Category: well, okay

persepolis

we can’t be the only ones who’ve seen this. it came highly recommended by our friends jane and karen in boulder, not to mention the majority of reliable film critics, but i fear i found it a little disappointing. which is not to say i disliked it. the animation is wonderful, and a refreshing change from the pixar-realism of american animation, or for that matter the magical miyazaki style. however, the narrative was a little flat. the film may just be inheriting the graphic novel’s lack of thematic complexity (i have not read it), but i thought there was no real interesting connection made between the coming of age story and the potted history of the iranian revolution. by which i mean that the two were just there together, and neither illuminated or shaded the other in an interesting way. i appreciated the film (and the graphic novel’s, i presume) resistance to the mapping of personal growth onto a journey of salvation to the west, which is all too common a feature of the genre, but it would have been more interesting if the film paid more attention to questions of gender within the iranian revolution. from the little i know of it, i understand that older women, especially from the non-westernized classes were a large, public part of the revolution. and, of course, class itself is mostly elided here. i don’t wish to suggest that the story of a westernized, (presumably) upper-middle class kid cannot be the central story of a critique of the iranian revolution, but it needed to be situated a little more. why does she go to french school in tehran in the first place? how does her family have contacts in vienna and paris? (and, as sunhee asked, why is the film in french to begin with?) how does her immediate family survive in a time when all their radical friends are disappearing?

anyone else?

I’m Not There

Caught an early screening of the new Todd Haynes film tonight. I’m thinking I should have taken a few notes. Haynes is deconstructing the bio-pic from every angle while urgently demystifying the mythologies swirling around a mercurial artist like Bob Dylan . . . and it mostly works, up to a point, though the thing is messy and insidery (hell, I have no idea who Sara Lownds is). It didn’t help sitting in an audience full of Dylan purists (it is Minnesota after all) who hung on every slippery yet iconic image Haynes was willing to offer up. Still, I’m not going to call it a mess nor do I think it is overtly intellectual. As you’ve probably heard, Haynes cast six actors to take on his vision of “Bob Dylan;” there’s the eleven-year-old black kid singin’ the blues and riding the trains, the twenty-year-old poet (Dylan as Rimbaud), the intensely politicized folk singer turned Christian evangelical, the plugged-in rock-n-roll asshole, the celebrity movie star misogynist, and the runaway cowboy hiding out from the law. Variations on Alan Ginsberg, Jean Baez, Lownds, the Beatles, and Edie Sedgwick also move in and out of the scenes. Haynes lovingly quotes Fellini, D.A. Pennebaker, Godard, seventies style talking-head documentaries, Sam Peckinpah, Conrad Hall, and others. Ultimately, the film appears to be an insightful meditation on race, power, identity, celebrity, America, war, sex, conformity, freedom, etc., but mostly the film sounds a discordantly pessimistic note as it interrogates the notion that any artist can and/or should be held responsible for advocating social justice and inciting social change. Haynes’ Dylan is a supremely narcissistic chameleon unwilling and perhaps unable to speak for any generation. If you want to keep a low profile, never create anything one of the Dylans remarks to the camera. Embedded within the act of creation are the seeds of destruction . . . and it’s the destruction, man . . . it’s the destruction that’s blowing in the wind. The times, they don’t seem to be changing one damn bit.

Knocked Up

Nobody’s posted on this one yet so I’ll give it a go. It is really hard to dislike this movie, though I did feel a bit let down after the comic delights of The 40 Year Old Virgin. The laughs are generous, the pacing a bit sluggish and the premise is ludicrous at best. Basically, a hot girl picks up a beta-male, they have sex, he repells her with his immaturity the following morning, and eight weeks later she discovers she’s pregnant. Fair enough; high concept. But then something odd happens. The script asks us to believe these two should automatically fall in love because there’s a baby on the way. Sure, you go to a rom-com for happy endings and without some conflict the climatic scenes lack proper generic decorum, but Knocked Up asks us to believe that two characters who have had one somewhat unfortunate evening and are about as compatible as cheese and chalk would be holding hands and picking out gynaecologists together as if that’s what happens. Basically, I wanted these two to fall for each other despite themselves (as if by accident after a series of carefully scripted scenes in which major obstacles and ah ha moments merge into something fresh and believable, love finds a way), and I guess that’s what the film thinks it’s doing but it is not. That being said, I would like to return to this idea of the film’s generosity. Continue reading Knocked Up

Strangers With Candy / X-Men 3

I find it kind of amusing that there was some talk about the trailer for X-Men 3, but no talk of the movie itself. I didn’t see the first two, but I come across chunks of them on TV so often that it would now be annoying to try to watch the entire films now. I’d been told the second one was quite good and the third one bad, but at least I hadn’t seen 15 minute sections of the third one over and over, so I rented it for no good reason. Continue reading Strangers With Candy / X-Men 3

Superman‘s Big Fat Crying Jag

Well… I didn’t hate it.

The first half-hour, forty-five minutes has some nice touches. As in many of his big-budget extravagaction films, Bryan Singer displays a real fondness and talent for the character-driven, carefully-staged, small-scale suspenseful witty moments… even as such films invariably stomp all over such smaller pleasures, looking to supersede the sequence with CGItis.

What works: a lot of small character details and witty side-ways moments (again, mostly in that first third of the film). One particularly good sequence involving a henchman, a defiant Lois Lane, and her sickly little boy, the boy and h-man playing “Body and Soul” on the piano together. (It’s a really great bit.) Spacey, occasionally. Posey, less occasionally.
Continue reading Superman‘s Big Fat Crying Jag

ringo lam

my recent mike-inspired johnnie to festival has spurred me to make my way more methodically through the films of other major hong kong directors. and so full contact last night. the only other films by lam that i’ve seen are prison on fire and city on fire. i think i liked both of those–though all i remember of the prison one is a rare scene of the protagonist of a film taking a noisy dump. i was expecting to like full contact a lot (i’ve heard a lot about it) but ended up mostly unmoved. yes, it has a lot of great action scenes, and chow yun-fat is as magnetic as ever (bad haircut and all) but the action and violence are of an almost decadent variety. there is a more realistic and cynical edge to it than in most of woo, and there’s something to be said for that. but the film tries in the end to have it both ways–chow is apparently a more chivalrous thief/killer than simon yam’s villain–and it just doesn’t work. i think i prefer both woo’s over-the-top, operatic explorations of codes of masculinity and to’s more off-kilter explorations of genre. and the portrayal of women in this film, and of the queer psychopathic villain are really quite deplorable.

are there other films by lam that you would recommend? or is anyone interested in defending this one?

nizhalkkuthu (shadow kill)

this is adoor gopalakrishnan’s most recent film. adoor is one of the most lauded figures in india’s new cinema, and, of course, all but unknown outside of the film-festival circuit outside india. as far as i can tell, this is the only one of his films that is available on dvd–as part of some global cinema initiative (see comment 8 here). i hope more of his films will become available. this partly because while this film is interesting enough, and certainly quite beautiful to look at, it isn’t close to his best. it is about a hangman in the colonial era state of travancore (the film is set in 1940) and his spiritual/physical crisis around his work. there’s some dwelling on the ritual role of the hangman in the community–he doubles as a healer (his proximity to death making him closer to the goddess kali)–and some passing references to social justice/injustice, but it just didn’t all come together for me. in a director’s statement on the dvd adoor writes that this is a film to be understood after it is seen, not during, so maybe i need to think about it more, or maybe watch it again.

i would recommend it anyway (netflix has it). i’ll also repeat my earlier recommendations of the early films of shyam benegal (which netflix also has). as far as i can tell, no one but jeff has taken these up.

four brothers

i watched this a couple of nights ago. i suppose it is entertaining enough, despite some casual racism and misogyny (which coincide in the characterization of a latina character) and a plot that increasingly strains credulity. marky mark is a compelling presence, andre 3000 holds his own, terence howard is fine, and chiwetel ejiofor hides his accent well–once again, why do brits do so much better at american accents than yanks do at brit ones?

more interesting would be a discussion of the film’s racial politics vis a vis the career of its director, john singleton. i’m not feeling up to it now but this is roughly the film’s plot: a saintly, old white woman who apparently lives in the ‘hood in detroit is gunned down; her four adopted sons, 2 white, 2 black, go about figuring out why and getting revenge. the bad guys are almost all black, from gangbangers to organized gangsters to corrupt politicians (there is one corrupt white cop as well) . interestingly, there’s some class issues thrown in as well but in a half-baked kind of way. the pleasures here are mostly those of very macho banter among the four brothers, marky mark’s believable inhabitation of his character, and some great shoot ’em up scenes.

Savages (1975)

I’d always looked at the DVD sitting there, especially with Michael O’Donoghue’s name on it. So odd. I mean, it’s a Merchant-Ivory film, co-written by O’Donoghue (!), that refers to the said Savages – on the DVD box yet, as “the Mud People.” So it’s intriguing if nothing else.

After the outcries of the indignities in King Kong and stuff about the Noble Natives, I thought this just might be the antidote. For those who don’t know, O’Donoghue was part of National Lampoon as its regulars morphed into SNL and SCTV. He was a main writer on SNL and sometimes performer (Wolverine, Steel Needles in the Eyes), but other than Scrooged, he had precious few screenplays to his credit. Continue reading Savages (1975)

muscles from brussels

there was a period in the late 80s and early 90s when only one person in our circle of friends in sector 21, noida had a vcr and a flat devoid of parents where we could watch movies, get drunk and behave badly (not always in that order). unfortunately, the vcr and the flat belonged to the biggest and loudest member of the group, who also had appalling taste, and as a result we all became experts in such genres as thai kickboxing movies and also in the careers of such lumniaries as jean-claude van damme. i think it is misplaced nostalgia for these misspent years that drives my continued obsession with van damme–though there is also my general obsession with crap action movies (as documented on this blog). all this as preamble to the admission that i watched nowhere to run on ondemand last night.
Continue reading muscles from brussels