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Originally posted by oscar jubis
Sunday July 24th
Two Excellent award-winning films from Israel
Campfire (2004) at Cosford Cinema
Checkpoint aka Machssomim (2003) on Sundance Channel
Hey,
I am glad you have finally watched the movie Campfire ...
So, I guess you know what I am talking about here ...
http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/show...light=campfire
HiQuote:
Originally posted by Chris Knipp
Have you heard anything about Machuca, directed by Andrés Wood, set in Chile in the early Seventies? It's here next week.
Did you finally watched it?
Howard and I have some comments here
http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/show...&threadid=1263
Not yet. This is only Monday.
*Chris, at least our foreign list will have a few common titles. I'm happy 2046 opens August 5th in theatres.
*Hengcs, my apologies for not posting my comments about Campfire on the thread you opened. I forgot about it. The questions I posed to you have been answered. My conclusion is that the protagonist decides that even though, as a Zionist, she supports the government's settlement policy, life in a settlement is not appropriate for her and her daughters. I've decided that the fact that some in the selection committee are elitists and prejudiced does not constitute a criticism of the policy itself on the part of the director. I agree with you that Campfire is solely concerned with personal motivations. On the other hand, I'm convinced Mr. Shamir, the director of the political doc Checkpoint, would find that Campfire lacks the courage to confront the (im)morality of the occupation.
which would be damning.Quote:
that Campfire lacks the courage to confront the (im)morality of the occupation.
*Two Israelis commenting about Campfire on IMdb posted thoughts like "Cedar decided to indict his origins" and "religious/settlement people will hate this movie". This is because, although the film doesn't argue for or against the policy, those who select who lives in the settlements are portrayed unsympathetically. The film is not focused on the politics or morality of the settlement policy and, even though I am very much against the policy, I wouldn't want to damn Campfire because of that. Moreover, a major portion of this film concerns issues between parents and teenagers, and a widow beginning to date again, which are handled extremely well.
Monday July 25th
Fighting Elegy (Japan, 1966) dvd
I've always found Seijun Suzuki's films extremely satisfying to watch because of the daring visual and aural inventiveness, but I have had difficulty becoming engaged by inane genre plots about yakuzas and killers-for-hire. What elevates Fighting Elegy is the historical background (1935 Japan, just before the failed coup d'etat inspired by Ikki Kita) and its relentless satirical criticism of the militarization and imperialism prevalent in Japan until the end of WWII.
Xala (Senegal, 1975) dvd
Tuesday July 26th
Camel(s) (South Korea, 2002) on import dvd
Black-and-white film written and directed by Ki-Yong Park about a pharmacist in her late 30s spending a day (and night) with a 45 y.o. customer at a resort town. They are both married to other people. They drink. They fuck. They eat. They sleep. They eat. They part. Long takes, minimal dialogue. Somber and restrained to a fault.
*I'll be in NYC for about a week with my family, which means sightseeing, Broadway musicals, a Yankees game, a day at MOMA. Will try to fit in some film-watching and post upon my return.
I'll be posting on films I've watched during the past week. The one below I watched at home before I left to New York.
Wed. July 27th
Detective (France, 1985) PAL dvd
A commercial film, but exclusively as defined by J.L. Godard, which means it uses popular genre conventions and features a recognizable cast_the opening titles name some under the heading of "acteurs" while others are labeled "stars". I believe Godard never stopped being a film critic and that his reviews for "Cashiers" reveal a writing style that corresponds to that of his films. Detective is not a whodunit, although it features Jean Pierre Leaud investigating a shooting. It's a presentation of the component parts of a murder mystery set entirely at the Hotel Concorde St. Lazare after Godard has taken it apart. It functions as a critique of the genre in which Godard experiments with juxtapositions between images and brief, intense passages of classical and jazz pieces. Formally, this is very interesting. Just don't come here looking for the comforting, familiar pleasures of the genre.
Friday July 29th
The Beat That My Heart Skipped (France, 2005) at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, NYC.
That answers my question about where you saw it.
Thanks for your assessment of Detective.
That's a great point about his film criticism and style of making movies. Godard has always stayed true to Godard's Laws.
He demands admiration. He challenges the viewer, and not with pretention as so many claim. He's deeply passionate and a serious film artist. His films are blessings, and when he dies cinema will lose one of it's saints.
I'm sure someone could write a thesis or book that explains and illustrates the massive impact he's had on the medium- an impact that regular movie-goers are ignorant of. Godard's influence has reached into the strangest of places...
You can be sure someone has, various someones in fact, though even in Europe the greatest interest would be in his early work, and a lot of his later films don't seem to be available on DVD even in France, much more on VHS. I can get a US tape of Detective used on Amazon for $5.Quote:
I'm sure someone could write a thesis or book that explains and illustrates the massive impact he's had on the medium
*I also have great admiration for this cinema saint, Johann. I have yet to come across a book that specifically "explains and illustrates the massive impact he's had on the medium", which would be a very worthy endeavor. Of course there are many books about the artist and his films. I propose that he will continue being a major influence on cinema years after he stops making films because these will become increasingly available to future generations of filmmakers. Many of the innovations/formal experiments contained in his films have yet to be properly digested by the culture at-large thus have not achieve full impact yet.
*Maybe Chris is right when he writes that "even in Europe the greatest interest would be in his early work". This implies nothing negative about the quality of his "later" work. It has more to do with the nature of cinephilia and distribution/marketing realities at the time the films were released. Some well-known critics, particularly Americans, have done a disservice to the understanding and appreciation of Godard's films released in the past three decades. The excerpt below, from an article by Craig Keller posted at Senses of Cinema, concerns this very issue.
The first instance grants that Godard's body of work can be read as a movement that passes through many aesthetic phases but never fails to constitute an oeuvre that examined from any point, yields a poetic and cinematic value consistent with or building upon those films that have come before. It is the second standpoint, however, that has been so consistently adopted by a number of prominent (that is, visible) critics. This flank, whose American roster includes but is not limited to Roger Ebert, Anthony Lane, Andrew Sarris, and David Thomson, have long confused the evolution of the artist Godard with some kind of fundamental betrayal. For this group, Godard is a filmmaker who will forever be associated with pop-art palettes, love-and-guns on the run, and the intellectual exuberance of a breezy, pre-Vietnam 60s youth; but who will never be forgiven for discarding the early use of Hollywood reference points (which the filmmaker's latter-day antagonists had perceived in any case not as aesthetic critique but as blank cool cultural homage), exhibiting overtly political tendencies, exploring in his two tv series the possibilities of a different medium, and then settling on a mode of filmmaking that incorporates narrative cadenzas, historical scrutiny, visual poetry, literary citation, and a dominant mood of elegiac contemplativeness.
In short, Godard has evolved from making films of great complexity and beauty to making films of even greater complexity that frequently approach the sublime. Godard's crime, that which the impatient soul and the Philistine alike deem the greatest felony of all: that Godard is an artist of tremendous agency and authority within his medium, and through the uncompromised expression of his aesthetic and, therefore, moral convictions, demonstrates as little concern for the satiety of the "audience that might have been" as Beethoven or Joyce before him.
At least you're open about your hagiography.Quote:
...this cinematic saint....
Wow! Now that's what I call writing! (He misuses the word satiety though.)Quote:
Godard's crime, that which the impatient soul and the Philistine alike deem the greatest felony of all: that Godard is an artist of tremendous agency and authority within his medium, and through the uncompromised expression of his aesthetic and, therefore, moral convictions, demonstrates as little concern for the satiety of the "audience that might have been" as Beethoven or Joyce before him.
I incorporated the term used by Johann in my response to his post. I had initially put it between quotations. Then I decided to remove them thus taking responsibility for its use, however borrowed. I figure...if catholics can designate hundreds as saints, cinephiles can have at least fifty of our own. A polite provocation: those who wouldn't include Godard among those fifty probably love storytelling more than they love cinema.
Saturday July 30th
5th Avenue Girl (USA, 1939) at MOMA, NYC.
Gregory La Cava is known for directing My Man Godfrey and Stage Door, most of his other films are rarely screened. Fifth Avenue Girl, seen as part of a retrospective of the director's filmography, provides evidence that La Cava deserves as much recognition as Capra and Cukor, better-known contemporaries whose work often deals with similar subject matter. 5th Avenue is one of those witty depression comedies about what happens when a working class person enters the world of the rich. Ginger Rogers meets a middle-aged CEO in Central Park and becomes a catalytic agent who transforms him and the members of his family. This is only my third La Cava film but I'd say he seems to allow more ambiguity into his narratives than Cukor and his view of the poor is less romanticized than Capra's. Oh, and Chelsea and I found 5th Avenue Girl very funny. We didn't stay for the next La Cava film on today's schedule because we had tickets to the new Broadway show "Lennon". Maybe someday I get to watch other films from this director such as Primrose Path and She Married Her Boss.
Monday August 1st
9 Songs (UK, 2004) at the Angelika, NYC.
Michael Winterbottom (24-hr Party People, Butterfly Kiss) is apparently guided by an agenda in his low-budget latest: to normalize the depiction of sex in mainstream cinema. The film opens with Matt (TV actor Kieran O'Brien) flying over Antarctica. Matt's voice-over implies his affair with Lisa (newcomer Margo Stilley) has ended. 9 Songs flashes back to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club performing the first of the titular rock songs. Matt and Lisa meet at the show then go to his place for sex. The minimal dialogue is banal. Most of the 66 minutes concern the couple going to rock shows and fucking. Some scenes are as explicit as porn but shorter and untouched. The sex is not realistic, it's real. Imagine a home movie depicting what goes on inside the apartment of a couple who are having a casual relationship based on sexual compatibility and a shared appreciation for rock. There are couples who do this on the net. It's perhaps historically significant that Winterbottom managed to get 9 Songs shown in theatres. But given the minimal context and character detail, all the audience gets is the satisfaction of subsidizing socio-cultural progress.
*This Monday screening was nearly sold-out. The Village Voice had a still from it on the front cover, which doesn't hurt the b.o. It's going wider on August 12th, if you're curious. I found it unambitious thus can't recommend it.
Too bad, seems not a fortunate choice. I wonder if you went to Film Forum, or Quad Cinema? Maybe not so much right now at either place, though John G. Young's The Reception at Quad Cinema looks good. Oyster Farmer less so. Nothing much new now at Film Forum, except a documentary about Chechen children. Have you seen Darwin's Nightmare? I haven't. It's at the IFC Center on Sixth Avenue and W 3rd St. Otherwise at Angelika maybe better: Broken Flowers (the new Jarmusch!!!), Junebug (good US inde?), Tony Takitani (Japanese, "A delicate wisp of a film with a surprisingly sharp sting..."," Manohla Dargis), and Secuestro Express (Miramax) which would all be new to me.
Oscar, have I missed your trip? I have been completely swamped and out of town and forgot entirely that you were in the city... how rude. Hope you all are having a great time. Email me if youre still around.
Peter
*I'm back in Miami, Peter but I'll send e-mail to you and Chris soon.
*Broken Flowers and Junebug will open here soon. I had free tickets to a screening of Secuestro tonight with the director in attendance. I passed, based on the trailer. Wish I had seen Tony Takitani or the re-released The Conformist (a personal fave) instead of 9 Songs.
Wed. August 3rd
Rear Entrance (Hong Kong, 1959) on import dvd
I've seen few non-Japanese Asian films made before 1970 so I decided to take a chance on this winner of Best Film at the 7th Asian Film Festival (?). I found this melodrama, about a childless middle-aged couple adopting a neglected 7-year old girl, crudely written and otherwise unremarkable. Direction by Han Hsiang Li (The Burning of Imperial Palace, Enchanting Shadow).
Tout Va Bien (France, 1973) Criterion dvd
The final title at the end of Week-End read END OF CINEMA/END OF THE WORLD. Jean Luc Godard proceeded to form the Dziga-Vertov Group, named after the Polish-born Soviet director who proposed that cinema could instill mass revolutionary consciousness. Prominent among its members was Jean-Pierre Gorin, an avowed Maoist who collaborated closely with Godard, primarily on the scripts of films Godard directed between 1968 and 1974. Generally, these films had an obvious political agenda. In the US, they were primarily shown during Godard and Gorin's tours of American Universities and Film Societies.
Tout Va Bien is perhaps the most commercially viable of the films made during this period, because it features Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, and there's a semblance of plot. It's a meditation on the role of the artist/intellectual in effecting revolutionary social change. Godard has spoken about the pitfalls of attempting to speak for the workers/oppressed/working classes. Fonda and Montand are a married couple who serve as Godard's surrogates. She works for an American TV network and is assigned to report on a strike at a sausage factory. He plays a writer-turned-director who was prominent during the New Wave but finds himself directing commercials to pay the bills. He accompanies her to the factory where she's scheduled to interview the manager. Upon arrival, they learn some workers have occupied the administrative offices. The workers are keeping the manager hostage and decide to do the same to the visitors. The offices and factory are shown as a dollhouse set, with the front wall removed like Jerry Lewis did for his The Ladies Man. The union reps, mangement, several workers, the reporter and the director get to face the camera at several points to present their perspective on the events. The last segment of Tout Va Bien takes a tangential detour into a large department store. The camera pans slowly along multiple checkout lanes back and forth as a consumer riot gradually erupts.
I guess my recommendatons were a bit late. I forgot the length of your New York stay. Sorry you missed even talking to PMW. but I'm sure you did a lot of good stuff and things that your family loved too and I'll enjoy hearing about. I was hinting Secuestro sounds 'Miramaxical.' If I'd been on a quick trip to NYC I'd have skipped 9 Songs because it's coming here shortly, and because I never saw 24-Hour Party People which is the one of his movies people (party people I guess) really loved (and somehow, I didn't mind missing it from what I heard; I thought maybe it was for another generation). Anthony Lane reviewed this new one in last week's New Yorker and said, "There is a fine film to be made about the retreat from worldly obligation into erotic rite, and Brando and Bertolucci made it in 1972......This is an awkward stumble for Winterbottom, who made the wonderful 'In the World' (2002)...Only one aspect of '9 Songs' was a shock to me, and that was the music....the cream of current bands, supposedly, although the unitiatied may wonder why most of the cream sounds like a cow giving birth in a wind tunnel."
I did see Machuca finally the other day and will write a review of it.
Now that I may be committing to Netflix (which I'm not at all sure isn't a mistake on my part) I've received a copy of "Le Cercle rouge" and written an evaluation of the expanded version on DVD (from Netflix) .
*I was quite aware of what was playing in New York. It was indeed a family vacation and we had tix to two Broadway shows and a Yankees game, and dinner with my sis who was there on business...so I only managed to see 3 movies.
*Why'd Netflix be a mistake? It's cheap, efficient, and they seem to have every Region 1 disc in existence. Even if every film I wanted to watch played at a nearby theatre, I couldn't afford the cost of admission and transport.
*I watched Le Cercle Rouge at the Cosford, 2003 I think. Well worth it.
Thursday August 4th[/i]
Yes (UK, 2005) at Regal SoBe
Driving home after watching Sally Potter's latest, I prepared myself for the scorn and ridicule I predicted some reviews would contain. I also found myself almost grieving over the fact that it's unlikely I would ever watch Yes on a theatre screen again_ today was the 7th and last day of its theatrical run here.
I wouldn't want to give you the impression that I believe Yes must be uniformly regarded as an instant classic or a masterpiece, although it's the one English-language movie of 2005 that perhaps merits such accolades (of course, only my humble opinion after a first viewing). It's just that Yes is the type of film that conjures up the sarcastic, jaded and Philistinic out of reviewers, particularly those employed by mainstream dailies: an adulterous affair between a White She (Joan Allen) and an Arab He (Ararat's Simon Abkarian), written in iambic verse, and featuring philosophical soliloquies by a cleaning lady. Moreover, although Yes is clearly Potter's response to the state of global politics, I can't remember any other recent film that distills class issues with such earnestness (taboo subject, at least in the land of opportunity). A final affront: the final poem takes place in Cuba, viewed here as a land that facilitates moral cleansing and renewal, if only because of its isolation.
It's apparent that Potter spent a great deal of time and effort in rehearsals aimed at removing any trace of mannerism from the actors' delivery of the dialogue. The script would seem particularly challenging to Allen and Abkarian, as their characters go through a wide range of emotions, from flowery romantic passion to abject scorn. I am perhaps most impressed by Potter's display of technique in order to render some of the most awesome images I've seen this year: her use of slurred action, "security-camera" angles, freeze frames, expressionistic use of color, and a variety of framing devices_most memorably, a tree trunk from which we gaze at the couple strolling during their first rendezvous. Sally Potter has delivered a film in which the visuals never play second fiddle to the attention-grabbing text. There is a poetry of images that complements the verses. The eclectic score incorporates Chopin, the Kronos Quartet, BB King and Rachmaninoff, but it's a melody by Phillip Glass that reappears quite effectively at key moments.
Yes is that rare film that looks directly at the dirty mess that seems part and parcel of human existence, perhaps as much now as ever, and manages to provide an affirmation, a rebuke to nihilism and despair.
My practice of periodically taking a chance on relatively obscure, "under the radar" titles disappoints sometimes (Camel(s) and Rear Entrance the most recent). Below two instances of the practice yielding good results. Head in the Clouds received a limited release in 2004 and received generally poor reviews. The Russian The Wedding was undistributed in the US. The dvd version released in Brazil is the only one I know that has English subs.
Friday August 5th
Head in the Clouds (Canada/UK, 2004) dvd
This winner of 4 Canadian Academy awards (cinematography, editing, costume design, music score) was directed by John Duigan (Flirting, Lawn Dogs) and stars Oscar-winner Charlize Theron as Gilda, a hedonist dilettante. The film opens at Cambridge in 1933, where Gilda meets Guy, an inexperienced and affable young student. The course of their relationship is charted over the next, eventful dozen years. A third major character is introduced when Gilda moves to Paris in 1936: Mia (Penelope Cruz), a Spanish nursing student who shares Guy's passion for Gilda and commitment to political causes. Head in the Clouds is a handsome, eye-catching movie with an over-familiar romance-in-wartime plot and a great performance from the perfectly cast Theron. Ultimately, what makes it worth watching is the focus on her Gilda's interior struggle between selfish convenience and moral sacrifice.
Svadba The Wedding (Russia/France 2000) import dvd
Tanya returns to the small mining town where she grew up after 5 years in Moscow pursuing a modeling career. Childhood sweetheart Mishka, a miner, is still smitten and available. They decide to marry. Of course, the remainder of the film concerns the preparations and the wedding. A chaotic, music-filled affair involving eccentric relatives, petty gangsters, politicos, cops, and a lot of vodka. A tragicomic blend of Jiri Menzel's My Sweet Little Village and Kusturica's bawdy and raucous Black Cat, White Cat. The Wedding was co-written and directed by Pavel Lungin (Taxi Blues, Luna Park).
Sat August 6th
Letter to Jane (France, 1972) dvd
A 52-min long analysis of the "Hanoi Jane" photograph of Jane Fonda, which appeared in L'Express and countless publications following her visit to North Vietnam. Gorin and Godard take turns discussing in accented but comprehensible English every aspect of the photograph, its dissemination, interpretation and public reaction to it. Some of the material is instructive, some thought-provoking; some of it is risibly tendentious and boorish_such as their ascribing all kinds of substance to the expression of an out-of-focus Vietnamese while considering Fonda's concerned gaze utterly meaningless.
Thieves Like Us (USA, 1974) import dvd
Three guys (Keith Carradine, John Schuck and Bert Remsen) escape from a Mississippi jail during the depression, reunite with friends and relatives and rob a series of banks while being pursued. Carradine and Shelley Duvall fall hard for each other and become a young-couple-on-the-lam. These are common elements of a string of outstanding American movies. Thieves Like Us is based on the novel of the same title by Edward Anderson, which was first adapted by Nicholas Ray with the title They Live by Night. What's special about Robert Altman's film is his uncanny ability to convey a very specific sense of place and time. He opens the film with a masterful long shot of a prairie as the trio escapes. Altman was a consummate artist by the time he shot Thieves Like Us, every frame provides ample evidence of his skills. The use of radio programming (news, serials, music, ads, etc.) to provide a sense of the world-at-large is carefully blended into the complex sound design, which includes Altman's trademark overlapping dialogue. Available only on vhs in the USA.
Thieves Like Us -- this makes me want to see it. I don't believe I ever have.
Pauline Kael never praised anything more enthusiastically.
"Robert Altman finds a sureness of tone and never loses it; Thieves Like Us has the pensive, delicate romanticism of McCabe but it isn't hesitant or precarious. It has perfect clarity. I wouldn't say I respond to it more than to McCabe or that I enjoy it more than the loony The Long Goodbye, but Thieves Like Us seems to achieve beauty without artifice. It's the closest to flawless of Altman's films_a masterpiece".
"Thieves Like Us is so sensuous and lucid that it is as if William Faulkner and the young Jean Renoir had collaborated. Altman uses the novel as his base, but he finds the story through the actors, and, as Renoir did, through accidents of weather and discoveries along the way."
"Thieves Like Us come closer to the vision and sensibility of Faulkner's novels than any of the movie adaptations of them do".
Though I loved reading Pauline Kael's writing, I didn't go out and follow her advice, and I often disagreed when I did. Nevertheless, as I said, this sounds like I might like it.
I probably disagreed with Kael more often than you did, but I feel she wrote some valid things about Thieves I didn't bring up.
Sunday August 7th
Babes on Broadway (USA, 1941) on TCM
It ain't Meet Me in St. Louis, but it stars Judy Garland and the talented Mickey Rooney, who had good chemistry together. Also in the cast: Virginia Wiedler (Hepburn's sister in The Philadelphia Story), who's always a pleasure to watch. Director Busby Berkeley's characteristic crane shots are here, but so is a blackface number that made me squirm.
Monday August 8th
Devils on the Doorstep (China, 2000) dvd
The Night of the Hunter (USA, 1955) on TCM
"LOVE and HATE tatooed acroos the knuckes of his hands
The hands that slap the kids around 'cos they don't understand
how death or glory becomes just another story"
(The Clash, 1979)
A repeat viewing of my favorite American movie of 1955, despised by critics and ignored by audiences upon release, then hailed as a masterpiece of iconic power less than a decade later. Actor Charles Laughton had never directed a film before and never directed a film again. Robert Mitchum played many unforgettable characters, but his Harry Powell is the most enmeshed in the cultural fabric of America. A vulnerable psychopath with delusions of grandeur, a hypocritical preacher obsessed with locating the $10,000 his cellmate gave to his kids before being executed. The Night of the Hunter is by no means realistic. It's a moral parable/fairly tale/horror story with a mix of German expressionism and film-noir stylings. A queer, self-conscious object d'art in which even the stiff performances by the child actors have a very welcome "nightmarish" quality_several sources agree that Laughton hated the kids and that it was Mitchum who "directed" them. The script is based on David Grubb's Depression-era novel and credited to Pulitzer-winner James Agee, but apparently Laughton changed a substantial portion of it. Anyway this is a story told with striking images, lensed by the great Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons).
Tuesday August 9th
These current releases earn only a mild recommendation from me largely because of indistinctive and unremarkable debut scripts by Amy Fox (Heights) and Sabina Murray (The Beautiful Country).
Heights (USA, 2005) at Regal SoBe
The first feature by director Chris Terrio is an ensembler about the problems of the heart of art-world Manhattan residents. Glenn Close is an actress rehearsing Macbeth who can no longer feign indifference to her husband's infidelities. Her daughter Isabel is a photographer about to discover her fiancee's secret life. Interlocking stories involve a large cast that includes Eric Bogosian, George Segal, and musician Rufus Wainwright. They're all fine; not surprisingly, Glenn Close is magnificent. Lamentably, the sense that you've seen it all before, and you know exactly where it's going, becomes increasingly pronounced. Alternative title: "Two Degrees of Separation", which highlights how inferior Heights is to John Guare's play and Fred Schepisi's film adaptation.
The Beautiful Country (USA/Norway, 2005)
Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland has a good track record (The Last Lieutenant, Zero Kelvin, Aberdeen, all on dvd). A substantial portion of The Beautiful Country does for SE Asians what El Norte did for Central Americans: dramatize the difficult journey of those who immigrate to the USA. Despite its honorable intentions and the skillful filmmaking, the film is hampered by a facile if serviceable script that takes the "easy way out" too often. The protagonist is Bihn, a young Vietnamese man who is extremely meek and deferential_probably the result of a lifetime of humiliation because his father is a white American. (Warning: Spoilers Below). Binh reunites with his mom who's working for some very bad rich people in Saigon. The ineffectual man is not the type who abandons his loving mom (thus becoming less sympathetic) or embarks on a perilous transoceanic journey. So there's an unlikely, elaborate accident scene in which Bihn simultaneously breaks an expensive statue AND kills the nasty, rich lady. Now, he has to leave, with mom's toddler son in tow. By the way, unlike the vast majority of American soldiers who fathered kids in Vietnam, Dad (Nick Nolte) married Binh's mother, and played no part in decision to leave Vietnam without her. The Beautiful Country is too careful not to lose the audience's sympathy for any of its major characters. Granted, the immigrant's struggle to come to America and to carve a niche here is given proper exposition, and the encounter between father and son is brilliantly understated.
I reviewed Heights, also referring to Guare's play and the Fred Schepisi film.
I also thought of El Norte after seeing The Big Country. I loved Nick Nolte. I may write a review--and your criticisms of the screenplay will help me; I have some others, but you see different things.
Thanks for the link to your CineScene review. My only disagreement therein has nothing to do with Heights_ I thought Le Divorce was far from a "disaster". While at the site, I checked their 2004 Top 10 poll of contributors and was surprised that none of the top 10 are foreign-language films. It seems more of a "mainstream" site than I had anticipated, with The Incredibles and Shaun of the Dead as #2 and #3 films of the year.
Watching and thinking about Heights led me to thoughts regarding critic and audience (For the purpose of this discussion let's regard ourselves as "critics"). I don't think presumptuous to state that you and I have watched many more films than the average moviegoer, particularly young ones. Heights, for instance, suffers in comparison to films like Short Cuts and Six Degrees of Separation. But many in its potential audience have not seen those. And, isn't it better than others currently at theatres? Isn't it a lot better than hits like Dukes, Bewitched, Longest Yard, etc? Yes, we can only write what we see, think and feel from our unique perspectives. But perhaps we need to moderate our comments about a film that may "work well" and be a good choice for a certain audience making a choice today at the multiplex. After all, there are lots of places where 2046 and The Beat that my Heart Skipped ain't playing.
I'm only thinking out-loud here, riffing on to what extent an experienced-moviewatcher-turned-amateur-crit need to consider the casual filmgoer's p.o.v.
I can't compare Heights with The Longest Yard, The Dukes of Hazard, and Bewitched, since I haven't seen those. I think though the general public would find those more entertaining. In fact I'm sure of it. How could someone who's looking for what The Dukes of Hazard has to offer possibly be interested in spending their time watching Heights? But my concern is to be honest about my evaluations of movies, not to educate the "mainstream" audience. You seem disappointed to learn that Cinescene isn't Senses of Cinema, yet you want us to be nudging fans of The Dukes of Hazard toward Heights. How's that work? How can we want to write for elitist offbeat sites, and influence the mainstream? Cinescene's year-end lists are a vote that includes a lot of people whose writing rarely appeared on the site, so it doesn't very accurately reflect the views of the most frequent reviewers, which might be less "mainstream." I'm more elitist than you are, I've found. I only want to recommend the movies I really like, and I wouldn't pretend to like Me and You or The Beautiful Country or Heights or even Machuca because they are admirable or come from a more sophisticated place than The Dukes of Hazard. But I'm hesitant to recommend a movie to anybody. I'm evaluating them, not recommending that people see them. There's little use urging somebody to see a movie that they won't like.
I don't know who's more or less elitist, and I don't want to be nudging anyone. Actually, like I wrote, I'm JUST thinking out loud and all I want is what I got: some sense as to whether you write with an audience in mind. Published crits either do or are forced to think of the readership by editors, publicists, etc. It's a luxury not to have to consider anybody. Friends and acquaintances who know of my passion ask me if I'd like to write for the daily: "Interviewing Mel Gibson or having to watch The Longest Yard AND write 600 words about it sure ain't my idea of a fun job. I'd rather deal with neurotics and schizos all day than do that".
I can't find anything in my last post about not writing for anybody. I did suggest I don't write to nudge the mainstream audience to change its moviegoing habits. I do write primarily to please myself; I'd assume that's the most honest thing and also what the best "published crits" do. I don't see them as going through a process of being tamed and modified by editors pointing to a dissatisfied audience. If they've been well chosen, then the editor can trust them to please him and the audience. A good editor is a dream come true for any writer. Being a reviewer for the local "daily" isn't what I dream of, but it's a job that has its benefits. You don't have to interview Mel and crank out 600 words on Longest Yard every day; with the job comes other interviews and other films to write about, and a good sized readership. You're scorning the job that would give you the best opportunity to lead the "mainstream" audience away from Dukes of Hazard toward Heights (and best of luck to you).
I can't find anything in my preceding post that suggests I write I without an audience in mind. I may have implied that I write without the mainstream audience's needs in mind. Certainly not without the editor's interest in mind, when there is one, as with Cinescene. "It's a luxury not to have to consider anybody." Is it? You misconstrue the idea of writing primarily for oneself. I don't think it's a luxury but a necessity. If one isn't one's own most stringent critic, but also one's own most ardent fan, how can one produce anything good? So one hasn't the luxury of writing with nobody in mind; one writes with oneself in mind. And if one seeks to inform and to entertain, one writes with the civilized and well informed reader in mind too. I would like to have an editor who was stringent, congenial, and diplomatic (I think the best ones are). Unfortunately, I can't say I have the editor of my dreams. Critics with good jobs don't have to be constantly altering what they say to accomodate either the audience or the editor. They please both, or they wouldn't have been hired. But then their job is to do what they do best: exercise their own taste. As for writing for the "daily," that isn't the job you have assigned yourself, but interviewing Mel Gibson and reviewing The Longest Yard would also give one permission to interview other people and review other films, for a decent salary. Not such a bad job if you can get it.
I seem to be doing a shitty job of expressing my thoughts on this issue. I was speaking only of myself when I wrote "it's a luxury not to have to consider anybody" (it's probably an exageration because when I write journal entries, I'm hoping to hear from you and other members with whom I've had constructive exchanges), so you couldn't be more right when you state "I can't find anything that suggests I write without an audience in mind". I was thinking in the context of what I learned from reviewers I met during press screenings, what I learned from reading Rosenbaum's "Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media..." and my decision not to pursue a modest opportunity that presented itself thanks to the MIFF's publicist, who's become a friend.
Wednesday August 10th
Manji (Japan, 1964) on dvd
So much talk in the West about the Nouvelle Vague and the German New Wave while something just as exciting and ground-breaking went unacknowledged in Japan. Only recently have some of the key directors of this movement got their films released in the West, thanks to the dvd format. One of "my discoveries" of 2005 is Matsumoto's amazing Funeral Parade of Roses, but it's Seijun Suzuki and Yasuzo Masumura who are getting the most attention. When it comes to Suzuki, Oshima, Matsumoto, Masumura, Mishima and their contemporaries, I am speaking from a position of ignorance. I've probably seen less Japanese New Wave film than films directed by Truffaut or any single French New Wave director. I recently watched Suzuki's Fighting Elegy, maybe his best because it transcends genre more than rest of his filmography. Suzuki is a great stylist, but perhaps I prefer Masumura (who directed Manji and, among others, the consumer satire Giants and Toys) because he seems more interested in characters than Suzuki. Masumura (1924-1986) fell in love with European Cinema as a child, earned degrees in law and philosophy in Japan, studied film in Italy from Antonioni and Visconti, and returned to Japan to become an assistant to Mizoguchi and Ichikawa. He started directing in the late 50s. Masumura was highly prolific and subversive throughout his career.
Manji is a widescreen color film about a married woman's sexual obsession with a younger one enrolled in the same art class. A feverish and stylish film in which the women have control over the men in their lives. Like most of Masumura's films (from what I've read), Manji is decidedly Japanese, particularly with regards to content (based on a novel by Junichiro Tanizaki) yet the filmmaking bears an unmistakably European sensibility. I look forward to watching more films from this generation of Japanese filmmakers.
Cabin in the Sky (USA,1941) on TCM
Vincent Minelli directed an all-black cast featuring Ethel Waters and Lena Horne (her breakthrough preformance). Angels from heaven and hell do battle for Joe's soul in this musical with a plot that recalls Heaven Can Wait. One number features the great Duke Ellington and his band. Quite entertaining.
To renew our discussion, if I may.Initially you addressed yourself to my review of the movie, Heights, which you thought went astray because I seemed to neglect the fact that there were worse movies being shown in theaters, such as The Longest Yard. Later you said (here) you wanted to find out who I was writing for ("whether you write with an audience in mind"). What you decided about that question -- do I write with an audience in mind, in your view? -- is still not clear to me. I became confused, understandably, I think, by the above passage because you suddenly shifted from talking about me to talking about yourself -- "It's a luxury not to have to consider anybody." Again I ask, Is it? And does it even make sense? This pleasure in not writing for a print audience as reviewers for a "daily do" appears to be because you, no doubt understandably, got a negative picture of the reviewer's job from talking to people who work for dailies and from reading Rosenbaum's "Movie Wars." But the fact reamains that if you post even on a small website, you're in that sense writing for others, and if you think you're not writing for anybody that merely means you're forgetting that you do, or, perhaps, as I was saying, because you're focusing primarily on your own requirements -- quite wisely so, if those requirements are good ones. Understandably here and elsewhere there's some confusion about whom one's wriring for. I think I try to model my movie comments on good writing about film and other subjects. That's writing that meets the requirements of critical readers. I likewise have done the best work I could as an artist, regardless of how many people saw my work or how much people paid for it. There are good movie critics. When I try to write like them (but still be original, if possible), I'm seeking to please myself. That's why I don't present my movie comments as a log, but rather as much as possible in the form of finished reviews. To some extent my aims and principles are more at odds with posting on a website like this than yours are.Quote:
Actually, like I wrote, I'm JUST thinking out loud and all I want is what I got: some sense as to whether you write with an audience in mind. Published crits either do or are forced to think of the readership by editors, publicists, etc. It's a luxury not to have to consider anybody.
But I still won't recommend Heights to "mainstream" readers or any other readers.
From where I sit, this discussion is still bearing fruit. I'll proceed
by quoting the sentence from your post that calls for clarification on my part.
Originally posted by Chris Knipp
my review of the movie, Heights, which you thought went astray because I seemed to neglect the fact that there were worse movies being shown in theaters
What I wrote about your review is: "my only disagreement therein has nothing to do with Heights_I thought Le Divorce was far from a disaster".
Of course, we can both split-hairs over each other's choice of words here and there, revealing too much or too little of the plot, etc. Any two could. As far as the three last films I watched in theatres, it seems to me our opinions are not that far apart. You disliked Heights and The Beautiful Country a bit more than I did, and liked Hustle and Flow a bit more than I did. All three had enough going to make me glad I saw them; all three have flaws and limitations I've mentioned in my reviews. These are films I can only recommend with reservations, or recommend mildly.
My main issue with Heights has more to do with lack of
originality and distinctiveness. It's not a very ambitious film by any measure. But these aspects are related to a viewer's experience with the older and better titles that came to mind while watching it. I thought that, basically and within its limitations, Heights "works" well enough. And that it would probably seem a better movie to one who hasn't seen the "older and better titles" than it seemed to me. To regard the film from the perspective of that sentence amounts to an attempt to step off my skin, so to speak.
I could also adopt another's perspective by thinking about the current crop of releases from the p.o.v. of moviegoers who live in smaller markets, say Albuquerque, NM or Jacksonville, FLA (where I traveled last spring for my daughter's choral competition). Not that Miami is a cultural mecca like Frisco or NYC, but sophisticated enough to have a German silent playing at one museum this weekend, a leftist doc from Brasil in another, and several foreigns and indies at theatres. There are millions of people in North America, who may find themselves wanting to watch a movie this friday night, and couldn't do better than to choose one of these barely recommendable (my opinion) titles.
I agree that these considerations shouldn't impinge on one's reaction to a movie and our writing about them. I am just sharing my musings with you and everybody who visits this thread, as far as they continue to ellicit fruitful discussion.
Thursday August 11th
Michelangelo Antonioni: The Eye That Changed Cinema
(Italy, 2001) dvd
Hour-long doc directed by Sandro Lai comprised mostly of excerpts from interviews of Antonioni himself conducted over a thirty year span. Additional footage of Antonioni at awards presentations at Cannes and Venice and in the set of major films are priceless to a fan of Antonioni like myself. As the title of the doc implies, Antonioni was first and foremost an innovator, a ground-breaker who kept challenging himself in myriad ways. He kept abreast of the new technologies, he went to England, America and China to films from different perspectives, he switched to color in '64 and manipulated its expressive use like no one had before. Antonioni often explored the less dynamic yet no less significant aspects of human reality, and did so suggestively, always allowing the viewer room to make his/her own discoveries.
Hustle and Flow (USA, 2005) at SoBe Regal
Don't call it Frisco (that used to be the name of a restaurant, but San Franciscans so dislike the word "Frisco" that the restaurant failed; it probably wasn't that good a restaurant anyway). You can call it a cultural mecca if you want to.
Except for Hustle and Flow, the filmgoers in what you call "smaller markets" (adopting a mercantile terminology I'm not fluent in), I would suggest they go to Wedding Crashers instead. As I think I've said recently on these insatiable pages, I don't really go in for "recommending" movies. If I were to "recommend" a movie, I have to see who in particular I'm supposed to be "recommending" to. If it's a soft hearted sucker or a patient old lady I might "recommend" The Beautiful Country if she had to spend a couple hours in a theater. If she or he was a naive pseudo-sophisticate who imagines herself or himself too delicate for the strong humor of Wedding Crashers I might give a nod to Heights. But my heart wouldn't be in it. On the other hand -- the difference in our opinions that you think are "not far apart" are enormous, as far as I'm concerned -- and Le Divorce is much closer to a disaster than you are willing to allow -- I would "recommend" Hustle and Flow to a lot of people, depending on what they were looking for in the way of entertainment. But it is hard for me to stomach the idea of telling or even suggesting to people how they should spend their time. Apropos of Hustle and Flow, you sometimes seem so concerned that a movie be properly uplifting and moral that you fail to notice that it is the only one we're talking about that has a pulse.
To all those who say they have no choice at the movie house I say one word: Netflix.
As for your question as to why I might think Netflix possibly not a good idea for me, I'll answer that at another time. But in general I can see its virtues and benefits for the vast majority of geographically disadvantaged or homebound movie fans.