Imagining how heartbreaking the conclusion would have been if we had arrived at it in the ordinary way by starting at the beginning, I felt as if an unnecessary screen of technique had been placed between the story and the audience. Yet I do not want to give the wrong impression: This is an accomplished and effective film despite my reservations.
It grips us, moves us, astonishes us. Some of the revelations do benefit by coming as surprises. But artists often grow by learning what to leave out the great example is Ozu. I have a feeling that Inarritu's fractured technique, which was so impressive in his first film and is not so satisfactory in this one, may inspire impatience a third time around. He is so good that it's time for him to get out of his own way.
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Rated R for language, sexuality, some violence and drug use.
Benicio Del Toro as Jack. Naomi Watts as Christina. In that we are called upon to piece together a puzzle, one could argue that 21 Grams is almost an interactive motion picture. At first, the movie is confusing. It's as if the filmmakers assembled about 50 scenes, all two to four minutes in length, and randomly edited them together. But, out of what initially seems to be a maddeningly random approach, a pattern emerges.
Past, future, and present are all converging. It takes a little while, but a picture begins to emerge from the fog. Then, it's just a matter of putting the pieces in the right places. By seeing them in a wide variety of circumstances during a compressed time frame, we come to relate to them far more quickly than we would had this story been told in a chronological fashion.
We know bits and pieces of where they have been and where they are headed, and this can make it feel a little like playing an amnesiac God. For Sean Penn, this represents an amazing one-two punch alongside Mystic River. Penn might not only have given the best male performance of the year, but the second-best as well, and it's difficult to determine whether he's better here or in Clint Eastwood's movie.
He's more subdued in 21 Grams , since he's playing a dying man with a guilt-ridden conscience, but the same kinds of moral issues confront Paul as those that confront Penn's Mystic River character. MacDougall describes how he set about converting a hospital bed into a rudimentary balance so he could measure a patient's weight change as they died.
The bed balance was sensitive, so to prevent his soon-to-be-dead patients from messing up his data, MacDougall hunted around for people who were dying of tuberculosis. As he noted: "It seemed to me best to select a patient dying with a disease that produces great exhaustion, the death occurring with little or no muscular movement, because in such a case, the beam could be kept more perfectly at balance and any loss occurring readily noted.
In all, MacDougall managed to recruit a mere six dying people for his study, four of whom had tuberculosis. In turn, each was tucked up in his modified bed and their weight monitored until some minutes after their death. Any bowel movements or urination at death were fine, at least so far as the experiment was concerned, as it all stayed on the bed. With a nod to best scientific practice, MacDougall then repeated the study with 15 dogs, which according to his religious beliefs, were not blessed with souls.
It's not clear how MacDougall managed to get his dogs to die without rocking the bed, but some scientists suspect a nasty cocktail of drugs was used. At the end of his foray into science, MacDougall declared that humans lost up to three-fourths of an ounce upon death, a figure that doesn't have quite the same ring as 21g, the metric equivalent.
The dogs, he said, lost nothing. John Rubinstein Gynecologist as Gynecologist. Antef A. Harris Basketball Guy as Basketball Guy. Teresa Delgado Gina as Gina. Tony Guyton Guard 2 as Guard 2. Wayne E. Beech Jr. Inmate 1 as Inmate 1. Alejandro G. More like this.
Watch options. Storyline Edit. Difference between dead and life. Rated R for language, sexuality, some violence and drug use. Did you know Edit. Trivia The film was shot almost completely with hand-held cameras.
Goofs When the Private Investigator gives Paul the revolver, he flips it open to show that it is loaded. He then spins the cylinder and we hear a ratcheting sound. When a revolver is open, there is no ratchet mechanism connected to the cylinder
0コメント