by ·Comments Off on Three Times (2005, Hou Hsiao-hsien)

Three love stories with the same actors in different eras. Can’t think of an apt comparison to another film (haven’t seen Resnais’ Smoking/No Smoking) but it’s sort of the opposite of Hal Hartley’s Flirt). I’d avoided this despite the acclaim because I thought it’d be long and boring (flashback to two Hou movies I didn’t enjoy/understand, Flowers of Shanghai and Goodbye South, Goodbye) but lately I’ve decided that those two required more attention than I gave them, so I watched this one twice (err, six times).

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1966: A Time for Love

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A perfect mini-movie, and it ends so simply and beautifully. He meets her by accident at a pool hall, looking for a different girl. Writes her letters while on his military duty, returns one day and finds her gone. This time, instead of just writing to the next girl, he tracks her down, spends his last few hours of leave with her. Repeated settings, actions and songs (“smoke gets in your eyes” and “rain and tears”) along with the period setting and romantic atmosphere unavoidable evoke Wong Kar-Wai.

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Girish draws connections:

The original Chinese title of the film is Best Of Times. Hou, like a popular musician, is drawing from his “discography” of films for these three stories. The first reminds me in look and mood of A Time To Live And A Time To Die or Dust In The Wind; the second is set in a brothel like Flowers Of Shanghai; and the third clearly recalls the modern neon-smeared interior spaces of Millennium Mambo. So, Hou has created a sort of compilation album, only he has “remade” the ideas and memories behind his previous films into new stories.

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1911: A Time for Freedom

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Silent with piano music and intertitles for dialogue most of the time, traditional twangy vocal music a couple of times (performed, it turns out, by our woman). She is a geisha and apparently in love with her man, though he seems to pay her little mind, focusing on poetry, national politics and the fate of another geisha. He pays for the other girl to be freed when she becomes pregnant, leaving his own girl stuck and alone when he leaves town for Shanghai. Such slow, fluid, measured movements I am sometimes not sure if Hou’s movies are in slow-motion.

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Stylus:

Of course, the principal subject of both “A Time for Freedom” and Flowers of Shanghai is liberation—from a life of service for the long-suffering geishas, and from foreign rule for Hou’s homeland. Examining the dichotomous relationship between a wealthy activist (Chang) protesting the Japanese occupation of Taiwan and a geisha (Shu) longing desperately for a life outside the brothel, this is Hou’s most explicitly political work since his trilogy on 20th Century Taiwanese history (City of Sadness, The Puppet Master, Good Men, Good Women) and, arguably, his most resonant feminist statement to date.

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2005: A Time for Youth

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A confusing one – multiple girls with multiple problems, little explicit story but more detail information than ever. He’s a motorcycle-driving photographer and she’s a throat-tattooed, epileptic lounge singer with a scary website. Seemed to me the usual commentary on modern disconnection through overload of technology, not adding much besides superior cinematography, but the second time through I enjoyed it more (and figured out more, like the fact that He and She both have other girlfriends). Her girl says she’s committing suicide from neglect (touchy) towards the end. Still doesn’t have the emotional impact of the first two – I might’ve switched the order of the segments.

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Senses of Cinema:

Hou represents this state of freedom by a narrative near-chaos transmitted with a calm and almost casual-looking inscrutability that makes the story impossible to comprehend to any satisfactory degree in just one viewing. It is ironic, though, that while an initial impression might well have been that many of the scenes are presented in a chronologically rather random order, careful examination seems to establish that the story is actually told in a scrupulously linear way.

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Qi Shu (The Eye 2, Transporter and Sex & Zen 2) has got nothing on the career of costar Chen Chang (Red Cliff, Breath, Crouching Tiger, Happy Together and A Brighter Summer Day), but they’re both wonderful here. Story and characterizations are pretty minimal, movie gets by on weight of emotion, similar to Friday Night and In the Mood for Love – and it shares ITMFL’s co-cinematographer Pin Bing Lee, a Hou regular who also shot Air Doll and Norwegian Wood. Would look even more lovely, I’ll bet, if the DVD wasn’t all interlaced and non-anamorphic.

Won all the Taiwanese film awards. Played at Cannes with A History of Violence and Cache, Battle In Heaven and Broken Flowers, all unfairly beaten by that Dardenne movie.

by ·1 Comment

Scenes from movies in the silent era, cut together to flow nicely. Music that alternates between pleasantly ambient/minimal, and sharply attention-grabbing, including cuts by Fennesz and David Grubbs. Lots of graphic, sometimes deviant, sex. Pointless quotes from ancient poetry on intertitles connect and divide the piece into sections.

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Seemed, to me, more valuable as a collection of scenes to peruse, to marvel at these unknown early films (didn’t recognize a single shot, but then I’m no silent film scholar) than as an original piece of editing/filmmaking. It didn’t wear out its welcome, but neither was I impressed by the connections made between scenes. Maybe with access to the original footage one could better appreciate Deutsch’s contribution, besides as curator of some damned interesting old movies. Still excited to see his earlier Film Ist pieces composed of footage from scientific films.

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More wonderful screenshots:
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by ·Comments Off on It Felt Like a Kiss (2009, Adam Curtis)

Different from the other Curtis docs I’ve seen in that it’s not assembling semi-obscure facts to analyze human/political behavior, but assembling well-known facts to create a mood, and lead to an understanding through experience. Of course I’m missing part of this experience, since the film was part of a multimedia show inside a deserted office building set to music by Damon Albarn and the Kronos Quartet.

Traces a semi-chronological historical path through key events (chimps in space), tragedies (kennedy assassinations, manson family) and future tragedies (WTC construction) but mostly uses pop songs as history, letting artist bios (tina turner, lou reed) and the lyrics themselves tell the stories of disenchantment.

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What results has Lynchian overtones with its dark seeds beneath 1950’s suburban pop, and shades of Craig Baldwin, using newsreel montages to create new stories, to confuse and not inform. But it’s still got Curtis written all over it, in the pacing and clip selection, that old familiar typeface, and the sense that the film makes your brain understand things in ways not explicitly told by the narration, making covert connections. Most importantly, when it was over I had the same urge to immediately watch it again that I got after The Power of Nightmares and The Trap.

C. Brooker:

Where his preceding works have occasionally been a touch eccentric, this one takes the piss. It is completely and utterly demented – in a positive way. I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense; if anything, it forges its own new brand of coherence whether you like it or not. This is a documentary running on alien software. I’m at a loss to describe it. For starters, the trademark Curtis voiceover has gone completely, replaced instead by occasional, simple captions. Music is at the forefront. Ominous soundscapes and bubblegum pop weave their way around the images: archive news, Hollywood movies. It’s hypnotic.

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Brooker also gets us some Curtis quotes. I’ve brutally edited so as not to copy his entire article:

I wanted to do a film about what it actually felt like to live through that time … Where you could see the roots of the uncertainties we feel today, the things they did out on the dark fringes of the world that they didn’t really notice at the time, which would then come back to haunt us. … The politics of our time are deeply embedded in this idea of individualism, which is far wider than … consumerism or anything like that. It’s how you feel. … But it’s not the be-all and end-all. It’s not an absolute. It’s a way of feeling and thinking which is a product of a particular time and power. The notion that you only achieve your true self if your desires, your dreams, are satisfied … It’s a political idea. … What you desire is the most important thing. But a great paradox of our time is that what you desire may not be coming from within you. … The iPhone is a good example. People really feel they want one – to express themselves. But they all want one, at the same time. Where does that come from? From within or without? Because we live in an age where the individual is paramount and everything is seen from the perspective of ‘you’, we’ve lost sight of the bigger forces at work. Which has limited us. Not only in our understanding of the world; it’s made us very powerless. I think that’s what I’m really trying to get at in this.

Curtis keeps a blog, which I need to start reading, and I’ve been watching Mr. Brooker’s own TV series, to which Curtis has recently contributed.

by ·Comments Off on The Box (2009, Richard Kelly)

The Box (I)
by Richard Kelly, director of Donnie Darko

Cameron Diaz and Cyclops from X-Men are happily married with a kid in the 1970’s. Cyclops is a rocket scientist. They get The Box delivered to them by a fire-scarred Frank Langella. Should they push the button, winning themselves a million bucks and dooming a random citizen, “someone you don’t know,” to death? They do. Someone, somewhere, shoots his wife. The Box is then given to a new family, “someone you don’t know.” Movie should obviously end here, but now their son is kidnapped, made blind and deaf, and Cy can only save his son by shooting his wife. He does, as someone new pushes the button. Okay.

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The Box (II)
by Richard Kelly, director of Southland Tales

Over at NASA, Cyclops takes time out from astronaut training to make his wife a false foot. He finds out Frank Langella was hit by lightning years before and replaced by a psychic alien from a society big on punishing the selfish and forcing people to make arbitrary, life-changing decisions, like the series of watery doors (cue The Abyss/Darko effects team) which lead to either hell or Cy’s own upstairs bedroom. NASA seems unconcerned with investigating any of this. Movie seems unnecessarily complicated and expensive, and parts make no damned sense.

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Donnie’s dad!
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I way did not notice that Arcade Fire did the music!

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by ·Comments Off on Avatar (2009, James Cameron)

The adventures of a tall blue cat man on a blacklight-mooned planet climbing fluorescent disco trees. How appropriate that the film follows a preview for Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland.

Katy and I liked it!

by ·Comments Off on The Hangover (2009, Todd Phillips)

From the director of Road Trip and writers of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past!

A dude gets lost during a bachelor party weekend in Vegas, and it’s up to good friends The Bland One (Bradley Cooper of Midnight Meat Train), The Reluctant One (Atlanta native Ed Helms of The Daily Show) and The Socially Maladjusted One (Zach G. of The Ballad of G.I. Joe) to retrieve him. This is hard because Zach (via drug dealer Mike Epps) slipped them all roofies. While under the influence, Ed yanks out a tooth (my vote for funniest moment, even though it was just a still photo, Ed smiling maniacally) and marries Heather Graham, Zach steals Mike Tyson’s pet tiger, and I can’t remember Cooper doing anything of note. Not a good movie, but it’s always nice to see Jeffrey Tambor. More importantly, since I watched this, Paranormal Activity and Avatar all in the same week, I can now feel like I’m caught up with the rest of America until the next wave of summer flicks come out.

by ·Comments Off on Paranormal Activity (2007, Oren Peli)

Handicam horror, but not all blair-witch super-shaky (or cloverfield or whatever). Dude hears that his girlfriend has been haunted since she was little (she rolls out the backstory gradually since there’s not much else in the way of plot development) so he gets the camera and tries to document her hauntings. Psychic tells them it’s demons not ghosts, shows them a clip from The Exorcist and skedaddles. Doors open themselves, chandeliers shake, footprints appear. The dude escalates things by buying a ouija board, spoiling things for everyone, including the viewer who’d been enjoying the general lack of hackery up to that point.

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Movie is as great as advertised for the first half – I was scared to death. The ouija thing takes it from convincing-fake-doc into clearly-scripted territory, where it remains as she reveals more backstory and discovers a long-lost family photo in the attic of the boyfriend’s house. Then the ending (one of a few, apparently) didn’t do it for me. She sleepwalks downstairs, screams until he comes running, then slowly comes back upstairs holding a bloody knife. No problem there, and apparently the theatrical version ends into “she was never seen again” title cards, but mine had the cops come in and shoot her dead when they saw the knife. Halfway worth the hype, then… still impressive for indie horror. Let’s see if its sequel can avoid the Blair Witch 2 trap.

by ·Comments Off on The Romance of Astrée and Celadon (2007, Eric Rohmer)

Astree loves Celadon and vice versa, with the kind of suicide-pact love that mainly exists among 17-year-olds in tragi-romantic plays. His parents don’t approve so the young lovers make a public show of dating other people… but Astree believes the show, feels betrayed and tells Celadon to piss off, so he goes and drowns himself in the river. Not quite dead, he’s rescued by nymph Galathée and her gang. Gal wants hunky Cel for herself but he escapes and hides away in the forest, eating berries, refusing to approach his beloved because, after all, she ordered him away. Meanwhile, Astree and Cel’s brother alternate (“he must be dead!” “he must be alive!”).

I guess I see the Rohmer moral theme at work here. Cel loves his girl so he must remain faithful to her and do as she says, staying away even if she doesn’t know he’s alive. But as Jimmy said, breaking into a giggling fit after hearing Celadon echo his simple emotions for the thousandth time, “he’s SO dumb!” It’s hard to disagree… they are all so dumb, and the movie is so straightforward and simple that it gets frustrating. Some nice imagery though, I thought (Katy said it looked made-for-public-television). Best not to get into the ending, in which Celadon pretends (not convincingly) to be a girl in order to get closer to his beloved.

Astree is Stephanie Crayencour and Celadon is Andy Gillet, neither of whom have shown up elsewhere yet. Jocelyn Quivrin who played Celadon’s brother died in a car crash two months ago. Nominated for the golden lion in Venice along with six movies I’ve loved (and also Sukiyaki Western Django) but they all lost to Lust, Caution, which I thought didn’t get good reviews.

M.J. Anderson:

Adapting Honoré d’Urfé’s novel of 5th century Gaul life, The Romance of Astree and Celadon claims to reproduce less the period depicted than its 17th century readers’ imagination of the earlier period. Commensurate with this goal, the director features canvases painted in the seventeenth century, a castle built well after the novel’s setting and importantly a grafting of the Christian faith onto the Druid-themed source material.

by ·1 Comment

Wow, for years I thought I would hate this movie, but it popped up on best-of-decade lists so I gave it a shot and enjoyed the whole thing. It’s even a genre I dislike, the youth coming-of-age story, but this one’s aimed at adults (creepy adults maybe, all NC-17 for underage sex).

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Anaïs (henceforth Anais) is the fat girl (French title was something like To My Sister!) on vacation with her parents and hot older sister. After some frank sex chat (younger Anais: “If I meet a man I love I’d want to be broken in. The first time should be with nobody.”) the girls meet roguish Italian Fernando, who’s making out with older sister Elena in a restaurant within minutes. Anais barely seems to pay attention, kills time the whole movie singing and talking to herself, imagining multiple boyfriends, chanting about being bored.

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First-time sex scene follows between Elena and the boy. She tries to back out, but he counters, not about to give up. “All the girls take it the back way. That way it doesn’t count. It’s a proof of love.”

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Excellent, unique in its shots and pacing and general outrageousness. I’d watch more Breillat for sure. I get the feminist label for the most part – it’s told completely from girls’ perspectives. The ending worries me, where the older sister and her mom get killed by a maniac who then rapes Anais. Doesn’t seem too feminist, that. Maybe the very end is feminist – Anais insisting to the cops and medics that she wasn’t raped. She can’t mean she wanted it, so maybe she’s making comparisons to her sister’s experience (Anais was in the room at the time). All sex is/isn’t rape, that sort of thing.

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The most interesting part is really the relationship between Elena and the boy. He steals a ring from his mother and gives it to Elena, leading to parental intervention and the abrupt end of the vacation. The boy tricked Elena into having sex, but it didn’t ruin her life; she’s still crazy for him. The director doesn’t talk plot in the DVD features, just metaphor – pressing forth, climbing mountains, doing something that is beyond me. Film should be a tormenting experience! She presents herself as an actor-torturing sadist, but the actors all seem happy in behind-the-scenes footage. Breillat seems the stereotype of an arty Euro filmmaker, but her great movie proves otherwise.

Older sister Roxane Mesquida later starred in two more Breillat films. Mom Arsinée Khanjian is Atom Egoyan’s wife so she’s in all his movies as well as Code Unknown and Irma Vep. Dad Romain Goupil is a director, has worked with Chantal Akerman. Our D.P. Giorgos Arvanitis shot films for Theo Angelopoulos, and Breillat made the movie Romance (X), which I skipped in Barcelona to see either Wild Wild West, Happiness or Judas Kiss.