by ·Comments Off on The Road to Guantánamo (2006, Michael Winterbottom)

Daaamn. A mean, helluva movie. I liked Winterbottom’s Code 46 then was on the fence after 9 Songs and 24hr Party People, but this one redeems him (for its intentions alone, but I thought it was well-made). And this is a movie with intentions… it has a definite and righteous goal.

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Interesting how people call this (like Touching the Void before it) a documentary when it’s mostly re-enactments with voice-over. Three guys went to afghanistan, got caught up in the al-qaeda retreat by mistake, and got captured by the US forces. Or that’s what they say happened… whatever truly happened does not matter, because it’s what happens next, their imprisonment and torture, that really counts. Seems like the US forces can do whatever they want without repercussion, so I’m surprised they even let these guys loose to tell their stories, despite their innocence. Took ’em two years to do it, though. My favorite part is the Americans and Brits pointing at zoomed-in photographs and grainy videotapes, pointing at blurred heads in the crowd and saying to these guys “this is you, admit this is you at an osama bin laden rally”). It’s not them, and our guys have proof they were in Britain the entire year in question, but all the inquisitors want is a confession (of anything at all, however false)… and apparently all middle-eastern people look the same to them.

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As an expose of the post-terror guantanamo system, it’s a horribly necessary film. Sad, mean and awful, but with a purpose, an anti-torture agenda. Winterbottom’s a minor hero for actually travelling to Afghanistan and Iran to shoot this. The story continues, since some of the film team was detained on the way home from winning prizes at the Berlin film festival and “asked if they intended to make any more political films” Scary.

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by ·Comments Off on Inland Empire (2006, David Lynch)

Yay!

A purely textural, immersive experience, defies all description or explanation. The actors in a film become their characters, teleporting to Poland, psychics and unknowns, and of course, Rabbits.

Sam writes: “most impressive to me was its function as a purely visceral machine. The sound in the theater was booming, giving his shock-moments of menacing narrative intrusion a physical as well as mental impact. The endless distorted close-ups, his use of darkness and blinding brightness, and the excellently interpolated sequences of abstraction (and those verging on it) contribute at least as much to this effect. Perhaps this is what has been missing in his films since Eraserhead: his attempts at messing with our imagination were only interesting inasmuch as we were interested in his, while in these two very medium-specific movies he ropes our physiological responses into the mix, and cuts far deeper in every way. In an era when the loudest and flashiest action films can actually seem boring (even when combined with artistic pretention as in Children of Men), the emergence of a truly shaking cinematic experience is good news indeed.”

Katy didn’t go.

by ·Comments Off on Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961, Blake Edwards)

Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that Audrey Hepburn’s character was named Holly Golightly, but elsewhere I assumed she was named Tiffany. The jewelry store never occurred to me.

5-time oscar-nominated audrey/tiffany:
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I read that Holly is a “call girl” and that she’s a “socialite”. I prefer the latter. Audrey (who I barely remember from Charade) runs around with a buncha guys looking for a nice rich man to marry, but she sorta falls for boring lumpy novelist George Peppard (Hannibal from the A-Team!). He falls harder for her, for obvious reasons, and their relationship seems like an excuse for us to get to watch her for two hours, which is worth doing anyway.

Patricia Neal (Cookie in Cookie’s Fortune, and herself in Bright Leaves) is a neighbor, Buddy Ebsen (Barnaby Jones and Jed Clampett!) is Holly’s ex-husband, and Andy “Mickey Rooney” Hardy plays a surprisingly horrible Japanese caricature of an upstairs neighbor (“Miss Goriightryyy!!”). Audrey’s cat “Cat” is in almost every scene. Blake “Pink Panther / Peter Gunn” Edwards directs from a Truman Capote story (my second, after The Innocents (also from ’61)).

“the most distasteful thing I ever had to do on film”:
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won an honorary oscar:
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A good movie (when Rooney’s not onscreen), but not a romantic comedy like I thought it’d be… more of a drama / character exploration. Holly has a hidden past as a rural wife and homemaker with a dear brother who’s off at war (she renames Peppard “Fred” after her brother) and she doesn’t do relationships very well. It sometimes seems like a story of a modern liberated woman, but then Peppard will go into his spiel about how she belongs to him and people need to be together, and is he proven right at the end?

Katy suggested/liked it.

by ·Comments Off on Letters From Iwo Jima (2006, Clint Eastwood)

A better movie than Flags of Our Fathers? Yes.

Most Famous Current Japanese Actor In Hollywood Ken Watanabe is the new commander on Iwo Jima and commands the troops to entrench in the mountain instead of the beaches, so they can blast the Americans from above when they roll in, a decision that made the island much harder to capture (as seen in the hit film Flags of Our Fathers). His horse-riding bud Baron Nishi (star of Gamera: Guardian of the Universe) is in charge of the mountain while Ken is stationed elsewhere making big decisions.

But most of the story is told through the eyes of Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya from Pika*nchi Life Is Hard Dakedo Happy), a regular guy who gets drafted and has no particular allegiance to the war, just wants to survive and see his wife again. Saigo is the “regular guy just caught up by circumstance” who all the film critics are cheering for putting a human Japanese face on a Hollywood depiction of WWII. True dat, but his “war is hell” attitude of just wanting to get home is almost pro-American in how little he seems to care about his own side… would’ve been nice to get more of a balance within one character. I mean, the two elder traditionalists have both dealt with Americans before, and respect them, so there’s a little of that, but during the actual battle they are all-out willing to die for Japan, and our Saigo all-out refuses to die at any cost. So there’s little internal struggle.

It’s still a very good, well-done war movie, and an interesting twist for a Hollywood (Clint Eastwood!) flick. But as I was saying to Katy (who missed the whole Eastwood saga), after The Thin Red Line, it’s not enough to just make a capable war movie. That one set my standards unreasonably high.

Flavor-of-the-last-couple-years Paul Haggis (Million $ Baby, L.A. Crash, Walker Texas Ranger) helped write these flicks, Spielberg produced, and Tom Stern, Clint’s only cinematographer since Blood Work, shot ’em.

Famous Ken:
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Our hero:
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White man:
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by ·Comments Off on Flags of Our Fathers (2006, Clint Eastwood)

From the writers of Planet of the Apes remake, Unfaithful remake, Casino Royale remake and The Last Kiss remake…

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An okay movie. Story of the guys who raised the flag on day five or six of the 30-40 day battle for Iwo Jima in WWII. Flashes back and forth at fucking random, but at least once it’s flashed, it stays on a single story for long enough to get a sense of what’s going on. Someone’s narrating about his dead father here in the present, the three surviving flag-raisers are out on a promotional tour, and meanwhile the war’s still on and they’re still in it. Oh and after the whole promo thing raises lots of money in war bonds, our guys are forgotten and left to crap jobs and suicide. But they were never heroes anyway, just some guys fighting for their buddies who got asked to put up a flag. War is stupid. And the US shits on american indians, that’s another theme.

This land is… my land?
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I never did figure out who’s who in the war scenes because all soldiers look the same, but maybe after Jesse Bradford (My Sassy Girl remake) and Adam Beach (Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things remake) get all famous, I’ll be able to watch this again and tell them apart from Ryan Phillippe.

Already famous: T-1000 formed his liquid metal body into the shape of a Colonel in the early scenes, I somehow missed recognizing Jamie Bell in any scene, Neal McDonough from Ravenous was Captain Severance (heh), and Barry Goodboy Pepper got blown up by friendly fire.

The high hat:
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Clint Eastwood wrote the music, which sounds a lot like “Hey Jude” and the cinematographer wants to remind us of the old photo at Iwo Jima by making the whole movie look like an old photo. Nice. Spielberg produced, whatever that means.

Katy didn’t watch it, but if she had, she probably would’ve paid better attention and then talked about stuff I missed and I’d pretend like I was following her.

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by ·Comments Off on Rabbits (2002, David Lynch)

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Rabbits! Eight episodes of rabbity nonsense, with Laura “Rita” Harring, Naomi “Betty” Watts, Scott “scenes deleted” Coffey, and Rebekah “Del” Rio.

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The rabbits seem to be having an actual conversation, but all the lines are out of order. So if you try to remember the dialogue in an episode, at the end you can piece it together, sort of. Or it probably doesn’t matter. And thrice there’s an episode where there’s just one person singing.

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And sometimes this happens.

by ·Comments Off on Fantasia (1940, Disney)

Fantasia is exactly how I remember it. A drowsy opening, some pretty business, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, some more neat stuff, then the conductor announces the halfway point and I fall asleep, only waking up for the Night On Bald Mountain segment and the closing credits.

I guess the animation purists love it, but I just find it a pleasant excuse for a nap. Sorry!

by ·Comments Off on Hard Candy (2005, David Slade)

Music video director Slade does a fine job here. He should be One To Look Out For in the future. Actually-18-yr-old Ellen Page (Kitty Pryde in X-men 3!) stars with Patrick Wilson (in his second movie featuring pedophilia and castration in a single year, jeez louise), and Sandra Oh has a single scene as a nosy neighbor.

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Great looking movie, candy-bright and colorful, lots of close-ups and private-ryan framing. About a predatory 14-yr-old girl who lets herself get picked up by an obvious pedophile online only to turn the tables, tie him up, torture him, and lead him to kill himself. The spoiler twist is that she’s done this before, and that he and another guy once kidnapped and killed another girl, who may have been our heroine’s friend.

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That’s pretty much the whole thing. A great first half gives way to a not-as-great second half. The ending doesn’t exactly kill the whole movie, but it comes close. I’ll blame the writer. Straightforward. She always seems to be in control, there’s never any question that he’s a pedophile, and he is never sympathetic. The girl calling his ex-girlfriend and pretending to be a cop is the only part that doesn’t quite fit – she’s a little too thorough in her psychological profiling for a 14-yr-old.

Next up for this director, writer and cinematographer: a Josh Hartnett vampire movie set in Alaska! Can’t wait.

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by ·Comments Off on The Lives of Others (2006, F.H. Donnersmarck)

Movie 1 of the Key Sunday Cinema Club. The post-movie discussion really helped, made the movie more memorable, made its intentions and plot twists more clear. Thanks, Katy!

In West Berlin: Wiesler (meticulous rule-follower) works for Grubitz (ambitious, opportunistic dullard) works for Minister Hempf (fat awful bureaucrat). Georg Dreyman is a theater writer, Christa-Maria Sieland is Georg’s actress girlfriend, Albert Jerska is his blacklisted former director, and Paul Hauser is their anti-gov’t buddy.

Wiesler bugs Dreyman’s apartment to find proof that Dreyman is an anti-gov agent so he can be locked up and Hempf can be free to sleep with Sieland. But ever-loyal Wiesler learns the motivations for his operation, as he learns that Dreyman is not anti-gov at all, but becomes anti-gov as a result of all the spying, sleeping around and other rude behavior. Wiesler becomes unhealthily engrossed in “the lives of others” (oooh) and is eventually demoted after Dreyman is provoked to write an anti-gov scribe in a West German paper, and Sieland throws herself into traffic, remorseful for having informed on her boyfriend. Tragedy! All of this proves that Germans can never be trusted.

A neat movie and a story well told. AV Club says “von Donnersmarck largely keeps the emotion at a distance, preferring to intellectualize the action rather than letting the audience fully feel what Mühe and Koch are going through… makes the meaning of every moment thuddingly clear, and doesn’t move on until he’s sure everyone’s gotten it.” At least they agree that the actors and story are great. True the film’s a little dry and long, but it’s also in the head of the very formal Stasi cop Wiesler, so it only seems appropriate. And it had a lot to say about a system that I previously knew little about, so I found its straightforwardness helpful, but I guess I’m not clamoring to see it again anytime soon.