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Huzzah! A South Korean film that isn’t completely horrible! Alas, it was made in 2005, but better then than not at all. When originally released, I kept hearing about this in the Han Cinema weekly email list and how the director was South Korea’s answer to Woody Allen. This, naturally, more the piqued my interest in the film. But I didn’t find him to be anything close to Woody Allen. Unless I mistook the film, there was very little comedy. Just incidental comedy from the typical Korean freak-out (this time in a movie theater after Ho-jun starts yelling about people coming in late). It’s also not as meditative and insightful as Heywood’s more sober pictures, like Crimes and Misdemeanors or Match Point. So, I’m not sure where the connection comes in. That said, it was still a good film. The problem is that you have to pretty much ignore the absurdity of the inciting incident (Ho-jun getting locked in the bathroom after a shower, and Gye-sang rescuing him) to get anything out of the film. The sprouting of the friendship after that point is absorbing, though, as Ho-jun eventually tries to staple his life back together and Gye-sang’s principals are tested in the extreme by the rigid South Korean state.
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It’s so difficult to put the feel and emotion of this film into words, but that’s pretty much typical Wong Kar Wai for you. I love his films, but I have nothing to say about them beyond that. It’s nearly impossible to articulate the reaction his films cause, except to say that this one causes the deepest reaction of any of his other films.
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If not for the incredibly bizarre, down ending that looked like it was shot in one take with the camera plopped down in the center of the street, I might call this my favorite Godard film. Nana’s trip through life is difficult and dreary one, but with minor rays of sunshine, during one of which she gives us a dance just as endearing as the one in Band of Outsiders, in which you also believe she is wondering whether the boys are noticing her breasts under her dress. As well as Godard’s and Anna Karina’s, it also happens to be some of Raoul Coutard’s best work behind the lens.
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Whiny hipster pap, and all the proof needed that low-cost video productions are a blight on the world of cinema.
Can we get a moratorium on scenes where the dude jerking off gets walked in on? Please? They pretty much did the most you can do with that by 1985. If that’s where your script begins, time to start it over.
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If this were a movie by another director, I’d probably say, good job, it’s a good movie. But, when you are Michael Mann, there are higher standards to bear. And this does not meet them. It’s a too pedestrian a film for the man who did Heat and The Insider to make as a follow up. The entire third act is blatantly clear within the first 10 minutes. If you’re going to do something like that, you can’t use a high profile actress like Jada Pinkett, because we know she’s not signing on to this kind of a film for a 10 minute cameo. She’ll be back. And once Tom Cruise starts picking off witnesses against a drug kingpin, we know exactly when, where and how she will be back. It requires no thought or vision to pick it up. It was a very disappointing effort, and shot on video no less. Is the era of good Michael Mann films over? I can’t even bring myself to attempt watching Miami Vice. Sad day.
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This is a fairly strange film. It opens with a 15 minute lecture on the life of Michelangelo through various shots of his sculptures and then goes into the biopic portion. It features Charlton Heston as Charlton Heston playing Michelangelo, but it fits extremely well. There are only certain people who can play roles this big, and he and Rex Harrison nailed both parts, Rex Harrison in particular, who brings a level of dry humor and humanity to Julius II, who was “known as a better warrior than pope”. It’s a shame films like this just can’t get made anymore. Last year’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford came close to this scale of epic, and was just as good as this. But no one went to see it. No one would go to see this if it were out today either.
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Schrader and Scorsese’s foray into the depths and pathology of loneliness and mental instability still holds up so astoundingly well that it’s become just as relevant 30 years later, even with the Disneyfication of Times Square and the City in general. It’s kind of interesting to think about what Travis Bickle would think about the new Times Square. Yes, it’s clean. Sort of. The problems were just shoved under the rug in favor of a commercial facade, but they didn’t really go anywhere. Would this please him? Was his problem just that he could see the human grime, or was there some psychic connection to that grime that he would still search it out and try to destroy it today?
His character remains relevant, too. In a day where people call fall into the internet and disconnect almost completely, Travis Bickle represents the inner workings of this decade just as much as the 1970s. He was a nutso blogger in a way, squirreling away at his journal so much. He was just 25 years too early.
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This is one of the best introductions to indie a teenager in the mid-90s could have ever dreamed of. The slightly down, but still romantic, view of a true loser floundering through his life. At various points when I was a teenager I wouldn’t have been surprised with myself to end up like Tommy, but then I grew up. The film is starting to show its date these days. It’s very much a film of the 90s and would fit right into a time capsule, but it doesn’t belong on this earth anymore except as a slap in the forehead and glimpse into a lot of the future Sopranos casting.
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Happy Holidays is a bit of a strange, but good, film from the mumblecore school of filmmaking. It follows the trials of a teenage painter as she leaves home and her boyfriend behind in DC to attend art school in California and the strains the separation cause. It’s told roughly as a series of chapters taking place before, during and after holidays and how everything has changed in the intervening time.
The debut film for writer-director Sarah Mohen, it comes with all of the unfortunate trappings of an indie first feature, especially as video shooting becomes more cost effective and available to more people. By now we’re used to the charming nature of no-budget films with sub-par acting and overly personal stories, but Mohen gets away with it by the skin of her teeth here. It has a lyrical pace, and the (assumed) use of ADR in many of the scenes lends it a kind of European quality in presentation. The subpar acting is kept mostly to the secondary roles in this. Everyone who absolutely needs to hit a cue can, but it sometimes feels like a filmed play more than a film. What it has over other films of it’s ilk is that it contains the A, B and C that so many mumblecore directors seem to despise or fear. It tells a story. Isn’t that what movies are supposed to do?
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The theory behind Smart People rests entirely on this quote by Ernest Hemingway: “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” And while Despicable People would probably have been a better title, there is something interesting in Ellen Page and Thomas Haden Church’s storyline. Ellen Page gets to play a character where her caustic sarcasm finally legitimately plays well (you’re not really supposed to like her) as a brilliant but malformed young Republican, who you feel will end up burning her bra and sitting under a tree reading a Che Guevara biography once she gets almost the entire continental United States between her and her father. And Thomas Hayden Church gets to go back to essentially playing Jack from Sideways, which was fun. The rest of the story I could not have cared less about.
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I always considered this as more of an indictment of Generation X than a film about it. There really isn’t anything about that generation, one I guess I came out of, to celebrate. And if there was, nothing came as close to celebrating it as Elizabeth Wurtzle’s Prozac Nation (which was eventually turned into a movie a few leagues worse than this, actually). My own memories of teenage malaise and shiftlessness are embarrassing enough to think back on, without having a neat little postcard to relive from. (The only reason I watched it again was that I was in a Winona Ryder mood.) And aside from New Order, the Juliana Hatfield Three and the Posies, the soundtrack (music taste being this generation is supposed to be famous for) is absolutely abysmal. Peter Fucking Frampton? Disco Inferno? Come on now. Singles and subUrbia weren’t all that much better, but at least they had great soundtracks. Dan Harris’s Imaginary Heroes remains the only realistic portrayal of this time frame that I’ve seen. Of course, I can only speak from my own experiences.
I still have no idea why Ben Stiller is considered talented, though. I don’t think I ever will.
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This is Woody Allen at his most charming, straddling the border between intellectual comedy and verbal slapstick pinned to the back of a good dramatic structure. To over-simplify, I think you can boil this film down to old adage that timing is everything, and it’s a very clever demonstration of that. The only thing that could have made this better would have have been more Sam Waterston.
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I wonder what it is about London that makes Woody Allen think about murder so much? He made three films there and they all are about a murder, or a murderer. Cassandra’s Dream would probably have had more impact were it not for it being right on the heels of Match Point, but it tread on so many of the same themes and a similar plot. In turn, it succeeds in some places where Match Point failed, but the reverse is true as well. They do make a nice companion set, with Scoop as their kind of handicapped second cousin.
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I really didn’t make a connection with this film at all. It has no in character for me, someone who has never been married and couldn’t possibly understand the complexities of a marriage. The one story line I got anything out of was Gabe and Rain and the way their relationship evolved, especially with the thunderstorm kiss. The rest didn’t do it for me. Maybe some day.
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Much like Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, if you can see this out until the end it pays off well. It all absolutely ties in and makes sense, but not until the last few minutes. It’s sort of like a dare to the audience in response to their indifference to Interiors (which I still haven’t seen, but I will take care of that in the next few days). It’s a little tedious and confusing up until that point, but there are some absolutely wonderful scenes mixed in with the tedium, including everything at the UFO fest which has to rank up there with some of his top moments.
