On 35mm at the Metreon with Lucía on 3 June 2008 at 20:15.
The Wachowski brothers definitely have an eye for special effects and a sense for fight scenes. The story was ___, the dialogue was even more ___, but John Goodman, Christina Ricci, and Roger Allam were great. It’s a shame about the main actor, but I guess it’s a harder role to pull off—not so much there to have fun with.
All in all I enjoyed it, however. Like Indiana Jones, it was thoroughly entertaining and better than expected, but I probably won’t remember much about it this time next year.
On 35mm at the Century San Francisco Centre with Lucía on 2 June 2008 at 20:35.
I enjoyed this much more than I expected. Harrison Ford is as entertaining as usual and while the story is ridiculous/formulaic the dialogue is not painful. I can’t say that I was ever really that excited about Indiana Jones (or at least I don’t remember being excited), the amount of effort and imagination that went into this film really showed. It’s hard enough to make an adventure film in the 80s that people really care about, but to do as good a job twenty years later when that style of filmmaking is long dead is really a remarkable accomplishment. Was this better than the other Indiana Jones films? Hmm… maybe if I remembered the previous ones better I could say.
Cate Blanchett was clearly the other star of the film, and John Hurt is distinctive as always. None of the other actors brought anything special to the film, however, and could probably have been easily replaced.
Hollywood soundtracks have definitely dropped in quality over the last decades, and this was a refreshing return to form for John Williams, much more so than with Star Wars I–III.
On DVD at Delsa’s house with Lucía (asleep) on 28 May 2008 at around 22:30.
Ace in the Hole is a very dark, cynical film. A deep shade of noir. While perhaps not as extreme as Sweet Smell of Success, it certainly comes close, and is probably more relevant after all these years. Accurately or not, I can’t be sure, Sweet Smell of Success describes in what seems like the starkest possible light, the power of gossip columnists to create and destroy careers, and the unhesitating manner that they do so to further their goals.
If gossip columnists still wield that power, it’s not apparent to me. Media circuses (and this film is just about the purest characterization of a media circus I can imagine), on the other hand, seem stronger than ever, even if they are now more the domain of TV and Internet news than print newspapers (for whom having exclusive access to the subject at the heart of national attention is no longer what makes or breaks each company). The basic mechanics of the story of Ace in the Hole don’t strike me as any more implausible now than then, and if it helps anyone remember to think of the underlying motives of the people telling you the news when you watch it, then the film is certainly still relevant.
On DVD with Lucía at Delsa’s house on 24 May 2008 at around 21:30.
I like heist films. This one has Donald Sutherland and Sean Connery in it. How can it not be good?
Oh, right. It’s a Michael Crichton film. Actually, this is probably the worst Michael Crichton film I’ve seen, as well as the worst Sean Connery film. Ah well, the less said about it, the better.
On DVD at home with Lucía on 21 May 2008 at around 21:45.
I was a bit disappointed with The French Connection. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting, but what I got was a pretty good early-70s thriller. The film was fairly cliché, with an impulsive cop with strong hunches, little trust from his superiors, and a tendency to leave a trail of wreckage behind him (this is all implied/described—in the film, we never see anything other than the case he’s following). The story is compelling enough that I was able to forgive a fair number of what I felt at the time were implausible plot and character developments. While I’m not sure how many similar films might have come before, I can certainly see that most of Hollywood’s reckless cop thrillers since The French Connection seem to be made of the same mold. Most recently American Gangster feels like something of an homage.
Would it be fair to consider The French Connection a post-noir film? Same flawed characters, same gritty town, but with mostly honest cops, no sense of the which way is up? morality, and a strong sense of vindication.
Anyways, I enjoyed The Conversation more, with its ambiguous morality and ambiguous ending.
On 35mm at the Kabuki with Lucía and Ben on 20 May 2008 at 21:20.
Redbelt was very much like every other Mamet film I’ve seen: crisp dialogue delivered by all the actors in exactly the same manner; plot twists for the sake of plot twists. The ending is so short, implausible, and gratuitous that it’s tempting to read it as a mere fantasy on the part of Mike Terry, the main character—a vindication of standing by his core values, Job-like, in times of great adversity (despite a few slippages). The fact that he is able to take his wife’s betrayal so in stride is particularly disturbing. Much of the film was spent developing the characters and their various motivations, and as the plot began to accelerate, the film began to feel more and more like a damaged ship trying to make it to port before its hull collapses.
Translated by William Weaver from the Italian Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore.
Read sometime in May 2008.
It was enjoyable to follow Italo Calvino in his second-person, literary-centric adventures, and it would be difficult to say whether I liked more his frame story, or the individual story fragments that the book is stitched together from. The prose is good enough to bask in, and as the frame story becomes more developed and more central to the book (and more convoluted and more ridiculous), I find myself taking refuge in each new story fragment with its blank slate and subtly different new style—an opportunity to clean myself off before I am once more plunged into the madness of the main story-line.
My Neighbors the Yamadas (Isao Takahata, 1999)
On DVD at home with Lucía on 18 May 2008 at around 22:00.
My Neighbors the Yamadas was a delightful film. The animation style was intentionally sparse, and looked as though it was made up of rough ink sketches with watercolor. Similarly, the film comprised a series of vignettes of varying length that gave the sort of impression of the Yamada family that one might get from a series of mostly disconnected comic strips, which is what the film was adapted from. The characters are very much caricatures, very familiar ones at that, as is the family itself (family of four + grandma).
Next time I’ll try it again without subtitles.
On 35mm at the Century 20 Daly City with Lucía and Ben, on 13 May 2008 at 21:40.
Enjoyable superhero rubbish. I loved Marvel Comics when I was a kid, but I’ve been sorely disappointed by each of the recent film adaptations that I’ve seen (X-Men, Spider Man, The Hulk, X2, The Fantastic Four—The Hulk probably being the most interest of the bunch). I’ve pretty much given up on them and have skipped over a few, but naturally when I heard that this was better than the others, I scarcely hesitated to give ‘them’ another chance.
This time I was not disappointed. While still a dumb Hollywood film in every sense, this one didn’t leave me groaning over the dialogue or cringing from the delivery. The special effects were enjoyable (as they were in all of the films), the pacing was not too fast or too slow, and everything else sort of filled in the gaps. Is it because I was less attached to Iron Man than the other characters? Perhaps, but more so I think it’s just a better director and a more mature cast.
I was never really a big fan of The Avengers, so I’m a bit spiteful that they’re taking them so seriously when they shat all over The Fantastic Four. Ah well… gotta let it go, I guess.
Orz Boyz (Ya-che Yang, 2007)
no wikipedia or imdb entries
On 35mm at the Clay Theater during the 51st SFIFF with Lucía, on 8 May 2008, at 17:45.
I have not seen many Taiwanese films, but somehow this is the third one I’ve seen this year at the Clay Theater. Ya-che Yang is a new director, and Orz Boyz is his first film. This is probably why I can find neither the director nor his film on imdb or wikipedia. While I definitely liked this film, and it definitely had some of the more memorable scenes of any films I’ve seen in the last year, it was something of a mixed bag. For starters, even though it was half as long, it seemed at least twice as long as the four-hour A Brighter Summer Day (also Taiwanese, also about childhood, also by a guy named 楊).
The film is something of a collage of shared experiences of two boys, named Liar No.1 and Liar No.2 (No.2 is of course younger, shorter, and less well-tempered than No.1). No.2 was abandoned by his parents and is being raised by his grandmother. No.1 lost his mother (what happened to her I’m not sure) and his father is mad, mostly shuffling around silently. As a result of all of this abandonment, they have a copious amount of free time to wander around the city, their own derelict neighborhood by the water, abandoned areas of their school, etc., and involve themselves in dares, taunting each other, elaborate make-believes, and all kinds of trouble. There is a brief involvement with a slightly more mature girl, and those are perhaps some of the best scenes in the film (particularly memorable was the long scene with the fans and pillow feathers).
The director wants us to remember what it was like to be a child, and while very few people that will ever see the film are likely to have gone through anything resembling the childhood these kids are having, it somehow works. Perhaps it is because the film is something of an exaggerated version of the free time, self-involvement, alienation from the adult world, and need to escape reality that I had, that I am able to connect to it so well. Also, the fact that 110 minutes could seem so long reminded me very much of my childhood, when everything seemed like a long time.