A bit of Welsh nastiness from Marc Evans, shot in Nova Scotia with American actors. A snowbound house, five "slices of white bread" coming to the end of their tenacy in a Big Brother-inspired, web-cam surveilled spooky house. After six months, they are a few days away from the million dollar prize until bad things start to happen. The film lays on suspense and tension through a soundtrack of electronic whirrings and clicks, toys with us with a paranoia-upping visit from a stranger, and ends with a satisfying bloody third act. There are missteps--Evans betrays his handicam-only aesthetic when he tries to make the kills zippy, and it's never really feels like these five have been living together for six months. But it has a dark and despairing ending that Stephen King would love.
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Currently Reading
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BLOGROLL
Movable Type 4.25
March 5, 2010
My Little Eye - 2001
February 19, 2009
New York Magazine Profile on Film Critic Armond White
I don't really read Armond White, but I do like to read about someone who is uncompromising and drives mainstream critics nuts. (On the other hand, he thinks Spielberg is America's Greatest Director. (Really?)) I was interested in his statement here:
“We always went to the movies, every Saturday at least,” White says. “I used to love to see stuff like The Long, Hot Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. To me, this was a window into the adult world. Now people watch movies so they can stay kids, which proves how infantilized the culture is. I wanted to see how grown-ups acted, in CinemaScope. Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor, the most beautiful people ever, on that giant image: It filled my head … Detroit was a great movie town then. We got Canadian TV, so I got to see stuff like La Dolce Vita, Jacques Demy’s Lola, 8½, all of them dubbed. Boccaccio ’70—these shorts by Fellini, De Sica, and Visconti—I must have seen that one twenty times.One of our problems as a culture is that a lot of our movies are made by men (mostly) who haven't grown up. That's why we have a lot of crappy superhero films and big-budget B-movies, but it's hard to find films about what life is actually like for most of us these days. (On the other hand, I liked "Iron Man.")
The Crisis of Credit visualized
Many people sent me this today. But that's because it's very good, created by a guy called Jonathan Jarvis as part of his thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Give this guy his diploma already.
A snowy "Fire" music video, feat. cool tilt-shift
Fire (Jimmy Edgar Remix) from Erik West on Vimeo.
Artist: Codebreaker feat. Kathy Diamond
Directed, Shot and Edited by Erik West
Copyright 2009 Disco Demolition Records
Pretty awesome tiltshift video by Erik West. I haven't got tired of this technique yet.
None of the snow in this piece is simulated. I went out and show on the snowiest days of winter. The last scenes in the video were shot during a blizzard.
This was shot on a Canon Powershot SD630 Point & Shoot.
Additional footage was shot on a Sony EX1 by Jeff Thomas.
Posted using Final Cut, Photoshop, Motion and Color.
August 17, 2008
Searching for the One
A quote from Infinite ThØught's culture blog:
Films that appear to be 'all about women', such as Sex and the City are paeans to a curious combination of ultra-mediation and a post-religious obsession with 'the one'. You go to the City in search of 'labels and love'; the one mediating the other – the nicest thing your boyfriend can do for you is have a giant wardrobe installed for all your 'labels'. Drinks with 'the girls' are dominated by discussions about whether he is 'the one' or not. What does this obsession with 'the one' mean? The bourgeoisie may have 'drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation', as Marx and Engels observed, but certain religious motifs are harder to shake than others. The 'one' as the transcendent culmination of an entire romantic destiny demonstrates a curious melange of the sentimental ('we were always meant to be together!') and the cynical (if there's a 'one' then the 'non-ones' don't count; the sex with them is of no importance, there is no need to behave even moderately pleasantly towards them).
June 12, 2008
20th Century Boys - the first long trailer
I am all emotional and excited like a leeeeeetalll guuuuuurrrrrrl after coming across this first longform trailer for the live action adaptation of Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys manga (which I've already written about). With one of the biggest budgets in Japanese film history and spread over three, 2-hour films, this looks like it may just live up to its hype. Having read the full series, I watched the trailer and just kept nodding my head: yep, they got that right...uh-huh...yes...good choice...so-and-so looks exactly like the character...etc.
The question is: how long until I get a subtitled copy in my sweaty, greedy hands?
April 28, 2008
Fantoche
Well done and slightly unnerving. The artist(s) are called notblu and there are more videos here.
UPDATE 05.14.08: Turns out that was part two of a longer film:
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
By way of New Shelton Wet/Dry.
April 24, 2008
Shinya Tsukamoto's "Adventures of Electric Rod Boy"
Tsukamoto made his breakthrough with Tetsuo Iron Man, and then went on to Tokyo Fist and A Snake in June. But here's where it all began with "Adventures of Electric Rod Boy." (Okay, it was his second film.) You can see that his obsessions were already in place. And you can see over the years that he's tried to keep that Super 8 aesthetic.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
By way of Robot Action Boy
January 31, 2008
Gondry remakes his own "Be Kind Rewind" trailer
Be Kind Rewind is Gondry's upcoming comedy about two video store guys who create homemade versions of classic films using cheap props and a viddy cam. Now Gondry has remade the official trailer in the homemade style. This is why Gondry is a genius and you (probably) are not.
January 27, 2008
Interview: Javier Bardem grabs film fest's Montecito Award
TED MILLS, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT
January 27, 2008 7:23 AM
Many in the audience who sat enthralled by the dark villainy of Anton Chigurh, the killing machine in the Coen Brothers' "No Country for Old Men," may not have recognized Javier Bardem as the same actor who starred in Julian Schnabel's "Before Night Falls" as gay Cuban poet and dissident Reinaldo Arenas. The Arenas role earned Mr. Bardem a Golden Globe nomination; "No Country" won him one (for Best Supporting Actor).
He has another honor in the bag: the Montecito Award, presented by the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. The Spanish actor will pick up the award, created to honor a series of classic and standout performances, Monday night at the Lobero Theatre.
Mr. Bardem, 38, has been working in front of the camera since he was 6 -- not too much of a surprise when you consider his grandfather and uncle are both directors and his siblings also act. But there was also a time when he was a member of the Spanish national rugby team.
Foreign film buffs may recognize his first Spanish breakout role as the lover of Penelope Cruz's character in "Jam0x97n, jam0x97n" from 1992. It took until 2000 and "Before Night Falls" to break into American film, but he did so to obvious success.
Since then, he's made appearances in Michael Mann's "Collateral" and starred in "The Sea Inside," but even still, "No Country" feels like a revelation.
Mr. Bardem chooses carefully, some might say too carefully. His interviews and articles for previous films describe a reluctant actor who needed major convincing before taking a part.
In an interview with the News-Press, Mr. Bardem said he wasn't sure if his style is a quality or a curse.
"I guess it's about facing what you really are and knowing what you can bring to other people's process," he said. "It's best to know your limitations and good to step out if you're not the right guy. It's good to have no surprises."
Of course, this sounds odd coming from someone with Mr. Bardem's rèsumè -- and mid-sentence he reconsiders.
"But you never know what those surprises will be. That's the fun part. Some people love to jump off the cliff into the water without checking how deep it is," he said.
In "No Country For Old Men," Mr. Bardem's Chigurh chases Josh Brolin's Llewelyn Moss, who has stolen a bag of money from a drug deal gone bad. Chasing both is Tommy lee Jones' Sheriff Bell, who follows a trail of bodies left in Chigurh's wake.
Though the trio is connected by fate, the actors never share a scene together, except for a murky gunfight in a street.
"It was like we were doing three different movies," Mr. Bardem recalled.
"The only connection between all three is Kelly McDonald's character." (Ms. McDonald shares major, separate scenes with all three).
For Mr. Bardem, he has his own theory for why this works.
"They are three different sides of male behavior. Tommy is goodwill; Josh is an impulsive kind of violence; I play this kind of nonsense violence, just pure aggression . . . the movie is a statement of too much testosterone making things go very wrong."
Mr. Bardem recently wrapped on Woody Allen's latest film, "Vicky Christina Barcelona," shot in Barcelona, Spain.
"I have no idea what the finished movie will be like; that is up to Allen's magic," the actor said. "It was a great pleasure to work with Allen, but very demanding. He puts you in a position where you are . . . obliged to just 'be.' There is no time to 'act.' For my country, it is a big honor to have him shooting here."
The Javier Bardem tribute is 8 p.m. Monday at the Lobero Theatre, 33 E. Canon Perdido St. Tickets are $65. For information and tickets, call 963-0761 or 963-4408, or log on to www.sbfilmfestival.org.
January 3, 2008
Movie time!! Nowhereland and Walk Cycle
While I sit and recover from an awful head cold (my second in three weeks after a year of being fine), I've uploaded some of my older films. Bet you thought I just made music videos, huh? Anyway, the above film, Walk Cycle, was shot on 16mm and is a little comedy. Don't skip to the end, just be patient!
The next four (below) contain my entire sci-fi film nowhereland and though I didn't want to break it up into four bits, YouTube make you do that for longer films. At least I got to choose the end of each "act."
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
August 25, 2007
Some new-ish David Lynch: Absurda
Haven't seen this before, though the ballerina footage appears on the INLAND EMPIRE DVD...which you should buy...right now.
According to the YouTube post, created for Cannes 2007.
August 9, 2007
New Michel Gondry!!
Oh hellz yeh.
Thanks to Josie for posting this first!
August 7, 2007
Hot Rod
USA, 2007
Dir. Akiva Schaffer
Not perfect, but if you like the Lonely Island vids, then you could certainly do worse than this Adam Sandberg comedy, in which he plays a wannabe stuntman who plans to jump 15 school buses to raise money for his step-father's heart transplant...so he can kick the old man's ass. That's the kicker in this film that's half surreal and half an affectionate riff on late-80s teen flicks like Karate Kid. For goodness' sake, 90% of the songs in this film are by Europe! And the rest are by John Farnham!
To be honest I wanted to laugh at this more than I did, what with Will Arnett in it and lots of slapstick goodness. I was reminded of the anything-goes attitude of early Stephen Chow (compare this to Chow's Love on Delivery and tell me I'm wrong), and there's one line by a newscaster that had me howling in the theater along with the three other people who had paid to see it.
A lot of the humor is undone by either: bad directing (Schaffer not knowing where to point the camera), bad editing (cutting too soon and not letting things hang just a little bit longer), or bad producing (leaning on both director and editor to cut the time down). Who knows? Check the riot scene and see what I mean.
Worth owning on DVD--lots of quotables. Hopefully they'll be able to let rip next time, because this still feels very restrained.
The Stupidest Thing Camille Paglia has said, ever
I'm used to Paglia writing things I disagree with, but this is boneheaded to the extreme.
On the culture front, fabled film directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni dying on the same day was certainly a cold douche for my narcissistic generation of the 1960s. We who revered those great artists, we who sat stunned and spellbound before their masterpieces -- what have we achieved? Aside from Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather" series, with its deft flashbacks and gritty social realism, is there a single film produced over the past 35 years that is arguably of equal philosophical weight or virtuosity of execution to Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" or "Persona"? Perhaps only George Lucas' multilayered, six-film "Star Wars" epic can genuinely claim classic status, and it descends not from Bergman or Antonioni but from Stanley Kubrick and his pop antecedents in Hollywood science fiction.If by "multi-layered" she means "multiple layers of poo, each new layer stinkier than the last" well yes.
And to answer her question: The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut, Mulholland Dr., Rosetta and/or The Son, A Time to Live and a Time to Die, The Wind Will Carry Us, Nostalghia, etc.
Jumping Kee-rist, that's a stupid rhetorical question.
July 6, 2007
Film Review: Transformers
MOVIE REVIEW: 'Transformers': less meets the eye - Transforms money into wasted time
BY TED MILLS NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT
July 6, 2007 8:19 AM
Good morning class. Welcome to Day 2 of the Michael Bay Film Academy. I'm glad all of you could attend the screening of "Transformers" last night. Weren't we all pumped! I certainly could feel the energy in the room as professor Bay unfurled his latest masterpiece. But you might have some questions regarding how to make films. I will address these questions.
I know some of you, when you were kids, played with the Hasbro toys. For those who were reading books -- OK, everyone, calm down, let me talk -- Transformers were cars, trucks, planes and the like that turned into robots. Some were good -- they turned into GMC trucks and Camaros -- and were led by Optimus Prime. Some were bad, were called Decepticons and were headed by Megatron.
What's that, Smith? You think the movie should have consisted of robots fighting? That's what the fans want, you say? Well, you obviously don't know the first thing about Michael Bay filmmaking.
June 30, 2007
Man Out of Time
Cleaning up some old bookmarks I decided to pay UBUWEB a visit and came across Orson Welles: The One Man Band, a 1995 documentary by Vassill Silovic that features fascinating bits and pieces from the numerous projects Welles started but never finished in his later years. It's 90 minutes long, but if you're like me it's completely fascinating. One can only wonder what Welles would have done in the age of digital video, when the costs would have dropped immensely. Of particular interest to me are his readings from Moby Dick. Has Melville ever sounded this good?
June 29, 2007
Herzog's New Film
Went to a sneak preview last night of Werner Herzog's first big-budget Hollywood film, "Rescue Dawn," about Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale), a US pilot shot down over Laos and how he escapes internment. My review will come later, but in the meantime my friend Jon has pointed out this New Yorker profile on making the film from about a year ago. Apparently, Herzog (with whom I share a birthday) likes to do things his way:
The fact that Herzog has been making films for more than forty years, many of them acclaimed as works of unnerving originality, didn’t shake the collective judgment that he was doing it all wrong. The mood on the set was toxic. Josef Lieck, the first assistant director, who has worked with Wim Wenders, said, “For a man of his age, it’s a very . . . raw talent. It’s more like an eighteen-year-old running into the forest.” A costume designer complained, “He doesn’t know basic things about filmmaking, things that simply make it easier to tell a story. He thinks that these things will undermine his vision, but they won’t.” Harry Knapp, an assistant director, said, “There is a silent war on the set. We’re all in a state of shock.” Herzog, for his part, politely ignored the crew’s complaints. Zeitlinger explained, “When making a film, Werner tries to pretend as if nobody is around but him and the actors.”That the film is very suspenseful and gripping shows how much all the crew's opinion really mattered. The article is long, but a hoot.
April 14, 2007
Paradise Lost 2: Revelations
Gimme Shelter
1) Threatening bearded people
2) People who should not be naked dancing around naked
3) People insisting I share their high with them
4) People who think I came to the concert so they could stage dive/crowd surf on my face
5) General aggressive dumbness
6) Hippies -- why oh why are you still with us?
Best moment of the film, performance wise is not the Stones--they just seem to be plowing ahead, playing the hits--but Tina Turner stroking her mic stand like it's a long tumescent johnson. Yowee.
April 9, 2007
Grindhouse
1) Let's hear it for Buellton! The car chase was shot just over the hill here in the Santa Ynez Valley.
2) As Tarantino gets older, he begins to look like Bill O'Reilly
3) Eli Roth's preview was the worst. He's the true inheritor of Hershell Gordon Lewis, misogyny on down.
4) "Machete" was the best preview, in tone and feel. Runner up was Edgar Wright's "Don't"
5) Loved the "Missing Reel"s
6) Zoe the stuntperson transcends the film. She's truly kick-ass.
April 5, 2007
Hot Fuzz
I saw this as part of a sneak preview press screening at the Plaza de Awful I mean Oro.
Paradise Lost
April 1, 2007
The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. 1
So finally Fantoma put these out on DVD, with Anger's own commentary (needed on symbolically obscure films like "Inauguaration of the Pleasure Dome"). They look beautiful, from the woozy focus and outre sexual fantasies of "Fireworks" to the color explosion of "Pleasure Dome". I stole a heap of stuff for "nowhereland" and it was cool to go back and see what I had taken (I had forgotten).
March 30, 2007
No Direction Home
Great footage, great obscurities. You can forgive Dylan for never reaching the heights of Bringing/Highway/Blonde again. That Dylan crashed along with the motorcycle.
March 29, 2007
Beau Travail
March 25, 2007
Avenue Montaigne/Orchestra Seats
March 24, 2007
Water Drops on Burning Rocks
And Ludivine is only in the second half of the film, but, well, you'll understand when you see it.
March 14, 2007
Critical Mass!
I tried to add some movies to my Netflix and got this message! D'oh! I have since deleted a few (on the saved/upcoming/never-will-come-out list), but mostly I need to start watching more.
That magic number by the way is...500 movies.
September 15, 2006
1,000 Cars
Man hacks a video racing game and populates it with 1,000 cars, then lets them go at it. Complete, beautiful mayhem follows, all set to a Moby song. Ace!!
July 24, 2006
Sketches of Frank Gehry
Dir. Sidney Pollack
2005
My friend Mr. C invited me out to see this film which he needed to review. I haven't been a fan of Frank Gehry, but I was willing to give the film a try. Hey, convince me, right?
But I got the distinct feeling over its 90 minutes that both supporters and detractors of Gehry, and Gehry himself, were talking a load of balls. Sidney Pollack, who directs and interviews and is one of Gehry's longtime friends, is probably the most interesting person here, as he brings his concerns about art and filmmaking to the interviews, trying to find similarities to filmmaking.
We hear from architectural critics and artists (including Julian Schnabel looking like The Dude in a robe and sunglasses), CEOs and museum directors. But who we don't hear from are the people who have to live and work in these buildings. Is it well designed for humans? Is it convenient? Does it leak? Is it comfortable? Does the sun refract off of the side of the building and incinerate some office drone's head?
Basic questions like these are not only absent here, but absent from most writing on it, and one of the problems that has beset architecture since the anti-human scourge of Le Corbu and modernism.
From the film, it looks as though Gehry works in paper, glue, and crumpled plastic, then a warehouse full of designers and engineers bring his collage-like whims to reality. It looks like the easiest job in the world if you can just get away with it. As Mr. C said, you get the feeling Gehry is pulling a fast one. This is often leveled at many artists, but with a Damien Hirst you can take it or leave it. It's not like one has to weigh the options of having a sheep in a tank of formaldehyde in the living room. But people have to live in these buildings. When critics go on about how Gehry takes risks, my initial thought was "Do I want to live in somebody else's risk?"
With numerous shots of blank walls that come down to the curb with no public access and of teeny weeny heads seemingly lost among the metal, one has to wonder where humans have a place in Gehry's work. If they do, you won't know it from this film.
May 31, 2006
Art School Confidential
Dir. Terry Zwigoff
2006
Like Ghost World, "Art School Confidential" started as a Daniel Clowes comic in Eightball, but unlike the first narrative, which played itself out over several issues, this was a one-shot, a blast of vitriol aimed directly at the author's own years at the Pratt Institute (we are told, anyway). Teamed up again with Terry Zwigoff, the film molds the screed out into a narrative of sorts, but lacks the warmth or empathy of Ghost World.
It could be that Clowes is much more sympathetic to the girls of Ghost World, but when faced with a male character, more of his self-loathing enters the picture. The Clowes stand-in, Jerome is a good draftsman and illustrator when he gets to art school. His life studies are the best in class. But this is not what art school is about--it's about coming up with a gimmick, sucking cock (as an old, jaded artist played by Jim Broadbent tells him), and working the gallery scene (which I suppose is just more cock-sucking).
Meanwhile there's a strangler on campus claiming lives, a beautiful model (Sophia Myles) to become obsessed about, odd teachers to please (John Malkovich), and assorted character types to react to (my favorite: the Kevin Smith-like film student).
If only Jerome wasn't such a pushover. He's easily led by both instructor and mentor, and in the end isn't even producing his own art (a plot development that feels too much like Enid's ending gambit in Ghost World). I know that Clowes' idea of irony, but if a lot of the best comedy comes out of desperation, Jacob isn't desperate enough.
Now, while watching the film, I laughed and laughed. It is funny, and the scapel-like wit that disects its supporting cast never lets up. But at the end there's not much left to feel.
X-Men : The Last Stand
Dir. Brett Ratner
2006
As a comic reader (never enough $$ to be a collector) as a kid, my love for tragic stories probably comes from the Dark Phoenix saga of the X-men. Not that I could ever buy that particular "death of Jean Grey" issue, but I could make out what I had missed in the lead-in and the aftermath. It was also their handling of the death later on that turned me against superhero comics right around age 16.
So I do have a soft spot for the X-Men. The fact that Jean Grey could not control her powers, destroys a planet in a frenzy, and is then sentenced to death, finally sacrificing herself lest her lover and her friends step in to stop justice from proceeding, gave me a little look into themes that would be dealt later in more adult literature (though writer Chris Claremont is responsible for a lot of Marvel's maturity). A tragic flaw that cannot be rectified with anything other than death--it paved the way for me to read Hamlet later in high school, etc.
May 30, 2006
Doctor Who - The Idiot's Lantern
Written by Mark Gatiss
2006
A great period setting--the Queen's coronation, 1953--and a bit of retro technofear (new televisions as alien conduit) make this episode one of the better ones. The Doctor and Rose land in London to way too many TV aerials and a electronics dealer, Magpie, selling them off to families for a pittance. It's for the Coronation, but surely not everyone on the block needs one? Plus, black police cars are pulling up in front of residences and taking people away, bundling them into the back seat with blankets over their heads.
Turns out an alien force is using the televisions to reach out to the viewers and suck their faces off (a nice, frightening touch), leaving a blank zombie behind. One who's already had their mug wiped is the grandma of a young boy, son of a nationalist bully father and a dominated mother. The Doctor arrives just in time to sort out the alien's plan and to provide some needed family counseling.
Idiots Lantern moves quickly, but it doesn't stay in the memory. For every creepy moment (those blank faces give me the willies), there's a cheeseball one--the alien, in the form of a kindly female BBC announcer, screaming HUNGREEEE!!! FEEEEED MEEEEEE!!! when it was much neater when she remained kindly (and evil).
Best of the supporting bunch is Ron Cook as Magpie, who does the alien's bidding to keep his face. The more he realises the alien's true plan (maximum viewership during the coronation broadcast means the best time to suck all of Britain's faces off) the more torn and disgusted with himself he becomes.
But so many things make no sense. We see that Magpie has sold TV sets to everyone on the street. But surely the point of setting the story during the Coronation is that very few people owned a set and so block parties (like the one we see at the end) were centered around only one television. Less televisions, more concentrated viewers. The story indicates that Magpie is only selling televisions in this neighborhood, instead of all over Britain. So are there thousands of Magpie-like men over Britain? And why does the alien suck people's faces off before the big day? As a snack, perhaps? Like the Cybermen story last week, budget constraints limited the vision, but surely some of this could have been dealt with by some dialog. Why does this alien choose this one, small shopkeeper to do her bidding? I get the feeling that a lot of this was written out in rewrites.
Next week: Shrimp-headed monsters in space.
Shohei Imamura dead at 79
Two obits in a row--I better write some jollier entries. Imamura was one of the masters of the Japanese New Wave. I highly recommend "The Pornographers" and "Insect Women" from his classic early period.
Two-time Cannes winner Shohei Imamura dies at 79
May 25, 2006
Doctor Who - Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel
Writer: Tom McRae
2006
The first two-parter of the season "Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel" brought back an old nemesis (one of the least interesting, in my book) and tried to rework some modern magic on them. I found the episodes only mildly successful, mostly because of its pretensions of scope and its inability to provide the visuals or ideas to match. Instead of following the mythology--cybermen, hailing from Telos, invading planets and such--the script posits an alternative universe where Cybermen are invention by a mad CEO of a telecommunications company. Played by wheezing, scene-chompiness by Roger Lloyd Pack, John Lumic desires to evolve and escape from his wheelchair-bound, terminally ill state. (Though I have to give Mr. Pack credit for saying he created the character based on Donald Rumsfeld.)
Continue reading "Doctor Who - Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel" »
May 10, 2006
Storyville
Dir. Mark Frost
1992
A steamy belch of bayou gas, Mark Frost's Storyville features senators behaving badly, lawyers acting erratically, and judges packing heat. A story this silly could only come out of the fevered dream of New Orleans, and Frost is working from a novel called Juryman by Frank Galbally and Robert Macklin. I assume he was faithful, because I can't find anything about the book on the web.
May 9, 2006
Best of Youth
Dir. Marco Tullio Giordana
2003
Spanning four decades in the life of one Italian family, Best of Youth recreates the depth and psychological breadth of a fine novel. It's also compulsive viewing, though I spread its six-hour length over a few days. And to talk about what happens in the film would ruin your potential enjoyment of its character development and plot twists (which are often sudden and shocking).
But essentially we have two brothers, Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio) and Matteo (Alessio Boni), who we join as they are about to graduate from college in the early 60s. Along with two of their friends, they have a great European trip planned. Nicola is the studious one, Matteo is the impulsive one, though even at the beginning, they share each others qualities. The trip goes awry--Matteo, who is volunteering at a psychiatric hospital, rescues a young female patient,Giorgia (Jasmine Trinca), convinced she is being tortured with electroshock therapy. The two friends go on ahead, while the two brothers abscond with the girl to return her to her family in the north. Yet, that doesn't work out either, in surprising ways, and Nicola winds up being the only one to really travel outside the country, up to Norway.
May 8, 2006
Doctor Who - The Girl in the Fireplace
Written by Stephen Moffat
2006
At last. Finally. An episode of Doctor Who that can stand up with the best from Season One. The Girl in the Fireplace looked like it was going to be a typical "run away from mechanical monsters" story in the preview, but Stephen Moffat's script managed to be a thoughtful piece about time and love.
The Doctor and companions land on a 51st century spaceship that contain time portals into 18th century France. Why and how are discovered over the course of the episode, but at the center is, Reinette, a young girl who will grow up to become Madame de Pompadour, mistress to the king. She also believes, when the Doctor enters her room via the fireplace that he is her imaginary friend come to rescue her from the monster under the bed, a V-for-Vendetta style clockwork robot, all that's left of the ship's crew.
The Doctor's trips back and forth between the ship and France are only minutes, but each window is another stage in Reinette's life. Like Sarah Jane Smith last week, the madam waits for the Doctor to return to save her from the moment when the robots return at age 37 to claim her head.
Now, there are lots of unexplained facts and plain plotholes in this episode (why do the robots have to watch her evolve? Why can't they just skip ahead to age 37? Why can't Reinette just leave the palace and get out of danger? Why is there a white horse wandering the spaceship?) but in this dreamy episode all this is secondary to the love that builds between the Doctor and the rapidly aging mistress (again, reflecting what was said last week to SJS about watching companions age). She has spent her life waiting for these brief moments of pleasure, while the Doctor must choose between traveling through time or resigning himself to a temporal existence (much like a Greek Gods desire to become mortal) for love. We know what the end result will be, yet Moffat manages to wring as much pathos and sadness out of the Doctor's decision (and his equally rash return to the spaceship).
Rose and Mickey are essentially marginalized for the majority of the episode, which is a weakness. Some stories really only belong to the Doctor. But the irritating breakneck pace of the earlier episodes is gone and the same amount of time delivers the kind of bittersweet emotion that School Reunion should have had.
Next week: Cybermen!
May 3, 2006
Marebito
Dir. Takashi Shimizu
2004
Made in conjunction with one of Tokyo's film school's and starring Shinya Tsukamoto, better known as a film director of Tetsuo: Iron Man, Marebito successfully marries Japanese grunginess with a particular brand of early 20th century Lovecraftian horror. It's a relief to see that this was shot by the same director of (and at the same time as) the U.S. remake of The Grudge, and that Hollywood hasn't gone to his head. Instead, this is a creepy, shot-on-several-kinds-of-video story.
May 1, 2006
Doctor Who - School Reunion
Written by Toby Whitehouse
2006
Ironically, on the weekend the Beeb broadcast this latest Doctor Who episode, America's Sci-Fi channel was finally getting around to showing "Father's Day," one of the best episodes of the first season, and one of the best--dare I say--of all Doctor Who. Ironic in that I so wanted "School Reunion" to at least aim for the emotion of that episode, knowing that it would be bringing back former assistant Sarah Jane Smith (Elizabeth Sladen), and well, it comes up short.
The plot was straight out of Rodriguez' "The Faculty," with a school overrun by aliens in teachers' clothing. There's some mysterious oil, a supercomputer, large bat creatures, and a headmaster who is cartoony evil. For 45 minutes, it still feels rushed, leaving out the usual Tardis-landing, where-are-we introduction. Instead, The Doctor and Rose are already in place, working undercover in the school as a teacher and a school lunch lady respectively. Then Sarah Jane Smith turns up as an investigative reporter and the episode heads towards its emotional core.
"I waited for you, all these years!" Sarah says to the Doctor, and fans will remember how she was dropped back off on Earth, suddenly after the Doctor was called to Gallifrey alone. Trouble is, every time the story turned dramatic (ie. interesting), some silliness intervened, including being attacked by giant bats and such. Rose's kneejerk jealousy was a bit too obvious, especially after her character's development last season, which suggested that her mind had expanded beyond her time-and-space-bound earth perspective. The same goes for the little bitch-fight the two assistants have later. ("I saw a werewolf!" "Well, I saw the Loch Ness Monster!" etc.) It was cute, but designed purely for fans. Much better was the Doctor having to defend why he changes assistants over the years--it was suddenly brutal and harsh and Rose was taken aback.
Maybe it's too much of me to ask for more drama in a sci-fi serial, but go back and rewatch "Father's Day" and be amazed at how much emotion (and time-paradox goodness) is packed into a simple siege scenario.
The last five minutes, though, nearly made up for it, with a final goodbye insisted on from Sarah, and K-9 returned to its mistress. Silly tin dog.
Surely this story deserved a two-part arc?
April 24, 2006
Doctor Who - Tooth and Claw
Written by Russell T. Davies
2006
Much better. This week's episode was staple Who fodder, nothing more, nothing less, but unlike New Earth (which Davies also wrote), it got to show us the rapport between Rose and the Doctor. The episode did start out with a quite rubbishy prologue, wherein an order of monks take over a large Scottish estate. For whatever reason, these Scottish monks, circa 1879, go all Shaolin on the poor servants, in a hastily shot fighting sequence that was five years too late to be cool, and had no later bearing on the plot. Couldn't they just have been evil monks with guns?
But after that, we have the Doctor and Rose planning to send the Tardis to 1979 to see Ian Dury and the Blockheads perform. Wouldn't most of us, if we were companions use the Tardis for this kind of historical journey? Why would I want to go see the Battle of Hastings? I'd probably get hurt. So anyway, they undershoot by a century and join Queen Victoria, who is journeying north and has to stay in the creepy, monk-overrun estate. The monks are intending to release a werewolf they both worship and carry around in a crate and hope that a bite will carry on the lycanthrope gene to the monarch. The episode features a CG wolf in the house, a few moments of scary "it's quiet, too quiet" suspense, and the Doctor thinking on his feet. So as I said, pretty simple. The pre-werewolf man, with his solid black eyes, was actually creepier than the wolf--too bad we only saw a little bit of him.
Most enjoyable was the waggish banter between the two leads, which reminded me a bit of the "above it all" attitude of the Tom Baker years. Yet, there's always a dose of reality around the corner to put Rose (and by extension the Doctor) in her place.
If I remember rightly, both the first and second episodes of Season One (or Season 27 for you purists) were just okay, so hopefully we'll really be getting to the meat of the season soon enough. Next week's episode promises a reunion with former companion Sarah Jane Smith.
April 20, 2006
Doctor Who -- Season Two Begins!
Episode One - "New Earth"
Written by Russel T. Davies
The new season of Doctor Who, with David Tennant as the Doctor, started this Saturday in the UK, and through the help of the Internet, I was able to see it soon after. (Sorry, SciFi Channel, you took too long to get Season One screened--with commericials, too!)
The stopgap "Christmas Invasion" episode, back in Christmas, was a nice intro to the new Doctor, but I expected a bit more from this opening episode. As it was, "New Earth," was, well, kinda...balls. In one of those desperate attempts to begin with a bang, the episode chucked all sorts of half-baked ideas into a blender and hoped excitment would result. Body shifting! Old enemies! Zombies! Cat-women nuns! Fresh fruit! Yet, as the show progressed, the plot became sillier and sillier. The Doctor and Rose land on "New Earth" (set up after the Earth dies in Season One), but don't go explore this new society. Instead they go to a megaplex hospital and split up (of course). Turns out that major diseases are being cured (ahead of what the Doctor knows of Earth history) because the guardians of the hospital are harvesting clones that they inject with "all major diseases" and, uh, harvest the antidotes? The Doctor objects on the grounds that clones are people too and the last 1/3 of the episodes find all the disease ridden zombie-clones escaped and touching people. Ewww!
Sorry, but if I capsule any more of the episode, my brain will collapse. Suffice to say that the episode had two saving graces--seeing Tennant's new Doctor (great except for a tendency to explode into shouty shouty anger, bad writing to blame) and Rose acting all saucy (after the body swap with someone more shameless--Billie Piper managed the personality changes well).
Season One was so great last year, some of the best television in 2005, that I hope this is just a misstep. Next week promises Queen Victoria and werewolves. Better be good, guys!
Downfall
Dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel
2004
Downfall reenacts, in excrutiating and claustrophobic detail, the last days of Hitler, hiding out in his Berlin bunker as his dreams of the Third Reich fell around him and the Russian front got closer.
Yet it's not a solitary piece--who would want to be with Hitler for more than two hours of screen time?--so Oliver Hirschbiegel's film follows other characters, the young and wide-eyed secretary, Frau Junge (who became the subject of "Blind Spot", and the source for much of what happened in the final days), a doctor who has to help the wounded civilians, though the country itself is bleeding internally, black-marbled eyed loonball Joseph Goebbels (and his infanticidal wife, Magda), who will stay by his Fuhrer no matter what, and Eva Braun, glassy-eyed, still trying to live in the dream her dear Adolph has created. There's also a host of famous and not-so famous Nazis making an appearance: Albert Speer, Heinrich Himmler (beating out even Hitler for worst hair award), and Goering, who is a blink-and-you'll-miss appearance.
But the center is Bruno Ganz's Hitler. Hard to believe this is the same actor who plays the angel in Wings of Desire, but there you go. The worry (from some critics) about playing Hitler as a human (which he was) and not as some cartoon monster is that, like all supervillains, audiences will come to sympathize with him. But Ganz and the movie are too clearheaded, and the script objective when it needs to be, that the effect is what it should be: watching a madman in his final days come up against painful reality. Hirshbiegel saves his empathy for those caught up in the conflict, such as the Frau Junge and a young Hitler Youth who gets the sense knocked into him very quickly after surviving the Russian shelling. The real Junge, in a clip taken from "Blind Spot" that ends the film, makes sure that we don't absolve her too much, noting that Sophie Scholl was the same age as her. "I could have found things out, if I had wanted to," she says.
The DVD had a perfect 5.1 sound mix, which even on my cheapo "home theater" was very impressive, shocking during the above ground bombardments and scary during the underground sequences, and deep thuds fill the front and back speakers. Very cool.
Anyway, for an unnerving look at a nation falling into madness and coming completely unhinged, Downfall is highly recommended.
December 12, 2005
Tomb of the Cybermen
Dir. Morris Barry
1966
Tomb of the Cybermen is exactly the kind of DVD to pull out when you still have a cold a week later, and can't be arsed to do anything else.
One of the few surviving Patrick Troughton-era Doctor Who serials (most of which were thrown out by the BBC to make room on their tape shelves) and one of two available on DVD, this was thought lost until discovered in a Hong Kong basement in 1992. Proclaimed a "classic" by now-grown-up impressionable children who hadn't seen it since, this four-part story fortunately is a cute dose of early Who.
December 9, 2005
Two Uneasy Pieces
Unlikable: Two Road Movies
Sideways
Dir. Alexander Payne
2004
Five Easy Pieces
Dir. Bob Rafaelson
1970
This week, while suffering from post-movie-premiere exhaustion, I finally got back to watching films. I have a stack of DVDs waiting and I'm set to tackle them.
And maybe subconsciously, I chose two men-on-the-road movies, "Sideways" and "Five Easy Pieces." Twenty-four years separate these films, but there are many similarities, and I'll comment on a few here.
Briefly, Sideways, for those who haven't seen it, concerns two mid-life crises men on a week-long road trip to Santa Barbara's wine country. The two--Paul Giamatti and Michael Haden Church--were roommates in college, and now Church's Jack is about to marry--into money, we see, which would solve at least temporarily his failing acting career. Giamatti's is an alcoholic wine connoisseur, a failed writer, with a failed marriage, and the inability to move forward. Over the week they both meet a woman each, and slowly Giamatti's Miles grows up a little.
Five Easy Pieces stars Jack Nicholson as Robert, who we first meet working on an oil field in Wasco, CA. We might mistake Wasco for Waco, Texas, for all the oil and dust, but then again, we might mistake Nicholson's Robert as just another minimum wage cracker until it's revealed he's the lone wolf son of a musical patriarchy. And when that patriarch has two strokes and is near death, Robert is called back up to the family's retreat off the coast of Washington state.
Both Robert and Miles are in existential crisis, lost, unsure who they are, who they could be, and if anything lies ahead. So they take to the road, Robert on a trip towards the father, and Miles towards (metaphorically) the wife, as if to discover what went wrong.
December 6, 2005
Another Lonely Hitman
Dir. Rokuro Mochizuki
1995
Rokuro Mochizuki's moody, downbeat Yakuza tale may mention "hitman" in the title, but apart from a backstory sequence Ryo Ishibashi's gangster doesn't even use a gun. Out of prison 10 years after whacking a family boss, Ishibashi's Tachibana tries to fit back into the lifestyle only to find it cynical and without honor. He doesn't get sent out on hits--instead he and a younger partner usually wind up kicking the hell out of junkies and pimps. You know, dull stuff. At the same time, he tries to rescue a prostitute, Yuki (Asami Sawaki) from the game and get her to kick heroin. Pretty soon, Tachibana wants out.
November 3, 2005
Another Tron-inspired Music Vid
Can't get enough of the vecotr lightcycles! This one is called From Paris to Berlin by the dance outfit Infernal. Tasty.
Thanks to Scott for the tip.
October 23, 2005
Follow the Bouncing Balls
Somebody on Flickr posted a short set some months back when a commercial film crew drop thousands of rubber bouncy balls down a street in San Francisco. This mass bouncy ball madness was one of my childhood dreams realized! Finally, the commercial was released (it's for a Sony LCD monitor) and you can see it here.
October 15, 2005
The Aviator
Dir. Martin Scorcese
2004
Or Why Should I Care About Rich People with Mental Illness?
Martin Scorcese's Oscar-nominated, Oscar-designed biopic of Howard Hughes, sticks to what Hollywood thinks "works" in such a film, while it tries occasionally to undermine its self-achievement, feelgood ending. But mostly it reminded me that I don't really like biopics, and I don't really care too much about the woes of billionaires, and there is something empty at the heart of the film and its Hughes' character. Geoffrey O'Brien made a big hoohah in Film Comment about this time last year about the film, praising it for exactly that: the reclusive, germ phobic Hughes won't conform to the demands on the sort of narrative the story sets out. Well, that's a bit "meta" as criticism, I suppose.
September 29, 2005
No, it's not that deep
My friend Phil has an excellent post (these days he has a lot of excellent posts) on debunking Steven Johnson and his proclamation that Lost (which I haven't seen) proves the point that American pop culture is now so much more complex that the country is actually full of multi-tasking geniuses (who still manage to elect doofi like Bush).
Well, Phil calls bullshit :
The best American TV really should be trouncing mainstream movies in the “smart, complex and many-layered” stakes, but it rarely comes close. And this is without even letting arthouse movies join the fray. If you’re after complexity, emotion and originality, why not compare TV with the best lower budget films from around the world? Maybe there’s an unspoken caveat to pieces like Johnson’s, that while Lost and its ilk are apparently clever and multi-layered, they’re only as clever and multi-layered as we should expect for something that is hoping to attract a mass audience. Shouldn’t we be asking why this is as good as we get? Why are the most intellectually demanding TV shows only reaching the level of blockbuster movies and airport novels?
September 26, 2005
Lord of War
Dir. Andrew Niccol
2005
This is a film I wanted to like more than I did. After The Constant Gardener, which unearthed the nefarious dealings of global pharmaceutical companies, why not a public-palpable expose on the international arms trade?
Except, the script comes at the character two different ways. There's what Yuri (Nicolas Cage) knows and what director-writer Andrew Niccol wants us to know. Or more precisely, what Niccol wants to hide from us until the end for dramatic impact.
September 22, 2005
Petracovich - The New Video
Petracovich - Others (18 mpg)
Alternate Download site
After many months of editing, learning new software, and purchasing a new external harddrive (and not in that order), I can proudly present the music video for the artist Petracovich. "Others" is from the new album "We Are Wyoming." Big thanks out to Michael Long (who provided the artwork seen in the video), everybody at Muddy Waters coffeehouse, producer/cameraman/renaissance man Paul Mathieu, extra camerapeople Jon Crow and Annie, and of course Petracovich herself, Jessica Peters, who graciously allowed us to do the thing in the first place.
The file is big (18mb) so please give it time to load. Enjoy.
UPDATE (9/24/05): We have solved some encoding problems (i.e. missing footage!!) so it's all good to go.
UPDATE (9/25/05): It seems some people are still having a problem with the video freezing up around 1:16. If so, please try saving the movie to your hardrive and then open it with Quicktime, instead of having the browser play it. No, I have no idea why this should be. Also, make sure you have the latest version of Quicktime for your system.
UPDATE (9/27/05): The video has now been reencoded as a letterboxed mpg. I swear this time y'all can get it to work.
UPDATE (9/29/05): I've talked with my provider and they say there's nothing going on their end. The video loads complete and fast. I tried it here at work on a Windows XP machine. So did another guy at the office. So I really don't know why some people are still getting the "half-video" deal. Dump your cache?
July 5, 2005
Burroughs
Dir: Howard Brookner
1983
Knowing I was reading the Burroughs bio, Mr. C____ lent me an old tape of documentaries, including this one by Howard Brookner on El Hombre Invisible. To me, it was like watching an adaptation of the book. Brookner hit the same marks, and included many of the same quotes, though glossing over a lot of the novels post-Naked Lunch. It was good to put face to name, and the doc, shot between '79 and '82, includes some meetings with old friends and family: Allen Ginsberg (in his non-beard phase), Lucien Carr, Bill Burroughs Jr. (months before he died, virtually homeless), Burroughs' brother (who roughly dismisses Naked Lunch to his face), and the author's last assistant (and one of the executive producers) James W. Grauerholz, who comes across like one of John Malkovich's slippery characters. There's also footage of Burroughs' NYC "bunker" and clips from the experimental films he and other friends shot, and many readings from his works (most notably Nova Express). In the credits we find that Jim Jarmusch worked as sound man for many of the NYC shoots--a quick IMDB search shows that Brookner worked as crew on Jarmusch's first film, "Permanent Vacation."
This is a great doc, but is currently out of print on VHS or DVD. Here are some photos I found of the NYC bunker.
Brookner died after making only one feature film, Bloodhounds of Broadway, which boasted a major cast, but flopped seriously at the box office.
July 3, 2005
Land of the Dead
Dir: George A. Romero
2005
We had to wait twenty years for the fourth installment of George Romero's zombie opus, but I would say it was worth the wait. Nothing too advanced has happened since Day of the Dead that would alter Romero's viewpoint. We've had lesser attempts (the Return of the Dead series), and some comical takes on the mythology (Peter Jackson's most excellent "Dead Alive" and Simon Pegg's adulatory "Shaun of the Dead"), as well as some atrocious updating ("28 Days Later" and the "Dawn" remake). So the door was still open to Romero to advance the mythology in this film and he doesn't disappoint. Older scripts are kicking around that show what would have happened if the money had arrived ten years ago. However, Romero wrote this just before 9/11 and his sense of doom and the encroaching police state are just right for the times we're in.
The rich live in a walled off citadel called Fiddler's Green (a vertical version of the mall in "Dawn", but reimagined as if the humans in that film had never left), overseen by Dennis Hopper's Kaufman. Outside lie the impoverished class, unable to enter the citadel, but separated from the zombie-fied world outside by electric barricades. Addicted to drugs, drink, and gambling, infected with prostitution and revolutionary fervor (there's a thin subplot of a people leader who still has, of all things, an Irish brogue), the masses are glad to be hemmed inside their little camp. A band of rogues in Kaufman's employ (as opposed to the lawless road pirates in "Dawn") make the occasional sortie out into the wastelands to scavenge supplies from abandoned markets.
The zombies, we see, still shamble about like zombies do, but they've evolved a bit, now able to understand primitive communication and follow a leader called Big Daddy, a former gas station owner. Romero's sympathies have evolved--whereas the survivors of the past three Dead films had African-Americans in their cast, this time the charismatic black actor is the zombie leader. Here's the real underclass.
Well, the plot follows two paths: the zombie army advancing on Fiddlers Green, and the heroes' journey outside the walled city to capture the armored tank called "Dead Reckoning," which has been hijacked by John Leguizamo's character. Much zombie action follows, including a "flip-top head zombie" and much flesh-chunk chewing. The long-awaited massacre of the yuppie scum inside Fiddlers Green isn't what I'd hoped for though. Hopefully the unrated director's cut on DVD will satisfy my bloodlust. Bwaa-hahahaha!
Romero's social commentary is always there and makes the film a bit more than just a horror flick--from the beginning, when "Dead Reckoning" storms through a village and masacres zombies for fun, the images of the raid on Fallujah and other Iraq war battles can't help but pop up. And while Kaufman doesn't resemble Bush in any way, the whole idea of Fiddler's Green is pretty much a Neo-con's wet dream. The masses outside have their diversions, and can never hope to enter the shining citadel. Romero parallels this idea with the use of fireworks to distract the zombies. Big Daddy finally teaches the zombies to ignore the shiny diversion and attack, which suggests the revolution will only happen once people turn off their TVs, stop worrying about sports and celebrity trials, and, as my friend suggested, stop going to popcorn movies like this one.
All in all, some good eatin'. Ain't It Cool News has a nice and long, geeky interview with Romero from a year ago. Now that Land of the Dead did good box office, perchance some of the projects mentioned will go forward?
June 22, 2005
Kino DVD does the Avant Garde
William just alerted me to this: Kino Video is releasing a 2-DVD set of Classic Avant Garde Cinema of the 1920s and 30s. I've been hoping a company like Kino would do this, what with the success of the Brakhage and the Bunuel/Dali sets (and the always-promised, never-arriving Kenneth Anger set), and now they have. Street date is August 2nd. Two discs of avant-garde goodness for $30--ya can't beat it. Here's the track listing:
Anemic Cinema (Marcel Duchamp, 1926); Autumn Fire (Herman G. Weinberg, 1931); Ballet Mécanique (Ferdinand Leger, 1924); La Coquille and et le Clergyman (Germaine Dulac, 1926); Emak-Bakia (Man Ray, 1926); L'étoile de Mer (Man Ray, 1928); Even - As You and I (Roger Barlow, Harry Hay and LeRoy Robbins, 1937); La Glace a Trois Faces (Jean Epstein, 1927); H2O (Ralph Steiner, 1928); The Hearts of Age (Orson Welles, 1934); The Life and Death of 9413, A Hollywood Extra (Slavko Vorkapich and Robert Florey, 1928); Lot in Sodom (James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber); Manhatta (Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, 1921); Ménilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1926); Les Mystères du Château du Dé (Man Ray, 1929); Regen (Joris Ivens, 1929); Le Retour à la Raison (Man Ray, 1923); Rhythmus 21 (Hans Richter, 1921); Romance Senimentale (Sergei Eisenstein, 1930); Symphonie Diagonale (Viking Eggeling, 1924); Le Tempestaire (Jean Epstein, 1947); Überfall (Ernö Metzner, 1928); Le Vampire (Jean Painlevé, 1939); Ghosts Before Breakfast (Hans Richter, 1928).
I've seen a fraction of these films, and I'm very excited to know there's much more.
June 15, 2005
Blind Chance
Dir: Krzysztof Kieslowski
1981 rel. 1987
Blind Chance is one of Krzysztof Kieslowski's mid-period films before he dove into The Dekalog, but which sat on the shelf for six years because of its political content. The film shows us Witek, a student reeling from his father's death a week before and in a rush to catch a train to Warsaw. The three narratives of Blind Chance show us what happens when he 1) made the train, 2) missed the train, and 3) missed the train and ran into a guard. Witek (Boguslaw Linda) remains the same personality throughout, but the fortunes and characters around him change, so that in one outcome he becomes a Communist Party Member, in another a militant opposition member, and another an apolitical doctor.
The prologue to this is a beautiful montage of memories that make up Witek's past, in which Kieslowski's camera floats seemingly in and out of the head of the child, subjective then objective. I am reminded of the pure poetry and economy found late in Trois Colours: Blue's car crash sequence. Yet at the same time, this 20 or so scenes will later act as clues to why Witek makes the choices he does, his deference to his father, his attitude toward women, his need to belong to groups but his failure to insinuate himself within them.
In all three Witek becomes involved with a protest by students at a hospital; he winds up with conflicting allegiances; he meets women from his past; and he is presented with a ticket to France. Characters from one narrative turn up in the following story as background "extras," and questions from one story are answered in another. When Witek meets his first love in the first story, she has a hand smudged with black. It's only in the second story where we figure out that she must have been helping print underground books, as Witek joins the student press that she worked for tangentially.
Character, then, is less likely to shape our destinies than our interactions with others and the choices we make within those situations. In one story, Witek finds religion (he gazes at a horrifically kitsch photo of Jesus, one that open and closes its eyes depending on where you stand, and then goes asks to be baptized) but we never get a sense that God is shaping his fate (of course, we understand that Kieslowski the writer is).
This is an energizing film for those who have watched too many straight narratives recently (that is, me), and which ends with a final shot like a kick in the lungs.
However, the opening shot, which features Witek on the train, yelling at the camera (which dives into his mouth), has led some to believe that all three stories are Witek's fantasies on fate, but I don't see this. However, the shot doesn't fit into the rest of the film--it's more of a frontespiece, a scream of existential terror to welcome us to the tale.
June 10, 2005
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Dir: Doug Liman
2005
Salon called director Doug Liman a hack, but if so, I think he's a pretty good hack. He knows how to shoot his action sequences, as evidenced by The Bourne Identity. He also knows that in a film like this we want to lock our eyes on the gorgeous being that is Angelina Jolie (and Brad Pitt, I assume, but even the wife found it hard to keep her eyes off Jolie).
Mr. and Mrs. Smith is highly improbable, cartoon malarkey, where neither Smith know that the other is a trained assassin until they're set up to kill each other. Their marriage is on the skids anyway, and a good duel to the death reignites their passion. "I don't know whether to fight him or fuck him," as Jake LaMotta said in Raging Bull--in this film you can do both.
The film is way too long, but at least is chock full of funny little sequences, such as the one where both sit down for a very tense dinner after discovering each others' secret. Or the anti-SUV jabs when they borrow one for a car chase. Or the squabbling while trying to interrogate a hostage.
There's plenty of Jolie to gaze at, one of the sexiest stars we have working today, not just because she's pretty but because she exudes this confidence and charisma. She's like a femme fatale come unlocked from the punishing film noir universe, set free to walk among other film genres and overturn them.
One thing I enjoyed seeing destroyed was their foul, foul yuppie house, the interior design of which gave me a headache. Heavy, thick materials, too much black marble, oppressive. I would suggest that it was actually the house that soured their marriage and its destruction that brought their hearts back together.
June 6, 2005
Taking Lives
Dir: D.J. Caruso
2004
A dark'n'grimy slice of serial killer silliness, Taking Lives must have passed me by in the theaters. I don't remember anything about this film when it came out, and the poster, which just features Angelina Jolie's lips and not her eyes, looks like she's being taken from behind, more of an erotic thriller.
This is one of those thrillers that makes sense as you watch it, especially as you try to keep up with its tangled web and red herrings, but in retrospect makes absolutely no sense at all. For such a brilliant profiler as Jolie's Illeana Scott character is supposed to be, she actually fails to do her job, getting it all wrong, and several people die because of her. She eventually catches the killer and, as happens in these films, kills him with her own bare hands, but we're asked to believe that a disgraced agent would still receive funding from her agency in order to lay a trap over six months later. What did she do with all that spare time, waiting for the killer to turn up? And when he finally does, why is she surprised? That was, indeed, her job.
So. Apart from that we get Quebec standing in for Montreal, a number of great French and French-Canadian actors slumming about, the challenge of seeing Keifer Sutherland and not hearing "I'm agent Frank Bauer of CTU" in your head, a nice shagging scene (unrated DVD only) designed for Jolie fans (and one that suggested right away that her lover is the killer, as nobody has a sex scene this late in a film without some ulterior motive). You also get the site of Gena Rowland's head cut off in a elevator by a son who apparently carries around bone-cutting tools and a speedy working method--from then on the film lost me.
June 4, 2005
Bright Future
Dir: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
2003
After years of having to pay top $$ to get Kiyoshi Kurosawa films on DVD, suddenly they're all coming out, including Seance, which I have yet to see, and this one, Bright Future, his follow up to Pulse, and his first break from the horror genre.
Parts of the film are of a piece with "Cure," as Mamoru, the enigmatic co-lead, is a blank hole into which all morality is sucked, yet he's not evil either. (Kurosawa's favorite method of killing is a metal pipe over the skull--check out "Cure" and "Doppelganger" for some more blunt trauma fun). Mamoru and the lost-looking Nimura (Jo Odagiri) are co-conspirators in a murder that occurs earlier on in the film. It seems like Nimura was about to go and accomplish the deed, but Mamoru gets there in his place and commits the deed. After being sent to death row, Mamoru asks Nimura to look after his red jellyfish, which he's been slowly adapting to live in fresh water. The halfway point of the film (always a point of interest to me) features Mamoru committing suicide and Nimura (intentionally?) toppling over the jellyfish tank and losing the creature between the floorboards. As with Doppelganger, the film then begins to make even less sense. Mamoru has an estranged father, who has only recently come back into his son's life to find it too late to enjoy anything except sad prison visits. He has another son, who we only see in one scene because only one is needed, who is freeloading twit. We have a standard relationship at the core of the film--directionless man needing father figure (Nimura goes to work for him after meeting at the funeral) and father seeking a son substitute to make up for past mistakes. Only Kurosawa tweaks with it and suggests that need is the co-dependent flipside of being existentially lost. Either way, you haven't found your own identity.
The escaped jellyfish begins to multiply (how, it's not said) and begin to invade Tokyo like some mysterious floating lantern festival. Kurosawa's resolution of the story is subtle and not totally satisfying, but it is interesting that stripped of any horror trappings, his films still hold a hypnotic pull.
May 26, 2005
History of the Doctor Who Theme
A very long detailed history, courtesy of Mark Ayres. See when pop culture and "difficult" electronic music combined, and did so often. So much movie and TV music today is very bland, but it's sci-fi that always leads the way (well, except for John Williams, I guess). I think the new Doctor Who theme is the only thing I'm not crazy about from this most brilliant season.
May 25, 2005
Closer
Dir: Mike Nichols
2004
If there was a cartoony graphic for Closer on the movie poster, instead of the pretty typical glossy shots of the stars lined up like bowling pins, I would suggest this: A circle of four people, male, female, male, female, each with a knife stuck in the next person's heart.
That pretty much sums up this gloomy examination of honesty and infidelity my Mike Nichols, directing an adaptation of Patrick Marber's play. Dan (Jude Law) falls in love wtih Alice (Natalie Portman), a visiting American tourist to London, while also wanting to sleep with a more mature photographer, Anna (Julia Roberts, smile still in lockdown since Ocean's 11). But a practical joke winds up throwing Larry (Clive Owen) into Anna's arms instead. Let the honesty and bitterness begin!
Closer is a film/play where the characters speak their mind, then wonder why they suffer from the consequences of a fickle emotional core that won't let them commit or even enjoy what they have. It's human relationships infected with the emptiness of 21st century consumerism, where desire is all and attainment is crushing and debilitating. It makes sense, then, that after everything has fallen apart (for the 20th time) Larry finds Alice working at a strip club, where desire is for purchase and absolutely nothing is left after the transaction. We do discover later, ironically, that Alice (or Jane, as she calls herself) is actually telling the truth for once in this scene, but in this environment, the message can't be heard.
It's a very cruel film, but it does show Owen's range as an actor, for his Larry is the most complex character of the quartet. I was beginning to doubt him after his blank stare performance in I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. Natalie Portman, who I've also read described as "icy", gives a good performance, though I couldn't stop looking at her face and wondering if she'd had plastic surgery. There was something off with her mouth and cheeks. Say it ain't so, Natalie!
Jude Law is very good at playing a cad, though a cad who crumbles easily (he did so later in I Heart Huckabees). And Julia Roberts was equal amounts strength and weakness. I wouldn't mind reading the play after this, though I'm not too sure when and if I'd want to watch the film again, as it really is a joyless piece. There's an overview and review of the play here.
May 21, 2005
Must see BSTV
Linked from the comments section on the Bruce Bickford post below, BSTV is a collection of music videos from Zappa, Negativland, and more. Check out the absolutely blistering Pretenders video for Tattoed Love Boys ("Stop sniveling/You'll make a plastic surgeon rich one day") and sample the Bickford animation in Zappa's Inca Roads, Dubroom Special, and Stinkfoot. Ahhh yehhhh.
May 20, 2005
Doppelganger
Dir: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
2003
As far as I'm concerned the triumvirate of brilliance from Kiyoshi Kurosawa--Cure, Charisma, and Kairo--established him as one of Japan's major directors, and friends know how much I love those films. I missed Bright Future, although I shall see it soon, but it seems that after Kairo, and the end of the world in it, Kurosawa has given up on horror. Or at least, he feels trapped by the genre. Doppelganger is his attempt to break free from that genre, and it's no coincidence that the story is about a brilliant inventor trying to break free from his more devious and amoral twin. But just as the twin doesn't conform to the stereotypes of the doppelganger (he's not pure evil), the film breaks away from its original horror underpinnings and becomes...well, I'm not sure. Its later desolate tone reminds me of the unmoored reality of Charisma (as does the humor), but whereas Charisma reminds me of Kobo Abe's novels, Doppelganger feels half baked. It has no propulsion to it--it coalesces and dissipates over and over.
Kurosawa regular Yakusho Koji plays Hayasaki, the inventor of a wheelchair for paraplegics that uses robotic arms and some sort of mind control (it's never made clear, and like a lot in the film, has no bearing on the plot). He's later joined by Kimishima (Yusuke Santamaria), an assistant hired by the doppelganger, and Yuka (Hiromi Nagasaku), whose own brother similarly was supplanted by a doppelganger, back when the movie was a horror film. These two co-workers are doubles as well, for they have taken the place of Hayasaki's original team that we have seen earlier. The last third details a journey across the country to Niigata (on Japan's west coast) to deliver the finished chair, which begins to feel like a double as well, a metal man with flailing arms. We also begin to wonder, especially with Kurosawa's elliptical style, whether anybody in the film is their "original" self, a "double," or a "remerged version," giving all the final scenes an alienating air.
I'm hoping that the film is a transitional piece, and not a slow, weird, and not too enjoyable falling apart of a focused talent.
April 28, 2005
Ocean's 11
Dir: Stephen Soderbergh
2001
Haven't watched much these days, as I'm editing (or thinking about editing) this music video, but the missus insisted we watch this film as the plane she was on a week or so ago landed before the film finished. (In an even stranger example of bad planning, they showed Ocean's 12 first. The original Rat Pack vehicle is overrated to start with, going downhill after the excellent Saul Bass title sequence. Lazy plotting, turn-up-and-goof performances, and Sammy Davis Jr. relegated to "working negro" status all make the film ordinary at best, but its reputation has been resurrected, I believe, by viewers nostalgic for the era of their fathers, with Sinatra standing in for Daddy.
Oh well. Sodenberg's remake is equally slapdash, but big, bloated, glossy. I like all these actors here: Clooney, Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, but what are they doing? Slumming, looking grumpy or blank, with not many memorable lines to utter or laughs to gain. Pitt especially, whose character is solely defined by his proximity (friendship?) to Clooney's "Ocean". And watching Carl Reiner waste his time was sad, after not having seen him on the screen for ages. Maybe only Elliot Gould seems to be having fun. Compared to this, the remake of The Italian Job, dumb though it may be, at least breathed on the screen. This is as airless as a bank vault.
April 1, 2005
Ah, Mr. Bickford, at last you've come
Frank Zappa fans might know of the brain-twisting clay animations of Bruce Bickford, as Zappa released some of his work in the '80s on VHS. Those tapes are hard to find now, as was much info about the artist. But now the award-winning animator has an Official Homepage, which shows numerous photos of his work, but no clips. Above is a series of clay work he did based on David Lynch's "Twin Peaks." A DVD is rumored to be in the works.
Oh yes, and there's a documentary, too.
March 30, 2005
The Savage Young Pythons...and Bonzos
Before Monty Python there was Do Not Adjust Your Set, which featured Jones, Idle, and Palin. Not only that but their musical guest every week was The Bonzo Dog Band. Lots of great clips at this site for a band sorely unknown here in the States.
March 28, 2005
Ruthless People
Dirs: Jim Abrahams and David Zucker
1986
I got the urge to see "Ruthless People" again after Jessica's last business trip, where she caught it (for the first time) on her hotel TV.
Things I had forgotten about the film: Bill Pullman plays the dumb guy, sporting a seriously bad dye-job; the parade of awful awful awful '80s furniture and fashion (Helen Slater's character Sandy's fashions looks like a selection of clown suits); it has a collection of similarly foul songs, including career nadirs from both Mick Jagger (the title track) and Billy Joel (the deluded and patronizing "Modern Woman").
Things still the same: Danny DeVito's gleefully evil performance. Yes, I know he plays this character in nearly every film, but this is probably the best incarnation, from hoping his new Doberman will eat his wife's poodle to his casual and offensive dismissal of a wrong number.
Tightly written plot, courtesy of Dale Launer, by way of O. Henry. And a nice performance by Judge Reinhold, who talks about being bloodthirsty and ruthless while carefully scooping up a spider and placing it outside.
The film should be taught in economics course as an example of perceived vs. absolute value, with the rich man's wife as the commodity.
March 27, 2005
Music for Oblique Strategies about Films
Brian Eno about films as experiments:
If I go to a cinema and I look at a film, what I do is take part in a kind of role-playing. I first of all watch a world being constructed, and if the film is any good I understand what the conditions and rules of that world are, and then I watch a few people who represent certain sets and bundles of characteristics, and I see what they do and how they relate to the world. Essentially what I'm watching is a kind of experiment that's been set up. I'm watching what would it be like if the world was like this, and what would it be like if this kind of person met that kind of person in that kind of context.
From an excellent essay by Paul Morley on the release of the next three Eno Remasters.
March 20, 2005
Watership Down
Dir: Martin Rosen
1978
Never read the Richard Adams book, but I did read Plague Dogs. Never saw the film of Plague Dogs, but I did watch Watership Down several times growing up. This DVD popped up in the library and so I grabbed it, wondering what it would be like now to view it.
The animation is fairly ropey, but for an independent British production of its time, it does the job well. There are some jittery pans and zooms, the rabbits occasionally jump up and down as if somebody put the animation cells out of order, and the often flat drawing style takes us out of the film's illusion.
But the daily life of a rabbit is presented with grim realism, with much blood and death. I do remember being scared by this as a kid, and with due reason: the film starts off with a stylized origin myth (a mix of British and African graphics), which proclaims death to always be nearby, and then jumps to the narrative where nervous, prescient rabbit Fiver sees his warren's doom: "I see blood all over the field!" It's like Stanley Kubrick directing Beatrix Potter.
The tale is a hero's journey from doomed warren to utopian hill, and then a secondary journey back to infiltrate the evil rabbit gang to pillage their women for breeding purposes.
I was entertained, and there hasn't been many films like it since, pitched somewhere between anthropomorphism and realism.
It's also a one-stop shop for great British actors, a list of major celebrity voices: John Hurt, Ralph Richardson, Zero Mostel (not British, I know), Richard Briers, Nigel Hawthorne, Roy Kinnear, Denholm Elliott, Joss Ackland, and more I'm sure. Apart from the wobbly animation, the film did seem truncated at the end. We never did get a resolution to the main characters, and we jump ahead years to witness the hero rabbit snuffing his little bunny lid and hopping off with the great Black Rabbit in the sky (The disembodied black head floating in the sky is still a very cool image.) But is this how quickly the book ends?
March 17, 2005
Supersize Me
Dir: Morgan Spurlock
2004
Supersize Me is not just a metabolism-killing stunt documentary, like a socially conscious Jackass. Sure, the mainstream media focues on Spurlock's less than scientific study, and picked holes in it, which he readily admits in the film. But surrounding this stunt is the real meat (ha ha) of the movie, which is a long-overdue broadside against the American food industry, and the government's complicity in keeping the industry's profits up. As with Fahrenheit 9-11, the media opted to not follow up on Spurlock's findings, though he certainly gives publicity to a number of interesting stories: the horrific school lunches that the average student eats (and the one school that cooks everything from scratch); the amount the food/grocery/brand name industry spends on lobbyists that essentially keep any healthy legislation from being passed. In fact, it's this last point that is the biggest culprit in the whole game. Capitalist entities will do anything to increase profit--they are amoral by design. It's the role of government (we should think) to curtail their excesses, but that so rarely happens.
As an entertaining documentary it works, not just because of the gross out masochism on display, but Spurlock's winning, friendly manner. He's doesn't start out as angry and ready to make accusations. But like his doctors, he can't believe how badly his MickeyD's diet starts to affect him, and we're they're with him.
The DVD contains a few bonus scenes, nothing amazing, but a separate mini film of watching these fast foods decompose is fascinating. And as you might have heard, while the Big Macs and Quarter Pounders turn into putrescent jelly, those magical fries keep their shape and color long into the third month. Ewwww.
By the way, brave Mr. Spurlock has a blog.
February 3, 2005
Cutie Honey
Dir: Hideaki Anno
2004
Eriko Sato started off her life as cute bikini model in Japan, but has now jumped to film by grabbing the lead role in "Cutie Honey," a purple and pink psychedelic blast of live-action anime based on the '70s manga by Go Nagai. As her theme tune tells us, she has "perfect boobs", kitten-like lips, a fine behind, and generally just lives up to her name. She's also perched somewhere between human and post-human, being as she is a recreation of her scientist father's dead daughter, a reanimation. This also makes her a perfect heroine as well as sex object: innocent but sexual, loving but unobtainable. The film rightfully indulges in its star's good looks and body, giving us more cheesecake than a California factory. Compare this to the huffing and puffin over nuthin' that was "Catwoman"--Cutie Honey's post-feminism is more honest than the bait and switch of American attempts.
Even after the CG explosion of "Kung Fu Hustle", this film's low-rent effects are still bracing and inventive, though after a head-spinning opening sequence, the film settles down for character building and humor before building up to a series of climactic battles between members of the Panther Claw gang and the asexual immortal called Sister Jill. The film is slow in places like many Takashi Miike films. However, we wouldn't want to cut out such moments as a drunken karaoke evening between the three leads, including Jun Murakami as a be-capped journalist with groovy flared hair, and the button-down (but very very hot) police officer Aki (Mikako Ichikawa). Or a very silly moment when Black Claw sings a song all about himself, backed up by violin-playing henchmen.
This was the third film I've seen at the festival, and I was glad to see the crowd ate it up. The festival staffers all loved it as well, introducing the screening with a group call out of Cutie's power-up magic words: "Honey! FLASH!"
February 2, 2005
Kung Fu Hustle
Dir: Stephen Chow
2004
I just missed Kung Fu Hustle when I was in Taiwan last November--it was set to open two weeks after I left, but what a pleasure to see that it was in the line-up at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. Apparently, S.B. marked the second American screening outside of Sundance (not counting those who have found a bootleg copy in Chinatown). Director, star, and comic genius Stephen Chow has been working on this since 2002, which is a long time compared to his productive height in the early '90s, where they would knock off four Chow vehicles a year (and nearly all good).
"Kung Fu Hustle" makes Chow's previous film "Shaolin Soccer" feel like a transitional piece. There was plenty of CG in that film, but now we see that Chow was working towards realizing a sort of human cartoon, where live action meets Tex Avery. Of course, The Mask also attempted this, but the boundaries between the Avery-like Mask character and the "real" world were set. The world of "Kung Fu Hustle" is completely different.
What fans of Chow might have a problem with is the lack of him for great chunks of the picture--his character appears off and on in the first half. He plays a useless street "tough" trying to get into the infamous Ax Gang, while the gang itself tries to put the heat on a innocent looking neigborhood/tenement which is secretly home to a group of kung fu masters. The centerpiece here is the landlord/landlady couple who run the tenement: the landlady (Yuen Qiu) has superspeed and the "Lion's Roar" and the husband (once Chow regular Wah Yuen, who hasn't been in one of his films since "Fists of Fury II") who knows a very bendy style of kung fu. Apart from Wah and Chi Chung Lam (the fat guy from Shaolin Soccer), there's very few familiar faces, and a great many are first time actors, a method Chow employed in his previous film.
Chow's character makes a transition from being a wannabe gangster with blocked chi to a superhuman good-guy with chi a'plenty, and this comes later in the proceedings. The feeling is somewhat like when a stand-up comedian goes from his regular job to be an announcer for other, younger comedians under his mantle.
Is the film good, though? Oh yes, very much, with plenty of eye candy, deft camerawork (Chow knows how to shoot a fight scene), and effects that don't drown out the rest of the film, making sure to keep the human element centered. Is the film one of his bests? No way, for there's very little of him. But is this film unlike anything Chow has ever made, and is this film unlike anything most audiences have ever seen? Undoubtedly.
January 31, 2005
24: Season Three
Prods: Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran
2004
Season Three of 24 finally got into our greedy little hands this month, and it wasn't long till we had blasted through the series, sitting through at least two five-episodes-in-a-row viewings. Unfortunately this season pales in comparison to the first two for a couple of reasons.
One is that, under pressure from Fox execs, I believe, to make the show accessible to any damn person who may join the show at any point during its run, the script and its structure got dumbed down a lot. Agents told other agents things they already knew, stating and restating the obvious for the benefit of nobody else except the chance viewer.
Second is that the faithfulness to the 24-hour, real-time narrative has been eschewed for a plotting structure that feels like regular TV. Yes, these events still happen in an hour during each episode, but now things happen way too fast. Despite being located near downtown L.A., nobody seems to take any time to drive to locations, with most trips taking ten minutes at most. Hell, it takes 2 minutes just to get to the car from CTU, I bet. Whoever is working the Powerpoint at CTU should get a medal, as well, because 10 minutes after data is requested, there's a brilliant presentation full of animated graphics and multiple click-throughs to be screened for the agents. 24 has never been the most realistic of shows, but so much of the suspense from Seasons One and Two came from the time it took to just achieve simple tasks. When time was broken down to the minute, suddenly every minute counted, and we counted along with the show. Now the show feels like a 72-hour bad dream.
The show continues its balance between one of the most moral administrations in the history of fictional presidencies, and between the ruthless, cold agent assigned to protect it. Jack Bauer never speaks of his country or of the freedoms he (or others) enjoy here and that he's protecting. He's there to protect the President and by proxy the American people (usually presented as a mob of extras, as all other characters are agents, villains, or victims). Jack's victory over emotion (which cost him his wife in the first season) is now contrasted with the "weak" agent Tony, who acts selflessly when his wife is threatened and is punished for it by show's end. Like George Romero's zombie films, 24 punishes those who acts out of emotion and a sense of family, and rewards those who don't. That may include the villain, but his undoing is when Jack threatens the life of his daughter.
Like Season Two, this season presents torture as a common practice for both sides. In a year that has brought us Abu Ghraib and torture's legal architect Alberto Gonzales, these scenes disturb, though set up as being as a desperate last option. And torture in 24 always leads to vital information, unlike in real life.
The structure of the season began to show more this time 'round. There's a "beta criminal" that takes up the first half of the season, whose death or capture leads to the surprise revelation of "alpha criminal" whose death or capture caps the penultimate episode, with loose ends tied up in the final episode. There will also be a sacrifice among the CTU staff. And emotional women will wind up ruining everything as usual. (Exception: Reiko Aylesworth's Michelle, who plays by the book, leaving husband Tony as the emasculated male).
So, for now, we're sticking with the series, though we were disappointed. In a year we'll have Season Four to contemplate, and see if the show got back on track.
January 20, 2005
In the Mirror of Maya Deren
Dir: Martina Kudlacek
2003
A gift from my buddy William (along with a Brakhage documentary I haven't watched yet). For those of us who know Maya Deren from her short body of work (but what films they are!) and some of her writings, this documentary allows us a glimpse into the world of the first major woman filmmaker and one of the most important experimental directors of the 20th century. She was a proto-hippy, a proto-feminist with her wild hair, Spanish dresses, and deep interest in other cultures (mainly Haiti). According to Brakhage, who is interviewed here and talks in a most wonderful voice, Deren got so involved in Haitain Voudou that she could call the spirits, and even cursed Brakhage with ill health when he was late to a show. And I believe it too.
For me, I would have liked a bit more on "Meshes of the Afternoon," which inspires me everytime I watch it. I've heard it was shot either up around Mulholland Drive or Laurel Canyon. That long, long curving road speaks to me of a dream from childhood--familiar yet strange. Surely somebody knows that address.
Despite being a visionary and responsible for getting experimental film shown in the States, she died young (45, I believe) and poor, unable to scrape together the cash to finish the movies she was planning and working on. We get some tittilating shots of rolls and rolls of film sitting in her film archives, but very little of the footage itself. She burned brightly and fiercely and then was gone. Damn.
January 18, 2005
Another case for Creative Commons
In what is sure to be one of today's most-blogged stories, this Globe and Mail article on how copyright is killing documentaries makes the case for new, more flexible ways of thinking about copyright--and how greed trumps information and education. Well, duh, you commie.
As Americans commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy today, no television channel will be broadcasting the documentary series Eyes on the Prize. Produced in the 1980s and widely considered the most important encapsulation of the American civil-rights movement on video, the documentary series can no longer be broadcast or sold anywhere.
Why?
The makers of the series no longer have permission for the archival footage they previously used of such key events as the historic protest marches or the confrontations with Southern police. Given Eyes on the Prize's tight budget, typical of any documentary, its filmmakers could barely afford the minimum five-year rights for use of the clips. That permission has long since expired, and the $250,000 to $500,000 needed to clear the numerous copyrights involved is proving too expensive.
January 11, 2005
The Wire: Season One
Prod. David Simon
2002
Recommended by Jon, and in the back of my mind since reading a laudatory article in Salon about it, the first season of Wire was my first order on Netflix. (Yes, we've signed up). David Simon's story of a Baltimore drug kingpin and the team assigned to bring him down takes delight in upending every cop show cliche, and not just for effect's sake, but because that's the way the world works, baby. So instead of brilliant cops going rogue after being told they're off the case by their cigar-chewing boss, we have cops and detectives brought down by bureaucracy and their own weaknesses. There's no dialog-for-dummies here, either; characters reference events several episodes previous and we're just expected to know. On top of that put the dueling patois of the drug dealers (garden variety Ebonics laced with phone-is-tapped shorthand slang) and the cops (cynical, pseudo-racism mixed with procedural jargon) and you've really got to prick up your ears. Characters reveal themselves slowly--our "hero" McNulty comes across later as rather selfish; rising dealer Dee is a street thug trying to figure out a right way to live in a society that's all wrong. There's none of the safe humor of The Sopranos here, nor a need to ratchet up the suspense. What we get instead is a chance to explore the minutia of the typical drug enforcement case. Salon calls it "novelistic"--in its breadth I'd have to agree. The ending of Season One puts the show on the level of political films as "Z," a world where no good deed goes unpunished.
December 26, 2004
Nightwatch
Dir: Ole Bornedal
1997
Ewan McGregor plays a law student who gets a job as a night watchman in a very spooky medical center, where one of his nightly duties is to walk across the stiff-filled morgue and turn a key. If this building had been inspected by any state-run agency, it would have been shut down: faulty lighting, crummy-looking halls, and an open sewer nearby. Instead, this is a perfect place for a thriller. The best part of this remake of a 1994 Dutch film is the setup, where we are given a tour of the medical center and introduced to several upcoming plot points and red herrings. There's even an alarm just in case a corpse revives and needs to call for assistance. Being left alone in a big spooky place with nothing but your mind to play tricks on you guarantees some jolts, but this is a thriller, and--just as in the original--there's a serial killer out there, a number of bodies, and a young nightwatchman to frame for the murder.
There's far too much music in this film, especially when silence would have done the job, and alert viewers will guess the killer in the opening scenes. All that remains is an effective scene with a prostitute in a restaurant, Nick Nolte's weary cop (Nolte and weary like each other so much they should get married), and an early glimpse of John C. Reilly in a supporting role.
December 25, 2004
Light Sleeper
Dir: Paul Schrader
1991
Paul Schrader's film of a drug dealer trying to get on with life though he knows it's probably passed him by, is a lighter, NewAgey-er version of his Taxi Driver, with William Defoe keeping a diary and surveying the garbage that lies in his path, metaphorically and literally (there's an interminable garbage strike that threatens to swallow New York throughout. Susan Sarandon plays his supplier, who also plans to get out and go legit with a makeup company. Pushing him to find a way out is the random appearance of his ex-wife (Dana Delaney) who knows she shouldn't get involved again. This is a city of expensive apartments and restaurants, where even a ratty apartment looks nicer than anything in Taxi Driver. But, like that film, Light Sleeper will end in blood, something to wash away the streets.
It's a very sad, hopeless movie, though the characters are more in-control and nobler. It still doesn't help them out of the hole they've dug for themselves.
The film is marred by a lack of momentum and a bloody awful song that plays throughout, which sound like Leonard Cohen crossed with Michael Bolton. It truly was cold-turkey music.
December 24, 2004
Irma Vep
Dir: Olivier Assayas
1996
I had forgotten how much of this film's ending I had ripped off for my film, so much that when it came I sat slightly embarrassed next to my wife, who just said, "hey, it's Nowhereland!"
But it's to the credit of Assayas' film that all it took was one viewing and I immediately absorbed the ideas and lessons that the last 3 minutes teach.
That said, the film is both a love letter to Maggie Cheung (in a rubber suit! looking gorgeous!) and French film. For most of the film is about the latter and the problems of advancing the state of film from those who either want to pronounce it dead and nothing like America (the dumb journalist who interviews Cheung) or the others who want it to rehash what has come before (the remake of Les Vampires that forms the movie within the movie). Various positions are staked out, nothing gets consummated--from art to sex, life flows on continuous, and what is left is the most personal kind of film of all, an oblique experimental art piece inside a film that mixes the avant-garde with realism. All that and Luna covering "Bonnie and Clyde." I love it.
Double Vision
Dir: Kuo-fu Chen
2002
Double Vision transplants a Seven-like serial killer tale into Taiwan and a strange Daoist cult. Victims believe themselves to be drowning or burning alive, and die appropriately. Could it be "pure evil" or some strange sort of science? Enter an American expert on serial killers (David Morse) and a workaholic cop (Tony Leung--the other one) who has been ostracized for exposing corruption. The buddy cop dynamics are out of an X-Files episode, as is the set-up, but Double Vision transcends its rather cliched beginnings and veers off into something dark and menacing. The truth here lies somewhere between science and religion, and both men are right in their own way while being wrong in more important ways (ie. those that would save lives).
I liked it more than I thought I would--a great pall of evil and corruption hung over the entire film, permeating even the police office where, supposedly, equilibrium can be found. There's even a bloody massacre of cops'n'cultists in the third act that I never expected, but which have done Peckinpah proud. Morse, who is best known for being in nearly every Stephen King tele-movie, but who I know as the cop that Bjork kills in "Dancer in the Dark," keeps his dignity throughout in a project that so desperately wants to compete with the West. But it succeeds on what makes it particularly Taiwanese: the Daoist angle, the audience's knowledge of Daoist visions of hell, and a lack of Hollywood structure near the end. Even in its sillier moments, it takes itself seriously, and manages to be chilling.
December 23, 2004
Dog Day Afternoon
Dir: Sidney Lumet
1976
Dog Day Afternoon was one of two DVDs I bought for Abel's Christmas present (people always buy him food, not knowing what else to get him; Mom suggested DVDs), but being a used copy, we watched it before wrapping it up. Sidney Lumet's job was to take a sensationalist story (two incompetents try to rob a bank, one of whom wants the money for his lover's sex-change operation) and turn it inside out, making the outlandish universal. With Pacino, he succeeds, and then goes further into doom and despair. Sonny and Sal's attempts are funny at first, but as the day wears on and the AC and lights go out in the building, death seems right outside the door, cheered on by the bread'n'circuses New York mob.
The film now is a documentary glimpse into a New York that opened up to us only in the 70s, before being reformed and reshaped in the 80s. DDA's opening five minutes show life in the city, c. 1976 (set in 1972, nobody worries that 1976's film "A Star Is Born" hangs on a marquee). It was a move borrowed from the New Wave, and rarely seen these days, but sets up the wider context for a film that mostly takes place in two locations: inside and outside the bank. And look closely, for wandering among the crowd is Sonny's wife, who we won't see till much later--fiction intermingling with fact.
Pacino's performance is tempered here with equal doses of anger and passivity--and it's his star power that allows us entrance into the more disturbed or delusional aspects of Sonny's personality.
The film pulses along between slow pools of calm and thrashes of activity (the series of lightning fast cuts that follow Sonny's gunshot out the back window shows that you can cut quick and still be comprehensible). The script has time for dialog that exists apart from furthering the plot. And the supporting cast stand out as real people, not central casting drones (in particular the frizzy haired teller who is always doing something idiosyncratic when the camera passes over her.
Lastly, we come to identify with Sonny so much that in the end we feel his sadness when the hostages--supporting characters in Sonny's head movie--refuse to acknowledge us or him once he is arrested. He's lost his chance, his friends, his family--and mostly he's lost center stage.
The Italian Job
Dir: F. Gary Gray
20003
The Italian Job remakes the Michael Caine vehicle and though it keeps the MiniMetro, much to Austin's delight, it ditches Italy after the opening Bond-like sequence for less interesting Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. Throw into the mix some psychobabble thread about father issues (Donald Sutherland as masterthief--it's his death that must be revenged for the rest of the film) and some attempts at light humor (mostly Seth Green), and each sort of outweighs the other. Edward Norton hangs around for a paycheck, which he admitted as much in an article around the time of the film's release. His lack of joy at being on set certainly helps his dour character, and Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron have as much chemistry as an underfunded inner city science class.
Still, it proceeds at a quick pace and director F. Gary Gray knows how to shoot action for the most part. Don't expect any of it to make sense, though.
December 12, 2004
So Close
Dir: Corey Yuen
2002
At heart this is a rather silly film that tries to mix melodrama with spectacular violence in the grand tradition of John Woo, but has trouble keeping the two hanging together.
Hsu Chi and Vicki Zhao (the female lead in Shaolin Soccer) play sisters whose parents were murdered years before by thugs over their father's magical software. Now, they use the software--a program that can tap into any security camera anywhere--as assassins for hire. Lynn (Hsu) does the leg work, Sue (Zhao) stays at home behind monitors and guides her. After an opening sequence where Lynn kills off an evil CEO and jumps off a skyscraper to safety, rookie-but-brilliant cop, Hong, played by Karen Mok, is on the case and begins to track them down.
Just recounting the plot makes no sense. But for some reason it hangs together, as it's only a backbone to have the sisters in a cat and mouse with Hong, and, like Woo, set up a series of fight scenes where adversaries slowly become partners against a larger menace (here, the same corporation as seen in the beginning). Woo's homoerotic attraction here becomes thinly vieled (and barely explored) lesbianism between the cop (who wears slacks and smokes those silly long cigarettes) and the heavy-lidded Sue. Meanwhile, Lynn is involved with a drippy guy who may cause her to leave the business.
When the women have at it and bring the smack-down, the film comes alive. Nothing's as brutal as the Bride/Elle Driver fight in Kill Bill 2, but the scenes are well shot and cut, and nobody stops for a witty quip. There's also gratuitous shots of Mok's pantie-clad booty and lots of Hsu Chi flesh. Who can complain?
But seriously, if you're going to be an ultra-secret assassination team, why the huge summer house? Who pays for this? When Mok gets framed for murder later in the film, it makes no sense. Nor does a computer system that on one hand is so advanced it offered real time shots over the network of security cams, but on the other seems to take ten seconds to send a 1k email.
So Close is pure eye candy, and that's great, but it's hard to imagine the script making it out of development so quickly here. It's truly slapdash. It's to the credit of the actors, mostly Mok, who I find fascinating even when she's hamming it up, that the movie isn't a total stinker.
December 6, 2004
Infernal Affairs
Dirs: Andrew Lau and Alan Mak
2004
Infernal Affairs was the big HK blockbuster of 2002, and unsurprisingly enough, it still hasn't opened here (except for the big cities), so when I saw it in Taiwan, I bought it, 2-DVD version too.
Andy Lau plays a cop who is secretly a Triad spy. Tony Leung plays a Triad member who is secretly a police mole (but for so long he's perhaps crossed the line). Though we are informed they trained long ago at the academy, neither knows of each others' existence until Lau's character goes into the audio shop where Leung's character works to buy some speakers. To each other they're just regular guys. This, among other twists in this revved up genre flick, will also be the last time they meet until the end.
With such a simple premise that offers such complex conflicts (both men are suffering crises of character and identity) directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak speed things along until it's hard to know exactly how either character will react. On the other hand the speed also undoes the finale, which resolves itself too quickly for my tastes. (There is an alternative ending which I have yet to watch.) It's not that I couldn't figure it out, just that the pace feels wrong.
Andy Lau is again good in this film, two in a row. When he's playing these sort of characters (authortarian types who may just be traitors--as in Flying Daggers) he's fine. When it's comedy or romance, he comes up short. Tony Leung's world-weary character, beaten down for years on an undercover assignment that will never end, walks through the film, skulking but sympathetic. When he salutes his commanding officer's passing funeral procession, hidden down an alley so nobody can see him, we fully understand his sad situation.
The double-DVD contains making-ofs, trailers, and other goodies, but all are in Chinese.
December 5, 2004
House of Flying Daggers
Dir: Zhang Yimou
2004
Zhang Yimou's Hero may have promised wuxia and delivered it in a Rashomon-style vehicle, but his follow up, House of Flying Daggers, is something different altogether: a classic love triangle playing itself out in a world of the Law and a band of secret rebels who plan to overthrow it (the titular House being the rebels' HQ).
Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro play Leo and Jin, policemen who go undercover to arrest a suspected member of the Flying Daggers, played by Zhang Ziyi, who is incognito as a blind dancer at the local Peony Pavilion brothel. These opening scenes, as Ziyi's Mei is put to the test by Leo, mark the film as a thing of beauty, as it trades in "Hero's" solid colors for extravagant, finely detailed silks of many colors and patterns. After her arrest, Jin breaks Mei out of jail and flees with her to the north, hoping she will take him to the group's hideout. Being undercover means Jin has to fight alongside Mei, even when his fellow officers, not knowing who Jin is, attack. And of course, meanwhile Jin is falling in love with Mei (when it's Zhang Ziyi, who can blame him?) while only pretending to do so for the sake of his cover. There are more twists and turns to come, and the film is so pure in its story (Salon rightly compared it to silent film and opera), that they still surprise.
The action sequences are finally, truly breathtaking, instead of us wanting them to be so (as in Hero). Jin undertakes some archery skills that would put Legolas to shame (with a motion technique that Peter Jackson would love), and the Flying Daggers get their due as well. Adding to all this is the excellent sound design: for a fight in a bamboo forest (a wuxia staple), Yimou drops out all the music and leaves just the strange sounds of bamboo, which are after all a forest of hollow tubes. A good 5.1 system should be required to appreciate what is done here.
Yet it's not all flash. In the center is a true romantic tale, free of irony, which few directors would get near in the west. Love is suffering, as my wife likes to remind me (physically sometimes). Yes, there's princesses and such in sword'n'sorcery tales here, but they're the prizes to be won after the battle, not the causes of the battle themselves. Plus, Zhang Ziyi's Mei can do fine by herself, thank you, if you give her some daggers. Andy Lau, who I've never particularly liked as an actor is really good here too, with all his character's repressed pain returning in the very last reel. Of course, maybe it takes a director like Zhang to bring out a good performance in Lau.
There was a period ("Not One Less") where I really thought Zhang Yimou had lost it as a director, and who's string of mediocre films were approaching than of his contemporary Chen Kaige. But fortune's wheel had turned again, and he's come back, in a surprising different style, perhaps, but he's rediscovered the emotional power of his earlier work.
Oh yes, I bought stuff
I came back from my Taiwan trip with a lot of DVDs and VCDs. I'll be giving these a look soon enough...:
From Beijing with Love
Fight Back to School 2
Look Out, Officer
Street Angels 3
House of Flying Daggers
Goodbye Dragon Inn
The Missing
Dog Soldiers
Welcome to Sarayevo
My Name Is Joe
Time and Tide
Three
My Sassy Girl
Phone
Donnie Darko
So Close
Light Sleeper
The Warriors
Curry and Pepper 3
Double Vision
The Addiction
Viva Tonal
Sex For Sale
A lot of the Western films were for sale in a cut out bin where DVDs were something like $3 each. Total amount spent: $115. Nice, eh?
December 1, 2004
Quill
Dir: Yoichi Sai
2004
The poster may show a labrador puppy, but Quill is much more than a cute widdle doggie film. Instead, Quill is something that has yet to be achieved in the west, methinks: a realistic portrayal of a dog's life. The Quill of the title is a labrador than is chosen, because of its calm nature, to train as a seeing-eye dog. We follow Quill from puppy through academy graduation to being in the service of a irascible blind man, Kaoru Kobayashi, and how their relationship unfolds.
In America, we seem unable to have a film about a dog unless it has super powers, can play sports, or rescue children trapped down wells. Though director Yoichi Sai is better known for gangster films, he brings the right lack of sentimentality to this story, though there's plenty to get choked up about. No CG mouths, no talking dogs, no humans falling on their ass ("D'oh! That darned dog! WhyIOughta...!"). Just straight ahead dog behaviour.
There is one slightly amusing diversion to the realism, where Quill falls asleep and dreams of his old squeeze toy, now walking by itself and tormenting him--which is probably what dogs do dream about. But for the most, we see Kobayashi and Quill interacting as owners and dogs do. His wife doesn't like the dog at first, but we never get the obvious "Quill does something daring and wins her affection" scene that some hack would write, we just get a quiet admission later on in the film that you might miss if you're not paying attention.
The film also deals bravely and clearly with death, and as I said, this is a dog's life story, so we encompass all. No, Quill doesn't die saving the owner from an oncoming train, but instead the film simply observes the facts of life. There's more, but I don't want to spoil it.
By the end, Jessica and I were wiping away tears. This would be a good film for all the family, especially if you want your children to accept that we don't all live forever, and that dogs have more to offer than just making dunk shots.
November 30, 2004
From Beijing with Love
Dir: Lik-Chi Lee and Stephen Chow
1994
Long said to one of Chow's best, I finally found a copy of "From Beijing with Love" at one of Chia-yi's CD stores for about three bucks. Here Chow plays a pork butcher who has been waiting years and years for an assignment from China's spy agency, despite having a large red "rejected" stamp in his files. Yet, as we see, he's a dab hand with his curved meat cleaver, which he keeps in a holster. The film is--obviously--a parody of James Bond, with a Jaws-like villain, a sequence of useless spy goods (a solar powered flashlight), and a femme fatale, played here by dewy-eyed Anita Yuen.
There's a disturbing mix of violence and comedy here that keeps it off my top list, with a father being gunned down in front of his young son in a shopping mall, and it's missing "Uncle Nat," but there's still lots of good jokes: The springboard "Magic Box" which shoots Chow off in all sorts of wrong directions (the best gag from this sequence, though, is in the closing blooper reel), and a scene where a wounded Chow watches a porno tape, hoping the diverted blood flow to his erection with stop the bleeding. (Eagle-eyed porn hounds will notice the star briefly glimpsed is--I believe--Traci Lords.) In a way, the serious turns the film takes are a test run for the more successful mixture in God of Cookery. And Chow's character, as usual, knows more than he lets on, which allows him to play fool and hero at the same time.
November 29, 2004
Ali G Indahouse
Dir: Mark Mylod
2002
I came across this purely by accident on HBO while we were channel surfing, so I can't be too disappointed that it turned out to be much much less than of what the Ali G show is capable. The Ali G shows gets all its tension and humor from the collision of a brilliant fiction with a unwitting reality, as Sacha Baron Cohen's homeboy character asks blindingly dumb questions of his various guests, who have pegged him for a moron or worse.
But throw the character into a scenario where he must prevail as a sort of hero, and immediately you have problems. In reality, an Ali G would be brought up short by reality immediately, but then we wouldn't have a movie, so Ali G's story here paints him as the wise fool, recruited by a scheming politician to run for a local council seat and cause the Prime Minister to fall. This is the "Producers" ruse, and it comes undone similarly, where Ali G's idiotic yet straight talk makes him the most popular politician in the land. There is a slim satire of Blair's "Cool Britannia" in all this, but it never really pays off.
Instead we get poo jokes, dick jokes, and drug jokes, and though some is funny, most could have come from any number of inane teen comedies.
November 16, 2004
Donald Trump Discusses Citizen Kane
Scenes from an aborted project by Errol Morris.
November 10, 2004
Netherland Media Art Institute
I wish these video clips were longer, but the NMAI hosts a major selection of video art from the '60s on up. The database is searchable, and contains not just a lot of Dutch artists I don't know but also people like Bill Viola, William Wegman, Gary Hill, and many more. Fans of "Alive From Off Center" and the Channel 4 show "Ghosts in the Machine" will appreciate it all.
Netherlands Media Art Institute.
By way of Metafilter
November 9, 2004
Paycheck
Dir: John Woo
2004
Some have joked that "Paycheck" alludes to how John Woo saw this film. They're probably right. The filmmakers take an interesting premise (from Philip K. Dick, who never gets any respect) and make it exquisitely dull by gussying everything up in cold blue techno sheen and throwing in a pointless car chase. When a solitary (CG?) dove flies out of a door for no reason at all I felt the screen should have read Copyright John Woo 1990.
Ben Affleck plays a reverse engineer who has his brain wiped at the end of every top-secret project he works on. Apparently, he's very good at this and works at some sort of MicrosoftEvilCorp, who employs him to steal competitors ideas and make them their own (wow, just like in real life!).
Then he is approached by Aaron Eckhart to reverse engineer something so furshlugginerly top secret, Ben will have to have all of three years wiped. Benefit? Ninety million dollars. Sure, erase away.
So, three years later he finds himself with no money, the Feds accusing him of treason, and no memory of what he did except an envelope of random objects that he sent to his future self.
The film remains a run-n-chase, just instead of our hero using his brains to get out of a situation, he has a future self handing him objects. There aren't too many philosophical conundrums here, just using keys to unlock doors...and the keys are clearly marked.
Uma Thurman turns up to play the girlfriend (Woo's not very interested in her, or any females, as usual, or the idea of having your lover lose all knowledge of you. It's interesting that this film came out the same year as Michel Gondry's near-classic "Eternal Sunshine," which takes on all these themes and ideas with 1/25 of the budget, but 10 times the intelligence and caring. When will Mr. Dick stop being dicked?
November 8, 2004
Spartan
Dir: David Mamet
2004
The title is correct. David Mamet's kidnapping thriller is pared down to its essence, with dialog and a plot that doesn't wait for the stupid people in the audience to catch up. So many thrillers and action films tell you something three times just in case you get it. Mamet will have none of that.
Val Kilmer isn't my favorite actor, but he's well cast a Scott, and Special Ops Navy Seal (I think, I don't pay particular attention to thing like that), a guy who just gets the (bloody) job done with maximum efficiency and never asks questions.
"Spartan" then sets up Scott in a situation where he must question his elders, as others are dying around him. I went into this film knowing nothing except for Mamet's name and the fact that the film came and went. I can see why it did--most people couldn't catch up with the film, despite being in a safe Hollywood genre. I also don't want to discuss the plot too much as I found many of the twists unexpected. The trailer, however, is made for the mouthbreathers and tells you most of the film.
Mamet's vision of modern politics is of a ruthless and efficient engine that chews up those far and near. And the gulf that separates the soldiers from those that give orders is wide when it comes to morals.
5 Minutes Online
Boasting an impressive roster of hard-to-find films on DVD-R, 5 Minutes Online is another in a series of homegrown companies who are fed up waiting for their favorite cinematic obscurities to be released. The legality of any of this is questionable, but what company is gonna go there for a Mr. T PSA collection?
Myself, I'm thinking that Anna Karina music video film is looking good for $20...
November 7, 2004
Collateral
Dir: Michael Mann
2004
Shot on 80% DV, Michael Mann's latest captures the airless nighttime of Los Angeles, and is fairly truthful to the city's geography (Thom Anderson would approve). When a hitman played by a grizzled-by-GQ hitman enters the cab of tktk (Jamie Foxx) for the first time, they have a small discussion about Los Angeles. Cruise finds it empty and cold; to Foxx it's his city, and he knows it inside and out. L.A. is the kind of city where a man can die on the Metro line and nobody will notice him for six hours, says the hitman.
He may be right. Certainly there are times in Collateral where major things happen in the streets and nobody is around to witness them. A car hits a road block, flips upside down, and two survivors crawl out, one running off. Because this happens in the Bunker Hill area of downtown, Mann convincingly stages it right in the middle of the road. Nobody passes by. If you've ever driven around there at 3 a.m. you can bet Mann's crew didn't have to have much security for the shot.
As Foxx and Cruise make their afterhours journey (hitman has a list of five targets, the cabbie is forced to chauffer), Los Angeles unveils itself as a series of tribal encampments that only the in-the-know can visit. Two apartment complexes--one lower class, the other with a view of the city--three clubs, a jazz club, a Mexican dance club, and Korean nightclub out in the middle of nowhere. Mann gets the ethnic make-up and dispersement of L.A. correct here too, even though it's used for a backdrop.
There's also something to the fact that Collateral is about a black man unwillingly chauffering around a well-paid white guy as he knocks off people of color. After the first murder, Cruise throws Foxx's moral panic back in his face: "tens of thousands killed in one day in Rwanda, and did you shed a tear? Did you join Amnesty International? So what's one dead Angelino?" (I'm paraphrasing, but it's close). The hitman is a bit of a moral relativist. The cabbie is not. Anyway, I don't know if there's much to be made of this or not, but we are made to feel empathy for the victim who is African-American (the club owner) whereas the rest are just cyphers. And of course, the last on the list is none other than the African-American prosecutor that Foxx has in his cab at the beginning of the film. In one way you could see Cruise's hitman as the white elite coming down into a city of mixed race he has chosen not to understand, and the cabbie's progression towards someone who will staunchly defend the city for all its problems. The film ends on a different mode of transport--the Metro line, method of transport for those who can't afford cars.
Am I reading more into this film or not? Your comments welcome.
October 20, 2004
Tokyo Story
Dir: Yasujiro Ozu
1953
I can't remember when I first watched Tokyo Story, but I know it was on crumb-bum video and I hadn't lived enough.
So here comes Jon Crow shoving DVDs in my hand, shaming me for not watching Mizoguchi and Ozu enough. Fortunately, Criterion are finally getting around to releasing Ozu's films on DVD. A good transfer of an old film is essential to its enjoyment, I think.
Anyway, "Tokyo Story" is a masterpiece, and not just because everybody says so. It has the emotional cruelty and sparse interior landscape of Chris Ware, but the sort of heart that Ware is only beginning to attain.
The story of an aging couple making a rare trip from their countryside home to the big city, only to be treated as mostly a nuisance by their grown children, doesn't offer easy explanations to the conflicts on the screen, but suggests much more beneath the surface. That is, we could blame Shige's bad treatment of her parents to being obsessed with making money, but there are hints that she has some sort of reason, some issues that she hasn't worked out, something she hasn't forgiven.
Not that "Tokyo Story" is a post-modern "everything's opposite" twist-o-rama text, just that the film's handling of character is so well-drawn that multiple viewings are bound to bring out the numerous levels on which these people think. The father, Shukichi, was apparently a bit of a drunk (as was the deceased son), and may explain the children's differing responses to him.
The film asks a lot of questions about the parent-child bond, what motivates the breaking of that bond, reality vs. a parents' expectations, and whether there's anything to be done about it. When the youngest daughter vows at the end that she'll never be as selfish as her older sister, there's no way to say if she'll be able to keep her word. "Tokyo Story" leaves the viewer wanting to know what will happen to so many of the characters. What will happen to daughter-in-law Noriko, (Setsuko Hara, an Ozu regular), now a struggling widow still young enough for remarriage? What will happen to Shukishi, especially after he is cheerfully damned in a way by the neighbor at the end of the film? ("You will be lonely" she says to him, which could be the film's brutal message).
October 19, 2004
Giant Robots Attack Canada
Giant wind-up robots, that is. "The Dream" is Trevor Cawood's music video that mixes the mini with the huge, and uses seamless CG to do so. (Cawood did effects for the Matrix, so this is what he does on his days off.)
October 13, 2004
Bullet in the Head
Dir: John Woo
1990
"Bullet in the Head" is often hailed as one of John Woo's best, because it springs from his own memories of growing up rough on the streets. And after he sends his three heroes off to Saigon in 1967, determined to lay low from the police and make some money in the process, the film turns into his own version of "The Deer Hunter."
The leads are Ben (Tony Leung), Frank (Jackie Cheung), and Paul (Waise Lee), and their character types are wistful/sensitive, well-meaning/unhinged, and realistic/selfish respectively.
All three, we see in an opening sequence that combines dancing with fighting (Woo's tribute to West Side Story), are good at fighting. This comes in handy later when they go up against a crime boss and his minions with all sorts of firepower, from sub-machine guns to exploding cigars (!).
The three are poor, but Ben seems to be starting off well, getting married to a rather drippy girl in the neighborhood. But soon Frank's problems with a local gangster cause all three to have to leave the country. Will they make a drop off of pharmaceuticals in Saigon while they lie low? Easy!
In the first of many well-executed set pieces, the three have just barely arrived in Saigon for five minutes when they wind up in the middle of an assassination attempt and have their important package blown up. Desperate, they decide to team up with a CIA op called Luke (Simon Yam) are wipe out the crime boss.
Another great set piece of ridiculous violence follows as the three take on the entire building.
So far we are safely in Woo territory. Then the three get captured by the Vietcong, who know nothing of gangland honor, and the movie gets very dangerous, refreshingly so.
At the center of the tale is a US army box full of gold. Paul insists on keeping it at all costs, destroying the friendship. There's also a substitute for Ben's drippy wife, a similarly drippy Canto-pop star turned captive druggie whore who Ben tries to rescue. Woo, who is never really that interested in women except when they are abstract plot elements, does away with her too.
I was with the film up until the final act, when Ben returns to Hong Kong to see vengeance on Paul for what happened to Frank. (What happens to Frank results in one of Jackie Cheung's scenery-chewingest performances. He even got nominated for it.)
The ending, it turns out, was not the original, though that survives on the expanded, remastered DVD as an outtake. Like so many Hong Kong action films, any strides made by the drama are ditched for absurdity. The missus gave up on this film when the skull appeared.
Still, the transfer looks wonderful on this FortuneStar remaster, and is exciting for much of its length. But for those who want to build a case against Woo, there's plenty fodder here too.
October 11, 2004
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
Dir.Mamoru Oshii
2004
As far as I know, this isn't based on a manga by Masamune Shirow, but a film-only sequel to one of the best post-Akira sci-fi anime on the last decade.
With "The Major," the female cyborg hero of the first film, living inside the 'net/Matrix/computerverse, the sequel focuses on her partner, Bateau, a cyborg with a human brain, and his rookie partner, Togusa, a human with a synthetic brain.
The plot is police-procedural--investigate the homi- and suicidal impulses of pleasurebots (called gynorgs here), who have taken out their wealthy industrial johns. What is causing this breaking of one of the three robotic laws?
As GITS2 (great acronym!) progresses, it becomes apparent that the suicides, as well as Bateau's outre responses to them (taking on an entire yakuza den with clever holography and a bloody great fun) are chess moves to draw protag and antag together. The solution to the mystery is a nice inverse on the idea that prostitution--in particular child prostitution--destroys the soul.
In between GITS2 delivers some of the most beautiful set pieces and animation so far in animation. Blending 2D and 3D animation, a painter's eye for light, an otaku's attention to techie detail, the film demands repeat viewing. Certain sequences deserve a mention: Bateau's paranoid attack in a convenience store brings us fully into the subjective view of its cyborg brain; Kosuga's brain-viral attack that leads into a Moebius loop of a nightmare narrative sends the film off into a Borgesian dimension.
It's a very restrained film, and chilly in its diagnosis. Yes, the "soul" might be what separates the humans from the borgs (even when that line is blurry), but when soul becomes rare it turns into, in a capitalist system, a commodity
October 8, 2004
Don Hertzfeldt...poet?
Apart from being the master of stick figure animation, Don Hertzfeldt has been posting poems on his blog made of nothing but spam text. Enjoy. enjoy the status of platinum today
building vicodin shut
enhanced penis pill is amazing
why arent you watershed goblet
if pizza be the food of love
i can hardly feel the device under my pants
and
what would your family do if you died?
Allow us to show you our quality operation
see the fish come alive!
mature lesbians rubbing their armpitsFind that special someone!
Tooth whitening of the stars
With exclusive peeing Belgian girls
if you don't wish to receive these offers, go here
Really, you should check out the rest of the blog. Can't wait to see the new film, four years in the making!
October 7, 2004
Shaun of the Dead
Dir. Edgar Wright
2004
After many a year of bad, bad, bad zombie films (running zombies=wrong! Resident Evil=where's the gore?), "Shaun of the Dead" gets it so right, and understands its genre so well, that I immediately want to put it up in my list of Top 10 zombie films (including the first two Romero films and Jackson's "Dead Alive").
The key is that the filmmakers aren't making fun of the genre--they're placing characters from another genre (slacker comedy) into a zombie film. Big difference. I don't usually like comedy in my horror, but here it works, because the makers are sniggering "Aren't horror films stupid?"
Shaun (Simon Pegg) and his useless friend Ed (Nick Frost) spend most of their days lounging about the house they rent, playing XBox, going down the pub, assaulting each other with farts. Shaun has a dead end job in an appliance store, at least, and has a girlfriend, Liz (Kate Ashfield), but his idea of a good time is...taking her down the pub. With Ed.
No time is wasted setting up the zombies--taking his idea straight from Romero, the zombies are activated by a satellite re-entering the atmosphere--and much of the pleasure of the opening third is seeing how long it takes this workaday drone to cotton on to the fact that the dead now walk the earth. ("Sorry mate, I don't have any change") he says to one young flesheater as he walks home from the shops. Anyway, Shaun is too wrapped up in his heartache from being dumped to notice.
The rules have been studied well. There's a rescue attempt (girlfriend, her friends, his parents), a journey across familiar-now-hostile territory, then refuge in a safe haven (the pub) that slowly turns into a trap. Members of the team get bitten, and slowly turn into zombies. There's a finale of humans vs. overwhelming numbers of zombies.
The television acts as a reality check and a framing device for the horror elements, like in the original Night. There's a nice scene where they channel surf and we get to see all the cable channel logos, all with the same "standing by" message. In the end, television culture turns out to be as resilient as the humans.
There's no holding back on the gore in the latter half of the film, and we get a nice homage to Day of the Dead's stomach-buffet scene. Thank goodness for that--I had nearly given up all hope.
Apparently, Romero loved the film enough that its said the lead and his writing/directing partner will appear in the upcoming fourth installment of the director's series, called Land of the Dead.
For sheer pleasure and laughs, you gotta go see this.
(If you have a multi-region DVD player, you can already buy this from Amazon UK. I doubt if the American release will retain its many extras.)
October 4, 2004
Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro
Dir: Hayao Miyazaki
1979
Though I am very much against bootlegs, I couldn't say no when this box set fell into my hands. Originating somewhere in China, this 14-DVD set contains all of Studio Ghibli's work. That means not only all of Hayao Miyazaki's films up to Spirited Away, but works by other directors such as 1994's "Pon Poko" which I originally caught in its theatrical release in Japan all those years ago.
This is over $350 worth of DVDs here, and rumor has it that the box only cost $9. Yep. (I already own 'Mononoke' and 'Totoro' on DVD).
So, I've decided to watch all of these films in order, starting with this one from 1979, the first film that Miyazaki wrote and directed for the big screen. The director had already been directing episodes for the TV series of this very popular character, and this feature is not the first to feature Lupin III.
But a lot of Miyazaki's future style can be glimpsed here. While this is mostly a rock'em sock'em adventure tale, with the Bond-like Lupin III rescuing a princess from a evil count, there are moments when the movie pauses to take in the countryside and you can feel Miyazaki's love of nature.
A lot of "The Castle of Cagliostro" turns up in his later "Castle in the Sky: Laputa": the same princess, a powerful trinket (a pendant in the latter, a ring here), a post-lapsidarian Eden-like castle, a dizzying habit of setting action sequences high above the ground; flying cars.
The film itself is a rollicking good adventure, with several great scenes. I especially liked how Lupin gained access to the castle through the water supply, and the final fight inside the machinery of the tower clock would have made Disney's clock-cleaners proud.
September 30, 2004
The Sopranos - Season Four
Prod. David Chase
2002
The fourth season is the first Sopranos to be written in the shadow of 9-11 and brought home those feelings of doom and anxiety that accompanied the months following. Now, of course, we're so used to living in this world that we've become used to it. This season Tony tries to circle the wagons and just rely on "blood," that is, his immediate family, but as the season progresses it shows even this is unreliable. Chris, his nephew is addicted to heroin. Uncle Junior is under house arrest and facing his RICO trial. And domestically, bonds start to fray and break, as Carmella asks for, then secretly takes, more control over the household finances. Tony directs his affection to all the wrong places--Ralphie's goomah, Ralphie's horse, his ex-mistress' cousin. And one by one, he loses these things too. It's a very sad season, and probably my favorite so far.
Part of the reason that we like gangster films is that we like to see a subculture much like our own but with strict, old fashioned rules. In this way, the way of the Mafioso crosses paths with Asian ideas of "saving face" and "honor". We feel these things are missing somehow, yet our true delight comes out of seeing how these rules are broken and punished, not how they are followed. One of the plot threads of Season 4 involves Johnny Sack and how he seeks justice for a fat joke Ralphie has told about his wife. The idea of besmirching a woman's honor marks this plot as almost medieval, and much of the tension of this storyline comes from Sack's intractability in the matter. We like our codes of honor, but this is getting too fundamental.
This medieval way also plays out in Furio's unrequited love for Carmela, which costs him much heartache, not unlike the traditional romance. When he returns to Italy for his father's funeral, he is told that in the old days, such a predicament would mean that he'd either have to kill the woman's husband, or exile himself (as memory serves). And he does think about doing the deed at one point.
These medieval storylines are contrasted with the more modern threads--Bobby Bacala's grief, Janice's manipulations, Paulie's divided loyalties. So, in a way, the whole season gives us both glimpses of a post 9-11 world without being didactic about it: the hard, fundamentalist way (and not in a Islamic sense), or the equally painful, soul-searching modern way. (Note that the female characters have to ask this a lot: Carmela choosing self-respect over marriage, Adrianna choosing a law-abiding future over the crime family).
Favorite episodes: "Christopher" (for the final scene in the car), "Whoever Did This" (so many great images: the wounded child, the bloody dispatch of Ralphie, Tony's solitary walk through the Bada Bing, empty and hollow inside and out), and "Whitecaps" (nothing sums up a breakup like watching the inflatable mattress go up.)
Now we've exhausted all the Sopranos DVDs, we can now get back to watching anything and everything else. Phew.
September 23, 2004
Academia meets the Sopranos: Sopranos wins
There's a lot of essays out there on the Sopranos, but like a lot of pop criticism (and academia in general), there's so little substance to these essays that, once you get past the paragraphs name-dropping theorists and philosophers, past the paragraphs that awkwardly sum up the film/tv show for those who've never seen it (but are snoozy to those who do), and finally past the references to the other books and films the author has read, there's very little analysis. I spent a little while looking around the web for some good reading on The Sopranos, and while Salon has a few good articles, this one by Martha P. Nochimson is one of the best: Tony's Options: The Sopranos and the Televisuality of the Gangster Genre
September 22, 2004
Preview: Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession
When we first got cable in the early 80s, before HBO was an option to us, my dad subscribed to a channel called the Z Channel. I don't remember too much about it except that everytime I tuned in they were showing one of two films: "Agatha" with Dustin Hoffman and Maggie Smith, and "The Great Train Robbery" with Sean Connery. If you made it all the way to the end of one of these, there was a good chance you'd run into "Hardware Wars."
Well, apparently Z Channel was much more important than that--an L.A.-based channel run by a troubled film buff who, ahead of his time, insisted on director's cuts and restoration. Filmmakers like Verhoeven say it lead to their success by screening their early works. Tarantino got an education in foreign film.
Xan Cassavettes, daughter of John, now has a documentary that examines the channel and the fall of its owner Jerry Harvey.
Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession was the hit of the Los Angeles Film Festival is making the rounds soon.
September 17, 2004
Sopranos Season Three
Prod. David Chase
2001
Sins of the fathers...Season Three of the Sopranos (yes, I know we're going at a bloody clip) is much stronger than its predecessor, almost as if the out-of-control Ralphie (Joe Pantaliano) was infecting the entire show. We have beatings, a grim rape, numerous bullets to the head, and plenty of people not thinking straight at all.
Tony tries to keep one son (his) out of the business, going as far as enrolling him in a military academy. Yet he fails to keep the son of his former boss--the drippy Freddie Prinze Jr.-lookalike Jackie Jr.--out of the game, despite numerous warnings and slappings about. The results are inevitable, tragic, and a waste.
Elsewhere, some of the episodes this season are some of my favorites. The premiere, Mr. Ruggeriostktktk Neighborhood, focused on a few days in the life of the Sopranos as the FBI try to plant a listening device in their house. It was a taught, time-specific episode, unlike the rather loose, rat-ta-tat plotting of a usual episode. Plus the use of the bootleg mashup of "Every Breath You Take" and "Peter Gunn" was hair-tinglingly brilliant. (The female tennis instructor who had the hots for Adrianne also tingled the body, just not the scalp.) I also liked the Blair Witch-meets-Joisy episode where Paulie and Chris get lost in the woods after being overpowered by a hardy Russian they have taken out to whack. Their fate juxtaposed with Tony's problems with his hot goomah (Annabella Sciorra, oozing sex) brought out the black comedy this show does best.
Two missteps: the very awkward final Livia episode, where Marchand was pasted electronically into one last scene with James Gandolfini (memories of Bruce Lee in Game of Death!). It didn't look right and it was obvious, awkward, and sad that Gandolfini was acting to air. The episode came back, though, and delivered a knock-out ending as Carmela lets rip at the wake and speaks what's on everyone's mind.
The other sour note was Chase's attempt to universalize the sad song sung by Uncle Junior at the finale's funeral. The soundtrack switched from the Italian song to a Chinese ballad, a Portugese fado, and beyond, a real jarring experience.
This third season ends with numerous loose threads, and the sense that the chaos hinted at here is one mistake away from exploding.
September 14, 2004
Los Angeles Plays Itself
Dir: Thom Anderson
2003
On Thursday night I rushed down to L.A. after work to meet Jon for the one-time screening of Thom Anderson's three-hour opus, "Los Angeles Plays Itself." This film, made entirely out of shots from other movies, took something like ten years to make, and, like Fahrenheit 9-11, is so densely packed with information and ideas that it feels like a book. (Moore's film has one central idea, Anderson's has several).
Anderson's main thesis--and as a professor of film at CalArts for decades (Jon took some of his classes) he thinks academically--is that Los Angeles has failed to receive the sort of representational respect that is reserved for cities like New York and Paris.
You wouldn't shoot Grand Central Station in New York and then call it "Grand Central Station, Phoenix," would you? But that's what often happened through the years to many Los Angeles landmarks, as Hollywood seemed to use the city as one big backlot, cultural importance be damned.
In the first half, Anderson explores how architectural landmarks and modernist architecture in general are misused in the movies, and sometimes celebrated. Modern homes that were once examples of a bright future always seem to wind up cast as the lairs of villains and drug lords. To illustrate his points, Anderson has at his hands all of Hollywood's output, copyright be damned (this may explain its small release, its succes as a film, and a case for 'fair use'). It's fascinating to watch the same interior pop up over the decades, sometimes as a hotel, sometimes as an apartment, set in the past, set in the future--like watching an actor's reel.
Anderson also talks about "high tourist" and "low tourist" directors, the high ones being someone like Hitchcock, who, for example, created such a portrait of San Francisco for "Vertigo" that the city is a character in the film. A "low tourist" director avoids landmarks but tries to get the city right, and of these there are very few. Billy Wilder is one--Anderson lauds "Double Idemnity" and "Sunset Blvd" as being very faithful to the geography and feel of Los Angeles. He also praises the original "Gone in 60 Seconds" and "Kiss Me Deadly."
The second half devotes itself to more indepth discussions, including the similar "secret histories" on show in "Chinatown" and "L.A. Confidential". Not so secret, is what Anderson says of these histories, the issues were front page news, but Polanski and Towne's film coincides with Los Angeles developing a self-awareness, and creating a "secret history" to please that which wants cynicism to rule is the order of the day. Finally, Anderson looks at the true "secret histories" of Los Angeles--representations of its Black and Hispanic populations, which are usually invisible.
Anderson admits in interviews to coming to favor a traditional Bazinian realism in his films, and it parallels his leftist leanings (the sardonic voice over--by Anderson's friend standing in for the director--makes this clear almost from the beginning.) The film will make you appreciate architecture in film and have you glancing more at the backgrounds of films next time you go to the cinema. It will also be a must-own film when it comes out on DVD, for it can act as a reference work on top of a statement about representation. There's even talk of an accompanying book to contain all the material the director couldn't include.
Film fans will also want to debate Anderson's omissions (no David Lynch? no Kenneth Anger? Only a glimpse of Tarantino?) and also hunt down some of the more obscure but intriguing films he shows (on the intelligent side, "Killer of Sheep" by Charles Burnett; on the dumb side, "Death Wish 5" and Stallone's "Cobra").
Made for peanuts, it's no small irony that this is one of the most thoughtful and straight out beste films of the year.
Also: Interviews with Anderson here (with Steve Erickson)here and here (with Andrew Tracey).
September 7, 2004
Sopranos Season Two
Prod. David Chase
2000
It must have been hard to top Season One of the sopranos, and many episodes of Season Two aren't as plot-driven as the first. If this was a symphony, season two would be the exposition part after the statement of the theme. The characters of Richie (David Provale) and Janice (Aida Turturro) are brought in and slyly dominate the season, rounding out their stories very neatly near the end (a big shock, too, in how they did so.) One thing the show reveals is how by toying with genre, the program becomes open to all sorts of experimentation. The show is able to contain realism and surrealism without feeling off. It's that most magical of shows, one that creates an entire universe. You believe that anything can happen.
Violence is treated realistically here, with short, brutal beatings that don't last too long, unspectacular car crashes, bullets dispatched without witticisms, and plain knuckle(head) punches. And by doing so, the show never glosses over its characters' lives of crime. The finale montage, showing the happy extended Soprano clan intercut with shots of ruined lives and illegal schemes run their course (the trashed offices of the 'boiler room,' the bankrupted sports good store, reminded us in a lovely cinematic way of the exactly what we're celebrating. This is capitalism, baby, as we're often reminded.
And, criminy, what other show would use a Pierre Henri piece on its soundtrack?
Also: My wife has been studying Carmela for pointers. I'm in trouble, I think.
Favorite episodes: The D-Girl (mainly for Alicia Witt--oofa!--but also for the parody of Hollywood), Knight in White Satin Armor, and Funhouse (obviously).
Favorite line: Unrepeatable curse when Uncle Junior falls over in the shower.
And finally: Adrianna (Drea de Matteo) is hot. As is Oksana Babiy (Irina, the mistress).
Sopranos Season One
Prod. David Chase
1999
It took something like seven episodes before my better half got into the Sopranos. (It took me three). That may be a long time for some, but understand that in learning English as a second language all those years ago, there was no week devoted to Italian-American Mafia slang and its sentence structure. Imagine getting your English down fluently and then encountering a line such as "For his mother a smoke he hires!" said in a rising tone.(Imagine you even know that a 'smoke' is a derogatory word ahead of time.)
No wonder she couldn't get into Goodfellas a few years back...
So anyway, after years of people telling me that the Sopranos is essential viewing, the box set for Season One turned up at the library of all places, allowing us the leisure of watching all 13 episodes over the course of a week.
One of the great pleasures of the series is how it intersects with our shared cultural knowledge of previous gangster films. This intertextual referencing occurs within and outside the world of the Sopranos. While Tony Soprano's crew talk about the Godfather and Silvio does impressions of Pacino, we also get a kick out of the fact that Christopher shoots the toe off a donut-shop vendor, replaying a scene from Goodfellas in which the same actor (much younger) gets his foot shot by Joe Pesci. Or how the attempted assassination of Tony is a homage to Don Corlione's shooting in the original Godfather, with a smashed orange juice bottle alluding to Brando's dropped bag of oranges.
That the Sopranos discusses all this marks the show as a major post-modern text, yet it's a real drama, not diluted with snarky irony. James Gandolfini went from appearing in films as a heavy or a psycho (8mm for one) to appearing fully formed as Tony Soprano, simultaneously ruthless and vulnerable, with no winks to the audience, no grandstanding. These are the kind of breakthrough roles most actors never get.
The season arc--the taking over of Uncle Junior's business and Tony's mom's plot against him--plays out slowly and satisfyingly. Once again the hour-long drama series shows itself to be the closest we get to a novel in film.
The finale sets us up for a Godfather-esque "massacre during christening" sequence, with Michael's death in the woods, but then throws us a curve as Uncle Junior and crew are indicted. The closing scene, with the crew and family huddled inside Vesuvio during a storm was an oddly suspenseful way to round out the season, and keeps us on our toes for the next.
Favorite line: "Who do we blame for your hat?"--Paulie to Christopher, when the latter rushes in wearing a floppy fisherman's cap.
August 22, 2004
While you are waiting...
In between feature movies (and Jessica just brought back a motherlode of them from Shanghai), we are currently stuck into the DVD box of The Sopranos, Season One. Yes, we're finally getting around to watching it. Hey, don't worry, we had never seen Sex and the City until earlier this year, and through the magic of DVD box sets, we've caught up (only the second half of Season Six to go). I prefer it this way too.
August 21, 2004
Late August, Early September
Dir: Olivier Assayas
1998
Late Autumn, Early September was such a realist followup to Olivier Assayas's oddball and entrancing Irma Vep, that it took me this long to getting round to watching it. But it's has Irma Vep's energy and comes alive onscreen in much the same way, that I realized that the director can handle both styles with aplomb. And for those who yearned for the experimentalism of Irma Vep, check out Demonlover.
Shot in grainy Super 16mm on handhelds, the film is a swirl of action and character, revolving around Adrien, a writer (Francois Cluzet), Gabrielle (Mathieu Amalric), his fan and sometimes assistant, Anne (Virginie Ledoyen), Gabrielle's current lover, and Jenny (Jeanne Balibar), his former. Assayas drops in and out of the their lives over a period of about a year, with an elliptical method that makes us put together what's happened in between. Adrien develops a serious illness but recovers, Gabrielle can't seem to let Anne fully into his life, friends come together to help Adrian, and other events that don't sound much on the page, but are fascinating to watch unfold. While Adrien sets the tone in an exchange on a train with Gabrielle ("I just turned 40 and I seem to be nowhere.") it's everybody who's in transition, not quite rich, not quite poor, not fully in or out of love.
Late Autumn really points out how, when it comes to relationships, the French are on a different planet than the New Puritans. After Anne disappears from Gabrielle's life for a while, she next see her enjoying a three-way between her workmate and an unknown man. An American film would have shown this excess as evil and an example of how far Anne had fallen. But Assayas treats it like a light afternoon daydream, scored with airy music. Anne and her workmate then have a conversation about how she still loves Gabrielle but still needs to explore her wider sexual needs. It's all matter of fact. (By the way, Virginie Ledoyen is heart-stoppingly beautiful.)
Adrien keeps a young 15-year-old lover, the boyish Vera with her Jean Seberg-like hairdo. She's treated fairly, not as some sign of Adrian's prurience.
Lead actor Amalric has a frazzled intensity, and, like most of the cast, is very watchable and unpredictable. Nobody is cast into any type, and even though Jenny looks like she is going to be the "crazy ex," she turns out to be stable as well. Maybe it's me--maybe I've just been watching too much Hollywood.
Z
Dir: Costa-Gavras
1969
For some reason I have dim memories of trying to watch this in my early 20s and falling asleep. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Z is in fact a punchy political thriller with a deeply cynical ending. I would like to think this change is in part due to a certain political maturity (ha ha ha) on my part. Or perhaps I was just awake this time. Yves Montand plays an anti-war, anti-American/imperialist left-wing senator who is targeted for assassination by the militarist government. Though entirely in French, the film is based on the assassination in1963 of Grigorios Lambrakis, a professor of medicine at the University of Athens. The beginning of the film states "Any similarities between people living or dead is deliberate." The gloves are off.
Montand's character gets clubbed after a speaking engagement and later dies on the operating table. The protagonist role slowly shifts to the investigating judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who begins with a neutral assessment of events and then becomes convinced of a right-wing coverup in play. Fast-paced camera work (not to be confused with shaky, incomprehensible camera work) keeps the large cast of characters and their interactions clear as Trintignant's judge builds a case.
The portrait of the explosive politics of the late '60s resonates through to today, especially as we gear up towards the antagonism of the Republican Convention. Doesn't that angry mob look just like the GOP bullyboys brought down to Florida in 2000 to stop the vote? Hmmm.
August 13, 2004
The Hills Have Eyes
Dir: Wes Craven
1977
Craven's second film, and one based on the Sawney Bean legend, the 17th century family of cannibals that preyed on hapless travelers near Edinburgh. (You can hear a great rendition of this legend on Snakefinger's "Night of Desirable Objects" album.)
Unfortunately, this wasn't as horrific or downbeat as I'd hoped from a 1977 horror film, just sort of quaint and low budget. There's only two moments where the film breaks through its genre safety zone, the first being the camper attack on the family in which the older sister and the mother is shot, the younger sister raped (or rather dry humped for ten seconds), and the baby kidnapped. This trades in its "afraid of the dark" scare tactics (of which there are too many) for terror and violence--scary marauding loonballs don't need fancy tools to kill, a gun does just as well. (This reminded me again of how short and ultimately non-terrifying slasher films would be if the killer had a machine gun.) The loose handheld camera presents the chaos well. The second moment is the finale where the brother-in-law (Martin Speer), a Sonny Bono lookalike, stabs to death the cannibal Mars in revenge for the death of his wife and for kidnapping the baby. And keeps stabbing, plunging the knife over and over into the guy's chest. Wes Craven wants us to see this as a sort of critique of how savage we all are underneath, but the circumstances stop this from being ethically dubious (it's not like he's going to perform a citizen's arrest on the guy). If, on the other hand, the brother-in-law had taken it out on one of the more innocent members of the cannibal family without provocation, we might have had to think a bit. In this case, I'm with Mr. Bono all the way.
This was the Anchor Bay re-release and once again, Anchor Bay is the company to beat when it comes to horror DVD. No matter the quality of the movie, they always assume somebody is a huge fan and throw in lots of documentary extras. The making-of doc reunites most of the cast (except, strangely, Speer) and they talk about what was a quite rough shoot in the desert. Craven, as usual, is a very pleasant guy, very smart ("Last House on the Left" is a remake of a Bergman film, for example, just much more unpleasant), the son of fundamentalist Baptists who didn't get to see much film in his early years and who gave up a doctorate degree to get into filmmaking. I was never much a fan of Freddy Krueger, but if you've never seen it, "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" is self-reflexive, smart, and quite dark.
Waiting for Guffman
Dir: Christopher Guest
1996
What do you mean, you've never seen ______? I often get this. For a bloody film critic, there's a lot of stuff I just plain haven't watched. I'm perpetually playing catch up. In fact, just this weekend I got this Jon, who thrust a copy of Ozu's "Floating Weeds" at me in disbelief and disgust. For this film it was the video store guy saying to me, "Guffman again, eh?" and me saying no, I, um, haven't seen it.
So most of you know Guest's mockumentary of a community theater performance, a tribute to the small town of Blaine, Missouri, put on by the town populace under the directing eye of ex-New Yorker Corky St. Claire (Guest). The entire film was improvised along certain narrative guidelines, and again suggests that it is Second City, not the desperate comics of SNL (although many come from SC), that spawned the best comedians in the '80s. There's always been something infantile about Saturday Night Live, with its petty jostlings for movie projects superceding the work at hand. Second City, especially SCTV, always seemed more of a group effort, and you can still sense that togetherness when two or more appear in films together. Fred Willard always makes me laugh, but he doesn't steal scenes. He was great as the oblivious announcer in Best in Show, and his character in WFG is buffoonish without being a caricature. I wonder how some of SNL's best and brightest would be in a future Guest film? Will Farrell is good at cartoon characters, but could he present a three-dimensional person?
The DVD features about 20 minutes of extra scenes, and witty commentary from Guest and Eugene Levy.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Dir: Blake Edwards
1961
By absolute coincidence, I wound up watching a second film this month based on a Capote novel, although you couldn't get further apart in tone. I tried to watch this film once before and jumped ship after bloody Mickey Rooney turned up with his buck-teethed Jappo atrocity. Two words for you, Mr. Rooney: Internment Camp. May you be haunted forever by the ghosts of Manzanar. (On the other hand, the Japanese may get as offended by this as "Rising Sun" (i.e. they don't). And they love Audrey Hepburn more than we do.)
That out of the way, the rest of the film was cutesy-cutesy, with plenty of charm from Audrey Hepburn, though her dialog was a bit laden-down with exposition and rang a bit flat. But then again, as her agent O.J. (played wonderfully in two scenes by Martin Balsam) notes, "she's a phony, but she's a real phony. She believes in it." That's probably good advice for watching the film. Both Hepburn and co-star George Peppard were about 32 when they filmed this, they look so much older than that.
Good friend Mr. C reminded me that this film influenced the rest of the '60s that followed, as Miss Golightly was a template upon which many a female molded themselves. (Poor Mr. C, that must have been agony.)
I actually choked up at the end, with its rainy-street reconciliation, but that was from my empathy for the lost cat "Cat" who got chucked out the taxi by a petulant Miss Golightly and was (temporarily) left to fend for himself in the downpour. If my wife was here (she's on a business trip) she would have been sniffing too. That is, if she hadn't snapped the DVD in two upon the appearance of Buckteeth.
(Great Mancini score, though I've never been a fan of "Moon River," the song Hepburn plays on guitar while sitting on her fire escape. Something about the line "my huckleberry friend" rubs me the wrong way.)
The Piano Teacher
Dir: Michael Haneke
2001
Similar in effect to Almodovar's "Talk to Her," this French film based on a German novel comes at us like a dangerous, erotic love story, while actually delivering a scary study in creeping insanity. We're too busy slotting the characters into their genre-determined space that we don't notice what's actually going on (and in this way we mirror the experience of the young man who falls in lust with the title character, Erika, played by Isabelle Huppert.
However, that Erika is slightly off her nut is shown in the first scene, where, returning home late to the flat she shares with her mother, she is berated for being a wanton libertine until violence ensues and she beats up mom a bit. Yikes. I'll wait in the hall, thanks.
As other critics have noted, we enter the film after the breakdown has happened. We're just around to watch the unraveling. Her cocky, assured, but talented student Walter (Benot Magimel), doesn't know this--he just sees the repressed wild thang hiding behind the librarian outfit. When they finally explode together halfway through the film, its a desperate display of control and masochism. This, also, has been proceeded by a subtly filmed piece of psychotic violence, as a very jealous Erika makes sure a young pianist (in her mind, her rival) doesn't play for a whole year. I'll let you find out how that happens.
Well, the film goes on from there, culminating in a series of unpleasant sex scenes that show just how far apart are the goals of these supposed lovers. It's not a film that you'd love to watch over and over again, but it is smart, brave, completely nuts, and features a wangdoodle of a performance by Huppert, who goes places many actresses would not. There was also a part of me that found the whole thing amusing, in a "sexual futility is funny" sort of way. But that's just me.
The American DVD has been cut, though I'm not too sure where. There's a strange fade/edit during the locker-room blowjob scene, and my friend Jon mentioned a disturbing self-abuse scene that was not on my copy. So shame on whoever released this DVD for being wimpy.
August 3, 2004
Party Girl
Dir: Daisy von Scherler Mayer
1995
If it weren't for Parker Posey, this film wouldn't have much going for it, an irresponsible-youth-gains-maturity tale played out in a series of sketches. She plays Mary the titular party girl who lives day-to-day throwing rent parties in New York and waltzing around in fabulous clothes. There's trouble in the opening moments where we're not even shown how great these supposed parties are, before she is arrested for possession of a joint and sent out to get a real job. She does this by working for her godmother in a neighborhood branch of the NYC library.
There's a lot of cutesy-cutesy running gags about the Dewey Decimal System and a rather bland romance with a bland Lebanese falafel vendor. A subplot, featuring Mary's DJ roommate and his burgeoning spinning career, goes nowhere. As does a scene where they get in the shower together (she's late for work, he jumped his place in line). They kiss and nothing happens. Too many scenes are like this, suggesting plot twists but dropping them by the end of the scene.
Apparently, the film has a minor cult following, which I suspect is based around Posey's performance, which is always watchable, even though her character isn't the most likable or her character arc that fulfilling.
(This was another random library pickup from their DVD shelf. Can't win 'em all.)
July 27, 2004
The Bourne Supremacy
Dir: Paul Greengrass
2004
I liked the first Bourne movie, despite not being the biggest fan of Matt Damon (although "Gerry" was also good (and completely unseen)). This sequel hurries along at a good clip, keeps its twists and turns to a minimum, and generates enough excitement to qualify it as a decent summer movie, but the film doesn't do as well under the director Paul Greengrass ("Bloody Sunday"). He comes from the "chased by a bear" school of action shooting (nods to Paul Tatara), and the car chase at the end is completely incomprehensible despite the hero and villain being in different makes of cars. Previous director Doug Liman knew how to move the camera through space and how to simulate weight and movement. Greengrass just shakes the camera a lot. He was hired because of his newsreel/verite style of his previous film, but placing a camera near the wheels of a car is not verite, unless you are just about to be run over.
Typically dark, blue and grey cinematography (even in the isle of Goa sequence) by Oliver Wood, which becomes quite dull to look at. Fortunately, the script isn't too dumb, and violence comes sudden and silent. It also helps to have Julia Stiles in it, reprising her role as a CIA op, primarily because, well, I think she's cute. Nice scarf/jacket combo, miss!
Fahrenheit 9-11
Dir: Michael Moore
2004
No, I haven't just watched Fahrenheit 9-11. I caught it opening weekend, and I've been making return visits since. Most recently, I took my dad to see it (he's sort of a reformed centrist. When we lived in England he got the Telegraph and the Daily Mail. I'm not too sure if he realised they were Tory papers.)
It was a 1 p.m. showing on a Thursday, and the theater has about 20 people. Instead of the whooping laff-fest of opening weekend, laced with jeers and screams (the appearance of Britney Spears after the horrific Iraq footage prompted a Yamataka Eye-style evisceration from the front row), there was studied silence which later broke into laughter around the time of the "fear of terrorism" segment. And the film still earned applause at the end (which is rare when there's few in the audience). In the lobby afterwards, one elderly lady was in tears and being comforted by her daughter. Blimey.
It's still a powerful movie. Whether or not its main function--to toss Bush out of office--succeeds, we won't know until November. But it also serves in other ways:
* Doing the job of what journalism used to do: making connections, pointing out hypocrisy, showing the President unedited.
* Pushing the meme of Bush's "seven-minutes-in-a-classroom." To many of us on the left we knew of this for a long time. But a majority of Americans didn't, and Bush lied when he told his version of things (he was active, decisive). Watching a bit o' CSPAN last night, I watched a voter roundtable of calmly talking Americans, all with different views, but all pretty centrist. And the "7 minutes" meme is among them, mentioned and not disputed.
* Reminding us, as documentaries have to do every now and then, that war is hell. But I would say that it's the American public who have done the best job of telling themselves that war is not about your friend's guts exploding everywhere but video-game point and click fun stuff. Sure, the Armed Forces ads look like promos for adventure camp (the one with jet skis is a hoot), but how stupid are you to think that's what the army is? Isn't this part of our culture-wide arrested adolescence, of how we've taken on the teenager's faith in our own immortality?
* If not creating a new style of documentary, he's cemented his style as a new genre. It's not confessional, like Ross McElwee, but it is polemical, up to date (due to digital technology in editing), and appropriates the mass media to explode its methods. Oh yeh, and documentaries can be funny, too.
So far, the only fair criticism I've read of the facts (as opposed to Moore's patriotism, etc. etc.) presented in the film is over at Juan Cole's blog, in which he smooths out the rather convoluted Saudi-Bush connection. I'm glad Moore gets all this in the movie, but due to pacing, he has to compact enough info for another film into a short segment. It's not that he plays fast and loose with the truth, but what are actually separate episodes of BushJunta awfulness (the coddling of the Taliban regime, the Karzai-Unocal pipeline connection, the Bush-Saudi conneciton, the Carlysle Group), appear in the film as a linear tale (at least when I watched it this time). And there isn't time to sit and wonder if that actually makes sense.
Moreover, if it is true that the Saudis have so much invested in this country, then it makes no sense for wealthy Saudi entrepreneurs and governing figures to wish the US harm. Can you imagine the bath Saudi investments took here after 9/11? The Saudi royals and the Bin Ladens lounging about in places like Orlando, who were airlifted out lest they be massacred after the attacks, didn't know anything about the apocalyptic plots hatched in dusty Qandahar, and if they had they would have blown the whistle on them with the US so as to avoid losing everything they had.
The Saudi bashing in the Moore film makes no sense. It is true that some of the hijackers were Saudis, but that is only because Bin Laden hand-picked some Saudi muscle at the last minute to help the brains of the operation, who were Egyptians, Lebanese, Yemenis, etc. Bin Laden did that deliberately, in hopes of souring US/Saudi relations so that he could the better overthrow the Saudi government.
The implication one often hears from Democrats that the US should have invaded Saudi Arabia and Pakistan after the Afghan war rather than Iraq is just another kind of warmongering and illogical. There is no evidence that either the Saudi or the Pakistani government was complicit in 9/11.
But, of course, it's usually only "us liberals" who get our panties in a bunch over the intricacies of facts and figures. The BushJunta and their propaganda ministers over at Fox just plain out lie. (However, for a long-ass breakdown of the facts from the right, you could do worse than check out Dave Kopel's site. See how "fair and balanced" I am? Wow. (Gun rights activist Kopel goes overboard--as is typical--and enters "Moore is a terrorist symp" territory near the end. Yeh, yeh, yeh. Okay, we get it.))
Moore has posted his own footnotes to the film over at his own site.
Finally, it is a very patriotic film, even nationalistic in its exclusion from the film anything to do with the worldwide protests or (apart from two mentions) the Blair government's role in cooking the Iraq books. But as I said to Jessica, it's only in America would such a film get made and released during the administration it was criticizing. When I asked her if such a film would be made in her country (revealing the nefarious dealings of Chen Shui-bein and released before his next election) she said "the filmmaker would probably be killed." When you see the slugfests they have in Taiwan's parliament, I have no doubt she's right.
So cheers to Michael Moore, and here's to sticking it to Bush.
Also, is anybody going to ever take to task the Democrat members of the Senate for not signing the Black Caucus's complaint letter, as seen in the beginning of the film (one of the few events in the film that I didn't know about)? How do they justify it? And how do they sleep knowing that a little bit of bravery could have saved this country from four years of savagery?
July 20, 2004
The Cocoe Conspiracy Headquarters (TCCH)
Here's what you can do with After Effects, the always helpful Prelinger Archives, and a good deal of talent. A secret history of the Cocoe Conspiracy. Quictime Movie, 20 mb download.
By way of Tween
My newest DVD Player
I recently bought the CyberHome CH-DVD 300 player at Best Buy for a whopping $32.99, primarily since it plays PAL discs as well as NTSC and can be made, through a few menu buttons, completely Region Free. Now I have repaid my good luck by writing a review of it for DVD Beaver. I will not let any capitalists tell me what I can or cannot watch, based on where I live.
July 18, 2004
The Return
Dir: Andrey Zvyagintsev
2003
A startling debut from Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev, "The Return" is a family drama stuctured and shot as suspense/mystery. Two boys, Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov) and the older Andrej (Vladimir Garin), are surprised to find their father (Konstantin Lavronenko), who they barely remember, has returned after a long absense. The father takes them on a long fishing/camping trip, where the two brothers come into conflict with his authortarian behavior. By the time they take a small motorboat out to a deserted island, Ivan begins to suspect his father isn't who he says he is.
Zvyagintsev's film is enthralling, and by turns surprising and inevitable in its fateful tale. Neither child is correct about their father, and the father isn't an ogre. We get a sense that the father was stationed at this island during his time in the army, but what happened there we never find out. His strict nature feels like the only way he can understand relationships. We also see that, having been raised by an overprotective mother, the two kids are coddled and don't understand their father's behavior at all. Ivan feels persecuted.
Andrey spends a lot of his trip taking photos, and in his own silent protest (unlike Ivan's stubborn nature) excludes his father from the frame. It's understandable, but this tactic comes back at the end of the tale to devastating effect, as do several small plot points, such as failing to follow their father's instructions. Zvyagintsev never hammers these points home, wisely, but drops a few red herrings.
Limited in release, most of us will have to wait for the DVD release, though the small screen may not do justice to the 24-hour sunlight the filmmakers shot in (up near the Finnish/Russian border).
(A side note: The elder of the child actors died not long after filming, drowning in the lake where most of "The Return" was filmed.)
July 16, 2004
Lady Snowblood
Dir. Toshiya Fujita
1973
A fast-paced samurai revenge picture with a female in the title role, "Lady Snowblood" has received this release due to Tarantino referencing it (and using some of its soundtrack) in "Kill Bill."
Wide-eyed Mieko Kaji (who played the title role in Female Convict Scorpion) stars as Yuki, whose mother died in childbirth, and raised by a hard-assed martial arts-teaching priest. She is raised to complete her revenge against the gang of four who killed her family and raped and tortured her mother. Yes, she has a list, just like in Kill Bill, but things get more complex. Death number one was completed by the mother before her death in prison. Death number two comes easily. But when Yuki tracks down Number Three, she finds a headstone. Seems like he died some time back. However, a young reporter seems to know about her story and a tenuous relationship develops.
All this is set against the Meiji era of Japan, and a climactic fight scene is shot inside a very Western costume ball, where British Admirals dance with Japanese ladies.
If anyone thought the violence in Kill Bill was cartoony or gross, Lady Snowblood has plenty more limb-choppin', blood spurtin' action. No matter where Yuki hits with her sword, she is guaranteed to hit a main artery, the result a hissing, arcing fountain o' blood. Great fun, as is the wah-wah pedal-heavy, jazz-rock score, but Toshiya Fujita plays it straight. It was made in 1973 after all.
This is a very good DVD release by Animeigo, which though it lacks in extras, makes sure that every single thing in Japanese is translated, with multicolored subtitles helping the sometimes speedy dialog. Very few Japanese DVDs have such extensive subtitles.
Japanese film fans won't be surprised to know Yuki dies in the end, but they may be surprised to see that Yuki came back the next year for a sequel. Did she punch her way out of her six-feet-under coffin? No idea.
July 15, 2004
In Cold Blood
Dir: Richard Brooks
1967
I read Truman Capote's novel during my first year at 6th Form in England, over the course of a month of bus rides to and from campus. It still stays with me, and I finally saw the 1967 adaptation by Richard Brooks the other night.
Brooks shot the murder scenes in the actual house where it occured, and wisely removes all music from this sequence, just letting the wind howl around the house.
With Robert Blake in the main role as killer Perry Smith, the film can't help but reflect on his own trial and incarceration. Not only that, but much of the film reminded me of Lynch's "Lost Highway," from the night shots speeding along the road to the scenes in the cell. Maybe we're seeing chapters of a megamovie where Robert Blake, frustrated movie star, kills his wife, and transmogrifies into a young, sexy Perry Smith, who then goes on to kill again and wind back up on death row. As the psychologist in the movie says, "Separate they were harmless, but together they made a third person who killed" (I'm paraphrasing). That third person shaved his eyebrows, lives in a roadside shack, and urges men to kill.
There's even more intertextual hoohah when we see Perry in flashback as a little Mexican-American kid helping his mom out at the rodea. An early Blake role was as a little Mexican kid who sells Bogart a ticket in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. That movie and Bogart are referenced several times in "In Cold Blood." Some film student is bound to have a field day with this...
Missed in several online reviews I read of the film was the rather obvious suppressed homosexual relationship between the two killers. Dick Hickock, the other killer, talks of their friendship like marriage, and Perry seems quite co-dependent. The rage that sets him off on the killing spree in the Clutters' home starts when he stops Dick from raping the young girl, a sort of jealous rage. (Add in the father issues as well, and there's a whole heap o' problems here).
Strangely enough, a writer by the name of J.J. Maloney was the first to advance the homosexual jealousy idea, not Capote, in 1999. But didn't he get this idea from the film? Somebody's out of chronological order here. Either way, you can read about that ideahere.
May 11, 2004
Kill Bill 2
Dir: Quentin Tarantino
2004
Forgot to post my thoughts on this here, as I had posted them over at a mailing list I'm on. Here's pretty much what I said there.
On the Jackie Brown DVD, QT talks about how JB "proved" he could make an intelligent, mostly dialog-driven film. And he had done it as his third film, early in his career. He goes on to say that maybe the next film will just be a movie-movie, just stupid fun, but craaaaazy.
So that's how I take KB. The trouble with QT is that we have to wait so bloody long between films that the expectations outweigh the eventual release.
A friend of mine made a comparison between 1 and 2 in that they reflect Kurosawa's tactic with Yojimbo and Sanjuro. Yojimbo is all blood 'n' guts; Sanjuro has little of that, and when violence does arrive it doesn't conform to our expectations. Big baddies are dispatched quickly and without flourishes, where we expect big set pieces.
Over on the P5 list, where the convo is about sampling, Paul's Boutique has been mentioned a few times, and I feel that KB is a bit like that--QT has made a sampladelic movie, no more no less. He's just throwing everything out there on the table--all the movies he loves, reconfiguring it, tweaking it.
I admit it's light and superficial, but I had some laughs along the way: Sonny Chiba's sushi chef scene, Gordon Liu's segment, the massacre of the Crazy 88s.
Who knows what QT will do for a follow up? My sense is that it will be something more like Jackie Brown. There's been this WWII movie that he's been wanting to make. Maybe he'll pull a David Mamet and do a drawing-room drama like The Winslow Boy. Really, it could be anything. Only by the next film will we really know how to see KBII.
Japattack's Tarantino Interview
This is a pretty good Tarantino interview from before KBI came out. It made me think of the landscape of Kill Bill, how each "land" is made up purely of films and film references. Not a big revelation, as this is a post-modern film at its grandest, but how the rules change from location to location are, I think, particular to this film (instead of being a free-for-all).
May 7, 2004
Secretary
Dir: Stephen Shainberg
2002
A fabulous performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal and a typically weird one by James Spader, in this tale of a socially backward girl who comes into her own under the weird dominating presence of the lawyer, Edward Grey, she works for. The critical consensus of the film is that the ending falls apart, or suggests that much was cut to keep the third act from leaving its near-literal hothouse atmosphere. I felt this way too, that Lee (Gyllenhaal) finds her freedom through becoming a submissive, and so the end, where the two consummate their love in a very straight, hetero way (naked rumpy-pumpy) feels like it's against everything that's come first. Surely, the desired outcome for Lee would be more of the submissive game.
A few days later, I came up with an alternative to just dismissing the ending. Perhaps what we're seeing is Edward's assertion of dominance over the narrative. How can Lee, a submissive, wind up being the hero? Wouldn't that make her dominant? So, think about the orchids, Edward's prised possession. They are cloistered, doted on, but stuck in an artificial "natural" environment." We also see Edward plant a photo of Lee in the garden. What if the lawyer's office is the nursery, and marriage/life in a suburban house is the end location/result? Lee becomes a flower that is transplanted into Edward's life. When they finally make love, it is on a grass bed. A following shot shows Lee strapped to a tree during sex (the last image of bondage we see). Is the ultimate bondage domestic servitude? Is the final shot of Lee, as she looks into the camera with all sorts of emotion washing over her face, damning? A cry for help? Acceptance? She has spoken to us thorughout, but now Lee just looks. Is the film a very subtle and/or vague version of "The Collector"? How complicit is Lee in her fate? How should we feel about this?
Looking at the film this way, it may not be so hard to dismiss.
Stolen Kisses
Dir: Francois Truffaut
1968
Francois Truffaut's sequel--if you discount the short made in between--to "The 400 Blows", following the young adulthood of Antoine Doniel (Jean-Pierre Leaud), as he goes from crummy job to crummy job (hotel night clerk, detective (!), shoe salesman, TV repairman), falling in and out of love, and getting into a little bit of trouble.
It's an incredibly light film, surprising as it was made during May 1968, as the Nouvelle Vague protested the Langlois affair and shut down Cannes. In the Criterion Collection DVD extras, the film is said to almost have been made as a way to relax from the political pressures of that year, with filming happening in a scattershot fashion with loads of improv.
The various detectives in the film (in typical trenchcoat, and always shadowing someone) are classic American Noir (Truffaut had just finished his adaptation of Cornell Woolrich's The Bride Wore Black before this film) rendered comical by their transplanting into French society. The young, sometimes girlfriend of Antoine, Christine (Claude Jade), is tailed all the way through the movie, only to find the detective confessing his love for her at the end in a strange closing scene. Hey, it's France, vive l'amour!
Prime Suspect 6
Dir: Tom Hooper
2003
Has it really been six years since the last Prime Suspect? This series along with Cracker show how differently the British and the Americans see their police dramas. Although Prime Suspect is clearly Detective Tennyson's show, the fleshing out of her fellow squad members and of the victims and suspects really give the show a novelistic touch. Detective Supt. Tennyson is not a super-genius, but we thrill at her bullheadedness and determination, while her moments of self-doubt and even defeat round out her character humbly.
There are very few chases--the ones that happen resolve themselves quickly (suspect escapes, suspect caught)--very little gunplay, though there are guns. Tennyson wanders around potentially dangerous areas without a gun drawn, confusing the American viewers. Major clues are not exclusively the domain of the lead--often a member of the team finds them.
Steadily, steadily, the case is built, in this case around an obvious suspect in the murder of a Bosnian Muslim women who immigrated to England 10 years before only to find the war followed her. Interrogations don't produce immediate results. The media is out of the investigation's hands and ruins leads. And one major tactic that PS does over and over to some effect is never allowing the audience any release through the protagonist. As stones are lain in her path, Tennyson gets more and more frustrated, but very little do we see her exploding in anger. Instead another, sometimes disconnected, scene begins and we carry over that emotion with us. No wonder the show is so bleedin' tense.
Helen Mirren is great, just great, a real hero, always thinking.
April 27, 2004
Giants and Toys
Dir: Yasuo Masamura
1958
Absolute complete insanity from Masamura and all sorts of props go out to Fantoma DVD for bringing this out of obscurity. Imagine a mix of Willy Wonka, Network, and a 1940s screwball comedy, driven by a soundtrack like Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and you have a little sense of this film.
The setting is modern Japan in the late '50s. Three caramel candy makers declare an all-out consumerist assault on society with a series of campaigns that begin to look a bit like war. We focus on one company, World Caramel, that hires a very common looking girl (Hitomi Nozoe) to be their spokesmodel, all the while trying to second-guess the other two companies on its way to complete market domination. At what point does decency and humanity go out the window and when does the race for a bottom line turn into a nosedive?
Furious in pace and devilishly funny (I particularly liked the earthy, sleazebag photographer) the film has to be experienced not described. In fact, though modern filmmaking looks fast, it often drags drags drags. Masamura just keeps blasting along, scene after scene, breathless, throwing people together, watching the sparks. He also employs a weird montage strategy involving the mid-level boss's cigarette lighter. Some sort of family heirloom or gift, it takes about 50 strikes to get it to work. The incessant strikes are the gateway into several montages, one showing the candy being made, the other the marketing of the spokesmodel. Once the montage finishes (and it is usually double exposed with a close up of the lighter), Masamura returns to the scene and carries on. This is so strange (are we supposed to see the montage as happening concurrently or in the past?) that I can't think of a single film before or since that has does such a thing.
On top of that, the film stops near the finale for a 4-minute dance sequence, featuring the now-successful spokesmodel and a chorus of men dressed up like savages.
After this film, and with memories of his similarly wacky "The Key" and "Blind Beast," more Masamura films need to be released.
Black Robe
Dir: Bruce Beresford
1991
Bruce Beresford's gloomy film of a French Jesuit priest (Lothaire Bluteau) traveling into the wilds of 1600s Quebec to find that God ain't gonna save him from the weather, the Iroquoi, or his own righteous hubris. Scott and myself gave this a look on the weekend as its setting ties into the script we're writing, and though the plot was a bit tepid, the historical details, costumes, and set design were all intriguing to us. The film is often cited as a refreshing antidote to the "noble white man" of Dances With Wolves, but the main character is so stuffy and unbending, we just watch him get buffeted about by fate and by the tribe who live more realistically within their surroundings. Trouble is, we follow him to the end, a disease-overrun tribal outpost in the snowy north, where he finally convinces the tribe there to be baptised. Some reward.
A shaman, played by a little person with yellow-green fright mask make-up, and who follows whitey around shouting "Demon! Demon!" provided (unintentional?) comic relief, and the young Algonquin woman, Annuka (Sandrine Holt) was cute as the dickens. Unlike the uptight Jesuit, traveling companion Daniel (Aiden Young) was down for a bit of doggie-style cross-pollination with Annuka inside the teepee.
Evil Dead
Dir: Sam Raimi
1981
Wow, was it really 16 years ago that I watched this for the first time, and is this really the second time I've seen it? I've always said I preferred this Evil Dead to the sequel, as this one have much more bad vibes to it, and less slapstick. I still think the "forest-rape" scene is rather silly, but the demonic possession is still chilling and the scares still made me jump, and all done in the simplest way (sleight of hand, making us look at one part of the screen and popping something up elsewhere.) And I had plum forgotten about all the wonderful stop-motion animation at the end.
This special release from Anchor Bay comes in a "Book of the Dead" rubber mask-covered case and contains bonus outtakes, an interview with the British distributors that made Evil Dead a roaring success and a fine, short documentary by Bruce Campbell on fans and fanatics, which contained enough shots of overweight Jedi Knights and furries to keep me away from conventions for life.
The Hustler
Dir: Robert Rosssen
1961
Most excellent and gritty drama that made a well-deserved star out of Paul Newman, but also has fine performances by George C. Scott and Piper Laurie, as well as a "guest star" appearance by Jackie Gleason, saying few words and dominating the screen. Who could do that now?
The film has a surprising structure, with an opening 10 minute "tease" that sets up Fast Eddie (Newman) and his manager Charlie (Myron McCormick) as pool hustlers. Then for the next 30 or so minutes Fast Eddie goes up against reigning champion Minnesota Fats (Gleason), winning, then losing all his earnings in a show of hubris (and booze). It's such a long scene it surprising they thought they could lead off with it, but it's engrossing nonetheless. Fast Eddie rehabilitates with the help of Piper Laurie's Sarah, an alcoholic trust-fund baby with a habit for picking up men to share a bottle with. Bert (George C. Scott) becomes his new manager and the second half of the film follows the three as Bert uses Fast Eddie and destroys Sarah in the process. Nobody in this film is a dunce, but they all have their weaknesses. And its in recognizing the weaknesses that make the characters strong--ignore weakness at your own cost...
This a film about father figures and father issues, a psychological drama as only they could make 'em back then. (Psychological dramas now have somebody say "I love you, Dad" in the third act.) Fast Eddie spends the film looking to topple the father (Minnesota Fats), leaves his manager, finds another one even worse ("When did you adopt me?" Fast Eddie asks Bert after one spectacularly written scene in a bar), and in doing so, kills off the feminine. His maturity is revealed at the end when both Fats and Fast (anagrams of each other, notice) size each other up as equals, not a high/low equation. Great performances all 'round--no wonder Newman became such a star.
March 31, 2004
Japanese Story
Dir: Sue Brooks
2003
I'm glad I stuck with this film, because for the first half the story really sticks close to the typical road-film crossed with romantic-drama of two people who are complete opposites finding love. Sandy (Toni Collette) is a geologist software expert who winds up accompanying an interested Japanese salaryman Hiromitsu (Gotaro Tsunashima) around the outback. She's rude and outspoken, he's quiet and demure. She can't believe she's being treated as just a tour guide, he is headstrong over where he wants to go and doesn't care how long it takes to get there. The characters are almost stereotypical, but then the two get stuck in the outback and things begin to flesh out. The third act then throws a complete curve ball and suddenly the film takes on much emotional resonance, not just from our relationship to the characters, but our relationship to the expectations of genre.
I dont' want to mention the third act surprise, but the film becomes a true study of grief, and not even the early scenes that would suggest a framing structure (to give us that good ol' sense of "closure") are found wanting in the face of events. What starts off as a story of the difficulties of bridging cultures through communication in a lighthearted way turns around and looks at the difficulties of communicating emotion, and the inability of the unaffected parties to understand just what has been lost. It's good stuff, and it reminds me a little bit of the emotional punch of another recent Australian film, "Lantana."
Toni Collette looked familiar and no wonder: she was the girlfriend in "About a Boy," and, reaching back, the title character of "Muriel's Wedding." Blimey.
The Ladykillers
Dirs: Ethan and Joel Coen
2004
"That's a bomb," my dad said, when I was over visiting and the ad for "The Ladykillers" came on the TV. He didn't know I had just come from the cinema having seen it. "That's what the critics say," he say. "They say it's terrible." "Well, I thought it was allright," I tossed in, but the damage was done. I'm told that this is a bad film.
Now, I suppose that, compared to the original Ealing comedy, this is pretty shallow stuff. The film just goes for the jokes and doesn't bother with characters, and is fair ammunition for those who think the Coen Brothers are exquisite stylists with hearts of cold. Look at the film that way, and it's a bomb, I suppose.
But the Coens have given us rounded characters before, so I believe they know what they're doing. This is Ealing rethought as a screwball comedy, pure satire. I laughed through most of it. It was refreshing to see Tom Hanks playing a comic role for once--I thought he was going to sink into stodgy characters like the FBI agent in "Catch Me If You Can" (to which I remarked to my wife next to me, "What, didn't Dan Ackroyd have time to play this?"). Stuck with goofy teeth and coming on like a over-educated Colonel Sanders, his character makes no realistic sense. And neither do his ragtag group of criminals who are helping dig a tunnel from the basement of his lodging house into the casino's vault. I found "The General" (Tzi Ma) a funny character throughout, a militaristic Vietnamese gentleman with a Hitler moustache and a perpetual half-smoked cigarette in his mouth. Likewise the accident-prone explosives expert (J.K. Simmons) with a case of irritable bowel syndrome. Marlon Wayans does the typical loudmouthed homey, but I laughed at that too. What can I say? However, you do get the itchy sensation that the Coens consider everybody in this film to be a fool, except perhaps the cat.
My main complaint is that the movie is too long in its set-up, execution, and resolution. But will I be renting it for a family get-together, so I can hear my mom pee her pants laughing? You bet your sweet bippy.
March 28, 2004
The Sure Thing
Dir: Rob Reiner
1984
Our local library has something like 200 DVDs, but they are so popular only 5 are on the shelf at any given time (where else but Netflix can you get a deal like free rental, 7-day-loan?). It's become a bit of filmgoer zen when approaching the shelf. I'll usually find one film a week to watch from here, but I'll have no idea what. Metropolis was last week's "choice". This week it was Rob Reiner's romantic comedy "The Sure Thing," which I had never seen.
A pleasant, none-too-cynical mix of "opposites attract" with a road movie, the film takes you exactly where you want to go--the eventual coupling of wild-boy John Cusack and conservative Alison (Daphne Zuniga)--but throws in every obstacle it can. A few surprising things, based on what the teen romantic comedy has become. Zuniga's character is not the ugly duckling, the nerdy girl who suddenly looks like a million bucks when she takes off her glasses. She stays pretty much the same fashionwise throughout--it's her character, revealed through her face, that changes. Nobody's character traits are revealed to arise from parental issues. Refreshingly, we don't hear much about either of their parents, except that Alison's dad has left her with a credit card (to be discovered in one fortuitous scene). Plus the romantic tension never resolves itself until after the two return to the East Coast. How many road films feature the characters returning home?
John Cusack, in the film that made him a star, shows ever here the great charisma and ease in performing that marks all his early films. Daphne Zuniga, who went on to star in Spaceballs and four seasons of Melrose Place) gets short shrift in the DVD extras. She gets interviewed, but nobody else seems to talk about her when reminiscing about the film. The blonde who plays "The Sure Thing" (Nicolette Sheridan) gets name checked more.
Teen films are so formulaic now (although the great resurgence in them--the Freddie Prinze Jr. years--seems to have passed) that The Sure Thing, despite having a bikini-wearing fantasy woman, feels old-fashioned and "classic."
But I also think that people who love this film really are in love with who they were when they saw it. Unlike "Say Anything", I didn't find the script to be that quotable. There's no scene comparable to SA's "Gas 'n' Sip", or a monolog as bizarre as Lloyd Dobler's career statement.
Local note--at one point they drive over a bridge that I recognized as the one on the north side of the 154--descending from Camino Cielo down to the Cachuma Lake region. The little winding path underneath it (visible on the DVD) goes to Cold Springs Tavern (we were just there last week). It's a great bridge, especially seen from that road below. I believe at this point the characters were supposed to be in the Midwest.
Metropolis
Dir: Rintaro
2001
A strange amalgam of Fritz Lang and anime, this adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's manga comes on like a giant amusement park as seen by a four year old child jonesing for some ritalin. The metropolis of the title is a similar-to-Lang mega-city, with a street level surrounded by skyscrapers and elevated trams, while underneath the city, runs a poorer level populated by proto-revolutionaries and service robots. Everything on both levels looks great--I can't think of a more self-consciously colorful anime. If anyone bothered anymore, this is a great film to toke up to.
The film has taken on Tezuka's manga (written in 1948, I believe) and, instead of just focusing on Tima, the girl humanoid robot who searches for her identity, throws in a lot of characters. I'm not too sure whose story we're really watching. Boy-hero Ken-ichi never fully develops as a character--while he does rescue Tima at the beginning, he is easily taken out by the bad guys who want her back. Tima is too helpless, the detective uncle is too cagey.
A lot of "Metropolis" is given over to either chase scenes or rescue scenes and the end if very much like Castle in the Sky. Released in pre-9/11 2001, its sequence of crumbling and toppling skyscrapers with a Ray Charles tune playing over the top might have worked once.
Still, it's lovely to look at, and I particularly liked Kiki, the three-legged trashcan robot who briefly became Ken-ichi and Tima's friend. Making sounds like an affectionate puppy, I was sad to see him/her fall sacrificial to the bad guys' bullets.
The DVD's 5.1 mix really worked my speakers, with echoes receding far in the back and gunshots zipping past. This is a great disc to show off a home theater, and the bigger your screen the better.
In the Mouth of Madness
Dir: John Carpenter
1995
The second of my Lovecraftian viewings was John Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness". Though HPL is not mentioned, it's clear that Sutter Cane is supposed to be some sexier, rock'n'roll version of Lovecraft, updated to modern times. (Reviewers who see Sutter Cane as Stephen King probably haven't read much). The film has a lot of promise, but it doesn't exactly pull through, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps Sam Neill is not likable enough as the main character, John Trent, an insurance fraud investigator sent out to determine why famous horror writer Cane has disappeared and why his novels are inspiring acts of violence. This leads to Neil and Cane's editor to go searching for and find the fictional town that Cane has always written about.
Perhaps its Carpenter and his scriptwriter Michael De Luca's inability to decide whether this is a high-concept Borges-like piece (where its best stuff lies) or a monster movie (where its rubberiest stuff flops). The creature effects here are done by Industrial Light and Magic, but they look really poor. The innkeeper who becomes a demon is particularly poor, and often there are shots of fleshy, drippy creatures just for the sake of it. One is seen growing out of Cane's back, but it never turns up again.
Julie Carmen, who plays Trent's assistant Linda, isn't much of a presence, and seems to have different motivation in each scene. Is she part of Cane's plot, or a victim--is she surprised or horrified by any of it? She also looks like she has on an inch of foundation, a grey-brown pallor in some shots.
My favorite parts are the subtle ones. The hotel painting that changes, the bulging door in Cane's lair (very Lovecraft), the apocalyptic scenario. The idea that the book causes insanity and allows the Chthulu-like beings to enter this dimension is a good one--with similarities to "The Thing."
I feel that if the story had been worked with a bit more, and the monster business had been taken out, then it might have been one of Carpenter's best. But instead, this is middle-period Carpenter, all over the place, loose, disappointing.
Re-Animator
Dir: Stuart Gordon
1985
Can you believe I'd never seen Re-Animator until now? I lived outside of the States for the middle part of the '80s, and where I lived was far from the cinema, and we couldn't afford those newfangled VCR thingies. So a lot of "classic" '80s films have passed me by.
It was my friend Chris S_____ who recommended I see the film in a "you mean you've never?" situation. That on top of my Lovecraft reading this week made the screening a must. All spruced up for a 2-DVD set, the film now looks great instead of a "video nasty," which was always its reputation in the U.K.
So, the film was a jolly lot of fun. I like my horror less hilarious, but I did admire its silliness. But I don't feel there's much to say about the film a few days after watching it. Some points:
• Fake cats always amuse--fake, psychotic, undead cats are even better.
• Complete nudity from the lead actress dates this film to that most liberal of eras...the Reagan Administration.
• Dr. Hill (David Gale) looks strangely like John Kerry.
• It's perfectly fitting that the magic potion in an '80s film is neon green.
• A great, Hermann-inspired soundtrack by Richard Band--the soundtrack lends a touch of seriousness to the film which a rock band wouldn't.
March 21, 2004
Chris Eccleston is the new Doctor Who
The general consensus is "Yes....mmm...goooood choice." And indeed it is--this will hopefully rescue the Doctor from the days of Pantomine from the mid-80s. I'm looking forward to it.
Eccleston is new Doctor Who
March 17, 2004
The Fog of War
Dir: Errol Morris
2003
Robert McNamara loves to tell a story and hinge it on one big "But!" He does this several times in Morris' fabulous, unnerving documentary on the man people consider the architect of the Vietnam War. "But!" he interjects, looking right into the camera and holding his index finger aloft.
This habit suggests a lot about McNamara--the "but" marks the flipside of the coin, the opposite viewpoint, the enemy's POV. It's business sense, it war strategist's sense, it's science.
Morris handles the conflicting strands in McNamara's story well--a man who helped create the war, but who claims it was so large it was beyond his control. A man who admits the failure of the war, but will not accept any blame or issue an apology (or perhaps he knows an apology will sound facile and too late if he offers one). How mathematics and statistics helped the Americans win WWII. How those abstractions cover atrocities like the fire bombing of Tokyo and the atomic bomb drops. (Morris' shot of numbers and symbols dropping from the bombbay doors onto a Japanese landscape is a succinct visualisation.)
Charles Taylor's review in Salon chided Morris for letting technique get in the way of his subject, but I never felt this was the case. Morris enlivens his subjects with his (sparsely used here) use of graphics, but does leave most of the film devoted to McNamara's onscreen narration. I came away with the feeling that McNamara knows full well what he's done, but who is still wrestling with how abstract his crimes and his guilt should be.
The Blue Planet: The Deep
Prod: Alastair Fothergill
2001
After watching Finding Nemo, by chance a DVD I had ordered came in the mail the next day ready to complement Pixar's fishy fantasy. The Blue Planet is an 8-part documentary miniseries about the ocean, narrated by Mr. Nature Doc himself, David Attenborough. The episode called "The Deep" explores the deep ocean like never before, discovering all sorts of freakish and often unnerving species living in the dark. The depth means that very little animal or vegetable matter is floating around, making the water (when lit by the submersible) as clear as air. On DVD, this makes for some sharp-as-tack photography, and this hour-long episode is pure eye-candy all the way. As the camera crew--in this tiny diving machine designed to withstand the incredible pressures--descend the discoveries become more incredible. We've all seen the angler fish, with his little glowing lure and huge teeth, but did you know as some points in the ocean there is a lake at the bottom? Or that around the volcanic vents in the continental shelf there are worms and crabs designed to live in boiling water? This is a DVD sure to astonish anybody and I'm sure will hold up to several viewings. (There's another episode on the DVD, "Open Ocean," but I haven't bothered with it yet!)
Side note: The reason I bought this is, well, for some time I've been interested in deep sea fishes and other creatures (among thousands of other interests, but it's filed away in the brain). The other day somebody posted a selection of astonishing photos on Metafilter, causing me to link to it over on Stone Cold Pimpin'. In Metafilter's comment section, one poster mentioned this video. I followed his link to Amazon and bought it used. I mention this because there is no way any computer algorithm could figure I'd be interested in such a project. Amazon's still recommending I buy "Poison Ivy 2" for goshsakes.
March 9, 2004
Finding Nemo
Dirs: Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich
2003
Yes, well, now I see it. Although I don't have any kids tugging at my arm, I do have my wife, who, though not too interested in Disney, feels the need to keep up with movies discussed around the water cooler at her job. And the office women seem to like "Finding Nemo". Plus her sister keeps going on about it (she kept saying "You made me ink!" over and over on holiday, and ruined that joke for me). So here we are.
I will go and see Pixar films; they are a separate entity from Disney (especially now), and I did really like "A Bug's Life" for it wealth of background jokes and well done supporting characters (the pillbugs especially). I saw "Monsters Inc." last year and that was okay.
"Finding Nemo" had some good moments, but I feel this is the most "Disney" of the lot--too much saccharine, too many 'life lessons', too much "I love you dad!" moments. Characters come, do their shtick, then go, such as the surfer turtles, the vegetarian sharks, and the rest, all feeling quite programmed after a while. Undoubtedly, many children's books also go with this structure when there's a journey narrative--just think of Wizard of Oz--but it becomes very obvious here.
Just as there's too many supporting characters (Nemo's fishtank friends are reduced to one or two gags each), the film is almost too beautiful. The realism and the minute craftsmanship that goes into every single backdrop means even the scary parts are comforting. The light upon the water, the transparency of the ocean, the fluorescence of the coral reefs, the textures of sand and rock--it's all very amazing.
But having watched this in the same week as "Laputa," I can remember much more of that film's characters than here. I also became very aware that the two main characters are Ellen Degeneres and Albert Brooks. I couldn't separate them from their animated characters. I could just see Albert and Ellen in the studio, improv'ing it up. On the other hand, I had no idea that was Willem Dafoe as the battle-scarred tropical fish, Gill.
In the end it was the small things I liked: the arguing Boston lobsters near the steam vent, the gulls (a design nod to Aardman?) who just say "mine. mine." when food is about, and the French shrimp ("I shall resist!" he says when told not to clean the tank, a line that no doubt goes over all the kids' heads and most of the adults').
Yes, it's funny, but the humor comes from the concessions it makes for the adult audience. Kids get thrown pretty colors and an ADD-inspired adventure tale; sappy adults get thrown a father-son tale about "letting go as a parent," while the adult jokes and sitcom delivery please the television watchers.
This is still "separate-but-equal" entertainment. Many children's filmmakers have decided that their product will be unwatchable to adults unless a second level is added. Do we have the ability to make a film that succeeds with all ages without dumbing down or snarking up?
By the way, when we were in the video store, we watched a young father trying to find movies to rent for his two kids, who I guess were 5 and 7, maybe younger. He was trying to rent "The Apple Dumpling Gang," presumably because he loved the film as a kid and wanted to initiate them. "But is has guns and explosions in it," he explained to the little boy, "You'll like that!" The boy wasn't having any of it. Parents: will they ever learn?
Laputa: Castle in the Sky
Dir: Hayuo Miyazaki
1986
Recently released domestically with a disposable dubbed soundtrack (James Vanderbeek, eek!), Laputa is another classic from Miyazaki. I haven't seen all his films yet, but each time I do, I'm astounded by the breadth of his vision. He puts other animated film directors to shame. For this story of a young girl and her mysterious amulet and the rough and tumble lad, Pazu, who tries to help her escape the clutches of bad governmentals who are after her, we are treated to two hours of exquisite landscapes, stuff that dreams are made on. Pazu's mountain village is an impossible architecture of village England crossed with Alpine cliff dwellers; the Army base is a round and geometric prison; the pirate ship they escape on is steam-punk before there was such a word (nods to Captain Nemo abound); and the Castle in the Sky contains four to five distinct environments. I've had dreams like this--Miyazaki brings them to life.
On top of that, the story is a rip-roaring boys' and girls' own adventure, plus an ecological fable that doesn't hit you over the head. Miyazaki also treats his working people with respect, like he does in Princess Mononoke. The villagers mine the earth, but they respect it. The air pirates are scary, but they're more romantic outlaws and mostly buffoons. The true villains are the army (blockheads with big weapons) and government officials (who quickly corrupt themselves absolutely).
Plus, such is my fear of heights that I found a lot of the suspence near unbearable, as Pazu's often winds up hanging by the skin of his teeth from the bottom of the sky city.
Most excellent!
Just one example of Miyazaki's subtle touch: When Pazu agrees to join the sky pirates and go in search of the girl, he is in essence growing up and agreeing to leave home for the greater world. We see him leave the dovecot open and wish his doves well. A few scenes later when he and pirates pass back over the valley, we get a wide shot of the village and we can just make out his house. And in fact, there's a small flock of doves flying nearby. Miyazaki succinctly sums up Pazu's feelings right there--that his former life is nearby but very far away, not really a part of him now. (One can imagine the Hollywood version: "Wow, I can see my house from here! And there go my doves! Fly and be free, doves!" probably with a shot of the airpirates' craft from Pazu's old house.)
The Weather Underground
Dirs: Sam Green and Bill Siegel
2003
This was up for an Oscar for best doc (didn't win). A well done history of the Weather Underground, the "Days of Rage" that sprung out of the frustrated anti-war movement, and what happens with middle-age and reality catches up with student radicals. The Weather Underground is one of those historical docs that reframes history so that not only does its subject become the center of attention, but alters how you look at its surrounding people and places. Green and Siegel succeed in making the actions of the radicals, though in the end futile, seem initially creditable. They did manage to explode bombs without killing anybody (except when it was themselves), they did do it for a reason (all bombings were in protest to some grave injustice by the police or the governemtn), they did successfully elude capture and become some sort of political force.
One of the interesting points it brings up about the Weathermen is even in the radical/neo-terrorist movement, their white skin offered them privileges. Whereas they were surveilled and tracked, members of the Black Panthers were assassinated outright.
Green and Siegel use a nice blend of footage, and don't blink from showing us the atrocities that Americans were subject to through the TV of our foray into Vietnam. In fact, this is the first time that I'd seen the full footage of the assassination in Hanoi (TV, if it shows it at all, cuts right after the gun goes off--actually the cameraman continues filming as the blood spurts out of his head in a drinking-fountain arc). They use amateur animation and a soundtrack full of Aphex Twin and Sonic Youth.
The film ends suggesting that the '80s curdled the dreams of the '60s radicals, and that the remaining Weathermen live with a palpable ambivalence over what they did. The filmmakers also end with two ironic clips--"Hanoi Jane" Fonda turned in a workout video guru, and the fact that one of the Weathermen went on Jeopardy and won $32,000. Not too shabby.
February 24, 2004
Enki Bilal's IMMORTEL
Enki Bilal should be familiar to all fans of early Heavy Metal comics, sci-fi tales full of sex, machinery, and ancient gods. You can now watch a HUGE (32 meg) trailer for the film version of Immortel, which opened today in France. Directed by Bilal himself, it looks pretty faithful to his look.
February 19, 2004
Suicide Club (Jisatsu Saakuru)
Dir: Shion Sono
2002
I'm always up for a good Japanese horror movie, but this one didn't do it for me. The film felt like it began with a series of striking images (a mass suicide in front of a train; a roll of stitched-together flesh; a woman blithely cutting off her fingers; a theater filled with scary-looking children) and then a script was written to contain them.
Taking a lot from Kiyoshi Kurosawa (especially his classic "Kairo"--you should know this is one of my favorite films from the current Japanese horror renaissance), Sono creates a whole lot of questions, emotional and logical, and then confuses not explicitly answering them with not having an answer.
The plot centers around a rash of group suicides around Japan, and the detective (Ryo Ishibashi) called in to solve the case. The film opens with a bravura set piece where 50 or so high school girls jump in front of a subway. Trouble is, the editing reveals the budget, and the soundtrack (a kooky march) ruins the shock. It's actually (intentionally?) funny. Big waves of blood shoot out from beneath the train as it plows through the tender flesh--it's something that Dario Argento would love. But it is rather silly.
Much better is a later mass suicide set on the top of a high school where horsing around leads to the entire rooftop of students jumping to their deaths (although we get some more buckets-o-blood splashed on the ground floor windows). It's a well-written scene and the tone is just right. No marching music either.
Then there's a completely unrelated sequence set in a hospital with two nurses and a security guard--this is shot very dark, and is reminiscent of Kurosawa or Nakata (Ringu). In the context of the film though, it doesn't follow the "mass suicide" theme. Seems to me it's either mass suicide or just random suicides--Sono seems to change his mind depending on the effect. When things drag, Sono goes back to this set up for one more scare with the security guard--where he sees the nurses' ghosts. But this isn't a ghost story--and so we never see anything like this again.
Then there's some bits about an online Suicide Club (a bit reminiscent of Kairo's ghostly website); a mysterious child who calls the detective and offers up cryptic clues (don't they all?); and a 5 member "idol" group, a bit like Morning Musume, who seem to be everywhere, and who also seem to be singing cryptic messages. Gee, you think...? Naaaah.
Then there's Rolly. Who? Rolly.
This guy is a sort of glam rocker who was popular when I lived in Japan. Think Ziggy Stardust, but less subtle. He turns up as the head of a murder (or is it suicide?) cult in the third reel, and, whaddya know? he sings a song! I don't think this sort of thing has happened in film since Mick Jagger's Memo From Turner walked onscreen in Nicholas Roeg's "Performance" and baffled all. The movie really skids off the rails when this campy fella turns up.
Suicide Club wants to make us think, but more importantly, it wants to make us quietly depressed, like...well, like "Kairo" I'm afraid to say. But thinking back over the film only reveals its weak points. If young children are behind the murders, then who is producing the music, filming the shows, setting up the websites? Who is the (adult) guy in the executioner mask who planes off the victim's flesh? If--as we see--it's that hard to get into the flesh-planing place to start with, how come more and more people are offing themselves, as membership suggests? Well, you see, the film sort of falls apart.
The reason why Kurosawa is so good at his horror films is that, in Cure and Kairo in particular, once the "mystery" is solved, the film doesn't end--the knowledge is the horror, not a solution to it. Kurosawa takes the solution then expands it beyond what we've expected. Sono doesn't do that because, as I said at the beginning, he's working backwards.
For a rave review, for I could be wrong, check out the one at Snowblood Apple, although I feel Mandi Apple is reading way too much into the film.
Oh, and this is one of the first DVDs released by TLA Entertainment. I don't know whether the lack of a 5.1 mix is their fault, but unremovable subtitles? C'mon now...
February 15, 2004
Ninjatune: The Videos
You can check out a fair sampling of Ninjatune videos over at their official site. Oh, if only all music sites were like this. (We're particularly fond of the cute Mr. Scruff videos. Kawaii!)
February 11, 2004
David Lynch's Cigarette Ad
Dating apparently from 1998, this is one of a series of cigarette ads for French cinemas only. Other directors included Wim Wenders, Roman Polanski, and the Coen Bros. Lynch's commercial features his usual obsessions: fire, electricity, smoke. But it also features two black dudes who seem to entice fish to rise up into the sky. If this is selling out, go for it.
You can see other Lynch commercials at Lynch.net, and the other cigarette commercials over at LDM Productions.
February 10, 2004
Matrix Revolutions
Dir: Andy and Larry Wachowsky
2003
I come not for the philosophy, but one law: the law of diminishing returns. The Matrix "trilogy" is over and thank goodness. Revolutions is essentially two hours of being hit over the head with a electric hammer. So disappointing to see that all the philosophical conundrums of the first film are solved in Zion with a big gun battle and hitting the smart bomb button on the game console, and then in the Matrix with a punch-up in a mud puddle. And so once again science fiction in American film is reduced to "things-blowing-up-in-space", what was once exhilirating is now mastubatory, what was once multilayered is now Bush Administration good-and-evil. "Agent Smith is the yin to Neo's yang" is not the most revelatory observation by a long shot, but it's presented as such. Holmes/Moriarty, anybody? Superman/Lex Luthor?
Setting most of the final film in the "real world" of Zion makes for some great questions: If an EMP (or whatever) blast from a ship has the ability to knock out all the metal squid monsters and the fair people of Zion have enough technology and skill to build the city in the first place, why didn't they set up their own EMP system as civil defense? Also, knowing their enemy, why weren't the exoskeleton robotech machines designed to protect their pilots? As it is, it leaves the pilot exposed to the claws of the squids. I mean, ask a crab--does that have its tender juicy meat on the outside?
And so now Zion is saved, who really wants to live there? How depressing a place--if they've had to live there for centuries, couldn't someone splurge on a coat of paint? What's the economy of Zion? How does it feed itself? Who grows the space-cotton to make all those wool sweaters?
I don't blame the Wachowsky Brothers for not letting a good idea alone, but it just looks like they couldn't answer their own questions. And maybe the secret is that they weren't supposed to.
And why do evil places have to have such bad weather? If you controlled the earth, wouldn't you make sure you chose the best spot to set up HQ? I hear it's often sunny outside the offices of Halliburton, so what's the deal?
December 10, 2003
Honey
Dir: Bille Woodruff
2003
Yesterday I chuckled over a recent (?) Boondocks cartoon where Riley is asked to write a "what I did for my summer vacation" essay for school. He turns in a page of paper completely covered by one phrase: "I KEPT IT REAL!"
"Honey" is all about keeping it real, but not as funny as Boondocks. In fact, the film treats its cliches with a straight face.
While it often feels like Jessica Alba is trying to channel Jennifer Beals from Flashdance, I couldn't believe I was seeing a third act twist straight out of a Little Rascals or Andy Hardy film from the 1930s: Lets raise money for the youth center by putting on a show! Mmm, smell the mothballs on that one.
I also felt that a lot of what we were seeing was warmed over sentiments from the last 20 Jennifer Lopez videos. Never has a pop star sung so often about "keeping it real" and being just "Jenny from the Block" and other self-aggrandizing platitudes as Lopez, so much that I suspect she either a) absolutely doesn't believe it and it's just her "image," or b) she has an incredible guilt complex about being so rich and famous.
That's the sense on display here. Honey barely has time to sell out and be mean to her friends--she skips out on a friend's birthday trip for a black tie party, but we're shown that she didn't know this going in--so we're never worried about her not "keeping it real."
Anyway, the previews show Alba all hoochied out with the midriff and lip gloss and this and the that, so is there a lot of that, really, for the furtive overcoat brigade? Nope, only at the beginning, then New York gets chilly and Honey wraps up.
Any other reason to see it? Well, Missy Elliot has a funny one-and-a-half scenes, but the preview shows 80 percent of that. The smallest of Honey's young charges is also cute as the dickens and we get to see him try to dance. Honey also has a pug, but we get no pug reaction shots. Surely we could have had some pug head-cocking, maybe when Mekhi Phifer is trying to get his groove on (Mekhi Phifer is an appealing actor though, more than Alba, who doesn't really invite us into her character). And the sleazebag video director guy who winds up getting bitch-slapped for wanting a "taste of honey" hurh hurh hurh, is called Michael Ellis, which I desperately want to be some scriptwriter's reference to the similarly named Monty Python skit.
So, you get some early midriff, some 1930's "save the schoolhouse" malarkey, a whole lotta product placement, a cute friend (Joy Bryant) who wears less than Alba, a righteous Mrs. Honey who wants her daughter to travel and broaden her horizons, but who also wears some frightful necklaces. But best of all, nearly everybody in this film, save Mr. Ellis, KEEPS IT REAL.
Addendum: There's a silly part in the film where Honey finds choreographic inspiration from watching basketball players and girls playing jumprope. With the intensest look that Alba can muster, Honey starts trying out her versions of dribbling and jumping for the upcoming dance. "Hey!" the film says, "This is how artists work!" I am now annoying the wife by studying her mundane movements (chin in hand and the other hand using the mouse) and coming up with my own hip-hop choreography.
Also: If you follow the link to www.jessica-alba.com, you wind up at the Dennis Kucinich campaign site. Ewwww.
December 9, 2003
The Last Samurai
Dir: Edward Zwick
2003
Well, me and "the missus" just came back from this film and boy are we disappointed (bordering on anger) on how they dropped the ball on this one.
Now, I have to discuss the ending of this film, so if you're still achin' to see it (because of that "Oscar®©™ Buzz" you heard about), then stop reading. Go click on a link, why dontcha.
Back to the issue at hand.
I understand that maybe there's a lot of people out that who are only just learning about this crazy island called "Japan" and that maybe some people have never seen a samurai film. I'll let it go, as I will all the long scenes of Algren (Tom Cruise) learning how to say "hashi" or "samui." It's wacky, it's cute, it's educational. I'll also let the audiencese have the orientalism that romanticizes the entire culture as this pure and noble people.
But the fact that the filmmakers blew the ending by having Algren live instead of die in the field of battle was, in a word, bullshit. Yep, bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Unko. Kuso. (There's some Japanese to learn!).
America hates to have its heroes die, especially these days when the Prez avoids military funerals like pretzels, but even before that (the 80s was the sea change). But I could really sense in the theater that the filmmakers could have gotten away with it. The film wins you over to the samurai code of honor, just as Algren is won over, and it would have made sense to have him fall alongside his former enemy, now blood brother, Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe, who does the role justice while Tom Cruise still seems concerned about his hair). In fact, the scene is filmed like he does. The entire samurai clan has been mowed down by American machine guns--the way of the sword is over, as are the old ways, and around the corner is WWI, then WWII, then Hiroshima. And Algren had faced his past and his mortality and learned something about honor.
Not only that, but earlier in the film, the story begins to parallel contemporary events in Iraq. When asked if the Western-backed forces will defeat the renegades, the commander says, all hubris, "Of course, we have superior firepower." Add a few more lines about them being savages, and the script looks back to the genocide of the Native Americans, and forward to the invasion of Iraq and our other imperial adventures. Substitute rail lines for oil pipelines and you're nearly there.
Of course, this is nothing new; "Dances With Wolves" also towed this squishy liberal line.
But like that film, the Western character can never totally assimilate.
No, he has to survive, understand that he has learned a great life lesson, conquered his alcoholism, and now is ready for a full and happy life.
After the battle, he retuns for an audience with the young Meiji emperor (apparently, it's easy to bluff your way in to see the mortal deity) and returns the dead Katsumoto's sword. Algren's gone all samurai'n'stuff! Why he even offers to take his own life, just like Katsumoto offered earlier! And the young emperor, who hasn't found his own voice--that is, he hasn't been on the self-improvement course that Algren's been on--suddenly realises that the old ways weren't so bad after all! In fact, he casts out the American businessman (sorry, Halliburton!) and his Japanese representative (sorry, Chalabi!) and announces plans to distribute the wealth to the people (huh?)!
Then a further coda where we see Algren and horse companion returning to the village where Katsumoto had originally taken him when he was captured at the beginning of the film. "Some say he finally found his peace," says the narrator (who I take to be Timothy Spall, who is quite good in a Charles Laughton way).
Okay, now wait.
First of all, you kill off your best, most charismatic supporting character (Katsumoto), but not the lead, and don't have that as your closing scene (which would have devastated the crowd, but in a good way). Instead, you give the long closing speech to the teenage emperor, whose English is hesitant and bland, and who offers some crap-o platitudes about Western Influence. And maybe Honor.
Then you have Algren returning to the village--THE VILLAGE WHO JUST LOST THEIR ENTIRE MALE POPULATION TO A WESTERN MACHINE GUN! Do you think the women want to see this Western guy, even though he was on their side? They are going to either starve because there are no men to provide the hard labor, or some roving gang is going to either kill or capture them. Is Tom Cruise going to help?
But really, we're not supposed to care, because IT ALL WORKS OUT FOR THE AMERICAN. Tom's studied Zen, he's dry and at peace with himself. Isn't that enough? And now he can retire to the mountains and live out his days with the widow of the man he killed at the beginning of the film. Won't that be romantic?
So, kids, honor can only take you so far. First you have to feel good about yourself.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
October 11, 2003
Moonlight Whispers
Dir: Akihito Shiota
1999
A tender coming of age story masked as a psycho-sexual treatise on sado-masochism...or vice versa? Akihito Shiota's film is based on a manga by the same name, and came out in 1999. I got to watch it on a VHS copy taped off a Chinese VCD (with English subs).
The film starts off with a typical young high-school love relationship beginning during the spring semester. The nervous few months of Takuya and Satsuki's relationship rang very true and for a brief moments I felt like I was watching a very good realist film (it certainly brought me back to memories of my first girlfriend in 1986). But soon after she gives up her virginity to him, she discovers his true fetish.
Remarkably, Aota doesn't push the switch in our faces, and doesn't try to make us feel bad in a true miserablist way (such as a Solondz would do). Satsuki is pissed, but Takuya is persistent and won't give up after being dumped and humiliated. In fact, he likes being humiliated, and Satsuki begins to realize she loves to humiliate.
By the end, Shiota even brings us back to a world of innocence, only shifted to accomodate a relationship beyond the norm of society, and does so without reducing anybody down to something less than human. The movie is a good lesson for filmmakers in how to explore the most outre material without resorting to snarky nihilism. Fascinating.
Equally fascinating: lead actress Tsugumi, with her moony face and a bullet-bra that couldn't help reminding me of the cold war.
Don't Look Up (a k a "Ghost Actress")
Dir: Hideo Nakata
1996
Got around to watching this after having friends tape it off the Sundance Channel last year, during their "Japanese Horror" week, where I was able to tape "Cure" and "Spiral" as well. "Don't Look Up," given the absolute straight-to-landfill title of "Ghost Actress" for some reason, is Hideo Nakata's first film and the one that presumably got him the gig to make the original "Ring" film.
At a very speedy 75 minutes, it's more like an extended TV episode than a movie, but there are plenty of chilliing moments here, almost from the beginning, when the mysterious outtakes of an old movie turn up superimposed on recent footage shot at a studio. These initial scenes, when the crew watch the dailies in silence, are very effective. The look of terror in the actresses eyes when she glimpses something awful offscreen shocked even me. The movie deserved to have a script that fleshed out the characters a bit more, and music that matched its mood of creeping menace. Instead there's some terrible cod-reggae that pops up in all the wrong parts.
The parallels between this film and Ring are certainly there in the mysterious footage and the slow unconvering of the truth as well as the subtle way that Nakata has history double over on itself. Much more could have been made with theme of acting and identity, and of the film that's actually being shot, the story which seems to be about supressing the horror of the Second World War. The ghost is particularly frightening, especially because it doesn't give you all the goods at once. At first it looks harmless, then the more we see it, the more we want to look away. That's good--most filmmakers would give you the money shot immediately.
On a greater level, the reason why Japanese horror is so effective is that it really is about death. American horror isn't about death in any tangible sense, just artifice and actors exiting the screen in spectacular ways. The recent Cabin Fever was awful because it couldn't even begin to look at disease and death in any real way.
Anyway, the film so freaked out Jessica, who takes these ghost stories so seriously that she can't even say the word (she says "G" instead), that she refused to speak to me about it afterwards.
demonlover
Dir: Olivier Assayas
2002
Certainly one of the strangest films I've seen this year, I caught this in Pasadena at the Laemmle, sure that it will never come to Santa Barbara. What starts out as a chilly tale of big business quickly turns into something broader in scheme. This isn't a film about pawns caught in capitalism's game, this film is capitalism itself. It's a relentless blurring of identity until characters get reduced to units to be fucked or killed. Connie Nielson plays Diane, who at the beginning of the film, drugs her coworker, an event that allows her to take her place in a multinational corporation that is shuttling back and forth between Tokyo and Paris to buy shares in an anime company specializing in porn cartoons and 3-D CG porn. There's Hervé (Charles Berling), who Diane may be involved with, and a subordinate, Elise (Chloe Sevigny), who hates her guts. Then there's the American representatives, one of whom is Gina Gershon. There's a secret website called "The Hellfire Club" that offers live snuff feeds for a price.
About halfway through I kind of gave up on the plot and, like giving up on trying to pick out notes and melody in a wash of feedback, just let the movie roll over me. (Soundtrack is by Sonic Youth, and I'm glad I saw this in the theater, as the effective sound levels are something that would get me evicted.)
The film is intentionally hard to listen to, hard to watch, and hard to follow. Here and there you start to pick up on clues that Assayas has left. Why so many shots of credit card machines? Why a scene similar to the hotel scene in Assayas' own "Irma Vep"--and why does Diane's costume in that scene return as a PVC Emma Peel suit? (Emma Peel--Avengers...wasn't one of the episodes in which she nearly got tortured to death called the Hellfire Club? And wasn't the Hellfire Club a front for the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in the XMen comic book...and didn't Storm get captured by them? And doesn't a character at the end of the movie request a victim dress up like Storm? And by making all these connections, does that make me closer to an understanding, or does that make me a sad, sad man?)
Nobody has any background or connection to anybody or anything. Though the movie teems with lascivious sex, there's barely any to be had, and nothing to come of it in terms of humanity.
"demonlover" alludes to the website, but also to the multi-phallused and tentacled demons of Japanese porn anime, able to send out their tendrils to fill every orifice of their young nubile victims. Tattoo "21st Century Capitalism" across the demon's chest and you have a rough and ready metaphor of the film.
Following up, there's a short essay over at The Film Journal on the film that brings up an interesting point regarding video games and the scene in which Nielson fights Gershon (a "level boss" in videogame terms). That the film is one big video game is suggested, and reminded me of my friend's worry that in fact The Matrix Revolutions will end with this po-mo joke (they wouldn't be so blatant or so bold, methinks, but the trailer for that film looks like the makers are cashing in their chips for a full-on Death Star like battle to the death).
In a later conversation with Jon, I added that those critics who think the whole thing is a videogame fall into the same apathetic trap as the teenager at the end--that nobody is worth caring about because they're on the computer screen.
Manhunter
Dir: Michael Mann
1986
I picked up the two-disc DVD of this at the rental store, and made the boneheaded mistake of watching the original, clumsily edited version, completely oblivious to the fact that the other disc contained the remastered director's cut. And after two hours of "Manhunter" I wasn't going to watch it again.
A lot of critics regard this film highly, and like to drag it out in reference when they want to go on about how much they didn't like "Hannibal" or whatever. And I can't really say too much not having seen the director's cut, but here Mann plays the serial killer genre as a straight police procedural, with much focus on the job of the profiler, played here by William Petersen, who often pounds his fist and addresses windows or televisions, vowing that he'll find the killer before he does it again. Showing a profiler coming to conclusions in his head, showing the thought process itself, is difficult, but Mann does it well in a scene with Petersen and two television monitors. The music here is all wrong, either naff Yamaha DX-7 wanking or blaring "hard rock" stupidity.
I didn't feel particularly gripped by the film, and the ending really fell apart in the editing room. But who knows what the director's cut was like?
Brian Cox was okay as Hannibal Lecter, but maybe a bit too "normal". He felt more like an imprisoned mafioso than a cannibal serial killer.
24 Season 2 (Eps. 13-24)
Creators: Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow
2003
We rattled through the end of this series on a marathon Saturday evening, where Jessica was so agitated by the end of episode 20 that she made me push on with the final four, ending somewhere around 4:30 in the a.m. It's to 24's credit that we remained awake up until the end, in a suspense-filled equivalent of a dinner-time espresso fix. Unable to go to sleep, too agitated.
Despite some of the more unbelievable twists and turns, I think the second season was better--it slowly built its tension along the way, whereas the first dipped in the middle, all the more remarkable with how it got away with some of the hoariest cliches of the thriller genre (how many people gave up (or didn't) vital info just before snuffing it: "the man's name is...is...urrrrgh!")
What is most fascinating is how the writers and producers incorporated so much from post-9-11 America, then spun so much of it on its head. (Especially when Jack Bauer in essense becomes a suicide bomber to save the world, and while doing so engages in a cell phone convo that can't help bring back the stories of the various victims on the four airliners). And President Palmer continues his role as the Bizarro President, acting shocked, shocked that an oil businessman would start a world war in order to increase his profits. (In the bonus materials, actor Dennis Haysbert interprets his role as a mix of Carter, Clinton and Colin Powell, and suggests his honorable and honest prez is a "suggestion of how it can be done." Are you listening, Bush?
In this sense, 24 has caught up with the world and mirrors it, while Hollywood still appears to be lollygagging about, endlessly repeating the easy lies and simplistic morals of years past.
Season Three, which appears to be about biological warfare, may be equally unnerving. But I wonder, how long can they keep it up?
Notebook on Cities and Clothes
Dir: Wim Wenders
1989
This is Wenders' little-seen documentary on designer Yohji Yamamoto, and I watched it in two parts because it simply wasn't that compelling. The documentary was very derivative of Chris Marker's musings on video and film, but without Marker's eye for story or depth or his knack for arresting images. Part of the reason is Yamamoto as a subject. His fashion isn't that interesting (as most of that season's line is black and filmed in muddy pre-DV video, there's not much to see), and most of his interviews seem conducted at the end of a full day of work, where the subject is exhausted. Yamamoto mumbles a lot, and Wenders tries to make it more cinematic by playing with video and film (this was one of Wenders' first times to use a portable video camera). Half the film is about Wenders questions about film/video vs. reality, but I didn't feel he got to any major points on it. I feel more that Wenders started making a doc on Yamamoto and found that it wasn't really enough, that the subject was too elusive. All the time the film reminded me of Marker's A.K., his documentary on Akira Kurosawa and the making of "Ran", which uses similar techniques, and also muses a lot on memory and truth, but still offers a lot of insight into Kurosawa's talent and methods.
24 Season 2 (Eps 1-12)
Dir: Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow
2002
Well, I guess Jessica's gone 24 mad, insisting that we get the new series on DVD as soon as it appeared in the shops. This is a story "ripped from today's headlines" as they like to say, with L.A. threatened by a nuke and terrorists of a certain Arabian shade (where last time they were Serbs). If Season One was about family and responsibility, Season Two is all about our Constitution and our laws and when or if to break them. Certainly, the show thinks about this more than the Bush administration, which feels no need to mull over this question--it knows no doubt when it comes to this. As usual the scenes with President Palmer have a strange sci-fi ring to them--nothing of what he or his advisors say feel anywhere near what must go on at Chimpy McCokespoon's White House. Will Palmer finally get duped by his scheming wife? One hopes not.
Although Jack's daughter Kim gets into trouble only 20 minutes into the first show, it is nice to see that she's learned to trust nobody and lamp them properly with a tire iron instead of getting caught. Not as much stupidity this time around and very few hostage takings (because, you could say, all of Los Angeles is essentially a hostage this time around).
Season One's initial jolt wore off by episode 9 or so, this season the suspense is ramping up, also nice to see. We're also sad to see that George Mason is marked for death, as he became one of our favorite characters; his line delivery is quite sharp and cynical.
I suppose we'll be finished with this soon enough. Then I can get on to something else (possibly sitting down to finally watch The Sopranos).
A backlog of film fun
As mentioned on the front page, I've been moving everything over to a new provider and server. I've still been writing, but not posting, wanting to wait until things are settled. The reviews above are from early September up to the date of this entry. That should explain watching 24 Season Two when it first came out (September 9).
September 3, 2003
24 (Season 1, Episodes 21-24)
Creator: Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow
2001
Aaargh, you got us! We didn't see that coming, no way. So the final episode of Season One is over and the clock ticked silently full circle. We're going to take a break from non-stop suspense for a couple of weeks, or at least until Season Two is out on DVD.
What began to annoy us was woman-in-turmoil Teri, who should have considered herself lucky to be allowed access to what is surely a high-security location (the CTA offices), but instead spends the final episodes continually wandering around, getting up in people's faces, asking them for continual updates on Jack and Kim. And would anybody really let her storm up into Mason's office like she does and demand he do something? Couldn't they have locked her in a room? And see?See? What happened to her when she continued to walk around, nosing about, near the end of the final episode? Exactly.
We were also glad to see Sherry Palmer kicked to the curb at the end, so tired were we of her Lady Macbethisms and Machiavellian trickery. Too bad Patty, the assistant, was let go as her sacrificial lamb. Senator Palmer, on the other hand is so honest a presidential candidate that he takes 24 into the realm of pure sci-fi.
And Dennis Hopper was a bit out of place with a quite unconvincing accent, but oh well.
24 (Season 1, Episodes 17-20)
Creator: Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow
2001
Although we're enjoying 24 a lot, by the 20th episode it's apparent to us that the show's view of women is pretty bleak--they're either duplicitous, or dense, and the latter seem to be the majority. Is Jack such a bad father that Kim has to continually act out and seek out Rich, the bad boy moron who got her into this mess in the first place? Her inability to leave Rich's hovel when it was apparent some pretty nasty drug dealers were on their way over was infuriating. And why on earth did Palmer's assistant screw up her set-up with Drazon, electing to hang around after planting a tracking device in order to run him through with a letter opener? Frailty, thy name is woman!
Another group who fail in the mental division (and who overlap with the women) is the teenagers. It's refreshing to not see teens as bastions of wisdom, I guess, but Kyle Palmer isn't as smart as he thinks he is, and Kim...well, we all know about Kim's wise decisions. Their stubborn behavior becomes a bit much after a while.
24 (Season 1, Episodes 13-16)
Creator: Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow
2001
This was the quartet of episodes when things cycled back around. Jack was reunited with his family; Jack returns to the office after several hours on the run; Palmer finally confronts Jack; the plot and its motivation is finally explained to us. And almost immediately things began to fall apart. Possibly this structure will be mirrored in the end--we'll have to wait an see.
Another note: it's really hard to do research into 24 without running into massive spoilers on the web. There's been a few times I've nearly learned some shocking truth about the ending, only to turn (or click) away in time. Yes, I know it's not going to end well (and it's going to be a cliffhanger, but of course). Yes, I know there's more twists to come--and more death.
August 30, 2003
24 (Season One, Episodes 9-12)
Creator: Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow
2001
Phew, this is gruelling, yet so very exciting. Patience slightly tested with the usual uselessness of Women in Peril, who spend their time speaking loudly of how they're going to get out of their predicament (don't they think somebody is listening?).
24 is definitely a post-Clinton pre-BushJunta thriller, raising issues of realpolitik in both the Bauer and Palmer storylines. Palmer reminds us of the theory that Clinton was named "the first Black president" by some analysists. Yet his Chief of Staff seems to clearly be modeled on Tricky Dick Cheney (the crooked smile, especially).
Palmer is too upright and honest (as far as we know at the moment) to really be a stand in for Clinton, but he certainly does feel your pain. In fact, he just feels pained. The Bosnian angle now coming into the plot also reflects on Clinton's major war, now feeling like years and years ago. Did we ever fear vengeance would be enacted upon us by angry Serbs?
And would 9-11 have ever happened if the CIA and FBI were as hi-tech as such agencies are made to look in the show? As the 9-11 investigations are showing, some of these offices barely began using email a couple of years back.
I also note with some irony that the actress who plays Palmer's wife also plays Condoleeza Rice in some made-for-TV movie about 9-11.
24 (Season One, Episodes 5-8)
Creator: Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow
2001
The night turns into day and Jack Bauer becomes entrapped himself. I don't know if I could really watch more than four episodes in a row of this, but it does remind me that some British cinema nearly did show a run of the first season in one straight 24-hour block. What would the effect be of watching the show in real time? Would it be interesting to have the screen go black during the space allotted for commercials? What about keeping the black screen but overlaying a stopwatch during the space?
Or how about splitting the show into its requisite parts, screening Jack's storyline on one monitor, the kidnapped family on another, the CTA on another, and Palmer on yet one more monitor, switching them on and off when need be? Just a thought.
The themes of 24 are starting to come out: family vs. job, sacrifice (of yourself, of others), upholding the law vs. bending it.
And L.A. looks really, really smoggy.
August 27, 2003
24 (Season One, Episodes 1-4)
Creator: Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow
2001
All memories of the pink fuzzball of Legally Blonde were mercilessly crushed once the first episode of this TV series-now-on-DVD was finished. Fans of the show will not be surprised to learn that after a short break, Jessica and I watched Episode 2...then Episode 3...then checking the clock to see if it was that late...Episode 4. Yep, we finished the whole disc.
Being a rental (along with LB) we'll have to go back for 5-8.
More thrilling than any multiplex, megagazillion dollar blockbuster, 24 piles on calamity on top of peril and mixes it all up with heavily carbonated paranoia. And on DVD, where there are no commercials (save the product placement by Ford and Apple), the effect is even more like a series of jolts to the heart.
The gimmick of having each episode play out in real time is a good one, and in a way justifies the contant peril that is going on (though in real life this would probably lead to a nervous breakdown). It also allows us to engage in the characters as we would a novel, and to have minor moments play out as major twists. The chessgame that is the Terrorism Unit's interaction is marvelously detailed, the shifting allegiances dramatically complex.
I don't know how this will all play out (and if you've seen the first season all the way through, keep your mouth shut, please) but Episode 4 showed a bit of slowing down, keeping Jack in a warehouse for most of the episode, and slightly letting things down with a dip into cliche'd dialog: Jack is a "loose cannon" and, the line I love to hate, "You just don't get it, do you?" fortunately said by a minor character. Will the series remain this tense all the way through? Will it show its narrative strategy too early? Will we have heart attacks by the end of it all? Stay tuned, because I think we'll be finished with the whole series by the end of next week. Tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic...
Legally Blonde
Dir. Robert Luketic
2001
On an anthropological mission, Jessica and I watched this last night, my wife wanting to figure out why this was the most popular film around her office (which is not a law office). Reese Witherspoon stars as Elle, a sorority queen who winds up in Harvard Law School and a) learns to believe in herself b) teaches others to believe in herself and c) solves a major case through her knowledge of haircare products.
It's standard Hollywood comedy, with a couple of good lines ("I even had a Coppola direct my admissions video!" she pouts), but making the audience "feel good" is higher on the agenda than making them laugh. What's wrong here is typical of comedies for the last ten years: the film can't decide whether to be a farce, with cartoonish characters and crazy situations, or a realistic comedy drama, with the laughs coming out of the drama of well-rounded characters. Unlike Hong Kong or Bollywood cinema, where all genres are thrown into the blender, here the effect is to diminish the comedy.
The first half continually tells us how outlandish Elle is (everybody gets a dropped-jaw moment), but then the second half works equally hard to show us Elle's innate talent. I would like to think that an older comedy would have just began with the idea of a Barbie lawyer who wins cases through her keen eye for trivial fashion detail, then pitted her against an equally "specialized" lawyer. But as I said, the whole film serves to make us feel good that Elle feels good about herself, that if you "follow your dream" you will succeed, blah blah blah.
I'm curious whether Legally Blonde 2 has a bit more to say about the character...but then again I'm not that curious.
Link: There's an interesting interpretation of the film as a love letter to itself over at Metaphilm, where a writer simply called Kirby sees Elle representing the film itself, trying to ingratiate itself into the minds of the anti-Hollywood intelligentsia. I think the essay falls apart at the end, but I do like the line: "I have stopped making conscious decisions and have become the dreaming mind of the world." Is he quoting somebody?
August 25, 2003
Vive l'amour
Dir. Tsai Ming-Liang
1994
I had to think if this really was the first Tsai Ming-Liang film I've seen. I don't count the first 10 minutes of The River I caught on The International Channel after I started taping it (I then misplaced the tape, forgetting to label it). And I don't count the numerous articles I've read on him. I think because I've seen many a Hou Hsiao Hsien film and a few Edward Yang films, that I knew in advance how to prepare for Tsai's films. And I was right.
Like Hou and Yang, Tsai believes in long takes, objective views, elliptical storytelling. He gives you just enough info to keep you going, then near the end of the film you realize you've been given so much that you know more than you thought about the characters. (Compare this to many a H'wood film where people blather on and on and by the end of the film we still don't know who these people are).
Vive l'Amour is a film about three alienated characters in a alienating city (Taipei) trying to connect and finding it hard to do so. The film sets up a early dichotomy between sex and death: the lonely Hsiao Kang (Kang-Sheng Lee) sells columbria (spaces in a crematorium) and when we first meet him he tries to commit suicide; May (Kuei-Mei Yang) sells real estate (big boxes for the living) and when we first meet her she meets and shags a night-market salesman, Ah-Jung (Chao-jung Chen). That these three people are all using this empty space (one of her sale properties) as a temporary location (Hsiao-Kang stole a misplaced key to get in) leads to a strange love triangle (Hsiao is gay and unlike May's relationship, engages in conversation with Ah-Jung). The movie is full of empty spaces, one-sided conversations, hidden emotions, and lonely distances. The film ends on a daring long take, which demonstrates Yang's talent as an actress, and how much she trusts the director.
Tsai also has a very subtle sense of humor, and in such a sad and lonely film manages to eak out some laughs (Ah-Jung falling on his ass when he hears somebody coming in the apartment, Ah-Jung later crawling out from under the bed, when the camera placement has us focused on the open doorway).
(Jessica was slightly bored by the film, but perked up in a scene where May eats at a "stinky tofu" stall. We had to stop the film and make some late-night snacks due to it.)
The DVD is by those foul anti-movie brigands Fox Lorber who have been producing careless transfers from many years now. How can one company be so consistently crap, I don't know. No extras, burned in subtitles, less than crisp image, with some murky black and some artifacts. I wonder if an Asian version would be better?
By the way, there's a nice essay on Tsai over at Senses of Cinema from which I nicked the photo.
Jin-Roh - The Wolf Brigade
Dir. Hiroyuki Okiura
1998
"From the makers of Ghost in the Shell!" says the DVD box, but, they don't mention, not from the mind of Masamune Shirow (the manga creator). What looked to be a tech, sci-fi thing, turns out to be a psychological drama between a sort of Special Ops soldier in a fascist future Japan, the memory of the teenage girl terrorist who blows herself up in front of him, and the living sister who looks like her (a la Vertigo) who may or may not be linked to the underground movement. Apart from the alterna-history design to the film (it's set in a Tokyo that stopped evolving its architecture and automobiles around the 1950s, and spent all its money on the police force, what with the Nazis pulling out and the country battling terrorists) there wasn't too much reason for it to be an anime. (My friend Jon says that it's purely the economics of the Japanese film industry).
It's a nicely reserved film, and builds to a satisfactory twist ending that only amplifies the despair throughout. Maybe anime is the medium from which to deal with political issues (my fuzzy memory of Patlabor 2 reminds me of how intelligent that film's politics were, able to deal with sociological issues behind the mask of sci-fi action) and my above statement on shooting in anime is wrong. One thing that lets the film down is its reliance on rotoscoping, which let off the malodorous air of Ralph Bakshi. Tracing the real doesn't make things look real.
August 23, 2003
Vegans, Reloaded
A vegan's response to The Matrix. (The bad guy eats Matrix steak; the good guys eat...what do they eat?)
Animal rights, Ecological Determinism and The Matrix.By way of 24fpsAs a vegan, I'm often confronted with various versions of this theory nonetheless, and even before the first Matrix movie was made, I used to ask my carnivorous interlocutors if manifestly more intelligent creatures would be justified in eating us. A similar argument is posited on one level by the two opening Matrix films. Presented with a world where humans are controlled by machines that are manifestly more intelligent than us, we are repelled, at least most of us are. It's a film that strives on one level to put us in the position that we put animals in at the moment.
August 20, 2003
He Thought He Had It All...
By chance, we continue in our Hollywood theme of unsung heroes, with this feature on Don La Fontaine, the most famous voice-over artist you didn't know the name of. Don who? you may ask. Three words, baby: "In a world..."
Golden VoiceThe lights dim. The trailer begins. "In a world beyond imagination..." No matter what the film, one man is always featured – only one man – alongside Arnold, Bruce and Sly. You never see him. But you know his voice: breathy, deep, sonorous, ominous. Don La Fontaine is the most successful, most ubiquitous voice-over actor working in show business promotion today. And although his agent, Steve Tisherman, is hesitant to reveal Don's salary, cinema's golden voice reluctantly admits that he is, in fact, "a millionaire...several times over."
By way of Creative Generalist
AAAAAAAAAARGH!
You may think you've never heard the Wilhelm Scream but you have: since 1951, when some Hollywood sound engineer recorded an anonymous actor screaming in three different flavors, the "Wilhelm Scream" has been used in movies ever since as everybody's favorite sound of anonymous death. The Wilhelm Scream site is devoted to cataloging Sir Wilhelm of Scream's numerous appearances. (Most recent: "Dell Computers - PC Dreams" TV Commercial (May 2003): One of the Dell Interns is repeatedly dropped through a trap door in a dream about how Dell computers are tested.")
Once you hear it, you'll keep on hearing it!
By way of J-Walk
August 2, 2003
Tactless references to leprosy and terminal cancer
I'm a bit of a Python fan, but I didn't know how much of their stuff was and has been censored over the years. This stuff doesn't reappear on the DVDs or anywhere. In fact, nobody would know about this if people didn't hunt through archives and find treasures like the following. Monty Python Episode 24 - The Missing Bits details the "tasteless" parts cut out of this episode. Gee, what could have offended the BBC?
July 22, 2003
Dune
Dir. David Lynch, 1984
Inspired by the overview of the novels found in last month's issue of The Believer, I decided to finally watch the Lynch version I bought on DVD last September in Taiwan (not a bootleg, mind you). I've seen the film once before, on British TV back in the late '80s, and remember very little except lots of troops and explosions.
So another look. You can see the things that Lynch finds interesting (the evil, rapacious Baron; the floating elephant foetus thing; the dreams; the prophecy; the decor and the retrotech we would now call steampunk) and the things he finds utterly boring (the aforementioned explosions, the plot, the regal lineage and the large cast of characters).
You wish he had been a bit more daring with his adaptation, and I wonder how much of a Frank Herbert fan he was growing up. The plot is essentially that of betrayal/banishment/transformation/return/success, the thought behind it one of theological (and ecological) revolution. But the film seems in no rush to get to this story. I also wonder how popular a story like this would be now, dealing as it does with a native people of a sandy planet banding together to proclaim a "jihad" against the imperialists who are stealing its natural resources. And the leader of this violent overthrow is the film's hero! Blimey.
In fact, the first hour is not so bad, with the most amazing sets and design that seem lost to most recent sci-fi (The Matrix is not exactly the most exciting film to look at, and Reloaded's underground city showed us nothing new.) What other film has a factory with a chimney the shape of an open baby's mouth? Not many. When the first battles begin the editing and pace falls apart. It looks either like Lynch didn't shoot enough, or too much, or that they let an intern have at the flatbed. The film becomes incomprehensible just in the visuals. And then the poncing around in caves, and the low-rent blue screen effects just suck. Lynch fans who desperately want to see the director-disowned "television cut" that adds another hour to the film are either under the delusion that there's some brilliant Lynchian weirdness hiding on the cutting room floor, or masochistic.
I did enjoy seeing all the actors who would soon populate Lynch's better works: Kyle McLaughlan (large hair that constantly screams "soundtrack by Toto"), Dean Stockwell (with a ridiculous moustache), Everett McGill (rugged beard), Brad Dourif (Willy Wonka Temp Agency hair) and good ol' Jack Nance (a total of five lines of dialog; I guess Lynch just wanted him to hang out on the set).
And then there's Patrick Stewart, whose finest moment comes when he leads a charge in the first battle, holding the dead emperor's pug dog, and yelling "Long Live Emperor Leto!" or something. The shots of the pug throughout caused me much mirth, and I would have liked to have seen more soldiers going into battle carrying pugs, or perhaps a pug riding a giant sand worm, or a pug growing so large and eating so much Puppy Chow Now With Added Spice that it learned to fold time itself.
July 21, 2003
Lucia, Lucia
Dir. Antonio Serrano, 2003
Retitled from the unwieldy "La Hija del canibal" (Daughter of the Cannibal), which, though the true to the original novel, suggests that this is a horror movie, instead of the mid-life crisis film it actually is. The movie starts off energetically, and I was a bit excited wondering whether again I was watching another chapter in the rebirth of Mexican cinema. Lucia (Celia Roth) plays a 40-something children's book author whose husband mysteriously disappears at the airport just before a vacation trip. As the plot unwinds, she befriends two men in her apartment building, a young man and an old revolutionary, and they help her get to the bottom of the rather convoluted mystery. Of course, she grows as a person, and falls a bit in love with the younger man. It's a bit like Shirley Valentine crossed with Under the Sand crossed with Y Tu Mama Tambien crossed with When The Cat's Away, but not in that order.
Unfortunately, the movie has zero dramatic momentum. Lucia doesn't seem to have lost much and if her marriage was so loveless, where's the desire to get the husband back? The director throws in a lot of tricky narrative moves (which may be in the novel) and toys with subjectivity (she's an author, see, and you know they make stories up) to no effect.
On a personal level, my wife is currently on a business trip to Mexico City and experiencing that city for the first time, so I got a kick out of seeing the locations. I almost expected her to have a walk-on as an extra.
After the film (which was a preview I was invited to sit in on) a fellow theatergoer asked my viewing companion what he thought. When he replied with lukewarm sentences, she said "We