Hairy, Bitey Things

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.
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Miyazaki films on TCM

Quick note to say that there’s one Thursday night left of Miyazaki films showing on TCM. They’re co-hosted by Pixar’s John Lassiter, who nearly single-handedly brought Miyazaki’s films to wide distribution in the U.S.

Saw Whisper of the Heart (non-magic, but cute), My Neighbor Totoro, which was excellent, and then ran out of tape on Porco Rosso; something I didn’t think I’d like, but now want to rent quickly. Still, my favorite is Spirited Away.

Of course there’s probably colonial subtext to it that I’ve missed and Arnab will now point out to me, ruining the film forever. Thanks in advance Arnab.

tech updates and glitches

quick notes:

1. i have installed a plugin that makes the search function also search comments for the specified keywords. earlier a search for a keyword would only yield results if it was contained in a top-level post. that is to say, if a film or actress was mentioned only in comments it would not show up in a search for those names. now they will; however, if the keyword is in a comment the search page will still display the top-level post–you’ll have to view its comments to find the word itself. hope that makes sense.

2. wordpress 2.0 (the latest version of the blog software we use) is out. i haven’t yet checked out what features etc. it has but the urge to upgrade is strong. however, i’ll probably wait till 2.1 which is likely when bugs will have been ironed out.

Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys Upon the Life of the People

The documentary Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (dir. Robert Stone) is not remarkable in itself, being mostly a combination of footage and talking heads interviews. Nevertheless, the overall effect is simultaneously icy and almost comic, heartbreaking and ludicrous. The film, in a tight 85 minutes, chronicles the rise of The Symbionese Liberation Army generally and its specific crime of kidnapping Hearst and making her one of the SLA over the course of a year and a half, during which Patty robs two banks and sprays a store with bullets. For those of us familiar with the combination of earnestness, self-righteousness, naivete and otherworldliness brought by many children of the middle classes to graduate school many of the “characters” may seem vaguely familiar; but instead of the humorless radical correcting another student on his/her interpretation of Foucault, these humorless radicals take up automatic weapons, rob banks, kill people and issue “communique’s.” They call themselves “Generals” or “Field Marshalls” in the Unified Army of the People. They refer to the “pigs” and claim spiritual connections to Che and George Jackson.
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Hustle & Flow

Three parts Hoop Dreams, one part 8 Mile and one part Pretty Woman adds up to one seriously entertaining crunk fairy tale. Set in the fetid streets of Memphis in July, Hustle & Flow takes about 30 minutes to find its groove, but from then on the film is truly irresistible. Terrence Howard is really, really good, but the supporting cast is just as strong (including Isaac Hayes and Ludicris). I’ll leave it to Reynolds to offer a thesis on the film’s politics of race not to mention its representation of black male subjectivity, but I liked this film a lot.

Country Boys / Channel Z

Anyone else catch the 6-hour Frontline doc Country Boys? Any thoughts? I missed the first night, caught most of the 2nd night. Depressing and really well done… Makes me remember growing up in Southern Illinois a little too closely again – as did Stevie.

PBS’ website is currently down, but I think they are using the web as a kind of dynamic “extras” feature to the program, with lots of different expanded topics. Good idea (as long as your website is working).

Also recently saw the first half of Channel Z – a documentary about an early cable channel in L.A. that ran good movies, including the restored Heaven’s Gate a few years after it came out. I was really enjoying it when the DVD i had of it crapped out (Dayna thinks it was b/c I kept using the rewind button to see who was fronting Black Flag…It was Ron Reyes I guess, not Keith Morris) But I’ll rent another copy and try again; I really liked what I saw of both of these films. More and more, I am impressed more by docs than by “scripted” films.

2046

Anyone seen this? It’s a remarkable film: a loose sequel to ‘In The Mood for Love’ with many familiar Wong Kar Wai elements, but all of them taken to another level. To the extent that it has a narrative structure, it is all over the place. It skips back and fore in time, from the “real” story to the fictional one that the protagonist (Chow) is writing, and it replays certain scenes as new information makes them more poignant, or marginally intelligible. I kept thinking of ‘Beau Travail’ as I watched it because that’s another film that I can watch over and over for its imagery without ever really understanding what is going on. So I won’t even try to explain the plot, and it is in any case irrelevant to the pleasures of the film.

Tong Leung is fabulous both because of the half smile that always plays on his lips, and because his sentences always end with a rising inflection that makes him sound questioning even when he is making a statement (this is a film that has to be watched with subtitles rather than dubbing). His three loves, Li Gong, Faye Wong and Ziyi Zhang, are all superb, especially Zhang as the prostitute that falls hard for Chow. I’m not sure anyone can demonstrate the bittersweet quality of love as well as Wong Kar Wai.

And the cinematography is, as you would expect, nothing less than stunning. Almost every image is beautifully composed; you would expect to see them hanging in an art gallery rather than strung together in a movie. Oh, and check out the first deleted scene in which Black Spider visits Chow. It should not have been cut, and would have made a wonderful ending to the film.

Funny Ha Ha

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.

quirky little things

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