Author Topic: Danny Boyle's latest, a fact-based '127 Hours,' with James Franco and—Kate Mara!  (Read 13086 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/08/127_hours_trailer_between_jame.html


127 Hours Teaser Trailer:
Between James Franco
and a Hard Place

8/24/10 at 7:15 PM



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-3AHv2E5jg&feature[/youtube]


Here's our first official look at 127 Hours, Danny Boyle's fact-based, James Franco—starring thriller about Aron Ralston, the mountain-climber who chopped off his own arm with a dull knife in 2003 after getting the damn thing stuck under rock. Instead of dwelling on the amputation-y stuff, though, this teaser seeks to remind us that Boyle has also made delightful, Oscar-quality movies like Slumdog Millionaire  (with clips of delightful, Oscar-quality slumdogs), and that Franco is a total heartthrob (with scenes of him playing handsome mountain guide to a smitten Amber Tamblyn and Kate Mara). Noted. Presumably most of the film will still involve him drinking urine and sawing away at his forearm, though, so don't get comfortable.

--Lane Brown
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(and you know who I am...)


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Offline serious crayons

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I was just coming here to post the trailer! It looks interesting.


Offline Front-Ranger

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If I see this movie, it will definitely be the weekly thing I do that scares me! I've been a little too close to the same experience for comfort!
"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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I love Danny Boyle, and I LOVE James Franco
(and I like the reviewer, Dana Stevens)
but I just don't know....

  :(
Hacker
The horror of self-amputation
in Danny Boyle's 127 Hours

By Dana Stevens
Posted Thursday, Nov. 4, 2010, at 6:49 PM ET


Danny Boyle's 127 Hours  (Twentieth Century Fox) departs from the same premise as the first Saw  movie. Instead of two men's ankles chained by a murderer, we have one man's arm trapped by a fallen rock, and instead of Saw 's titular tool, we have a cheap Chinese pocketknife. But the sickening, claustrophobic central dilemma is the same: The protagonists have been stranded in hell by a force beyond their control, and if they want to get out alive, they had better get to hackin'.

Of course, Saw  and 127 Hours  are films with completely different aesthetic and moral aims: Saw sought to frighten and shock its audience, while 127 Hours  seeks to ... actually, I'm not sure what Boyle is trying to do here. Uplift and inspire? Yes, by moments. Gross us out? In at least two long sequences, oh, God, yes. Show off? Definitely. Boyle's signature quality as a director is his intensity. His flashy, polychromatic, pop-music-crammed style is often praised as "kinetic," but it can also feel simply busy, which is not the mood you want when trying to re-create five days of soul-searing isolation and silence.

Unlike a horror movie, 127 Hours  can't take advantage of narrative suspense, based as it is on a well-known true story: In 2003, 28-year-old Aron Ralston (James Franco), while hiking alone in Utah, was pinned against a canyon wall when a boulder came loose and crushed his right arm. After five days, a dehydrated and delirious Ralston managed to amputate his own arm below the elbow, rappel down a 100-foot drop, and hike out of the canyon.

Severing a part of one's own body with a dull knife while fully conscious is an image that's difficult to dwell on for even a second, and Boyle clearly relishes the chance to make us contemplate the act from every conceivable angle for 95 full minutes. How much time would go by before you seriously began to consider amputation as a possibility? How would you go about doing it? How long would the severing itself take? It's not that the director is a sadist, exactly—he's just keen to experiment with extreme sensations, like a teenager with a bottle of pilfered vodka and a bungee cord.

Except for a brief opening act in which Aron flirts with two girls he meets on the trail (Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn) and a very short coda in which he's found by some hikers and airlifted to safety, we spend every second of the movie trapped in that canyon with him. There are flashbacks as Aron remembers the family he loves and may never see again, but they're fleeting and fragmentary enough that we never experience the relief of even a brief respite. We always remain aware we're in Aron's head, especially since, whenever Aron himself appears in a hallucination, Boyle makes the smart choice of using a stand-in for Franco.

As for James Franco himself, I've long considered him one of America's natural wonders. In lieu of choosing the career path his movie-star looks entitle him to—doe-eyed romantic lead, buff action hero—Franco has become a real movie star, taking on roles that pose daunting technical challenges, and if this performance isn't quite the tour de force that his Allen Ginsberg was in Howl,  it's only because the character of Aron Ralston—a laconic charmer unwilling to accept his own human limitations—seems closer to Franco's real-life self than a gay beat poet.

Boyle's last film, Slumdog Millionaire,  had its hero running, fighting, and Bollywood-style dancing through the slums of Mumbai, India, with Anthony Dod Mantle's nimble camera in tow. 127 Hours  takes place in a space about five feet square, but Mantle is still there, and his camera almost as active. It frames Franco's face in tight close-up as he screams for help, then pulls up, out of the crevasse and into the sky, to reveal the vast stretch of empty, silent desert that surrounds him. This is one moment when the jittery camerawork is effective, but its power is weakened by the fact that nearly every scene contains an equally gimmicky shot.

Boyle's use of sound is similarly maximalist: Sometimes it's ironic and almost lighthearted, as when Aron embarks on a new day of fruitless attempts to dislodge the crushing boulder to the sound of the '70s soul hit "Lovely Day." Later, when the shit hits the fan and the serious arm-sawing begins, A.R. Rahman's percussive score has a horror-movie intensity.

I can't tell you much about how sound and image worked together in that amputation scene, because, honestly, I watched that part through intermittently covered eyes. At this film's Sundance premiere, there were reportedly audience members who needed medical attention, and I can understand why: Almost despite myself—indeed, as I continued to assess Boyle's aesthetic choices dispassionately—the close-ups of a human being butchering his own limb like a leg of lamb made me feel icy-hot and clammy, as if I might pass out. (The cucumber-cool social columnist seated to my left seemed amused.)

Boyle's skill at wringing physical and emotional reactions from his audience is impressive; watching 127 Hours  is, as intended, an experience of grueling intensity. But in the end, Boyle's maximalist approach has a boy-who-cried-wolf effect; a day after seeing this movie, I remembered only the peak sensations, not the story's emotional trajectory and certainly not the moral lessons (which, as far as I can tell, are pretty much reducible to "When you go on a hiking trip, leave a note"). 127 Hours  wants to tell the story of a thrill-seeking adventurer forced to go on a wrenching inward journey, but the movie itself is an extreme athlete incapable of keeping quiet or sitting still.
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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Annie Proulx has a short story in one of her Wyoming books about a woman who gets caught in a similar situation, I wonder if she was inspired by this story.
"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

Offline southendmd

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The torture scenes in Slumdog Millionnaire were sickening enough for me.  I'll be skipping this one.

Maybe I'll see Howl again.

Offline David In Indy

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James Franco was just on Ellen promoting this movie. It sounds very intense and gripping.
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/movies/05one.html?ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=all


Movie Review
127 Hours
NYT Critics' Pick



James Franco as Aron Ralston in “127 Hours.”

The Tale of a Shocking Fall and a Gritty Resolve
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: November 4, 2010



In April 2003 Aron Ralston, a 27-year-old hiker, fell and was trapped in a narrow slot in Blue John Canyon in Utah, his right arm wedged against the rock wall by a boulder. Mr. Ralston’s ordeal — described in many interviews after the fact and in his lively, unaffected memoir, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place” — was a struggle for survival and a profound existential crisis.

But it was also, more pressingly, a practical challenge. Mr. Ralston, a trained engineer and a skilled, if sometimes careless, outdoorsman, understood his predicament, above all, as a series of technical problems. His solution was grisly and dramatic: using the blade of a cheap multipurpose tool, he cut off the immobilized arm between the elbow and the wrist, freeing himself after more than five days. Extreme as this action was, it was also logical, even downright ingenious.

In bringing this horrific, perversely inspirational story to the screen, Danny Boyle has stayed true to Mr. Ralston’s can-do spirit. His new film, “127 Hours,” is itself the frequently dazzling and perpetually surprising solution to an imposing set of formal and creative conundrums. The stakes are not life and death, but rather life and art.

How do you make a startling, true anecdote into a dramatically satisfying feature film? How, more precisely, do you turn an experience of confinement and tedium — take a moment to consider the weight of that title — into a kinetic, suspenseful visual spectacle. How do you turn an immobilized protagonist into the hero of a motion picture, emphasis on motion?

The most obvious answer is that you cast James Franco, an actor whose loose physicality and free-ranging intelligence make him good company for a lonely spell in wilderness. (Another answer is to employ two nimble and gifted cinematographers, Enrique Chediak and Anthony Dod Mantle, and set them loose in some of the most beautiful places on earth.)

At times Mr. Franco resembles a Looney Tunes character drawn by Chuck Jones. On his mountain bike and then on foot, Aron zooms across the desert landscape like the Roadrunner, only to be transformed into Wile E. Coyote, tripped up by the laws of physics and dependent on Acme-style gadgets and gizmos.

A guileless, naturally funny fellow, he narrates his plight into a small video camera, imagining himself at one point as both host and guest on a peppy daytime interview show, complete with audience response. Reflecting on the mistakes that brought him to this unhappy pass — in particular, neglecting to tell anyone where he was going — he finds there is only one word to sum it all up: “Oops.”

But “127 Hours,” a chronicle of accident and determination, is nearly flawless. Mr. Franco’s goofball energy connects the viewer to the character almost instantly, and Mr. Boyle’s speedy, jumpy style sends us out into the desert on a wave of caffeine and rock ’n’ roll. Aron is hardly one for rapt Wordsworthian contemplation of nature; his romanticism, though deep, is sensual and hedonistic rather than quietly reverent.

He wants to cover distances in record time with his headphones on and is happy to share his exuberance with whomever he happens to meet. Bumping into Kristi (Kate Mara) and Megan (Amber Tamblyn), two young women who seem to be lost, he charms and perplexes them with his knowledge of their surroundings and his casual adventurousness. The three of them frolic in an underground pool, they invite him to a party, and as he lopes off into the canyons one of them remarks, “I don’t think we figured in his day at all.”

It is instructive to compare this movie’s Aron Ralston with Christopher McCandless, another real-life explorer whose unhappy encounter with the vast American wilderness was the subject of Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild.” In that film (as in the book by Jon Krakauer that was its source) Christopher was a figure of almost saintly asceticism, driven further and further from civilization by his disaffection with family and society and finding, ultimately, a half-accidental, half-willed martyrdom.

Aron, in contrast, is better adjusted and therefore somewhat more elusive. Though he mutters “please” and “thank you” to whatever unseen force may be watching over him, he is more concerned with physics than metaphysics. And though he leaves Blue John with renewed appreciation for other people — having hallucinated a former girlfriend (Clémence Poésy), various friends and his parents (Kate Burton and Treat Williams) while he was down there — he never really rejected them in the first place.





Mr. Boyle has a knack for tackling painful, violent or unpleasant subjects with unremitting verve and unstoppable joie de vivre. He has dealt with some pretty ugly stuff over the years — poverty and violence in “Slumdog Millionaire”; heroin addiction in “Trainspotting”; flesh-craving zombies in “28 Days Later” — but almost always with an eager, exuberant energy that makes his films invigorating rather than depressing.

He is not one to chase after big ideas, preferring sensory intensity to reflection, but “127 Hours,” which Mr. Boyle wrote with Simon Beaufoy, his “Slumdog” writing partner, leaves you with a lot to think about, precisely because it is so attuned to the details of what is happening to Aron’s body.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the film leaves you with the impression of having lived, vicariously but intensely, through something whose meaning is both profound and elusive.

There are scenes in “127 Hours” that are hard to bear — the cracking of a bone, the severing of a nerve, the desperate consumption of a water bag filled with urine — but what these moments communicate is more than worth a jolt of discomfort or a spasm of revulsion. To say that this movie gets under your skin is only barely a figure of speech. It pins you down, shakes you up and leaves you glad to be alive.

“127 Hours” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Some swearing (understandable given the circumstances) and a very graphic scene of self-mutilation.

127 HOURS

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Danny Boyle; written by Mr. Boyle and Simon Beaufoy, based on the book “Between a Rock and a Hard Place” by Aron Ralston; directors of photography, Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak; edited by Jon Harris; music by A. R. Rahman; production design and costumes by Suttirat Larlarb; produced by Christian Colson, Mr. Boyle and John Smithson; released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.

WITH: James Franco (Aron Ralston), Amber Tamblyn (Megan), Kate Mara (Kristi), Clémence Poésy (Rana), Kate Burton (Aron’s Mom), Treat Williams (Aron’s Dad) and Lizzy Caplan (Sonja).
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Monika

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this all looks pretty cool

Offline Front-Ranger

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I saw this on Friday and there was a special treat at the end...an appearance by the man himself...Aron Ralston!
"chewing gum and duct tape"