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GERARDO NARANJO'S I'M GONNA EXPLODE REVIEWED.
Youthful rebellion freshly and ironically chronicled from Mexico.
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STEVEN SODERBERGH'S CHE REVIEWED.
Soderbergh's Cannes-controversial 4-hour-plus Che, aka The Argentine plus Guerilla, is impressive, but excessive. They thought the Bolivia story was too sad--or not sad enough, if you didn't know about the earlier triumphs. So the director had writer Peter Buchman write more about Cuba--and then decided to make another whole movie--and stick the two together. Benicio Del Toro got the Best Actor award at Cannes for the lead performance. There are good actors in other leads, such as Demian Bichir (Fidel Castro), Santiago Cabrera (Camillo Cienfuegos), Elvira Minguez (Celia Sanchez) Jorge Perugorria (Joaquin), Edgar Ramiorez (Ciro Redondo), Victor Rasuk (of Raising Victor Vargas as Rogelio Acevedo), Catalina Sandino Moreno (of Maria Full of Grace, as Aleida Guevara), Rodrogo Santoro (Raul Castro), Unax Ugalde (Little Cowboy), Yul Vazquez (Alejandro Ramirez), and in Part 2 Carlos Bardem (Moises Guevara), Julia Ormond (Lisa Howard), Lou Diamond Philipps (Mario Monje),and Franka Potente (as Tania), among others, including an unidentified cameo by Matt Damon. I wonder if all the accents match properly.
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JOAO BOTELHO'S THE NORTHERN LAND REVIEWED.
A Portuguese film adapting the eponymous novel by Augustina Bessa Luis (also said to be a great favorite of Manoel de Oliveira), this tells a complicated story about multiple generations using one actress, Ana Moreira, in seven roles. Hard-to-read and overly detailed (but thorough) subtitles made this film difficult to follow on firist viewing, but the beautiful digital images with rich painterly tableaux made me give it the benefit of the doubt. This is fine European filmmaking in the great tradition, but with smooth use of new technology. Botelho has been featured at Lincoln center twice before, in 1985 and 1988.
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OLIVIER ASSAYAS' SUMMER HOURS REVIEWED.
Assayas brings it all back home in a film shot in France about a French family and the way modern life makes it divide up and relinquish its history and its heirlooms when three adult children lose their mother. "I don't know if SUMMER HOURS is a summing up of everything that preceded it," Assayas has said, "but it does recapitulate a lot of things at a moment when I felt the need to do so."
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DARRON ARONOFSKY'S THE WRESTLER REVIEWED.
Not for the squeamish. Staple guns, broken glass, barbed wire. Razor blades. Lap dancing. Tit rings. Heart attacks. Deli food. Mickey Rourke is 56 years old. This may be his best movie yet. He thinks so. and at the Venice Festival, this film won the Golden Lion.
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CLINT EASTWOOD'S CHANGELING REVIEWED.
A typically stylish and well-made effort by Eastwood about a boy who disappears, his bereaved mother (Angelina Jolie) and a corrupt LAPD and a wigged-out murderer. We're in James Ellroy territory, and sometimes Sam Fuller's, but this is about a forgotten crime story called the Wineville Chicken Murders and writer J. Michael Straczynski stays close to newspaper accounts from the 1928-1935 period of the story. Not quite up to Eastwood's outstanding 2003, 2004 and 2006 efforts, but still worth seeing, and likely to be talked of at Oscar time. (The Onion A.V. Club Oscar-o-Meter rated it an 8/10.)
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ARI FOLMAN'S WALTZ WITH BASHIR REVIEWED.
Traveling autobiographically through animated space-time, Ari Folman and Israeli veteran comrades recover buried memories of their participation in the 1982 Lebanon war and their complicity in the massacre of Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Christian Militian Phalangiests.
Another of the NYFF's 17 films out of 28 from the Cannes festival, this dream meditation with a shocking finale aroused very mixed feelings in me.
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WONG KAR-WAI'S ASHES OF TIME REDUX REVIEWED.
New music, a little cutting, painstaking restoration of images from multiple copies, 'enhanced' color (some of that questionable), and still a magical experience not to be missed in this iconic, unique reinterpretation of the martial arts film.
Sony Pictures Classics is releasing it in the US starting October 10th.
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Using the search feature, I found that I've mentioned ASHES OF TIME a total of 21 times on this site. I've called it "the most visually arresting film of the 1990s" and listed it in my top 10 films of that decade. I also wrote back in early 2005 that "I'm convinced it will one day be properly restored and subtitled". How could it not be? I was dismayed when the film was not included in a Wong Kar Wai box set released a couple of years ago. Now I think I understand why it wasn't included. There was not a single pristine and complete print of the film available! I've watched my dvd copy of ASHES OF TIME almost as often as a teenager plays her favorite song but I've exhorted readers not to buy that low-quality dvd and wait until the right time to experience it for the first time. Obviously the time has come and I hope anyone who loves movies and appreciates beauty runs to the theater playing this "redux" version. It's highly unlikely that any of the new films released this year will be the equal of ASHES OF TIME Redux.
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I hope people will run to see it too. Didn't realize ASHES OF TIME was such a favorite of yours. I personally prefer DAYS OF BEING WILD, which was also been more simply 'reduxed' and briefly reissued in theaters. I saw the latter in the beautiful new print at Film Forum a few years ago. It to me is more the true Wong Kar-wai. However, for sheer visual dazzle, and quite a distinctive kind (nothing like Zhang Yimou for example), this one is remarkable. Since you're watched ASHES OF TIME so often, maybe you can elucidate the plot-line for us here. Or have you done that somewhere else?
Please tell me also if possible who the actor is in the still at the top of my review.
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 10-04-2008 at 05:54 PM.
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COMING NEXT WEEK
Still to come from the NYFF, reviews of:
NIGHT AND DAY (HONG SANG-SOO)
IT'S HARD BEING LOVED BY JERKS (DANIEL LECONTE)
TOKYO SONATA (KIYOSHI KUROSAWA)
A CHRISTMAS TALE (ARNAUD DESPLECHIN)
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HONG SANG-SOO'S NIGHT AND DAY REVIEWED.
Another of South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo's well-observed bumblingly over-confident macho protagonists torn between several women. This time he's a Seoul painter of cloud pictures who flees to Paris in fear of prosecution for a minor drug charge, while his wife remains at home and he mixes with the local Korean community and especially some of the younger prettier women. As textured and ironic as ever, but a little over-long at 144 minutes. Shown at Berlin in February and in Paris theaters since July in a double bill with Woman on the Beach, the new Hong film has no US release planned.
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DANIEL LECONTE'S IT'S HARD BEING LOVED BY JERKS REVIEWED.
A high-profile French trial over cartoons, French Muslims, and freedom of expression.
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KIYOSHI KUROSAWA'S TOKYO SONATA REVIEWED.
Kurosawa escapes his J-horror doldrums and makes a haunting family drama that stretches middle class limits, moving in directions both bizarre and touching. Hailed a a brilliant return to form in a new genre, Tokyo Sonata received the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard series at Cannes this year.
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Finally find a little time to visit the thread and read your latest reviews. I'm looking forward to seeing these movies. Currently editing midterm essays on Abel Gance's La Roue and Lewis Milestone's Hallelujah, I'm a Bum! and attending screenings of Chantal Akerman's films in preparation for her visit to campus on Tuesday.
The actor in the still you used for your review of Ashes of Time Redux is Tony Leung Ka Fai. He's less well known in the West than costar Tony Leung Chiu Wai. Ka Fai has been nominated 13 times for Best Actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards and has won four times (most recently for his performance in Johnnie To's Election). As far as elucidating the plot line, I'll leave that for another time or to another person.
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