The Claim

Michael Winterbottom, UK / Canada / France, 2000
3.5 out of 4 stars

It’s an interesting feeling when almost everything in the plot suggests that some awful collision is about to take place at the expense of the main characters, but the result, instead, is always something more nuanced, if not, ultimately, less catastrophic. I was quite impressed with this unique “western,” in which a railroad engineer and his crew come to a town called Kingdom Come in order to determine the course of the railroad and, it’s understood, the fate of the town itself. Arriving at the same time is a woman and her adult daughter, both of whom lead to a revelation, in flashback, as to the somewhat dubious origins of this town, and of course, everyone’s plot line intersects as well.

It’s interesting to see what a filmmaker like Winterbottom, concerned mostly with films that contain some measure of “reality,” does with a mid-level epic such as this one. Although he uses actors rather than real people, and works in a historical period rather than in the “now” of most of his other films, I think there is definitely some sense that he is trying to capture a historical turning point (through microcosm) by showing us the low-key interactions and almost mundane incidents that make up these kinds of shifts, entirely eschewing the melodrama and tragic elements that often are assumed to be necessary components of anything remotely epic or historical. This is not to say that he has made a boring film, or a film that tries the viewer’s patience in a self-consciously “arty” fashion. Rather, he seeks to overturn those assumptions I mentioned at the beginning, making everything a bit more immediate and, by consequence, more engaging. If I have any complaints, it’s that the plot is actually somewhat hard to follow at times, partially because you have to connect the dots to a certain extent.

Source: MGM DVD
28 January, 10:36 PM

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

(Moartea domnului Lazarescu)
Cristi Puiu, Romania, 2005
3 out of 4 stars

Spending two and a half hours a man slow decaying towards a fate preordained by the title itself is the kind of film experience that critics rave about (it was on many top 10 lists) and audiences shun (the American box office was a whopping $80,301). As for myself, well, I often lean towards the critics in cases like these. I think they may have overpraised the film a bit, but I also think that this film is exactly what it is supposed to be.

The length is certainly excessive (even some of its strongest proponents have said so), and yet the lackadaisical pacing is key in the director’s attempt to convey the maddening delays and demurrals of the Romanian medical system – at least as depicted here. The characters are thinly sketched, but this is also necessary; Lazarescu needs to be enough of everyman that the pathos can come from the events (or lack therof) alone. While I wasn’t exactly rapt with attention, I was invested enough with Lazarescu’s plight that, even though I knew what would happen, I felt hopeful when he seemed to come across someone willing to do something for him. The point is, this is not an unrelenting film in which people are all bad, which is what you might expect from the premise and from the execution. Instead, it shows a world in which pettiness and decency are mixed, often in the same people. It might try the patience of some folks, and it’s not the masterpiece that some critics claim it to be, but it is a good, solid, and unusual film.

Source: Genius DVD
27 January, 7:03 PM

Pan’s Labyrinth

(El Laberinto del Fauno)
Guillermo del Toro, Mexico / Spain / USA, 2006
4 out of 4 stars

This is an extremely well-realized, gripping vision of fairies in fascist Spain, which sounds like some kind of ridiculous high concept project, and in a way, it is quite ridiculous, but del Toro manages to make it work for him. He has very effectively created a sense of terror without resorting to cheap tricks. Although the Faun that the heroine encounters is very big on rules, these rules seem arbitrary at best, and overall I was never quite sure what would happen to whom, which means that everything seems more crucial and more tense. Finally, the picture is shot in a way that is grim but not unrelenting or lifeless. I found the ending, actually, to be the most unsettling thing about the picture, largely for the unanswerable questions it brings up. I wouldn’t call it a perfect film, but at the same time, there are no significant flaws for me to pick on. It is definitely a triumph.

Source: New Line 35mm print
26 January, 6:45 PM

Kill Zone

(Sha po long)
Yip Wai Sun, Hong Kong / Macau, 2005
2 out of 4 stars

So what happens when you mix the martial arts genre (more recently associated, at least by Western audiences, with the period piece) and the cop genre? At least in this film, the result seems to be some kind of reconstituted slasher film, and I have to admit that I have never been one to get behind the slasher genre. It’s one thing to have some gore in the battle scenes, but some of these characters aren’t even capable of putting up enough of a fight, meaning that many of the “action” scenes are nothing more than slaughters.

In fact, the fighting is quite good in this film, although it is nothing groundbreaking. Although the filmmaking isn’t incompetent, there’s not all that much else to celebrate I about it, and the acting is particularly laughable at times (strong emotions come out of nowhere and then disappear again). My usual complaint in these kind of films is that I am just waiting through the bad acting for the good action, but in this case, I guess I also have to complain about the general nihilism that is the inevitable consequence of veering too far into slasher territory. It seems like the filmmakers wanted to have some kind of weight behind the whole thing, but really, this is an insubstantial picture with a underlying morality that is muddled at best.

Source: Genius DVD
25 January, 10:53 PM

Gabrielle

Patrice Chéreau, France / Germany / Italy, 2005
4 out of 4 stars

This is, in essence, a chamber drama that basically sustains a very narrow focus on an unexpected marital crisis for 90 minutes, and yet it is much more filmic and more alive than such an accurate description would suggest. There are certainly some surprising, successful flourishes employed to tell this story, such as the unusual use of monochrome and title cards. Furthermore, the classical music score is expertly done and quite disturbing, especially when it (apparently) doesn’t at all match with what we’re seeing on screen. Finally, the camera work is very vibrant when needed, and when otherwise, it conveys very well the moroseness of the situation.

All that said, of course a film that is mostly about two people imploding needs some good performances, and these are certainly provided by Pascal Greggory and Isabelle Huppert, the one manic and strangely engaging, the other hiding something with a series of elliptical looks and remarks. I do imagine this film is not for everyone, but for me, it was one of the better films that had its American release (such as it was) in 2006.

Source: Genius DVD
22 January, 11:55 PM

Letters from Iwo Jima

Clint Eastwood, USA, 2006
3.5 out of 4 stars

To some extent, the most remarkable thing about this film is that it was made by an American director and an American studio, and that it is actually on wide release in American theaters, and as such, I can’t help but wonder if the film would seem more ordinary to me if it was a Japanese film. In an industry that makes Memoirs of a Geisha to satisfy our “curiosity” about Japan and usually makes war films that recycle our old propaganda with only slightly updated sensibilities, it is quite impressive that this film even exists, because the perspective of the “Other” is something that we need to see a lot more of in American film.

Putting aside all that baggage, if possible, I can safely say that this is a very solid, well-acted, and emotionally compelling humanist drama about the lives of soldiers whom we all know to be doomed. Quite a bit of the film, actually the stronger part of it, is concerned with the buildup and character development, and this definitely makes the battle scenes a lot more effective when they finally come. Even then, the focus is on how the soldiers interact and reconcile conflicting instincts, giving some quality insight into what has always been portrayed, in American film and schools, as entirely incomprehensible behavior.

Of course, it’s not entirely a perfect film. It probably should be mentioned that any hint of Japanese imperialism is entirely left out. Of course, the reality of soldiers forced to defend an imperialist order really shouldn’t impair our identification with these folks, but I don’t think Eastwood was ready to think about our own modern imperial projects in that way. Finally, the script does imply that some of the more sympathetic characters perhaps derive some of their humanity from the time they spent in the US, which does remind you that this is indeed an American film.

Source: Warner 35mm print
20 January, 6:40 PM

The Fountain

Darren Aronofsky, USA, 2006
3.5 out of 4 stars

It would be hard for me to spoil this movie for you, seeing as how I had a very minimal understanding of how the three parts of the film (past, present, and… future? I’m not sure) connect to each other. Visually, it’s an astonishing piece, and it’s also very emotionally compelling, which is a nice thing in such an admittedly esoteric film. The relationship between Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz is quite affecting, helping to make this a very human film in the midst of all the weirdness and mindtrips.

Unfortunately, my viewing experience was also very far from ideal, which makes it even harder for me to evaluate the film. The bargain theater has given us trouble in the past, such as when Talladega Nights was out of focus (for the entire film) or when the sound went out a couple of times during Babel, but this was definitely the worst they’ve done yet, because they somehow managed to present us with a viewable area about 1/8 of the way down from what we were supposed to be seeing. This meant that we saw boom mikes during some dialogue scenes and large black rectangles during some visual effects scenes, and that during close-ups, the actors’ mouths were never visible. The problem was not resolved even after two different trips to complain, and it took me quite a while to stop obsessing about it and just enjoy the film as much as possible. I strongly suspect I will enjoy this film even more when I watch it on DVD, as I will, you know, actually get to see the shots the director wanted me to see!

Source: Warner 35mm print
19 January, 9:30 PM

Miami Vice

Michael Mann, USA / Germany, 2006
1 out of 4 stars

I was intrigued when this film started showing up on all kinds of top 10 lists, but my reaction to this film’s inexplicable year-end celebration is summed up by a talkback comment, regrettably one I can’t find a link for, that read something to the effect of, “Oh, I didn’t realize that the reason I was bored out of my mind is it was supposed to be an art film.” Michael Mann has certainly done good work in the past, but giving him any credit for this piece of nonsense is certainly as good a case of the auteur theory run amuck as I can think of. The alternative theory would be that if there’s no joy in it, it must be “good” for you. But what use is there for a film that has no joy, no beauty, no energy, and no anything.

This is just an all-around dreary, listless affair, with ugly digital cinematography (it worked in Mann’s Collateral but it sure doesn’t work here), tacky dialogue (even if it is deliberately so, it’s just a trial to listen to), an aimless, unengaging story, a near-total lack of action… even the music is bad! The cast is either poor (puppy-dog sleazeball Collin Ferrell), misused (Gong Li, who just looks lost), or perhaps some of both (Jamie Foxx, who I think was more interesting before he somehow achieved instant stardom. The worst of it is that there is hardly any action in the film, and when you finally get a shootout, it is deliberately muddled and scattershot. Maybe there was a point here, but it was all I could do to not just turn off the DVD player at the one-hour mark. Avoid at all costs, no matter what the critics say!

Source: Universal DVD
17 January, 11:15 PM

Curse of the Golden Flower

(Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia)
Zhang Yimou, China / Hong Kong, 2006
2 out of 4 stars

Nothing short of maddening, this film certainly indicates that Zhang Yimou’s prolonged detour into the field of martial-arts extravaganza is a case of diminishing returns (but more on whether that tag really fits this film later). While Hero was a masterpiece, House of Flying Daggers as problematic at best. This film is just crazy, baroque overkill, and while I did get involved enough in it to be intensely annoyed by what happens at the end, perhaps because of the work that Gong Li does or perhaps just because she gets such a raw deal, I was never really engaged in a meaningful way by the action.

Undeniably, the sets are extravagant in a way I haven’t often seen on screen. I don’t know whether it’s at all accurate, but Zhang’s depiction of the Tang dynasty is a veritable orgy of color, really bright and gaudy color, and the costumes are very ornate and flashy as well. While this all lends to the general “overkill” feel in the long run, it probably also keeps the film from being any less engaging than it already is.

See, the problem is that this is not really a wuxia film like the ones I mentioned at the beginning, although the only reason it’s even being distributed (and given a wide release) in the US is that people like myself will assume that it is one based on the director’s past work. It takes quite a while to get to any real fight scenes, which actually makes them seem more random and ridiculous when they do finally occur. This, in fact, is a period drama, and while the period is more fully realized than in Hero or Daggers, the drama is decidedly weaker, which is a bad sign, obviously. Zhang aims for tragedy, but he comes up with an absurdist trainwreck instead. I’m still interested to see what the director does next, but I do hope it’s something that’s a bit more grounded, as this was a major disappointment (although I did have my suspicions going into it).

Source: Sony 35mm print
14 January, 7:15 PM

L’Enfant

Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium / France, 2005
3 out of 4 stars

The film opens with a young woman carrying a very little baby, but this is misleading – we end up spending much more time with the emotionally-stunted father of the child as he embarks upon a series of very ill-considered choices, none of which I will mention here as you could basically spoil the entire story in a few lines (I find myself generally avoiding even the Netflix or Blockbuster disc sleeves as they tend to give you plot points from halfway through the film, so I try to do what readers I have the courtesy of facilitating an unspoiled viewing of a film if they choose to watch it).

Although this is the typical French understated drama, in which characters don’t say a lot, especially not what they feel, my comments above are misleading, in that the Dardenne brothers, at least in this film, use this style to tell an actual story, rather than just a mood piece or a character study. While the latter two possibilities wouldn’t necessarily make a bad film, it was nice to see some storytelling nonetheless, and the plot is indeed fairly compelling.

So overall, I enjoyed this film, but I didn’t think it quite lived up to its potential, although I’m not exactly sure what could have been done differently. While I won’t describe the ending, I will say that it was at that point, as it often is for me, that I realized that I hadn’t quite been emotionally involved in the piece. I watched what was seemingly a very moving moment with near-total detachment. Maybe that was what the Dardennes wanted from me, but even if this is the case, it doesn’t change my assessment; this is a compelling movie worth watching, but it’s, I hate to say it, sometimes hard to tell what the point is.

Source: Sony DVD
14 January, 12:30 AM

The Road to Guantánamo

Michael Winterbottom & Mat Whitecross, UK, 2006
3.5 out of 4 stars

Michael Winterbottom, as any article you read about him will tell you, is a man of many filmic styles, but one that he seems to keep coming back to, albeit in varying shapes and forms, is the docudrama. While his earlier film In This World used nonprofessionals reacting naturally to more-or-less fictional occurrences, this film uses actors to depict the true story of a handful of young British South Asian men who, while visiting Pakistan for a wedding, make an extremely ill-advised detour into Afghanistan right when the Americans start bombing it.

As you can guess from the title, these guys eventually end up in Cuba, where we are treated to a series of harrowing mistreatments and abuses of power that, let’s just say, made me even less proud to be an American than I already was. The docudrama style is effective here because the depictions of prisoner abuse stand on their own, without any need for manipulative music or embellishment of psychological detail. This isn’t to say that I value “realism” in film for its own sake, but in cases such as these, some form of it is probably the best way to get the point across. The decision to include interview segments is an interesting one, but it ultimately prevents this from becoming some kind of inscrutable art-film by allowing us some idea of what the prisoners were thinking.

It must be said that the entire film does not take place in prison camps, and the lead-up to this portion of the film is a quite captivating sort of travelogue, as these guys place themselves in the belly of the beast in a misguided effort to make some kind of difference. The film does a good job at conveying their shifting cultural identities, making their fate all the more compelling.

Source: Sony DVD
12 January, 11:55 PM

West Side Story

Jerome Robbins & Robert Wise, USA, 1961
4 out of 4 stars

I saw this film in my capacity as a “projectionist” (actually, I just put in the tape or the DVD) for an undergraduate class, and many of the people there couldn’t help but laugh, even though the professor asked them to look past the cheesiness that admittedly is present in the film. But much as this film is now a touchstone for its now laughably tame portrayal of gang violence, it is actually quite far from the cheesefest that its reputation suggests.

There are certainly weaknesses, such as the sometimes-uncomfortable minstrelsy of two of the three actors portraying the principle Puerto Rican characters (silly accents, mostly, especially in the singing), and the just plan weakness of the white male lead. In fact, I think the best parts of the movie don’t even include the main couple, which makes it amazing that the film works at all.

It does, however, work quite well. I found the dance to be quite exciting and dynamically filmed, and I appreciated how, minstrelsy aside, the depiction of the struggles of the immigrants and the racial prejudices puts the treatment of the same issues in most modern films to shame. The cops, after all, openly state their preference for the white gang (although there are occasional reminders that these kids are “merely” first-generation Americans, and shouldn’t take too much for granted). The fact that the white kids still fight shows that the generational gap is just as importance for them, but it also makes them more complicit in the tragedy that ensues because they don’t really need to fight, at least not as much.

Source: Warner widescreen VHS
11 January, 5:10 PM

Clean

Olivier Assayas, France / UK / Canada, 2004
3.5 out of 4 stars

When a musical legend self-destructs, we have a bad habit of blaming his decline on his wife or partner, as if he had no agency in bringing about his own end. This film is about such a wife, played by Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung (speaking mostly English and French here), and what she has to do when she finds herself all on her own. I found her character very sympathetic, perhaps because I am always resistant to those blame-the-woman narratives in the first place, but I think Assayas and Cheung do a good job at crafting a character who you can root for even though she obviously is a little bit complicit in some things, especially when it comes to drugs.

The main weakness of the film is that the plotting is a bit haphazard at times, which is somewhat problematic because it’s a largely plot-driven film. Although much of the film is spent depicting some rather difficult times for the protagonist, I felt that the overall tone was surprisingly optimistic, but I don’t know if I was just filling in the blanks the way I wanted to in order to see it as a story of redemption (rather than the opposite). That, however, may be the point; if so, it only enriches the film when two kinds of spectators could validly take something entirely different from the same film.

Source: UMVD DVD
6 January, 1:07 PM

Children of Men

Alfonso Cuarón, UK / USA / Japan, 2006
4 out of 4 stars

So far, this dystopian, apocalyptic tale is easily the best film of 2006. It consists largely of extremely long takes, and while this might sound a bit gimmicky, it’s a very effective and engrossing stylistic choice, and it makes for some absolutely astonishing cinematography. Much as in V for Vendetta, we once again find ourselves in a Britain that has remained stable – but at what cost – in the midst of a world that is apparently in turmoil, due to an unexplained epidemic of infertility. In the case of this film, we know that the outside turmoil is not mere propaganda, thanks to the sight of the many refugees desperately trying to get in or stay in the UK, most of whom end up in camps. Obviously, this a very openly political film, and so of course, Clive Owen’s character presents us with an apparently apolitical hero who is drawn back into action on a course that he doesn’t quite understand, until of course it’s too late for him to step away from it.

Much as he did in his Harry Potter film, Cuarón very effectively sets his atmosphere, conveying quite clearly, even before we see the refugee camps, that “survival” has had a high psychological cost for the British people. While it’s unlikely that we ever have to worry about not enough babies being born, the film nonetheless takes a very compelling look at how far the state could go in response to such a conundrum, and yet, it doesn’t come across as preachy at all; this is in many ways a very good action film, and very accessible despite its many layers.

Source: Universal 35mm print
5 January, 7:10 PM

Once Upon a Time in America

Sergio Leone, Italy / USA, 1984
2 out of 4 stars

This would-be epic about Prohibition-era Jewish (!) gangsters caught my attention at first, as the contemplative tone, elliptical style and in medias res opening suggested that there were many interesting layers to be peeled through in this 229 minute (!!) film. In fact, I did like the stretch of the film concerning the protagonist's miscreant childhood, for the most part. But by about halfway through, the promise of the opening just seems like smoke and mirrors. Leone’s film is overall quite empty at heart, and even if he did film more than 10 hours of footage, there really doesn’t seem to be enough story, characters, or interest here to justify the time spent. I guess I can see what Leone was getting at, I just don’t think I would buy into it in any form. Admittedly, I do have some trouble being objective about a film that trivializes rape in such a horrendous manner, but I don’t really feel that I am in error in making that value judgment either.

Source: Warner DVD
3 January, 6:31 PM

C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America

Kevin Willmott, USA, 2004
3 of 4 stars

This mockumentary, formed out of fake commercials and reenactments as well as decontextualized photos and video, purports to show the viewer how America would have developed if the South had won the war and established the Confederate government over the entire nation. The point of this is that, through various ingeniously repositioned quotes and rearranged or reversed historical occurrences, the director is able to show us how our own society has developed into a slightly cleaned-up, more polite version of this slave society dystopia, rather than something completely opposite from it as we would like to think. What turns out to be shocking is not how alien this scenario is, but instead, how easily various real aspects of American history fit into this alternate trajectory.

I do think that without a basic knowledge of American history (and I don’t claim any more than that), some of these parallels might be lost on the viewer. That is perhaps the main weakness of the piece, which is that it requires a certain amount of knowledge and saavy in order to draw the needed connections, and that those who lack one or both may feel confident in rejecting the content of the film as a mere “what if” flight of fancy. There is some text at the end that attempts to ground us in real history, but while admittedly informative, it comes off as heavy-handed.

It also must be said that the film is not of consistent quality, which is perhaps due to Willmott’s grand ambitions and his low budget. For instance, some period pieces, especially the 1946 film, don’t evoke their periods very well, and we could have used a greater variety of fake talking heads (the ones we have are sometimes a bit too didactic or obvious). Finally, Willmott seems to lose control of his alternate history near the end, as some threads are never resolved properly, such as the fate of Nazi Germany, and this really undermines the effectiveness of the film.

Nonetheless, the message is worthwhile and compelling, and above all, the film is darkly humorous… that is meant in the sense of “black comedy,” but I can’t help but be self-conscious about these kind of expressions after watching this film! The point is, I laughed with horror throughout, and this seems to indicate that Willmott at least captured the right tone, even if he faltered at times in the execution.

Source: Genius DVD
1 January, 8:58 PM