Lucía and Jun-Dai on Blu-ray at home on 6 November 2011.
Jun-Dai:
From the point where Pauline and Juliet become acquainted until the point at which other people start to become concerned with their relationship, Heavenly Creatures has so much kinetic energy that it can be a little difficult to keep up. The camera movement, mise-en-scène, and editing are, in combination, so remarkably virtuosic during this section that I will most likely remember the film for it.
Some things were quite grotesque. The character Nicholas, for example (almost everything about him). Pauline’s father’s makeup, for another.
It’s hard not to wonder what Pauline’s mother was actually like. She’s portrayed so sympathetically in the film.
The film very nicely leaves the sexuality of Pauline and Juliet’s relationship fairly ambiguous.
Overall, I think, the film is a good illustration of how engaging a film can be with a great deal of assistance from the filmmaking technical qualities. That’s not to say that the acting, dialogue, or story were poor, but that I was frequently sucked into the film because of its tight editing, framing, camerawork, lighting, etc., where otherwise I would normally be a bit more distanced from it. It is no coincidence that the film uses a segment from The Third Man. Jackson must have drawn a lot of conscious inspiration from that film. Is there any film that is a more perfect blending of camerawork, editing, lighting, music, and story?
More coincidentally, the film reminded me quite a bit of Picnic at Hanging Rock (a period film about repressed/unrepressed schoolgirls in the Antipodes) and The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, which features a child with a similar self-developed disregard for the life of people around him.
(2 stars)
Lucía and Jun-Dai on DVD at home on 5 November 2011.
Jun-Dai:
Probably the weakest of the Ealing Studios films we’ve seen so far. Still, it had its moments. And in nice contrast to The Green Hornet (which we watched just before), it got better as the film progressed. It was particularly nice to see St. James’ paradise fall apart, and he handles it as expertly and nobly as you would expect him to.
(1 star)
Jun-Dai and Lucía on Blu-ray at home on 5 November.
Jun-Dai:
While there were a few nice Gondry touches (particularly towards the beginning), sadly this was more of a Seth Rogen film. It was nice to see Jay Chou, though.
(0 stars)
Lucía and Jun-Dai at UGC Ciné Cité Les Halles at 22:40 on 29 October 2011.
Jun-Dai:
Slow, moody, and occasionally interesting. Reminds me of The Professional (aka, Léon) in a few ways. For starters, they’re both about a professional criminal specialists who maintain a detachment from the brutality of their work (and instead focus on extreme professionalism). They also maintain a remarkable detachment from the human social world, interacting with people on an impersonal level and having almost no concept of popular culture. In the case of Drive, the unnamed main character even has a barren apartment, expressing his internal emptiness and/or pushing his personification of his attributes to an extreme.
In The Professional, Léon has his world blown wide open by a suddenly orphaned neighbour girl (probably Natalie Portman’s best role), forcing him to bring out his underdeveloped human side. In Drive, the unnamed main character similarly has his human side brought out of him as he develops a relationship with his neighbour and her son (and later, her ex-con husband). Unlike Léon, however, he encourages this as much as she does, and it represents something he seems to have longed for but for some reason never grabbed hold of before.
The film ends nicely. While Standard Gabriel is conveniently removed from the scene (as an obstacle between the driver and Irene), the driver is himself unable to keep her because his inhuman side is too strong (as demonstrated by a very Kitano-esque explosion of violence in an elevator).
(1 star)
Lucía and Jun-Dai on Blu-ray at home on 22 October 2011.
Jun-Dai:
Quite the epic.
(1 star)
Jun-Dai and Lucía on DVD at home on 7 October 2011.
Jun-Dai:
Funny. I’m not really sure what the point of the film was. It was definitely an unusual film. Sort of your typical dumb-and-dumber set of characters making a series of idiotic choices and behaving like asses most of the time, but set around a pretty serious topic. Funny when Omar, at the end of the film, sees no other option and runs into a chemist’s and blows the place up. Funny/sad when Faisal tries to train a crow to be a suicide crow bomber. Faisal was my favorite character. Funny the way Omar’s wife seems to be okay with him martyring himself (though I’m not 100% sure she understood?).
(0 stars)
Lucía and Jun-Dai on Blu-ray at home on 7 October 2011.
Jun-Dai:
The film gives a pretty good sense of what it must have been like to follow along with Bob Dylan on his 1965 British tour. Somehow it’s hard to ever think of Bob Dylan as young (his voice has always seemed old).
I particularly love it when Bob Dylan picks a fight with the Time reporter. I’d love to see the article he wrote after that interview.
(2 stars)
Lucía and Jun-Dai on Blu-ray at home on 5 October 2011.
Jun-Dai:
A fairly typical Disney film. Fun, funny, quirky. Some of the animation was nice (I particularly liked the cast-iron frying pan), but nothing like a top-tier Pixar film. The music was pretty terrible and the story fairly trite, but it was still enjoyable.
I liked the ivy-covered entrance to the secret hidden canyon. What do you call an area like a clearing surrounded by cliffs? In any case, that was very cool. The tower itself was neat as well, though Rapunzel made an awful lot of self portraits on the wall.
(1 star)
Lucía, Jun-Dai, and Maki at the Barbican Centre Pit Theater on 2 October 2011 at 19:45.
Jun-Dai:
I could have done without all the shakeycam, and I’m pretty sure I could have made the film about half an hour shorter without losing much. I wouldn’t mind seeing the opening again, however.
It’s an interesting trick to start a film with a music-video collage of imagery that reveals various moments throughout the film, sort of challenging you to recall them when they unfold onscreen. I’m sure it’s been done before, but I can’t think of a film that might have done that. In any case, it (among other things) gives a sense of the characters being trapped by their destiny—as though they had seen the montage and couldn’t escape the events in it from unfolding.
I’m not generally much of a Wagner fan, but I do love the opening to Tristan und Isolde, which is good because it plays over the initial montage in its entirety and bits of it are replayed throughout the film (as though to recall that montage).
Going into the film, I’d had no idea it was a science fiction film. By the end of the first part, I’d forgotten that it had opened with the title “Part 1 – Justine” and was thinking that the film was over, and had just been about a wedding.
I think von Trier was aiming to win the record for least pleasant onscreen wedding. I suspect he made it handily into the finalist round.
I suppose we are meant to see Claire’s breakdown as the world comes to an end as some sort of equivalent to Justine’s breakdown over the course of her wedding. It seems clear that Justine is not entirely sane, in general, but her sense of calm through most of the second half seems to be a parallel to Claire’s general sense of calm throughout the insanity of Justine’s wedding.
When Claire struggles with the idea of the end of the world, Justine’s level of sympathy seems like a parallel to her mother’s sympathy when Justine opens up to her during the wedding.
The ending was excellent.
(1 star)
Lucía and Jun-Dai on iTunes on 1 October 2011.
Jun-Dai:
I suppose the film could have been worse. It was pretty bad, though. Certainly a waste of Brannagh’s and Stellan Skarsård’s talents.
(0 stars)