My Week In Film (11/2 - 11/8)

(500) Days of Summer (2009)
(Directed by Marc Webb)

All the sensitive boys out there, beware! 'cuz those idealized versions of the girls you like that you carry around in your head will never come to be. They only exist in your head. Yeah, this girl is the one! She likes The Smiths! Come on. Yeah, sure, this is the fantasy of all the roujins out there, but even the roujin knows it's not real, and even if it were kind of real, things like this just don't exist, which is why you can't control none of that shit in the first place. It's kind of way too similar to High Fidelity in a way (at one point, it kind of paraphrases one of the book's key ideas - that pop songs, movies and entertainment had made them anticipate heartbreak or something). Whatever. It's the rollercoaster of love, just done in non-chronological fashion, peppered throughout with Indie 101 references that will get your nipples all hard. The actors are good and it's hard to not be touched by it or relate to it in some way, as I am a sensitive roujin, and Levitt is what I would like to imagine I could someday be (except with all the lessons learned), and this movie only really interested me on this vague level that's sort of separated from the movie but triggered by it and by the images and the performances and the score and all that nonsense, and that's probably something that I value more than any actual qualitative judgment about it, which is good, I guess, because I was prepared to trash the fuck out it and it's better to enjoy something for some strange reasons than not to enjoy it... I think.

★★★

Up (2009)
(Directed by Pete Docter)

A masterpiece and Pixar's best. I don't really know what to say about it other than its emotions are deeper and truer than anything else in Pixar films, outside of, I guess, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Its sense of adventure and its thematics were extremely appealing to me, and when the film started showing the empty spaces of the house, I fucking teared up. Goddamn, these guys are good.

★★★★

whoa, the first time I haven't watched three movies in a week since I started this blog... Actually, that's not quite true since I did watch E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial in class this week, but I don't count class viewings because they're split in the middle and I don't feel that's fair to the film. I used to think E.T. was the best film of the 80's. I'm not even sure it's the best film of its year now. However, it's still Spielberg's best just cuz of that one shot where Elliott walks outside and there's that one chair there and the shed is all lit up and you can see the fields in the background and it looks like a painting, it's so spooky great.

Jhon's Movie of the Week is... Up

My Week in Film (10/26 - 11/1)

it felt like a kiss from roujin on Vimeo.

It Felt Like A Kiss (2009)
(Directed by Adam Curtis)

America. Crazy place. Curtis shows us some of the key events of the late 50s and early 60s through a bunch of found footage, awesome pop songs and occasional on-screen text. There's no narration at all. Just footage and music and awesomeness. Curtis links certain things together: Osama Bin Laden loved the show Bonanza as a little boy. Later on The Manson Family would move in to the ranch where the show took place. They are interviewed and are seen preaching peace. The CIA repeatedly tries to assassinate Castro. The AIDS virus is first passed from a chimp to a human. Other chimps from central Africa are being trained for space flight. The CIA engineers coups in other countries that are questionable. Fragments of the culture; half-forgotten dreams. The story of the takeover. I'll be your mirror. It makes no sense. It makes perfect sense.

★★★

Deep Red (1975)*
(Directed by Dario Argento)

Watched this again on the big screen. Good news, all the awesome things about it are still awesome. Those incredible closeups of the piano keys, the objects on that one table, the eye with the crazy shadows, those fucking dolls. The camera moves and the great compositions - when it pulls all the way back to have the two characters on opposite ends of the frame while the huge ass fountain covers the gulf in between. That shit is awesome. The bad news is that they played the American cut which apparently removes like 30 minutes. Granted, the plot of the film isn't really the point, but it would be hard to judge it from this version. Character relationships, plot points and other stuff are almost totally jettisoned in favor of the bigger set pieces (and the weird humor that creeps through sometimes). I think the film loses something in this shorter version. It's no longer the drowsy, draggy film I remembered it to be. The print was pretty beat down and sometimes the sound would just blow out for a few seconds (the score is so badass that it overwhelms everything else). There's no logic here. There's only awesomeness. Now, everyone else, they can all die.

★★★1/2

Aladin (2009)
(Directed by Sujoy Ghosh)

It's hard to say where I should start with this one so I'll just dive right in - it's not very good. Good, in the sense, that if I compare it to other films that I've seen this year, it just doesn't add up. But when I say that I laughed a lot and generally had a good time, I'd probably be calling the film good. Maybe. I don't know. It's not that I don't trust my opinion regarding the film (it's pretty faceless stuff, inoffensive and largely inconsequential), it's just that the experience of watching the film is too singular. It's become a ritual to visit the theater, read the same ads before the movie, see the trailers, go to the restroom during the intermission. It's something that's beyond the movie. Anyway, the story's pretty dumb stuff. Aladin finds lamp. Rubs it. Genie comes out. Grants three wishes. Love interest is introduced. She might be attainable with the lamp. Evil dude (The Ringmaster played with great gusto by Sanjay Dutt) is introduced. The genie and him have a history. Amitabh Bachchan plays the genie in a genuinely winning performance. He gets to do some pretty goofy shit. He constantly slips between Hindi and English to drop some cheesy lines (constantly refers to Aladin as "brother") and one of his numbers could've been directed by Hype Williams. The song itself is one of the most painfully cheesy thing I've ever heard. But Big B is cool and by the end I was pretty charmed by him. I only wish I could say that I liked the whole thing without any of the annoying qualifiers I have with these damn movies.

★★1/2

Jhon's Movie of the Week is... Deep Red

My Week in Film (10/19 - 10/25)

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)
(Directed by Ernst Lubitsch)

Maurice Chevalier unknowingly smiles at a princess (and winks at her! The scandal!) and she gets all crazy and things happen and there are things which do not happen and songs are sung and there's sex everywhere and Chevalier is a true Viennese and you just can't uproot him like a tree and I'm not sure how much I like Colbert (she was amazing in The Palm Beach Story) but that was a different roujin and while I appreciate her garter-givin', I'm just not how sure I dug everything that went down (she's a sophisticated lady though) and Chevalier will not drink the water and sometimes The Princess just has to sex it up (and that is the hottest thing ever) and the frenchman can't resist and you got yourself some HOT STUFF and roujin is amused and roujin enjoys being amused and he specially enjoys lacy lingerie and things like that (well, you can't have it all) and the only reason this isn't as good as One Hour With You is just because there's not enough good jokes and, even at 90 minutes, there's not enough distribution of the music/jokes/whateverz and although while I love Chevalier, that cheeky son of a gun, we can't win all of them and well, roujin, SHIT IS REAL. I must agree.

★★★

Scenario de 'Sauve qui peut (la vie)' (1979)
(Directed by Jean-Luc Godard)

Godard basically comes clean about the reasoning for a lot of the techniques he uses in his 1980 film, Slow Motion and they're pretty fascinating. He talks about he doesn't like shot/counter shot stuff because it reduces dialogue to something like a ping pong match or a competition. He talks about his use of crossfading not as just linking two images, but, that he sometimes he starts with a sequence as an image and he says that he sees cross-fading images as "doors" that will either open or close to new ideas and shit. He talks of his use of slow motion as slowing down to see if there's anything even there. Godard talks about a lot of times music is used to highlight emotion in events so he had various actors wonder out loud where the music was coming from and always saying that it was coming from the neighbour's radio. And that leads us to the amazing ending of Slow Motion and although I didn't love that movie, it was always interesting and I imagine watching this film can only unlock more and more stuff from that movie and I'm eager to check it out and I am not gonna change my name to godardfan27 OKAY. But, yeah, fascinating stuff.

★★★

Sink or Swim (1990)
(Directed by Su Friedrich)

Composed of 26 short vignettes, each for each letter of the alphabet, but presented in reverse alphabetical order, Sink or Swim is about Friedrich's relationship to her Father. A young girl comes on the soundtrack to tell stories about her Father and about herself all while home footage (?) plays. The stories are sometimes shocking like when the Father basically almost drowns the children (twice) and sometimes kind of funny. Sometimes the links between the names of the sections and the stories/images aren't that clear and sometimes they are, but that goes only to show that none of these elements take us toward a single answer that wraps up everything nicely. By the end of the film, the girl from the previous stories is grown up and her relationship to her Father is still ambivalent, still ill-defined. Anyway, this was really good. roujin is watching movies again! (but only short ones)

★★★


Jhon's Movie of the Week is... Sink or Swim

My Week in Film (10/12 - 10/18)

Dil Bole Hadippa! (2009)
(Directed by Anurag Singh)

I bring you 2009's finest crossdressing cricket musical romance extravaganza! I wish I had watched it in the theater to experience all the great colors in the musical sequences (which are basically glorified music videos doubling as montages) and because I like the ambience and just the experience of going to that theater but watching it at home turned out fine. I didn't have the greatest subs but the story was so cliched and typical that it didn't matter. I've pretty much given up expecting something aesthetically interesting out of these movies so I just focuses on the actors and how awesome they were and the big smiles and the cricket action (I still know nothing about this sport even though I've played). The search continues for a Bollywood movie that I can proudly say is actually good... This is still a lot of fun, though.

★★1/2

Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (2009)*
(Directed b Manoel de Oliveira)

Okay, I've seen it twice now. And it's still very perplexing. However, I don't mind as much now. The first viewing was kind of filled with a bunch of nagging questions - where will this lead? Why does this even matter? What is the meaning of your existence, roujin? But that all went away this time around. What I noticed was the kind of old-timey morals of the thing: everyone acts by adhering to some sort of strict social code. The main dude defers to his older uncle; he asks the uncle for permission to marry and then is denied. While the story is situated in a modern city, everything else that happens seems highly peculiar. The characters end social gatherings in which a famous harpist plays Debussy and some random dude recites a poem. These are extremely fancy places and Oliveira pays as much attention to the artworks on the walls as he does to the characters. I think these sort of throwback morals (along with the literary dialogue) are what explains the ending; and, also, a slight foreshadowing (?) with that first encounter in the store. Whatever. I was transfixed throughout. Just thinking of that lateral tracking shot going over the incredibly furnished rooms as it enters the room where the harp's playing gives me goosebumps. Maybe that's all I need; just lush furnished rooms and interesting framings and hot kleptoroujins.

★★★

Nosferatu (1922)
(Directed by F.W. Murnau)

This was boring. Sorry.

★★

Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979)
(Directed by Werner Herzog)

This was unexpectedly great. Follows more or less the same story as the original one with several deviations that I found to be worthwhile/better or whatever. It takes its time to get going. Herzog relishes Harker journey to Transylvania and spends a great amount of time on it; these are the film's best moments. The Popol Vuh score takes over and it's just one great image after another. Herzog also finds room for the gypsies and finds room for lengthy admiration of space and setting and all this awesome stuff. What monkeys are to Aguirre, rats are for Nosferatu. I like Adjani a lot. She's extremely pale and beautiful, but her eyes pop out in this bizarre way sometimes and it kind of grounds her for me and doesn't make her seem as ethereal and all this other obsessive roujin nonsense that is going on. Kinski is pretty great. He plays Dracula as this little wounded thing. When he finally gets Adjani all alone, he asks for only a little love and when she rejects him, he makes this little face/noise like a wounded animal. That's more interesting to me than Orlok in the original, who is more or less just a creepy... thing... that walks around. Herzog's documentary impulse and penchant for capturing strong images is also really great and is a good anachronistic touch for the story's gothic roots. He incorporates a child's sneeze into the scene where the townspeople board the boat. When pigs overrun the city square and they casually wander into the frame, he doesn't cut until he sees one shit ( ). When Harker roams about Dracula's castle, there's none of Murnau's expressionism or whatever, Herzog just follows him around in mostly unbroken handheld takes. Very interesting things. Very interesting things. roujin, what do you do now? Ride off!

★★★1/2

Jhon's Movie of the Week is... PHANTOM DER NACHT

My Week in Film (10/5 - 10/11)

The Public Enemy (1931)
(Directed by William Wellman)

Lots of fun, but I guess it lacked the gravitas and tragedy I felt in The Roaring Twenties although it does supply its own whopper of an ending. Cagney is pretty great here with his grapefruit and his stares. Jean Harlow is horrendous. I have no idea what the hell is going on with her. The guy who played Cagney's brother was pretty bad, too. Really, I just kind of liked Cagney and seeing him do all these awesome things. But, you know, that gets old and stuff and roujin was like "why is roujin getting bored with this movie?" and roujin answered himself "i don't know, i guess roujin is just dumb" and that confused roujin and the world stopped for a second or two or three and then everything made sense again and order was restored to the world and roujin was always right. always.

★★★

The Invention of Lying (2009)
(Directed by Ricky Gervais + Matthew Robinson)

This was actually pretty good. Gervais discovers that he can say something besides the truth and uses it to his own advantage. While that first half is pretty great and really mean and funny, I think the film gets more interesting once when the whole religion aspect is thrown in there. Mostly cuz it suggests that religion can only exist in a world without lying which to me is funny. But, it isn't just funny. It was genuinely moving to me. The scene with Gervais and his mother is the emotional lynchpin of the movie and from there on it becomes more serious and more probing and more interesting. Very, very interesting. All those movies look hilarious...

★★★

Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)
(Directed by Hector Babenco)

Anyway, this was pretty good. William Hurt and Raul Julia are both really good as two cellmates who over the course of the movie get to know each other better. Julia is a political prisoners, Hurt had sex with a minor. As a way to escape from the drudgery of his everyday existence, Hurt relates some of his favorite movies to Julia. The film recreates his movies in a totally stylistically excessive way. They're lots of fun to watch. Naturally, Hurt and Julia butt heads. First, about Hurt's dismissal of all things political and sometimes about Hurt's sexuality, but, naturally, they get closer. Of course, it isn't that simple and what seems to be happening isn't really happening. At least not for the reasons that the viewer thinks it is. Some fine acting all across the board and it never felt stagy to me even when it was just confined to the dude's prison cells. Very, very interesting...

★★★

Jhon's Movie of the Week is... Kiss of The Spider Woman

My Week in Film (9/28 - 10/4)

Ossos (1997)
(Directed by Pedro Costa)

Finally made it through this. I think I've seen the first 30 or 40 minutes of this like three times but something's always stopped me. It definitely reminded me of Bresson except less concentrated. Costa's editing got carried over from Casa de Lava. This shit is really confusing. Well, probably less so, but the editing doesn't really clarify, it probably makes things even more maddening and confusing. Except that they aren't. It's such a dingy film, too, probably the dingiest I've ever seen. Most of it takes in a slum of sorts and the contrast between the white walls of the city apartments and that place is huge. The acting is pretty mannered and stuff. They stand there staring off into space suggesting things that we couldn't possibly guess at. They also smoke a lot. Sometimes it gets a little ridiculous like when The Father just suddenly drops to a bed or when he refuses to move so Tina has to drag him through the floor. Really? That's just weird. While I was mostly just kind of not really interested in what happened, there is this one scene that I found to be completely heartbreaking. The Father sits with his son in some random bathroom stall. He takes small bites out of a sandwich, chews it up and then feeds it to the kid. After he does this, he takes swigs of alcohol. It's so fucking sad. Anyway, Costa, you confuzzle me. What do I do with you? TELL ME, SWEET BABY JESUS

★★1/2

Coming to America (1988)*
(Directed by John Landis)

This is definitely Eddie Murphy's finest moment. He plays it completely straight, always sticking to his character. His naivete and sweet honesty are the real anchor of the film while everyone else does a bunch of hilarious stuff. The barbershop stuff is completely hilarious and Murphy's interactions with Arsenio Hall are incredible, too. Yeah, yeah, everything's funny. The romance elements are pretty good even if by the end of the film the movie forgets to be funny and gets all sentimental on you, you don't really mind because Murphy is so great. It's hard to dislike a movie that incorporates zebras running in the background as a joke. Get it, it's AFRICA! What's also funny is that there's pretty much three people white people in the entire movie - Louis Anderson is one of them. This is Eddie Murphy's America. Funny, funny, funny. Soul GLO is one of the funniest things I've ever seen/heard in my life. The royal penis is clean, roujin. Well, what can you do?

★★★

Death and the Devil (1973)
(Directed by Stephen Dwoskin)

I liked Behindert's persistent sense of intimacy and that's also here in spades, but I guess I just wasn't in the mood for relentlessly invasive closeups. It's funny. I was really into the film at first but I guess it just wore me out. It also didn't help matters that I thought the 30 + minute dialogue scene was excruciatingly boring. It was just some talk about sex and women or something and while sort of interesting, it just was maddeningly slow for me and besides some stellar treatment of the human face, by film's end I was mostly just not very interested... I suck


★★

Zombieland (2009)
(Directed by Ruben Fleischer)

It was okay. Everything was played for comedy which suits me fine, but, I don't know. I guess it just isn't particularly special to me. It's just kinda whatever. I like Jesse Eisenberg but I got pretty tired of his voiceover pretty quickly. Yeah, I get it, you were a nerd and were wasting your life before all this happened and you've never had a girlfriend or something. Don't trust people! Jeez! Woody is great, duh, I liked his shameless crying. The sequence in the Hollywood mansion is definitely the best part. Lots of really funny stuff there even if it does put on hold their journey or whatever, but I guess you gotta pad out your running time somehow. So, laughs were had, blood was spilled, roujin was amused. Mostly. But... I really hated that on-screen text. I don't know why but that shit just annoys the hell out of me. Blergh. Average. Average roujin average ninjas average versus average self.

★★

This was a bad week...

Jhon's Movie of the Week is... Coming to America

My Week in Film (9/21 - 9/27)

Jackie Brown (1997)*
(Directed by Quentin Tarantino)

what struck me the most about this viewing, how concerned it is with aging, trying to stake out your own way even if the years are getting on. Ordell has his money, Max has his thoughts about getting out of the bonds business and Jackie, well, she has a plan. I guess the people that wanted Tarantino to grow up must've skipped this movie cuz it's by far his most mature and soulful film. all while grounding it firmly in a genre framework. It also contains bar none his most emotionally resonant sequence (Max Cherry: out-of-focus, alone). Not to mention Tarantino's most complex and human characterizations. Fuck, that reprise of "Across 110th Street" is one of the greatest things ever. Those lines on Forster's face say it all. I liked the languid pace and the funky soundtrack and the repeating mall sequence and its incredible soundtrack. May be his best film.

★★★1/2

What Time Is It There? (2001)
(Directed by Tsai Ming-Liang)

I intended to go all chronological with Tsai but it didn't work out that way (I lost my copy of Vive L'Amour somewhere...) Anyway, this is a fantastic film. I don't really know what to say about it. I kind of expected it to be a little boring but after a while I just started getting into the rhythm of the movie and the thought that "nothing is happening" quickly went away. In fact, the film is teeming with incident. Hsiao-Kang goes out into the streets after meeting a woman who's going to Paris and starts changing all the clocks to Paris time. Why does he do this? I don't really know. The woman she meets goes to Paris for no reason we ever know, wonders around, looking alone but not lonely? The film's best moment is the synchronized reach toward something. Well, you'll know the moment. Lest I make the film sound like nothing but Asian Ennui ™, I should also mention that it's startlingly funny. There's these little visual punchlines every once in a while that are both kinda sad but also, well, funny. My two favorites may be when Fatty, the fish, eats a cockroach and the dude who steals Hsiao-Kang's clock in the movie theater (that's gotta be one of the funniest things ever). And Jean-Pierre Leaud haunts the cemeteries of Paris, Hsiao-Kang watches The 400 Blows and it's apparently Tsai's favoritest movie. Hmmm, I need to watch The Skywalk is Gone now and then wrap it up with THE WAYWARD CLOUD. TSAI-FEST

★★★★

The Skywalk is Gone (2002)
(Directed by Tsai Ming-Liang)

The connective tissue between What Time Is It There? and The Wayward Cloud that sets up that film's porn/water shortage shenanigans. The girl comes back from France looking for the street vendor but... look at the title. It's typical that they actually do walk past each other at one point but only one of them recognizes the other... and then does nothing about it. Anyway, it's interesting (the camera moves!) but not nearly long enough to truly get into it.

★★★

The Wayward Cloud (2005)*
(Directed by Tsai Ming-Liang)

I'm really glad I watched it again. The first time the only thing I registered was this: long static takes, weirdo sex scenes and bizarre musical numbers. Now, after watching What Time and The Skywalk is missing, I think I'm closer to... well, something. It feels like a damn angry movie in its depiction of pornography as an essentially dehumanizing force. There's a shot of a woman's face post-money shot that's grotesque and bizarre. The film's sex scenes are all without pleasure and they're often ridiculous. One of them has Hsiao-Kang having sex with a woman in the shower. However, since there's a water shortage, the film crew has to use water bottles to recreate the water in the shower and at one point they run out before Hsiao-Kang, uh, finishes. There's also some scenes that suggest a romance that could be. Tsai has a weird homage to Annie Hall in there as the couple pick up crabs from the kitchen floor and the film's most loving image is that of Hsiao-Kang taking puffs from a cigarette that's being held in Shiang-chyi's toes. The film's most daring and shocking moment is its final 30-minute (?) or so set piece that will probably seal the deal on your view of the movie. It's both disgusting and oddly touching. It's like the decade's weirdest musical romance!

★★★★

The Brown Bunny (2003)
(Directed by Vincent Gallo)

It's good. Seriously, it's not that different from something like Taste of Cherry in that a lot of it takes place inside of a car. Mostly, we see a profile of Gallo's face as he drives his van. For extended periods of time, we see through his bug-splattered windshield as he drives across the country. Occasionally, a plaintive folk song will pop up on the soundtrack. It's just so damn lonely. I had this feeling about Buffalo '66, too, and this is a, well, not logical, but an extension of the same concerns of that film but carried over into a film that does not make the same narrative concessions that Buffalo made. This film will make you feel the loneliness... even if it bores you a little bit. Gallo goes through the country, his face stricken with pain or something, runs into several women named after flowers and then promptly leaves them. He convinces the first woman he meets to go away with him after like 2 minutes of knowing her (ha, Gallo, you dog, you!) but once she goes into her house to get her things, he leaves. In one of the film's best moments, Gallo meets a woman named Lilly in some rest stop (do all the women have their names visible somewhere?). Gallo senses something and sits next to her. Immediately, he's touching her hair and asking her if something's wrong and it's seriously one of the most intimate things I've ever seen. The whole thing is so quiet (does this film have one of the lowest sound mixes in history or something? I had to turn up my volume full blast to hear what they were saying) and painful and sad.

The film's last sequence has Gallo returning to Los Angeles to meet up with Daisy. Besides the unfortunate crack smoking, this entire sequence is masterful, revealing so much about this dude's issues with women and about his own self or something. By the time, Sevigny actually does what everyone expects her to do, we are completely with the film (even if we wonder about the necessity of that act). What I don't like about the film is what happens afterward. It's plausible that all the other women Gallo met on the way to Los Angeles were a way of trying to deal with his issues with Daisy, but the final revelation just makes him seem crazy... and this is what makes the film not pretty good, but only good. It's a psychological reveal that tries to "explain" or something and that didn't sit well with me.

★★★

Away We Go (2009)
(Directed by Sam Mendes)

It's bad. It's just a celebration of good old-fashioned values. You know, family, love, all that crap. Basically, take a sharpie and draw it on your foreheads: yay, we're boring!. ugh. Everything follows as you expect it to. The main couple are just trying to figure everything out. Hmmm, okay. So is everyone else. Well, they need to go on a journey to do this. Hmmm, okay. They need to be exposed to various different types of parenting so at the end we can come to the conclusion that, yep, what we got going on here, this is normal, this is how it should be. So, all those alternative ways of raising your children, that doesn't fly. The first two stops they make are ridiculous caricatures. I wanted to kill myself after suffering through Alison Janney's performance. It's so goddamn grating and hideous. Yeah, sure, that's what they're going for. THIS IS NOT HOW YOU RAISE CHILDREN. Got it. Next up is Gyllenhaal playing some kind of hippie mom, trying to rear her children in a non-traditional way. Well, our couple just won't stand for that. THAT'S JUST FUCKING WRONG. Sure, the characters are total cartoons but what they represent still stands. You just don't deviate from what's normal. no way! Then they go to Montreal where they meet some college buddies who've adopted... but... the wife feels so empty... because she can't conceive. That's right, adopting just isn't fulfilling. It needs to come out of her vagina for the child to feel like hers! Just nasty. I mean, some of this stuff is moving to me, too. I mean, I got the same ole boring values as everyone else but the way in which it's presented is just so boring. It's so bland and vanilla and whatever. NEXT.

★1/2


Jhon's Movie of the Week is... The Wayward Cloud