24 City (Jia Zhangke, 2008)
On 35mm at the IFC Center with Lucía and John on 10 June 2009 at 21:50.
I think I have to see this film over again, although it’s pretty painfully slow and not very visually appealing. I spent the first half struggling to stay awake, and by the time I figured out what the film was about, I’d already missed most of what had been talked about already.
The film is about the closing of Factory 420 in order to build 24 City, a modern apartment complex. The entire story is told through interviews, in between which there are some mostly dialogueless scenes of the factory, its demolition, and various areas around the factory. Each interview captures, through the interviewee’s personal narrative, some essence of both the history of Factory 420 and the generational changes in China as a whole from just after the Cultural Revolution to the present day.
I remembered, luckily, to sit towards the back of the theater as the movie is shot on consumer video. Unlike Still Life, which has a pleasing aesthetic sensibility that makes the camera seem to be wistfully pondering the last days of a soon-to-be-flooded world of life, 24 City has a sort of anti-aesthetic that makes the film all the harder to watch. There are a few nice scenes in the vacant areas of the factory, and Jia Zhangke captures certain details that lend a certain mood to the film (rain hitting a pane of glass sitting on a windowsill).
On DVD at home with Jun-Dai and John on 05 June 2009 after dinner.
I was impressed with the skill and economy of storytelling and characterisation in this film.
On DVD at home on 05 June 2009, while somebody worked until 3:30 a.m.
I liked The 39 Steps quite a bit more.
On DVD at home with Lucía on 2 June 2009.
I should really be more disciplined and jot down my thoughts soon after watching the film. Ratcatcher is one of the best films I’ve seen in a while, but my thoughts on the film have become a little fragmented in the 10 days since I saw it.
I do remember that the film is thoroughly enveloping as a child’s perspective, and the child acting in the film is brilliantly captured, no less so than in films like My Life as a Dog, Le 400 coups, and Le vieil homme et l’enfant.
The film is from the perspective of a young boy named James, living in Scottish public housing building during a garbage collectors’ strike. On one side of the building there is a large, growing pile of garbage infested with rats. On the other side of the building there is a large, open canal. This canal is constantly present in the background of the film (frequently visible through windows in interior shots), and it is along (or in) the canal that many of the scenes in the film take place. Drowning in the canal seems to be an important theme in the film (it opens with a child drowning).
There is a lot of repetition in the film, sort of illustrating the cyclical life in a limited environment. One recurring activity is hunting around the garbage bags looking for rats. Another is watching older boys get off on mistreating others and bullying an older girl.
A lot of the characters are sort of mysterious. It’s not always clear why the parents are acting the way they are, and James’ older sister in particular seems to have a whole other life that he’s not a part of. Similarly, the garbage strike is sort of a peculiar background event that seems only relevant in that it gives James a large pile of garbage in which to look for rats, and later a number of soldiers (they come to break the strike and clear up the garbage) that children are given free rein to taunt, impede, and hit. The housing inspectors (or social workers or whatever they are) that come to investigate his family’s living conditions are clearly important to James’ father, but to James the gravity of the visit only becomes apparent after they’ve left.
But the most effective part of the film’s portrayal of James’ perspective comes in the littler things. There are two scenes where James’ parents are asleep in their clothes, and James reaches out to pull his mother’s stocking over her toe (it’s sticking out through a hole). There is a scene where James pours salt onto the table into a pile and plays with it with a toy car while none of the other characters seem to notice.
On DVD at home with Lucía on 1 June 2009 at around 22:00.
Criterion’s DVD of Le Corbeau was of pretty poor quality, but it didn’t stop me from enjoying this fine film.
Twenty-Four Eyes (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1954)
wikipedia
On DVD at home with Lucía on 31 May 2009 pretty late at night.
Twenty-Four Eyes was a very interesting film. It really drags on at times, and I got pretty tired of the gossip => cry => sing routine that the film employs throughout. On the other hand, it’s a pretty amazing portrait of a particular place (Shodoshima) through the hard times of the early thirties, the overseas expansion and surge in ultra-nationalism, the war, and defeat.
The acting was not great. There were a lot of child actors playing somewhat contrived roles, and that resulted in a fairly amateurish feel. On the other hand, when the actors were doing more ordinary things—walking about, rowing, attending class—they seemed very much to fit the parts. The film seemed to straddle traditional drama and realism in a fairly awkward way. There was, among other things, a sort of constant appeal to tragic emotion that made the film seem sort of endless.
The cinematography in the film was memorable. There was a lot of long, super-long, and super-super-long shots that provided a lot of context in the way of scenery. Most of the film was fairly low contrast, and brought out the surrounding environment in tremendous detail. After the film, I felt that I knew that little corner of Shōdoshima intimately. To use a cliché: the setting was so thoroughly felt throughout the film that the island itself was as much a character in the film as any of the people.
Twenty-Four Eyes is a sort of flawed film that through its earnestness, careful construction, inclusive photography, and capturing of a historic moment is elevated to a sort of special realm in cinéma—it’s not a masterpiece, but it is an important and unique work.
On Blu-ray at home with Lucía on 30 May late at night.
I don’t think Baraka is quite the profound film it wants to be. It is a remarkable collage of footage from around the world, showing the very developed side of some developed countries (e.g., Park Ave. and Grand Central Station in New York, Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo) and the very undeveloped side of the developing and underdeveloped nations (e.g., scavengers at a dump near Delhi, homeless in Brazil, a cigarette plant in Indonesia), along with various religious ceremonies and a few locations of great natural wonder (e.g., Ayers Rock, Iguazu), archaeological significance (e.g., the Pyramids, Angkor Wat), and at least one place of particular politico-historical import (Sonsam Kosal Killing Fields). There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to the selection of footage—it’s more a sampling of what humanity and the Earth has to offer.
The footage itself was very uneven. The night shots did not come off well, and while some sequences were brilliant short films in their own right, others didn’t seem like they belonged at all. There seemed to be an emphasis on the busyness and inhuman nature of Tokyo and New York as well as the poverty of Brazil and India, which, while certainly being very noticeable things about those countries, seemed to de-emphasize the incredible range of each. Perhaps I’m reading into it too much, but in some ways the film felt like it was revealing the incredible variety on this planet by diminishing the variety within each location and emphasizing the difference between them. This felt a little false, but perhaps it was the only feasible option given the scope of the film and its short running time. Also, showing the destitute in New York and the more developed parts of India might have contributed to a sense of homogeneity that I imagine the filmmakers were trying to avoid.
The film was definitely at its strongest when capturing religious ceremonies and architecture, as well as in capturing portraits of individual people. There’s something very reverent about the film’s approach to capturing rituals, and its coverage of religious settings is far more comprehensive than the coverage of nature, industrial, urban, etc. settings. And the portraits are just great.
Lucía: B-
Jun-Dai B+
On 3D digital projection at the Ziegfeld with Lucía, Chris, and Mai, on 29 May 2009 at 21:30.
One remarkable thing that Up and WALL•E have in common is that they both open with almost entirely dialogue-less expositions. The opening of Up, in particular, is a something of a charming but sad short film. Indeed, Up must have a record for having made so many people cry so quickly. Everyone at the Ziegfeld was sniffling at the end of it when a young child asked out loudly, “what happened?”, and the entire theater burst out laughing. It was quite a moment.
That opening short film was a masterwork in its own right.
From there, the film is in turns funny, fantastic, exciting, cute, and more than a little ridiculous. Certainly it was a notch above your average Pixar film (and that’s high praise indeed).
I don’t think this film compares so well to Ratatouille in terms of its inventiveness or WALL•E and Monsters Inc. in terms of sheer imaginativeness. Despite the fact that it’s an immersive, imaginative film, it does seem almost somewhat conventional compared to a lot of the other Pixar films. Archetypal egomaniacal bad guy, running jokes with talking dogs, uninspiringly predictable action sequences (it is a children’s film, after all, so these are pretty easy to forgive). That said, the portrayal of Fredricksen is so human that it goes beyond anything else Pixar has ever done and I can only really compare it to Miyazaki. The other characters aren’t more than paper-thin, but really, other than Russell, the only other main characters are a talking dog and a large bird (they provide little more than plot movement and comic relief), so that’s understandable. The film is really about Fredricksen.
Fenton’s is probably the biggest props to Emeryville (well, Oakland) that Pixar has given since The Incredibles action scenes along San Pablo and around the Embarcadero. Pretty awesome.
I guess for me there’s no one great Pixar film. There are those with remarkable storytelling (Ratatouille, The Incredibles), those that are truly imaginative depictions of an alternate world (Monsters, Inc., WALL•E, Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and even Cars), those with memorable characters and relationships (Monsters, Inc.), those with something to say about the world (WALL•E, The Incredibles), etc. In combination these films represent a truly remarkable output, and the fact that many consider Cars to be their worst film illustrates the incredibly high standard they’ve set for themselves (I would take Cars over all but the finest of Disney films, and over pretty much anything from Dreamworks or Sony’s animation studios). But somehow I feel they never quite reach the profound level filmmaking that Miyazaki’s better films represent. Up represents something of a new direction (a little less focus on imaginativeness and fantastic visualization), and despite what I perceive to be its flaws, it does give me hope that their films will continue to be as fresh as ever for some time to come.
Up was a wonderful film that carries on the Pixar tradition in a splendid way, and I’m sure I’ll see it many more times and have more opportunities to reflect on it. But it wasn’t quite the film I wanted it to be.
Lucía: A+
Jun-Dai: B+
On DVD at home with Lucía on 28 May 2009, pretty late at night.
I’ve seen Jean Gabin in a number of films now, and while he plays a wide range of characters, he always has a sort of self-assurance about him, much like Humphrey Bogart. This is the first film I’ve seen him perform in English, and it kind of makes me wish he’d done more of them.
Moontide is a most unusual story. Jean Gabin and Ida Lupino are both excellent, as is Claude Rains, although the film takes certain awkward twists and turns, and there is something sort of incomprehensible about all of the relationships.
Lucía: B
Jun-Dai: B-
Pinjar (Chandra Prakash Dwivedi, 2003)
On DVD at home with Lucía on 21 May 2009 at about 22:00.
I know so little about Partition that for me Pinjar would have been interesting even if everything else in it was not. Pinjar gave me some small taste for what that period must have been like (although I certainly don’t know enough about the period to know how well Pinjar speaks to that experience), and from my perspective the characters and story were pretty interesting, partly because they are so far removed from anything I know.
I like how Rashid becomes one of the most sympathetic of all the characters, despite how horrific his original crime. Manoj Bajpai gave a memorable performance in that role as a crazed stalker who transforms into a burdened and tortured soul who waits and waits for an opportunity to undo or make up for what cannot be undone.
Jun-Dai: B-
Lucía: B-