Month: May 2005

Lemony

Got around to watching Lemony Snicket’s long title. Did someone post about that previously?

Well…. I am not going to hash around much with the film overall; it sort of works, sort of doesn’t. I think at age 12 I’d have been in love, but I’m not sure at 37 I could get past the crude stitching of slapstick to dry bitter irony.

But my god it looked good. Without aping Gorey, the film’s production (and the animation on the dvd, and in the film’s credits) was equally baroque, brutal, wondrous. I think it’s worth seeing if just to revel in that look ….

indian regional and “art” cinema

the magazine outlook is celebrating its 10 year anniversary with a series of articles on indian film, 1995-2005. the entire issue is here. one of the more interesting articles is this one which makes the case that while bollywood has swamped all other indian cinema in marketing terms, excellent regional and parallel cinema continues to thrive. after summing up the dominance of bollywood chatterjee writes:

Continue reading indian regional and “art” cinema

Male hysteria –> Stewart –> Hitchcock

(continuing from here.)

Stewart’s an emotional wreck in much of Hitchcock’s stuff. While Cary Grant maintains a kind of icy hauteur through the thick/thin of those thrillers, Stewart bubbles with barely-repressed confusion and turmoil. So–my wrongheaded snipe about melodramatics is completely, thoroughly wrong.

(I read an interesting little tidbit about Stewart yesterday in Jonathan Lethem’s collection, _The Disappointment Artist_–which I can’t recommend highly enough as a model of smart, personal criticism about art. He was noting how a biographer of Stewart had wondered how the “gentle” actor of early pictures turned, after his service in WWII, into the dark troubled soul of later pictures. And Stewart’s war record was, in part, sealed–protected as confidential. The biographer wondered if Stewart had been part of the Dresden bombing raid….)

There’s a project in here somewhere: Action films as male hysteria.

Shiri (and action-melodrama)

Shitty.

You liked this, Arnab? The camera did so many 360 turns I thought they had it rigged to a toilet. Okay, it wasn’t awful. But it wasn’t good, either. I don’t like it when there’s so much crying in an action movie. Suck it up, you fuckers. Sublimate your sadness in a good old-fashioned ass-whupping, like the rest of us.

I far prefer the action of “Nowhere to Hide” and the thriller politics of “J.S.A.” (and Park’s later films–“Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and “OldBoy”–are even better).

“Robot Stories” & Race

Anyone else seen this? Or heard of it? Low-budget anthology, all circling around “robots” introduced into an archetypal human experience (birth, love, and two about death). It’s a fine small film; smart, funny, compassionate. My favorite segment is called “The Robot Fixer,” and a distant mother grapples with her son’s comatose state by fixing up his collection of cheap quasi-Transformer toys.

And, okay, I admit: the film caught my eye first for its geeky premise, then for its almost entirely non-white cast. This cast is quite good, but it is striking–a sad commentary either on my own habits as a viewer or on the state of American film, or both–that I was/am surprised that a film so careful to cast predominantly Asian-American leads never mentions race, doesn’t bother to define race as central to the stories, doesn’t even hint at the ‘difference’ from mainstream cinema.

So my question out to all: is it racist to read the “robot” focus as in some way allegorical, or at least analogical, to the representation and experience of non-white racial identity in America?

Or–how about this: is this an “Asian-American” film? Debate.

Or don’t. Regardless, it’s a good flick.

Extremes

Recommended (pretty highly):

An anthology of … well, more “Disturbing” than Horror films: “3 Extremes,” by Chan-wook Park, Takashi Miike, and Fruit Chan. None will completely astound you–the plots are a little thin in each case, suffering from an anthology-movie mundaneness–but they each are quite impressive in catching a tone (or, in Chan & Park, a variety of shifting tones) with gorgeous compositions. They also all have lots of cool crackling squishy overly-loud sound effects, to highlight things being eaten, ghosts moving broken necks, etc. I wish I had a foley artist following me around all day. A foley artist following me around would make me appreciate the little things in life.

Beats me where you’ll find this. But if/when it ever pops up, check it out. It made me want to find some stuff by Chan (whom I don’t know), and it will hopefully encourage you to check out some stuff by Miike and Park, both of whom deserve your attention.

kinsey

another film recommended by well-known deviant james kincaid. and it is easy to see why kinky mcperv likes it so much: it takes the salacious, sex-mongering of a deviant and presents it as valid “research”. which, of course, is what kincaid himself does (once again see comment #4 here).

actually, “kinsey” is an excellent movie and i recommend it highly. directed by bill condon, who made the excellent “gods and monsters” some years ago, this is what every biopic should aspire to: an adult presentation of a complicated subject that neither canonizes him nor shoehorns his story into some existing template of well-meaning saint/savant triumphing against conventional morality. i don’t want to say too much about the content until more people have seen it, but i will say that i have not seen so many strong perfomances in one movie in a while. there isn’t a false note here: laura linney and peter saarsgard are excellent in the main supporting performances; in the smaller parts, timothy hutton and chris o’donnell do a lot with little; and even tim curry and the tragically underemployed oliver platt restrain themselves. at the center of all of this is a great performance by liam neeson–this is the kind of performance that makes you forget that there is “acting” going on.

watch it.

Rock Documentaries

Saw End of the Century a few weeks ago. I enjoyed it, but it was mildly depressing. Did everyone in that band hate each other, or what? The Clash documentary (Westway to the World) is excellent.

Jerry Lewis sings The Ramones, live on the Champs-Elysee: Gabba gabba wha-HOY!!!!

Welcome back, Michael.

a mixed bag

recently in the dvd player: “the alamo”, “zakhm”, “hum dil de chuke sanam” and “swades”. two pieces of crap, and two decent but overly worthy efforts. crap first:

“the alamo”: uninvolving, pointless, trivial. even something jingoistic would have been preferable to this lifeless mess. the sad thing is that it seems to think it is a clever movie which has interesting things to say about mythmaking and nationmaking. it does not. the only plus i can think of: i finally know what a bowie knife looks like. other than that this is an exercise in costume design. the guy playing santa anna chews some scenery but only half-heartedly.

“hum dil de chuke sanam”: i’m ambivalent about reviewing bad bollywood films here since most of you are unlikely to watch them unless i recommend them very highly (and of the ones i have recommended mike’s seen “company” and that’s about it i think). so i’m not going to spend too much time on this except to say that no one exoticizes india like indians themselves and that this film may have been written by a particularly stupid 12 year old. the liberalization of the indian economy in the 90s saw the rise of both a big spending leisure class and the expression of a complicated hindu chauvinism. this film, like many other 90s blockbusters, speaks to both–on the one hand providing aspirational fantasies and on the other, in the guise of critiquing it, repackaging patriarchal tradition.

Continue reading a mixed bag