Category: likey

I’ve praised this director before, but I’ll bump him up again, having just watched Running on Karma, a neatly-strange little mix of genres that plays out quite enjoyably. In a nutshell: bodybuilder/male-stripper (Andy Lau, in a muscle suit) is a former Buddhist monk and sees karma, which gets him entangled with a police investigation. Yes.

It takes its notions of karma and the pleasurable protocol of action sequences seriously, yet its tone avoids that kind of unblinking engagement in genre or tone that other Hong Kong directors (like Woo) sometimes fall into–the conventions are, when you’re being melodramatic, play it over-the-top melodramatic, and the same when being funny, or romantic, or…. To, on the other hand, has this lightness of touch–while never mocking or ironic, his films also dance across generic boundaries so that, thinking you’re watching a comedy, something fairly violent happens, and vice versa. Besides the pleasures of Lau (I’ll go ahead and say it–as charismatic as and far more interesting than Chow Yun Fat), and the textbook beauty of To’s action choreography, you get a surefooted spinning that meets and disrupts our expectations.

So check out Karma, or even better, my favorite The Mission, or any of the many films of his Netflix carries. I mean you, Howell and Chakladar. These are damn fine action films.

Jeff and I saw this together last night. We walked in as fans of director Michael Haneke, and walked out with that adoration confirmed, if not exuberantly so–I think it was a strong, smart, challenging film, if not quite the equal of his finest (Time of the Wolf). So it is highly recommended, and I think we both want to puzzle over its objectives and accomplishments.

That said, it is also a film best discussed after viewing, and I don’t want to disrupt any of the pleasures of the text by giving away this or that–you can’t really start addressing without naming, so I’ll avoid explicit spoilers but can’t sidestep certain specifics. Continue reading Cache/Hidden

just saw sally potter’s Yes and i’m fairly blown away. i’m surprised no one has posted on it yet (though the ever reliable jeff mentioned it in an earlier post!). this is my first sally potter, so i won’t be able to put it in perspective, but what a film! it is decidedly striking, for one, that she should have chosen to have the whole damn thing in rhymed iambic pentameters, and that she wrote every damn word herself. since the delivery is not as crisp as if it had been on stage, and since a fair number of the actors have regional or foreign accents, i assume potter knew we would not be able to get everything. but the two leads, joan allen and simon abkarian, do a pretty splendid job of portraying their characters’ emotions, so whatever you miss in the diction comes through in the body language. Continue reading Yes!

We watched Wedding Crashers yesterday, and looking back Jeff had mentioned it positively lo those long Summer months ago, but nary a word since. I thought it was fine–a few fine laughs here and there, but less interesting than 40-Year-Old Virgin and far far less funny than Anchorman. (In fact, when Will Ferrell makes the inevitable cameo at Crashers‘ end, he made me laugh almost harder than the rest of the film. Which perhaps invites a bit of self- and world-categorizing about the kinds of people who find Anchorman‘s surreal silliness funnier than the more conventional romance-bound comedies cited above, but:)

But I digress: I want to return to a point about Vaughn that Jeff made: he is indeed a god. Continue reading Vince

Well, I did see ‘Underworld: Evolution’ and it is a worthy successor to the first, though with some of the familiar mistakes of sequels. The main problem is that the plot is horribly convoluted. The first movie had a fairly stripped down plot which revolved around hybridity between vampires and werewolves. This second movie introduces two additional kinds of hybridity. A complicated and incoherent plot is not necessarily a problem because you don’t go see this kind of movie for the plot (what is the Bill Hicks line about porn films? “I don’t think acting and plot can carry these movies, folks; I’d leave in those fucking scenes”), but an awful lot of exposition is needed to explain every twist, each accompanied by poor Kate Beckinsale looking horrified yet determined. There are also too many flashbacks. It helps to have seen the first movie.
Continue reading Hairy, Bitey Things

I watched Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha last night after reading a lot of accolades (particularly A.O. Scott in the Times and the Slate end-of-the-year critic’s discussion which Reynolds referenced a couple of weeks ago). This film is a stripped to the bones, no-budget portrait of twentysomething post-graduates trying to figure it all out (work, love, freedom, obligation). During the first twenty minutes I was put off by the amateurish quality of the filmmaking, but the performances were believable, the writing honest and unaffected and there was nary a note of hipster irony (these kids aren’t overeducated slackers spouting off the greatest hits of Heidegger and Nietzsche and McLuhan) so I stuck with it . . . and I’m glad I did. Funny Ha Ha is unassuming—a comic work of “slice of life” naturalism in the tradition of John Cassavetes and John Sayles (the closest I can come to finding an appropriate analogue is Sayles’ The Return of the Secaucus Seven). Bujalski’s film develops real poignancy over its 90+ minutes offering up a genuinely believable collection of psychologically complex (and confused) characters who both embrace and resist the randomness of human existence in order to defend themselves from the encroaching responsibilities of adulthood while consciously moving in that very direction. My only criticism concerns the way Bujalski makes invisible the very integuments of class privilege which provides these kids the time and space to work it all out. Worth a look.

i just saw two amazing little films on DVD, both from the Land of Quirk. One is Dirty Filthy Love, the other is Me and You and Everyone We Know. Dirty Filthy Love is neither dirty nor filthy, though it is about love. what it is really about, though, is serious OCD coupled with serious tourette’s syndrome. the story is about mahk (mark, really, but it’s a british movie), a promising young architect who, in his thirties, experiences such a worsening of his OCD and tourette’s that his wife leaves him and he is laid off from his job in a trendy firm. one little absurdity of this made-for-tv film is that no one — his wife, his best mate, his doctor — is able to diagnose mark’s rather textbook tourette’s. two facts about tourette’s: it is possible for it to get really bad when one is in one’s thirties (i learned this from the fact that no one amongst the various sufferers on imdb.com pointed this out as unlikely), and it is only a small minority of tourette’s sufferers who are compelled to swear. Continue reading quirky little things