Strong and Moving!

Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

There are long longeurs of people brooding that go on forever. Many scenes seem to play-out in slow-motion depression. The plot is basic enough - a politician swindles his driver to take the fall for a fatal accident. The driver goes to jail – the drivers' wife falls for the politician, the son of the driver finds out about his mother and when the driver is released from jail he suspects that not all is kosher. The family dissolves into a full blown depression and they speak in monosyllables to each other. There is even some science fiction when a long dead son starts miraculously appearing. I didn't quite get this part but it was pretty eerie!Really it's not that there is no empathy – but everything is so dreary that it just weighs you down. One wonders if there is any point to it all – I didn't see any. It's like an old Ingmar Bergman that has been transported to Turkey.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan shows us how an awful screenplay turns to a good movie in a professional director's hand. I think he deserved all those award because of that reason.Overall acting was good. Especially those two Yavuz Bingol and Ercan Kesal who are not actors in real (Bingl is a musician and Kesal is a doctor) were remarkable.By the way, to put a dead child in a movie to support the physiological atmosphere and subject of the movie was a good idea. But still I did not like the form of the child as he was too scary to be a part the movie. So, 0 for the screenplay, 6 for performers and 8 for the director.

As my friend Jeremy Fassler says, the film Three Monkeys "would be much better if it had some actual monkeys". In fact, from the title, one expects a Pixar film about three monkeys that have some kind of adventure. At least that would be an enjoyable way to spend 109 minutes. The set-up for Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys is indeed an interesting one; a politician in the midst of an election runs over someone and pays his driver to take the blame. The action seems to have a potential for a thrilling film, but Ceylan only explores this conflict for the first half hour. Ceylan doesn't explore anything of interest to the audience and wastes rolls and rolls of film on the minutia of everyday life, filling the screen with people constantly sitting and doing things that have no meaning. He places different conflicts throughout the film, but they are never fully explored and are few and far between. For example, at one point in the film, the son of the driver who took the blame for the car accident comes home bloodied and bruised. His mother simply looks at him. There is no explanation of what happened and why. Even at the end of the film, the audience has no idea who the characters are, what there backgrounds are, and what their mutual history is. What Ceylan has created here is a slow and boring look at everyday life. Ceylan seems willing to let the story be told by having his actors sit, and stare. He fails to realize that watching other people do unimportant things does not make for an interesting film. Ceylan's direction isn't bad, but it isn't good either. At times he just turns the camera on and he cannot figure out how to involve the audience in the film. The shots he uses are nothing special and nothing sticks out. The cinematography gives the film a very distinct look. But every shot in the film looks the same, and after a while, it stops being interesting. The only part of the film that works is the acting. All the performances are good, but because Ceylan doesn't explore any of the characters, there is nothing for the actors to convey to the audience as a way of involving the viewer. As a result, the audience feels alienated from the characters and doesn't care what happens. Three Monkeys attempts to be an intense and involving character study. Instead it comes off as pretentious and flat. Ceylan tries to milk as much drama out of Three Monkeys, but this cow is all dried up. This is evidenced by the final shot of the film; the main character, seen from afar, stands outside as it begins to rain. Ceylan is wrong director for this film (regardless of the fact that he co-wrote it). He seems interested in emotional drama and doesn't realize what type of film Three Monkeys needs to be. A film with a plot like this can go either one of two ways; it can either explore the conflict the main character creates and the direct consequences, or it can show what happens when all the dust settles. Unfortunately, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys takes the latter. C+

If you look close enough into a human face, chances are that in nine cases out of ten, you would successfully read the directions of his thoughts. And if you happen to know his situation, that chance borders more on the tenner. "Three monkeys" by Nuri Bilge Ceylan exploits this very power of the viewer and virtually transports him straight into the characters' mind, simply by taking the camera far close to their faces than any decency would allow. And then, the viewer knows -- he knows the son's accusations of his mother before they actually come, he knows the pop's extreme distaste towards his wife so much so that when he does not lift a finger to dissuade his wife from taking the plunge, the viewer does not find himself unprepared for it. So very few verbal exchanges actually take place within the family, and yet, the wheels grinding are as clear as the day. This ploy goes back to Bergman, and Ceylan probably stretches it to its extreme by hardly ever leaving his actors' faces. And despite what anyone says about this movie, at the end of the day, it was only meant to highlight the inner workings of a family in the light of some frothing, volatile circumstances. At the end of the day, the son does what he thinks best for his mother; the father does what he thinks best to salvage the remnants of the wreck that his family had become in his absence. That's how every son and every father of every race or nationality is supposed to behave. Probably, it's the mother who refuses to fit into the "family" model, but then again, it is the odd element that actually initiates a story --- there's hardly ever a story if every person sticks to the script that life has destined him with. Moreover, Hacer, the horniest bitch of a mother that ever was, does not materialise from nowhere. The movie has all the elaborations for the sceptics, all the evidences for the Freudians. A good portion of the beginning half of the movie, where nothing whatsoever seems to be happening, does a brilliant job of what it had probably set out to do -- - to establish that nothing whatsoever happened to cheer up the mother's humdrum existence. This movie imitates life to that detailed extent --- life, which is usually a series of a few dynamite explosions, punctuated by a prolonged duration, where there's nothing but the fuse burning itself up. That brings me to what I believe is the greatest asset of the movie--- it's grim imitation of life. The hypocrisy, the evasion, the desire to let go yet the leash holding one back, the ordinariness, the extraordinariness, every possible human feeling that could cross a day- to-day existence has been etched deep and clear into this gem of a movie ---or, as I stated right in the beginning, into the actor's faces.And of course, there's the technical aspect of it. The train rumbling at just the right time, the cellphone ringing again just when it needed to (to say nothing of the ringtone, which was probably all the music that the movie had, the rest was just a brilliant choice of natural sounds), the camera focussing not just on the faces, but on the right areas of the faces (see how close it went), the use of monochrome for the most part without ever making it apparent --- these were just a random pick from the myriad of technical ploys that has stamped the word "masterpiece" on this visual and emotional extravaganza.