The Painted Veil

John Curran, China / USA, 2006
3 out of 4 stars

Those of you that are familiar with my kneejerk leftism will know that I’m no big fan of “white people in Asia” movies – I prefer to let the Asians speak for themselves, to put it bluntly. Nevertheless, this picture, aside from The Quiet American, is one of the better examples of this kind of film. The focus is on the spoiled socialite wife (Naomi Watts), and her microbiologist husband (Edward Norton), who find themselves acting out the ups and downs of all-but-arranged marriage against the backdrop first of Shanghai, then later of rural China, as Norton’s character tries to stem a cholera outbreak.

The perspective of the film is such that it does not try to instill the couple with an unrealistic level of insight regarding their complicity in 1920s Europeans imperialism. It does not shy away from pointing out these issues, but it also manages to avoid heavy-handedness. Ultimately, the movie really is about the trials of the couple themselves, and the actors both do a good job with some shifts and changes that might have seemed absurd if acted out by others. Finally, the cinematography is certainly nothing to sneer at.

Source: Warner DVD
19 May, 9:59 PM

Volver

Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 2006
2.5 out of 4 stars

Certainly, Almodóvar retains his interesting, bright visual style, although it doesn’t seem quite as distinctive overall. And he continues spotlighting the generational traumas and triumphs of women and whatnot. Yet despite all that, this film fell fall short of the only other one I’ve seen by him, All About My Mother. There is much here that should be involving, but I felt strangely uninvolved for the most part. Despite the serious issues at play, the plot is structured in a manner that felt either like a sitcom or a soap opera, I’m not quite sure which. It’s also all over the map; threads get dropped or deemphasized at will, leaving me unsure as to what I was really supposed to be paying attention to.

If I’ve been vague about what happens in this film so far, it’s because anything that is really important happens after a good 30 minutes is past, which is generally my vague cut-off point for giving away plot details (this rather conservative spoilerphobe policy is a direct response to all those TV and film trailers, not to mention TV listing and DVD box covers, that carelessly tell you everything that’s gonna happen). To give you some kind of hint, though, just let me tell you the apparent use of magical realism was one of the more interesting things about the film, and I felt more than a bit let down once I realized how this element was actually being put to use. That might just be my fault, and perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood for this film, but as it is, I did not enjoy it very much.

Source: Sony DVD
13 May, 9:27 PM

Conversations with Other Women

Hans Canosa, UK / USA, 2005
3 out of 4 stars

I had never heard of this film until I saw it on a Blockbuster shelf, and having one last in-store rental from my free trial with the online service, I picked it up solely on the strength of the actors, Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter. I anticipated that the film would be exclusively focused on them, and that their performances would be very engaging, and I was right on both counts.

The two actors play wedding guests who meet and begin flirting. Two things stand out right away. The first is that the dialogue is sparking and quite clever, and the second is that everything is in split-screen. This is a difficult effect to describe; sometimes each actor occupies a different side of the screen, sometimes we get different angles, different moments in the scene (some of which appear to have not actually occurred), and even flashbacks, on occasion. It actually did take me a little while to get accustomed to this very singular stylistic choice, as sometimes it’s hard to know where to direct one’s attention! Furthermore, although as usual I don’t want to give anything away, you can’t take everything these characters say to each other at face value, at least not at the beginning.

Ultimately, I would say that the interplay between these characters is really entertaining and moving, and that the actors definitely sell it. I think the split-screen works, although it perhaps would have been better to just use it in part of the film, as there are moments in which it seems unnecessary. This is a good solid film; there just isn’t enough here for it to be a great one (and with less-talented actors, it might well have been a bad one).

Source: WEA DVD
8 February, 8:32 PM

Idiocracy

Mike Judge, USA, 2006
3.5 out of 4 stars

The same studio that was responsible for dumping this film into all of 130 theaters last year, 20th Century Fox, just this last weekend opened Epic Movie, a film that has 0% positive score on Rotten Tomatoes and is unanimously described as a film that contains no actual jokes, merely a random sequence of reenactments of various blockbusters alongside depictions of bodily functions. Of course, this was last weekend’s #1 film. Unsurprisingly, some people on the Internet feel that Fox is engaged in some kind of conspiracy, preferring that we not see this comic (but also very angry) depiction of dystopic society in which, 500 years later, everyone has become terminally stupid due to natural selection no longer taking its course (“only stupid people are breeding,” as the song goes).

Rumors also circulate that this film has been butchered by the studio, and I couldn’t help but engage in guessing games while watching the film. For instance, did they really need that narration? Although it was often funny, it also felt, often enough, like it was really just explaining the obvious, although you could take that as some kind of perverse metacommentary. The film is also only 84 minutes, which made me wonder if the narration wasn’t covering up the gaps left by all the footage that had been hacked away (unless Mike Judge got his budget slashed and had to use narration to convey what he wasn’t able to film).

Indeed, there are ways in which the film seems cheap or hastily done, but there is still a spark of malicious genius to the whole thing, a sort of tremendous hate-letter to our modern society and its valorization of the idiotic; the cynic will claim that most of the things in the film are only slightly exaggerated. I don’t think I agree with Judge that people are getting dumber, and will only get dumber in the future. I think that the popular culture certainly is getting dumber, but I think that this is, for the most part, due to the media’s increasing willingness to pander to our more vapid and venal impulses, rather than attempt to pacify us as they did in the Father Knows Best days (what was so “smart” about that stuff, after all? I think, then, that our overall intelligence isn’t decreasing, it’s more that the visibility of the unintelligent is at an all time high, and whatever thrall the intelligent once had over those who are less so is at an all time low. I will say that the part that rang the truest for me was when the “average” hero is time and time again shot down for his apparent effeminacy, because that is how the future people read anything other than idiocy. I may not agree with Judge’s diagnosis (much less his reading of class and sex, which is questionable at best), but I agree that something is rotten, and I found his vision, powered by righteous anger, to be appropriately disturbing.

Source: Fox DVD
31 January, 10:32 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

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

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

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

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

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

The Beat That My Heart Skipped

(De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté)
Jacques Audiard, France, 2005
3 out of 4 stars

I thought I wasn’t going to like this at all at the beginning, but once the character’s arc gets off the ground it’s fairly involving. I found the status of the main relationship at the end to be very confusing, however.

Source: Genius DVD
4 March, 10 PM

Junebug

Phil Morrison, USA, 2005
3 out of 4 stars

Not perfectly transcendent, but certainly successful at reaching towards it. My favorite moment is when the Blue State protagonist is listening to her Red State-raised husband sing a hymn (very well), and her expression goes through so many contortions, leaving you really uncertain as to whether she is offended by the possibility that he might still have some religious sentiment, amazed that he has hidden his proficiency at singing from her, or something else more nebulous. Her reactions and his singing combine to produce an interesting, sublime moment. I don’t know that I would have nominated Amy Adams for an Oscar though; I think Embeth Davidtz’s work here is more nuanced.

Source: Sony DVD
23 February, 8:20 PM

Dark Water

Walter Salles, USA, 2005
3.5 out of 4 stars

This could be a constant refrain here, but nonetheless I really have to give credit to Walter Chaw of Film Freak Central for drawing this film to my attention, because the notion of another crummy “J-horror” knockoff with killer washing machines caused me to merely chortle that I’d never see that movie. Unfortunately this seems to have been a common reaction, as the film was a flop. I also didn’t trust my co-worker’s recommendation, as I figured that his taste was suspect. However, Chaw’s belated recommendation led me to give it a chance, and what I found was a very compelling and involving psychological thriller (not “horror” at all), filled with atmosphere and a surprisingly good performance by Jennifer Connelly, certainly better than what I saw from her in House of Sand and Fog. Fumbles the ending a bit, in execution if not in substance. I haven’t seen the original yet but I do doubt it will be as good. It just goes to show that just because the original impetus to make a film might have been bad (remake a foreign film because Americans won’t read subtitles), it doesn’t mean the film itself is bad. Seems obvious, but apparently I needed to learn this lesson again.

Source: Buena Vista DVD
21 February, 9 PM

Spider Forest

(Geomi sup)
Song Il-gon, South Korea, 2004
3 out of 4 stars

One of those “what the hell is going on” movies, but, despite the “Asia Extreme” label (without which I imagine there’d be no Region 1 DVD release), not exactly one of those “pushing the limits of horrificness” films. By the end, you pretty much do know what’s going on, and it’s interesting but not exactly shattering. I found the mood to be well cultivated but the film to be a little somnolent at times, or maybe it’s the characters that weren’t involving enough. It’s not bad, but I don’t know if I’d recommend it to someone that had never heard of it.

Source: TLA DVD
19 February, 10 PM

Head-On

(Gegen die wand)
Fatih Akin, Germany / Turkey, 2004
3 out of 4 stars

Engaging, but uneven. There are definitely a lot of extreme moments and the characters are interesting, but it doesn’t reach the heights you keep hoping it will build up to.

Source: Strand DVD
17 February – 9:30 PM

Nobody Knows

(Dare mo shiranai)
Kore-eda Hirokazu, Japan, 2004
4 out of 4 stars

Sublime. I was afraid this would be one of those “so artsy it’s boring” films, and it might be for a lot of people, but I found this to be a very engaging story to base a largely improvised, silent series of performances on. There’s nothing and everything going on here.

Source: MGM DVD
12 February, 10:30 PM

Hoop Dreams

Steve James, USA, 1994
3.5 out of 4 stars

A film like this seems especially valuable in today’s climate of Big Momma’s House 2 and take your pick of whatever else. A really compelling look at ghetto life; I don’t think I really had a clear idea of what it’s like (for some) until I saw this. Of course it’s 12 years later and things have changed, but I imagine, not for the better. It’s also a scathing example of how white basketball coaches display their contempt for the black kids they coach (although maybe this guy isn’t racist, he might just be inhuman). The dedication of the team involved is amazing. They actually follow these two boys and their families for the entire four years of high school. One can argue that the film lacks visual pizzaaz, but it’s hardly ever boring despite the length.

Source: Home Vision DVD
28 January, 9 PM

Chinatown

Roman Polanski, USA, 1974
4 out of 4 stars

Excellent, a “classic” that actually lives up to the film geek hype. I don’t think I realized that Jack Nicholson used to be a bad-ass (the old man version just isn’t cutting it), and the plot really hits you, especially at the end, which admittedly does feel tacked on, all the more so after you learn that Roman Polanski rewrote it against the screenwriter’s wishes (it works thematically but it doesn’t entirely make sense with regards to plot and characters). Without knowing enough about moviemaking I can tell that it’s very well shot. The idea of Chinatown being a menacing place not because of anything that we see actually happen there, but because of the bad memories they have of what has happened there, memories that ultimately have no relevance what happens at the end.

Finally, the effect of having his snooping go on in real time (actually showing him fiddle around until the receptionist gets fed up and gets him who he’s asked to see) is quite amazing. You’d think that would only fly in art flicks, and it’d be boring regardless, but I guess the 1970s were a different time for movies, and more importantly, Nicholson can pull it off here.

Source: Paramount DVD
20 January, 10:30 PM