SYNOPSICS
No Such Thing (2001) is a English,Icelandic movie. Hal Hartley has directed this movie. Sarah Polley,Robert John Burke,Margrét Ákadóttir,Julie Anderson are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2001. No Such Thing (2001) is considered one of the best Comedy,Drama,Fantasy movie in India and around the world.
Beatrice (Sarah Polley) works as a researcher at a sensationalist New York City-based media organization, although she is more often than not tasked with making coffee than anything else. Unlike her colleagues, she is shy, soft spoken, and a Plain Jane of a woman. She convinces her cutthroat boss (Dame Helen Mirren) to send her on assignment to Iceland, where one of their camera crews, led by Beatrice's fiancé Jim, has gone missing, they who were investigating eyewitness accounts of what was largely seen as a long held urban myth of a medieval monster. En route to Iceland, Beatrice becomes the sole survivor of the plane crashing, her survival considered a miracle. She is quickly abandoned in Iceland by her boss, as she will not consent to become the media darling to tell the story of the crash, leaving her alone in her long physical and emotional recovery. Beatrice believes her emotional recovery can only be fulfilled by still finding out what happened to Jim, the camera crew who were...
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No Such Thing (2001) Reviews
Recommended
Imagine that the original "Outer Limits" folks remade "King Kong" in their standard monster style and you have a good idea of "No Such Thing's" look and feel. Then throw in a little "Mighty Joe Young" banter, "Beauty and the Beast fashions", and "The Song of Bernadette" for good measure. The film is a stylistic masterpiece and the banter between the beast and Beatrice (Sarah Polley) is surreal comedy at its best. If you enjoy quirky and subtly off-kilter films then the superficial story of "No Such Thing" will be a real pleasure in itself. Don't let frustration over the underlying meaning ruin the fun during the first viewing-just go with it. The DVD does not contain a director's commentary so the viewer is left to speculate on just what this thing is really about; what themes Hartley is serious about and to what degree the obvious themes are just there for parody and laughs. My retrospective take is that it is about the interplay of evolution and intelligent design, with the monster an artifact left over from creation. God created the monster, knowing that humankind needs fear for motivation. He expected us to have evolved beyond fear and hate of each other long before now, creating a need for the monster. But this did not happen, making the monster irrelevant and God disillusioned with humankind. Both he and the monster are bored with the stupidity they see. God decides to intervene so the monster can go away and be put out of it's misery. He chooses Beatrice for this mission and she goes through a miracle survival experience to heighten her appreciation for life and to give her a distanced perspective free of fear and hate (the plane was going to crash with no survivors). Sarah Polley is perfectly cast as Beatrice; her Beatrice is somehow both detached and expressive. If you enjoy Polley you will love this character. Virginia Woolf: Someone has to die Leonard, in order that the rest of us should value life more.
Creepin' to reach the shore...
Hal Hartley's strange tale opens with a monster giving a soliloquy in the vein of the sad reflection that Count Dracula makes on his condition, while Jonathan Harker listens, in Werner Herzog's "Nosferatu". The story alternates between modern settings of a television network and the home in Iceland of a legendary monster that -as in "King Kong"- will become a victim of the manipulative methods of the communication media (with Helen Mirren in charge.) The scenes dealing with the reserved journalist (Sarah Polley in an outstanding underacted performance) surviving a plane crash, meeting a community of weirdoes in Iceland and finally facing the monster, are the most attractive; the following is rather clichéd, though this endearing monster (who looks like a rock star) keeps making until the end, insightful comments on human beings, when we were still creeping "to reach the shore", and our destructive ways. 8/10.
Art-house Fairy Tale
NO SUCH THING (3 outta 5 stars) A weird kind of project for indy art movie writer/director Hal Hartley... a modern day version of "Beauty and the Beast". A heavily made-up Robert John Burke is "The Beast", a near-immortal monster living as far from humanity as he can. Unfortunately, people still keep seeking him out, causing him to respond with violence. All he really wants is the peace of death... and when pretty, young reporter Sarah Polley is taken to him as a sort of sacrifice he offers to spare her life if she'll help him find a missing scientist who may be able to grant him his fondest wish. The movie starts out well... the monster gets some funny, earthy dialogue and the tentative relationship with "The Beauty" doesn't seem too forced. Towards the end, however, the story seems to fall apart a bit... becoming less believable and a little unfocused. The movie concludes in grand "art movie" style... with a series of arty crosscuts and fades that look very stylish... but don't really bring things to a satisfying close.
The monster speaks!
Hal Hartley is an original film maker. With this film, which I recently saw in DVD form, he presents us a modern day parable about the media an its influence on our lives. It's curious to see how ahead of his times Mr. Hartley is when he deals with paranoia, even before the attacks of 9/11, in his own subtle way. It was not intentional, I'm sure, but he proves to have a keen eye for what was coming. The film is not one of Mr. Hartley's best, but we see his sure hand behind all what he is trying to do here. He is working with a cast that is working with him for the first time, with the exception of Robert John Burke, the Monster. Sarah Polley, is one of the best actresses working in movies these days. Her Beatrice is a study in contrasts. Also excellent, as always, is Helen Mirren, Beatrice's boss who is ruthless, arrogant, and manipulative. She knows the secret of how to get attention in the worst possible ways. Julie Christie makes a rare appearance as a kind doctor who befriends Beatrice. The scenery in Iceland is magnificent and Mr. Hartley captures it brilliantly.
Cinematic Doubt
Cinematic Doubt Spoilers herein. I do not know Hartley's other work, and stumbled upon this as a result of a Sarah Polley survey. And I am wonderously aghast that I had not heard of this film. I have a hobby of watching postmodern films about the nature of film and truth. In this community, there are some clever notions but they pretty much depend on quoting each other. So when someone comes seemingly out of the blue with a perfect, wholly original construction, it blows me away. Oh, there is quoting here, lots of it from `Forbidden Planet' and its source `The Tempest' to `Smilla' and `Dancer' and lots of obvious chintzy stuff. But it is all presented humorlessly in a sort of reverse irony and gives you `Mulholland Drive' -- a construction from the constructed characters -- without you noticing. Some viewers actually think this is a `Beauty and the Beast' story! The game is that what we think of as a constructed world gone awry is just camoflage for a world that constructs us. The two feed each other with seemingly no escape. There are some lovely devices used as outlining material. -- The use of Iceland as an originating location for myth. Very, very abstract as is everything else including the performances. But this gives us a visual registration for the synthetic space of this world. This sort of thing was tried in say, `Babette's Feast,' but just didn't work. Here, the rarified air of abstraction is helped by the odd, minimalist, hypnotizing score. Short of Figgis -- whose notions are adventuresome but mainstream -- I can think of no other effective filmmaker/composer, except by stretching the notion with `Sweet and Lowdown.' -- The weaving in and out of the influence of `media.' It is hidden behind an Albert Brooks-like game of selfish media. But there is more there behind this `Our Man Flint' facade -- it is not just a selfish game, it is the creation of reality itself. -- The wonderful dialogue, anchored by a sequence at the beginning. This would have been what the film crew would have gotten, but the subject took over and recorded himself. Opening scenes are both a promise and an introduction to the world in which you have just been dropped. There are few better. This ranks with `Farewell my Concubine' in that first scene. -- The use of Sarah Polley. She has made some very wise career choices, following a sort of Parker Posey model of independent filmmaking. But Posey's filmmakers are Hollywood wannabees or skitmasters. Polley has worked with Gilliam, Cronenberg, Egoyam, Winterbottom and now Hartley. She adapts to their peculiar worlds. I am amazed and appreciative of her work and wish her a long career. I am tentatively giving this my highest ranking, a rare honor. It is so intellectually novel it belongs with a few similar cinematic statements (from say Rohmer and Wenders) that both create and question themselves . (The 4 of 4 ranking constitutes not the `best' films, whatever that means, but the most important and rewarding including the most competently innovative. It forms my recommendation for young people seeking to understand their visual minds.) Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 4: Every visually literate person should experience this.