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I can cross Tom Tykwer off my bucket list of directors I want to be in the presence of before I die! He ended up being at last night's screening of his new film Three after all. He introduced the film and did a Q&A afterward - most of which I recorded... extremely poorly I might add; the lighting and sound in the MoMA theater was not conducive at all... but you can watch it over here if you so desire. As an aside, he might just be the best looking director working. Man is super crazy handsome! Anyway I find myself sort of at a loss for reviewing this movie. I liked a lot of it, and I didn't like a lot of it.
On the positive side there were a lot of fun, as Tykwer called them, diversions, where he'd take off on an homage to Bergman for a minute, or where he'd spin the whole thing off its rails in some confrontational manner that undercut your expectations in exciting ways. Like, you could see the gay coming from a mile away, but you didn't quite expect the gallon of ejaculate so fast! Anyway Tykwer's incapable of being boring. The film's great to look at, and the actors are all giving intricate, absorbing, not particularly begging for you to like them performances.
And that's the thing - I felt a real disconnect between how I was seeing the characters and the way the film seemed to really want me to view them. In general I thought they were pretty much awful people, but I kind of got the feeling that Tykwer didn't see them that way (and he said as much in his Q&A). It was fine when he was playing their faults for laughs, but then a minute later we were supposed to find the same thing endearing or emotionally resonant and it didn't quite stick that landing for me. I found his farce a tragedy, while he seemed to find his comedy an inspiration. He got his angels and his testicles all mixed up.
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