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.

by ·Comments Off on Takeshis’ (2005, Takeshi Kitano)

Takeshi Kitano plays sort-of-himself, a superstar gangster actor. But mostly he plays a beat-down loser wannabe actor who keeps failing auditions for small parts on TV shows. His neighbors laugh at him, and he works at a convenience store. But one day a real gangster hides in the store then dies in the back room, and the loser Kitano finds himself with a Falling Down-style bag full of guns… goes on a mighty rampage. Or does he? Dream sequences and fantasies are flowing in and out of the picture.

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There aren’t as many Kitanos as I thought there’d be, and the whole thing made more sense than I thought it would. Lesson learned again and again: when everyone says a movie is difficult and confusing, that don’t necessarily make it so.

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As usual, The Internets come in handy here. A couple weeks later, I saw the dvdbeaver review with a ton of great screen shots… really a great looking movie, full of signature Kitano setups, but I was too busy following the story and reading subtitles to notice at the time.

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Rotterdam Film Festival calls it “a mocking, almost surrealist film about the star Kitano, his oeuvre and his failed alter ego”.

Trivia: Tetsu Watanabe the noodle cook was in Fireworks and Sonatine, Kitano’s friend Susumu Terajima was in Brother and Fireworks and everything else, and the manager & taxi driver was Ren Osugi, the chief from MPD Psycho.

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So two approaches. I’m tempted to consider this viewing a test run, this writing a rough draft, and sit down with all of Kitano’s films, watch or rewatch them, then see this one again to catch more of the references. On the other hand, even though it’s an extremely self-referential film, I know the Kitano persona well enough to get the overall joke, and I enjoyed watching this… why not take it on its own merits instead of turning it into a study project? Kitano’s films are all worth re/watching anyway… maybe I’ll get to ’em after my upcoming Seijun Suzuki fest.

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In the meantime I’ll have to say I liked this one more than I thought I would… it pretty much made sense, and looked great.

by ·Comments Off on Stranger Than Fiction (2006, Marc Forster)

One day, OCD number-freak IRS auditor Will Ferrell hears Emma Thompson narrating his life. He seeks help from English professor Dustin Hoffman, and spends his days auditing free-spirited baker Maggie Gyllenhaal. Queen Latifah is also there but I’m not sure why.

Lively Spoon soundtrack keeps me happy while I stare at Maggie and wonder about Will’s mostly non-acting. Guess he learned from the Truman Show and tried the less-is-more thing instead. Dustin Hoffman spends more time lifeguarding the pool than teaching classes. No really stupid parts, some funny bits, some clever writing. Somehow Emma’s novel is the greatest piece of American Literature in years but only if Will gets killed, and somehow Maggie falls in love with Will because he sings a Wreckless Eric song. Spoon’s new one “The Book I Write” is pretty good. Katy liked it too.

by ·Comments Off on Slither (2006, James Gunn)

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I recognized Michael Rooker as monstrously morphing Grant Grant (the TV producer with the dirty handshake in Mallrats) but it took me forever to notice that good-cop lead actor Nathan Fillion was the guy from Serenity. Guess it might be time to watch those Firefly DVDs.

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Rooker gets an alien shot to the chest, impregnates a local girl with thousands of mind-controlling slugs, and morphs quickly into a room-sized ugly mess of alien. It’s up to Fillion, Rooker’s wife and a girl they pick up along the way to save the day. It’s a love story! Hilarious and wonderful throughout, gotta see again.

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Katy caught brief glimpses and seemed disturbed.

–
2025: This holds up. I still haven’t watched those Firefly DVDs. Gunn followed up with Super, then has made exclusively superhero stuff. You don’t see Elizabeth Banks enough. “His arm was all bendy, mayor.” Forgot that the Zs share a consciousness and projectile-spit acid. Wondering if police receptionist Shelby (Pam from The Office US) is referencing Lucy from Twin Peaks, or if the whole concept is referencing Night of the Creeps. Our birds got very upset when Michael Rooker blew up.

by ·1 Comment

What is P-Net? Who or what is Lucy Monostone? How can a virus cause people to get bar codes on their eyeballs? How come some bar codes are black and some are red? What exactly went on with the detective’s wife and why? When was the detective changing personalities and why did it matter? Why do iMac computers appear prominently in every episode? And what exactly is the deal with the eyepatched snuff-film collector and what cult is he in and what does it have to do with anything else?

These are just some of the things I never figured out about this movie.

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Our MPD detective (above center) is both Amamiya Kazuhiko and Kobayashi Yosuke, and sometimes (?) also Nishizono Shinji. Played by Naoki Hosaka from Salaryman Kintaro. Not exactly a Miike regular, and in the interviews he said Miike barely spoke to him.

The police chief in this town is Sasayama (below, reading the source comic), played by Ren Osugi of at least ten other Miike films, six Kiyoshi Kurosawas, six Takeshi Kitanos, Twilight Samurai, and Uzumaki (he’s the dad who eats the spiral-rolls). Wow. Accordingly, he was my favorite actor in MPD Psycho.

Then we’ve got evil psychologist Isono Machi (Tomoko Nakajima of Parasite Eve), hilarious model-crafting young cop Manabe (Sadaharu Shiota), the detective’s wife Chizuko (Rieko Miura), eyepatch-bearing video collector Toguchi (Yoshinari Anan) and Sasayama’s wife or mistress or both, Mami[ko] (Fujiko, the slutty daughter in Visitor Q).

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Each episode has its own bizarre series of deaths – from a religious cult schoolgirl machine-gun killing to pregnant women’s babies being surgically replaced by telephones, to the ol’ skull-saw flower-in-the-brain (above) to spontaneous combustion. Each is somehow caused by ghostly killer Nishizono Shinji, who can pass from one person to the next through touch, telephone or internet. Everyone’s girlfriends and wives get killed, Machi turns bad, the whole police force turn their back on the cases and pretend Sasayama and Manabe don’t exist, we learn the terrible truth about Shinji and trans-gender rock star Lu-C Monostone (the terrible truth is probably not terribly important, but it’s summarized 17 minutes into the last episode if you want a refresher course later), the Gakuso Group and P-Net are mentioned from time to time, and all along, Kobayashi is turning into Amamiya and vice-versa but lead actor Naoki Hosaka’s face remains so blank that I can never tell when. Besides the iMacs, we get recurring scenes on a giant ferris wheel, black-and-white snippets of animation, regular appearances by the eyepatch guy, cool totally fake rain (sometimes glowing green, as seen below), and Lucy Monostone’s hit song “same blue sky in a strange new world”.

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I didn’t love the movie… didn’t even like it as much as I thought I would… but definitely not bad, worth watching. Makes for good rainy-day viewing. Would maybe like to see again and figure out the MPD side of things. Cheap, made-for-TV looking video lots of times, but Miike always manages to make the best of his low production values. The non-MPD cops’ scenes have a lot of humor, and Chief Sasayama ends up as a really well-defined character by the end, more so than anyone else.

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Katy didn’t watch this one. Katy would not have liked it.

by ·Comments Off on Marebito (2004, Takashi Shimizu)

Cameraman Masuoka (played by Shinya Tsukamoto, director of Tokyo Fist, Tetsuo & Haze!) is obsessed with fear. He catches a guy looking terrified in the subway stabbing himself in the eye, and Masuoka is off on a goofy adventure to find out what scared the old man to death. On his way home, he’s often annoyed by a kooky neighbor claiming to be his wife, ranting about how their daughter is missing. Masuoka can’t be bothered with this – he needs to explore the magical subterranean wonderland beneath the city, where he evades monsters long enough to find and rescue a young naked woman, who he brings home. The woman doesn’t respond to much, acts like an animal, etc. Still being harassed by the kooky neighbor, Masuoka finds a way to kill her without being detected. He probably has sex with the young woman too – if he does explicitly, I’ve blocked it out already. Either way, she of course turns out to be his daughter, and of course he murdered his wife and there you go.

The movie is shaky and ugly and lo-fi and annoying all of the time, often being filtered through our protagonist’s unsteady videocams. Except when the guy goes underground and finds his daughter – really nice looking few minutes in there. Not so bad overall I guess. From the director of all seven Ju-On The Grudge movies.

Katy didn’t watch this one. Katy wouldn’t have liked it one bit!

by ·Comments Off on The Science of Sleep (2006, Michel Gondry)

Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) is tricked by his mom into coming to Paris from Mexico to work at a calendar company, moves in next door to Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Job turns out to suck, not that he shows up for it very often, and after briefly falling for her friend, Stephane gets a thing for Stephanie. Unfortunately he lives completely in his dream world and can’t communicate with regular people, eventually has to give up on job and girl and go home.

Gondry isn’t trying to tell us that he is Stephane, since Gondry has a successful career and at least two kids, although both Gondry and Stephane make creative things out of paper and film, and both sometimes get big hands when they sleep. Just saying that dreams are great but it’s important to have a grip.

Stephane isn’t much of a romantic lead. Sometimes he screws up in an endearing way, but sometimes in a creepy, maladjusted, antisocial way. He’s determined when it comes to getting the girl or making crafts, not about holding down a job.

Movie is worth seeing of course because it’s the closest thing to a Gondry music video (mostly minus the music, though I heard a Jack White band in one scene) and that’s just what I’ve been clamoring for. Got what I deserved, and I’m loving it, though I feel the loss of writer Charlie Kaufman. Wonderful: the dreams, the one-second time-travel machine, Stephane’s co-worker, the music he composes using only the broken keys on Stephanie’s piano, the homemade feel to everything.

What did everyone else say?

Robert Keser in Bright Lights After Dark: “it charts Stéphane’s hilariously tortuous passage from awkward man-boy to still awkward man”. But does he become a man? His father dies (an important step towards manhood in the movies) but he’s still running away at the end. Or maybe these experiences in Paris will make him better understand himself in Mexico (we know nothing of his life there). Not putting Keser down: his is the best and most thoughtful review so far.

Ed Gonzalez in Slant Magazine: “Gondry, like David Lynch, makes art from the many-spindled arcs of our dreams and fantasies, but Lynch hasn’t gone so far as to suggest that our dreams are works of art themselves, our imagination a gallery of unfinished, haunted frescos. To submit to Science of Sleep becomes something strangely akin to acknowledging that our dreams make more sense than our waking life.”

Paul: “I did not like the ending much though, as both characters seemed too petulant. he kept saying desperate inappropriate things then went into her bed w/o permission.. made me uncomfy.”

by ·Comments Off on Talk To Her (2002, Almodovar)

Another Almodovar centering on accidents, suicide, bullfights and brain death on hospital beds… no organ donation discussions this time, though. Opens and closes with our protagonist seeing two different plays (there are either plays or films in every Almodovar movie that I can think of). And we get a gorgeous live performance by Caetano Veloso.

Center of the movie has Marco (Dario Grandinetti) watching over his girlfriend Lydia (Rosario Flores), and Benigno (Javier Camara) watching over his wannabe girlfriend Alicia (Leonor Watling) in a hospital. None of the main actors are Almodovar regulars; it’s a whole new cast. Geraldine Chaplin (Charlie’s daughter) plays Alicia’s dance instructor and Augustin Almodovar has another small part but I never recognize him.

So, the twists. Travel-writer Marco doesn’t realize that matador Lydia was about to leave him for another matador the day of the accident, and Alicia’s family doesn’t realize that Benigno is Alicia’s stalker until she becomes pregnant while still in the coma, and Benigno goes to jail and soon commits suicide. Seemingly happy ending as Marco meets Alicia at the play. Hell of a movie.

by ·Comments Off on Idiocracy (2006, Mike Judge)

Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph are supposed to be frozen for a year, but it turns into 500. Dax Shepard is Frito, the dummy they meet who tries to help them get home. Luke goes from being a criminal to being president (taking over from a pro wrestler). Also there’s a monster truck gladiator match, a big clock in the middle of town that blinks 12:00, and some other stuff that’s too tiring to try to remember right now. A pretty okay movie with scattered funny + clever parts, not the cult classic the AV Club seems to think it has/will become.

2015 edit: I was wrong. Cult classic!

2017 edit: Watched this again, for the final time, now that it has mostly come true.