Brick

Rian Johnson, USA, 2005
3 out of 4 stars

I always thought of noir as a genre, but after watching this film and talking with my friend about it, I’m beginning to see that even (especially?) at its best, it’s really more of a formula. Chinatown seems to be the exception which proves the rule (or at least proves that noir doesn’t just have to be variations on a theme), but then again, some quite good films are made by introducing very unlikely or outrageous variations on said theme, such as The Big Lebowski.

The premise of this film is both fascinating and in danger of becoming old before you even see it. High school noir? Haven’t these people seen Veronica Mars? In fact, Brick tries to fit high school into noir, whereas Mars more successfully fits noir into high school. Certainly, a high school setting shouldn’t define a production, considering the wide varieties of quality and genre among films and shows which such settings. This wide variety, however, does lead one to wonder if setting anything in a high school is something to get that excited about. This is after all an “indie” film rather than a wide-release, mainstream piece, but it nonetheless comes off as a weird cross between a high-concept studio pitch and a film school experiment (you at least seem to need to know a bit about noir in order to get much out of it).

All this said, it’s a good film, if not entirely great or as clever as it’s meant to be. The very-stylized dialogue is nigh-impenetrable at the beginning, and it rubbed me the wrong way at first because I felt like someone was just showing off to me. Eventually I did get sucked in, but I’m not sure I was jolted in quite the way I was supposed to have been at the beginning there. The hero is engaging, if significantly less sympathetic than his predecessors. The plot is, well, formula, but the best feature, aside from the brief, kinetic fight sequences, is the sight of the noir formula transpiring in suburban homes and veritable wastelands. Noir usually takes place in Southern California, but this manages to be the least “glamorous” depiction of the usual noir landscape yet.

Source: Universal DVD
14 August, 10:29 PM

Velvet Goldmine

Todd Haynes, UK / USA, 1998
2 out of 4 stars

I really wanted to like this colorful flick about glam rock, featuring thinly-veiled portrayals of two key figures from the time and an ostensibly-fictionalized intimate relationship between them. Unfortunately, the film is a mess despite the great music, the trippy performances and the compelling recreation of a classic subculture. Todd Haynes tries to slap some faux-Citizen Kane writing-an-article narrative onto what is otherwise a surreal, drug-induced haze of rock and sexual ambiguity, and while the journalist has his own story to tell through flashbacks, this only serves to throw us more off balance as we try to figure out which of the three male leads is supposed to be the protagonist. Haynes’ work is frustrating because he can’t decide whether to go for narrative or non-narrative, surreal or realist, linear or non-linear, and instead, he just goes with “all of the above.” What this leaves us with is a wealth of good content made tiresome by the awkward, fractured structure of the piece.

Source: Buena Vista DVD
12 August, 8:47 PM

The Best of Youth

(La Meglio Gioventú)
Marco Tulio Giordana, Italy, 2003
Three and a half stars

This epic six-hour film (more of a television miniseries actually, but its quality apparently netted it some festival showings and distribution, in two parts) tracks an Italian family from the 1960s to today. While there were clearly references to pieces of historical background that I wasn’t able to pick up on, overall this film does a good job of portraying a “slice of life” for Italy during most of the postwar period. Because Marco Giordana has so much room to breathe due to his running time, he is able to fully develop a wide variety of characters and themes, none of which end up seeming shallow or insubstantial. Although he uses these elements to comment on modern Italian historical and cultural phenomena, he doesn’t make the mistake of boiling his characters down into mere allegories. The result is a very rich, nuanced viewing experience, and while you may find yourself more interested in some plotlines than in others, Giordana has nonetheless created a wonderful tapestry that is well-worth your time (although you may well choose to watch it in multiple installments, as I did and as the original Italian TV audience did).

Source: Buena Vista DVD
9 August, 10:40 PM

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Shane Black, USA, 2005
3.5 out of 4 stars

What a shame this film didn’t get a real wide release, because it seems like with some real promotion and distribution, this might really have caught on. Here you have a seemingly worn-out premise, the buddy/romance/detective picture, somehow brought to new life with just the right flavor of wit. Writer-director Shane Black was responsible for writing the Lethal Weapon series (I only saw the fourth one and some of the many imitators), and it seems like this movie is about as revolutionary (from what I’ve heard of the original) in attempting to rejuvenate the genre… too bad nobody is ready for that anymore nowadays.

Robert Downey, Jr. and Michelle Monaghan are quite formidable here (in different ways), while Val Kilmer is more just okay, although his gay detective character is great anyway. Downey narrates the whole film (as his character, but also as a “narrator) and his commentary is mostly hilarious, although there are a few moments of meta that fall flat (and that must be saying something considering how much I love meta). The plot is convoluted, but it sets off the difference between “fantasy” and “reality” in a much more creative and even insightful way than how these films usually present outlandish events while impotently asserting their verité. It’s not perfect, but I do feel vindicated in my constant protests that mainstream film doesn’t have to be the thoughtless swamp of nonsense that it usually is now. The experiment doesn’t always work, but overall this film is meant to entertain and succeeds; are you really telling me that it was “too challenging” for the average moviegoer?

Source: Warner DVD
6 August, 9:32 PM

The Big Lebowski

Joel Coen, USA, 1998
3.5 out of stars

When I first saw this movie on video as a teenager, I didn’t understand what a stoner film it was (I don’t even know if I understood what he was drinking), or what a cult film in general it had become, or even, in a more general sense, the Philip Marlowe tradition that the Coen Brothers were once again subverting here. I personally think it’s pretty clear that they do a lot better job than Robert Altman did with The Long Goodbye, but this is just a much more viscerally entertaining film, bloody hilarious in its absurdity and likeability. The plot actually works, but it doesn’t need to and it doesn’t have that much to do with why the film works… or does it? The truth is, The Big Sleep is not at all affected negatively by the presence of an incident in the plot that could never be suitably explained, even by Raymond Chandler himself. This film, as far as I can tell so far, doesn’t have any such moments (I’m probably wrong) but it just manages to underscore the degree to which the detective plot doesn’t matter and is a mere vehicle for something else; comedy in this film, romance in Big Sleep.

Source: Universal DVD
6 August, 7:37 PM

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

(Angst essen Seele auf)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Germany, 1974
4 out of 4 stars

This film is the starkest thing I’ve ever seen in such bright (if ultimately eery) colors. It’s a “more-than-meets-the-eye” melodrama about intergenerational and interracial love back when such things were even more frowned upon (and even the protagonist is shown, in odd ways, to have Hitler on the brain, despite her love for a younger Arab man). Even before they get together (fairly early on) there is such a weird sense of menace and discomfort, as if you’re being forced to see how strange and “wrong” this is even though you yourself don’t feel it personally. Everyone who thought Crash was somehow insightful should watch this film, because it’s definitely the best film about racism that I’ve ever seen, even though it’s also “more” than that. The first part of the film is not oblique at all; if anything, it’s direct, like a series of punches to the gut. The final third, by contrast, moves inward more as we see the price of compromise (and some other factors that are more difficult to understand). This is one of those film-school classics that actually lives up to its reputation, and I strongly recommend it.

Source: Home Vision DVD
6 August, 8:49 PM

Rebels of the Neon God

(Ch'ing shaonien na cha)
Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, 1992
3 out of 4 stars

In his first film, international “arty” director Tsai Ming-liang tells what is apparently, for him, a fairly accessible tale about two fake thugs, the sometimes-girlfriend of one of them, and a younger teenager who has a strange preoccupation with the three of them. He does so largely with long, one-take, unmoving shots (when the action moves into the background, the camera usually doesn’t follow). It’s not always easy to understand the relationship between these various characters, which is just as well, as it is pretty languid and obscure in general; teasing out the nuances of these relationships was my main source of interest while watching this film. Overall, it seems to be worth a try, but not worth a recommendation. I got a generally positive impression from it (meaning that it didn’t just totally irritate me), but it didn’t provoke a strong visceral aesthetic appreciation (that’s a little paradoxical I guess) that I get from my favorite “art films.” I’m tempted to watch one of Tsai’s later, “better-known” (relatively speaking) films, but I’m not sure that I’m that enamored with his visual style or his style of storytelling (as opposed to, say, that of Wong Kar-Wai).

Source: Wellspring DVD
3 August, 8:37 PM

Clerks II

Kevin Smith, USA, 2006
2 out of 4 stars

Kevin Smith is an interesting guy. I was reading something about how his box office has never measured up to his media hype, and I think it’s largely because of Smith as a personality, whether he’s starting feuds with comic writers, dishing about the Superman production process, or prancing around in his own work. Even at his best, his films tend to be missing something, as if Smith mostly seeks to impress you by what he’s willing to bring up, rather than by what he actually says about it. Here, he tries to have it both ways, throwing both the tasteless, apropos-of-nothing comedy and the mawkish sentimentality that we’ve seen in his work before, but he doesn’t fully succeed at either. There are undeniably some hilarious bits, but there is also too much dead air, mostly consisting of unfunny shock attempts by the often-tiresome Randal, and impotent objections from Dante, the protagonist. In the harsh light of color, the actors who portray both characters seem really flat and dull, leaving the luminous Rosario Dawson to practically carry the whole movie (and she does a better job than I would have thought her capable of).

The unfunniness isn’t really caused by the plot or the sappy stuff, but this stuff doesn’t work either. Part of it is that the pathos of something like Chasing Amy is missing here, because the choices are too easy and everyone is so shallow and one-note in the first place. Ultimately, though, the thin-skinned Smith should have known better than to (rightly) mock The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King for its multiple endings, only to commit the same sin. Oh, and Jason Lee was shamefully wasted.

Source: MGM 35mm print
24 July, 10:50 PM

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

(A Cock and Bull Story)
Michael Winterbottom, UK, 2005
3.5 out of 4 stars

As I’ve said before, I’m sucker for meta, so my enjoyment of this film was all but guaranteed. However, aside from a disorienting ending, A Cock and Bull Story is actually quite linear, largely giving us a 24-hour period in the making of an actual Tristram Shandy film (the original British title making the point that this is not that film; presumably it was changed because we Americans genuinely don’t know what a “cock and bull story” is).

Much of it, then, consists of Steve Coogan portraying himself. He’s clearly the protagonist in Michael Winterbottom’s film, but his most of the Coogan character’s efforts are spent making sure that he will in fact be the protagonist and lead in the film that “Mark” is making. Considering that I’d never even heard of Coogan before, I was quite glad that the American DVD distributor included a trailer for the box set of his old mock talk show, which comes up several times throughout the film (and is therefore a must-view for fellow clueless yank viewers; it’s the last one that plays before you get to the menu). Even with this admittedly fuzzy knowledge, I still really enjoyed Coogan’s persona and the unerringly hilarious antics that the film provides. There’s also a lot of good observations and snarky commentary implicit in the how Winterbottom deals with high literature and high film, and the usual cluelessness that the characters, especially Coogan, have regarding both despite the task at hand. Amazingly, there is even a bit of a plot too; it’s just not Shandy’s story, although I did actually wish we’d seen a bit more of that, despite my appreciation of what I did get.

Source: Warner DVD
23 July, 2:37 PM

Collateral

Michael Mann, USA, 2004
4 out of 4 stars

There’s no denying that the flawless style of Michael Mann is the main reason this movie is as remarkable as it is. However, this is also the movie that made me a big Jamie Foxx fan, even though I’ve still never seen Ray. Much like Damon Wayons in Bamboozled, I sensed both times I watched this film that Foxx was basing his role off of one of his comic personas, specifically the passive loser. Spike Lee talks on the Bamboozled DVD about using comic (black) actors in dramatic roles because he believes they’re capable of more (and probably because he hopes to redeem the buffoonish portrayal of blacks in film) and he was right; he just had the wrong guy.

Wayans never managed to rise above the level of preprogrammed comic persona, whereas Foxx, despite my initial skepticism on the first viewing, does a fantastic job at slowly progressing his character through a sometimes-ludicrous series of transformations and epiphanies, mostly revolving around how he both reacts against and is molded by Tom Cruise’s villain character (and Cruise-as-villain seems rather prescient now that people have turned against him; today, Foxx might well have gotten the top-billing he deserved).

I’ve read criticisms about the plot in spite of the style, but honestly, I’m not bothered by any of it, not even the ending that I’ve seen criticized the most frequently. What I love about this movie is that it’s a mainstream film that beats most art films at their own game. It doesn’t actually have to be so polarized. Imagine that.

Source: Universal DVD
20 July, 8:08 PM

Not One Less

(Yi ge dou bu neng shao)
Zhang Yimou, China, 1999
4 out of 4 stars

Surprisingly, I never lost my patience or got bored while watching this, even though it is very slow, understated film in which there is a great deal of repetition and very little character development. Zhang Yimou takes us along with a 13-year-old substitute teacher, played, like the other characters, by a nonprofessional actor (the credits even tell you where each person comes from, and that most of them actually do the jobs in real life that we see them doing here).

It is fascinating to see the bonds develop between the teacher and her students almost without anyone trying. The film barely even seems like it needs a “quest,” but when one develops, the teacher’s plight is even more poignant. I will say that I’m not sure I got any great insights into the problem of “poverty in rural China,” but the mindset of the characters as Zhang shows them – obstinate and determined – was quite captivating.

Source: Sony DVD
18 July, 10 PM

Blazing Saddles

Mel Brooks, USA, 1974
3 out of 4 stars

Maybe I jinxed it by reading about how important it was too many times, but it was unquestionably funnier and a better film than The Producers, which had me beginning to wonder if Mel Brooks was anything like what he was cracked up to be. While there seem to be some lulls, Brooks overall succeeds at depicting outrageous racism, often without much humor to shield the audience or the protagonist from its blunt impact, and then succeeds in depicting an almost cartoonish comedic effort to squash it. It’s a “deconstruction” of the western in that it fills in the blanks, rather than, say, the thoughtless revisionism that leads to casting Will Smith as the lead in Wild, Wild West and hoping we’ll accept that no white character in the film notices.It is, then, interesting to see how positive and forceful the political message of this film is, considering that the most one gets out of Producers is that gays and Germans are allegedly funny. The film isn’t always a laugh-riot, but it earns our patience.

Source: Warner DVD
16 July, 9:36 PM

A Scanner Darkly

Richard Linklater, USA, 2006
4 out of 4 stars

So far, it’s the best movie I’ve seen that came out in 2006. Richard Linklater and his rotoscoping animation staff have greatly improved on the already impressive technique used in his earlier film, Waking Life, and the improvement is only helped by the use of actual characters this time around; there’s still not tons of plot, but it’s less of a patience-testing talkfest than the aforementioned film, which was nonetheless still fairly good.

Although it’s not particularly plot-driven, it’s still a narrative film (being as it is based on a Philip K. Dick novel), and so that means that we get to see this technique used toward “traditional” film towards the purpose of disrupting it. Some effects clearly need this medium to be accomplished effectively, but the nice thing about this medium is that the effects aren’t particularly different from the sight of a ashtray on the table, slightly wobbling in its color distribution. What this means is that every frame of the film is ultimately a joy to look at, which is a rare thing in film.

Surprisingly, the film is also quite hilarious, in addition to the expected morose darkness. Drug addiction is shown to be “funny” without the awful side of it somehow being erased with this depiction. This humor is mostly thanks to Robert Downey, Jr. although the other, more frequently maligned cast members hold their own fairly well. The twists and turns of who’s watching who and who’s responsible for what are politically and dramatically compelling.

Source: Warner 35mm print
11 July, 11 PM

An Inconvenient Truth

Davis Guggenheim, USA, 2006
3.5 out of 4 stars

At first, I figured that a movie based on a PowerPoint presentation didn’t really need to be seen on the big screen, but having finally succumbed to good buzz from friends and media, I found that I was mistaken after all. Surprisingly, the still photos Al Gore offers of the effects of global warming are quite effective – breathtaking and disturbing – on the big screen. There are, of course, some videos too, and even a few quite funny cartoons, but the director chooses to show all of these through Gore’s giant video screen, which means that we are, barring some autobiographical interludes in Tennessee and so on, firmly placed in the seats of Gore’s college audience. This seems like folly, but it is surprisingly effective.

Speaking of those autobiographical bits, Gore narrates some key turning points in his life, but I wish he had explained what epiphany transformed him from a guy that couldn’t carry a CSPAN session to a guy that can carry a major motion picture! I definitely want him for president now, almost in spite of myself. As for the science, I did learn a lot, and I thought he was most effective when he took shots at the characterization of global warming as “theory.” This movie is a force for good and its actually well mad and honest; it’s nice when these things come together for once.

Source: Paramount 35mm print
10 July, 6:57 PM

The Devil Wears Prada

David Frankel, USA, 2006
2.5 out of 4 stars

This is one of those movies that seems solid and entertaining, then starts to crumble a bit when you think about it afterwards; however, it still holds up for the most part, and the main purpose of a movie is to keep you interested while you’re watching, after all. The first problem is the title, which also implies that Meryl Streep is the main role, rather than protagonist Anne Hathaway who is, in fact, effectively plays an interesting character rather than just a sounding board for another virtuoso Streep performance (which isn’t to say that Streep isn’t good, either).

The main problems mostly lie in how Andy, Hathaway’s charcter, deals with her dilemma; should she stay true to herself or fall into the fashion world? This isn’t as lame as it sounds on paper, especially since they managed to convey some sense of the aforementioned fashion world’s glamour to someone like me who by default reviles every aspect of it. This, however, might mean that I sympathized more with her plight than someone who, say, never had any qualms about “fitting in” at all costs. However, the weakness of the detractors seems to sap this film’s moral clarity, as does its eventual mutation from a series of critiques of a whole industry to a mere interpersonal conflict; of course this is inevitable in Hollywood film, but the way this happens in this movie decidedly muddies up and changes the entire issue at hand. Of course, a film like this wants to have it both ways, but one hopes at the very least that when several characters describe a size 4 as “fat,” the filmmaker means to attack that perspective. A lack of clarity on this issue is a lot more unforgivable. All that said, I did find it to be compelling and well-played.

Source: Fox 35mm print
6 July, 7:00 PM

The Mission

(Cheung fo)
Johnnie To, Hong Kong, 1999
2 out of 4 stars

This film does have a reasonable amount of style, but ultimately, it’s not enough to make up for the baffling nature of most of the action, and more importantly, the utter lack of character development. Actually, the film does become fairly compelling in its final sequences, but ultimately this is too small a part of an already short film to make enough of a difference. The action is okay, impressive at times, but the acting is basically not there, even though I’ve at least seen Anthony Wong in other things and know that he can do better when he’s meant to. A bit of a disappointment, to be sure.

Source: Tai Seng DVD
5 July, 7:19 PM

Caché

Michael Haneke, France / Austria / Germany / Italy, 2005
3.5 out of 4 stars

This is a “family under siege” film in which the threat (or menace) increasingly seems insignificant compared to darkness in the protagonist’s own past. Georges’ darkness has political shades to it, but most interestingly, it’s always a little fuzzy just exactly what happened, and this lack of clarity continues into the “present day” of the film. I’m used to ambiguous endings and what not, but this film threw me off a bit in regards to how the director included ambiguity throughout what seemed to be a “realist” rather than impressionist film, and yet managed to do it without leaving the viewer merely irritated. My observations on this count were influenced, to some extent, by my viewing of the director interview found on the DVD.

Source: Sony DVD
3 July, 1:22 PM

Infernal Affairs II

(Mou gaan dou II)
Andrew Lau & Alan Mak, Hong Kong, 2003
3 out of 4 stars

What a tangled web a studio can weave when they realize they desperately need to make some money off of a sequel to a film that didn’t need one. That’s not to say that this is bad, but it would strike me as an ordinary film even if I hadn’t seen the extraordinary film that came before. This “sequel,” despite the number, is actually a prequel, but it doesn’t so much fill in the blanks as muddy up the waters; it’s often confusing, it’s not always clear if some of the new backstory really squares with the depictions we saw in the first one, and some of the more glaring questions are left unanswered (possibly for film number three). The young replacements the mole characters, previously played by Tony Leung and Andy Lau, are certainly not up to the task. Thankfully, the movie works because Anthony Wong and Eric Tsang reprise their roles as the respective cop and mob boss, and it is quite interesting to learn about a relationship between them that, from what I recall, was far from obvious before. I certainly wouldn’t recommend watching this before the first one, despite the chronology, but I imagine it is worth satisfying the likely thirst for more that you will most likely have after watching the previous film.

Source: Mega Star DVD
6 June, 3:15 PM

Crimson Gold

(Talaye sorkh)
Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2003
3.5 out of 4 stars

It’s positively amazing what you can sometimes get with non-professional actors, basically playing themselves, especially compared to the many times that real actors flub things entirely. This film follows the sad trajectory of a disaffected pizza delivery driver in Tehran, but while his journey is rooted in reality and presented, aside from the cuts from one scene to another, in something much like real time including all the boring waiting periods (and without the comforting style of similar scenes in Chinatown), the story itself is almost fantastical, probably in part because the people Hussein meets are, to no small degree, more symbolic than anything. The story is heartbreaking and the visuals held my interest without being flashy in the least. Most interestingly, director Jafar Panahi provides us with a removed, rational view of modern Iranian society even as he shows his considerable skill in unobtrusively guiding us along with one man’s unfortunate journey.

Source: Wellspring DVD
28 June, 9:11 PM

Superman Returns

Bryan Singer, Australia / USA, 2006
3.5 out of 4 stars

I thought that Richard Donner’s 1978 film, which I recently reviewed here, came from the right place, but was largely unsuccessful. You would think, then, that I wouldn’t get much out of a Superman franchise reboot that is nothing more than a rejuiced version of the Donner films, seeing as how I enjoyed Christopher Nolan’s pastiche of all the best Batman elements.

It is perhaps true that Bryan Singer’s choice of adaptation can be limiting in that he wasn't able or willing to drop anything that perhaps didn’t work ideally. Despite this, the film is an incredible, almost miraculous success. I’m really impressed with how well Singer does at creating good riff on something I didn't find that impressive, as I am with his general ability to sustain an un-ironic “earnest” tone without being overly corny (give or take a few minutes) or excessively anachronistic. The best example is Kevin Spacey’s Lex Luthor; he took Gene Hackman’s Luthor, which I was none too fond of, and made it work (with help from the script I presume). Certainly, there are problems; some scenes go on forever despite their lack of suspense (the filmmakers only get a pass on the “will Superman save them” thing for the first time), and the ending is abrupt in all the wrong ways. Finally, I’m not sure if this will convert you to the pro-Superman camp, but it will satisfy both casual and true believers.

Source: Warner 35mm print
28 June, 10 PM