Day: November 20, 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