by ·Comments Off on The Grandmaster (2013, Wong Kar-Wai)

On one hand, I don’t think this is a perfect movie. Many of the scenes are beautiful by themselves, but I’m not sure that it comes together into a structure that makes sense. On the other hand, I’m fascinated with this movie, having watched the U.S. version twice in theaters then the original on blu-ray. The U.S. makes some major blunders, changes the order of events to the detriment of all emotional build-up and overuses title cards. But those title cards came in handy for me, and the original version made more sense for my having seen the other one first. Also, even though the U.S. is a half hour shorter, it somehow contains entire scenes that weren’t in the original.

My favorite edit:

Tony Leung has been in Red Cliff and Lust, Caution but I haven’t seen him since 2046. He plays Ip Man, a renowned martial artist and teacher, introduced fighting a hundred dudes including a final boss played by Cung Le (Bronze Lion) under the slow-motion rain. Action isn’t abstracted like in Ashes of Time – it’s actually more commercial-looking than usual for Wong, shot by new guy Philippe Le Sourd but edited by William Chang who worked on Ashes of Time and the others.

Ip moves away from his wife to Hong Kong then isn’t allowed to return. He and Zhang Ziyi have a mutual fascination, and the best part of the movie follows her story as she reclaims her father’s title from his traitorous former disciple Ma San. This sidetrack from the “Grandmaster” story plus the movie’s splintering into different versions make it seem more open-ended, like every character could unexpectedly lead his own movie. For instance, Chen Chang (male star of Three Times) has a minor scene in the U.S. cut, and two completely different scenes (including a major anti-government battle) in the original. Usually we hear rumors of trouble in the editing room then Wong delivers a final, completed film – this time he seems to have given in to artistic indecision. Or maybe it’s simply the Weinsteins’ fault – either way, I’ve enjoyed assembling the pieces in my mind, dreaming my own Grandmaster.

Jiang, for instance, deserves his own entire movie:

by ·Comments Off on Some Television watched in 2013

Black Mirror season 1 (2011)

Sci-fi/political satire anthology written by Charlie Brooker.
Of course I was gonna watch this.

101: “In a few minutes the Prime Minister will perform an indecent act on your screen.” Prankster kidnaps a British princess, demanding only that the prime minister have sex with a pig on live television. Sounds like the series is getting off to a ridiculous start, but with Charlie’s knowledge of media and politics, it’s a finely detailed story, with humor and tension in equal measure. PM Rory Kinnear was in the last couple of Bond movies.

102: Bing (Daniel Kaluuya of Kick-Ass 2) lives in a Pumzi world, spending his days stationary-bicycling to power whatever complex they all live inside, and his evenings bombarded by shit television, spending cycle-earned credits to skip ads and change channels. A cyclist girl likes him, but he falls for another (Jessica Findlay, Lady Sybil from Downton Abbey) and pays all his credits for her to get a shot on a singing competition show. After getting his dreams dashed by her treatment on the show (I did not realize Rupert Everett was one of the judges), Bing schemes to go back on the show himself, armed with a shard of glass from a shattered screen, speaking truth to the show’s viewers under threat of suicide. Bing is a hit and is offered his own show where he does this weekly, while back on the bike room people purchase “bing shard” to ornament their avatars.

103: Post-google-glass, people have a “grain” in their neck that records everything they see and hear all the time, and works as a DVR of their lives, which they can replay privately or stream onto a nearby TV. Toby Kebbell (in The East this year) is boring everyone by stressing over his latest work evaluation, while his wife (Jodie Whittaker, O’Toole’s crush in Venus, irritable white woman in Attack the Block) is concealing an affair with Tom Cullen (Lady Mary’s wide-mouthed love interest at the start of Downton season 4). Jealousy, threats and much creepy in-eye playback follows.

Paranoia Agent (2004, Satoshi Kon)

A supernatural mystery story that branches and builds, then goes bloody insane for a while, then starts to fall apart, then is revealed to have been one massive hallucination, the first “victim” of Shounen Bat having created him psychosomatically. It’s more complicated than that, though – there’s a whole episode about neighborhood women making up Shounen Bat stories they “heard”, a behind-the-scenes episode about a doomed cartoon series, an internet suicide club, a video game-fantasy cop, not one but two mysterious/magic elderly people, and a city-devouring black blob.

Look Around You season 2 (2005)

The fake-science show steps up its game for the second season. Wasn’t sure I liked the changes at first, but the episodes are less isolated here, building to a fantastic conclusion. Always nice to see Nick Frost and Mark Heap as well.

Special appearance by Tchaikovsky:

Orson Welles’ Sketch Book (1955)

Orson does a quick sketch, then tells a story for fifteen minutes or so, illustrating as needed. This used to be all that was needed for a TV program. Long intro about props and sketches, then stories of his beginnings in theater. In the second one he discusses a Boston performance gone bad, then “the negro Macbeth,” during which a racist critic was killed by a voodoo curse. In #3 Orson claims to have helped bring a brutal cop to justice after hearing the story of his beating a soldier into blindness. He continues on the topics of passports and authority into a great ending. #4 tells a comic story about Charles Lederer, then Houdini and magic tricks and John Barrymore. #5 is about how he scared everyone with his War of the Worlds broadcast, and #6 is a great bullfighting story.

At this point Katy and I are still in the middle of Dollhouse 2, Downton 4 and Sports Night 2, and I’ve started some Important Things and Futurama episodes and a miniseries on silent films called Hollywood. Chances of finishing any of these soon are looking slim.

by ·Comments Off on Harakiri (1962, Masaki Kobayashi)

A brilliant flashback drama full of slow-boil tension leading to an explosive action scene and devastating business-as-usual finale. Tatsuya Nakadai (star of Kill! and of the snow-lady second segment of Kwaidan) asks a local clan for permission to commit ritual suicide in their courtyard, and the stooge in charge (Rentaro Mikuni, star of the first Kwaidan segment and the chained son in Profound Desire of the Gods, seeming older here, perhaps because of his baldy-samurai hair) tells of the last guy who tried that, how he was forced to go through with the suicide rather than being given some money to go away. But Nadakai knows this already, since the last guy was his son-in-law (Akira Ishihama of some Kinoshita films) whose death led his young wife Shima Iwashita (the daughter in An Autumn Afternoon) to her own. Nadakai’s plan is to demand an apology, and when the clan attacks he takes down as many men as he can (having killed some key guys earlier, as the flashback structure very gradually reveals). Rather than admit any blame, the clan leader orders a total cover-up, saying the others died of illness. A cynical movie, but thrilling in execution (with tastefully-deployed pre-’70s shock-zooms), the movie Kobayashi made before Kwaidan.

J. Mellen for Criterion:

In the film’s condemnation of the Iyi clan, Kobayashi rejects the notion of individual submission to the group. He condemns, simultaneously, the hierarchical structures that pervaded Japanese political and social life in the 1950s and 1960s, especially the zaibatsus, the giant corporations that recapitulated feudalism.

by ·Comments Off on The Suitor (1962, Pierre Etaix)

Etaix is a young shut-in astronomy obsessive. Thanks to an earplugs gag, he barely hears his dad’s speech about how the son should go find a wife, but takes it to heart anyway, immediately tearing down his star maps and proposing to Ilka the Swedish au pair. She can’t understand him, so he goes out, watches how other men meet and deal with women and attempts to imitate them, getting caught up with a vivacious neighbor, mooning after a singing star, then finally returning to the au pair. It all hangs together pretty well, not as constantly funny as As Long As You’ve Got Your Health, but pretty excellent for a first feature, a graceful comedy full of cinematic framing gags as well as standard behavioral humor.

by ·Comments Off on Catching Fire (2013, Francis Lawrence)

Lawrence (who made Water For Elephants and the music video for Gone Till November) turns in a much better Hunger Games movie than the last guy did. This movie will, of course, be best remembered for bringing together both mid-2000’s Truman Capotes: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toby Jones. New additions to the movie’s revolutionary team include Jeffrey Wright (also in Only Lovers Left Alive this year) and Sam Claflin (Snow White and the Huntsman).

by ·Comments Off on Say Anything (1989, Cameron Crowe)

Why isn’t this on here already? Half-watched again in Minnesota. Nice guy Cusack and rich girl Ione Skye (star of Girls In Prison) are in love. Her dad John Mahoney (novelist W.P. Mayhew in Barton Fink) disapproves and gets her to dump him, but his opinion ceases to matter when he goes to prison for fraud, and Cusack’s Peter Gabriel-soundtracked obsession wins out. Also, Lili Taylor sings some songs. Crowe manages not to wreck the movie through overuse of pop music, possibly because he couldn’t afford it yet.

by ·Comments Off on Animated Shorts watched Nov-Dec 2013

Ruka/The Hand (1965, Jiri Trnka)

Potter just wants to make pots and keep his little plant alive, but a fascist hand keeps intruding wanting him to sculpt fascist hands instead. Potter is kidnapped by the hand and forced to create hand progaganda but escapes only to die back at home. Banned in his home country of Czechoslovakia, naturally. Trnka’s final film – I will have to find more.

Johann Mouse (1952, Hanna & Barbera)

Jerry is a mouse in Strauss’s house who waltzes uncontrollably when the master is playing. The cat learns to play in order to set a trap, but the two are discovered and are invited to perform for the king. Cute enough, but I don’t know about oscar-winning. It beat a not-too-great Tex Avery, two from UPA and one from Canada, the same year McLaren’s Neighbours won best documentary (!?) short. Hans Conreid narrated.

Magoo’s Puddle Jumper (1956, Pete Burness)

Blind Magoo buys an electric car (!) and drives it into the ocean. Somehow his idiot son Waldo survived the bear short and tags along. People must’ve thought Jim Backus was hilarious. All three oscar nominees were UPA productions, so producer Stephen Bosustow could not have lost.

The Nightmare of Melies (1988, Pierre Etaix)

A fun Melies tribute incorporating the earliest cinema techniques, scenes from King Kong, an alka-seltzer commercial and late-80’s computer animation.

D. Cairns for The Forgotten:

Etaix additions to the source script make Méliès a prophet of the whole history of film, from the greatest special effects film of golden age Hollywood, up to the computerized visions of the present day (1988), and taking in the true nightmare of the television commercial. I love how the ad breaks in, hideously colorful and cheery, disrupting what is already a rather stylistically disparate piece .. almost to the point of disintegration.

Bimbo’s Initiation (1931, Dave Fleischer)

Bimbo is kidnapped by a cult that keeps attacking him with sharp things and spanking instruments then asking if he wants to be a member. He always answers no until confronted with dog-eared Betty Boop who dribbles her ass like a basketball. Maltin called it Fleischer’s darkest work, and Jim Woodring reveres it, naturally.

Tord and Tord (2010, Niki Lindroth Von Bahr)

“I felt my need for coffee becoming more and more apparent.”

Clearly somebody watched Fantastic Mr. Fox and David Lynch’s Rabbits then imagined a meeting of these two worlds. Sort of a less-violent stop-motion Fight Club, as a fox named Tord finds out his next-door neighbor is also named Tord, so they start hanging out and exchanging coded messages, until rabbit-Tord disappears and may not have ever existed.

The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (2005, Anthony Lucas)

Cool silhouette animation, watched with Katy. Narrator/Jasper (Joel Edgerton, villain of Gatsby) is a disgraced navigator in an airship-steampunk future, whose ship stumbles across deadly creatures whose blood can cure the plague affecting Jasper’s home planet (and more specifically, his wife). Sort of an Alien meets Little Shop of Horrors, with an unresolved ending.

Director Lucas followed this up with a 3-minute rabbit short and worked on new anthology film The Turning. Writer Mark Shirrefs does lots of Australian sci-fi television. The Australians gave this a best-short award, but Oscars picked The Moon and the Son and Baftas the great Fallen Art.

Bobby Yeah (2011, Robert Morgan)

The story of a murderous kidnapper with a predilection for pushing red buttons. Possibly the most grotesque stop-motion movie ever – kudos to Morgan! Reminds of Symbol at times, with a confused-looking guy in a room pushing mysterious buttons with varying consequences, but this one also has elements of murder-spree crime drama, with much sexual imagery.

by ·Comments Off on Passing Through (1977, Larry Clark)

Wildly multilayered movie, both in its ideas and plot elements and its visuals, with great use of dissolves and multiple exposures. Clark says the look was inspired by jazz record covers. Fantastic color (fades to red or blue instead of black) and clarity, using Japanese 16mm film stock. Jazz music guides the plot and the film’s own style. Some of the story elements don’t come together perfectly, but there are so many ideas that the movie feels revolutionary, so being a slave to plot wasn’t Clark’s top concern.

Warmack gets out of jail, hitches a ride home from Maya, a disillusioned designer who soon quits her job and hangs out with Warmack instead. He returns to his friends in a jazz group but can’t find his mentor Pops, tries to track him down. I had a hard time telling which characters were blood relatives and which were close friends or surrogate families. If Pops is the grandfather of Warmack, why does Warmack only find out about his death and funeral from a tarot card reader?

Warmack finds the music industry even more hopelessly corrupt than when he left it. His buddies are happy scraping by with the money the label boss gives them while he gets filthy rich selling their music. One guy snitches for the boss, another gets hooked on drugs and overdoses. Warmack was originally locked up for killing a dude who blinded bandmate Skeeter, later kills the label boss and his toughs for killing Skeeter. Poor Skeeter. Maya goes full-on revolutionary, helps with the murder revenge plot. Movie is interested in purity of expression, the black experience, the Attica riot and other recent events, and Africa and its leaders.

Cowriter Ted Lang became a TV director and Love Boat actor. Pops was played by Hollywood veteran Clarence Muse. Julie Dash did sound, Charles Burnett was a cameraman, and Pat O’Neill provided optical effects. Legend goes the film was studied by future Spike Lee cinematographers Arthur Jafa and Ernest Dickerson until they wore out their university’s print.

by ·Comments Off on Coal Money (2009, Wang Bing)

Quick-n-dirty handicam following coal traders in Inner Mongolia – mostly it’s people bitching and haggling for 50 minutes. I suppose it’s a useful film as a cinema verite document of a trade, but is this what most of Wang Bing’s cinema is like? Is West of the Tracks (about decline of an industrial district) like this for nine hours, and Crude Oil for fourteen?

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As Harvard puts it: “The hard, even bitter, bargaining and accusations of thievery that erupt at each juncture suggest the free market system to be based on an ever-sliding scale of distrust and insecurity.”

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Wang is one of Cinema Scope’s 50 Under 50. C. Fujiwara writes: “If Wang’s cinema is dedicated to uncovering the past of labour, it is also a search, in the middle of an era when labour is being disavowed, disgraced, and denied, for the possible futures of labour.”