Brandon's movie memory

Terrific! Maybe the best samurai movie I’ve seen. I never cared much for samurai movies, though… still, this was a blast. Stylish and musical in that late-60′s manner, with all the zooms and close-ups and depth-of-field tricks that you’d want.

Tatsuya Nakadai is Genta, “a former samurai haunted by his past, prefers living anonymously with gangsters” and Etsushi Takahashi is Hanji, “previously a farmer, longs to become a noble samurai”. Criterion’s promo blurb continues: “But when both men discover the wrongdoings of the nefarious clan leader, they side with a band of rebels who are under siege at a remote mountain cabin. Based on the same source novel as Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro, Kill! playfully tweaks samurai film convention, borrowing elements from established chanbara classics and seasoning them with a little Italian western.”

Tatsuya Nakadai starred in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Sanjuro (second-billed to Mifune), Harakiri, High and Low (again second to Mifune), Kwaidan, The Face of Another, Sword of Doom, Samurai Rebellion, Kagemusha (title role), Ran (the elderly lord) and this year’s The Inugamis. Wowie.

Lots of samurai movie recommendations in Chris D’s essay at the Criterion site. One day when I’ve completely run out of must-see movies, I must see the whole Zatoichi series. “What is so rewarding about Kill! is Okamoto’s expert balance of seemingly disparate elements. He walks a tightrope, skillfully juggling humorous moments, fierce swordplay, and more sober, dramatic sequences, all punctuated by Masaru Sato’s alternately whimsical and wistful score.” Howard Hampton’s essay is useful too, and saves me from attempting a character description: “Tatsuya Nakadai as a hobo swordsman, plus a peasant bumpkin turned would-be samurai, a dispossessed retainer, one kidnapped chamberlain and one kidnap-per-chamberlain, a mercenary who needs thirty ryo to buy his wife’s freedom from a brothel, and even seven squabbling samurai in search of a raison d’être.”

Guess I strongly prefer these late 60′s samurai movies to the stuffy, slow, traditional 50′s ones that everyone so reveres. This one, darker and more cynical, reminds me more of Seijun Suzuki than Akira Kurosawa. Fun, nimble little movie, and brilliant looking camerawork throughout.

Oh dear. I finally see Days of Being Wild and it makes as much of an impression as As Tears Go By or Ashes of Time did, which is to say, not much. Probably shouldn’t have watched it over four separate days.

A blur of characters and situations: a young man tries to convince his stepmother to give up the identity of his real mom – later he visits the mom but she won’t see him. maggie cheung is cute and two guys like her, including andy lau, who was a cop but becomes a sailor. Hong Kong and the Philippines are involved. Leslie Cheung must be the main guy, but I never recognize him. At the end someone is shot maybe in a train maybe over a passport. Oh here we go, courtesy of the IMDB:

“Set in 1960, the film centres on the young, boyishly handsome Yuddy, who learns from the drunken ex-prostitute who raised him that she is not his real mother. Hoping to hold onto him, she refuses to divulge the name of his real birth mother. The revelation shakes Yuddy to his very core, unleashing a cascade of conflicting emotions. Two women have the bad luck to fall for Yuddy. One is a quiet lass named Su Lizhen who works at a sports arena, while the other is a glitzy showgirl named Mimi. Perhaps due to his unresolved Oedipal issues, he passively lets the two compete for him, unable or unwilling to make a choice. As Lizhen slowly confides her frustration to a cop named Tide, he falls for her. The same is true for Yuddy’s friend Zeb, who falls for Mimi. Later, Yuddy learns of his birth mother’s whereabouts and heads out to the Philippines.”

I noticed Mimi/Lulu from 2046 was in this, but didn’t realize Maggie’s character was the same Su Lizhen as in the others. The two men stay together in a hotel at the end (in room 204, one digit short), not at first realizing that they both knew Maggie… the hotel room scenes reminiscent of Happy Together (not that I’m queering this film, just saying the setup is similar).

Exciting photography, in that grainy Chungking Express way, not in the polished Mood For Love style. Gotta watch the whole again, obviously… a whole mini-fest of Wong Kar-Wai videos is in order.

Fez from That 70′s Show and his girlfriend Maria Full of Grace sneak over the border with Luis Guzmán’s help, and they get jobs in the meat plant. Chrissy “Growing Pains” Seaver works at the McSomethingBurger after school where she has management potential and hopes of college. Oscar-nominated Greg Kinnear is a McSomething PR executive trying to clear up some rumors and student studies regarding shit in the meat.

Fez gets hurt on the job, Maria’s sister gets drugged up and has lots of sex with her supervisor, Maria gets away from the meat plant for a while but ends up back there working on the kill floor. Whole American dream thing doesn’t work out as planned.

Chrissy gets a visit from her inspirational rebel uncle Ethan Hawke, who turns her against the McSomethingBurger, leading her to quit her job and organize an attempted freedom raid on the local cow ranch.

Greg gets to interview two colorful, obstinate characters. Indie rancher Kris Kristofferson tells him that the meat plant is filthy and deceptive, and pally meat-packer/restaurant liason Bruce Willis basically tells him to fuck off and not go digging around anymore.

Avril Lavigne is in the movie, but I don’t know who she plays. Far as I can tell, she’s only in there in order to give people an easy way to ridicule the movie when I tell ‘em I saw it… like Lindsay Lohan in A Prairie Home Companion. Ethan Hawke serves the same purpose, but I kinda like him.

Mostly an easygoing picture, feels pretty comfy to watch, except when illegal Mexican immigrants are getting their legs chewed off by the meat machines. The shit-in-the-meat stuff was of course no big deal since I’ve read the source book and stopped eating McSomething. Despite what any lefty film critics might shout, it seems a minor Linklater movie, way below the Scanner Darkly / Before Sunset level. An admirable picture, well done, would’ve been cool if it’d been a hit and exposed the ideas & research of the book to malls across America, but it died quickly and quietly instead.

Katy didn’t watch it but wanted to.

Huge Ackman is a simian surgeon/scientist in a secluded snowy setting. Rachel Weisz (the superbitch from “the shape of things”) is his cancerous fantasy-author wife. Ellen Diet-Pills Burstyn runs the lab that Huge works at, and Ethan “you dumb bastard- it’s not a schooner, it’s a sailboat” Suplee is some guy who works there too. Huge needs to cure the monkeys of their cancer in order that he may cure his wife of hers.

BUT, Huge is also a Spanish conquistador looking for the tree of life in the New World in order that he may save Spain’s Queen Weisz from the invading forces. AND, Huge is a bald futureman in a futuresphere floating towards an enchanted nebula in order that he may save The Weisz Tree Of Life from its impending death. These two things aren’t actually happening, but are being imagined by our present-day Huge & Weisz in their books and dreams and imaginations.

In all three realities, Huge is obsessed with saving Weisz, needs her, but as Paul said, thrives on her illness(es) so that he’ll be able to keep saving her. He literally feeds off her in futureworld and fetishizes the ring she gives him in Spain, which he loses down a drain in the present and tattooes onto himself in futureworld.

Movie is beautiful almost all of the time, with good music swelling up at the end, some fab fantasy segments (plants sprouting out of Huge’s body after he first tastes the tree’s sap), some wacky effects (apparently stuff was composited onto microscopic cells to create futureworld instead of the whole thing being a CG creation), lots of closeups on our heroes, some total distractions by the schooner guy, and neat connections between the three planes.

Those connections are what keep the movie interesting. It’s such a complete story, circular and self-referencing, going back over itself and leaping way ahead of itself. A well-built movie, obviously so clearly thought out, more than just a straightforward story (though it is that too: Huge tries to save wife, she dies anyway, game over). Imaginatively detailed, every scene a necessary part of the whole. Deserves a better shake than it’s getting.

Katy may have liked this (she liked Pi). Paul at least didn’t hate it and everyone else is incredulous that I bothered to see it.

Cop Glenn Ford is causing trouble by trying to prove that police-corruption-protected mobster Lagana killed a witness (actually ordered her killed, via lackey Lee Marvin’s lackey). He causes enough trouble that Lagana orders him silenced, but ends up killing Ford’s perfect wife Jocelyn Brando (Marlon’s sister) with a carbomb instead. Whoopsie! Angry Glenn Ford takes it personal and tears down the whole criminal establishment, with the help of Marvin’s girlfriend (who turns on him when he tosses boiling water in her face).

Movie opens with a cop committing suicide beside a letter he wrote to the newspaper exposing the crime-cop corruption coverup. His wife, instead of delivering to the papers, puts the note in a safe deposit box and extorts the gangsters. Lee Marvin’s girl Gloria Grahame (human desire, crossfire, in a lonely place) ends up killing the widow to expose the plot, a cool twist.

Nice, noirish crime thriller. Not the breakout amazing Fritz Lang’s Greatest Achievement that I’d not dared to expect. In fact, after all the movies I’ve seen by Fritz Lang (thirty, more than any other director), I can’t necessarily tell a Fritz Lang film from anyone else’s. That’s where film school would have helped, I guess.

Katy did not watch it.

A movie I definitely need (and want) to see again. Completely beautiful, more striking than any of the three colors movies. It was late and I enjoyed getting swept up in the whole thing, didn’t worry too much about which Veronique was which (I think it was one for a while, then the other), making comparisons to Jean-Pierre Jeunet films, and watching for reflections and refractions in glass(es) a la the Criterion cover art.

Star Irene Jacob was also in Red and Beyond The Clouds, won best actress at Cannes for this one. Cinematographer did Blue, The Scar, Gattaca, Black Hawk Down (hello oscar nom) and the next Harry Potter.

Veronika (Poland) drops dead during her first big singing performance, and her unknowing double Véronique (Paris) feels the loss and quits her singing lessons to be a teacher. Véronique sees a puppeteer who later summons her via a series of mailed clues. Some kind of fate theme, which would tie it to the Decalogue I guess. Storyline seems so unimportant compared to the visuals, the sensation while watching.

Katy said she liked it but then never mentioned it again.

Interesting from the Criterion essay by Jonathan Romney:
“Kieslowski denied that there were any metaphors in his films… Yet he also confessed that he aspired to those moments when a film manages to escape from literalism. If Véronique spurs us to search for meaning in a maze of fragmentary significations, it is perhaps because Kieslowski made the film in just such a spirit of pursuit, quite simply in the sense of teasing out narrative shape. By Kieslowski’s estimation, he and editor Jacques Witta prepared some twenty rough cuts of Véronique, some more narratively transparent, others considerably more opaque. … Finally, the Véronique we have is one among a multitude of possible versions. It is this incompleteness, this sense of the provisional and arbitrary, that finally ensures the film’s sense of mystery and saves it from the sometimes oppressive weight of narrative authority that finally overburdens Three Colors.”

Joaquin “Lucius Hunt” Phoenix is a Johnny Cash impersonator and Reese “Tracy Flick” Witherspoon is this girl who likes him.

Plays like a bullet-point list of Cash’s early career turned into a movie. Right when I said “I thought “cry cry cry” was his first single, not the folsom song”, someone introduces Joaquin by saying “here’s johnny cash, whose new single ‘cry cry cry’ is burning up the charts” or some such thing. So a series of facts mixed with re-enactments of famous events and made-up scenes and dialogue = an uncomplicated biopic of a man whose complicated life deserved better.

Amusing cameos by a decent Jerry Lee Lewis, a totally unconvincing Elvis and a very convincing Waylon Jennings (played by Shooter Jennings). T-1000 plays the judgemental father, and Madge from Prophecy III: The Ascent plays music legend Mother Maybelle Carter, the whole thing lovingly assembled by the esteemed director of Kate & Leopold. Five oscar nominations and three golden globes don’t lie! This is a class act.

Katy loves it.

With no backstory, Kirsten Dunst (Austrian Marie) is married off to the prince of France, Jason “the director’s cousin” Schwartzmann. The two of them soon come to bigtime power when king Rip Torn dies, and run around doing whatever they like. Jason sure doesn’t want any sex with Kirsten, but finally agrees to consummate in order to get everyone off his back about an heir. Kirsten lazes around, has at least one affair and two baby heirs, and ends up with her own custom-made house in a custom-made garden with all her friends and fancy fancy food and clothes. Meanwhile, people in France are poor and angry and something is happening with Austria but nobody cares about that until it’s way too late and the people are storming the castle and beheading people.

Kirsten’s always seeming totally out of her element as an actress finally works for the part, as Marie is an awkward princess who becomes an awkward queen, then once she realizes she can do anything, runs around doing anything. The movie sort of lets her off the hook, because really, she knew hardly anything about her position and had no reason at all to try and find out more. The king apparently had policy meetings but they were kept simple and short (and both of the ones they showed us involved sending money to America, maybe Sofia’s little rebuke for the freedom-fries thing).

Who else? Molly Shannon from SNL is a snippy friend with a possibly fake nose, Asia Argento is King Rip Torn’s slutty & improper (natch) girlfriend, and Alan “Steve Coogan” Partridge is Queen Marie’s ambassador to her family and/in Austria.

Beautiful scenery, clothing, sets, everything… nice low-light photography. Kirsten Dunst is pretty. Fine idea, this whole showing off Marie’s life from inside, as if she’s just a carefree teen who won a neverending shopping spree at the mall. Nicely paced, as Katy says, slow but purposefully so, following Marie’s languorous lifestyle. But the movie never gets around to proving itself necessary or rewarding me for watching it, besides the odd beautiful shot or good use of a Bjork song as mood music. Feels somewhat flat, though I can’t point at just why. Double Life of Veronique a few days later confirmed the feeling… Marie is missing something big. If I knew what it was missing, I suppose I’d be writing this someplace other than here. Katy liked the movie pretty well but feared the hype.

Still my #1 or #2 favorite documentary of the decade (grizzly man? same river twice? farmer john?). Saw Ross McElwee speak twice today. What I learned:

– His movies are all interconnected, which I’d know if I bothered to watch some of them.
– He considers Time Indefinite to be the sequel to Sherman’s March
– was impressed by DA Pennebaker docs but particularly by Fred Wiseman’s Titticut Follies, which he said made him want to make docs, but not the same way as DA and Fred… example of the crazy naked man staring back at the camera, put a human face behind the camera so it’s not as much a weapon (my words)
– tries to capture these little moments of feeling, of humanity in each picture. Showed us a scene of a mechanic discussing his daughter’s death, Ross says he once tried to find the exact frame where the man’s face flashes, changes, but he couldn’t find it. “The moment must have been between the frames”.
– question whether he’s considering the film, the big picture, while filming each small scene, he says “even while you’re having these conversations about life, death and god, you have to be thinking ‘how am I gonna edit this?’”
– Ross was once fired by Miramax (apparently, The Six O’Clock News deals with this)
– says his future films will have more old footage juxtaposed with the new stuff, will deal more with memory and pictures and how time and preservation change things.

Favorite bits are still the film scholar wheeling Ross around (says he showed the movie to a group of self-important film scholars and they *howled* at that scene), the little revelations and plot twists, the cousin’s house of memorabilia, the beach / fish rescue ending.

Ross films himself walking across a yard, pumpkins in the foreground, garden sculptures behind, with a little dog yapping at his feet. The dog has ruined his shot, the shot of himself contemplating all that he’s learned, so he gets rid of the dog and does the shot again, self-consciously narrating these facts and including both versions in the final film. That’s one of my favorite documentary scenes… the part where the narrative stops, and he reminds us that he’s making this movie, that we’re watching a movie that he made… it’s not Life Exactly As It Happened, it’s not The Pure Unedited Truth, it is Ross’s movie and he shows and tells us everything through his own filter. It’s a creation, a film, like The Godfather or Rushmore, a work of mostly non-fiction, but still a valid creative work. And usually, USUALLY (see: American Movie?) the minds behind this work are more important than the subject matter. Gotta remember that the next time I’m tempted to see dreck like Enron or Gunner Palace. Ross is my hero.