Month: November 2009

Thirst is the story of a priest who becomes a vampire. In the latest offering from Chan-wook Park, Kanh-ho Song (justly praised by Mike for his last role in The Good, The Bad, the Weird) plays the priest who is resurrected as a vampire after volunteering to be in a medical experiment. Resurrection is appropriate because the priest struggles with the sins he is forced to commit in his new life, and is even worshiped by a small cult. He begins an affair with the wife of a childhood friend, played by a superb Ok-vin Kim, and she rapidly becomes entranced with his vampirism and indulges a taste for blood with far fewer inhibitions than the priest. Mayhem, and blood galore, ensue.

This is good, in places very good, but it doesn’t rival the Vengeance trilogy for raw emotional heft and powerful imagery. There are some long sections in the middle of the movie, particularly a subplot about a watery haunting, that distract from the central narrative and make the movie longer than it needs to be. But the last half hour is near perfect as the priest tenderly tries to tame his slaughterous lover, and ultimately finds a way to end the bloodshed. Near the end the priest finds a way to disgust his followers, and thus end the cult, and as the camera follows him leaving the encampment, we see a small smile playing on his face as knows he has made some small amends for his sins. And once Park is able to expand his palette beyond dark interiors and nighttime, the richness of the imagery becomes breathtaking.

Certainly, if you want an antidote to the version of love and vampires in New Moon, this is well worth watching.

We could probably define independent American cinema–in broad, unsustainable strokes–via a couple of longstanding styles.

One tastes like sadness, call it Lyric Despair, where we have somewhat stoic, even silent characters suffering under psychic and social burdens which emerge through the course of the film, obliquely. LD films eschew dialogue, or boil it down to improvisatory snippets that are hard to untangle — they capture an almost-desperate inability to communicate. Yet the images–trains rolling along, the protagonist in shadows backlit by a brilliantly-shaded gray sky, the cluttered composition of dirty city streets–are lovely, evocative. Expressionist. Lance Hammer’s moving, thoughtful, and (yup) lovely Ballast is an LD.

The other recipe relies more on handheld images, seems grainy almost as a badge of honor, full of close-ups in apartments and hotel rooms and small spaces, the emphasis almost on found dialogue. Lots of talking. Talking talking talking — mumbling, as so many critics have noted — full of ums and pauses. I don’t like “mumblecore,” but I’ve got no good substitute. The inability to communicate here becomes an obsessive attention to the need to communicate. Images are almost after-thought; the camera’s incisive sociological eye unconcerned with composition, instead intent on community and identity and behavior. Lynn Shelton’s very funny, occasionally and obliquely moving, and often incisive Humpday is one of these.

See ’em both. Continue reading Two flavors of indie realism

2012: is really pretty bad. Not really bad, just predictably bad. You will know the basic storyline: solar flares superheat neutrinos which destabilize the earth’s crust setting off earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis. The earth is more of less destroyed in the process. Meanwhile our planet’s leaders race against time to build a bunch of arks to ensure the survival of the species (plus assorted giraffes, elephants etc.), or at least a reasonable cross-section of the wealthiest and cutest members of the species. Amongst the mayhem we follow frustrated fiction writer, John Cusak and his family, and geophysicist Chiwetel Ejiofer. Continue reading Disaster Movies

I’ve seen all of these but seven and cannot disagree with the number one entry. What are your thoughts? Was really pleased to see This is England at number thirteen (ok, it is a British newspaper, but nobody seemed willing to take me up on Meadow’s excellent little film–Chris I’m pointing my finger at you–so I gloat in hopes you will queue it up). Seems like a good place to start thinking about the decade even if the glories of 2010 are still yet to be determined . . .

Il Divo is the imagined story of Giulio Andreotti’s last decade in the public eye, beginning with his selection as prime minister for the last time in 1989 (he was prime minster seven times in the 1970s and 1980w) and ending with the start of his trial for being an associate of the Mafia in 1996. It skirts the boundary between fact and fiction by implying Andreotti’s guilt for a wide range of crimes, including several murders, of which he was accused but never formally convicted, and for the vast majority of the dialogue, much of it spoken in private conversations by Toni Servillo, who plays Andreotti.

This film is stunning, not so much as an account of political intrigue, though there is plenty of that, but as a portrait of the interior life of Andreotti. He is haunted throughout the film – literally – by Aldo Moro, a rival in the 1970s, in whose murder Andreotti was complicit. Servillo portrays Andreotti as utterly still, at the center of a world that is collapsing around him. The film is beautifully shot – scenes of a police escort moving in slow motion as Andreotti walks to church, a string of rapid-fire murders that rivals the climactic scene of The Godfather, Andreotti motionless while journalists clamor around him, drenching rain as his bodyguards try to open a car door – and the eclectic soundtrack (classical, opera, Italian and German pop, American alternative) serves to heighten the back-and-forth movement between realism and surrealism in the film. There is a gripping “confession” in which Andreotti sits alone in a darkened room and lists his crimes while justifying them. Even setting aside the compelling subject-matter, the film’s construction and execution are brilliant.

Certainly the best film I have seen this year. I’d love to hear Gio’s take on it.