Kael looked below the surface of a movie without ever giving up on that surface.
Making Skyfall, Mendes thought he was being esoteric with the themes: "Under the surface of the movie is a meditation on ageing, and loss, and England.
The action takes place in the world's most ravishing decaying city, Venice, and the surface of the movie is as smooth as the placid canals.
The general intent here is to louse up the surface of the movie as much as possible and make that degraded surface, in a kind of high-tech punk conceit, a central part of the experience.
"My feeling is that a lot of these discussions are actually pretty interesting because they encourage people to look beyond the surface of the movie," says Foundas. "I think it's great to talk about what a film's politics are, what kind of ideologies are operating in the film, what may or may not be implied by omitting something or including something".
Ty Burr in Entertainment Weekly gave the film a B-; he wrote that "Burton still hasn't figured out how to tell a coherent story: He's more interested in fashioning pretty beads than in putting them on a string.... Yet for all the wintry weirdness, there's more going on under the surface of this movie than in the original.
He even rains artful scratches onto the surface of his movies like an unscrupulous antique dealer distressing an armoire.
Still, I suspect that she feels, as I do, that this focus on the surface of her movies, reducing them to catalogues, is a way of belittling her, her audience and the female stories she tells.
He avoids doing anything with the camera that risks surpassing the pigeonholed specificity of intentions, that risks breaking the classy surfaces of the movie's bland smoothness.
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