Vengeance is Mine

Shohei Imamura’s film is technically a true-crime story, documenting the capture (and flashbacking through the crimes) of a sociopathic lowlife in the mid-sixties. Enokizu (Ken Ogata) is something of a smiling cipher, who seems one thing in early scenes, a stonefaced whackjob, then emerges from scene to scene in ever complicating fashion–coming across as something of a naif, then a dumb thug, then a slick con man, and so on–and by the end of the film I hadn’t some simple narrative of his motivations but a rich, unsettling, and ambiguous portrait which never quite explains or resolves his actions.

Worse–or, aesthetically, better–the film’s portrait of the contemporary Japanese social milieu is equally unsettling. Enokizu’s violence and rage is echoed everywhere Continue reading Vengeance is Mine

xala

to mark the recent death of ousmane sembene, i moved xala to the top of our netflix queue, and we watched it last night. it is based on his own novel (which, by the way, was one of two texts fredric jameson referred to in his notorious argument about all third world fiction comprising nationalist allegories). apparently, sembene moved from writing to film so as to be able to reach a larger audience than that of elite literary culture in senegal. keeping this in mind may be useful in making sense of the film’s aesthetic which is a blend of modes: beginning with a satirical parable and then moving in and out of a realist framing of events if not of psychology (by which i mean that character development, motivations, consistency etc. are not major concerns). all of this may makes it sound avant garde as opposed to populist, but i suspect that what is also being utilized is the structure and logic of folk forms. not being familiar with senegalese narrative traditions i am unable to confirm–though there do seem to be elements which bear such a reading out: a group of peasants and beggars who function as a kind of chorus and then make a substantial narrative intervention at the end, occasional comic interludes etc..

or perhaps that’s a multicultural copout on my part. but it did make me think of the international reputation of the great bengali director, ritwik ghatak, whose films, unlike ray’s did not fall into either a recognizable universal humanism in their thematics nor structurally resemble the international (really, european) art film–and who consequently is not as well known as ray. his films too often featured a realist frame sutured with the logic and structural elements of other forms, particularly folk theater.
Continue reading xala

An Unreasonable Man

This documentary about Ralph Nader takes its title from a line by George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him… The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.” That gives a flavor of the central dilemma facing any assessment of Nader.

The documentary is straightforward enough: archival footage and interviews. Nader himself is interviewed several times, and prominence goes to the so-called “Nader’s Raiders” who worked with him in the early days. The first hour charts Nader’s career as a consumer advocate from the early conflict with GM and the formation of his “Raiders” through the highpoint of the Carter years when Nader was largely responsible for some of the most important consumer protection legislation of the late 20th century, to the exasperation of the Reagan, Bush I and Clinton years, by which time American business had learned how to fight and win the public relations battles and Nader watches his legacy slowly dismantled. The second hour covers the period since 2000 and Nader’s two presidential bids.
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flag of our fathers

has anyone seen this?

heart in the right place, i guess — heroes schmeroes, PTSD, the banal brutality of war. but why oh why do american directors have to spell everything out so damn explicitly? and why oh why do they feel a need to give us the same damn soundtrack every single time?

i wish i hadn’t seen it.

john from cincinnati

so, this is the new hbo show, the one milch lost interest in deadwood for. most critics have savaged it. partly for this reason, and partly because i wasn’t ready to go straight from the sopranos finale to a new show, i didn’t watch it on sunday, but caught it tonight on the repeat. i understand critics get 3 episodes of shows/series to write their preview-reviews and maybe the next two are pretty bad, but i quite liked the premiere and don’t really understand why it was trashed in the particular ways it was: a common theme was that the show is a mishmash of genres that don’t come together. well, it does veer towards self-conscious weirdness, and most of the acting is pretty bad–the exceptions are whoever the guy is who plays the title character, al bundy, luis guzman, and stanford from sex in the city–but i thought it pulled off the surf-scifi-noir thing quite well. the writing is generally decent, though some lines sounded like the actors were auditioning for twin peaks. it held my interest more than the first episode of deadwood had. i’m signed on for at least another 3 episodes. i don’t know if there’s a whole lot to be said about it at this point. jeff? anyone else watching?

battle royale

i’ve become more than a little lackadaisical about posting regularly to the blog. not sure why, but i’ve been more regular with comments on existing threads on movies i’m watching than with new posts. perhaps some blog-weariness? or just inertia since so few of us are making new posts? mark urged recently in a comment that we not hide posts about movies that don’t yet have topics of their own in comment threads for topics from years ago, and since it is rare that mark makes sense, here i am to post briefly about battle royale, which sunhee and i watched last week (on mark’s recommendation).
Continue reading battle royale

Fay Grim

Notionally a loose sequel to Henry Fool, Fay Grim defies easy characterization. A Hal Hartley film, on the face of it, this is an elaborate international spy thriller. Fay Grim becomes aware that Henry Fool, to whom she was once married, was a spy working on and off for the CIA. The notebooks containing his “confessions” are then clues to his past, and every intelligence service in the world is after Fay and the notebooks. But it is clear that this is far more of a parody of spy thrillers than one itself. The plot becomes ever more elaborate and bizarre, with dead ends and twists that strain credulity.

So I’m not sure what the movie actually is, except to say that this is probably my favorite movie of the year so far. It is darkly funny, and the writing is superb. I was hanging on every word of the dialogue, especially scenes with Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) whose seriousness in the face of the absurd was a joy to watch. Almost every performance is excellent, even Jeff Goldblum. It is nice to see him not perpetually wise-cracking, and he utters the perfect deadpan line when asked by Fay why he and the US tried to overthrow Allende: “it was not appropriate for our economic interests.” Parker Posey goes a little over the top as she plays Fay, but her character grew on me as she transformed from shallow ditz to sacrificing sleuth. Fay and Henry’s son, Ned (Liam Aiken), also turns in a great performance. The movie’s tone changes in the last half hour, becoming more serious, but it is still riveting, particularly a long conversation between Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) and an Osama bin Laden character played by Anatole Taubman. Finally, the camera work is great as almost every scene is shot a little crooked and from below so that all the actors lean to one side and you get ironic detachment just from the framing. Highly recommended.

History Boys

Closely based on the play (which I have not seen), this is set in the recent past and follows the experiences of a group of 7 or 8 boys at a British grammar school as they spend a semester studying for the Oxford and Cambridge University entrance exams. This was a curiosity of British education, now abolished, that involved students spending an extra semester at school to take specialized exams for Oxford and Cambridge, because those two universities claimed that the regular final exams (A levels) did not adequately test for what they were wanted in an undergraduate. The main theme is conflict between the gaining of knowledge for its own sake, and learning in order to pass the exam. The former is symbolized by the old History teacher, Hector, and the latter by a new teacher, Mr Irwin, brought in by the headmaster to increase the number of the school’s students who go to Oxbridge (one of the primary status symbols by which schools are judged). The very different approaches are on display as the two teachers prepare the boys for the exams and interviews, with Hector encouraging singing, soulful discussions of poetry and the First World War, and using one’s French to pick up prostitutes, while Irwin tells the students to choose the topics they write about and their favorite hobbies and composers strategically in order to impress the examiners. Years ago, one of my students who was also an English major, told me that all English majors at Oberlin could be neatly divided into either “truth and beauty freaks” or “theoryheads.” Hector clearly champions truth and beauty, while Irwin represents less theory than Thatcherism: the sublimation of all value to that of the market.
Continue reading History Boys

the pursuit of happyness

i’m somewhat embarrassed to say that i liked this. i kept waiting for the schmaltziness to make me cringe, but it never happened. maybe i have high schmaltziness tolerance tonight, maybe it’s just a good movie. anyway, i realized only when i saw the special features that will smith chose an italian director to do pursuit. the guy barely spoke english at the time of the shooting. the funniest parts of the whole dvd are the ones in which muccino communicates with smith using the gesticulations for which italians are famous around the world while making some incomprehensible but frenetic sounds with his mouth. god, it must have been dreadful for him. i get a headache just thinking about it, because i have of course been there. with hindsight, i can see the italian style. unless we try to make american audiences go gaga, we italians are a surprisingly unemotional people who find wearing positive feelings on our sleeves mortifying (we are just fine with negative feelings). we like american movies, but wouldn’t imagine for a second that people might actually talk to each other like that in real life.

some nice shots of san francisco, no gratuitous nastiness (it’s life that’s getting gardner in the teeth, no people’s cussedness), no gratuitous miracles (no one shows up in the nick of time to rescue him), great restraint in showing gardner’s slow but determined climb into solvency, and fantastic chemistry between smith and his son. fast and effective editing, good pace. i enjoyed myself.

Levees

Has no one else seen this? I heard how good Spike Lee’s documentary on Katrina was, and so quickly bought it when released on dvd, then as quickly shelved it, as it was hard to drum up excitement about a film that was almost certainly good for me but would be painful to watch. Foolish. This is a great, great film–easily the best documentary I’ve seen since (and probably better yet than) the excellent Mondovino. It is heartwrenching but often startlingly funny; its powerful sociopolitical thrust complemented by a remarkable sense of rhythm, image, sound, editing. It’s just amazing filmmaking, and I’m enjoying the hell out of it, even as it is in equal parts enraging and enlightening.

I’ll write more later–but I wanted to see if others simply hadn’t posted . . . .

I think you could make the case that Spike Lee is our most important filmmaker–in every sense of “important.” I cannot believe a work this damn good came out so quickly after the event.