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To Everything, Turn, Turn, Turn

November 3, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas, Foreign, Action No Comments

Ashes of Time Redux (Dung Che Sai Duk Redux)
2008 (Hong Kong / China)
Director: Wong Kar-wai
Viewed: November 2, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

(Sad to say, Hong Kong film-maker Wong Kar-wai is not a director with whom I have any previous experience. I have not seen the original edit of his 1994 feature, Ashes of Time. Accordingly, I will be reviewing the new edit of that film, Ashes of Time Redux, without reference to the original.)

Excess suffuses Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time Redux, but not the bombastic sort one might expect in a film that owes most of its narrative elements and a slice of style to the wuxia tradition. No, Ashes is an elliptical meditation first and foremost, a serious-minded discourse on love and loss, replete with swelling strings (just in case you forget for a moment how serious). Wong puts a glowing burnish on this tangled tale of swordsmanship and longing set against impossibly bright desert sands, relying on a lyrical four-part structure that admittedly gets its talons into you. The director’s preference for lingering shots and meandering dialogue, while not objectionable on its face, lends Ashes a musty odor of pretension, if only because it highlights the unevenness of his storytelling technique. One wonders at Wong’s choices: on the one hand he offers several minutes of a woman caressing a horse–an exquisitely poetic sequence–while elsewhere his transitions are so ambiguous and edits so jarring that the story becomes baffling.

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You Are Cordially Invited

October 29, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas 2 Comments

Rachel Getting Married
2008 (USA)
Director: Jonathan Demme
Viewed: October 28, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Part comfortable soap opera, part deliciously nasty glimpse of upper class twittery, and above all a sneaky, naturalistic celebration of music and milestones, Johnathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married is a work as far from the director’s The Silence of the Lambs as one could envision. Roiling with familial angst and earnest realism, it’s not a concoction that will appeal to everyone. Rachel juggles both ridiculous scenes of ugly misbehavior and helplessly sweet (and often equally ridiculous) sequences of distilled joy. That both of these elements can comfortably coexist in the same film reflects the central theme of Demme and screenwriter Jenny Lumet (yes, daughter of that Lumet): that families are both fundamentally miserable institutions and also refuges of grace and happiness. Often, as in Rachel Getting Married, in the same weekend.

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Dirty Pretty Thing

October 14, 2008 admin Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Film Diaries - Libby, Dramas, Foreign 5 Comments

A Girl Cut in Two (La Fille Coupée en Deux)
2007 (Germany / France)
Director: Claude Chabrol
Viewed: October 13, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

A Girl Cut in Two is a film that can only loosely be termed entertainment, unless you delight in the sight of self-absorbed twits driving one another to ruin. Admittedly, there is a certain fascination inherent in such a thing, and veteran French director Claude Chabrol manages to at least render his characters as engaging trifles. They are little more than wind-up figurines that jostle one another while bumbling through their crippling neuroses, and yet one can’t help but smirk a little at the tragic silliness of it. A Girl Cut in Two could have been an ugly, joyless film about ugly, joyless people, and it’s to Chabrol’s modest credit that it finds the space to provoke and ponder. The film’s character-poles—Charles the arrogant, graying, libertine intellectual and Paul the demented, anxious, foppish playboy—are deeply rotten men. Between these two cads ricochets Gabrielle, a gorgeous weather girl whose place in the film’s moral order is perpetually uncertain. Is she naïve or cunning? An ambitious manipulator or a pitiable victim? A liberated modern woman or a childish dimwit? The film’s sweeping ambiguity with respect to Gabrielle contrasts with its one certainty: she is the least loathsome vertex of the love triangle, and therefore our window into the dire and ludicrous events that unfold.

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3-Minute Intro: The Godfather and The Godfather Part II

October 13, 2008 Andrew 3-Minute Intros, Dramas No Comments

Screened: October 12, 2008
Format: Blu-ray - Paramount (2008)
Selected By: Andrew

For better or worse, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 crime epic, The Godfather, has become the iconic American gangster film, if not the iconic American film, of the post-New Hollywood era. Both the original, and its equally acclaimed 1974 sequel, The Godfather Part II, have fixed themselves in the American cinematic landscape, saturating our shared pop cultural traditions and even the Mafia’s perceptions of itself. Based on Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel, The Godfather has attained a universally legendary status that few films can claim. It was a box-office smash in its day; winner of the Best Picture Oscar; critically lauded from almost every corner; and still remembered and adored by cinematic aficionados and casual audiences alike a generation later.

In 1972, Coppola was a relative unknown, a risky choice to direct a big-budget Mafia epic in the mold of New Hollywood successes such as Bonnie & Clyde and The French Connection. The director’s domineering style frequently clashed with Paramount Pictures’ demands, particularly with respect to the film’s casting and its depiction of violence. As if Coppola’s casting of the notoriously intractable Marlon Brando was not enough, the director insisted on an obscure thirty-two year old actor named Al Pacino for his lead. Coppola was determined to craft an unusually sympathetic portrayal of an Italian-American crime family, one that explicitly approached its subject as a metaphor for American capitalism. In this The Godfather and its sequel can be seen as unparalleled successes, establishing the prestige of both the crime picture generally and the Mafia picture specifically. This effect has outlasted the New Hollywood era itself, lending stature to films as diverse as Scarface, Once Upon a Time in America, Goodfellas, Heat, and City of God.

After screening The Godfather Part II, George Lucas is said to have commented to Coppola that the two films are actually one, best appreciated as a single work of art. The Godfather presents us with a man who reluctantly and then ruthlessly assumes the commanding heights of power within his narrow, enclosed world. Part II illustrates how wickedness and paranoia eventually isolate that man, destroying all that loves save for the power itself.

Northeast Passage

September 4, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas No Comments

Frozen River
2008 (USA)
Director: Courtney Hunt
Screened: September 2, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Frozen River is a tale of dreams, or at least what passes for dreams in the bitter winters of far-upstate New York. The film presents us with two women, each a quintessential American survivor in their way. Ray (Melissa Leo) is a white, middle-aged single mom, scraping together a life for her two boys in a cramped manufactured home. Lila (Misty Upham) is a younger Mohawk woman, and also a mother, although her infant son has been wrested from her with the tacit consent of her tribe. When fate brings these two women together, their antagonism seethes, but eventually they embark on a perilous criminal collaboration. First-time director Courtney Hunt’s naturalistic story of slush-and-mud desperation on the margins of the American dream is an affecting and uncommonly sensitive depiction of foolish risks taken for all the right reasons.

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They Caught a Bad, Bad Train

September 2, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas, Foreign, Action No Comments

Transsiberian
2008 (UK / Germany / Spain / Lithuania)
Director: Brad Anderson
Viewed: August 31, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Allow me to clear up one thing that the marketing of Transsiberian has unforgivably muddled: Woody Harrelson might have first billing, but Emily Mortimer is the clear protagonist and the star of this serviceable–albeit raw-nerved–thriller. Director Brad Anderson begins with a meaty premise: two guileless Americans find themselves enmeshed in a heroin trafficking plot during their journey aboard the titular train. This is not a Locked Room mystery in the tradition of Murder of the Orient Express. Jessie (Mortimer) and Roy (Harrelson) spend as much time off the train as on it, and the film clearly owes a debt to Hitchcock’s more harried, dashing thrillers in its action set pieces and its fascination with Jessie’s responses to desperate, often uncanny, circumstances. Unfortunately, Anderson lends barely any thematic heft to the tale. While Jessie’s plight often has us sweating bullets in the moment, Transsiberian’s themes are confused, when the film-makers bother to articulate them at all. The result is a film that offers excitement and opportunities for “What Would You Do?” speculation, but little else.

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3-Minute Intro: Deliverance

September 2, 2008 Andrew 3-Minute Intros, Dramas No Comments

Screened: September 1, 2008
Format: DVD - Warner Brothers (2004)
Selected By: Grant

Burt Reynolds began his acting career on the stage and in television, but in the 1960s he transitioned to film, where he would eventually establish his role as a leading man sex symbol and Hollywood institution. Reynolds’ early renown as a reliable and popular performer, often in Spaghetti Westerns, gradually grew until he was offered his breakout starring role in John Boorman’s landmark 1972 drama, Deliverance. The film was also a pivotal success for its three other principals: John Voight, following his acclaimed debut in 1969’s Midnight Cowboy; relatively unknown actor and guitarist Ronny Cox; and newcomer Ned Beatty in his own acting debut.

Based on the lauded 1970 work by American poet and novelist James Dickey, whose popularity exploded following the film, Deliverance is arguably the most revered work from Boorman. The English director began his career as a documentary filmmaker for the BBC, before breaking out in 1967 with the brutal Lee Marvin crime drama Point Blank, now regarded as a neo-noir classic. Boorman’s modest success with feature films eventually paved the way for Deliverance, his first box-office triumph and most enduring feature, alongside his 1981 fantasy epic, Excalibur. Despite his British background, the director brought an unexpected sensitivity to the film’s disturbing, notorious depiction of American folly and endurance.

Dickey’s novel and the film address these themes with a relatively simple story: four Atlanta businessmen set off into the Georgian wilderness for a weekend canoe adventure that becomes a terrifying nightmare. The film’s renowned, eerie banjo sequence and the actors’ grueling stunt work provide a visceral edge to its commentary. Unremittingly dark in tone, the film features a now archetypal depiction of Appalachian hillbillies as monstrous, violent deviants. The protagonists, however, are also shown to be ultimately foolish, arrogant, and morally bankrupt. The film is ambiguous as to whether the brutality of the wilderness and their ordeal bestows the four suburbanites with these qualities, or merely brings them to the surface. In crafting this harrowing depiction of middle class hubris and the fragility of decency, Boorman and the performers created what might be regarded as one of the great American horror films of the late twentieth century.

The Greatest of These Is Love

August 31, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas, Foreign No Comments

The Edge of Heaven (Auf der Anderen Seite)
2007 (Germany / Turkey / Italy)
Director: Fatih Akin
Viewed: August 30, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

With The Edge of Heaven, Turkish-German director Fatih Akin offers a mournful, penetrating exhale of affecting cinema, a Shakespearean tragedy for a modern, multi-cultural Europe. Two violent deaths haunt this film, looming calamities that Akin bluntly telegraphs with title cards. (There Will Be Blood, indeed.) Catastrophe awaits us, not to mention the poor souls that populate Akin’s Bremen and Istanbul, gritty landscapes of crumbling buildings and fragile humanity. In more ways than the survivors will comprehend, these deaths will emerge as transforming phenomena, their bright and black ripples reaching far-flung shores and lives. With six gently compelling characters and an exultant soundtrack, Akin has crafted a meditation on human connection more profound and emotionally persuasive than any recent convoluted ensemble behemoth. Despite its grim–at times bitterly bemused–sensibility, The Edge of Heaven is far from a morbid work. This is awestruck human spectacle at its most unexpected and redemptive, and one of the best films of 2008.

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Spanish Fly

August 28, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas, Comedies, Romance No Comments

Vicky Cristina Barcelona
2008 (USA / Spain)
Director: Woody Allen
Viewed: August 26, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

I’ve kept my distance from Woody Allen’s output since Mighty Aphrodite, never successfully seduced by the rare acclaimed feature (Match Point), nor by the notorious belly-flops (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion). Therefore I can’t comment from an informed place on the praise that Vicky Cristina Barcelona seems to have reaped as some kind of return to form for the venerable Manhattanite. Certainly, VCB is steeped in wistful adoration for the Spanish locale of its title, echoing the lovestruck regard Allen’s earlier films evidence for New York City. The new film is self-consciously a Spanish travelogue, stuffed to the gills with breathtaking sights, rarefied culture, and delectable food and drink. If the Condé Nast slideshow feels a touch ludicrous, it also seems a natural fit for the film’s amorous story. VCB is unabashedly sexy, in a way that few American films ever manage, and without so much as a glimpse of Scarlett Johannson’s assets, or Javier Bardem’s for that matter. Allen employs the appeal of sun-dappled locales and the arousal of gorgeous people in the throes of temptation to tug VCB towards a destination that proves oddly ambiguous. The film underlines its themes with relentless desperation in places, favors contemplative melancholy in others, and far too often clunks along on contrivance and wincing dialog. At its most successful, it’s a kind of cinematic holiday: an exotic getaway for pleasure and perspective, ephemeral in essence and bittersweet in its conclusion.