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Sunday, November 1st, 2009
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12:24 am - october 09 movie log
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Darah Rating: C
Guess I didn't get the memo on why it's entertaining to watch a bunch of people get killed one by one.
Tokyo Sonata Rating: A-
The first two acts are note-perfect. The third act veers into a hair-pin turn, splinters into at least three separate films, and miraculously manages to right itself toward the end (though the coda verges on cheese; what's with the Japanese and classical music?!).
Forward Motion: Intros Rating:
From this entry onward I will not give grades for works that I feel are beyond me (e.g. non-narrative films). These short dance films are interesting for sharpening my awareness of the screen's materiality, and of the stylization of movement that is seemingly brought about by cinema's framing (Bresson's iconic pickpocket sequence must count as an example of screen dance?). Beyond that though, I'm hard-pressed to come up with answers on what I could get out of these clips.
(500) Days of Summer Rating: B+
Overly eager to brandish its hipster credentials. Too pleased by its own cleverness. Or, is it just saddled with the postmodernist anxiety that we would find a plainly bleeding heart uncool?
Julie & Julia Rating: C+
I've always found Meryl Streep overrated; the impression I get from her performances these days is that she pretty much directs herself. As for the film, so much of it is twee, tedious and devoid of dramatic interest.
The Blue Mansion Rating: C+
A conjoined twin, its parents would've done better to let only one live: the comic whodunit or the family drama. I say kill the former, which fails to entertain in the way even ill-received comic whodunits like 'Manhatten Murder Mystery' and 'Scoop' succeed in doing (this film is as removed from reality as those Woody Allens, sharing their rarefied air without quite breathing the same wit). Freed from this pesky twin, the family drama might have dug deeper, developed more fully; here we have a Singapore tragedy waiting to be told, here we want to see how a man (some would say THE man) is corrupted by the Singapore Dream into losing his soul, here is the Singapore 'Godfather', if we ever dare to paint on such a vast, majestic scale. But what we end up with is soap opera level feuding, and a denouement that does nothing to illuminate character, merely illustrating a wrongdoing in the past, which the film seems to believe is a shocker (it isn't). The redemption at the end rings hollow. And then you realize, so does the whole film.
The Hurt Locker Rating: B+
If you must shoot with the camera removed from the tripod, where it rightfully belongs, this is how you do it.
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| Thursday, October 29th, 2009
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12:48 am - making it real
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My first 10km last week, another 10km this week, with many more uncertain kilometers to come, as I work toward finally running under the open sky, as I realize running on adjacent treadmills in the comfort of the gym may make a nice metaphor but works as a metaphor only – true commitment may require one to keep up with the other, actual effort to run side by side, mutual agreement on where and when to stop, to catch our breaths, to wipe our brows, to survey the road that lies glimmering before us.
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| Thursday, October 15th, 2009
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7:22 pm - hear, hear
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Salon.com:
A lot of what you write -- and celebrate -- in the book is a culture of hedonism and sexual experimentation that seems at odds with the gay marriage movement. What do you make of this generation's pursuit of gay marriage?
Edmund White:
I believe in promiscuity. But you know people are a lot more complicated than they appear to be. I mean, right now I'm in a relationship where I am faithful because my partner wants me to be, and I respect him enough -- and it lowers the level of anxiety in our relationship. He's also extraordinarily hot.
In the past, when gays were very flamboyant as drag queens or as leather queens or whatever, that just amused people. And most of the people that come and watch the gay Halloween parade, where all those excesses are on display, those are straight families, and they think it's funny. But what people don't think is so funny is when two middle-aged lawyers who are married to each other move in next door to you and your wife and they have adopted a Korean girl and they want to send her to school with your children and they want to socialize with you and share a drink over the backyard fence. That creeps people out, especially Christians. So, I don't think gay marriage is a conservative issue. I think it's a radical issue.
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| Monday, October 5th, 2009
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11:39 am - did i see this coming
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Of all the motorbike-riding, Liverpool-supporting, marathon-running, Star Trek following, radio listening, Douglas Adams reading, Jonathan Safran Foer quoting, camwhoring, stat board middle managing, makciks' rights defending, babi-eating, straight A scoring, niece-loving, emo-blogging, trivia-hogging, nostalgia-indulging, youth-chasing, song lyric spouting mats—why this one?
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| Thursday, October 1st, 2009
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1:05 pm - september 09 movie log
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Blood Ties Rating: B-
Smartly plotted, but earnest to a fault; its overelaborate flashbacks rob it of its much-needed momentum.
Bakjwi (Thirst) Rating: B-
It's good to see Park Chan-wook stretching himself but it is becoming apparent, from 'I'm a Cyborg' to this, that going metaphysical is somewhat beyond him. Stick to genre, Mr Park.
Whatever Works Rating: B-
The jokes are familiar, the scenarios far-fetched, but Allen's heart is in the right place.
Onna Ga Kaidan Wo Agaru Toki (When a Woman Ascends the Stairs) (DVD) Rating: A+
Can an emotionally gripping story about a trapped woman be made by a male director without any whiff of sadism or sentimentality? Yes.
Inglorious Basterds Rating: A-
Juvenile. Tasteless. And the best thing Tarantino did since 'Pulp Fiction'.
Satantango Rating:
I left after the second intermission. Hungry lah.
The September Issue Rating: B-
Why are perfectly intelligent people so fascinated by Anna Wintour?! She is in a unique position of power, that's all you can say about it. Is someone worth worshipping simply for being a bitch (it's not a question this fawning documentary is interested in asking)? It's strange really to see fashion designers, who have genuine talent, quaking in their boots at the sight of this fur-wrapped hag seated in their fitting rooms.
Taking Woodstock Rating: B-
This one has its charms but not much of a story.
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| Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
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1:51 pm - August 09 movie log
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Ghost in the Shell (DVD) Rating: B+
Sci-fi noir, dystopian neon-and-rain atmosphere, steely techno music, moody talk about what it means to be human, and manga cool have never come together so fetchingly ('Blade Runner' excepted).
Ukigumo (Floating Clouds) (DVD) Rating: A
The truth in this film creeps up on you: weeks after seeing it, I'm still thinking about the main relationship (it's what we'd call 'It's Complicated™'; how did Naruse know these things when he made the film in '55?!); the light it throws on my personal life is almost unbearable to contemplate.
Up Rating: B-
So it has the most affecting sequence in this year's movies (the one that compresses an entire life in four minutes), and some very funny gags, but it overplays its cute card. And at the end of the day, I just don't care about what happens to that damn bird.
6th Singapore Short Cuts (2):
Swimming Lessoon Rating: previously rated
Older Children Rating: C
The Moth Catcher Rating: C+
Dawn Rating: C
Outing Rating: C+
Prepubescent solipsism is supposedly the subject of 'Older Children', but came across as its aesthetic. 'The Moth Catcher' has potential to become something scary and strange, but opts for easy irony that brings it thudding to earth with a quasi-environmental message. 'Dawn' wants to make a statement about the pace of Singapore's urban development – oh wow, so refreshing! 'Outing' is an example of what happens when beginner directors overly concern themselves with how a film should look and feel versus story development (would a grandfather really spend his last day with a grandson this way?).
Goodfellas (DVD) Rating: A
American pop cinema rarely gets better than this. Famously losing the Oscar to 'Dances with Wolves', but look who's really dancing. The formal dexterity here is dazzling; the filmmaking has an infectious swing and swagger. Scorsese makes that tricky marriage of tone (blithe) to subject (dark) look so easy.
Bangiku (Late Chrysanthemums) (DVD) Rating: A-
This is a multiple thread narrative but you'd hardly notice it, so unobstrusive and masterful is the braiding.
Quand J'étais Chanteur (The Singer) (cable) Rating: A-
A much more restrained, and much better written version of 'The Wrestler', world-weary and wounded.
District 9 Rating: B
Overly shaky camerawork and nagging logic lapses hinder a fuller immersion in the movie, which has some inspired touches, but hardly any of the mythic resonance that would make it a sci-fi classic.
Kimyo Na Sakasu (Strange Circus) Rating: B
The denouement explains way too much (like that how to mindfuck?), is too screamy, and is too over-the-top even by the film's own depraved incest-and-amputations standards.
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| Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
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2:20 pm - July 09 movie log
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Paranoid Park (DVD) Rating: A
It's lazy to proclaim an artist to be working 'at the height of his powers', but the fact that Van Sant made this back to back with 'Milk' can be proof of nothing but. Shot in different speeds and formats, and rife with stylistic flourishes that scream 'Experimental!' (these would usually have driven me up the wall), the film is free-floating yet centered, mysterious yet lucid, a drowsy diaphanous blow to the head and heart.
Here Rating: A-
The crack in the wall at the film's beginning is a harbinger of the audacious and increasingly deft frame-breaking to come, a head-trip with a sepulchral atmosphere reminiscent of 'Last Year at Marienbad' and a 'storyline' I'm tempted to describe as Charlie Kaufman minus the pranksterism – if only that approximates the generous cerebral pleasures this film affords. Even calling it the best Singapore feature I've seen diminishes its achievements somewhat, for no local film I know is more exhaustively thought through, more accommodating of multiple readings, and more divisive of critical opinion.
The Love of Siam (DVD) Rating: B
Sometimes, a happy ending is not a cop-out or a political imperative, but plain narrative necessity, especially after you've put the audience through an emotional wringer, and led them into believing a beatific resolution is waiting in the wings. It is a testament to how well this melodrama is made (it's got little of the exaggeration you expect from Thai pop cinema), that the anti-climax of its last five minutes is felt this acutely.
Revolutionary Road (DVD) Rating: B-
Mendes is so taken by suburbia bashing and rigging the kind of no-holds-barred husband-and-wife showdowns that brought home the Oscars for 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?', that he has failed to see the true terror at the heart of his source material: We may think we are superior to our trite little lives, we may insulate ourselves with irony and cling to the belief that we are destined for something more meaningful, but it is all delusion, because 'real' life isn't elsewhere, and what's worse, we may be every bit as banal and mediocre as the unthinking plebians we disdain.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Rating: B-
I've always thought the charm of the books lies mainly in the cozy self-containment of Rowling's whimsical little world (Harry Potter spent half of the final book in a tent), bursting at the seams with mischievously conceived minutiae and droll schoolboy humor. This may explain why the epic qualities of these Hollywood studio 'adaptations' feel so forced, so slapped-on to me. Sometimes, illusion is just illusion, not magic.
DIVE!!! (DVD) Rating: C+
Just because the narrative arc for a film like this is cast in stone (dream-obstacle-triumph), doesn't mean you can't have fun with it, as 'Strictly Ballroom', the first 'Iron Ladies', and 'Water Boys' have so amply demonstrated.
Huhwihaji Anha (No Regret) (DVD) Rating: C-
What the film wants to be is melodrama, but the director has other ideas (it's more refined to make an inscrutable art film, you see), doing away with vulgar things such as character motivation and psychology. The result: Hollow pretty pictures with neither emotional nor narrative logic.
Yi He Yuan (Summer Palace) (DVD) Rating: B+
An object lesson on how to channel French New Wave via WKW without seeming derivative or compromised. It went on for at least twenty minutes too long and by the end you're as numb as the dysfunctional leads – not entirely a bad thing.
Ssang Hwa Jeom (A Frozen Flower) Rating: C
Either way, it's fucked: Make the queen the villain and the film will be misogynistic. Make the king the bad guy and here you have it, the most bilious portrayal of homosexuality on celluloid in recent memory. I was so busy struggling against what the film was saying – that homosexuality is enslaving, histrionic, caused by inexperience with women, and ultimately castrating – that I didn't even notice how absurd the whole thing was getting.
Public Enemies Rating: B
Michael Mann's auteurist preoccupation with men at work continues with the usual crop of startling compositions and envelope-pushing HD work, among many other things to admire, but as a crime film, it could neither match the pop thrills of 'The Untouchables' nor quite attain the tragic jolt of 'Bonnie & Clyde'.
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| Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
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12:02 am - June 09 movie log
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Man On Wire Rating: A-
The film purports to be only concerned with how, not why, but in the breathless serenity of its climax, the answer to the why suddenly materializes, poised more than 400m over empty air (a site whose significance is made all the more powerful for never ever being mentioned): defiant, evanescent, transcendental. In one word: Poetry.
He's Just Not That Into You (Inflight) Rating: C+
Gee, I really have no idea what to say about this movie. It is not entirely disagreeable, yet it is somewhat distasteful, and it is such a trifle I simply can't get myself worked up enough to work out why.
Permanent Residence Rating: C-
The rather ordinary prologue never quite prepares you for what is to come, a film whose version of reality is so unique, you know the director must live in a parallel universe. Now here is that rare thing I love stumbling upon in my movie-going: a film so extravagantly and humorlessly bad it's hilarious.
Entre les Murs (The Class) (Inflight) Rating: B+
Notwithstanding its refusal to tidy life's moral morass into pithy sayings and instructive truisms (hello, Yasmin Ahmad), or to end on an inspirational high, this Palm D'Or winner sidesteps just about every platitude you would expect in a film about a teacher and a class of problem kids, but still lapses into stereotype beyond the walls referred to in the film's French title.
Men and Women (DVD) Rating: B-
Is there a political allegory in this? As with almost every Chinese work (whether painting or film): who knows? Engaging enough while it lasts (some silly toilet jokes, lovely cinematography, a comely central object of affection), though the overall impression is one of slightness.
Flare:
Promises in December Rating: B-
Kitchen Quartet Rating: C
Respirator Rating: B
Mu Dan Rating: B+
Frail Line Rating: C-
My Underwear, My World Rating: C
The Neighbourhood Ghost Rating: C-
Backyard Bowler Rating: C-
Threshold Rating: N.A.
'Promises' can do with less manipulation and more restraint (that last phone call, the dropped teddy bear – really?). 'Kitchen' is simple-minded and sentimental, its cluelessness underlined many times by its cheesy ending montage. 'Respirator', if more fully developed, could be an instant classic. 'Mu Dan' has sex, camp, surrealist simmer – Brian G Tan, you have competition! 'Frail Line', like too many local shorts, mistakes wallowing for drama, and more problematically, uses incest as a punchline. Someone please tell the director of 'Underwear' that a boy pulling briefs over his head is cute for all of, like, one second; making it a running gag for 16 minutes, when you don't have much of a story, is not funny (too many unloved children and misunderstood parents in Singapore cinema, no?). 'Ghost' invites us to laugh at a blind man – I suppose it is a refreshing change from celebrating a handicapped person's Nobility, Humanity, etc. Now if only the result is amusing. Of course, a blind man, especially one who is blind for many years, would confuse his blindness with death when he falls down. What a cinematic imagination! As for 'Bowler', I don't know if it is a series of unrelated skits or what. One thing for sure: this bowling ball clunked straight into the drain. Okay, so far so bitchy. So I won't praise 'Threshold' lest people say I biased.
Let the Right One In (DVD) Rating: C+
Yes, this one has more wide shots than one is accustomed to in a horror movie, all gorgeously framed and lit, and also quite unusually, stages what little action it has within these wide shots. However, I'm afraid not much in the story add up. And not much make me afraid, either. Verité and vampire – not a good match.
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| Monday, June 1st, 2009
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12:40 pm - May 2009 movie log
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The Warlords (DVD) Rating: B-
Just as those time travel blockbusters of the 80s are now read by some film scholars as America's unconscious desire to turn the clock back on the Reagan years, the ongoing spate of Chinese period epics, to whose tradition this Golden Horse and HK Film Award winner belongs, would probably be interpreted as anxiety over Chinese power. Whatever. The Power-grapple = Tragedy formula is getting tired, and Peter Chan should go back to working on a more intimate level, where his strengths as a filmmaker so clearly lie.
Ploy Rating: C-
Not as bad as 'Invisible Waves', but that's the nadir. I don't know. Maybe it takes a genuine talent to stretch what is essentially a mood piece into 105 minutes of nonsense, suspended in a narrative vacuum that even the director appeared to be bored of, as evidenced by a late, abrupt sequence involving an improbable homicidal rapist. Pen-ek fans may call this style slow-burn, but to me, it is all smoke.
Claustrophobia Rating: C+
I admire the challenge Ivy Ho has set up for herself in this debut as a writer-director; her narrative, like a Rachel Whiteread sculpture, is cast out of a negative space. In this case, it's one created by an illicit relationship – neither of the lovers speak of or even acknowledge their relationship, and we never see what they do as lovers. Unlike sculpture however, film is light and shadows, and having a narrative that runs backwards in time, provoking questions about what constitutes a relationship, its beginnings and endings, only underlines the inadequacy of what we're shown.
Monsters vs. Aliens Rating: C+
As compared to 'Kungfu Panda', so many of the gags in this one are lame (too many play off on the 3D effect), its action sequences unimaginative (you have a giant woman fighting an alien robot on the Golden Gate Bridge, and the best you can come up with is this?), and its characters insipid (banking on the audience to like your lead solely because she speaks with Reese Witherspoon's voice is plain lazy).
Star Trek Rating: B
Has the summer blockbuster become so numbingly dumb, that anything with a modicum of intelligence is lavished with critical love? For this non-Trekkie, the movie could do with a little streamlining (the monster-chase sequence strikes me as particularly gratuitous), and the time-warp component unnecessary and over-complicating. But to give J.J. Abrams his due, he did so many things right. I especially like that he did not update the overall retro quality of the series; the last thing Trekkies want, I suspect, is for him to boldly go where no Star Trek has gone before.
The Forbidden Kingdom (DVD) Rating: C
Not content with making a monkey out of Jackie Chan, Hollywood decided to make Jet Li one too, literally, by casting him as Sun Wukong in his first film with Chan (yes, only a mountain made with angmoh money can house two tigers). Unfortunately, two monkeys are not necessarily better than one. And being self-consciously cheesy is still cheesy, when you're not creative about it. And the dialogue, a rojak of Mandarin and heavily accented English, has to be heard to be believed.
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| Sunday, May 24th, 2009
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9:07 pm - goodbye flat world
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I've said it before and I'll say it again: CGI is the worst thing to have happened to the mainstream American film. This has not stopped me from seeing it the way it is meant to be seen, on digital projection. However, I never bought into 3D (since my memory of 3D, back in the 70s when 3D was also supposedly the future, wasn't so great), until I went to the 3D 'Monsters vs Aliens' today. Suffice to say, this 3D was nothing like the 3D I knew as a child. It was, in one hyphenated word, eye-popping. And it will be, I think it is safe to predict, the worst thing to have happened to the mainstream American film since CGI.
Because of the advantages 3D affords (higher ticket prices, piracy-resistance), I have little doubt it will be the format studios are now plumping for. And filmmaking will be poorer for it, as hacks not only have to write scenes in service of CGI set pieces, in the way dialogue fills out the spaces between sex in pornography, they have to devise scenes expressedly to show off what 3D can do. The irony is of course this technology, designed to immerse you in the very texture of the film, is constantly calling attention to itself, is helpless to do anything but, because it is also designed to make you go 'Wow, that's amazing!'. And so we take another step toward the day when, finally, we won't be able to tell Hollywood blockbuster from gameplay.
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| Friday, May 1st, 2009
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12:53 am - apr 09 movie log (slacking!)
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Gran Torino Rating: B
I wish I find the ending as powerful and moving as Eastwood thinks it is.
Sincerely Yours (SIFF) Rating: B
It has its moments, but does it really add anything to the migrant worker discourse?
Jay (SIFF) Rating: C+
Interesting script, though the satire is frequently cheap, especially in the ending. The filmmaking could be a lot more robust too.
Girl Inside (SIFF) Rating: B
It may lack the kind of obstacles you expect (hostile parents, hostile society), but its drama never lags.
Singapore Panorama 1 (SIFF)
Tanjung Rhu Rating: N.A.
Mosquitoes / Xiao Fu Rating: C
Love Lost Rating: B-
Note to Singapore film programmers/curators, please stop putting SooKoon Ang's work in theaters; they belong to galleries. 'Love Lost' wants to be TML, but doesn't know to generate the tension that exists in TML's long takes/shots; the problem, I think, lies in conception.
The Days (SIFF) Rating: B-
The narrative trajectories are not as clearly drawn as they could be; otherwise an engaging and heartfelt effort.
Singapore Shorts Finalists 2009: (SIFF)
Madam Chan Rating: B+
5 Films in an Anthology of a Film a Month Rating: B-
Leaving Me Rating: C
Hush Baby Rating: B-
Distance Rating: B-
Swimming Lesson Rating: B+
Dreaming Kester Rating: C
Shingaporu Monogatari Rating: C+
Sink Rating: B-
Another strong year; if this goes on, I may just start missing the so-bad-it's-funny entries.
Wendy and Lucy (SIFF) Rating: B
It's basically the Dardenne brothers, minus the Big Moral Dilemma.
Aruitemo Aruitemo (Still Walking) (SIFF) Rating: A-
Hello, 'Departures' fans, this is how it is done.
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| Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
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4:25 pm - mar 09 movie log (*DVDs courtesy of karmour!)
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The Terence Davies Trilogy:
Children Rating: B
Madonna and Child Rating: A-
Death and Transfiguration Rating: A
To watch these shorts is to witness a distinct cinematic sensibility developing, from somewhat mechanical perambulation to luminous flight.
Magnolia (DVD*) Rating: A-
On second viewing, this emotional demolition derby feels strained and slightly ludicrous. But I still like.
Delicatessen (DVD*) Rating: C+
Perhaps there's something to be said for making quirky films for the sake of being quirky, but I won't be the one to say it.
Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (DVD*) Rating: A
I'm nagged by the feeling there's something quite wrong with what the film is saying (the equating of Sadean thought with Fascism), but I can't say exactly what, and the film is so assaultive I daren't revisit it to clarify matters.
From Dusk Till Dawn (DVD*) Rating: C-
This is where the clever pop thrills and piquant dialogue that you've come to expect from Tarantino came to die.
Departures Rating: C+
You know those schmaltzy Hallmark cards categorised under 'Sympathy', in which you would never find the word 'die'? Now this is the movie version of that. A death in the family, as much as we want to believe it, will not bring out the best in every one it affects. And surely some double standard is at play here: If this fairytale comes from a Hollywood studio (its ending is blockbuster-hammy), I bet nobody will be tweeting about it on Facebook.
Amores Perros (DVD*) Rating: B
I wish I had seen this before 'Babel', which was so good at glamourizing grit and appearing to have something earth-shatteringly profound to say, I assumed Iñárritu must have warmed up with this. But this is still one hell of a debut by anyone's standards.
Tong San Dai Hing (Fists of Fury) (DVD) Rating: B-
This is as bad as they come, but once I went with the stupidity of it all, I quite enjoyed myself. It prompted inane thoughts like: is the kungfu film Hong Kong cinema's answer to the Hollywood movie musical, and if so, is Bruce Lee the Hong Kong Gene Kelly?
Dawn of the Dead (DVD*) Rating: C+
I haven't seen the original 1978 George Romero classic, but I'm certain this remake will seem superfluous next to it.
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| Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
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12:14 am - i like my poster haha
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In a motel room that is as hot and clammy as the jungle painted on its walls, an Ecstasy-fueled threesome has been arranged to take place. Except the two men who did the planning are officers from the Central Narcotics Bureau, and the third is their suspect, who is going to show up with the drugs at any moment.
One of the officers is garrulous and relaxed; for him, this is a job just like any other. His partner, on the other hand, is preoccupied and tense, and is increasingly restless as the wait for the suspect lengthens – it is apparent he has something infinitely more personal at stake.
In what appears to be a routine crackdown operation, what walls will come tumbling down, and which thresholds will be crossed? In the film’s oppressive tropical swelter, how can we know with absolute certainty that everything we see is not a mirage from a fragmenting mind?
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| Saturday, March 14th, 2009
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12:17 pm - Bag watch: it's now gone high fashion!
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| Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009
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3:44 pm - ten storey love song
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| Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
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8:08 pm - feb 09 movie log
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Changeling Rating: B
Eastwood truly is one of our greatest living directors: throw period drama, women prison drama, psycho killer drama, courtroom drama, as well as Lara Croft at him, and he will still be able to blend and bend it all into a film unmistakably his own. What's even more impressive, 'Changeling' can work as an allegory of political detention in Singapore too!
Doubt Rating: C+
This should play powerfully on a bare stage (I like how every plot twist forces me to reassess the central moral mystery), but I can't tell if its inadequacy as a film is really due to the inhospitability of the medium to the material, as some critics have suggested. Many Bergman films, after all, are airless chamber pieces of theater.
The Reader Rating: C
Merchant and Ivory might approve, but this year's 'Atonement' has one serious liability: the female lead, on which the story pivots, is completely unbelieveable. Also, while it is so daring and provocative etc for the film to hint at the holier-than-thou attitude of some Holocaust survivors, the film itself could do with some self-interrogation: does it really believe, for one, that a Nazi could be redeemed by reading Chekhov?
The Wrestler Rating: A
Here's a performance that dug so deep and packed so much feeling, it shores up all the film's weaknesses (an overly symmetrical structure with clichéd situations and clichéd characters), stunning the narrative into truth.
Slumdog Millionaire Rating: C
The surfeit of movement and color must have distracted most critics from realizing the film is an empty vessel -- we never got to know the characters, or why the leads love one another, or where that gun came from, or why the characters, halfway through the film, switched to English without needing to learn it in school first, or why we should buy the conceit that every question in a game show could be connected to the lead's past. Very very shoddy.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Rating: C+
On the other extreme, you have a film with every detail so thoroughly worked out, it numbs. The only thing I find curious is what drew Fincher, an otherwise coolheaded and cool-obsessed director, to such kitsch.
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| Thursday, February 19th, 2009
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11:34 pm - headline
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Woman decapitated, I read in the papers today. That sounded like me, I thought later, when he smiled at me over breakfast, that swift small arc of white scything toward me: a clean lop. There should be pungent light, geysers of red, a plump thump like a deflated basketball hitting the tarmac, but there was only him.
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| Saturday, February 7th, 2009
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5:01 pm - kuzushi once more
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I knew when I took out my sister's yearbooks this morning -- he told me he was from the same school, and calculating backwards I figured he should be in volumes '91 and '92 -- that I was lost beyond recall, that the inveterate projector of love stories that could never be had taken over. I had this romantic notion I wouldn't be able to locate him in the litany of blank-eyed faces, but there he was. Easily the best looking boy in his class. And already unavailable.
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| Friday, January 30th, 2009
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12:27 pm - Jan 09 movie log
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Lady Chatterley Rating: B-
The lead performance is intriguing (this Lady Chatterley is somehow grounded and flighty at the same time, like so many of the adulterers I know from real life), but the movie on the whole feels cold, odd and off-kilter. Gallic sensibility, I suppose, is fundamentally incompatible with Anglo-Saxon sexuality.
Milk Rating: A-
A document as much as an anthem, this poignant call-to-arms is timely for coming at just such a juncture as when so many despair of the Band Playing Its Last. Penn's performance is a gem of exquisite technical control and quiet emotional power.
Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea Rating: B
Replete with an anime master's delicate touches, this invokes the right note of wonder at the right places, but I wish it has something more to say about the irresponsibility of young lovers, other than merely stating it. And is it only me, or is the idea of love between five-year-olds a wee bit disturbing?
Chinatown (dvd) Rating: A-
Not quite as spellbinding as that other masterwork of West Coast Day Noir, Vertigo, though the young Nicholson is terrific (he softens Hard-boiled with a mute melancholy, stepping confidently into Bogart's shoes), and Faye Dunaway a total scream (is there any Femme Fatale from this tradition of filmmaking who isn't?).
Rachel Getting Married Rating: A-
What do you know, emo-exhibitionists don't only come from trailer parks, but Connecticut too, which this film paints as a Benetton commune where people sing a lot. As riveting and charged as the worst of Jerry Springer, but made with all the art and heart required to yoke Altmanesque vision to Dogme aesthetic.
Red Cliff 2 Rating: A-
Putting everything he's got into channeling Kurosawa, while lacking the Japanese master's sense of composition, and composure, John Woo slamdunks the saga to a chaotic, punishing, intense, frequently florid and cheesy, but genuinely thrilling and stirring close. Somewhere in heaven, seven samurais are cheering.
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, January 12th, 2009
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7:32 pm - I did ROJAK's first 'animated' invite!
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Like I told David, it turned out to be more 90s than I anticipated (very The Design Republic wannabe). But in defense, I'd say it was an earnest typographical exploration of the blackletter, with its calligraphic excess and its historical German association, incorporating both a literal take on 'interior', as well as colors of the German flag and Lunar New Year!
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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