go's compelling premise, clever images and nuanced performances -- that seems to be the exhausting directorial mantra for the entire creative team: 'this is the climax, make it important!' But not every scene can be a climax - just as with life, they only happen once. C+

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Yes, No, Maybe So: Never Let Me Go

I guess June is when the OscarBait trailers begin their stampede? I always forget summertime occurences as I have already melted. I hate summer. Yesterday we performed our patented three pronged expectation-management on Somewhere. Today Mark Romanek's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's best seller Never Let Me Go.



You might not want to read this if you're worried about subject/thematic spoilers. I still need to read the book but I feel like this would have been great to go into blind. I'm glad that the trailer is hinting rather than telling, as all trailers should.

The cast is a big draw: Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley, Sally Hawkins (looks like a good part), Charlotte Rampling... it just keeps on giving people that are a) fine actors and b) interesting to look at in one way or another. And they're all in the service of sober non-f/x driven sci-fi which is all too rare at the movies. [SPOILER] This one has to do with a school for clones though this trailer doesn't make that too specific. [/SPOILER] The last such sci-fi flick that comes to mind was Children of Men and those three words strung together should prompt fine cinematic memories.

This is an entirely personal thing. I don't tend to respond well to bifurcated structures where we get used to one actor playing a role and have to switch to another or switch back and forth. I like it when movies cover a short frame of time in their character's lives. Movies are most equatable with short stories, if you ask me. The television miniseries is the ideal home for novel adaptations but nobody in Hollywood agrees with this assessment. That said, that's the only "no" I could come up with which is a great sign. And those young girls do seem well cast to evoke Mulligan & Knightley.

Blade Runner (1982) is one of the greats and when an image like the one to your left explicitly calls it mind, it's both exciting and worrying. It seems likely that the movie will similarly examine entirely human concerns about the purpose of life, the mystery of the soul, and the fear of death through the distancing protection of a genre lens. Can Mark Romanek do all this justice? He's got a great eye and makes absolutely incredible music videos. But I didn't get much apart from aesthetic value from his previous feature, One Hour Photo. There's so much rich thematic possibility here: Do I have a soul? Is my life not even mine? Will loving someone save me? There's not enough time. All these moments will be lost like tears in the rain.

In short, I'm a yes. But I do think I should read the book first since it's supposed to be incredible. I'd rather know the real thing before experiencing its copy, even though the copy looks to have plenty of soul.

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