vengeance is mine

sympathy for mr. vengeance is a stupid name for a movie, and as per sunhee is not the name of the film in korean; in korean it apparently translates directly as vengeance is mine and so i’m sticking with that. who the hell decides to make stupid changes to movie titles for english audience releases?

anyway: we watched it last night. i liked it a lot. stylistically very subdued compared to oldboy but with far more social and physical heft. to take the latter first: pain and violence are far more real here, we see slashed bodies and blood oozing out of the slashes, the sadism is not leavened with comedy as it often is in oldboy. i’m not sure what to make of the social part. Continue reading vengeance is mine

Shame

The old grad school game, reimagined: following Chris’ comment that he almost felt embarrassed that he hadn’t ever seen McCabe and Mrs. Miller, two versions of the Shame game.

1. What ‘great film’ have you not seen (that you seriously regret not having seen)?
Me: Renoir’s Rules of the Game. I even own it, and still haven’t watched it. Pitiful.

2. What ‘great film’ do you shamefully not like/enjoy/appreciate? (NOTE: NOT those films others call great but you despise. Instead, ones you shamefacedly would avoid disparaging unless pushed.)
Me: Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. I know I should like it, but…. every time I try again, I stop liking the movie after the scorpion fight.

(Another version might be: What ‘mediocre film’ do you secretly love, one you know is NOT good but nonetheless cherish? Jeff, you’re only allowed one answer.)

McCabe and Mrs Miller

I’m a little embarrassed that I had never seen this. In fact, I had not even heard of it until I was leafing through a bad book of essays by Roger Ebert recently. I watched it as part of a double bill with ‘Nashville’ (which I had seen before) and really enjoyed it. The grittiness of the mining town (mud, rain, misshapen people) is done very well; ‘Deadwood looks downright slick against ‘McCabe.’ I had associated the less glamorous image of the West with Eastwood’s later Westerns (esp. ‘Pale Rider’) but Altman clearly got there first.

The principals were not particularly impressive. Warren Beatty mostly mumbles his way through the movie, looking bemused, and I’d say that Julie Christie was wasted except that I’m not sure if she can act (she raises banality to the level of an art form in the brief interview Peter Whitehead does with her in the Pink Floyd documentary that John mentioned a while back: “What do you love?” “The sun, sunflowers, cats… strong relationships”). But the strength of the movie is the background scenes. A young hired gun provokes a kid into drawing his gun and then kills him. Prostitutes enjoy a hot bath. Beatty boasts of his bargaining skills all the while showing his fear. And the final extended sequence is a masterpiece: the townspeople rush to put out a fire, oblivious to the cat and mouse game between Beatty and the gunmen hired to kill him. He slides around in the snow trying to hide while an early fire engine chugs up the hill to help put out the fire.

Anyway, well worth watching, not least to see so many actors who re-appear in ‘Nashville’ in larger parts. And of course, Keith Carradine was here and in ‘Deadwood.’

Young Adam / Nine Songs

I keep watching movies I find interesting then not writing about them. Then I forget the specific things I liked about them in the first place. These two films are hardly similar, but they do treat sex and nudity in a frank way, and I enjoyed both of them, though I’d hardly call either of them great.

M. Winterbottom cranks out the films. He’s directed five since the very enjoyable 24 Hour Party People , but this one had sex – AND bands, so it got my attention. Continue reading Young Adam / Nine Songs

Winter Short Takes

North Country: The climatic scene is shite (something tells me the class action suit didn’t go down quite so dramatically) and the melodrama is ramped up to eleven (indeed, the litany of horrors on display is overwhelming), but director Nikki Caro gets good performances from her cast and her film evokes a sense of place very well. Her commitment to the material made me want to see it through to the end, but Norma Rae is far, far superior. The film also deserves the Million Dollar Baby Award for best performance by an inanimate object (and to think said object has been nominated for an Academy Award!). Continue reading Winter Short Takes

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.

woody, when he was silly

watched take the money and run last night. ah woody, why did you have to go ingmar bergman on us? you were at your best when you were silly, tossing off sight gags and set-ups without punchlines. you were the natural inheritor of the marx brothers and vaudeville but that wasn’t good enough for you, was it? well, at least you didn’t go soft in the head like all those 70s comics. but why am i addressing you in the first person like this?

he’s obviously made some great films after love and death (annie hall, the purple rose of cairo, sweet and lowdown) so i don’t want to push this early silly woody vs. later serious woody thing very far (and annie hall probably belongs in the first group anyway) but when i watch these old movies i wish he still made things like that. no one else seems to have after he stopped.

Johnny To

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.

Annual Oscar Odds Roundup

Annual Oscar Odds Roundup, thanks to Canbet.com: notice odds on Hoffman, Witherspoon, Ang Lee and Brokeback (-450 means you have to bet that amount to receive a $100 payoff, +3000 means that you get 3000 on a $100 bet–in other words the first is like 1:5 odds and other is 30:1). Not much to pick from but I think Frances McDormand is an oscar fave and might have a chance and she’s got good odds at 20 to 1, also Keener in the same supporting category at 18 to 1. I don’t see why War of the Worlds wouldn’t win best visual effects over King Kong so I’m happy to take 30 to 1 odds there. Plus it’s a backhand way of recognizing spielberg whose munich will get shut out of the major categories. Ang Lee seems to be the lock at 1:10. I’ve never even seen odds that bad at the racetrack! The foreign language film is a hard one—south africa always has the liberal sentiment so a ham and cheese sandwhich from there could get nominated, “Paradise Now” might also be a backhand way to acknowledge the politics of Munich but in a far more minor way, but then there’s the old standby of the holocaust doc in the form of Sophie Scholl (one who died as a result of the White Rose protest to the Nazis)–the last provides provocative odds at 10 to 1 though it’s from Germany, something of a drawback. I’d say if you have a hundred to burn, split it 3 ways between Keener, War of the Worlds and Sophie Scholl. Jake Gyllenhall is also not getting bad odds at 5 to 1.
Continue reading Annual Oscar Odds Roundup

the sopranos

i am eagerly awaiting the start of the new season. the extended teaser on hbo is killing me. in preparation i’ve begun watching the previous season in reverse order, and am looking for clues on what might happen this year. perhaps we should open a predictions pool on what we think will be the major events this year. though i can’t decide whether the show will go out with a bang (a major death) or whether it will surprise us with a whimper.

some possible/likely deaths:

anthony jr.
carmela
tony
silvio
Continue reading the sopranos