The Double Featurette

Ken's Double Featurette Awards, 2010

2011-01-23T09:04:00.000-08:00

Best Double Feature 2010: Let Me In/Toy Story 3

Runners up to the above: Winter's Bone/Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

Best Cage Match Double Feature: Kick-Ass/The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Best Complete Nonsense Double Feature: Alice in Wonderland/Hot Tub Time Machine

Best Directed: The Social Network/Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Best double feature score heard in the same weekend: Let Me In/The Social Network

Best First Feature: Banksy, Exit Through the Gift Shop/Lena Dunham, Tiny Furniture

Best Harris Savides makes L.A. look inhabitable Double Feature: Greenberg/Somewhere

Best non-American double feature: Un prophète(A Prophet)/Io sono l'amore(I Am Love)

Best Liam Neeson can make anything watchable double feature: Clash of the Titans/The A-Team

Best inadvertently seen this year double feature set in the same state (New Mexico): Charley Varrick/Let Me In

Best non-Pixar double feature: Despicable Me/Tangled

Best Pepsi Throwback double feature: The American/The Romantics

Best use of pop songs: "O Children", Nick Cave, Harry Potter 7a/"1 Thing", Amerie, Somewhere

Favorite male supporting performances: Pierce Brosnan, The Ghost Writer/Maximus, Tangled

Favorite pair of totally different scores by the same composer: A Prophet/Harry Potter 7a, Alexandre Desplat

Most perpetually anticipated double feature I can't seem to see: Dogtooth/The Fighter

"OK, bored now" double feature: The King's Speech/Never Let Me Go

Overrated double feature: Black Swan/Inception

Still bringing it: Michael Douglas, Solitary Man/Woody Allen, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

Underrated double feature: Shutter Island/The Ghost Writer

LINKAGE

2010-12-12T15:31:00.000-08:00

From today's Economic Times: How to finance your film via The Social Network.

A Double Feature 5 Years After Katrina

2010-08-28T18:24:00.000-07:00

Soft Cat - It Won't Be Long from Friends Records on Vimeo.

My friend Fred posted this amazing music video animated by his sister Miranda Pfeiffer. So firstly, a big congrats to her. I am not sure if she meant the release of the video to coincide with the anniversary of Katrina but the images of the water swelling and engulfing everything + all the news coverage there has been of late about the Hurricane got me thinking.

In particular I thought about The Music Room (1958) by Satyajut Ray. Which I programmed a long way back in a series about Crumbling aristocracies. It's a wonderful mediation on the end of an era, as the lord of manor entertains his friends one last time in his famous music room even as the river threatens to take back the land his castle sits on. Hopefully in the next few days I will think of a double feature about rebirth and rebuilding... so that this Katrina anniversary can end on a slightly more hopeful note.

Linkage: For the day (possibly the week or month).

2010-08-25T15:17:00.000-07:00

(Maybe) Something on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World vs. Fatih Akin's Soul Kitchen pending, but first: From this past Sunday's NY Times, we have a piece from Arts & Style reporter Ms. Melena Ryzik on an interesting development regarding film distribution, "D.I.Y. Music Labels Embrace D.I.Y. Film":

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/movies/22indie.html?ref=music

Read and be merry.

SCIENCE FICTION/DOUBLE FEATURE

2010-07-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

Both Inception, the new movie by Christopher Nolan, and Jon Turteltaub's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, involve physics

and the human brain's capacity for perception. Both succeed on different levels.

Inception is the first movie by Chris Nolan conceived as an original story since his 2000 hit, Memento, which had the heady premise of presenting your standard neo-noir in backwards order; since then, Nolan has cut his teeth on adaptations -- Insomnia, the two recent Batman movies, and The Prestige. I'm not sure that his storytelling chops have evolved, but what's there can certainly be identified as a personal style, which always seems to involve spinning tricky stories with some sleight of hand and some admittedly charming old fashioned movie magic. In Inception, we're immediately thrust into a world where the invasion of a person's dreams and unconscious mind is a given, a la The Matrix or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. At the same time (not unlike Nolan's previous efforts), the plot follows that of a basic heist genre picture, set up as protagonist Cobb's (Leonardo DiCaprio) one "last big score" to get him reunited with the kids he hasn't seen since having to flee "Stateside". He recruits a crew for the job -- an Arthur (loyal partner Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an architect (Ellen Page, also doing extra work as a psychologist in some scenes), a forger (a lively and entertaining performance by Tom Hardy), and a chemist (Dileep Rao), all bankrolled by a new employer (Ken Watanabe) who can guarantee his future amnesty. Lurking in the shadows is a femme fatale in the form of Mal (Marion Cotillard and yes, that is one heavy-handed character name), who may or may not gum up the works. What sets this basic plot apart is that the majority of the action takes place in what are essentially several floors (and a basement) of Cillian Murphy's subconscious house of a mind (which also brings us into Being John Malkovich territory). The movie toys with this, has its fun, and keeps the audience engaged, albeit on an intellectual plane rather than an emotional one. While a lot of talky talk exposition gets unpacked (one of the drawbacks of sci-fi in general), it's kept to a minimum; the filmmakers are confident enough to rely on their visuals, which are enjoyable in details big (such as Page's quick read of what she can manipulate via the physics of the dream world) and small (the joke of explaining "the kick" by subjecting Gordon-Levitt's character to successive pratfalls, or Hardy's transformation into Tom Berenger via clever cutaways to various mirrors). JG-L gets to perform some of the more exhilarating effects work, in a scene -- probably the movie's best -- that moves from a fist fight in a rotating corridor to free-floating in the same environment to solve yet another dream conundrum (take that, 3-D!). Overall, it's an entertaining and refreshingly imaginative movie, inventively dazzling while being bereft of any real feeling. The prime example is the explanation of Cobb's angst over his relationship with Mal: You get the impression that our hearts are supposed to go out to this doomed affair, but like so much of the narrative not directly dealing with the main event, it only serves as more distancing backstory. The best you're going to get is the chemistry teased out between Hardy and Gordon-Levitt's characters, who seem ready for their own Oceans series. In line with the rest of Nolan's oeuvre, you're better off not overworking the 10% of your brain used in regard to the big dreamy ideas (or the length -- a James Bond ski chase sequence taxed my watch-glancing resistance) and just enjoying the small spinning top.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice, while being of more modest means (and, as the latest Cage/Bruckheimer co-lab, that speaks volumes), may arguably be the more rewarding experience: After an awesome voiceover intro by Ian McShane (can we just have him introduce everything from now on?), an unlikely "I make music with my Tesla coil" genius Dave (a winning Jake Cherry at 10 years old, then Jay Baruchel at 20, giving Michael Cera and Jesse Eisenberg some much needed competition) gets recruited by "Merlinist" magician Balthazar Blake (but really, they could've just named him "Nicolas Cage"), discovers he is -- wait for it -- "The Prime Merlinian" (LOL), and learns how to use more than 10% of his brain not to manipulate dreams but to blow shit up and get the girl. How does physics get explained in this, you may ask? Physics = Magic. Done. Seriously, Nic and the writers (based on a Goethe poem!) make it that easy for the audience. The rest is Alfred "Horvath (whore bath?)" Molina relishing his role as the baddie and forcing several Cage matches to ensue, involving floating sword fights, an urn with a ten year imprisonment expectancy (to the day), a dragon, a Russian nesting doll, an ashy Alice Krige and a Chrysler building gargoyle that knows how to get to Paris. Oh, and I forgot -- broomsticks. It's Maaaagic! All you have to do is get past the complete implausibility of a WNYU dj playing a Jonas Brothers-esque song on the New Afternoon Show. While the best magic is performed in getting our hero from Washington Square Park to the Chrysler Building in mere seconds, The Sorcerer's Apprentice makes the perfect palate cleanser to the high concept ambitions of Inception.

"Double Take" and "Mundane History"

2010-03-28T08:39:00.000-07:00

Double trouble Hitchcock meets himself in this allegorical satire

Double Take begins with Alfred Hitchcock explaining, in the footage of his 1966 interview with François Truffaut, the term "MacGuffin":

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?", and the other answers "Oh that's a McGuffin". The first one asks "What's a McGuffin?". "Well", the other man says, "It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands". The first man says "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands", and the other one answers "Well, then that's no McGuffin!".

Turns out Hitchcock himself - here either played by a famed look-alike (the late Ron Burrage), or assembled from amusing fragments of his TV and other public appearances, and is pitched against a double of himself (a character that "he must kill" in an imaginative re-edit of Psycho) - is the McGuffin, in what turns out to be an impressionistic, insightful, and all-too-often hilarious commentary on Cold War politics.

Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez's mockumentary charts the fierce relationship between America and Russia like a TV show: with Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev essentially cast as the fictional Hitchcock double, while, by some inspired combination of montage and voiceover, Folgers instant coffee is paralleled with murder poison, and The Birds the Cold War threat. It all culminates into Donald Rumsfeld's infamous McGuffin metaphor. Oh, who'd have thought?

On a similar if totally unrelated note, Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong's feature debut, Mundane History, is another movie that only takes its synopsis as a jumping board to something much more profound. In this Tiger Award winner at the recent Rotterdam Film Festival, what started out as a simple story between a rich, young man (paralysed from the waist down in an accident) and his male nurse (who gradually comes to break down his patient's resentful facade) eventually turns on its head and becomes something entirely different.

While its disjointed timeline may appear gimmicky at first, Mundane History slowly reveals its (literally) cosmic scope, spinning off into a philosophically perplexing take on personal emotions and illusions, traditional family structure and class distinction, political history of power and bloodshed, as well as a shockingly hynoptic double take on life and death. The young protagonist's injury remains unexplained - the McGuffin amid Suwichakornpong's meditation of an incomparably greater scope.

Their top 10s of the 2000s

2010-01-20T07:05:00.000-08:00

Ennui x 10 Jia's list shows us how much he likes his movies slow

In the January 2010 issue of Les Cahiers du Cinéma, a range of filmmakers were asked to give their 10-best lists of the last decade. Here are a few:

Jia Zhangke:
01 Colossal Youth
02 Elephant
03 Millenium Mambo
04 Nobody Knows
05 Yi Yi
06 Secret Sunshine
07 Uzak
08 I Don't Want to Sleep Alone
09 Summer Palace
10 Syndromes and a Century

Kiyoshi Kurosawa:
01 War of the Worlds
02 A History of Violence
03 Mystic River
04 Notre Musique (Dir JL Godard)
05 L'enfant
06 Eureka
07 Death Proof
08 Platform
09 The Host
10 The Bridesmaid (Dir Claude Chabrol)

Bong Joon-ho:
Zodiac
A History of Violence
No Country for Old Men
Still Life
Jellyfish
Woman on the Beach
Punch-Drunk Love
The Class
Hunger
A Brand New Life (Dir Ounie Lecomte)

Shinji Aoyama:
Jean Bricards' Itinerary (Dir Huillet & Straub)
Our Music (Dir Godard)
War of the Worlds (Dir Spielberg)
Death Proof (Dir Tarantino)
Woman on the Beach (Dir Sang-soo)
Merde (Dir Léos Carax)
Gran Torino (Dir Eastwood)
The Darjeeling Limited (Dir Anderson)
Four Nights with Anna (Dir Skolimovski)
Romance of Astree and Celadon (Dir Rohmer)

Asia Argento:
Irréversible
Werckmeister Harmonies
The White Ribbon
Fuck Me
Visito Q
Tarnation
Zodiac
There Will Be Blood
Elephant
Apocalypto

Quentin Tarantino:
01 Battle Royale
(Then the rest in alphabetical order)
Anything Else
Audition
Before Sunset
Cabin Fever
Lost in Translation
Shaun of the Dead
Team America
There Will Be Blood
Unbreakable

And finally, Les Cahiers critics' top ten:
01 Mulholland Drive
02 Elephant
03 Tropical Malady
04 The Host
05 A History of Violence
06 The Secret of the Grain, Abdellatif Kechiche
07 Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, Wang Bing
08 War of the Worlds
09 The New World
10 Ten

Ken's 10 will get you 20 in 2010:

2010-01-14T11:19:00.000-08:00

00: Mission to Mars & You Can Count on Me

Two movies where subtext is everything, and key scenes are used to communicate devastating emotional turning points. De Palma captures the very American "can do" spirit of astronauts in what seems like a gung-ho story illustrates the real significance of loss. Lonergan turns the giddy anticipation of the reunion of two siblings into a painful argument once one reveals where they've been in the absence of time. Both also have great tones set by Ennio Morricone's score for the first and Steve Earle's songs in the second.

01: Last Orders/Waking Life

Two that philosophically contemplate the meaning of life, the first through the death of a friend, and the next in the realm of dreams. Not much more to say, really, but both did so in visually inventive ways.

02: Punch-Drunk Love/25th Hour

A pair that are probably my favorites by their respective directors. Paul Thomas Anderson somehow finds a way to make me like and even understand "Adam Sandler" in the context of his almost movie musical. Spike Lee dives headfirst into telling an early post 9/11 story and makes it to the end without drowning. Both also present interesting narratives on what it is to be "a man".

03: X2/Oldboy

My favorite and most fully realized action movies of the decade (yes, more than Iron Man (X2 got there first) and definitely more than Nolan's Batmans). Both are fun spins on revenge and sacrifice, but it's the big scenes that really stick with you: Magneto's escape from his elegant, plastic prison, Dae-su Oh's from a mob den armed only with a hammer and single-pan shot; a genuinely frightening plane descent in the former, and a truly terrifying live octopus in the latter.

04: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind/Before Sunset

In a year where the majority of my favorite movies of the decade were released, Eternal Sunshine was the first and best, while Before Sunset is the one I've most often thought about. The former is the first work of Charlie Kaufman's that I think comes out perfect; the latter, an unexpected surprise -- when do you ever get a sequel for a zero box office indie movie nine years after the first one? Both explore the entangled relationship of love and memory as far as anything can, and both end with appropriate ambiguity. They're also well served by the great performances of Kate Winslet, Jim Carrey, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke. The work of Richard Linklater and Michel Gondry & co. is nothing to sniff at either.

05: Junebug/The New World

Two about exploration, and what happens when you want more. Oversimplified, I know. I still need more time to think about Malick's movie, which has occupied a big space in my brain since I finally saw it just after Thanksgiving, but I think it's easily the best in its year. I've had loads more time to think on Junebug: I like that you can't really be sure of Madeleine's character -- is she the villain of the piece, and/or simply awkwardly doing her best with the in-laws she barely knows? I've spoken to people who find the whole movie insultingly condescending in the presentation of its characters, but I feel completely opposite in the depiction of North Caroliners and their prodigal son, and Amy Adams is amazing in it.

06: Children of Men/Pan's Labyrinth

In what I recall being sort of a lame year, these two have sparked the most personal arguments. Some people charge that the "single takes" in the first are so blatantly fake that you're taken completely out of the movie, while others (me, obvs) felt so sucked in that it translated into hyperreality, a constant buzz of terror increased by the lack of cutting away in those scenes. In the latter, I completely bought into Ofelia's ignited imagination; what more does a girl need than a magical forest in the middle of fascist Spain? The special effects are deployed in a magnificently mundane way, so you never know if what she's seeing is real or just all in her desperate mind. Both films can also be read to have either abundantly happy, hopeful endings or as cruel, sick jokes. Muchas Gracias, Mexico!

07: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly/Ratatouille

The first restored my faith in movies at a period where I thought they were being wildly overrated (yes you, There Will Be Blood, and you, No Country for Old Men, and I'm not forgetting you, The Savages). The second is my personal favorite from the kingdom of Pixar. Both tell stories from the viewpoint of unlikely perspectives -- a paralyzed man left with only the use of one blinking eye, and the beautiful taboo of a rat in a kitchen -- and rapidly succeed over the course of their running time to place you in their heads. Both movies also make the most of flashbacks, and Ratatouille's may be the best, ever.

08: Happy-Go-Lucky/Let the Right One In

Two movies where I felt the desire to be protective of the main characters, only to discover that they'll do fine all on their own. Both have a hopefulness about humanity that'll make you feel right about the world; cleverly, both are also structured so that, depending on your perspective, you can almost feel the exact, pessimistic opposite.

09: Fantastic Mr. Fox/Summer Hours

"Pensez-vous que l'hiver sera rude?"

Ah, just go and see these last two, since they were out so recently. Done.

The Double Featurette Awards 2009 (Edmund's picks)

2010-01-06T09:36:00.000-08:00

Playing cool Penélope Cruz can't take her eyes off the coveted award

Best Feature Film:

Still Walking & Let the Right One In

Best Documentary:
The Beaches of Agnes & Anvil! The Story of Anvil

Best Director:
Claire Denis for 35 Shots of Rum & Lu Chuan for City of Life and Death

Best Performance by an Actress:
Penélope Cruz in Broken Embraces & Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist

Best Performance by an Actor:
Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious Man & Nicolas Cage in The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans

...and now for the special awards that take some explaining:

Best Performance by an Animal:
The iguanas in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans & the pink flamingos in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
They manage to leave an indelible mark on your memory without even acting; now that's what I call screen presence. (Side note: this category was set up because I can't tell the genders of iguanas. And flamingos.)

Biggest Unintended Joke in a Feature Film:
The Sigur Ros reference in Ondine & Aaron Kwok in Murderer
Ondine has something to do with gibberish and mermaid... while Cantopop singer-turned actor Aaron Kwok gives an over-acting masterclass.

Most Underrated Feature:
Broken Embraces & Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
It's not Almodovar's fault that his excellent film features the same plot elements as every other film on his CV (he's a fucking auteur!). Just as it's not Jan Kounen's fault that he's making an atmospheric mood piece instead of an old-school biopic with his two famed protagonists.

Most Overrated Feature:
Avatar & The White Ribbon
Not that I didn't consider these decent movies. But how innovative can you call a rehash of Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, and Princess Mononoke? And does hinting at your film's opening that you're adressing the roots of extremism necessarily mean that you're addressing the roots of extremism in your film?

Most Uncanny Combo:
Orphan & Murderer
Opening in Hong Kong within a four-week period, each of these two horror flicks features an utterly ridiculous and outrageously incredible plot twist. You want to know what's truly amazing? The two big twists are the same.

The Guiltiest Pleasure:
Slumdog Millionaire & Love Exposure
I thought it was bad enough to be thoroughly entertained by a poverty porn. And then I fell hopelessly in love with a four-hour epic teenage love story on transvestite, religious cult, incest, ultra-violence, and upskirt photography.

Most Pointless Feature:
Nine & Blood: The Last Vampire
Nine is a film adaptation of a Broadway musical adapted from an all-time classic movie - minus all the elements that made the latter great in the first place; while Blood is a live-action adaptation of an animated short film - whose newly added plotlines are so mind-numblingly nonsensical they actually contradicted the original premise. Quite a feat.

Biggest Disappointment:
Face & Trash Humpers
Does it not tell you something that I had as little fun watching Laetitia Casta dance around naked as I did seeing Harmony Korine hump trash in a creepy mask? Honourable mention goes to Lou Ye for the relentlessly dark Spring Fever. In fact, his film is so dark I couldn't even tell an actor's face from another's.

The Double Featurette Awards 2009 (Ken's Picks)

2009-12-29T09:02:00.000-08:00

From Ken:

Best Features:

Summer Hours & Fantastic Mr. Fox

if I could pick a second pair:

Bright Star & Coraline

runners-up: Still Walking & Star Trek

Best women's doubles match:
Jane Campion & Abbie Cornish, Bright Star v. Lone Scherfig & Carey Mulligan, An Education

Most memorable performance:
Dakota Fanning, Push & Rosamund Pike, An Education

runners-up: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds & Lorna Raver's teeth, Drag Me to Hell

Most Underrated:

The International & Push

Most Overrated:

Where the Wild Things Are

I Liked but Won't Recommend to You:

The Watchmen & The Road

Best Short Films within a Feature Film:

The opening sequences for Up & Inglourious Basterds

Best Character Theme Songs:

"HELVETICA!" from Shorts & Marvin Hamlisch's score for The Informant!

Best (narrative within a) piece of film narrative criticism:

RedLetterMedia's SW: TPM review -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI

Favorite pair of new Scottish band names:
Dananananakyroyd & We Were Promised Jetpacks

Best BTW of 2009:

Tim Robbins & Susan Sarandon

Best Remix:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVxe5NIABsI

The Double Featurette Awards 2009

2009-12-28T15:12:00.000-08:00

Its the end of the year, its the end of a decade. Thus it is time for the first ever
The Double Featurette Awards:

What do these fine films win?
Honor. Glory. Bragging Rights.

If you are a filmaker who has won this year. Pls feel free to print out the following picture on sticker paper and stick to your DVDs (and just watch those sales SKYROCKET).

Several of us here at the Double Featurette will be presenting our end of year lists. Here is mine:

Best Picture:

Fantastic Mr. Fox & Bright Star

Honorable Mention : I would like to yet again plug Zhao Ye's Jalainur which as it has never actually been released (only a handful of festivals) I took out of the running. It is one of the best films I saw this year.

Also, Pixar's Partly Cloudy may not be a full length feature but it is hands down one of the best films of the year.

Best Director:

Hirokazu Koreeda for Still Walking & Wes Anderson for Fantastic Mr. Fox

Best Performance by an Actress:

Mo'Nique in Precious & Abbie Cornish in Bright Star

Best Performance by an Actor:

Dug the Dog in Up & The Jeff Koons Dog in Night of the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian

Best Song:

"Helvetica" by Robert Rodriguez for the Film Shorts. & "Done All Wrong" by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club for (no kidding) The Twilight Saga: New Moon (the list of artists on the soundtrack is actually quite impressive... I have to say... oh hi Thom Yorke...you can print out the sticker if you really want to)

Team Sheen: "New Moon" & "Underworld: Rise of the Lycans"

2009-11-30T12:02:00.001-08:00

Lets face it. What I have to say about New Moon is not going to make a difference to you anyway. Either you were super super excited about it and have already seen it, or you would see Robin William's new film Old Dogs before you would see New Moon (aka never).

If you happen to be on the fence, I can't really help you. The film is pretty much as you would expect. Copious lack of shirt wearing. Slow motion walking towards camera (while taking shirt off). Voice over. Plot. More Plot. Though I do have to say that whoever picked Robert Patterson's lipstick shades should probably reconsider their career choice - Ronald McDonald much? The first Twilight film I actually found interesting, Catherine Hardwicke seemed to be trying to do something more than just please thirteen year old girls. There was style there, a certain adherence to a film style I think of as "Pastoral": shots of nature interspersed with action for no reason other than to evoke a certain mood, and through these kinds of shots a placing of mood above plot. In contrast, Chris Weitz's film is pretty simple. It tells the story well enough, but that's about it.

But really the $64,000 question is Team Edward or Team Jacob? Right? How about option C? How about Micheal Sheen who has played both werewolves and vampires?? Can I be on his team?

So in honor of Micheal Sheen and if you haven't had enough of vampires yet, try Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. Granted, the first Underworld film is the best, but this prequel which stars Sheen as he starts the thousand year war between the werewolves (lycans) and the vampires is just a lot of fun. In the NY Times review of the film, Manola Darghis writes:

" Tricked out in leather and heavy metal hair, the British actor Michael Sheen takes a lively break from his usual high-crust duties to bring wit, actual acting and some unexpected musculature to the goth-horror flick 'Underworld: Rise of the Lycans.' "

So yeah. TEAM SHEEN!!! *Scream* *Faint*

A.O. Scott's "Precious" Double Feature

2009-11-23T11:05:00.001-08:00

I was going to write a little something about Precious, which was better than I expected (and surprisingly did not require the giant mound of tissues I had expected). Lee Daniels really does a good job walking the fine line between exploiting the subject and glossing over issues. But A. O. Scott beat me to it (read it!) and discusses much of the soul searching this film has caused. All I will say is that Mo'nique was truly amazing and deserves all the hype. ( and maybe I should have included the hug it out kitten again....)

A letter from Ken: The Road, or, The End.

2009-11-19T12:32:00.000-08:00

[Should I mention that I'll now proceed to talk about this movie? There's this word I'm supposed to invoke at this point; although I'm resistant to deploy it, here it is -- spoilers.]

The Road. I saw it.

And it was bleak. We all die, except for an unlucky few among the human race, who meander about a desolate landscape of perpetual fires in a blisteringly cold climate. The sound one most often hears are petrified trees cracking to pieces, echoing like distant, dried out glaciers (if such a thing is even possible).

How did it come about in this particular post-apocolyptic narrative? If one of the early trailers is to be believed, it's from a mess of environmental disasters brought about by human ignorance, apparently by not listening to Al Gore and not building proper levees, etc., etc. (I actually thought I was watching the trailer for Blindness again). It's actually incredibly misleading -- without the benefit of having seen the current tv ad campaign or read the book beforehand, the cause of what is basically the end of the world in The Road is never explained. Ever. And like much else in the movie, it helps to keep everything off-kilter.

Directed by John Hillicoat, whose last outing was the terrific Oz land western, The Proposition, and adapted for the screen by Joe Penhall from Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Road pulls no punches. "The end of humanity" is pretty much the most depressing thing out there, and the filmmakers do a really intelligent job of never relenting from this tone. You can find your bearings in the story of a father ("The Man") and son ("The Boy"; the characters are never given Christian names) keeping it together for the sake of each other, but then you always hear those trees cracking. Fine: Even this, you tell yourself, you can get used to, as it is a neat design of sound, but then there's the fact that there are no identifiable signs of color in this world; the whole palette seems intended to tell you no color exists. It got killed or died or was maybe eaten by whatever killed everything else. The color. But, OK: Again, cool, stylistic choice, and even in this you can distance yourself somewhat. But, oh, right...most of the remaining people encountered in this journey, well...they eat each other. Like zombies, except they're still recognizable as human beings, they're still speaking to each other in those terms, yet what they really want to do is eat you. Even if you manage to survive all of this (at least just for the sake of your kid, like "The Man" that Viggo Mortensen portrays), what really starts to get to you are the dreams you've been having of the life you had with your wife (Charlize Theron) and how those were definitely in color and you got to go with her to the symphony and wear nice, expensive clothes and got to sneakily feel up your hot wife's thigh. Before it all went to shit.

I try to convey all this, because I'm having a hard time thinking of a way to really recommend this movie to you. Somewhere in the first ten minutes, the Man reminds the Boy how to put their only pistol with two lone bullets to the temple of his kid-sized head, just in case he needs to. That scene is done in full-close up on the child: The Boy has tears in his eyes as he's resisting, then showing his dad that he can do it and that he's prepared. I mean, it really is fucking depressing.

The Road was amazing to watch, and certainly compelling as you parse out the purpose of all this tragedy. Not that it's particularly tragic; I wouldn't want to oversell it. But really, what is the point? The movie obliquely refers to the fact that a good chunk of the population that likely survived the "event" that caused all this checked themselves out at some point, because it started to become plainly obvious that sticking around only meant that you were a potential meal or that you were in denial that any semblance of "happy days" or "good times" would ever return.

And that's it. The question of "Why go on living?" is never really explicitly answered. There is something at the end that is pretty much the definition of "speck of hope", but even this seems like cold comfort (it even struck me as being somewhat unbelievable in the context of everything else that happens, and I was honestly surprised that this was the ending in the book, but there it is).

What it does have is a visual consistency that is stunning. A bolder move might've been to just film it all in black & white (you know, "stark"), but cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe really makes perfect choices in what he does choose to keep in the color scheme of the picture, and it's enough to convince you of some warmth that keeps you involved in the experience of what the Man and Boy go through. It's there in the can of coke they discover in a resistant vending machine of a long abandoned building, and it's there when they open a tin of peaches in one of the happier moments in the movie. Yes, there's some happy times.

The performances are tremendous -- the entire story is carried on both Mortensen's and the unaffected, unpretentious Kodi Smit-McPhee's strong yet sickly shoulders (an aside -- the digital effects used throughout are effective in that they only ever seem necessary but never so obvious: Mostly in leeching out the color of the images, but then, as the Man and Boy strip naked to take their first bath in too long a time, we really get a sense of how ravaged and starving they really are. It's a testament to their performances that by the time this scene comes around, you believe the actors really stopped eating, too). Everyone else in the cast really only amounts to walk-on performances, but those shine brightly -- Charlize Theron as "The Woman" (whose face time in the trailer also seems to make you think she's in it for awhile; she's not), Garrett Dillahunt ("Deadwood"!), an almost unrecognizable Robert Duvall, poor Michael K. Williams ("The Wire"!!!) near the end, and then Guy Pierce and Molly Parker ("Deadwood"!!) at the very end.

For fans of the book, I can tell you that I read it after seeing the movie and that it's pretty much verbatim. (That arguably single most disturbing scene in the book where The Man breaks the lock to the first cellar and finds the, um, people? It's in the movie, and it's there pretty vividly.) For everyone else, I have to tell you that it's worth seeing, that I liked it immensely, but I can also tell you that the crowd immediately around my section of the screening left wondering how they could even release something like this. Who could watch it? Who would want to? On Thanksgiving weekend, no less!? It does put our economic woes in perspective. It makes you want to give everyone you love in this world a hug. And then maybe everyone else after that.

I mostly just wanted to write something about how I felt watching this movie, but I did want to put it in the classic context of this blog, so to that end, you have a few options for a celluloid tango:

1) The movie I actually thought of initially was Children of Men -- a similar combination of dread and a sense of loss is conveyed throughout, and like the first third or so of Alfonso Cuaron's movie, the entirety of The Road has the feel of an elegy for the world, and what it may feel or look like to be witness to the end of everything. There's even that twinge of hopefulness at end. Or something.

2) WALL*E. You'll feel a lot better afterwards no matter what. Maybe especially if you don't even like WALL*E.

3) Once I gave this some serious thought, it occurred to me that The Road most resembles Kon Ichikawa's (OK, I'll say it) masterpiece Fires on the Plain, which is a little more specific in terms of what is happening and why, but also conveys the same sense of desperation in a world that is ending but not quite soon enough, and the almost absurd yet mundane facts of life (among these, cannibalism) under the circumstances. They even share similar plot points -- the encounters with people along the road, the fires in the distance that are sometimes only heard, and what sometimes seem to amount to illusions of hope: The soldiers in Fires that fight to get to the coast, much like the Man's determination to do the same, and that things will get better for he and the Boy once they achieve this goal. Probably the most comforting thing about Fires on the Plain is that it ends with a definite feeling that this was the end of someone's world, and the rest of the world has moved beyond that (and hopefully evolved) with all of us still on it. Maybe you should watch it after watching The Road. And then buy a kitten. To hug.

Thanks to Ken Tan for contributing this post!!

"The Clone Returns Home" and "Solaris"

2009-11-14T10:00:00.000-08:00

Among the year's most widely ridiculed statements in the cinema world, Lars von Trier's dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky before the end credits of Antichrist ranks right up there at the very top. Having seen von Trier's film myself, I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's a prank on the part of the Danish provocateur, although, at the same time, I'm also not quite sure that Tarkovsky would welcome such an irrelevant mention.

In the November issue of Sight & Sound, editor Nick James, when discussing the tastes and selections of film festivals worldwide, observes that many of the prominent filmmakers of today - from Bela Tarr to Bruno Dumont and Apichatpong Weerasethakul - are "all unified by a post-Tarkovskian idea of poetic cinema", and "the reverence with which much of this cinema is regarded is ... too often uncritical".

I don't know. If James' statement is accurate, a film like The Clone Returns Home, written and directed by Japanese filmmaker Kanji Nakajima, would most certainly deserve a bigger audience than it has so far. By juxtaposing a sci-fi premise (cloning, space mission) with highly philosophical musing on such ideas as memories, family, identity, death, and the nature of the human soul, the film looks like something that you might get if Solaris and Stalker were ever rolled into one. (There's even a bit of indoor water-dripping!)

The wife of The Clone's astronaut protagonist is faced with a similar moral dilemma encountered by Solaris' protagonist. Her husband has volunteered for an experimental cloning program that will 'regenerate' his body and memory after any accidental death during his missions. When it actually happens, the scientists meet with her to relate the plan, opening by stating that they're not there to offer condolescence. The wife is, rightly, furious with the offer - you don't replace your beloved partner with a clone; although, when she's countered with the matter-of-fact reply, "In that case, we'll have to offer you our condolescence", her resistence crumbles.

All in all, yes, Nakajima's film is almost as boring as Tarkovsky's (excuse me). But then again, anyone who's willing to last the 110-minute distance will be justly rewarded with a highly cerebral, and strangely touching, journey into the afterlife.

"Bright Star" and "Twilight"

2009-10-11T21:00:00.000-07:00

No I wasn't kidding. Yes I said Twilight. (and its not just because the above posters are so similar) Now, I am not saying that Twilight comes ANYWHERE CLOSE to Bright Star, which was restrained, minimalist, beautiful. Buuuuut... when I saw Twilight, it struck me as not merely a film for 13 year olds but a indie movie watching 101 training for 13 year olds. When was the last time that you saw a tween film move so slowly, focusing on scenery and mood, long takes of the characters as they lay in the grass gazing into each other eyes? Voiceover.... Its like Terrence Malick with training wheels... Maybe when these 13 year olds hit sixteen they will be so used to this slow pace they will not fall asleep in films like Bright Star but will savor the beauty. It was a welcome change from quick fire speed of most tween fare these days.

There is a scene in Bright Star in which John Keats, played by the up and coming Ben Whishaw, describes poetry as something which should not be dissected: You do not jump in the lake of poetry to just immediately get to the other side. You let yourself stew in the waters/ experience, take it in. That is how I feel about Terrence Malick and was definitely a mantra that Jane Campion was channeling in Bright Star. Instead of a story, you get almost a series of vignets, flashes of a mood.

In Brief: Coco Before Chanel & My Brilliant Career - Strong independent feminine women (the characters and the actresses). The opening sequence in which the young Coco is being taken with her sister to the orphanage in a cart is one of the best openings I have seen in a while. The point of view shots we get from between the slats of wood on the cart are reminiscent of the framing being adjusted on a projector...beautiful.

"Shorts" & "The Good Enough Revolution"

2009-10-01T12:24:00.000-07:00

Leave it to me to post this AFTER the film is leaving the theaters. But lets face it, you weren’t going to go to the theater to watch Robert Rodriguez’s new kids film Shorts anyway. But maybe once you read this you will put it on your Netflix queue.

I was actually having a hard time coming up with a double feature for Shorts. I didn’t feel like it was fair to pair the film with anything that Rodriguez has done in the past, though I feel like seeing Shorts and Spy Kids 2 (well, anything with Spy Kids 2 really) is a good idea. Then on the subway, I was catching up on my backlog of Wired magazines and I read an article on “good enough” tech (The Good Enough Revolution: Why Cheap and Simple are Just Fine). And it occurred to me that this article, though discussing technology (cameras, military planes etc) actually articulated much of what draws me to Rodriguez’s children’s films.

The main gist of the article, which I highly recommend you read is that sometimes the simpler and more rudimentary the technology the better. For example the original Flip camera did not shoot in HD, or even have a optical zoom. And yet it was good enough. It was easy to use and it got the job done, whether that be recording rants to upload to Youtube or recording quick memories from vacations.

Rodriguez’s kids films are likewise “good enough”. Now, I love WALL-E and the rest of the Pixar clan, whose animation is outright beautiful, but when did high tech, special effects become a necessity of “good” childrens films? Kids are creative, more so than adults, they fill in blanks. Anyone who has ever seen a child’s drawing of their house (squiggles), knows that Kids are capable of using their imaginations to smooth over differences between what is represented and what is on paper. Rodriguez realizes this and thus the stories and jokes focus on being fun rather than being snazzy.

Rodriguez makes his kids films on the cheap (if you can get your hands on the special features of the Spy Kids 2 DVD, I will lend it to you! There is a great little snippet on how he creatively saves on production costs). He does not strive for realism or hyper realism (dazzle). He tells stories and jokes that kids get (like a giant booger that turns into a monster and terrorizes the home of the Noseworthy family - see pic above ew). He has fun with his films. And I would venture to say that his films, in being “good enough” are actually better. The plot, the “fun” does not get lost amidst all the add-ons. His films are the equivalent of really good traditional 2D animation. Hi Spongebob!

So that being said, I thoroughly enjoyed Shorts. As I write this I am still humming the theme music for the wonderfully named character of Helvetica Black. A theme that Rodriguez wrote himself I might add. The loose story centers around a magic wishing rock that wreaks havoc among a small suburban community and it is told in a series of shorts because the storyteller, young Toe Thompson, can’t remember the order in which events happened (eat your heart out Memento). John Cryer and Leslie Mann are hilarious as Toe’s parents, who are competing against each other at work.

Linkage: Now about that ticking clock....

2009-07-05T23:39:00.000-07:00

You can almost hear Viacom sighing with relief:

http://www.imdb.com/news/ni0861925/

True HD Streaming Likely Years Away, Says Report

It is likely to be at least five years years before high-definition movies can be streamed to home theaters with the same resolution as Blu-ray discs, according to a study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and reported on the Video Business magazine's website. Although millions of homes are already connected to video services that claim to offer HDTV titles, via streaming, the quality doesn't even match that of standard DVDs and the "flow" is sometimes jerky. The problem in many cases is that most consumers' broadband connections are too slow to stream HD video which ideally requires an 18- to 20-megabits-per-second connection. (The average broadband subscriber's connection is about 2.5 mbps.)

"Night at the Museum 2" & "The Incredible Paintings of Felix Clousseau"

2009-06-14T16:15:00.000-07:00

I have a very scattered taste in movies, which sometimes leads to disbelief and guffaws from my more snobby film friends. For example, a fellow film programmer in college came over to my house for the first time, and seeing the Spy Kids 2 DVD on my shelf ( I have, and still do claim, this is a masterpiece and rRod’s best) said “Oh. You weren’t kidding.” So it will surprise no one that despite my meager Chinese salary at the moment, I paid to go see Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian on the big screen.

Now, I am not going to say that this film is on par with Spy Kids 2. This is no masterpiece (though having the Giant Jeff Koons balloon dog bounce around the Smithsonian art galleries happily for half the film is a stroke of genius). It is however, a piece of unashamed fun.
Even more than the first film, NATM2 threw in every possible exhibit imaginable. Tuskegee Airmen, Amelia Earhart, General Custer… the list goes on and on. You could almost hear the cheers of elementary school history teachers in the background. Not to mention the cheers of the Smithsonian board: the film was literally a giant infomercial for the Smithsonian itself. There were of course some genuinely un-funny catering to the kids jokes. I could have done without the singing cupids for example (but yes Hank Azaria and his lisp were amazing). But these moments are not really what gives the movie its “fun”.

What is so nice about the Night of the Museum franchise is the unabashed enjoyment of good old-fashioned imagination: the idea of things that we already suspect are, and wish were, alive coming to life; and the resulting wonderful chaos. This kind of chaos is portrayed as a good thing, not something to be controlled or stopped. In many ways, despite the fancy schmancy Smithsonian website and the heavy use of CG, the film’s message is very anti-technological (see the last scene of the film for example and what becomes of all Larry’s exhibit friends in the end). Larry’s (Ben Stiller’s character) dissatisfaction with his success is crystallized in his being chained to his blackberry. All the old exhibits are going to be replaced by very hollow holograms (the horror!). These days with Tickle me Elmo and all kinds of think- for-you, you-don’t- need-imagination toys, its nice to see a message encouraging imagination and the chaos that comes with creativity and play. The advice of Amelia Earhart (played by Amy Adams) to Larry to just have fun, is almost a message to the audience. The film is less a movie about the suspension of disbelief and more about belief itself. It is a giant “What if?” What if you had a magic tablet that made everything come to life? What would it be like? It is the child’s version of fantasy dinner party.

As a pairing, I actually suggest a book. One of my all time favorites: The Incredible Painting of Felix Clousseau by John Agee. It tells the story of a man who paints pictures that come to life. His paintings, as long as they remain contained are lauded, but as soon as they begin to misbehave and cause chaos, Clousseau is thrown into jail. Like with NATM2, the chaos that creativity creates is treated as something to be contained by the rest of the world but something to be cherished by the hero of the story.

We all know that paintings cannot “actually” come to life. But I like to think that the best paintings create a world that we feel as if we could dive into. Just as the best history books make us feel (if not wish) to travel back in time to participate in historic battles and events. It is nice for once to not be reminded of the restraints of reality and be encouraged to imagine a world in which one can dive in and out of paintings and worlds and not worry about "real world" consequences. So for all you film snobs out there: you used to be kid. Remember?

"Blood: The Last Vampire" (2009)

2009-05-31T10:11:00.000-07:00

Edmund here:-

Vampire fans alert!

Just back from a preview screening of the live-action adaption of Hiroyuki Kitakubo's intriguing but over-brief animation from 2000. (The original was intriguing not only because the signature costume of its heroine stems from a joke, but also from its dubious racial, political and religious undertone.) While Gianna does look exceptionally hot here as Saya the non-smiling demon slayer (who also happens to be a vampire - don't ask), I'm sad to report that this film makes even less sense than the original despite doubling its runtime.

Let me put it this way: the parts based on the anime are mostly pretty awesome, but the back story that the filmmakers supplied to Saya is embarrassingly cliched AND non-sensical. Casting Allison Miller as Saya's sidekick is a misstep into teenage drama territory (although I can see the reasons they replace the ordinary-looking schoolteacher character in the original), while Koyuki's involvement as Saya's nemesis - without elaborating further, because of how incredibly ridiculous the final twist is - is nothing short of a joke.

So if you like the original and wish that it was longer... well, stop wishing and just stick with it.

(This is meant more as the ranting of a disappointed fanboy, rather than a proper review...)

Finally, a fact that's probably funnier than the film itself: in Hong Kong, Blood: The Last Vampire is scheduled for a June 4 theatrical release, i.e. on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, under the Chinese title of "血戰新世紀". Talk about irony.

From Behind a Great Wall of Fire

2009-05-31T01:07:00.000-07:00

Hey Guys, Hi Edmund!

Sorry to have been MIA for a while but blogger is still very much blocked here in Beijing (ehem.. oh hey June 4th). I will not go into detail about how I am getting around it because I don't want THAT to get blocked. But needless to say, I have found a way and will begin to post again very very soon.

Linkage: The big picture, and the bigger picture

2009-05-29T11:53:00.000-07:00

Edmund here:-

I'm not a fan of IMAX. I don't get the fixation that people have on this 'immersive experience' thingy. And, hell, I even regret it sometimes that I've only seen part of Kung Fu Panda, part of The Dark Knight, and part of Watchmen, all in an 'original' IMAX theatre. It's like having a dinner date with your dream girl and spending the whole evening staring at her chin. Or something.

But nevermind about me. Roger Ebert has made some interesting points about the various film projecting formats in his latest blog entry. An interesting read if size matters to you. Meanwhile I'll gladly stick to my small screen...

He might have watched some Melville...

2009-05-16T07:40:00.000-07:00

Edmund here:-

Sorry dear readers, I'm not Lixian, and you don't know me. In all likelihood, you should be scratching your head by now wondering who's this non-Lixian blogger doing here on Lix's wonderful little blog.

Don't worry. I'm wondering too.

If memory serves you well, you'd remember that Lix mentioned a while ago that she's inviting filmy people to contribute to her blog. And I, despite never much of a writer, happen to be on her invitation list.

So first of all, thanks to Lix.

Since I haven't been watching much of anything lately, I figure it may be better to start my first post with a poster and a link. They'll hopefully occupy Lix's mind for a little while:

A new interview with Johnnie... [<- now expired. Oops.]

Now seriously, I'm just biding my time before beginning to think about my first double featurette idea. But don't let Lix know...

Linkage: What is the Ultimate Prize- Web or TV?

2009-05-13T01:32:00.000-07:00

Ashton Kutcher's online show Blah Girls is going to TV. So was the web merely a way to get it onto network TV? Does this move show that the web format was not lucrative enough? Or is having it on TV just a way to get more people to watch it online. In essence is TV now advertising for the web?

Linkage: Why Chinese Pirates will Save Cinema

2009-05-11T20:55:00.000-07:00

I read in this New York Times article, that Hollywood studios are turning their backs on China. The dream of one billion viewers having been crushed by censorship and rampant piracy. Well all I can say to Hollywood is, if you want to leave, that’s fine: its your funeral. Chinese film piracy is going to save cinema. Censorship is a nuisance but it is not the end of the world. And those who are turning their back on China in favor of other “easier” markets are shooting themselves in the foot. One billion people are ready and waiting.

Kurosawa on the Corner:

Before I explain what I mean when I say that Chinese piracy will save the film industry, I need to first describe the Chinese DVD store. Because it is these stores which are the key to understanding how to crack the Chinese market:

Firstly, these are not hidden speakeasy style stores. Yes, these shops are selling “illegal” goods. But these are not stalls with scouts on the corners, ready to pack up at a moments notice. These are stores with neon signs. Their wares are not shoved into back rooms and hidden by curtains; step right in the door and browse freely.

Inside, you can of course get your copy of Watchmen the day of its release. Sometimes the quality is excellent, sometimes, the shop girls will openly tell you, the quality is not so great. With new releases, it’s sometimes hard to find HD quality fakes (I recently watched a certain Renee Zelleweger romcom which switched into Russian midway). But what is truly amazing is the non-new releases. Want the beautifully designed Jean Renoir box set? Want to watch every movie ever made by Kurosawa for 200 RMB (around 25 US)? How about Gomorrah, or Man on Wire over dinner tonight? Or my personal favorite, a box set that includes every single film ever to win a best picture Oscar. These small Beijing DVD stores are better stocked full of international and indie fare than any typical US DVD store. Imagine, all you Kim’s videos and Facets fans, if there was a Kim’s and Facets on every other street corner. Now imagine if every DVD was a dollar. Think how many more movies you would pick up on a whim. Think of how great a film education that would be.

The Smartest Pirates in the World (and why we should heart them):

The effect of this piracy is ironically that the Chinese consumer is being exposed to a vast array of films. Even more ironically, this piracy stems in part from the strict censorship laws. Censorship has inadvertently led to more exposure.

Instead of a country of brainwashed drones, only allowed to watch the twenty government approved foreign films a year in addition to local fare, the Chinese movie watching public is taking in French films, indie films, anything they can get ahold of. Since everything is subtitled, the original language is actually irrelevant. Foreign filmmakers of the world take note, forget the US market, where subtitles are seen as a dealbreaker, focus your efforts on China.

Consider this: In China, only 20 foreign films are let in a year (these films are vetted and censored by the government). Television is strictly controlled, as are the local films that are allowed to show in movie theaters.

Now Consider this: In the US, a movie ticket costs an average of $10. That’s about the price of lunch. In Beijing, my lunch costs on average RMB10. To go to a movie is at least RMB50 (that’s almost a weeks worth of lunch!). Imagine if a movie in the states cost $50, would you go? The prices of movies are prohibitively expensive (not to mention foreign imported DVDs, if you can find them).

It is no wonder, given these factors that the pirated DVD store is the chosen vehicle for film access in China. What is a wonder is that instead of turning its back on foreign films completely, the Chinese appetite for film has flourished. These homegrown DVD stores are nurturing an entire generation of film buffs. A few weeks ago, a DVD seller came to our office (I work in an all Chinese office) to sell DVDs. The entire office stopped working for an hour, sifting through hundreds of DVDs. I suggested to a co-worker who had already grabbed the Kiera Knightly film The Duchess, that he should also try one of my favorites Let the Right One In. Each DVD was 6RMB. Everyone bought around ten.

Hollywood should rejoice that in a country with such strict censorship, the awareness of their products is so high. They should think of piracy as free advertising.

Stop Blaming Piracy and Censorship, Just Get Smarter:

So one billion people have been watching your films. They like your films. Now how do you make money off of it? How does one crack China?

For now I would say, forget about movie theaters, they are still much too expensive for the majority of Chinese to afford. Also, censorship is still a problem and movie theaters are the area in which the government has the most control.

As for DVDs, unless you are planning on lowering the cost of your DVDs to at most 5 dollars, then you are probably not going to make any money. Also, so far, other than the Internet there is no way to get “real” DVDs in China. There is no Virgin Mega Store. Yet.

All I can say is get smart. Earlier this month, I wrote on the rise of web to TV movie streaming options. How about creating a web to TV (or web based) service for China (the NYT article says that Warner was planning on it but has yet to do it!). Yes there is the great fire wall, but people get around it. If it were merely the content of the films that was questionable then the little DVD shops would be shut down. Clearly there are ways to avoid film/ web censorship (oh hello Chinese government, pls don’t shut down my blog…). I spoke to someone closely involved with Web entrepreneurship in China, and he said that web content within China is not as regulated as you would think. He told me that the government is smart enough not to prematurely stifle the growth of new web industries. This lack of regulation especially applies to local media companies. Well Hollywood, time to get yourself a local partner!

And for goodness sakes make your web content free! Many Chinese still don’t have credit cards or means by which to pay for online content. Focus on getting one billion eyes on your site. Give them HD quality!

If you create a free, user friendly platform, in Chinese, full of movies, tv shows etc. I guarantee that you will have an audience. Thanks to the pirated DVD trade, the Chinese audience is prepped and ready. And hey, one billion eyes makes for some pretty juicy advertising prospects. Cha- ching.

Star Trek as movie conector

2009-05-11T01:54:00.000-07:00

If only this article on Star Trek had been written for Double Featurette (mad jeals). It discusses the way in which the original Star Trek was actually a melting pot of the movies and shows of that time. And that the galaxy Kirk and his crew were mapping was in fact a map of US pop culture. Great read.

Linkage: "Rip! A Remix Manifesto"

2009-05-06T19:58:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Ken for sending me this article/ interview with Rip! a Remix Manifesto director Brett Gaynor, founder of Opensourcecinema.org. Gaynor, in addition to a standard theatrical release, has released his film online in a Radiohead style pay what you want scheme. So if you are having a slow day at work and want to mess around, remix some open source footage, head on over to his site. Lawrence Lessig fans: get excited.

Here's a taste:

Wired.com: What are your thoughts on the future of open video?

Gaylor: I’m generally optimistic about it. There are a lot of challenges, for sure: Lack of universal standards, third-party rights, bandwidth, access for the developing world, and a lack of basic media literacy among users. On the flip side, I think the internet will very quickly overtake TV as the content-delivery medium of choice, and with that comes the opportunity for a genuine participatory experience. I think the time is now for developing the tools, standards and practices to make sure we don’t just see TV 2.0.

For the full article go here.

Linkage: New Web to TV figures

2009-05-06T10:45:00.000-07:00

Maybe I was wrong about film studios having time....

From the IMDB studio Briefing: "More TV being caught on the web"

Yet another study has indicated that television will rapidly converge with the Internet. The latest, from In-Stat, indicates that within five years 24 million households will be watching broadband video over their television sets and that revenue from Web-to-tv streaming will reach $2.9 billion. "Once Web-to-tv video becomes simple and convenient, mass consumer adoption will follow quite rapidly," In-Stat analyst Keith Nissen said in a statement. The report comes just one week after the Consumer Electronics Association predicted that about 3.5 million U.S. consumers will likely buy a television set that can be connected directly to the Internet within the next year,

Linkage: Me & A.O. Scott

2009-05-04T03:26:00.000-07:00

We appear to be on the same page:

To: The Internet

Cc: Hollywood

From: A. O. Scott

People really like movies. In theaters. On TV. On DVD. Whatever. We don’t mind paying for them, but we like to see them without too much trouble or inconvenience or confusion. It would be nice to be able to see some on our iPods or our computers. It might even be the best way for specialized, uncommercial movies to reach us. Can you come up with a business model to make this possible, while also ensuring that the artists and producers can make a living? When you figure something out, kindly forward it to the music, newspaper and publishing industries. Thanks!

For all the memos to hollywood go here.

"Jalainur" and "City Lights"

2009-04-28T20:55:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I saw City Lights for the very first time. Now I have to admit that I don’t really find Chaplin all that funny (sacrilege I know!), I am more of a Groucho Marx type, but there is no denying that the film itself is wonderful. It is also, surprisingly devastating. Chaplin’s hobo character pretends to be a rich suitor to cheer up the blind flower seller he is in love with and yet you are left wondering if she will still love Chaplin once his true identity is revealed. Yet through all the pain that Chaplin endures in the film, he never once falters in his mirth. A friend of mine once defined the best tragedies as ones where you laugh the whole way through. Chaplin, with his never-ending playfulness, seems to embody this idea within himself.

Well these days the world seems destined for tragedy. Everyone keeps tossing around the phrase “Great Depression” and all I can think is that we need our Chaplin. Who is going to get us through this? Well…(drumroll) I am happy to announce that I have found that Chaplin in the most unexpected of places, in a little film called Jalainur, set in a small coal-mining town in Inner Mongolia.

Jalainur, director Zhao Ye’s second feature and winner of the Fipresci prize at Pusan in 2008, follows two train engineers who work transporting coal. The older engineer Zhu, is about to retire after decades on the job and return home. His young apprentice Zhizhong follows him around on his last few days on the job. Their friendship and sadness at their impending separation is set against a breathtakingly beautiful and desolate landscape. It is truly unreal. Go see this film for the landscapes alone.

I saw this film at the Hong Kong International Film Festival and Zhao Ye was there. He said that he was inspired by the Chinese proverb: “Even if I could follow you for thousands of miles, we would still have to part.” I really cannot do a better job of summing up this film than that. And it is a credit to Zhao Ye that the finished product is so close to the initial inspiration.

And it is the character of Zhizhong, played by university student Liu Yuan-Sheng who is the Chaplin we have been waiting for. Imagine a Chinese Harpo Marx: he hardly ever says anything in the film. Often he is seen playing with the few village children for whom he is a kind of amusing clown. His life is hard and mundane and yet he approaches it all with a childish glee. Standing on a pile of coal that is being carted along the train tracks, he revels in the wind and surrounding landscape, happy to perform his daily duties. When faced with the prospect of being left behind by Zhu, his colleague and best friend, he follows him for as long as he can. His quest feels less epic and more playful. Even the sight of standard sesame balls being sold on the street outside the train station seems to fill Zhizhong with wonder.

Watching the film, I couldn’t help thinking, that like Chaplin, the character of Zhizhong embodies a view of the world that I wish I had. A view that I think we need more of these days. A view that gives us the ability to laugh through…anything.

Jalainur is a special film. If it shows anywhere near you, go see it. It is not a perfect film, the use of digital is sometimes a little rough and some shots are perhaps unnecessary and overly thought out. But that being said, it has been a long time since I felt so excited and surprised by a film.

Linkage: R.I.P. DVD

2009-04-25T22:22:00.000-07:00

THE WRITING ON THE VIRTUAL WALL

It is time for the film industry to face the music. Or rather, to face the crisis that has plagued the music industry for many years: the Internet crisis. You may think that this crisis has already hit home and that this is very very old news, with pirated DVDs sold in subways for a few dollars and the rise of Bit Torrent sites allowing free downloads of entire films. But that was just the beginning.

The truth is that for years the film industry has been relatively sheltered from the crippling effects of the Internet by the difference in quality between a store bought DVD watched on a good TV and the often grainy low quality of a downloaded video (illegal or legal) on a small computer monitor. For the average user, a downloaded song sounds the same as a store bought CD when played on a computer with decent speakers, while video has in the past looked different enough that they will begrudgingly pay the whopping $26 for a DVD.

Well that time has passed. Two recent articles in the New York Times caught my attention this week. The first was on the rush of PC companies to create smartphones. According to the article, these new smartphones will soon stream high definition movies to your TV. Add to this the recent article on Roku (a box that sits next to your TV and streams videos). Roku was originally released as a means by which Netflix users could watch a moderate library of 12,000 (mostly old) movies streamed from the Netflix site on their TVs. And at a mere $99, it was a great deal for Netflix users who wanted on demand service but wanted to watch movies on their TV rather then their computer. Now, Roku has the ability to stream Amazon.com movie rentals ($1 for 24 hrs, $15 for unlimited) and TV shows directly to your TV. You don’t even have to connect to your computer first!

What do these small devices mean for the film industry? To put it simply: the DVD is dead. What really is a DVD anyway? It is merely a storage device for a file that is the movie. If you can download that file, or turn on your TV and click on that file, then why wouldn’t you? Now that technology is being developed that enables you to watch whatever movie you want on your TV, when you want, without missing out on quality, the film industry is going to have to seriously rethink their business model.

MOVING USERS ONTO THE HIGH ROAD

Some may say, that if these high quality files are so easy to find, that Internet piracy will just run rampant and kill the film industry. This is a definite possibility, but it is a possibility that is actually very easy to avoid.

I believe that people do not want to steal movies or songs. I am speaking here of regular people, not techies. Those with large technical know-how, especially younger techies who have grown up with programs like Napster (and have probably never paid for a CD in their life), for whom file-sharing comes as easy as breathing, will forever balk at the idea of going through some legal channel. They are not like “older” techies who still value having a record/CD collection to display on the shelf. I also believe that the average user is fundamentally lazy, and is willing to pay a certain amount for ease.

What is so brilliant about Roku is that it provides an easy way for users to get what they want legally. Thus it allows users to be both lazy and legal. Netflix users pay on average $14 a month and can have unlimited access to DVDs (provided they keep sending them back) and the online film library. Is going online to download films illegally, and then having to plug your computer into your TV (assuming you have the technical knowledge to do all this), really worth saving $14 a month? Or even better, worth saving the $1 it costs to watch a movie from Amazon rentals? Gone are the days of driving to the nearest video store to buy expensive DVDs. Gone are the days of the DVD.

So how is the film industry, in particular the studios, going to face the extinction of this major revenue source? In order to see how to proceed, the film industry needs to learn the lessons of the music industry.

THE SUCCESS MODEL OF ITUNES

Many had predicted that the music industry would be completely over when file sharing took off: That there was no way to stop Internet piracy. No matter how many times you shut down a Napster, they argued, another illegal platform would spring up in its place. And yet how do we explain the success of something like iTunes? Why would anyone pay for a service that is free elsewhere?

The genius of iTunes is firstly that it makes people’s lives easy at a low enough cost. In other words, the ease that is gained by using iTunes versus seeking out torrents etc, is worth the price that is charged to download a song.

Even more importantly, iTunes is not merely an online music store but a platform by which all your media needs can be taken care of. Hook your ipod up and immediately have all your songs on the go. Have all your radio podcasts downloaded immediately as they become available. Throwing a party? Simply plug your ipod into one of the many Apple designed speaker systems. Apple has created an iTunes universe full of different media related products. The glue of this network is iTunes.

Granted, the few cents the industry gets for every song downloaded is not much compared the millions it made selling records and CDs. But Apple is rolling in profits with sales of its products. iTunes saw an opportunity and revolutionized the music industry in its favor. So while the major music labels may be hurting and glaring at iTunes, there are definitely still profits to be had.

In other words, people want services, they want their lives to be easy. And there is a certain price they will pay for this. iTunes, so far, has gotten this balance right.

WHAT THE STUDIOS NEED TO DO

The film industry needs to either “beat em or join em.”

iTtunes already allows users to download selected movies. But these still have to be watched on your computer. That is unless you buy Apple’s version of Roku, appleTV, and stream all of this to your TV. Netflix and Amazon via Roku offer a similar service. Tivo, in addition to its TV on demand services now offers Netflix, Amazon and Jaman, yet another movie downloading service specializing in independent films. So far the only thing that stands in the way of these companies revolutionizing the film world in their favor is the fact that studios still control copyrights and in the case of Netflix for example, refuse to allow the site to stream new releases. In the case of Apple TV, new releases are only available 30 days after the DVD is released.

So the studios could simply join forces with one, or all of these online platforms. They could release their libraries to Netflix and Amazon and iTunes. But in this scenario who would truly end up in the black? Remember that Netflix etc need to keep their costs down in order to provide cheap enough access to their services. Are they really going to pay the studios the big bucks? Will Netflix be willing to pay what the studios make from DVD sales? Even if the studios charged all these platforms royalties, would it come close to DVD sales? Just as with the music industry, this would probably lead to big bucks for iTunes and other platforms and pittances for the industry itself.

The other option is for the studios to quickly create their own platform. Their own products, their own Internet film universe.

I envision a time in which I can switch on my TV (which no longer needs a box to connect to the internet, sorry Roku!) and with one click of my remote (or cell phone/remote) watch whatever movie I want in HD. And I don’t want to have to pay for HD cable or specific on demand channels. I want one service, one bill and no hassle. If I am at a hotel traveling, I want to be able to log onto this imaginary platform and still be able to watch the film I was watching on the hotel TV, maybe even from the moment I left off. I want access to information on actors, behind the scenes footage, interviews, right after I watch a film. I want subtitles in whatever language I want! And if it’s not too much to ask, how about a portable movie projector that can log in from anywhere and stream any movie I want: a true mobile movie theater! The more I think about it, the more services I can think of that this new platform could provide.

And for those who still doubt the death of the DVD; those who hold up as evidence the slice of the movie buying audience who purchase DVDs for the special features: What I want to know is why this content is not already free. The people who are willing to pay extra for these special features are the very people most able to help the industry advertise their films, and in the future, their platform. Bloggers already embed grainy Youtube versions of trailers and interviews into their film reviews. Why not give them HD quality content to help spread the word? Easy free access to embeddable special features would be yet another great service the film industry could add to their platform. What better way to top off a new business plan than with free advertising.

The film industry still has a bit of time. Roku and other devices are still new. “Streaming” video is still no HD quality. And the smartphones of the future are still in the future. But this window of time is very short. The studios need to act quickly and get creative if they are going to continue to be the titans of the industry. As with the music industry, there are profits to be made, the question is: who will capture them?

special thanks to M.Dawson.

Announcing: Linkage

2009-04-24T21:13:00.000-07:00

The Double Featurette has always been about links. The links that join films together, themes, motifs. etc. etc. But what of the physical links? The technology that enables us to see and to share film and media? Well I am happy to announce a new segment "Linkage" that will feature news and opinion on the relationship between film and technology. This is something that I have been thinking a lot about lately (push glasses up on nose) and I look forward to your comments!!!

The Double Featurette Gets a Makeover

2009-04-23T00:44:00.000-07:00

Double Featurette is expanding! I have invited some of my lovely friends to join me in blogging about all the crazy things that join films, media, photos (all kinds of things!) together. This way there will hopefully be less of a wait between posts and you will be able to see many many more viewpoints and ideas. Look out for new kinds of pairings and double features!

Top 5 2008

2009-01-11T14:31:00.000-08:00

Happy Golden Globes Day! I feel mildly obligated to post a top 5 for 2008 (although I probably did not see the five best films of the year) so in no particular order: (i prob forgot many many films but oh well)

1. Let the Right One In - Tomas Alfredson

2. Iron Man - Jon Favreau

3. Still Life - Jia Zhang Ke

4. WALL-E - Andrew Stanton

5. The Fall - Tarsem

"Let the Right One In" & A very very obvious choice....

2008-11-13T13:46:00.000-08:00

My friend Ryan G just sent me a message on Facebook telling me that I HAD to go out to see Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In. If you are beginning to despair that this pre-oscar season is looking very very dull, then take his advice.

It would be easy to describe this Swedish film as merely the sum of its parts: Vampires, twelve year olds falling in love, overcoming bullies. I mean for me, I hear that and it is "SAY NO MORE" and I am off to the theater. But this film goes far beyond its synopsis.

Yes, this film is about vampires, but is it a vampire movie? I am a big fan of Vampire movies, and I find that most vampire films fall into two categories: Vampire as erotic object (see Underworld) in which the vampire is a desired higher being, or Vampire as vermin (see 30 Days of Night.... or rather don't see it) in which the vampire is more zombie-like, a monster that needs to be eradicated. There are films that combine both, in the original Blade, the protagonist Blade is on a mission to kill vampires who feed on innocent humans, however Stephen Dorff who plays the villain is about as close as you can get to the sexy vampire. I was always mildly disappointed that he didn't win.

Let the Right One In takes both these categories into consideration. Oscar, in a awkward 12 year old way, is drawn sexually to Eli, the twelve year old vampire who moves into his apartment complex. And yet director Tomas Alfredson does not ignore the monstrous side of Eli: the times in which we see her kill are violent and bloody, her body contorting unnaturally as she feeds, snarling, on her victim's blood.

So yes, the film is a vampire movie.

But the film is also a coming of age / revenge of the nerds type film. Oscar is picked on and learns in the film to stand up for himself. The final scene in which the bullies get what is coming to them is equally bloody and hilarious. And it is also a quiet romance: boy meets girl who changes his life. The film moves slowly and we are able to absorb the romance against a backdrop of snow at a drawn out pace. The film is cute: Twelve year olds!! But it is also extremely disturbing: Who is the old man who lives with Eli? Was he once a boy similar to Oscar? And thus while we root for them to be together, we also wonder if Oscar would be better off without her. This film is both heartwarming and bone-chilling. It is cute and gorey. It is a thriller. It is a romance. It is about coming of age and never coming of age. It is a wonderful friendship and it is also a dangerous potentially addictive deadly relationship.

Any of these themes would produce a good double feature, so you may be surprised that I picked, you guessed it (drumroll please), Interview with a Vampire. This is probably the most obvious choice that could be made based on simply reading both films synopsi. But I am not pairing Interview With a Vampire with LTROI because it is a vampire movie. But because both films use the the idea of the Vampire to create films about broader thenes: Youth, Mortality, Love, Obsession.

In particular, both films star girls who are girls for ever. The idea of never ending youth in a world that grows up despite you and the sexual frustration that underlies both these characters are major themes in both films. Similarly, it would be interesting to add Peter Pan to this mix. In Peter Pan, to never grow old is seen as something to be desired. But unlike in Neverland, both these girls are the only ones in thweir worlds who remain eternal children.

So for all those mid life crisisers out there: it could be worse.

Double Food Features

2008-10-28T14:13:00.000-07:00

Check out the new blog BobbyJayonfood.com for his list of foodie films! Everyone has their favorite: mine is Juzo Itami's 1985 film Tampopo. There are very few films that I think of as "perfect" and this is definately one of them. The video clip above is my favorite scene in the film.

Publish Post

Where in the world is me?

2008-10-10T07:56:00.001-07:00

Sorry sorry.... a month long lapse. I APOLOGIZE. The tragedy is, what with work, travel, and the fiscal crisis, i have been resorting to Netflix. And have not seen a new film in over a month. But I have to say the prospect of catching up on all those classics I have never seen is pretty exciting. So for starters: (Melissa, I hear you were sad that I never talk about films you can actually see, well these are all on Netflix!!)

400 Blows - Truffaut - Totally devastating and beautiful masterpiece. I had a similar reaction to this film as I did to Zhang Yimou's classic Raise the Red Lantern. Both films center on protagonists trapped in repressive lives (disfunctional home vs. arranged marraige) and who never truly are able to escape. In particular, both films have last scenes that are visually breathtaking and yet portray such unending tragedy that you are left emotionally drained. Basically, I was moved deeply by both these films but will be happy to see neither again. Though check out the awesome poster above from Posteritati. Polish poster are truly the best.

The Dark Knight & The Wild Bunch

2008-09-13T11:06:00.000-07:00

By now you have all already seen Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. Maybe you've even seen it on Imax. So the question: Does The Dark Knight live up to the hype??

The Answer: Heath Ledger's performance is indeed spectacular. While I thought he was great in Brokeback Mountain, this last performance is in my mind his best. Oscar worthy? Definitely. The film on the other hand?? Sadly, I can not be so enthusiastic. The film is frantic and lacks structure. While individual scenes (mostly with Ledger) are thrilling and seeing the film on IMAX is breathtaking, the film as a whole felt rushed and not well thought out. I would like to credit Nolan with creating chaotic structure to mirror the themes of chaos in the film...but I don't think he really thought through it that far.

That being said, I am willing to bet that this film is a moment of great importance in the history of cinema (not merely for its stellar box office performance). The film represents a sea change (well... an attempt at a sea change perhaps...more on that in a sec) in the superhero genre similar to the shift from the traditional western (think John Wayne in Ten Gallon Hat) to the revisionist western (think Clint Eastwood in a slightly less than Ten Gallon Hat). In Dark Knight, Nolan attempts to portray the Super hero as the Anti-Hero. Or perhaps the revisionist super hero?

(spoilers ahead but I mean, you've seen it already right?) So how is this new Batman installment a change for the darker?

First of all, Batman fails. The damsel in distress, played this time around by Maggie Gyllenhaal dies (rumors of her coming back to life as cat woman aside). Batman fails to save her and fails to prevent Harvey Dent from turning into Two-face.

Secondly, the tone of the film and world that serves as a backdrop to the action is distinctly dark. Kudos to Hans Zimmer for creating an eerie often piercing score.

Lastly, Batman becomes "the Dark Knight." By taking the blame for the murders that Harvey Dent committed, he becomes known as a cop killer and a villain. The film ends with now Commissioner Gordon leading his men to hunt Batman down. Not to mention the fact that Batman wiretaps all of Gotham in order to find the joker.

And yet.... he didn't do it. Batman didn't kill those men. He destroys the citywide wiretap after the joker has been found. Frankly, I think Nolan chickened out a bit. In one scene, the Joker gives two boats full of passengers the detonation device to the other boat and says unless one boat blows up the other, both boats will be destroyed. Miraculously no one on either boat destroys the other to save themselves. Human beings turn out to be not so corruptible, cowardly and selfish after all (Maybe I am cynical but I found that scene particularly hard to believe). By stopping short going all the way into the darkness, Nolan fails at his attempt to single-handily change the genre within one film . (perhaps Zack Snyder's The Watchmen will go there).

In Sam Peckinpah's notorious violent film The Wild Bunch (1969), the "heroes" are by no means so clean. They are not thieves with honor, they are cold blooded, bawdy and often downright despicable. They do not rise above the fray (they shoot the lovers that have jilted them, leave less intelligent gang members to die, get drunk and sleep with prostitutes. The world around them is equally harsh. Gone is the western of protecting the women and children, they are as trigger happy as the men. Throughout the film, cruelty and violence are met with laughter by the characters (definitely not he audience). As if this is the only way to accept life in this dog eat dog world.

The Wild Bunch was among the films that signaled a change in the genre. The west that of J. Wayne was no longer squeaky clean. I think the visual darkness of The Dark Knight and the, albeit unsuccessful, attempts to "smear" the superhero signal a possible sea change in the super hero genre.

From Wikipedia " The violence that was much criticized by critics in 1969 remains controversial. Director Peckinpah noted it was allegoric of the American war against Vietnam, whose violence was nightly televised to American homes at supper time. He tried showing the gun violence commonplace to the historic western frontier period, rebelling against sanitised, bloodless television westerns and films glamorizing gun fights and murder. The point of the film is to take this façade of movie violence and open it up, get people involved in it so that they are starting to go in the Hollywood television predictable reaction syndrome, and then twist it so that it's not fun anymore, just a wave of sickness in the gut . . . It's ugly, brutalizing, and bloody awful; it's not fun and games and cowboys and Indians. It's a terrible, ugly thing, and yet there's a certain response that you get from it, an excitement, because we're all violent people."

I think we are ready to see our super heroes be flawed and "two-faced." Is this a reflection of the times in the real world? Our Iraq war versus Peckinpah's Vietnam? Perhaps. It remains to be seen whether super hero films in the next few years follow down this darker road.

Dave Kehr on The Dark Knight

2008-08-18T14:14:00.001-07:00

VS.

I will soon post on this film myself (fear not dear readers) but in case you were wondering what Dave Kehr would pair the latest Batman installment with, he chose Dirty Harry. Check it out on his blog.

British Double Featuring

2008-08-12T07:23:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Patrick for pointing out that I am not alone in my double featuring. Sight and Sound magazine this month asked programmers to list their dream double bills. Check it out:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49469

Mummies Always Get the Shaft

2008-08-11T14:39:00.001-07:00

Apologies apologies! I have neglected you guys in your hour of need: Summer Movie Season!! I promise that I am in the midst of new exciting posts!!! In the meantime I would like to just say a few words about that poor victim of all film critic's wrath" The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor."

To all those critics who contributed to the film's 12% rating on Rotten Tomatoes I would like to ask: "What did you expect??" For all of us who enjoyed the first two mummy movies, the one liners, yaks yakking gags, Brendan Fraser swashbuckling and laughably bad CGI are just what we wanted. Add Jet Li, Anthony Wong and Michelle Yeoh and I am just peachy! Giant CGI terracota army: check! Skeleton army rising from the depths of the great wall to seek revenge: I'm so there.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is a summer film and nothing else. It does not strive to be anything but. As a pairing try Richard Brooks western The Professionals starring Lee Marvin. The connection: they are both tons of fun. And when its 95 degrees outside, thats enough.

"Encounters at the End of the World" & "The New World"

2008-07-03T09:03:00.001-07:00

I have always avoided Werner Herzog (why I do not know) but am a big sucker for all these kinds of Discovery Channel subject matter films (Aliens of the Deep 3D, yeah I saw it [what about it?] ) so went to see Encounters, his latest doc (actually sponsored by the Discovery Channel) about the communities of scientists who work in Antartica. While it would be easy to pair the film with other films like Aliens of the Deep or March of the Penguins Herzog's doc is not just about what is there physically (though the footage in film of underwater dives are mesmerizing and beautiful and would have been enough for me). Herzog tackles, through the film, the nature of exploration itself. He questions this desire to discover and reach all areas of the globe.

The journey also takes him inward as he questions the difference between humans and their animal counterparts: the most hilarious and heartbreaking part of the film features a penguin who rather than head towards the sea, runs off towards the center of the continent and certain death. Is this penguin suicidal? depressed? Or is he too drawn to exploration and adventure? These are the kinds of questions that Herzog poses.

Terrence Malick's The New World, (A masterpeice btw) also goes beyond the simple story of America's discovery to question the nature of exploration. The character of John Smith, played by Colin Farrell, abandons love and happiness for his never ending quest for his "Indies." (spoilers.. sort of) The rocky desolate lands he does discover bring neither glory or satisfaction to him. It is as if the explorer can never be content. And the settlers, dying of starvation in this strange new world embody the struggle of man against nature and the dark underside of new lands. The first settlement that they live in is not a far cry from the city of scientists in Antartica. Both places are muddy, depressing, bare bones places surrounded by beautiful and unforgiving landscapes.

And before I head off for the Fourth of July Weekend, I should report on the backlog of Summer movies I have been seeing:

WALL- E: Pixar is so consistently good that it is more a matter of which film is your favorite. This is probably the darkest Pixar film to date and while the kids in the audience seemed to be enjoying themselves, the film really pushes the limits of what a Children's film is. The dystopia in which WALL-E lives is a Earth that is so covered in trash that it has become uninhabitable. If I were to pair this film up I would actually match it with a book : Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay. In Motel, a gimmick by the US post office of free mail for a week has gone awry, burying the entire continent in junk mail and causing the entire US population to die en mass. Years later a group of archaeologists come to excavate the Toot-n C'mon Motel. Their cataloging and complete misunderstanding of the objects they find is a nice pairing with the wonder of WALL-E as he digs through a world of trash gathering precious objects (such as sporks) for his own collection.

Wanted: If you ever wondered how Angelina Jolie + Morgan Freeman + Terrance Stamp could = utter garbage look no further.

Sparrow: Yet another Johnny To Gem. This (musical?) is probably his most beautiful film to date. Definitely one to see in the theaters if you can. Its sort of a Blow Up meets Umbrellas of Cherbourgh meets The Proffesionals.

Now go outside and eat a hot dog.

Even More Surfaces!!! - "Mad Detective" at the New York Asian Film Festival

2008-06-23T12:06:00.000-07:00

Remember how hard it was for me to find a pairing for Flight of the Red Balloon (if not see my last post)?? Well I have now a possible candidate for a TRIPLE FEATURE!! Add Johnny To's Mad Detective to the mix:

First off, Johnny To just keeps getting better and better. Often with Asian directors such as the oft praised Wong Kar Wai, you have to make allowances for overly shmaltzy sequences or unrealistic action scenes as merely the fault of lower production value or loss during translation. To requires no such excuses. His genre smashing films are slick, beautiful and most of all, smart (I also find them hilariously funny, but am often alone here). My favorite is still the 2006 film Exiled (even though it is set in Macau and centered around a group of aging gangsters, it is one of the best Westerns I have seen in a while, if not ever).

Mad Detective's cinematic craftsmanship is perhaps To's best. The last shot, a birds eye view of a room full of broken mirrors, is a masterpiece*. It is one of those last shots that manages in one shot to encapsulate the entire conflict/point of the whole film. In the film, Lau Ching Wan plays Bun, a schizophrenic detective (he has the schizo walk down to a science) who is able to see someone's inner personalities. While the villain appears to Ho, the regular detective, to be just one man, Bun sees that he is in fact seven different people: the glutton (perfect casting of To regular Suet Lam), the violent maniac, the calm controlling female executive etc.

So why add this film to an already complete double feature?? Answer: Another cinematic surface to consider. In the climactic last scene (no worries, no spoilers here) the audience sees the inner personalities of characters reflected in a wall of mirrors. While in Kung Fu Panda and Flight of the Red Balloon, reflections directly reflected back "reality," in Mad Detective the surface reflects what is hidden. Here the surfaces drastically changes what is seen. So is the mirror distorting like a carnival crazy mirror or is the mirror showing what is "real", the inner self??

P.S. If you are not feeling the triple feature another possible pairing for this film would be the Hal Hartley 2001 film No Such Thing (ok actually spoilers this time). In Hartley's film (also known as Monster), the monster is only destroyed by convincing him that he does not exist. This is done through a series of small mirrors and lenses that reflect light and his image (or lack of?) back towards him. Here the surface's reflection actually destroys a character.

* Double Feature of films with Amazing last shots: Mad Detective and Tom Tykwer's Heaven (2002)

"Kung Fu Panda" & "Flight of the Red Balloon"

2008-06-12T19:41:00.000-07:00

I have wanted to write about Hou Hsiao Hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon for some time. I knew the idea that I wanted to use to connect the film to its pair (see below) but I could not think of a film that shared this idea (if you have better suggestions I would be glad to hear them!). In Flight of the Red Balloon, Hou brings his ever steady gaze to a small family in Paris made up of Puppet theater artist Juliet Binoche, her son and the Chinese nanny who takes care of him. The film is worth seeing if only for Binoche, whose performance as a loving and creative single mother verging on a mental breakdown is real and nuanced.

The criticism of Hou's work has often been that his films don't go anywhere and are boring. That too often, his camera merely documents. His cinema is the cinema of flies on walls and therefore not worth watching. While it is true that conventional plots and three act structure do not appear in Hou's Work, I thoroughly reject this criticism.

Yes, Hou does not often pass judgement on his characters or inject his own opinions into their lives. Yet it is clear in Flight of the Red Balloon, that Hou is aware of the fact that the director and camera is a lens through which we see the world that is presented and that watching a film of a family is not the same as being a literal fly on the wall. Shot after shot involve action that is seen reflected in mirrors, or through glass. Whether that be a mirror, a car window or the window of a restaurant. The action occurs through the filtering of different surfaces, leaving the audience with the question of how the filtering has affected what we see. How does the surface change our perception?

So while the film is still quiet like his earlier works (check out Millennium Mambo, my personal fave), it is almost as if he is addressing this constant criticism of his work and presenting many different lenses. However, these lenses do not necessarily create different opinions. Ultimately it is as if Hou is saying, no matter how much the camera moves and how much is reflected and filtered, the action does not change and it is the audience who should interpret what occurs.

So how in the world does Hou Hsiao Hsien, darling of the independent international cinema world connect to Jack Black, Angelina Jolie and the 60 Million $$ opening weekend film that is Kung Fu Panda? In many ways, it doesn't at all. I can't even say that Kung Fu Panda is a particularly good film. Certain scenes, especially one in which Po the Panda, voiced by Jack Black, and Master Sifu, voiced by Dustin Hoffman, fight over one last dumpling, are whimsical and well drawn, but for the most part the film is just a nice way to spend a hot summer afternoon. Seeing films like Kung Fu Panda make you realize just how amazing Pixar is (I am really looking forward to WALL-e later this month).

I had pretty much shelved writing about Flight of the Red Balloon by the time I went in to see Kung Fu Panda so imagine my surprise to find a meditation (well sort of, in a kids movie big lesson kind of way) on the idea of surface and perception!! (SPOILERS AHEAD!!) In one crucial scene Po opens the infamous dragon scroll only to find it blank(!!!). The magical secrets of kung fu are in reality only a piece of shiny paper. This is of course, a disappointment, but not unpredictably, Po realizes by seeing his reflection in the shiny paper that he already has all the skills he needs to succeed. The message here is simple and heartwarming: you are what you are and that is all you need to be.

Here, the crucial surface produces a simple reflection. The reflection does not lie or distort. And yet, this simple reflection is the key to the message of the film. The exact and undistorted reflection of the reality Po already knows is what changes everything. So the surface even though it changes nothing, changes everything (so in Flight of the Red Balloon, is there in fact a change in our perception after viewing he undistorted reflection?).

I sincerely doubt that the directors of Kung Fu Panda (Mark Osborne and John Stevenson) were thinking about the effects of cinematic surfaces when creating Kung Fu Panda, but the wonderful thing about film is the ability of two completely different films to unconsciously inform the other. So when you walk out of Kung Fu Panda, don' be too disappointed, I'm sure you were just watching it to compare it to Fight of the Red Balloon later. :P

"The Forbidden Kingdom" & "Kill Bill Vol.1"

2008-05-28T16:25:00.000-07:00

Yes, the pairing of Martial Arts powerhouses Jet Li and Jackie Chan is extremely gimmicky. And yet, as a kung fu movie fan, I have to admit that seeing the pair fight each other on screen was exhilarating and fulfilled a dream I did not realize I had. The Forbidden Kingdom features Chan as a drunken immortal, an homage to his earlier Drunken Master films, and Li as a fighting monk, a nod to his roots in the famous Once Upon a Time in China series (he even gets to exercise his substantial and underused comedic acting chops as he doubles as the character of the Monkey King). After enduring so many mediocre Li and Chan films in the past few years (Shanghai Knights, Cradle to the Grave... to name two) it is a relief to see director Rob Minkoff letting his two stars do what they do best. In essence, The Forbidden Kingdom sees the return of two great masters of the kung fu genre to their roots. The following video from the Spill.com (my new favorite film site) really sums it up:

However, as happy as I was to see this return to form, the film will probably bore anyone who does not still live with their parents. If Praying Mantice style vs. Tiger style does not intrigue you/ make you smile gleefully, go see Iron Man (which by the way is 15 dollars well spent [$10 for the movie $5 for the slushy]); for The Forbidden Kingdom is truly a film made for fans. Not only are the characters nods to themselves and the roles that made them, but the entire story is about a fan who saves the day for his heroes.

The film centers around Micheal Angarano, who plays a nerdy Boston Kung Fu fan who gets improbably transported into the world that he worships. The boy becomes man/kung fu master plot is predictable, but nevertheless warms your heart; for a fan is necessarily the little guy, the worshipper or groupie. And to see the little guy become what he has always dreamt of being is a plot that never gets old.

It is this idea of the fan as hero which led me to pair the film with Kill Bill Vol. 1. Quentin Tarantino is (despite what you may think of him), the film fan (cult film fan would perhaps be a better description) made good. And no film of his better shows off his fan-ness than Kill Bill Volume 1. In the first 30 seconds of the film alone you are treated to a Klingon Proverb and an homage to the Godard Film Band of Outsiders (blech!). Tarantino is the film junkie actually allowed behind the camera (for better or worse in some cases but I'll save that discussion for another time.) The casting of Gordon Lui (of 36 chambers fame) in the film is no coincidence. Wouldn't we all, if given the opportunity to work with our idols, take the chance? Tarantino is a man, similar to Angarano's character in The Forbidden Kingdom, who is allowed to play in the land he has worshiped. In this case the world of film. Viewed through this lens, Kill Bill Vol 1. does not dissapoint, there is black and white, split screen, anime, saturated color (subtitles even!!). There are few style stones left unturned.

That is not to say the film is a stylistic mess. Tarantino successfully pays homage without losing the film's individual identity, embodied by revenge minded Uma Thurman. Somehow all the quirky parts taken from other films blend together to become more than the sum of their parts. They become Tarantino style. Fan boy enters hero's world and becomes his own man. Lets hear it for the little guy!

Quick Note from the New York Polish Film Festival

2008-05-15T11:32:00.000-07:00

Work in the "real" world is keeping me away from the theaters this week so look out for a return to double-featuring next week. Just to tie you over (you millions of readers.. hi Dad...hi Mom...) here is a quick dispatch from last week's Polish Film Fest:

Aria Diva (Dir Agnieszka Smoczyska) 2007: Smoczyska is a student at the Andrzej Wajda school of filmaking and her short film is proof that she has learned well. Shorts are incredibly hard to do and often feel forced and studenty (or like sped up melodramatic low budget features), but Aria Diva starring the truly divaesque Katarzyna Figura as a famous Opera singer who has a fling with her housewife neighbor, does not need any excuses. I look forward to seeing Smoczyska's first feature.

Summer Love (dir Piotr Uklański) 2007: If you ever see this film and understand it, shoot me an email. The first "Polish Western" features Polish actors speaking in english (say "Lets cut him off at the pass" in a Polish accent.) Add to that a sex scene in which the couple spell out the word "sex" with their bodies on the floor Busby Berkeley Style and a scene where a man lights a pile of gunpowder on his head and you have Summer Love. I have the sneaking suspicion that the film is brilliant, but I really couldn't say why (I can't even explain the plot to you). But any film that features Val Kilmer as a corpse who gets tomatoes squished into his eyes must be brilliant.

Dispatches from the Tribeca Film Festival - "Theater of War" & "Children of Men"

2008-05-05T18:33:00.000-07:00

In times of war, how much responsibility does a director have to incorporate the world around him into the world that he creates in his art? This is one of the central questions that emerges from John Walter's documentary "Theater of War." The doc itself follows a production of Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage" that was put on by the Public theater starring Meryl Streep. Interspersed between shots of rehearsal are interviews with Streep, playwright Tony Kushner (who adapted the play for the production) and Brecht's daughter, as well as segments on the life of Brecht himself (the film is a good study in why directors [esp documentary filmmakers] should not edit their own work as some of the interspersions detract from the film as a whole [I must keep it in!!! Its my favorite!!!]. That being said, Public Theater Artistic director Oskar Eutis riding his bicycle cigar in hand is a moment that should be interspersed into all films.)

The play was put on in 2006 and the film is just coming out this year, so both had to come to terms with creating art on war in a time of war. Walter's does not shirk this responsibility, showing the anti-war protests that happened during the plays rehearsal as well as drawing parallels between the Iraq War climate and the WWII climate that produced the original "Mother Courage." These parallels are not heavy handed (Speaking of which, Michael Moore was at the screening). Walter's antiwar slant comes out of Brecht's work (Mother Courage loses everything to the war) and the Public theater's production rather than out of his own ideology. It is refreshing to see a documentary that does not sidestep the fact that we are currently at war but also does not barge into the topic and preach to the audience. Nicole Kidman said famously after September 11th that art is important but Walters goes deeper and explores how art is necessarily changed by war (Streep, in one segment, discusses how being in the play is her way of dealing with her frustration about the war).

Alphonso Cuarón "Children of Men" (2006) is another film that is closely tied to the current climate (note that it was released the year "Mother Courage" was performed). Cuarón wrote this film based on the novel of the same name by P.D. James and I think it is safe to assume that his interpretation of James' dystopia was affected by the way he sees the current state of the world (see video later in post).

That is not to say that the film, divorced from its historical context could not stand on its own, but in our current climate, graphic images of bombs going off in coffee shops, overcrowded refuge camps and rampant distrust and imprisonment of immigrants hit particularly close to home. In fact, as great a film as I think "Children of Men" is, I do not think I can ever see it again. I have never been as shook up by a movie. It is not a film for the faint of heart. Of course, it takes place in a fictional time, in a world where children are no longer born. But once you accept that one difference: no children, the world of the film seems a little to real. There are moments when blood spatters the camera lens, our eye into the world. It is as if Cuarón is saying "YOU ARE HERE." If ever a movie could give you PTSD, this is the one. Though I do wonder about how much my own reaction is based on the times. Would a 1950's viewer or a viewer 50 years from now be as affected? If a director is responsible for understanding and the war around them and its affect on their art, how much are we, the viewer, responsible for being conscious of how the war affects our viewing?

I normally just add video to give you a taste of the film, but the video above, which focuses on the cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki discusses how he strove to make the war seem "real" using lighting, style and editing.

Other Films in Brief:

"Fighter" (Natasha Arthy) 2007 : The Turkish "Bend it like Beckham". Predictable but fun. Very well filmed fight scenes, a treat for Kung Fu Fans. Congrats to Omar, a stuntman from the film who sat behind me at the screening.

"Everywhere at Once" (Holly Fisher & Peter Lindbergh) 2008 : If you like French impressionist film, see this movie. If you have a history of falling asleep in movies, skip it. That being said, Lindbergh's photographs are beautiful and everything remotely involving Milla Jovovich is awesome. Seriously, who need Maya Deren or experimental film when you have this:

Dispatches from the Tribeca Film Festival: "Lost. Indulgence" & "Il Deserto Rosso"

2008-05-01T13:27:00.000-07:00

Zhang Yibai's "Lost. Indulgence" and Michelangelo Antonioni's "Il Deserto Rosso" (the Red desert) is not an obvious pairing. I was very tempted to pair "Lost. Indulgence" with the recent Jia Zhang Ke film "Still Life" (which was one of my top five movies of last year). Both "Still Life" and "Lost Indulgence" are films made in China seemingly with the blessing of the Chinese Government. But unlike the slew of recent Chinese government sponsored films that star the entire Peoples Liberation Army in period garb fighting in slow motion to unify and glorify China, these films are quiet and often devastating looks at the lives of ordinary Chinese people.

I find it surprising that both these films seem to have made it easily through the notorious Chinese censors. Through these two films we see a China that allows women to be placed into servitude to pay off debts, veterinarian clinics in which workers pay for each death of an animal and the staggering bulldozing pace of change in China.

"Lost. Indulgence" takes place in an factory town, and follows the lives of a family after the father, a taxi driver, drives his cab into the Yangtse river. The mystery surrounding his death and the role that a prostitute, who was riding in the car and who is taken in by the family, had in his death, drive the drama of the entire film. Like in "Still Life" and indeed in real life, do not expect any of the mystery to clear or for characters to rise above their situations. If there is any lesson to be gleaned from these two excellent Chinese films it is that life goes on. Still life is right.

So why then choose another film entirely to pair with "Lost. Indulgence?" Why "Il Deserto Rosso?" Antonioni's "Il Deserto Rosso" is a film about the industrial landscape and its effect on those who reside in it. Antonioni waited to make his first color film and "Il Dessert Rosso is the fruit of that patience. Every color is meticulously chosen: Sulphur yellows pour out of factories, banisters are bright blue. In Antonioni's film the landscape is very much a character, if anything it is the villain, poisoning the landscape and the mind of Monica Vitti (the film would make a great pairing with Todd Haynes' "Safe" in which the environment is the omnipresent villain).

In "Lost. Indulgence" the industrial complex is less of character and more of a stifling backdrop. It is this world that all the characters live in and yet seek to leave. The industrial city allows them to survive (the mother works in the factory and met the father there) but the son seeks a simpler, more idyllic, life. So while the landscape is not overtly a villain it is something to escape from nonetheless. Both films seek to come to terms with changing landscapes. Both films examine the effect of the industrialization of a landscape on ordinary people and their attempts to fit themselves into these quickly changing worlds. The son in "Lost. Indulgence" creates a miniature plaster reproduction of the entire city. He stares at it, trying to take in the entirety of his world and landscape. This vignette mirrors the audience's experience of watching the film: as much as these two films are studies of characters, they are also studies of worlds.

Other films in brief:

Idiots and Angels: George Plympton. I am not really sure that Plympton's work is able to carry a feature length format. Then again it was late, I was tired. I much preferred his short "Guard Dog."

Guest of Cindy Sherman: Paul H-O & Tom Donahue. This is a film made by and about the ex boyfriend of artist Cindy Sherman who found himself completely overshadowed by her and decided to make a film about it. The sad thing was, after the film was over, I wanted to go out and see more Cindy Sherman, and still could not come up with any reason why I should care about her ex-boyfriend.

Dispatches from the Tribeca Film Festival – " Toby Dammit" & "The Beyond"

2008-04-30T07:23:00.000-07:00

My first reaction while watching Frederico Fellini's "Toby Dammit" was "oh no I am going to hate this movie." The film (that appeared to share the same makeup team as "Beetlejuice" [double feature?]) is full of seemingly nonsensical images: people with paper mask faces; packs of sunglass wearing nuns; a cardboard chef on the side of the road holding a basket. I felt the need to treat these images as symbols and decode them (what does it all mean ?!?!) and I was all ready to slot the film into the category of: needs to be seen more than once to be understood at all, (not that the "ring"esque little girl as devil would have encouraged future viewings on my part, I am a total wimp when it comes to horror).

As a rule, I am not a fan of films that force the audience to work hard and uncode some "deep hidden meaning (DHM). Good films do gain from repeated viewings but a good film should not need to be repeated. So I was worried that despite how much I love Terrance Stamp, this film was going to disappoint. And yet as the film continued I realized that my initial reaction of frustration and confusion was in fact all part of the grand master Fellini plan.

I once had a dream that my face was being smothered by a pillow and I could not move my head to avoid being suffocated. I tried and tried to turn my head but no matter what, lack of air and panic ensued. This is what the world of Fellini's "Toby Dammit" is like. For much of the film, Dammit is trapped driving around a strange town, unable to find his way back to Rome (turns out not all roads lead there). No matter what he does, he cannot escape.

The frustration that Toby feels is not unlike my initial frustration at trying to decode the film's images. All through the first half of the film I was trying to decipher and keep note of various images and characters in case they were to return later. But that is just what Fellini wants you to do, to try to make sense of that which is nonsense. Like Toby, we are trying to find roads where there are none. The nuns, the chef, these are all red herrings. Fellini has created an unsolvable maze for the viewer that mirrors the maze that Toby tries to navigate. So in a way, we feel what Toby feels.

(note: Spoilers Ahead) In "The Beyond," Lucio Fulci does not try to bait us with red herrings to get us to feel boxed in, and yet the world he creates is eerily similar in feel to the world that Toby is trapped in. Fulci, through the narrative, simply shows us the horrors of the place ( a hotel that is actually a gate to the underworld oh no!). He is telling a story in a more traditional way in comparison to Fellini. The hell that he shows us is a world in which no matter where you turn, you are faced with the same view. The protagonists find themselves surrounded on all sides by the same painting never to see or find an escape ever again. This place is a hell that battles the world of "Toby Dammit" for the title of worst and most inescapable prison on earth. Even though Fulci simply tells us the story and does not provide us with the "feel" of the place, can we say that this place is any less scary? These are two similar situations, presented very differently in terms of filmic style by two different directors, that end up, perhaps, not so far from each other in the end (both have me hiding under bed covers).

Other Tribeca screenings In brief:

"Night Tide"/ "Picnic" (Curtis Harrington) - Surprise visit from Dennis Hopper! Pity that they got the reels in the wrong order (!!!). I was distracted.

"Three Kingdoms" - (Daniel Lee) All over the place. Should have picked one kingdom.

"The Fall" & "Goodbye Lenin"

2008-04-24T07:35:00.000-07:00

I admit it freely: I did not like Pan's Labyrinth. I was disappointed by the effects which I found sparse, and by the black and white simplicity of the film's story (fascists are bad bad bad!!!). I bring this up only because when Tarsem Singh's "The Fall" is released on May 9th, comparisons between the two films will inevitably be drawn. Both star a young female fatherless protagonist who escapes into a fantasy world. Unlike Pan's Labyrinth, however, the fantasy world of "The Fall" is lush and vibrant. If there is anything to be said about Singh, it is that he has a wonderful eye. Even in the "real" world of the film, simple objects such as oranges and blocks of ice are lingered upon and presented as beautiful objects. (The film would work well in a pairing with any of the recent visually opulent Zhang Yimo films.) So no....no Pan/ Fall double feature (sorry Guillermo).

What is so refreshing about "The Fall," visuals aside, is that characters are not clear cut (with the exception of the aptly named Governor Odious). And that through the characters, larger issues about the the nature of fantasy are raised. Roy, who tells the story to the girl, Alexandria, is a jilted lover who befriends her and tells her a fantastic story full of bandits, rare butterflies and mysterious shamans. In her eyes (a perspective we share for much of the film) he is the hero, "the black bandit" and a substitute father figure. Yet at the same time as he spins these tales his thoughts are only on his own suicide and he takes advantage of Alexandria's innocence; conning her into bringing him morphine. He uses the fantasy to get what he wants in the "real" world. While for her the fantasy is healing the wounds her father's death has left, for Roy, the fantasy is merely a means to an end (the end to be precise). The same story serves two very different purposes.

(note: spoilers ahead) In one scene, when Alexandria has finally realized that Roy means to kill himself and he has realized the pain he has caused her by using her, Roy begins to kill off the characters in the story. All of them die valiantly; sacrificing themselves so that Alexandria can continue. They all commit suicide in ways deemed acceptable and heroic. One blows himself up along with hundreds of enemy soldiers, one shields Alexandria from arrows with his own body. It is as if Roy is justifying the idea of suicide through the fantasy. But who is Roy justifying the idea to? Is this a message that Alexandria needs to hear or that he needs to? Thus we are faced with the question of who the fantasy benefits: the storyteller or the listener? Who is the fantasy for?

Another film that confronts these same issues is "Goodbye Lenin". In the film, the character of Alex, his mother having been in a coma though the collapse of the Berlin wall, constructs in her bedroom a mini socialist museum. He tries to ensure that she never has to go though the potentially deadly shock of realizing that the wall has fallen. The fantasy he creates is ironically the mundane. His fantasy protects her from the fantastic: the massive historical and cultural changes around them (pickles from Holland!). But is it simply his fear of shocking her that drives his creation of the fantasy? Or is he driven by guilt as he was the one who had caused her initial heart attack? Just as with "The Fall," the question remains as to who the fantasy is for? Who needs the fantasy? The creator? The listener? Neither of these films answer these questions. Which is just fine. I appreciate that I am left wondering…and imagining.

"We are Wizards" & "Intimate Lighting"

2008-04-21T19:04:00.000-07:00

I recently attended a screening of Josh Koury's doc "We are Wizards" at Anthology , thanks to "Wizard's" composer Stan Oh, a familiar face to the patrons of Posteritati (even New Yorkers with the most enviable day jobs have secret "real" jobs and talents). The film does for Harry Potter Fans what the 1997 Doc "Trekkies" did for, well… trekkies. Instead of Star Trek themed dentists, there are 7 year old Wizard Rockers, bloggers turned Potter historians and, of course, Harry and the Potters. On a side note, fellow Anarchist Cinema fans will be pleasantly surprised to see appearances by MIT Media Studies expert Henry Jenkins (author of "What Made Pistachio Nuts").

In finding the perfect double feature pairing for "Wizards," a Trekkie Potter fan mania documentary double feature would be a good, though obvious choice. Riffing on the idea of fandom and obsession another pairing could be Wizards / Les Enfants du Paradis or a Wizards / Diva (recently restored and screened at Film Forum). But "Wizards" although a film about fans is less about the mania and the far out and more about the "normal". Koury does not portray his characters as two dimensional oddballs, he shows them as what they are: regular (often lovable) people who just happen to love Harry Potter.

This nuanced 3D view of the subject is no small feat. In documentaries especially it is easy to fall into the trap of portraying the subject as some kind of exotic other: "Look at him, he's so weird!?!? Isn't this bizarre?!??!." These kinds of films have always made me uncomfortable. It is akin to seeing someone picked on in middle school and not having the power/ courage to do anything about it. Does one laugh? Should one laugh? (check out a film called "The Cruise," a doc about a guide on a gray line tour bus. The film's subject clearly has a few screws loose and the film does a good job of walking the fine line of judging and understanding him. Funny enough, Bennett Miller, the director of the film, went on the write and direct "Capote." Now there is a double feature!)

A good example of films that have made me uncomfortable for all the reasons above is Milos Forman's early film Cerný Petr (Black Peter). Peter, a fictitious character, fails miserably to function in regular daily life. Forman does not try to understand Peter, he is presented as only awkwardness. We see only the sides of him that make us laugh at him. On the flipside, Forman's Czech contemporary, Ivan Passer, in his film "Intimate Lighting" shows us the daily goings on of one family of musicians with a unique warmth. We follow the family, much as a documentary does, from family dinners, to old fashioned exercise routines, to drunken romps and back to family dinners. There are moments where family members behave inappropriately or do things that would, if seen out of context, appear ridiculous and silly, but these are merely moments in a much larger picture. In the last scene (don't worry this won't spoil the film), the family attempts to drink a toast but the drink they are drinking has congealed. They stand there, their heads tilted back, waiting for the pudding like substance to make its way down into their mouths. The audience laughs, but we have grown to love the characters throughout the film and we are not judging. We are merely enjoying another moment with them. The film is not named "Intimate Lighting" by accident, and by the end I felt draped in the slow sunny glow that fills the film. So no, there are no fans, or wizards in "Intimate Lighting," but the two films share a warmth and an understanding that characters are people too.