Month: June 2006

frisoli, er, ribisi

the 2003 i love your work is nothing special. it is apparently this guy’s adam goldberg’s life work — he wrote it, directed it, produced it, edited it, wrote the score for it, he did everything but star in it. evidently adam had something to get off his chest, a certain, bleak, obsessive view of hollywood and celebrity. i seem to have noticed before that it is not rare for first-time directors to do films about hollywood. is it true? in any case, you have a sense with this guy that he’s working out some personal issues about hollywood. the film is original and watchable enough: it’s edited well, the colors are very good, the real and unreal sequence blend nicely. yet it took us three days to watch it. make of it what you will.

i didn’t want to talk much about the film, as about giovanni ribisi, who i find a sweetly charismatic actor. he’s really good in this. he plays a celebrity who goes nuts — literally. he can’t take it any more. surprisingly, there’s few to no drugs in this movie, so ribisi has to do all the going-nuts work inside. it has to seep out of his eyes and his gestures and the way he cocks his head. i think he’s very effective. his face is incredibly mobile and he can go from scary-looking to childish and sweet very convincingly. i never noticed him much, not even when he starred in the mediocre heaven, but here he comes into his own and shines.

Egoyan – Where the Truth Lies

Atom Egoyan’s latest film, which seems to be quite far removed, in plot at least, from his previous film, Ararat. If a few words could accurately sum up Egoyan’s obsessions and themes, it would be "where the truth lies" which would make this a nice opportunity to look back on Canada’s second best memory obsessed director, except I’m not feeling up for a retorspective.

There are some big problems with Where the Truth Lies; among them the characters, the acting, the amateurish direction, and the plot. None of these are beyond redemption, but parts of each are weak enough to end up being unsatisfying.

Continue reading Egoyan – Where the Truth Lies

Val Lewton

Kris and I watched The 7th Victim last evening, a spooky noir-ish story about a young woman trying to track down her missing sister, and runs into a secretive group of (as opposed to a bunch of showboat) Satanists. Which sounds sensationalized, and for a film from the ’40s portends some obvious schlocky “evil” (pronounced, a la Kevin McDonald, EEEE-villllll). It ain’t; like Lewton’s other productions, this is spooky, intelligent. Continue reading Val Lewton

Save the Green Planet

I’m not even sure how, or what, to recommend–but a flat assertion that this is worth seeing won’t do.

The plot: a young man believes that aliens have infiltrated corporate culture, and are carrying out experiments on the Earth. To save all, the hero kidnaps a big-league asshole CEO and starts torturing the guy to get him to contact his e.t. cohorts and stop the destruction. The film begins in strange silly slapstick land and creeps, oddly, into serial killer territory; our hero is, unsurprisingly, a bit whacked, but a dark and often moving backstory turns the film into a kind of psychological thriller. With slapstick. And…

…well, genre’s hard to nail down. The director (Jun-hwan Jeong) has energy and style to burn, and while the film’s plot may suggest z-picture camp it’s done with A-level aesthetics. And, yeah, it actually has some emotional heft. It didn’t fully work for me, or it wasn’t the 5-star dazzle I’d hoped, but I was never less than engaged and always off-guard. Aren’t too many films that so ceaselessly, slyly tangle with genre. (‘Though I’m beginning to think that the great stuff coming out of South Korea has a lock on this hybridized aesthetic.) And now let this post linger without comment for years to come…..

Chappelle

Block Party is just plain fun. From the minute the menu loaded–a great clip of Chappelle, bullhorn in hand, yelling at a marching band and dancing–you get invited in; the sense of play makes this one of the best concert films I’ve ever seen, and I’m not even a particular fan of any of the musical acts (admiring all, but only really digging the Fugees on my own time). Like The Last Waltz, I ended up loving the performances because of so much context, so clear a sense of the performers’ joy, despite my prior disinterest in the musicians.

The movie does a wonderful job capturing the infectious energy of Chappelle, intercutting performances with clips of Dave preparing the site, encouraging folks from his hometown in Ohio to come (with golden tickets and bus) to the show in Bed-Stuy, goofing with the site’s residents. The film slips in sideways a pretty hard-edged critique (of racism, of politics, of the relationship between those two and celebrity) while remaining never less than party-minded; in fact, and this is what I’ve always loved about Chappelle (and separates his challenges from a comic like Sarah Silverman) is that sense of invitation. It’s a party, it’s silly… even as his material (and the musicians’ performances) remains explicitly political and incisive.

He has a fantastic joke about the D.C. snipers, that he slips in after a serious discussion of the pressures placed on black performers who are celebrated by predominantly white audiences (I won’t give it away) . . . and the joke conveys yet complicates, affirms while not simply asserting the problems discussed: the joke flirts with racism, confuses those of us in the audience just marked by the discussion as a problem. Great, great stuff. I want more Chappelle, and I’m also mightily impressed by Michel Gondry’s work directing.

the hills have eyes

Speaking of gore, I watched The Hills Have Eyes remake last night. I’m not much of a horror fan but this creepy, fucked up, gruesome and grisly shocker is quite good. It’s all in the writing, I think. The main characters are unusually believable, honestly drawn, sympathetic even (you actually feel a bit sad when certain characters die). I guess that shouldn’t surprise me but it does. The violence, of course, is ugly and graphic but the film is well shot and edited and rarely overplays its hand. While not everyone’s cup of tea, this is worth the rental. The first act is probably as good as any horror film I’ve ever seen. It starts to go a bit downhill from there but don’t they all. Oh, and as a nod to big Al, the film has its own tidy little eco-political subtext that the former next President of the United States would probably appreciate.

One more …

I gotta give one great big shout for the fabulous (in all senses) Kamikaze Girls: the pop-culture-saturated story of an improbable friendship between Momoko (Kyoko Fukada), a young woman striving like Wilde toward a “rococo” way of being in frilly Lolita-inspired dresses, and Ichigo/Ichiko (Anna Tsuchiya), a young woman striving to be a Wild One via a tough-grrl Yanki way of being.

The movie is a joy to watch, moving through flashbacks and fantasy sequences of exuberant playfulness, even presenting one sequence in cartoons (to keep “you kids” attentive, Momoko tells the camera). It’s one big sugary/drug-rush of a film, but not–for all that–simplistic or stupid; it avoids all the expected cliches (especially the seemingly-inevitable breakdown of female friendship into hetero courtship). And best of all it revels in the intelligence and agency of its protagonists–not suckered into prefab style but slyly finding in the trash of consumer culture means to make something of their own. But blah blah: it’s just a blast.

Clubland: Black Narcissus

So, many of us wanted to see a film at something closer to the same time, to get a collective discussion together. I chose Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Narcissus to start us off, and therefore I pitch at you a few, by-no-means-inclusive reactions and readings, intended merely as jumpstart: Continue reading Clubland: Black Narcissus

L’argent

I saw this French film, Le Souffle, about a delinquent teenage boy abandoned by his father and packed off by his mother to the countryside to live and work on his uncle’s farm. The film’s ability to conjure up the hormonally-induced fever dreams of adolescence (an uneasy mix of primitive violent impulses, rural ennui and sexual desire) is quite palpable and the black and white photography was nice to look at. Anyway, don’t go searching for the film as it is only available on a Region 2 disc, but I bring it up because some reviewers compared the film to the work of Robert Bresson (I’d probably argue Jean Cocteau seeing as the film drifts into surreal, often homoerotic territory but that’s another story). I had never seen a Bresson film and while picking up a novel at the library, I came across a DVD for Bresson’s, L’argent, which was released in 1983 and was Bresson’s final effort. I decided to check it out and see what all the fuss was about. I’m glad I did as this is a terrific yet brutal condemnation of human capriciousness. If you have seen any of Michael Haneke’s films—particularly 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance or Code Unknown—it will be self-evident that Haneke studied L’argent very closely. Continue reading L’argent

Crossing the Bridge: The Music of Istanbul – Akin

This doc was directed by Fatih Akin, who also directed the much-praised Head-On. (I have a borrowed copy of Head-On at home, but havent seen it yet.) Akin is a German national of Turkish descent, and the film is largely directed at a German audience. The narrator is Alexander Hacke of Einsturzende Neubauten, whose love of unusual music shows through, and he’s a scruffy presence that seems at home among the cig’-smokin Istanbul musicians.

In a well-paced 90 minutes, Akin discovers 15 musicians or groups, from drug addicted buskers to tuxedo wearing ballroom singers whose peak of popularity was 40 years ago. Continue reading Crossing the Bridge: The Music of Istanbul – Akin