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.
Still Life (Jia Zhang-Ke, 2006)
On 35mm at the PFA during the 51st SFIFF with Lucía, Ben, and Sunny, on 6 May 2008, at 20:45.
This is exactly my kind of film. Among other things, it is the epitome of the concept of film as a means of travelling to other places. While I am unlikely to ever see much of China beyond its major cities, trainlines, and maybe some natural landscape (assuming I even ever go to China), it is impossible that I will ever see the old town of 奉节 (Fengjie) along the 长江 (Yangtze River). Why? Because it is now flooded as a result of the 长江三峡大坝 (Three Gorges Dam). Seeing a unique opportunity to capture in film a 2300-year-old town in the transition to annihilation, 贾樟柯 (Jia Zhang-Ke) took his camera with him and assembled a simple story of two abandoned spouses come looking for their missing other halves.
The main character, Han Sanming (played by Han Sanming), is a miner that has come to Fengjie to look for his wife, who was sold to him, and who fled him 16 years earlier to return to her family. In particular he wants to see his daughter again. In order to make ends meet during his inquiries, he takes a job dismantling buildings. The other main character, Shen Hong (played by 赵涛 [Zhao Tao], probably the only professional actor in the film), has come to see her husband, who left two years ago to work in Fengjie, and has not been returning calls.
The film is in some sense post-apocalyptic, but in a most unusual way. We see the dismantling of a society that has only partially made it into the industrial age. Only once do we get a glimpse into the world of those that are behind this transition—a man who makes a phone call to have the lights on a bridge turned on, so he can show off his importance. For the rest of the film, we see things from the perspective of those that are affected by these decisions and those that take advantage of it.
This is a film that one senses would only be possible with small unobtrusive cameras and little need for artificial light. Most of the shots in the film could be swapped out with others, and while that would change entirely the character of the film, it would have no effect on the story itself. The camera does two things: it acts as an observer of the trials of Han Sanming and Shen Hong, and it provides us with what one might suppose are their observations of the world around them. While it is impossible to avoid providing us with a perspective of his own (and indeed, the whole film is his perspective), Jia Zhang-Ke strives to give us the raw materials of his own observations, leaving us to construct our own idea of what means what as much as possible.
I really hope this will get general distribution, or at least show up in the NY film fest this fall, because I’d love to see it again.
[wikipedia] - [imdb]
On projected video at the PFA during the 51st SFIFF with Lucía, on 6 May 2008, at 18:45.
The Judge and the General wasn’t a particularly good documentary (designed for network TV, I guess?), but the subject was so interesting that I had no trouble looking past that. The film is an exploration of Juan Guzmán’s eye-opening experience as he looks for evidence of various crimes committed under Pinochet. As a member of the ruling class that had managed to remain fairly ignorant of the crimes of Pinochet’s administration, Guzmán is at first skeptical, but as he gathers evidence for the case brought before him (judges play an investigative role in the Chilean judicial system, apparently), he becomes increasingly aware of the depth of the injustices as well as the degree to which they are systematic. He begins a long process of working to bring Pinochet to justice, and while Pinochet dies before standing trial, he is at least subject to having his immunity stripped and being indicted. Moreover, this process opened the floodgates to thorough investigations into the role of other officials and subsequent indictments.
The film itself is a mix of footage following the judge as he looks into the evidence, musings on the part of the judge about his own eye-opening experience and about the role of justice in society, interview snippets of various parties involved in bringing about justice for the crimes under Pinochet, and archival footage, including some from Allende’s rise to power, the coup, and Pinochet’s rise to power.
Secret, or The Secret that Cannot Be Told (Jay Chou, 2007)
On 35mm at the Clay Theater during the 51st SFIFF with Lucía, on 4 May 2008, at 21:00.
At the other end of the spectrum from Tout est pardonné, we have the lush mainstream film from the massively popular Jay Chou. It’s probably worth noting that the cinematography is by Mark Lee Ping-bin, who probably made more money working on this film than all of his work with Hou Hsiao-Hsien, et al, combined. It certainly shows—the film is gorgeous.
It seemed to me an amazing amount of effort is put into the realistic hand motions of the piano playing (in stark contrast to the unrealistic piano playing itself, given the context). Jay Chou’s preference for Chopin certainly shows, and I won’t pretend that I don’t have a soft spot for the significant role that piano-playing plays in the film (and yet I didn’t really like Shine or The Piano).
Overall an enjoyable film, although I’m pretty sure I could have made it about 45 minutes shorter without detracting from the film in any way.
A Girl Cut in Two
On 35mm at the Clay Theater during the 51st SFIFF with Lucía, on 4 May 2008, at 18:00.
Quite removed from the ‘observationalist’ filmmaking of Le voyage du ballon rouge and Tout est pardonné, Chabrol’s latest, La fille coupée en deux is an engaging… thriller?, made by a mature director. While I haven’t seen enough of Chabrol’s films to know for sure, this seems to be the same sort of cynical look into the decadent mind-games of the ruling class that Chabrol has been making for a very long time (Les cousins was great!). I’d like to see others, because I enjoy them, but there’s nothing about Chabrol that I connect to too strongly on any level.
All is Forgiven
On 35mm at the Clay Theater during the 51st SFIFF with Lucía, on 4 May 2008, at 15:00.
Skipping over the three short-film series that I saw (a collection of animations, childrens’ animations, and films by teenagers), my first feature film at this year’s film festival was Tout est pardonné, the first feature from Mia Hansen-Løve. She cast it primarily with non-professional actors, and the results are very good. Between this and Le Voyage du ballon rouge, I think it will be a good year of films for me. :-)
Much like Le Voyage du ballon rouge, Tout est pardonné is akin to the sort of what I will call ‘observationalist’ or ‘neo-Neorealist’ film that I am so attracted to. While much more narrative-oriented than the other films I would put in this category, the method of filmmaking still seems to be about allowing a narrative and set of characters grow out of a series of moving snapshots from the characters’ lives and settings, many of which could almost be chosen at random. This seems to work best with non-professional actors, and while Hansen-Løve has a very strong story to tell, complete with pivotal plot points, she still seems quite dedicated to letting the characters develop out of the little behaviors of the actors. If she had chosen to remove the story and let one section of the film spread out to fill the whole runtime, she would have had a film very similar in philosophy to Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s.
The film is about a troubled writer whose life is gradually spinning out of control. As he finds himself pushing the ones he loves further and further out of the way, he becomes involved with a drifter addicted to heroin. When she ODs one morning, he goes to hospital for treatment, and when his wife comes to see him, he finds out that he’s crossed the line too many times and that she no longer wants him in her (or their daughter’s) life—they move to Venezuela.
The rest of the film is devoted to the daughter, who has moved back to Paris with her mother and finds out that her father is still living there (her mother had told her that he had long since moved to China). They meet twice, and then he dies.
The story of the film is very simple, and most of the film is devoted to incidental scenes that reveal a little at a time about the characters or their relationships. A lot of what might be considered ‘necessary’ information is omitted, and we are left to imagine it. To understand the struggle that the husband and wife go through, we must imagine what it was like before, as well as the unbalanced dynamic of the relationship over the years (we probably glimpse more of this from his sister’s perspective than from anywhere else). We must imagine what he went through over the years as he tried to pull himself together to make himself worthy of being in his daughter’s life. We must imagine what her childhood was like, to be close to her father, and then yanked out of life in Paris to live with her mother who was never willing to tell her anything true about her father. Most of all, however, we must imagine what the mother goes through once she finds out that her daughter and husband have reconnected.
I asked the director during the Q&A whether she had chosen to leave this last perspective out in the script, or whether it was something that got taken out of the film later, during the process of making the film. The director responded that it was part of the film from the very start, and that she had made this “cruel” decision to leave out the mother’s perspective in part because the film was about the daughter and father, but also largely because it was, in a sense, needed to respect the mother’s decision to remove him from her life.
Too Bad She’s Bad, based on a story by Alberto Moravia called Il fanatico.
On DVD at home with Lucía on her birthday, in the evening.
A combination of great personalities (Alberto Moravia, Alessandro Blasetti, Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, Vittorio De Sica) resulting in a fairly forgettable film (or at least, fairly forgettable in comparison to other films from the same time and place). It definitely had its moments, and Marcello Mastroianni always makes me wish I could speak Italian, mostly because he’s so good at it.
On DVD at home with Lucía, on 18 April, 2008, late at night.
Nicholas Ray seems like a pretty inconsistent director. I’ve now seen at least five of his films. His films seem to be trying to break into Hollywood as much as they try to break out of Hollywood. He is as unconventional as he is conventional, and while cliché dialogue will often match unusual story twists, even more often very strange dialogue will accompany rather groan-worthy plot developments. The performances he gets from his actors is often very awkward and opaque (inscrutable?), and while not necessarily believable or engaging, they can seem very appropriate to the characters they are playing. Just as inconsistent, I suppose, is Bernard Herrmann, and this is probably one of his worst scores.
The first half of the film was very interesting. Robert Ryan’s character is slowly built out mostly through the reactions of his acquaintances, and the story itself takes a back seat this exploration, in which we see the city as a grim and lonely place (to say that alienation is a common theme in Ray’s films would be something of an understatement). Having established the character, however, the film takes us through a roller-coaster ride in the form of a rather ludicrous rural wintertime chase. The purpose of this is to enable the transformation of Robert Ryan’s character, and this is managed in about as unsubtle a way as possible.