Cinematography, music, performances, violence

Rating: 8/10 (24 August 2008)

Few actors are interesting as persons, by what they have to say individually, in private, offscreen. I would name Rourke, Brando, Clift, Crowe. On the other hand, several firsthand actors are eminently uninteresting as personalitiesDe Niro, Pacino, Hopkins, Newman, Willis, Bogart,
I have found myself missing Crowe's roles that I already knew. He is a typical example of an actor better than the movies he's inlike Pacino, like Gabin and De Niro for the most part of their careers. He is worth more than his movies.
I like the ample, colossal battles scenes (and CNN's best -- and worst -- movie battle scenes list ). The scenes of enormous crowds, of hosts and hoards, of unnumbered armies .The battle scenes make the epics (in the conventional sense). There's no true epic without those battle scenes. Sometimes, it's a perspective, an angle; most often, it's slapdash and exploitation. They give the thrills.
The tumult, the excitement, the manly fierceness, too often the highly idealized rendering of the battle's thrills (where realism means gore, but not cowardice, physiology, stupidity, irrational things, confusion, fear, chaos, arbitrary moves, etc.).
The battle with the Germanic tribes at the beginning of GLADIATOR is good and impressing and a strong visual experience (though not as copious as deemed by some to beone would have liked moremore of everything in that battle).
GLADIATOR is a thrilleri.e., an adventure story, well paced and extremely aware of corporeality, of a happy and athletic one, and of the bodily, manly and physical world. This is the core of a thriller. By its high violence, its large amount of brutality, strikingly featured, it has also a side of decadence. It is suspenseful, inventive, luring.
Crowe is not an unsubtle actor; moreover, he's better than Depp, Pitt, and even than Willis, and finer than Spacey. Very endowed, gifted, and very intelligent also. His finest roles have that brio given by the intelligence alone.
GLADIATOR is a considerable thrillerextraordinarily scored, acted, filmed. By its inner nature and trend, it is a thriller. I am in a phase when Crowe is (again, but differently) very important to my notions of cinema. I am eager of each Crowe role.
The artificiality brought by the CGI suits somehow, if properly used, the cinema's natureI mean the technical artificialities.
As a footnote, I consider GLADIATOR was a notable influence on Gibson's religious masterpiecefor the violence, the cruelty, the military brutality, the harsh barbarianism. Way ago, when directors showed violence and brutality, they were aware of doing something sordid, nasty and dirty; but now, they do it with the conscience of doing something grand, epic, even noble. This is the change: the ennoblement of violence on an epic scale. Largerthanlife violence, shown with a clean conscience and with a sort of clean technical pride. Rehabilitating violence on screen.
Crowe, with his bitter, manly, intelligent smile.
Crowe was right that most of the lineshis, the others' are utter crap. But the performances are unexpectedly good. Of course, Crowe absolutely dominates the movie, and his role might be the best performance ever in this (revisited, reformed, reshaped, reconfigured) genre of movies.
It is interesting that once the emperor Marcus was harshly judged for his failure with his son this was hold against him, and nowadays one would consider absurd, unfitting to evaluate Sartre or another such modern philosophers for their failure to live up to their standards. This shows how things have changed, and not for the worseand how the honest quest for wisdom, and for wisdom in each practical aspect, was replaced with the quest for an invalid wisdom masquerading for something else and practically undermining itself.