Gateway Cinephiles

Film Diary: Still Life (Sanxia Haoren)

2006 (China / Hong Kong)
Director: Zhang Ke Jia
Viewed: February 21, 2009
Format: DVD - New Yorker Video (2008)

Film Diary: Lost Highway

1997 (France / USA)
Director: David Lynch
Viewed: February 19, 2009
Format: DVD - Universal (2008)

Film Diary: Pan’s Labyrinth (Laberinto del Fauno)

2006 (Spain / Mexico / USA)
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Viewed: February 12, 2009
Format: DVD - New Line (2007)

First I Was Afraid, I Was Petrified

Sita Sings the Blues
2008 (USA)
Director: Nina Paley
Viewed: February 14, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

[Sita Sings the Blues was featured in a limited engagement on February 13-15, 2009 as a part of the Multicultural Film Series at the Webster University Film Series.]

Nina Paley’s magnificent Sita Sings the Blues is an endlessly appealing treasure that weds animation’s myriad visual possibilities to a witty, painfully personal howl of frustration and liberation. Recalling Yellow Submarine in its delirious blending of storytelling, music, and design, Sita proudly admits to its own conceptual simplicity. It presents a familiar story–one of the oldest, really–of love weakened by crisis and shattered on the shoals of mistrust and betrayal. But, oh how it tells that story!: With wondrous Flash-style animation whose captivating design can only be described as “Game Boy Bollywood.” With pop art-inspired compositions and low-key chuckles that echo the Children Television’s Workshop in its finest moments. With whorls and bursts of pure color. With ingeniously re-imagined jazz ditties that elicit sighs of delight. Paley offers that rarest of animated works: one that thrives on its own dazzle. Sita’s unexpected luster extends to every crevice of its intricate yet natty form. Its joys emerge from the accumulation of a multitude of stylistic embellishments united by the vision of a passionate and furiously inventive auteur.

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Quick Review: Beauty in Trouble (Kráska v Nesnázích)

2006 (Czech Republic)
Director: Jan Hrebejk
Viewed: February 11, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

The sly success of Jan Hrebejk’s blackly comic melodrama, Beauty in Trouble, lies in its gently provocative probing of human behavior within a soap opera framework drunk on guilty pleasures. Borrowing from the Robert Graves poem for its title and tragic seed, Herbejk’s film discovers a refreshing stance towards its characters, particularly Marsela, a stubborn Czech redhead who promises a sunny, skanky eroticism. Beauty’s heroine finds herself tugged and provoked by bullies, saviors, obligations, and lusts, but Hrebejk shrewdly avoids both finger-wagging and chilly distance. Instead, the film challenges assumptions about how weary, battered people reconcile their conflicting motivations, all while maintaining a tone of puzzled affection even for its ostensible villains. Allegorical readings abound, especially with respect to the Czech Republic’s place in tomorrow’s Europe. This thematic complexity complements Beauty’s most memorable scenes, which are soaked in pure, giddy drama: an unbearably tense confrontation over cookies; a furious, regretful bout of coitus above a chop shop; and the slow, stupid realization that a sleeping figure is stone dead. Not even a soundtrack that notoriously passes around songs with John Carney’s Once distracts from Beauty’s lurid baubles and restless musings.

Quick Review: The Reader

2008 (USA / Germany)
Director: Stephen Daldry
Viewed: February 6, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Stephen Daldry’s studiously grave The Reader doesn’t quite slip from dry, forgettable melodrama to outright obnoxiousness, but it flirts with the move. Never mind the film’s thunderous pomposity at its own bravery, manifest in a weary shouldering of Very Serious Issues and a limitless supply of scenes featuring a nude Kate Winslet. The former can work in a film’s favor—e.g. The Dark Knight—and the latter is merely the prestige picture version of stunt work. What sticks in the craw is the labored, clinched manner in which The Reader plods towards its revelations, which are neither shocking nor thematically stimulating. That said, the film is smoothly efficient at achieving its primary goal: provoking vigorous discussion of its story’s moral peculiarities. Daldry’s direction isn’t the least bit artful, but it is disciplined and occasionally charming, which is odd in a work that is otherwise so mirthless.  The treat at the heart of The Reader is not Winslet, whose performance is durable yet monolithic, but Ralph Fiennes. His nuance of countenance and voice command the gaze, enriching scenes that haven’t earned their pathos and lending The Reader the lion’s share of its dramatic heft.

Quick Review: Were the World Mine

2008 (USA)
Director: Tom Gustafson
Viewed: February 3, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

The most striking aspect of Tom Gustafson’s determinedly affable queer high school musical, Were the World Mine, is the slick manner in which the director grafts his lightweight contemporary political message to the elemental bliss of his source material. That would be A Midsummer’s Night Dream, for which the film has the dreamy reverence of an enthralled sophomore literature geek (appropriately enough), but also a scrappy grasp of its timeless themes. Thus, Gustafson is able to juggle an obligatory liberal scolding of intolerance alongside the play’s more traditional facets: the giddy thrill of romance, the tragicomical nature of human relations, and a certain meta-textual impishness. Unfortunately, this nimbleness is nowhere else to be found in Were the World Mine. The amateurish acting aside, Gustafson just isn’t that skillful of a director, and the clumsy editing, sound, and choreography in particular make for some frustrating and baffling stretches. One wonders what Julie Taymor might have done with the concept and a $30 million budget. Still, Gustafson’s enthusiasm for the material and his cast shine through, and Tanner Cohen as the tale’s Puck / Helena propels the film with his alluring looks and soaring voice.

Revolutions, Glorious and Otherwise

Che: Part One and Che: Part Two
2008 (Spain / France / USA)
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Viewed: January 31, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

It’s unlikely that Steven Soderbergh’s meticulous, two-part marathon Che will ever end up a beloved film, to be devoured over and over. It’s simply too sprawling, and especially too heedless of the tactful cloak of “mere” entertainment that so many other biopics don. Not to say that Che disregards entertainment, as the four-plus-hour Roadshow Edition is unmistakably fashioned in the image of the 70mm epics of old, a Marxist Lawrence of Arabia complete with overture, intermission, and printed program. Che will be, I think, a work to be studied with deep fascination and awe, a case study in film-making both uncompromising and fiercely focused. Whatever Che lacks in humanity or grace, it is an exhaustive, gritty, and intricate cinematic dissertation on revolution as a social, political, and military process. The result is Soderbergh’s finest film(s) since his debut, sex, lies, and videotape, although Che far surpasses that work in its ambitions.

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Film Diary: My Winnipeg

2007 (Canada)
Director: Guy Maddin
Viewed: January 31, 2009
Format: DVD - IFC (2008)