darkthirty

Well, everyone seems to be treating this Precious movie a little too preciously, because it wasn't really that good, all round. (Reading some of these reviews, it's almost as if the writers aren't even aware they are writing about a film at all, but rather as if they thought they were writing about an actual social phenomenon.) The acting is fine, don't get me wrong, Mariah Carey included, but there are dozens of little and medium things that just keep happening in the movie to jar the viewer pointlessly, and a couple major question marks. Camera twitches, ostensibly to make it feel documentary at times, for example, were deeply distracting, the script was stangely lop-sided and occasionally quite trite, and while the movie revelled in some very well-behaved, strangely unaffecting, even mannered scenes at an all girl alternative school (Each One Teach One), the scenes at home sometimes seems slapped together, a kind of condensed version, as it were, including a father whose entire screen time is 2 abuse scenes lasting about 8 seconds total (an almost mordantly psychiatric elision, given the plot) - in a sense, the film unfolds like a magazine article written by some hopelessly idealistic and somewhat ignorant upstart journalist more than a movie. I felt afterwards as if I had just watched a diatribe in the guise of cinema. There were parts I would have liked more of - the younger girl who lived in the same apartment building, the colour palette at the beginning that was forgotten by, oh, the third scene, but the movie apparently had far too many noisesome things to do and "energetic" things to say to care about all that fancy cinema-is-art stuff. It's as if someone took a "committee against domestic abuse report" and wrote a fast, dark fairy tale around it. 4. Naturally, Hollywood loves it, just as they did not love Do the Right Thing. Now I think on it, the movie Precious is actually kind of tepid too, along with consorting long and listlessly in its vapidity, in it's strange way, for all the swearing and such. It doesnt' help that Sidebe is a decade too old for the part - and by that, I mean as much too old as Millie Perkins was for that really awful 1959 version of The Diary of Anne Frank - distractingly too old, so that what sounds authentic coming from a 14 or 15 year old sounds like mummery coming from a 21 year old.

Tepid movies for tepid people, like Dances with Smurfs Avatar, Dances with Wolves, Titanic, or even Gone with the Wind. The Road is not tepid at all, it is scorched and scorching - a kind of nightmare, I guess, with a fire inside. Had it better be called a horror film, or the book a horror story? Well, reading some of the reviews, this would seem a difficulty to some. It wasn't to me. I whole-heartedly applaud this strange, twisted movie/phantasm disguised as a feature film. 8.5.

Nothing in the trailers, snippets, advertising, or early reviews makes me think this Avatar film (early reviews are rather wisely embargoed, so the RT link shows nothing yet) is going to be any less unpleasant an experience than the lugubrious and ludicrous Titanic film - a movie that, to this day, actually makes me feel nauseous after brief seconds of viewing. I wished Cameron had retired from feature directing after Titanic, but here he comes again, all Boney M and Abba gone monumental. This time, however, the story is all his. As people all over are saying, Dances with Smurfs, or Ferngully in Space.

Here are two beautifully, artfully shot films with almost moronic plots that completely ruin one of them, and almost completely ruin the other. My search for quality horror films is really not getting anywhere - perhaps because the genre, finally utilizing much more artistic cinematography and set design, has abandoned the idea of script?

Timecrimes from 2007 is the easiest to watch - the forward momentum is measured but sustained, and the mere facts of the case fascinating. But when dressing someone up so they look like someone you caused the death of in another time and that being sufficient to "solve" the mistake, when we've clearly seen the original victim dead as stone, that's unforgivably idiotic. Well done as the transformation is through successive time trials of the protagonist into antagonist, at the heart of the flick there is a nagging logical morass that all time travel suppositions must contend with and solve, and which this film gleefully decides to ignore. Timecrimes can only muster a tepid 5.5. It's very easy to watch, but, like 95% of horror films, it's unforgivably stupider the closer to the end it gets. Apparently, it's being remade in English, surprise surprise.

Left Bank from 2008 (or 2009?) is, the dvd cover cover claims, "as important as Let the Right One In." Well, it isn't even close to being as important as Let the Right One In (still around 205 on the imdb top 250 list). It is even more beautifully shot than Timecrimes, and the story has more substance, until, of course, the last 10 minutes, when it all goes to hell. In fact, this film is one of the prettiest films of the last few years, almost a lovely even as Half-Blood Prince. But in the end it's all ritual sacrifice and samhain all over again. It's a very strong 6.5 though, because when it is beautiful, it is just the loveliest thing to watch. I wonder - did this have to be a classical horror film at all? Couldn't they have made the protagonist a bystander to something even darker, creepier and more sinister, instead of tossing her unceremoniously (I mean, really, a stangely unceremonious ritualistic witchcraft type setting) into a tar pit? This could have been a great flick, but it isn't. It's just a pretty bunch of cinema stuck inside a bland genre wrapper, tacked together with arrows.

For the record, Let the Right One In just gets better as it goes along, right up to the end. And the last 10 minutes are not something tacked on - they are ravishing.

Because I can, and because it is still raining here, I am right now seated in the theatre and am glad to see I'm not the only straight male here on a single ticket.
As for the flick, I'll let you know.

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And, well, it's not as bad as some critics would have it, but not much really happens, to be honest. Still, the parts that are meant to be pretty are, so that's something. 5 out ot 10 only for this one. Kristen is fine, again, and even Pattinson seems to be ever so slightly more engaged in his limited role this time around. What I liked almost always made up for what I didn't. Also, Dakota Fanning is really great in a bit part, her status doesn't interfer at all, or rather, her status within the story sort of matches her status as an actress, and the Volturi in general were pretty cool. And that's about it.

On a side note, the audience was actually quite interesting. Three blind women with assistance dogs, a couple families, lots of aboriginal folk too, and in general a more diverse crowd than I expected, and certainly a more diverse crowd than most of the higher rated movies I've seen this year. For such a mopey and pouty movie, this was strange to me.

Even stranger - the size of the muffins at Emily's place.

According to this judge, VANOC isn't performing a government function, and therefor has the right to infringe on civil liberties. Here's the VANOC page and here's the official list of government partners.

Such a bright, honest, careful legacy they are leaving us!

I was never sure if the the watery Ada in Bleak House was all Dickens, direction, or the performance of Carey Mulligan. Having finally seen An Education, I'm pretty sure it wasn't the latter, as Carey deserves the accolades she's gettiing for the clarity of her portrayal of high school girl Jenny's extra-mural adventures. In fact, the acting is all around just lovely in this easy to watch, strangely compelling film, and there's no ridiculous moralizing voice anywhere to be found. The film has other faults, mind, including a startlingly abrupt and needless voice over at the end, but these are minor. 8.

Oh, Carey was fine in Northanger Abbey too.

I don't say they are the best, but they are the ones I like most, so far

1. Let the Right One In (2008)
2. Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)
3. Whale Rider (2002)
4. Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
5. Cache (2005)
6. No Country for Old Men (2007)
7. Donnie Darko (2001)
8. Children of Men (2006)
9. Notre Musique/The Gleaners and I (2004/2000)
10. The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001 - 2003)

Close behind, The Lives of Others, The White Ribbon, Bleak House tv series, and Firefly/Serenity

ETA - I forgot one film which I will put alongside Notre Musique - Agnes Varda's Les glaneurs et la glaneus (The Gleaners and I) from 2000. I had thought it was released a year earlier than it actually was.

Mary Poppins horror trailer, The Exorcist comedy trailer, et al.

Well, I love rugby and loathe Eastwood as a director, feel middling about Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman, but this trailer certainly has nothing particularly squickable about it - just nothing very promising either. I watched almost every game in the 1995 Rugby World Cup - it really was an exciting tournament. The All Blacks were long an integrated team (the SA government, when need be, treating the Maori players as "honorary whites"), but the Springboks not so, even before apartheid. In fact, the New Zealand story is just as interesting - they got in deep trouble for touring SA, and much controversy arose at home and abroad because of these gestures - about which I am also of two minds. Invictus can't address this all, of course, and even with only a single non-white player on the field, there is no denying that Mandela was able to turn the game of rugby as played by the Springboks at that point in time into a kind of powerfully symbolic one. Perhaps just a convenient moment seized by an intelligent man? What happened with the team afterwards wasn't pretty, but they have since recovered and, of course, hold the title. That the 1995 final was against the All Blacks seemed to me appropriate both in terms of the level of play and within the symbolic system that had been generated. Neither the Springboks nor the All Blacks should really have to carry the burdens of more powerful people in those so-called corridors of power on their shoulders - they can and do carry the weight that high profile national teams always do on the international stage. The film appears to make it all just a bit prettier than it in fact was - the casting reflects this certainly. Are the allegations by the All Blacks of intentional food poisoning the day before the game addressed? And yet, I somehow really want to see this film. Weird, huh?

So, what do you guys think?

Judging by the website, which will load in English in the flash version, the makers of this two part film wanted to be as true to Noon Universe and the Strugatsky's vision as they could. A relatively expensive production, but wearing that pretty, inane HBO gloss, The Inhabited Island is a movie that follows its source, the rather central Noon Universe novel Prisoners of Power by Arkady and Boris Stugatsky, quite closely and literally, and which has, well, very little vision, or charm to it. The book is really an adventure story balanced between revolution and 5 year plans - or rather, the book makes clear that fiery youth and careful age both have their place in the progress of society. It isn't among the Strugatsky's best work,. but it is not a bad book, just, well, as has in fact happened, it is quite possible for the book to be taken very programmatically - if the poetry of it is lacking. You don't have to be Sokurov or Tarkovsky poetic, or even Lopushanky poetic to do the a decent Strugatsky film, but you have to have at least some poetry, and Fyodor Bondarchuk just doesn't have any at all. (I'm guessing this is a pretty big shortcoming in a Russian cultural worker.) There is some wonderful set design and CGI in this film - the windmills! - and most of the actors are great, one is even quite beautiful, but in all honesty, the Noon Universe has gotten a very iffy, somewhat misdirected start in cinema with these two watchable, forgettable films. I give parts 1 and 2 of The Inhabited Island 6. They haven't gotten a North American release, so you'll have to get these at the specialty rental stores, online, or at your local Russian video store, if you're lucky enough to have one like I do, not 5 blocks away from where I live.

The Book of Job (sort of) as performed in the late 60s, with some very fine acting (Michael Stuhlbarg, Larry Kind and whoever Jessica McManus is), containing a lot of humour, and some scenes that just lift off into true greatness, A Serious Man is something special - it would be a chore not to like this film, provided you get it, of course - not everyone (including film critics who can't even make the tiny little connection to "an act of God", perhaps piqued at the rather obvious theme of the film, and even while mentioning Job) gets The Book of Job and Jefferson Airplane. (How can this be? It's a mystery. Or perhaps it's the trendy, vacuous ridicule that all those Yoga-cultist enlightened ones deal out to anything that smacks of the Judeo-Christian - and I say this as an atheist.) Darby Slick's song Somebody to Love, made immortal by his pretty sister-in-law Grace and the Airplane, frames the whole movie. There is a deep melancholy beneath the humour, which breaks out at one point that is depicted in the movie poster - Larry Gopnick adjusting the antenna on the roof as he looks over the whole neighbourhood, trying to get clear reception on whatever dismal channel his son wants to watch. The final moments of the film will stay with you a long time. The Vietnam War and the huge protests against it, and all that happened then and thereafter, aren't referenced - the film is timeless in a sense - but they loom just as the First World War looms in The White Ribbon or Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. 9.

ETA - I've been thinking about this movie a lot, and I think it's essential viewing, to be honest. I also want Richard Kind's name forward for supporting actor consideration, because he is given very hard material to turn, and he turns it very well.

Zombieland struck me as combination of Troma and Disney sensibilites, which is fine. I laughed. 6.

The White Ribbon, or, the baron, the steward, the doctor, the pastor, and the schoolteacher, with each playing a role in Haneke's Freudian/Lacanian proceedings that is indespensible, is the best film I've seen from 2009. It has the look, the milieu and the narrative structure of a Dreyer film, particularly Ordet, but the lens is a pretty significantly a Foucauldian one - the observing hierarchy is clearly etched, control is practised through means that force to subject to identify their desires, as constitutients of themselves but separable, as evil, plus, there is examination, or in this case, religious confirmation. What this disciplinary mode does in any case, of course, is ensure that what is hidden stays hidden - that is, in Lacanian terms, is allowed, even encouraged to continue secretly. What we see in this film are brutal transgressions perpetrated by the older generation as the repressed returns, but  what is not filmed is even scarier, in a way - the return of the repressed as displayed convincingly by Haneke in the strange and nasty goings on, assaults, arson perhaps, even murder, that constitute the mystery at the narrative heart of the film. But what we see, again, becomes more frightening as the mystery comes clear - it's not the mystery of the evil deeds unwitnessed that is important, it's that the continued perpetuation of violence, revenge, brutality is demonstrated to be an inevitable fact of life given the circumstances. Haneke may have "trolled" our imagination before, particularly in Funny Games, and in a more refined and certainly more interesting way in Cache, but we become implicated even deeper in the arc of this movie. It's a film that won't be forgotten. 10. At the top of the 2009 list.

A Prophet, the French crime/prison drama/thriller by Jacques Audiard, is wonderfully shot and full of great turns and twists, the acting is above par, and any number of individual scenes are pure genius. It's 2 1/2 hours, though, about one episode, or 15 minutes, too long - it almost becomes episodic rather than epic, due to this. A young, naive, friendless French/Arab man with no family ends up in prison and becomes the lackey of a Corsican organized crime boss who is doing a life sentence. The fellow not only survives, but finds a way to write his own rather bloody history. This is not, however, one of those super-serious, grim Scorsese/Eastwood/FFCoppola/Penn grinds - it's got rather more charm than that, and isn't under the illusion that it is "the real god-damned true serious big deal" that permeates, and in a way trivializes (Mystic River being the best example) the output of those four Hollywood moralist reductionists. Tahar Rahim (who was very nice in the talk afterwards) is convincing in the lead role, and Niels Arestrup is more dangerous than we at first believe. I liked this movie much more than The Godfather 1 or 2. Plus, the violence is quite shocking. Some dream sequences help the film remain human and resonant. 8.

Politist, adj., directed by Romanian Corneliu Porumboiu, had me laughing quite a bit, even if it is rather a sad film. Unlike The Conversation (my favourite FFCoppola film) or The Lives of Others, this surveillance-themed film has little technology, and nothing is figured out. What we do watch, however, is someone watching, and also directly addressing the distinction between what is right and what is lawful, in a situation where it is all too easy to not think about it at all. There are three or four tremendously funny bits, and the absurd conditions under which our protagonist must work, and which reflect a wide array of socio-polical absurdities, do not once abate. 8.5. Who thought a dictionary could be used to such hilarious, devastating effect?

Now, I've rated them nearly the same, but truth is, I won't see A Prophet again, and will pick up Police, Adj. when it comes out on disc.

This is the 1961 book that consolidated the whole Strugatsky Noon Universe, which was incipient in the works they'd  started publishing just 3 years before in the Soviet Union  - a collection of 20 short stories loosely connected by various characters - 2 of 4 people who, as a result of an experimental faster than light drive, come back to Earth 100 after their time (the other 2 die) and slowly find places in the new world, a group of 4 school kids who we meet again at various times later on, and a fellow named Gorbovsky, a main player in the later Far Rainbow, who is probably the most heroic, and most often supine, character in the books. A kind of melancholy pervades the stories, even if Earth in Noon is a semi-utopia - there are no massive social problems or economic inequities, and so forth. What the brothers are able to do, though, in such a world, is to tackle what are, to me, interesting problems, as opposed to the sad, hard, endless and thankless work of opposing retrograde forces, racism and nationalism and and so forth, that currently obtain here. Surprisingly, one of the stories that made me feel most sad was a pretty simple one about moving roads (which also function as environmental purifiers) that seem rather like trails are to us - lovely when you need them, but seldom used. Because almost all of the major themes they tackled in their careers are represented in this collection to some degree, I recommend this book highly, on its own merits and as an introduction to the Noon Universe and to Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

Here is my Strugatsky collection so far. The small copy of Far Rainbow is from MIR Publishers way back in the 60s - it's in very good shape considering. Also, it isn't just a collector's thing - the translation is by A. G. Myers, while the Macmillan one is translated by Antonina W. Bouis. It is quite unusual for a Strugatsky novel to have two English versions. The Noon:22 Century book is signed in his peculiar way by Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote the introduction.

This Swedish/USA film is, if the rather snotty and more than a little pretentious American half of the directing/writing duo, C. W. Winter is to be believed, a direct demonstration of the potential of film if it hadn't been sidetracked by the text-loving 3-act cinematic crimes of D. W. Griffiths (seriously, he basically said that). The story is about the rhythm of a woman's life on a sparsely inhabited island, as her daughter and her partner depart after staying for while, and a hunter comes by later, which alters her routine even more. The dialogue is irrelevant to the narrative, but there are 3 short voice-overs - mini journal entries spoken in the voice of the protagonist. I wonder if the Swedish half of the duo, Anders Edstrom, feels the same way about Victor Sjostrom as his American counterpart feels about Griffiths, and, for example, Sjostrom's 1928 film The Wind, starring Lillian Gish. Wind plays a big role in The Anchorage - the sound of it, how it moves the water and the trees, and the filmmakers talked about wind afterwards - how Griffiths failed in his own vision to create a cinema as honest to the fact of wind as theirs. In fact, the film reminded me strongly of a Canadian film from 1973 called Ordinary Tenderness (8 at least), which the filmmakers haven't seen. I daresay they should see it, especially prickly C. W. Winter, so they can stop thinking their film is some paradigm shift of gigantic proportions the likes of which we have never seen. The Anchorage is well-executed and, in spite of the filmmaker's apparent belief that it is deeply peculiar, full of allusions to other films, particularly the horror genre - from Psycho to last year's Let the Right One In (three dead fish on deck, two decapitated as we watch, all with rubik's cube colours in the frame). I enjoyed the film for what it was, and want to advise the directors to chill the hell out and have fun with audience questions, instead of trying so hard to seem frustrated with the lack of obeisance to their genius displayed in every single comment we made after the film. The Anchorage gets a generous 6.5. The filmmakers get a finger for their rudeness, and for being such speshul snowflakes.

The Vancouver International Film Festival, over the years, has demonstrated one thing to me - movie directors are either very, very friendly, or very very rude and arrogant.

On another note, downtown Vancouver is now 3d on Google Earth, and I have taken some virtual screen caps from my balcony, which is silly but fun.

Real pic behind cut

( real pic )

There are movies you wonder why they are made at all - Gosford Park, Transformers 2 - and then there are movies you wonder why they were never made before. The Milk of Sorrow , directed by Claudia Llosa, is in the latter catagory. It's not particularly sentimental, but it is moving, it's extremely nice to look at, but not decorative, it has lots of humour, but never in bad taste or over the top. By deftly layering folklore, topical references to Peru's checkered, brutal past, allusions to the movie I worte about fairly recently Fando and Lis (see the burning piano), whimsy, herbology (a scene involving gardening made a couple people in the audience gasp in awe at the organic visual poetry of it), racism, a touch of mystery, and, rather centrally, music, this becomes a first class movie. It opens in darkness with a woman singing about a vicious rape (at the hands of the Shining Path in this case) - rather like Lisa needing to speak in rhyme in David and Lisa, which I also wrote about recently (and which shares a lot thematically with this Peruvian film) - and ends in a way that is at once open ended and deeply satisfying. We applauded at the end, for the film's palpable good-will, clarity, and honesty. 9 for this deserving Golden Bear and FIPRESCI Prize winner.
Three of the four best films I've seen so far this year have been directed by women.

Being on 2 weeks holidays starting Monday, I have a chance to take in, at a relaxed pace, since I'm not working at the festival this year, a few movies I've heard good things about, since the VIFF started yesterday. So far, I will be attending the very well-recieved French thriller A Prophet, Michael Haneke's lauded The White Ribbon, a new film by the Roumanian director of 12:08 East of Bucharest, Corneliu Porumboiu, called Police, adjective, which appears to be both funny and sad, and The Milk of Sorrow, a Peruvian film that seems to be generating a bit of artistic controversy. I gave Precious a pass when I ordered tickets a while ago, as I'll see it in general release, of course, if I'm feeling exceptionally unemotional one night. Otherwise, that's a dvd watch for me.