In any case, thanks are due to Lionsgate for rescuing Cabin in the Woods from oblivion. The film finally hits theaters in April.

I’m not a horror fan, so take this review for what it’s worth. For the most part, I know horror by its clichés, through its parodies, its trailers, and a handful of its well-known specimens: I like Nightmare on Elm Street 1, 3, and 4; I like Night Breed and Alien; I like The Others, The Orphanage, and The Devil’s Backbone (which are arguably not horror movies). Simply put, it’s not a genre I peruse when I’m looking for stuff to watch on Netflix. But in Multiplex, Jason’s going to be getting a bit of an introduction to horror in the near future, so I figure I’ll need to force myself out of my own comfort zone and do my research.

So, for the toe-dip into the pool (filled with blood, naturally)… Insidious.

Screenwriter Leigh Whannell and director James Wan are best known for creating the Saw franchise. Their two non-Saw follow-ups Dead Silence and Death Sentence were met with mixed reviews and so-so box-office. For their fourth feature, the two team up with Paranormal Activity‘s Oren Peli as producer for a pretty much gore-free haunted house flick that feels more than a little bit like “What if Paranormal Activity had a bigger budget?” — not much bigger, mind you. Insidious cost only $1 million to make.

Insidious starts out like a lot of these stories do: a family moves in, and weird shit starts happening. There’s an accident, and the oldest child, Dalton, has falls into a coma. More scary shit happens, but like clockwork, right when the guy down the aisle from you starts shouting that they should move to a new house, they actually do. It’s a little disappointing that they blow this twist on the usual haunted house story in the trailer, because I thought it was interesting, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter much. The family moves, but that doesn’t stop the scary shit from happening, and so they go looking for professional help.

Their characters might be thin on the page, Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson work well enough together that Renai and Josh feel fleshed out. It certainly helps that they’re allowed to behave like intelligent people actually might if facing these ludicrous circumstances. If you can entertain the “what if?” at all, you’ll enjoy Insidious as it teases you with an answer. Unlike Paranormal Activity, it’s not all teasing until the very end; in Insidious, you start to see supernatural stuff (in small doses) pretty much right away, although you don’t necessarily know it the first time.

The third act will be divisive. It will lose some, because there’s no real gore to speak of (it’s PG-13, after all). It’ll lose some people with the comic-relief duo of hyper-competitive paranormal investigators, whom I liked. It’ll lose some based on how they show the supernatural elements of the film. (Spoilers.) The design of a certain red-faced demon that becomes prominent late in the film is a little uninspired, but the approach seemed appropriate to me; it evoked a little kid’s real-world nightmares. (End spoilers.) The point is, I went with it.

Insidious doesn’t reinvent the wheel for horror; it feels more like a “reset,” back to a time before Saw and the ensuing wave of torture porn had taken over the whole genre. Insidious trades in the crutches of most recent horror — creature effects and buckets of blood — and instead uses three of the oldest special effects: a clever, efficient script; two talented actors; and good cinematography — and it uses them pretty damn well.

Insidious is out in the US now. It’s rated PG-13 ’cause it’s scary.

Another Year, from Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake director Mike Leigh, centers around one blissfully happy family, Tom (Jim Broadbent), Gerri (Ruth Sheen), and their son Joe (Oliver Maltman), and a handful of profoundly unhappy satellites — chief among them Mary (Lesley Manville), a divorced, forty-something co-worker of Gerri’s, desperately lonely and unable to meet a man up to her inordinately high standards.

True to life, Mary finds Ken (Peter Wight), another friend of the happy couple’s, whose brand of loneliness is nearly identical to her own, “weird” and pushes away his (admittedly ungentlemanly) advances, steadfast in her belief that she could do better…  and, in fact, setting her sights on Tom and Gerri’s thirty-something son, in the process. Mary’s one-sided flirtation with Joe becomes complicated by the introduction of a new girlfriend, Katie (Karina Fernandez), but… as the title would lead you to believe, the film ends more or less where it began. The film has no climax, and few confrontations; those few that occur are largely by Tom, and he’s quickly glanced into submission, presumably out of some sense of propriety. The sad irony, of course, being that in some cases, tough love is the greater love that you can give someone you honestly consider a friend.

While it may be open to interpretation, and this is certainly colored by my own experience (as are all films), I felt some measure of quiet condemnation of Tom and Gerri’s relative inaction to their friends’ loneliness. They may not be responsible for their misery, but you can’t help feeling that the couple takes some satisfaction in surrounding themselves with the desperately unhappy, or that they could, just possibly, make a little more of an effort to help them. Judging from other reviews, that may just be my reading of it, having had a few spots of crushing loneliness myself, on a few occasions in my life (yes, I know, poor me), but in one early, telling sequence where Mary is invited over for dinner, she inquires about whether anyone else was going to be there, and Tom replies, “We want you all to ourselves.”

Tom, Mary, and Joe in Another Year

That is the real beauty of Another Year (and, indeed, all of Leigh’s films that I’ve seen): thanks to its flawless cast (largely consistent of Mike Leigh regulars), the characters are just so utterly real, that you love them, ache for them, become cross with them and tire of them like real people. Over the course of Another Year, Mary’s numbing misery of loneliness slowly and surely eat away at her, and you die a little each time. Ultimately, Another Year is a bit of a downer. But, you know, that’s how life is sometimes.

Another Year was released last fall in the UK and a few other countries. It is currently in limited release here in the States and will find its way to Australia later this month.

Directed by Mike Leigh.
Starring Imelda Staunton, Phil Davis, Peter Wight, Eddie Marsan, Adrian Scarborough and Daniel Mays.

In Topsy-Turvy director Mike Leigh’s new drama, Vera Drake, Imelda Staunton (Sense & Sensibility, Shakespeare in Love) stars as the title character, a wonderfully cheerful, caring wife and mother of two grown children who works as a housekeeper for a few wealthy families in post-World War II England. Vera helps care for a few of her neighbors and her elderly mother as well, out of the kindness of her heart, and whenever a problem arises, Vera puts on a kettle — because a cup of tea fixes everything. Leigh takes his time setting up what a remarkably kind woman Vera is, but he drives home this point one time too many when her brother-in-law comments to her husband, Stan, that “she’s got a heart of gold, that woman.” It may seem to be an insignificant moment of excess, but it is still somewhat significant considering Vera performs illicit abortions for women who can’t afford or wouldn’t be allowed a legal one.

In contrast to Vera’s impoverished clientele, Susan (Sally Hawkins), the daughter of one of Vera’s wealthy employers, is raped by a suitor and becomes pregnant. Going through the legal channels, she procures her abortion for the sum of 150 guineas. By comparison, Lily (Ruth Sheen), the woman who puts those in need of help in touch with Vera, charges two guineas for Vera’s services. Vera is unaware of this, however; her own motivations are entirely charitable. While Susan is required to submit to a rather demeaning psychological exam, her ordeal is a simple one, on the whole. At the time, British law only permitted abortions when they were deemed liable to endanger the health of the mother, so Vera’s clients — including a woman with seven children already and a woman who didn’t want her husband to know she had cheated on him — would most likely not been granted one, even if they could afford one.

Vera administers the abortions by pumping soapy water (with a small amount of disinfectant, presumably for sterilization) into the woman’s vagina through a rubber syringe until they feel full. After a day or two, they feel a pain, they go to the bathroom, and it all comes out. She does this for a number of women in the first half of the film, and all of them presumably turn out fine. (We are told later on in the film that this was considered the safest method by other back-alley abortionists. In any case, she’s not scraping the women’ insides with a coat-hanger.) Eventually, however, one of Vera’s clients has complications and is taken to the hospital — the first of her clients to have any problems, to her knowledge, in her twenty or so years of administering them. While the girl’s mother initially claims that her daughter is having a miscarriage, the doctors realize the truth of the matter and call the police.

Staunton’s performance has already won her the Coppa Volpi for the Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival, and it is certainly riveting. Vera’s two main modes in the film are cheerful benevolence, as she is in almost the entire first half, and tearful remorse, as she is in almost the entire second half. During the first hour, this constancy makes the role seem almost one-note, but with one absolutely heart-wrenching shot, spotlighting Vera’s face as it transitions from the former to the latter as she realizes why the police have shown up at their home, Staunton masterfully demonstrates that trick lost on most Hollywood actors: subtlety.

Mike Leigh also shows an admirable amount of restraint, considering the film takes on such a hot-button issue. In one of the few times the film addresses the morality or immorality of abortion, Vera’s disapproving son Sid (Daniel Mays) trots out the baby-killing argument, but this line of conversation is … er, aborted … before it collapses into a series of all the tired, cliché arguments from either side of the issue. Vera never denies that what she did was illegal — and, of course, few people would argue that it should be legal for people who are not registered medical practitioners to give abortions.

It’s not really the morality of abortion in general that the film is really tackling, which I was tremendously grateful for, having always felt that the mainline arguments by pro-lifers and pro-choicers alike are utterly full of shit. What Vera Drake addresses is a much more practical subject: the morality of a society that only allows safe abortions to be accessible to the rich. Neither didactic nor melodramatic, Leigh has managed to create as objective a treatment of the subject as I can imagine. As such, Vera Drake is an effective condemnation of such a society — and, if that wasn’t enough, it’s just a damn fine movie.

Vera Drake is playing at the Landmark Century and the Century 12/CinéArts 6 in Evanston.

Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky.
Starring Karl Markovics, August Diehl and Devid Striesow.

Unless you paid attention to the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar nominations, you probably haven’t heard of The Counterfeiters; I hadn’t heard of it until then, myself, but after seeing the trailer (at Apple), I made sure to keep it on my radar. When I saw that the Gene Siskel Film Center had an advanced screening of it a couple of weeks back (at Landmark’s Century Centre), I leaped at the opportunity — and I was not disappointed.

The Counterfeiters is a tight, thrilling, true-life drama anchored its amazing lead, Karl Markovics, who plays Salomon Sorowitsch, a Polish Jew known as “The King of the Counterfeiters.” Arrested in the lead-up to WW2 and subsequently sent to a concentration camp, Sorowitsch survives on his artistic skills before being transferred to the Sachsenhausen camp. There, he learns the officer who arrested him is heading up “Operation Bernhard,” a Nazi plan to destabilize the British economy by flooding it with counterfeit pound notes — and they need his help to perfect their forgeries.

Sorowitsch and his fellow counterfeiters — comprised mainly of bankers, printers, and other artisans — are treated surprisingly well, compared to the other prisoners at the camp (from whom they are kept apart), which keeps The Counterfeiters from being quite as depressing as many Holocaust films, but they’re constantly reminded of the killings going on outside their isolated corner; certainly, the Nazis don’t think of them any different than the rest of the Jews and only treat them differently because their commanding officer, Sturmbannführer Herzog (Devid Striesow), orders them to — more because he recognizes that these artists need to be in good health to do their best work than because he thinks well of them.

The director, Stefan Ruzowitzky, occasionally goes out of his way not to paint the Jewish characters in black and white; some older Jews at the camp complain about a few others singing “that nigger music,” for instance. But he needn’t have bothered: Sorowitsch is hardly a picture of morality; the true moral “hero” of the story, if he can be called one, is a fellow named Adolf Burger (played by August Diehl), a collotype expert who singlehandedly — and against his fellow counterfeiters’ wishes — sabotages the plan to counterfeit the US dollar for months.

But this is not a story of heroes; it’s a story of survival. And it’s one hell of a story.

The Counterfeiters is rated R. It begins a limited release run stateside on February 22, 2008.

Directed by Brian Dannelly.
Starring Jena Malone, Mandy Moore, Macaulay Culkin, Patrick Fugit, Heather Matarazzo, Eva Amurri, Martin Donovan and Mary-Louise Parker.

The unholy suckiness that Christian rock generally traffics in is entirely too easy to make fun of, so it’s refreshing that Saved! takes the high road and allows its soundtrack to be kind of good. Besides some seemingly authentic (but most likely not) Christian rock, it features a few secular songs with the G- or J-words in them, such as Santana’s “Jesus Is Just Alright” and, believe it or not, the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” covered by Mandy Moore and Michael Stipe, who also served as producer. Similarly, the amount of sincerity and respect with which co-writer and director Brian Dannelly treats not only the film’s soundtrack, but also its genre, its characters and its intended audience is also refreshing — so much so that the fact that Saved! is a damned funny movie seems almost like a bonus.

In Saved!, an American Eagle Christian High School student named Mary (Jena Malone) who gets impregnated by her gay boyfriend (Chad Faust) and then proceeds to hide it from her friends and family over the course of the school year. The story occasionally wanders away from Mary and her pregnancy to concentrate on her mother’s flirtation with married-but-separated Pastor Skip (Martin Donovan) and wheelchair-bound Roland’s (Macaulay Culkin) blossoming relationship with the school’s Jewish hellion (Eva Amurri), as well as throw-away bits like Mary and her mother Lillian (Mary-Louise Parker) seeing a TV promo for a cancer movie starring Valerie Bertinelli (as herself) on Lifetime. (Mary-Louise Parker’s “Oh, that looks good” is hilariously sincere.) Somewhere in there, the filmmakers manage to squeeze in Patrick Fugit (Almost Famous), who provides a likeable enough romantic interest as a straight boy (Pastor Skip’s son, naturally) who Mary becomes interested in through the course of the school year, despite the obvious weirdness. The various threads all come together on prom night, of course, because this is still a high school movie after all; that’s how it’s supposed to happen.

Saved! never seriously questions faith itself any more than your typical episode of 7th Heaven, and it’s simply misguided to expect it to — you don’t walk into a Christian bookstore and look for Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian. Decidedly more on the level of, say, Mean Girls (minus the PG-13 T&A) than Election as high school satires go, Saved! is a surprisingly intelligent and even occasionally subtle movie that is, in every respect except for its Christian school setting, a by-the-numbers teen comedy: relatively flat characters, derivative plot and all. But I don’t mean that in a bad way; in this case, the flatness of the characters and predictable plot, help in some ways to underscore the film’s general message, which is clearly targeted much more towards believers than non-believers. Saved! is a terrific example of how the use of stereotypical characters and stock plots can be effectively handled (at least when the stereotypes used are at least somewhat rooted in reality, and from my own experiences being a part of a Christian youth group in my early teens, Saved!’s “Jesus freak” characters are definitely not wholly fiction; in fact, I would say the self-righteousness and condescension depicted in Saved! is a little mild compared to the beliefs of most evangelical Christians). The characters’ Christianity is occasionally played for laughs (yes, there is a “missionary position” joke in the movie) but their Christianity itself is never the butt of a joke, even though some specific few of their more misguided beliefs are fair game, most prominently their attitudes towards other religions (“heathens”) and homosexuality (“faggotry”).

The film has been chastized by some critics for making fun of its Christian characters, and by other critics for not making fun of them enough; both of these viewpoints are way off-base, because although hardcore Bible thumpers won’t agree with me, Saved! is, at its heart, a Christian film. What Saved! isn’t, though, is a fundamentalist Christian film. It recognizes, as Brian Dannelly stated in a recent interview with the Seattle Post Intelligencer, that “evangelical conservatives [have] hijacked the term ‘Christian,’” and that there are some fundamental flaws in their ideas of Christ and of Christianity (not to mention the world around them). But despite the movie-butter-induced visions that other reviewers have had that lead them to believe otherwise, Saved! absolutely does not pass judgment on its characters nor does it hold them up for ridicule the way some close-minded believers have said (and some close-minded non-believers would prefer). It only recognizes that they have a little room for improvement. Every character, even the movie’s closest thing to a villain, Hilary Faye, is implicitly forgiven and redeemed at the end, because that’s what Christianity is all about, not cynicism or hate — at its roots, true Christianity, on a personal level, is just about becoming a better person.

Saved! is playing at Pipers Alley, River East 21 and the Century 12/CineArts 6 in Evanston. Incidentally, Michael O’Sullivan’s review of Saved! for the Washington Post is quite possibly the most ridiculous review I’ve read of this film.

I’ve been defending The Green Hornet‘s potential for a long time. Hell, I was even quoted in a press release for some Hornet toys about how excited I was to see the movie — largely (okay, entirely) because of my faith in Michel Gondry. And now I’ve seen it.

On the up side, my faith in Gondry is left intact, and I don’t feel I need to eat my words: Hornet is, indeed, a fun, funny movie with a fair amount of the Michel Gondry visual insanity. Jay Chou (as Kato) handles himself well enough in the action scenes that I never missed Stephen Chow, and Gondry shoots the fights (and car chases) beautifully: fluidly, coherently, and stylishly.

The down side is that when Kato’s not gloriously whooping ass, the rest of the film is a thoroughly generic action comedy (albeit a funnier one than most). And there’s just not enough of that Gondry insanity. Most of my favorite shots are still those already seen in the trailers. There’s more cool shit to be seen in the movie, especially in one fantastic sequence late in the film, but I made the mistake of hoping for even more.

The plot of the film is a totally generic hero-versus-drug-crime-lord tale — the kind you’ve seen before a few too many times, and with not enough variations on that theme to be of much interest. The jokes worked into the story are very funny (if you like Rogen’s relatively gentle, self-deprecating style of humor, as I do), but perhaps not enough to redeem the movie on that basis alone. Such a lack of substance would be fine, though, if the style of the film is over the top — but we only got a few glimpses of that here.

Aw yeah, Kato's gonna whoop some ass.

Perhaps we’ll get there next time Gondry gets behind the camera for an action movie — and I certainly hope he does more, ideally with a script he can really sink his crazy teeth into. Hornet tasted like an appetizer. I’m usually good about not letting expectations (or hopes) get the better of me when seeing a movie, but that may have happened in this case: if I gave half stars, I’d say Hornet was a solid 3 1/2 star movie. I felt the same way about Megamind, but rounded up there because it had more up its spandex sleeves than I had expected. Here, Hornet had a bit less.

Since much of the negative hype surrounding this film has been about the 3D conversion, it bears mentioning that the conversion here is surprisingly decent — but it’s also flawed enough to recommend against seeing it in 3D. While the conversion isn’t embarrassingly bad, they had so much time to perfect the conversion (nearly a year!) that if this is the best conversions can get, I’d say it’s time to just stop trying to change live-action movies to 3D. Especially when complex objects overlap other complex objects — such as a tree slowly moving against grass in the background, the conversion produces a noisy, digital halo where the computers have to make up image behind the foreground object to simulate depth. This halo isn’t usually very noticeable — I was definitely looking for such artifacts — but when you do notice it, it can be a little distracting. In faster shots, though, it works much better; the flaws aren’t as easy to spot.

Even at its best, the conversion in Hornet is never as strong as any film shot in 3D — and it can’t hold a candle to the 3D found in CGI animated features like Tangled or How to Train Your Dragon. In those films, the 3D is gorgeous and truly immersive, truly adding to the experience of the films, and it’s almost certainly more effective because it’s exaggerated slightly, as the filmmakers have all the information they could possibly need in order to push objects and scenery as far out towards the viewer as they want: it’s already in the computer. With a conversion, the farther you want to push something out, the more the computer needs to make up, the more obvious that halo is — right when you need it to look its best, it’s at its worst.

The Green Hornet is rated PG-13. Skip the 3D version. See it in 2D, and keep your expectations low.

I know, Tangled has been out for a while, but while I thought the trailers looked amusing, I didn’t really expect to see what I think of as the first Disney classic since the three-peat of Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. That statement will chafe fans of The Lion King or Lilo & Stitch (and I absolutely adore Lilo & Stitch); it’s not to say, necessarily, that Tangled is better than all of those films, just that something about those films lacked the fantastical, fairy tale setting that I associate with “classic Disney.” (To further qualify that statement, I’ve skipped several Disney animated features after the disappointing Pocahontas.)

It’s more than just setting, though: Tangled‘s songs are — for the first time since The Little Mermaid and Beauty & the Beast — truly good, not just serviceable. Composer Alan Menken has found a fantastic new collaborator in lyricist Glenn Slater; none of Menken’s Disney efforts since the death of Howard Ashman quite recaptured that same Disney magic like Slater and Menken do in Tangled.

The leads — Mandy Moore’s Rapunzel and Zachary Levi’s Flynn Rider — are endearing and memorable, and yet very much in the classic Disney mold. Moore (who impressed me in both Saved! and Dedication) is utterly irresistible as Rapunzel, played as an infectiously excitable almost-18 year old girl who seems very much like the classic Disney princess… hopped up on Red Bull. If she comes off a bit extreme, it’s only appropriate: where Ariel and Belle were girls confined by their parents or their “small provincial town” their whole lives, Rapunzel grew up in one building for as long as she can remember.

Despite all of this rekindling of the old Disney magic, though, Tangled manages to feel fresh and modern. Perhaps most impressively, it does it earnestly, without that grating snarky attitude of the Shrek movies — that feeling of superiority over its own subject matter — that has come to mean (at least with me) “we know this isn’t really that great, but if we pretend we’re just kidding around and stick in some fart jokes and pop songs, you might fall for it.”

I groaned (while smiling) at a couple of silly jokes, but the film simply never hits a false note. The handful of brief action sequences are tremendously fun, the pacing is fast and smooth, and it tugs at the heartstrings a couple of times — perhaps not so forcefully as either Toy Story 3 or How to Train Your Dragon did earlier this year, but with no less skill. Despite its middling performance at the box office, this Rapunzel will soon secure her place in Disney’s princess pantheon — and it will be well-deserved.

See it while you still can, or keep your eye out for the DVD.

I didn't mention it in my review, but the animation is gorgeous, and the 3D is very well-used.

Tangled is rated PG for “brief, mild violence,” apparently. I wouldn’t have guessed it, myself. It’s a totally kid-friendly flick.

The King’s Speech is the tale of the not-yet-crowned King George VI and his speech therapist. I know, it sounds extraordinarily dull, right? Except that it’s not.

Crackling dialogue and an absolutely stunning performance by Colin Firth make this a English production a riveting crowd-pleaser in the best sense of the term. Firth’s work masterfully sidesteps any cynical “poor little rich boy” resistance you might have, utterly humanizing Prince Albert, the Duke of York, who was born second in line to the throne and unexpectedly crowned after a royal scandal — just in time for England to get pulled into World War II. (The trailer is all you need in the way of plot synopsis.) As you can imagine, a Duke needs to speak publicly every now and then (and certainly a King does), so — speech therapy to the rescue!

“Bertie” and his therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush, who also produced) are the warm, fuzzy heart of the film, and its their interactions that make The King’s Speech such a joy to watch, but a host of ace supporting players fill out the film beautifully, most notably Helena Bonham Carter as Bertie’s wife.

History buffs may smirk a bit at the seriousness of “Bertie’s” stammer; by most of the accounts I could find online, his stammer was never so bad as depicted in the film, and even so, Logue’s treatment had allowed him to speak publicly without a stammer (or without much of one) within a couple of years. Most of the facts behind the film do, in some loose sense or another, seem to be faithful to the truth, but it is more than a bit exaggerated in the dramatization. It’s a movie, after all, not a documentary.

Movie buffs will definitely smirk at the slightly too familiar story points: the set-up, treatment, growing friendship, a setback and a falling out, and then, of course, patching things up just before the critical moment (the titular King’s speech). Whether these are based on real events or simply dramatic inventions, I can’t say for sure, but the strength of the dialogue and the performances make it all ring true, at least for the duration of the film.

The King’s Speech is rated R for a bit of language (the S-word and the F-bomb are dropped multiple times, mostly in one scene related to the Duke’s therapy). There is no sex or violence in the film, and even just a bit of implied impropriety. Frankly, it’s absurd that this film is rated R; it’s absolutely a family film on every level. If the film isn’t playing near you yet, it will be soon.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is fucking weird, man. This Finnish feature is based on two popular and equally weird short films by the same team from 2003 and 2005, but it’s sort of an origin story behind those shorts, so you don’t need to be familiar with them at all (in fact, I hadn’t heard of them until after I saw the film).

Here’s how it goes: Up in the arctic circle, in the Korvatunturi Mountains, a team of archaeologists has just dug up what they were looking for: Santa Claus. Except this isn’t the Santa Claus we know and love… For some reason, this Santa is a child-eating killer. Or something like that. (The film brilliantly portrays this as drawn from the true origins of the Santa Claus story; it’s not, but a few critics seem to have fallen for it.)

Anyway, children in the nearby village start disappearing; a team of hunters capture him (or have they?) and try to sell him back to the corporation that sponsored the dig; and the story takes a couple of hilarious, movie cliché-inspired left-turns along the way.

Rare Exports is charmingly, disturbingly weird, and yet… in the end, it’s not nearly as dark as you might expect from the trailer. I certainly wouldn’t call it a horror movie, or really even a thriller. It’s just one messed up little adventure story — very much in the Christmas movie tradition… except for, you know, the psycho Santa thing. The lead child (Onni Tommila) is an adorable scene-stealer who centers the film admirably.

Unfortunately, the storytelling is a little messed up, too — when the hunters discover the body of “Santa,” for instance, they initially think he’s dead. Only after entirely too much time has passed, do these hunters realize he isn’t. But the few eye-rolling moments like that aren’t enough to outweigh the film’s bizarro charm.

If you can, see in theaters this Christmas, or on video next year. Better yet, see it with an impressionable kid.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is rated R because there’s a lot of naked Santa in it and a bit of language. There’s not really a lot of violence in it; parents okay with their kids getting an eyeful of old-man schlong (mostly from a distance) shouldn’t find anything too objectionable in the violence. It opens in Chicago at the Music Box Theatre on Christmas Eve.

Directed by Tom McGrath.
Written by Alan J. Schoolcraft and Brent Simons.
Starring Will Ferrell, Brad Pitt, Tina Fey, Jonah Hill, and David Cross.

After Dreamworks finally grew up and made its first truly great film with How to Train Your Dragon, I was a lot more interested in Megamind. Had Dreamworks finally seen the light? Did they finally realize that the short-term benefits of cheap pop culture references are greatly outweighed the long-term benefits of just making a good freakin’ movie? The answer, I’m sad to say, is: “Aw hell to the no.” (Get it? I couldn’t just say no, because it’s a Dreamworks movie! Now I’m driving the joke home too hard, because it’s a Dreamworks movie! Ahem. Anyway.)

When it’s great, it’s great, but Megamind is regrettably peppered with a few too many of mind-numbingly stupid gags to just get passed them like the two “undies” jokes in Dragon, and it incongrously tacks a groan-inducing song and dance number set to Michael Jackson’s “Bad” to the end of the film, apparently because it wants to leave the audience with a bad taste in their mouth. The taste of vomit. That kind of stuff, and a few too many more nitpicks like it, drag down an otherwise fun and often very funny super-hero action movie from being a truly terrific flick to just being an above-average Dreamworks cartoon… with some extremely cool stuff in it, (Mega-)mind you.

Megamind is at its best as an action flick — there’s stuff you see in Megamind that has never been seen on the big screen, at least not with these production values, like a supervillain swinging the top of a skyscraper at another hero like a baseball bat. You’ve definitely seen it in comics, or a few cheaply animated cartoon, but you haven’t seen it look this good. The action is so fun and so well done that it makes you ache to see a well done Superman movie. And that brings me to my two biggest problems with the movie, which, for lack of time, I’ll limit myself to…

This film is blatantly just the Superman mythology with a barely enough tweaks to prevent a lawsuit: Metro Man is a conceited, dim Superman; Roxanne Ritchi is Lois Lane almost note for note; Hal Stewart is a creepy riff on Jimmy Olsen, red hair and all; and Megamind could very easily have been Lex Luthor in one of his evil scientist incarnations. Hell, he’s even bald. For all the criticism (or praise) that The Incredibles gets for being a riff on the Fantastic Four, at least they changed up the formula, and Syndrome wasn’t a thinly-disguised Doctor Doom. But maybe criticizing a Dreamworks movie for not being original is a waste of time.

My other big quibble requires a bit of a spoiler warning. (Mind you, the film’s trailer spoils it for you, too.) The premise of the film is this: evil genius Megamind (Ferrell) accidentally kills his arch-nemesis Metro Man (Pitt), leaving him kind of bored and aimless in life after taking over Metro City, so he gives Hal Stewart (Hill) superpowers in order to turn him into a new hero. But, because Hal Stewart is creepy and ugly, of course he’s not hero material. Tighten (yes, not “Titan” — Tighten) quickly turns bad, and without a hero to fight off this new supervillain, Megamind steps up and becomes the good guy.

Which is all well and good, but everybody — Roxanne (Fey) and all of Metro City — is so quick to forgive Megamind’s past and hail him as a hero that it strains credulity way too much. I mean, if you can believe that he never once seriously injured a single innocent person, despite years of terrorizing the city, not even accidentally… except for Metro Man, whom everybody seems to mostly forget about… then maybe that’s believable, but come on. (End spoilers.) For me, at least, that flies past straining credulity and well into contrived territory. At super-speed.

But, seriously, the super-hero action is pretty awesome stuff. If that’s not enough for you, give it a pass. If it is, though, as it is with me, then you’ll have a lot of fun… in addition to rolling your eyes at the Dreamworksiness of it all.

Black Dynamite

Spoofs are a tough thing to pull off. Even when they manage to be funny, they’re rarely funny for more than half an hour, and usually so overloaded with padding as to render them a waste of time overall. Even more frustrating is when spoofs write themselves into a corner so badly that they end up turning into straight-faced, crappy version of the movies they’re supposedly parodying.

So it was with some trepidation that my friend Pete and I tossed in Black Dynamite one evening… and almost immediately loved it. Not only does Black Dynamite work shockingly well as a comedy — never wearing out its welcome for the full, brisk 84 minutes — it’s also a pretty effective action movie, thanks to its co-writer and star Michael Jai White.

The premise is a cliché as they come — Black Dynamite avenges his brother’s death (a.k.a. Revenge Plot #3) — but this sort of movie isn’t about plot; it’s about execution, and Black Dynamite is at once a terrific action movie, a painfully funny comedy, and a spot-on parody of the blaxploitation genre, both the relatively down-to-earth movies like the first Shaft and, over the course of the film, the increasingly ludicrous stuff from the tail end of the wave.

For me (and, I think, many film buffs), the best laughs were from the many so-dumb-they’re-brilliant touches peppered throughout the movie: a boom mike dipping into view, straight into Black Dynamite’s impressive afro; “I threw that shit before I walked in the room!”; and the lyrics at one point in Adrian Younge’s fantastically funky score giving a literal play-by-play of the on-screen proceedings.

Sadly, the film sank like a stone in theaters, only screening in 70 theaters for two whole weeks. But that’s what home video is for, isn’t it?

Black Dynamite is available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and Netflix (via disc and streaming).

Recommended Reading: If you loved Black Dynamite, check out Brian Maruca and Jim Rugg’s similar, yet also brilliant Afrodisiac.

When I saw Gone Baby Gone back in 2007, one late plot twist soured the film for me a bit, I assume that was taken from the book, and I came away exceedingly impressed by the cast and especially its director… Ben Affleck. What could have been a very ham-fisted tale was dealt with with impressive deftness — especially for a first-time feature director and an actor-turned-director, at that.

Actor-directors often lack an eye for visuals, opting instead to plop the camera in front of their actors and let ‘em go. They tend to get very good performances, but lack enough visual polish to be more than just serviceable directors, at least for me. George Clooney is a solid director (I love Good Night and Good Luck, in particular), for instance, but visually, his films are somewhat pedestrian.

When The Town was announced, I was both excited to see if Ben Affleck’s fantastic turn behind the camera was just a fluke, and kind of apprehensive about his choice for a lead: himself. Turns out — unlike many actor-directors — Affleck knows well enough to let his co-stars outshine him when they need to, and on the whole The Town was a hell of a lot of fun. While the film isn’t half as heavy and thought-provoking as Gone Baby Gone, it’s not trying to be. The Town is much more of a straight-up crime flick, but once again, it’s impressively well-told.

The plot — which was drawn from the Chuck Hogan novel Prince of Thieves — goes like this: in the course of a bank robbery, the robbers take a hostage (Rebecca Hall). Afraid that she may know something that could send them to jail, the leader of the robbers, Doug (Affleck), begins to spy on her, eventually meeting her and… well, this being the movies, they fall in love. It’s a bit of a stretch, but it’s handled well enough that I got past it easily. Their new relationship established the real stakes of the film — not just their relationship (which is a bit hard to care about), but Doug’s relationship with his partners in crime.

Anchoring the film are three robberies: a bank robbery that opens the film, an armored car robbery, and… one other one that I’ll let you discover on your own. Crucially, Affleck directs these, too, with a surprisingly strong hand. But the characters and their varied collisions are every bit as tense and enthralling as the action, and it’s those scenes that lift the movie up from just another gritty, violent, but ultimately empty crime flick to the kind of movie I’ll gladly revisit again.

Ben Affleck the director is officially, most definitely, not a one hit wonder.

The Town is rated R for violence, language, drug use, and a brief flash of boobies early in the film. Not Blake Lively’s.

The Proposition is a 2005 Australian Western centering a British lawman in a small Australian town Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), and deal he makes with… not the devil, but a devil — namely Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce). Charlie is presented with an ultimatum: to save his younger brother Mikey from hanging, he must kill his older brother Arthur (Danny Huston), the leader of a small gang of heinous, psychopathic criminals.

As Charlie sets out to find his brother, he runs afoul of a racist bounty hunter (John Hurt, in an amazing glorified cameo), Captain Stanley attempts to protect his wife (Emily Watson) from the horrors of his job and their newly adopted home, a slimy piece-of-crap politician (David Wenham, a.k.a. Faramir) throws a cog in Stanley’s plan, and a bunch of messed up shit happens.

It’s that B story between Stanley and his wife that prevents the film from being too unrelentingly bleak, like director John Hillcoat’s follow-up, the Cormac McCarthy adaptation, The Road. The tender exchanges, sublimely etched by the two actors, almost erase the shocks in nearly every other scene. More than anything else, they give the film its humanity, and yet they also give you perspective from which to register the more shocking moments that much more intensely.

I don’t say this too often, and I don’t say this lightly, but The Proposition is a perfect film. From its first disorienting seconds to its gut-wrenching last, the film does everything it needs to, exactly when it needs to, exactly how it needs to. The violence is sickening, as it should be, to justify exactly why Arthur Burns needs to die. The impeccably shot Australian landscape is, at turns, gorgeous and oppressive, as it should be. The dialogue is exquisitely chosen. And the pace, though it may fool you in a few scenes, never lets up for a moment. The screenplay by Nick Cave (yes, that Nick Cave) is just that good.

This is the Western with all the hokum and fantasy sucked out, folks. It’s ugly, it’s difficult, and it’s an absolute masterpiece.

The Proposition is available from the Criterion Collection on DVD, Blu-Ray, Amazon Video On Demand, and Netflix (via disc and streaming).

Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?

Directed by Bae Yong-Kyun.
Starring Lee Pan-yong, Sin Won-sop, and Yi Pan-Yong.

Set entirely on and around a floating temple (a set built for the movie on an artificial lake built about 200 years ago, to be specific), Kim Ki-duk’s 2003 feature Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring is a beautifully crafted but frustratingly artificial tale of one man’s life told in five chapters. The most disappointing aspect of Spring is how amazingly beautiful it is — disappointing because the several gorgeously photographed, languorous shots of the valley around the temple on the lake, sublime music, and mostly solid, understated performances with minimal dialogue make for exactly the right tone for the kind of film this aspires to be — yet its story falls short.

The film begins innocently enough — in “Spring,” of course — with a charming but troubling story wherein Child Monk (Jong-ho Kim) ties stones to a fish, a frog and a snake. Old Monk (the enchanting Young-soo Oh) is disappointed in him, so he ties a large stone to the child as he sleeps that night and says that he’ll only remove it once the boy has found the three animals and released them, telling the boy that if any of the animals are dead, he will carry the stone with him in his heart for the rest of his life. As he finds them, he discovers that the fish and the snake have died and begins to cry. Even as I was moved by the boy’s tears, it troubled me that the Master placed more importance on the boy’s lesson than the lives of the animals, a choice that — although I am neither a Buddhist nor a scholar of Buddhism — struck me as rather inauthentic.

In “Summer,” a sick girl (Yeo-jin Ha) is brought to the temple by her mother. Boy Monk (Jae-kyeong Seo), probably in his late teens, is obviously sexually entranced by her and, after placing a blanket over her as she sleeps, tries to cop a cheap feel off her. She slaps him, but — since this is a movie — soon enough they are having sex. Health restored by the healing power of sex, she is soon sent home and, that night, Young Adult Monk sneaks away to follow her to the world in spite of his master’s warning that lust begets possessiveness, which in turn begets “intent to murder” — a line that is obviously foreshadowing because of its outright absurdity.

In “Fall” (“Autumn,” as the subtitles call it), our protagonist, now played by Young-min Kim, is now 30. The old monk learns from the timeworn movie cliché of newspaper used to wrap a fish that he has killed his wife (presumably the girl from “Summer”) in a jealous rage and fled from the law. Upon discovering his protégé has returned to the temple and is about to commit suicide with the knife he apparently used to kill his wife (it is, ludicrously, still encrusted with her blood), the old monk beats Young Adult Monk with a cane, and strings him up inside the temple while he writes the Prajna Paramita Sutra on the outdoor deck of the temple with his cat’s tail. He then instructs Young Adult Monk to carve out the characters with his knife. (Though we are not benefited with a translation, the Prajna Paramita Sutra is known as “the highest mantra, destroyer of all suffering, the incorruptible truth,” and the Sutra itself roughly translates as “Gone, gone, gone to the other shore gone. Enlightenment hail.”) While he carves out the symbols, the two monks are shortly joined by two police detectives (Dae-han Ji and Min Choi), who at first watch Young Adult Monk carving through the night and later help complete it for him after he has passed out from exhaustion before taking him off to face justice. As he wakes up and sees the Sutra, now painted by the Master and the two detectives, and we see enlightenment suddenly wash over Young Adult Monk’s face. Though well acted, it still seemed just a bit too easy.

After the younger monk is lead away by the police, the Master builds a pyre on the boat, covers his eyes, ears, and mouth with pieces of paper with the symbol for “shut” drawn on them (as the younger monk had done before his aborted suicide attempt), and ends his own life. It is significant to note here that suicide has actually been praised in some early Buddhist texts, but “the Buddha’s praise of the suicides [was] not based on the fact that they were in terminal states, but rather that their minds were selfless, desireless, and enlightened at the moments of their passing” (“Buddhist Views of Suicide and Euthanasia” by Carl B. Becker); it is reasonable to assume, then, that the old monk’s suicide is not motivated by any feeling that he has failed in teaching his apprentice — rather that he has completed his task by passing enlightenment on to his apprentice, a point that may be lost on viewers wholly unfamiliar with Buddhism.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring

In “Winter,” we assume Adult Monk has spent some time in prison, because he is now played by the director (who is 44). As he returns to the temple, he finds the Old Monk’s few possessions laid out as they’d conscientiously been left for him and a snake resting on the neatly folded robes (which, incidentally, should be hibernating during this season). He digs into the ice of the submerged boat and retrieves Old Monk’s teeth to place in a Buddha he carves out of ice and, after finding a book of martial arts stances, the Adult Monk meditates at various picturesque locales around the temple, giving us the overall impression that the monk is finalizing his own training.

Some time later, a veiled woman (Ji-a Park) walks out across the ice, prays and sobs with equal enthusiasm, and leaves her baby with the monk at the temple. As she leaves, we are treated to the most ridiculous moment in the film when she falls through a slightly iced over hole the monk had carved in the ice to wash himself through the winter, and dies. Yes, seriously. I would like to think that the woman committed suicide, but the scene certainly did not seem staged that way; also, why would she hide her face if she had intended to kill herself after giving up her child? (The moralistic implications of this, and we can only assume there must be some, are especially disconcerting because we are not granted any insight into why the woman is giving up her child; is giving up her child for any reason, however grave, an offense deserving of death?)

The next morning, led to the hole by the baby who has seemingly telepathically divined that his mother has fallen through the ice at that spot, Adult Monk retrieves her body and looks at her face, which we don’t see. Subsequently, the monk takes a Buddha and a millstone, which he ties to himself, and climbs to the top of a nearby mountain to place them where the Buddha will overlook the lake. For a film with so little dialogue, it is almost impressive how heavy-handed the themes are addressed. For instance, as Adult Monk climbs the mountain, we are shown flashes of the animals he tied rocks to as a child, and in its brief coda, “… and Spring,” we get a glimpse of the baby, now several years older and played by the same boy who played out protagonist in the first sequence, cruelly beating on a turtle’s shell, just so that we don’t miss the symbolism of it all.

It is tempting to argue that Spring is a fable, thereby dismissing all of the films absurdities. The first vignette certainly lends itself to this interpretation, but the strongly Western-influenced story doesn’t permit its characters to act as the archetypes that this interpretation requires. At the same time, the film is too frequently absurd, too theatrical, to accept matter-of-factly, either. Perhaps it is this Western influence that bothered me so much. It transforms what apparently intends to be read as a tale of “natural renewal” (as J. R. Jones described it in his capsule review for the Reader) and enlightenment, which is central to Buddhism, into a trite tale of redemption through enlightenment — perhaps influenced by the fact that Ki-duk was raised as a Christian, not as a Buddhist.

Ultimately crossing the thin line between exquisitely simple to gratingly simplistic, Spring simply made me want to run home and re-watch Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?, a 1989 feature by Bae Young-kyun and a masterpiece which falls decidedly on the more preferable side of that line. With more than just a few similarities, it is difficult to imagine that Kim Ki-duk wasn’t influenced by the earlier film. Set largely around a temple in the mountains of South Korea, Bodhi-Dharma details the lives of an old monk, his younger monk apprentice, and the young orphan who lives with them over a short period of time. In an early sequence less effectively echoed by the first “Spring” chapter of Spring, the young orphan in Bodhi-Dharma throws rocks at two jays, injuring one. Out of guilt, he attempts to nurse it back to life but fails, and the jay’s mate watches him from a distance thereafter.

Yong-Kyun Bae is a primarily a painter. Aside from Bodhi-Dharma, he has made only one other film.

While Bodhi-Dharma may not immediately appear as well-photographed (its lower budget and a less-than-perfect transfer to DVD are to blame, not poor cinematography), it has equally beautiful imagery but is thankfully devoid of the cloying, heavy-handed contrivances that make the new film more palatable to the critics in this country, who seem to only want to watch the same redemption story recycled over and over again and have almost uniformly heaped praise on Spring.

Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? is the film equivalent of a Buddhist koan like the one that introduces the film: “To the disciple who asked about ‘Truth,’ without a word, he showed a flower.” Beautiful, subtle, and thought-provoking, Bodhi-Dharma opens before your eyes like a blossoming rose; Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring, on the other hand, is more like a silk rose: a “perfect” — but far less interesting — approximation of the real thing.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring is currently playing at the Evanston Century 12/CineArts 6 and the Music Box.

Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? is available for rent from Facets, as well as GreenCine and Netflix.

(Originally published in Gapers Block on May 14, 2004. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring is now available on DVD via Netflix. Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? is available via Netflix Streaming with a different transfer — and a few minutes of additional footage — than the copy I reviewed. Multiplex readers will note that Bodhi-Dharma is one of Jason’s favorite movies, and it’s one of mine, as well, but I would advise you to be wide awake when you see it. Its glacial pace knocked me out the first four times I tried to watch it.)

Godzilla

Stray Dog

Directed by Akira Kurosawa.
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Awaji and Eiko Miyoshi.

Although Godzilla creator and producer Tomoyuki Tanaka lifted monster-sized elements from King Kong (1933) and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), an early film featuring effects by Ray Harryhausen (Clash of the Titans), the immediate inspiration for Godzilla was a 1954 incident in which a fishing boat called the Lucky Dragon was scorched by an American H-bomb test, seriously burning several of the crew and causing the eventual death of its radio operator from radiation poisoning — clearly the reference point for the opening scene of the original 1954 Japanese Godzilla in which Godzilla’s attack on a small boat appears only as a flash of light.

Science fiction writer Shigeru Kayama, along with screenwriters Ishiro Honda (who also directed) and Takeo Murata, extended the metaphor a bit by paralleling many scenes of death and destruction in Godzilla’s wake with the aftermath of the H-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, using images of a flattened, burning town and hospitals overflowing with people. These images vividly recall what little documentary footage I’ve seen of the Hiroshima aftermath (to be specifc, the stock footage used in the first 20 minutes of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour), but pretending that the film’s deeper meaning is much more complicated than “H-bomb testing is bad” is giving the filmmakers a little more credit than they deserve.

Excised from the 1956 Americanized version of the film — which removed, in all, 40 minutes of footage and added in several awkward scenes with Raymond Burr (written and directed by an American crew) — these restored scenes only lift Godzilla up from simply being a fun, cheesy giant monster movie to being a really good, fun, cheesy giant monster movie.

Many of Godzilla’s special effects are surprisingly good for the time and Akira Ikufube’s somber score adds to the feeling of impending doom, but the trouble is that when doom finally arrives, it’s really just not all that scary or exciting (whichever it’s trying to be). Many sequences in Godzilla are undeniably great — restored to its full 13 minutes, Godzilla’s second rampage is delightful, partly because of and partly in spite of a few giggle-inducing moments which I think were supposed to be frightening — but the film isn’t a gripping, tautly structured allegorical masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination. Ultimately, 50 years later, this first Godzilla is more interesting as a historical artifact from postwar Japan, shortly after the American occupation ended, than as a piece of entertainment.

Those familiar with the films of Akira Kurosawa will immediately recognize Takashi Shimura (Ikiru, The Seven Samurai) in the cast of Godzilla, though he is pretty much wasted in his role as the grandfather of all “we should study the thing that just killed hundreds of people!” scientists, Dr. Yamane. (He would reprise this role in 1959′s Godzilla Raids Again.)Shimura appeared in over a dozen Kurosawa films, from 1943′s Judo Saga, Kurosawa’s first film as director, to the actor’s last film, 1980′s Kagemusha: the Shadow Warrior, most often supporting Kurosawa’s favorite leading man, Toshiro Mifune, as in Stray Dog (1949), recently released for the first time on DVD by the Criterion Collection.

(Incidentally, Shimura isn’t Godzilla’s only link to Stray Dog. Godzilla director Ishiro Honda also served as Kurosawa’s chief assistant director on the earlier film. Later on in their careers, the two would pair up again, with Honda serving as assistant or second unit director on all five of Kurosawa’s last films: Kagemusha, Ran, Dreams, Rhapsody in August and, finally, the heartbreakingly appropriate masterwork Madadayo [Not Yet], which was both Honda and Kurosawa’s last film before their deaths in 1993 and 1998, respectively.)

While not Kurosawa’s first foray into film noir (that distinction belongs to Drunken Angel, which also featured Shimura and Mifune, in his first Kurosawa role), Stray Dog is widely acknowledged one of Kurosawa’s earliest masterpieces. Strongly influenced in its tone by American film noir, particularly Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948), Stray Dog is something like the Pulp Fiction of Japanese film noir (whereas Drunken Angel would be its Reservoir Dogs), influencing filmmakers such as Takeshi Kitano (Boiling Point), Shohei Imamura (Endless Desire) and Seijun Suzuki (Branded to Kill).

Set during the American occupation of Japan, Stray Dog centers on a young detective (Mifune, in his third of 16 Kurosawa roles) whose gun is stolen from him on a crowded train and the his increasingly frantic efforts to retrieve it. Takashi Shimura co-stars as the older and wiser partner, Detective Sato, whose purpose is served mainly by one somewhat didactic scene near the middle where Sato espouses much of the film’s themes. With the arguable exception of one too-long sequence towards the beginning of just a few too many shots of Mifune’s Detective Murakami wandering (undercover) the streets looking for black market gun dealers, Stray Dog is relentlessly paced from the start of the film to Murakami’s desperate face-off with the titular character; it’s a hell of a movie that no Kurosawa fan or crime film lover should miss.

Accompanying a new high definition digital transfer of the film is a fascinating, if overly talkative, commentary track by Stephen Prince, author of The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, which provides a great deal of historical context and is well worth checking out, as is the 32-minute documentary (an excerpt from a Japanese TV program called “Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create”) on the making of the film.

Godzilla is playing at the Music Box through July 15. I think Toshiro Mifune could take the big G in a fight.

The Criterion Collection’s edition of Stray Dog is available through Netflix, GreenCine.com, and (good) video stores everywhere.

(Originally published at Gapers Block on July 9, 2004.)

The Story of Floating Weeds

Directed by Yasujiro Ozu.
Starring Takeshi Sakamoto, Chouko Iida, Hideo Mitsui, Rieko Yagumo and Yoshiko Tsubouchi.

The Story of Floating Weeds is, like most of Ozu’s film’s, what the Japanese master would call a “home drama,” in the sense that it deals with a family. In this 1934 silent, an aging actor and his troupe stop in a small mountain town, and the actor pays a visit to an old friend and her son. That the boy is his illegitimate son is almost immediately obvious, though it is not immediately addressed. When his current lover, an actress in his troupe, learns he has been visiting his ex, she becomes jealous and takes steps to destroy his hopes for his son’s future.

When viewed with Floating Weeds, the film’s 1959 color remake (also directed by Ozu), it’s somewhat surprising to note that the two stories are only very subtly different. These subtle differences are largely the result of Ozu’s evolving directorial style and the differences in technology. The wonderful story, which remains almost completely unchanged aside from a change of setting—from a mountain town to one by the ocean. While I prefer the slightly more poetic, langorous look and tone of the later version, which was shot by Kazuo Miyagawa (Rashomon), the cast of the original film is easily the superior of the two.

The two versions remind me of the famous statement by Hitchcock regarding his own remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much: “The first was the work of a talented amateur, while the second was the act of a seasoned professional.” And, perhaps, to some extent, this statement applies to Ozu’s two Floating Weeds films, even though, with over twenty films to his credit by the time he had shot The Story of Floating Weeds, Ozu could hardly be called an “amateur.” Perhaps Hitchcock’s remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much was an influence in Ozu’s decision? Hitchcock’s original was released in 1934, as well, and the remake debuted in 1956, only a couple of years before Ozu would have begun work on his own revisitation. Whatever the actual reason, the minute differences, for film lovers or Ozu fans, are enough to pore over for hours. But what’s more important than any comparison between the two is simply seeing them: each of the stories of Floating Weeds is a bittersweet masterpiece in its own way.

The Story of Floating Weeds is playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Sunday, February 13, at 3:00pm, with David Drazin providing live piano accompaniment. The Story of Floating Weeds is also available in a two-disc set, Stories of Floating Weeds, from the Criterion Collection, which pairs it with its 1959 remake and also features commentaries by Ozu scholar Donald Richie (on The Story of Floating Weeds) and Roger Ebert (on Floating Weeds). The Criterion Collection version of The Story of Floating Weeds sets the film to a terrific piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin (although you can play it without the accompaniment, in case you want to listen to Dark Side of the Moon instead).
Early Summer

Directed by Yasujiro Ozu.
Starring Setsuko Hara, Chishu Ryu, Chikage Awashima, Kuniko Miyake, Ichirô Sugai and Chieko Higashiyama.

Like a couple of other later Ozu films, Early Summer revolves largely around the marrying-off of a daughter, this time called Noriko and played by Setsuko Hara, the picturesque star of a handful of Ozu films, including Tokyo Story and Early Autumn. Noriko simply wants to work at her job and hang out with her friends, but her family is eager for her to marry; at twenty-eight, Noriko is dangerously close to becoming an old maid—at least by the previous generation’s standards. When Noriko’s hilariously perverse boss (Shuji Sano) suggests a match twelve years her senior, her family—and in particular her elder brother Koichi (fellow Ozu regular Chishu Ryu)—is thrilled, but Noriko resists, instead gravitating towards a childhood friend.

As with The Story of Floating Weeds, the story isn’t one tenth as schmaltzy as its synopsis sounds. Ozu has a way of defusing much of the melodrama inherent in his plots by simply skipping past the obvious (and therefore unecessary) scenes. Ozu realizes that spaces between the dots hint at a story every bit as well as the dots themselves. And so, accordingly, we have a film revolving around a marriage and no glimpse of that marriage, or even of a courtship. As such, Early Summer is decidedly unromantic, but this is fitting: Noriko and her family are the story, not Noriko and her future husband.

Another familiar Ozu theme that Early Summer touches on is the effects of modernization on Japanese society. Here, this can be seen in the changing society, but the characters—particularly the women—manifest this in their choice between traditional and Western clothing. Noriko and her single friend Takako, of course, wear the latter. But the theme is addressed more directly, as well. In one dinner scene, Koichi states, “It’s deplorable, what’s happened since the war. Women have become so forward, taking advantage of ‘etiquette.’”

But Noriko disagrees, explaining that women have simply “taken our natural place. Men were too forward up to now.” In case you don’t fully understand this point, Donald Richie’s wonderful commentary to the Criterion Collection provides a great deal of cultural context, but thanks to the flawless cast, an understanding of this context is by no means necessary to follow the main story. Ozu, as ever, is nothing if not simple (which I mean as the highest compliment). I dare say you could follow Early Summer—or any of his films—without even reading the subtitles.

As Donald Richie also mentions in his commentary, home dramas like that of Early Summer, as well as The Story of Floating Weeds and Tokyo Story, have largely been relegated to TV (and to crap films like The Door in the Floor), which is a shame. Ozu’s films at first glance seem to be the smallest of all possible tales, but in the hands of a master, film has a way of amplifying stories to mythical proportions: characters become generations, towns become universes and a lingering five second shot becomes a glimpse into eternity.

Early Summer is playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Saturday, February 19, at 5:00pm and Wednesday, February 23, at 6:00pm. It is also available on a Criterion Collection DVD with the aforementioned audio commentary by Donald Richie and Ozu’s Films from Behind the Scenes, a charming, insightful conversation between three of Ozu’s now-elderly collaborators: child-actor and sound technician Kojiro Suematsu, assistant cameraman Takashi Kawamata and producer Shizuo Yamanouchi.

(Originally published at Gapers Block on February 11, 2005. Both of these films are available on DVD through Netflix, but are not on Netflix Streaming.)

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Most of the geeky kids of my generation were introduced to feature-length Japanese animation with Katsuhiro Otomo’s apocalyptic Akira, a stunning apocalyptic masterpiece. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my own introduction to it was when I was in the sixth grade or thereabouts. Lazing about the house one afternoon, I noticed that an animated feature called Warriors of the Wind was playing on HBO in a few minutes, so — budding animation buff that I was — I decided to give it a try. To put it mildly, it blew my little brain out the back of my skull.

I had never before seen anything even remotely like it. I couldn’t have. American cartoons were nothing like this. There were Disney cartoons, amusing fluff like Smurfs and embarrassing garbage like The Last Unicorn. Even action cartoons like Transformers (which I didn’t realize was also Japanese until many years later), G.I. Joe and the sadly short-lived Dungeons & Dragons were so kiddie-fied that even as I watched them, I knew they weren’t even remotely on the same level as Star Wars or other live-action films. Warriors of the Wind was on an entirely different level: it was an animated film for people with brains.

Some of the imagery from Warriors of the Wind stuck with me so strongly that several years later, rummaging through a dusty bin on the floor of a comics shop, I immediately recognized that film’s main character on the cover of a comic calledNausicaä of the Valley of Wind (pronounced “NOW-she-ka,” not, as my younger self had assumed, “NAW-sih-ka”). After a bit of research, I learned that Warriors of the Wind was an edited-down, American version of the original Japanese film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, based on his own comic book. Although I quickly found all seven volumes of the comic book, it took me about five years to track down a bootleg import of the uncut Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind on VHS, by which time Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke had been released in the United States.

Nausicaä, like Princess Mononoke, is an adventure story, and one that also avoids the “white hat/black hat” conceit of most American adventures. When a plane from the nearby Torumekian Empire crashes in the Valley of Wind, which lies on the outskirts of an enormous, ever-growing wasteland populated by strange, enormous insects, the Torumekian army quickly invades the Valley to secure its precious cargo. When Nausicaä, a princess of the Valley, and her friend, Lord Yupa, learn what that cargo is, they attempt to stop the Torumekian army from taking it home with them. Although the Torumekian princess Kushana and her army are clearly the “bad guys” of the film, Miyazaki never demonizes them outright. While they are brash and aggressive, they are doing what they feel is right for their country, regardless of the repercussions, rather like our own country (though any parallels in the film are inferences on the viewer’s part, not allegory).

Although I couldn’t have known it when I first saw Warriors of the Wind, the edited version is, by most accounts, a travesty. Warriors edits out a whopping 30 minutes of footage from writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s original 116 minute cut — in addition to renaming some characters, including Nausicaä, who goes by “Princess Zandra” in Warriors. Key scenes including a revelation on the origin and functions of the wasteland are excised, undermining the point of the film considerably. Still, it was the only edition available in the United States for a long time. Actually, Miyazaki’s dissatisfaction with this gutting of Nausicaä is why this and many other Studio Ghibli films took so long to be released in the United States.

There are a couple of reminders that the film was originally made in 1984. Miyazaki’s animation is gorgeous, of course, though it suffers slightly when compared to the more recent, more lushly animated Mononoke or Spirited Away, which cheated a bit and used computers for a number of shots that would have been either difficult or impossible to pull off by hand alone. Also, the score, though mostly beautiful, occasionally lapses into cheesy 1980s synthesizer music in some of the more action-oriented scenes. Only the latter of these bothers me, but it doesn’t detract from the film in any major way. The story, as with all of Miyazaki’s films, is the star. As it should be.

At long last, a legitimate, U.S. edition of Nausicaä hits the stands next week. Disney’s two-disc edition, entitled Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, will be released on Tuesday, February 21. In addition to the extra “the,” the new edition features an English dub starring Allison Lohman, Patrick Stewart, Uma Thurman and Edward James Olmos. It also includes the original Japanese language track, the complete storyboards, the original Japanese trailers and a featurette on the “birth” of Studio Ghibli.

Viz Comics recently released new editions of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind comics, also with an extra “the” in the title. Fans of the film should definitely check out the comic. It’s not just a great comic book that greatly expands on the film’s story. Instead, it is, like the animated feature based upon it, one of the greatest works of its medium.

Also due out from Disney and Studio Ghibli are U.S. editions of Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso (which is really weird, but fun) and the Hiroyuki Morita-helmed The Cat Returns, a slight fantasy that loosely ties into an older Ghibli film as yet unreleased in the United States called Whisper of the Heart.

Miyazaki’s next feature, Howl’s Moving Castle, an adaptation of the British children’s novel by Diana Wynne Jones, will be out sometime this summer.

(Originally published at Gapers Block on February 18, 2005. Nausicaä is available on disc through Netflix.)

So far, I’ve only seen the five available in four Criterion Collection DVD sets (Tokyo Story, Good Morning, Early Summerand Stories of Floating Weeds, containing The Story of Floating Weeds and its remake, Floating Weeds). Although, if I ever get over this wretched cold, I hope to see a few more at the Siskel Film Center in the coming weeks. Each film I’ve seen has been a touching portrait of a Japanese family (or families), beautifully told.

I encourage you to see any of them that you can, particularly those that are not available on DVD, since it may be the only chance you get for some time. But since I can only properly discuss those films I’ve seen, I’ll be touching on Tokyo Story and Good Morning in this column, to coincide with their upcoming screenings at the Siskel Film Center. Next month, I’ll talk about The Story of Floating Weeds and Early Summer, to more closely coincide with those films’ screenings.

Tokyo Story

Directed by Yasujiro Ozu.
Starring Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama, Setsuko Hara, Haruko Sugimura and Sô Yamamura.

Rightly considered by many critics as one of the greatest films ever made, Ozu’s 1953 film, Tokyo Story, is a quiet, melancholy tale of an elderly couple who travel from the country to Tokyo to visit their grown-up children. Too self-absorbed to show them around town, only their daughter-in-law Akiko (Setsuko Hara), who was widowed in the war, is genuinely pleased to spend time with them. Their real children send them off to a resort spa, only for their parents to return home early. When the mother (Chieko Higashiyama) falls ill, though, the children rush to her side, but it is too late for some of them.

Typical of Ozu’s later work, Tokyo Story employs a stripped-down style with almost no camera movement at all. (In fact, the camera moves only twice.) Each perfectly composed shot is, in effect, a snapshot of their lives, and Ozu’s camera sits still for us to absorb each one fully. The resulting, almost ambling pace of Tokyo Story may give the false impression that little is going on. On the contrary, the “action” of the story is simply underneath the surface. Your thoughts should be those of the characters, although Ozu never stoops to declaring outright precisely what those thoughts should be. If you haven’t seen it,Tokyo Story should be at the top of your list of films to see this month.

Tokyo Story is playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Saturday, January 15, at 3:00pm and Thursday, January 20, at 6:00pm. Tokyo Story is also available in a two-disc Criterion Collection edition featuring an audio commentary by Ozu scholar David Desser. The set also includes I Lived, But…, a two-hour documentary on the life and work of Yasujiro Ozu, and a 30-minute tribute to Ozu with directors Stanley Kwan, Aki Kurasmaki, Claire Denis, Lindsay Anderson, Paul Schrader, Wim Wenders and Hsiao-Hsien.

Good Morning

Directed by Yasujiro Ozu.
Starring Keiji Sada, Yoshiko Ryu, Chishu Ryu, Kuniko Miyake, Haruko Sugimura, Koji Shidara and Masahiko Shimazu.

A surprising, comical break from the more sober films, Good Morning (or Ohayo) is a loose remake of Ozu’s own, earlier I Was Born, But… (showing on Saturday, January 23, at 3:00, with an introduction by Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum). Like Tokyo Story, it is a portrait of post-World War II Japan, depicting modernization as a negative, but inevitable force in family life, shifting back and forth between the family’s petty, gossiping neighbors and their two sons’ bratty crusade to force their parents to buy a television set through a vow of silence.

Ozu mainstay Chishu Ryu holds the film together as their tight-lipped father, and the children, when they’re not being so bratty even I wanted to smack them, are charming, particularly the youngest, Isamu (Masahiko Shimazu), even though he isn’t a particularly good actor. I feel the ending goes on a few minutes too long, but perhaps I’m more troubled by the ending ideologically. I’m not spoiling anything by saying that, in the end, they do get a TV, and the idea that they should be rewarded for their behavior doesn’t sit well with me — although at the same time, there is really no other way the story could have ended. In any event, one of the film’s subtler themes, the importance of small talk between adults, is beautifully handled, and the film’s pervasive fart jokes (seriously) are irresistibly funny.

Good Morning is playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Saturday, January 29, at 3:00pm and Thursday, February 3, at 6:00pm. Good Morning is also available on a Criterion Collection DVD with no extras.

(Originally published at Gapers Block on January 5, 2005. Both films are available through Netflix, however only Tokyo Story is currently available via Netflix Streaming. Neither film is available on Blu-Ray in the United States, although there is a UK Blu-Ray of Tokyo Story; this could indicate that Criterion doesn’t have the rights to release Ozu’s films on Blu-Ray.)

Angels are a tricky thing in movies. Anything supernatural is, really. But where I can run with demons and devils as just fun monsters to toss into a story, when you start talking about an afterlife that’s pretty much the same as the one we’re living now, except with wings and all the sucky shit taken out, it’s just a bit more than I can take.

So it takes a special sort of movie to get me past that hurdle: It’s a Wonderful Life works, for intance, because of Jimmy Stewart and Frank Capra’s irresistible humanity. In a way, it’s the same kind of thing that made Wings of Desire work for me, too. On its face, it’s the story of an angel, Damiel (Bruno Ganz), who has become frustrated with the unending task of invisibly chronicling the lives of us humans on Earth — specifically 1980′s West Berlin. (Chronicling for whom and why are never really mentioned, and they’re irrelevant.) But like all great stories, it’s about a lot more than just its plot.

The film is shot beautifully in black and white, punctuated by moments of almost fluorescent color representing the humans’ perspective. (A conceit  borrowed from Powell and Pressburgers’s 1946 film, A Matter of Life and Death.) The first hour of the film moved along rather ponderously. It’s at once dizzying and appropriately dull as it depicts Damiel’s job as an angel, pausing occasionally for a conversation with his fellow angel Cassiel (Otto Sander, whose face is utterly fascinating).

Damiel falls for a trapeze artist named Marion (Solveig Dommamartin) and decides he wants to create his own “story,” one way or another. Shortly after the half-way point, Damiel and Peter Falk (playing himself, in town to film a movie), share a pivotal moment, and in that one hilariously brilliant twist, and the film catapults into motion, racing towards its inevitable, sweet conclusion.

Wings of Desire is available from the Criterion Collection on DVD and Blu-Ray — and, you can stream it through Netflix.

The Iron Giant

Directed by Brad Bird.
Starring Jennifer Aniston, Harry Connick Jr., Vin Diesel, Christopher McDonald, John Mahoney and Eli Marienthal.

The Incredibles

Directed by Brad Bird.
Starring Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah Vowell, Spencer Fox, Samuel L. Jackson, Jason Lee, Elizabeth Peña and Brad Bird.

Brad Bird’s first feature film, The Iron Giant, was a tiny masterpiece that, despite almost universal critical acclaim, slipped in and out of theaters with almost no audience whatsoever. (The film made back only half of its $50 million budget.) Loosely based on Ted Hughes’ 1968 children’s book, The Iron Man, the less-suable-by-Marvel-Comics Iron Giant is the story of Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal) and his giant, monosyllabic robot (a perfectly typecast Vin Diesel) from outer space, set during the Russophobic 1950s. Sent to investigate what is initially believed to be a meteorite landing, Kent Mansley (Happy Gilmore‘s Christopher McDonald) quickly learns that something else is wandering out in the woods near the Hughes’ home. Once Mansley finds his proof, General Rogard (Frasier‘s John Mahoney) comes in to destroy the giant at all costs. At turns hilarious, poignant and thrilling, The Iron Giant gets a bit heavy-handed with its anti-gun message, but not so much so that those of us without racks on our pick-ups would be turned off.
Terrific animation by the short-lived Warner Brothers Feature Animation Division (in its second and final production, after the disastrous Quest for Camelot) provides the only seamless integration of computer-generated and 2D animation that I’ve ever seen. By adding outlines to the robot and the various vehicles, and by not over-rendering them, Brad Bird’s team created a giant robot that comes across like a giant kid, in the best possible way. When the army sets off the giant’s defense mechanisms, all hell breaks loose. The Iron Giant was like nothing before or since — that is, until The Incredibles came out last weekend.

Cribbing a plot point (and that’s not all) from the greatest of all superhero comic books, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, The Incredibles centers on Bob Parr, a.k.a. Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson), who has been forcibly retired for the past 15 years, and sent with his family into hiding through something like the FBI Witness Protection Program, as have all of the other “Supers.” (“Super-hero” is a trademark jointly owned by Marvel and DC Comics.) But he isn’t the only Super in the family. His wife Helen, the former Elastigirl (Holly Hunter), can stretch her body like the Fantastic Four’s Mr. Fantastic. Their two older children have superpowers as well: the roughly 14-year-old Violet (This American Life’s Sarah Vowell) can turn invisible and create force fields just like the Fantastic Four’s Invisible Girl, and Dash (Spencer Fox) is super fast, like the Flash. Only the baby, Jack-Jack, seems to have no powers at all.

Bob, who has superstrength and some level of invulnerability, occasionally relives the good old days with his pal Lucius, a.k.a. Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson), who can create ice from the moisture in the air, like Iceman, but Bob’s adventures attract attention. When a mysterious woman named Mirage (Elizabeth Peña) identifies Bob as Mr. Incredible, she presents him an offer he can’t refuse: the opportunity to be a Super again. He gets back in shape and outfits himself with a new costume courtesy of his old designer, Edna Mode (a hilarious, scene-stealing performance by none other than director Brad Bird). But Bob doesn’t realize that Mirage’s shadowy employer has ties to his golden days…

Also reminiscent of Watchmen, which featured variations of the obscure Charlton Comics characters that Watchmen publisher DC Comics had just purchased, the powers of the major characters in The Incredibles are almost all obvious riffs on familiar DC or Marvel superheroes. However, their personalities are changed enough that they rise above mere carbon copies. In addition, the family dynamic (not to mention one especially familiar villain) makes it clear that the Incredibles themselves are a thinly-disguised variation on the Fantastic Four, minus the elemental motif and the silly origin. But while some critics have mistaken the derivative and comedic elements of The Incredibles for parody, it’s not. It’s a periodically light-hearted superhero action flick, but it is firmly entrenched in its genre, not a parody of it. Bird is brilliantly using the existing characters as the basis for a mythology, and even a passing familiarity with the source of his borrowed ideas adds depth to the background of an already richly textured film.

In the first half-hour of the film, we see a fair amount of history concerning how things were before the Supers went into hiding and what Mr. Incredible has been doing in the 15 years since. This provides much more back story than any Pixar film to date. But, with a running time just shy of two hours, we get more story than in any Pixar film to date, too. I quickly realized I was watching something Pixar had never done before: The Incredibles is not an outright kiddie flick like Finding Nemo or the Toy Story movies. Instead, The Incredibles is an action-adventure story aimed at a somewhat older crowd, along the lines of the Indiana Jones movies or the original Star Wars trilogy, and the pacing of the story follows suit. Some critics have called the first half-hour of the film slow-paced, but they are saying that in the wrong context. The first act of the film is only slow-paced compared to Finding Nemo or other children’s movies. When compared, as it should be, to other superhero films, live-action and animated ones alike, it speeds by faster than a speeding bullet.

Live-action superhero films such as X-Men 2 or Spider-Man 2 cost $125-200 million to make and only have relatively few, small-scale action sequences to show for it. But the $92 million budget of The Incredibles can stretch much further because it is animated. Never mind that super-hero costumes just look faintly ridiculous on real people; if every shot in an animated film is a special effect, why should it cost significantly more to make that shot an action sequence, as live-action action sequences do? Without the need to add another budget-minded scene of Peter Parker or Superman agonizing over whether or not to take up the costume again before finally trouncing the bad guys, The Incredibles is able to stage action sequence after action sequence, tapping the full potential of the superhero genre, arguably for the first time on film.

Yet The Incredibles is far from just a lightning-paced, slam-bang action picture. The human element so prominent in Bird’s Iron Giant and all of Pixar’s films remains at the forefront of this film, too. Pixar’s animation team manages to convey human form and movement shockingly well in their first film featuring an all-human cast of characters. For example, the hair is amazing: wet, blowing in the air or just hanging in front of Violet’s face, it looks almost real. On a different head, it probably would look real, except that Pixar does not make the mistake of trying to duplicate reality that the upcoming Robert Zemeckis-engineered Polar Express makes. Where Polar Express looks as if fresh corpses have been propped up on broomsticks and shaken around for your amusement, the world of The Incredibles, from its cars to the chin on Mr. Incredible’s head, is a beautifully sleek, streamlined ’60s-inspired affair, bursting with energy.

Absolutely note-perfect, The Incredibles is hands-down the most faithful, most exciting and most intelligent superhero movie ever made. But The Incredibles is even more than that: it is also one of the finest animated films ever made and one of the most purely enjoyable films, animated or otherwise, I’ve seen this year or any year.

The Incredibles is playing in theaters everywhere. It is rated PG for action violence: people die (off-screen or hidden by explosions), guns are fired and other scariness occurs for which the little tykes might not be ready, but it is nothing worse than anything in the original Star Wars movies. Although The Incredibles is not exactly cute or cuddly, compared to Pixar’s earlier work, the short film before it, the huggable “Boundin’,” is more than enough of both to satisfy any need you may have for either.

The Iron Giant: Special Edition DVD will be released November 16, with a new digital transfer, commentary track, deleted scenes and eight featurettes on the making of the film that weren’t on its initial DVD release. It is rated PG for violence and mild language. Rent it. For the love of God, rent it.

(Originally published at Gapers Block on November 12, 2004.)

Tokyo Drifter

Starring Tetsuya Watari, Tamio Kawaji, Ryuji Kita, Chieko Matsubara and Hideaki Nitani.

Branded to Kill

Starring Koji Nanbara, Joe Shishido, Mariko Ogawa and Annu Mari.

Kanto Wanderer

Starring Chieko Matsubara, Hiroko Ito and Akira Kobayashi.

Seijun Suzuki worked as a director in the Japanese studio system from 1956 to 1967, until, after filming Branded to Kill, he was fired for making an “incomprehensible” film, and, after having seen four of his films, it’s pretty hard to argue that claim. Taking the unprecedented act of suing his former production company, Nikkatsu, he won, but soon found himself blacklisted and didn’t make another movie for 10 years. Seijun Suzuki’s films are shockingly innovative on a visual level, and his characteristic narrative tangles have been a huge influence on modern-day filmmakers from Wong Kar Wai to Quentin Tarantino.

Suzuki’s earlier works, however, are by all accounts almost exclusively B gangster movies. But if Underworld Beauty (1958) is any indication, they are well-executed ones. In it, Miyamoto (Michitaro Mizushima) is released from prison, but he soon descends into the sewers to retrieve a gun and the diamonds which were stolen in the “incident” that sent him to prison — and crippled Mihara, to whom Miyamoto intends to deliver them. Betrayed by one of their number during an attempted exchange on a rooftop, Mihara swallows the diamonds and leaps off the building, dying from his injuries and leaving his brothers-in-arms wondering how to retrieve the diamonds from Mihara’s body. Mihara’s belligerent sister Akiko gets in the way, and her clever, conniving boyfriend Arita proves to be another obstacle, but Miyamoto is driven to do right by his fallen comrade. Despite a few too many clichés and a few strained attempts at comedy, Underworld Beauty is a highly enjoyable, yet straightforward, genre exercise with more than a few moments of brilliance.

Thanks in part to the Criterion Collection, however, the much more avant-garde Tokyo Drifter (1966) and Branded to Kill (1967) are Suzuki’s best-known films, and each is entertaining in its own peculiar way.

Tokyo Drifter has been described as both a Western-inspired yakuza film as well as a parody of the same. The trouble is, I just don’t buy its over-the-top camp moments as parody. They obviously are intended to be parody, but just aren’t funny enough, and worse, they undermine the more clever and more interesting serious parts of the film, including, most egregiously, its climactic face-off. On top of that, the sheer number of characters — two of whom are named Tetsu, including the main character — and Suzuki’s somewhat fractured storytelling make the film hard to follow at first, though eventually the story settles into familiar territory with our hero, “Phoenix” Tetsu (Tetsuya Watari), on the run from two gangs. Fortunately, Tokyo Drifter’s surf-influenced score and inspired use of color, particularly in the set designs, make for a terrific experience, even where the story fails.

Branded to Kill is another beast entirely. Obviously filmed on a much lower budget than either Tokyo Drifter or Kanto Wanderer, this black-and-white film centers on the number three ranked hitman in Japan, Hanada (Jo Shishido), who is hired for a “kill or be killed” contract. Botching the hit, he is eventually brought into conflict with the mysterious number one killer. Along the way, we are treated to some strange sex with Number Three’s almost perpetually naked wife, even stranger sex with the death-obsessed Misako (Mari Annu), who had contracted him for the hit, and… well, let me just say it’s kind of a weird story. The shots are not as well executed as in his other movies, and Suzuki’s trademark storytelling is even more disjointed than in Tokyo Drifter, but there are still a few great moments in the film.

For my money, though, Kanto Wanderer (1963) is the best film of Suzuki’s that I’ve seen to date. A bit hard to follow at first, though much less so than Tokyo Drifter, Kanto Wanderer is the story of Boss Izu’s bodyguard Katsuta (Akira Kobayashi), a rigid, traditionalist yakuza, who learns that the world around him is changing. Strained relations with a rival gang and the reappearance of a lost love, the now-married Mrs. Iwama, complicate his efforts to live by his moral code, but he follows through with it uncompromisingly, even as doing so proves to be his undoing.

Kanto Wanderer is the most visually stunning of Suzuki’s films that I’ve seen. More than that, it is one of the most visually arresting films I’ve ever seen, period. One of the most elegant shots in the film comes when Katsuta is sitting across from Mrs. Iwama, staring off into space as she looks towards him. The lighting shifts lazily from them to the room beyond and then back, when we see him looking at her while she looks away from him, the camera inching forward all the while. The effect of conveying the rising tension between the characters is simply amazing. Then, he suddenly moves toward her, they kiss, and the lighting shifts into the room beyond once again.

In an earlier scene, a flashback to when Katsuta and Mrs. Iwama met, the lighting is focused on her, with other characters only stepping into the light as they speak or begin to interact with Katsuta or Mrs. Iwama, as if a function of his cloudy memory. Even so trivial a shot as Mrs. Iwama being pushed against a wall turns into something greater as Suzuki takes advantage of the sliding Japanese doors, which he does on more than one occasion in the film. As Mrs. Iwama falls into the white rice paper and wood door, it moves to reveal the snowy winter sky behind her. The image is simply haunting.

One of my favorite moments from Kanto Wanderer

Suzuki’s use of color and the picture perfect shot framing alone make Kanto Wanderer a must-see for any cinema buff, but the story and tone never get in the way. Devoid of “weird for weird’s sake” moments, Kanto Wanderer is more immediately accessible than Suzuki’s later work yet less inconsequential than Underworld Beauty. Other critics may fawn over the more bizarre Tokyo Drifter or Branded to Kill, but of the four, Kanto Wanderer is the only one I think still holds up well after multiple viewings, in large part because you can pay attention to the technical elements of a film more closely after the first time. While all of Suzuki’s films that I have seen so far have had enough rewarding moments to make them worth watching once, Kanto Wanderer engages on every level.

Underworld Beauty, Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill are available on DVD from Netflix, Odd Obsession and Facets. Kanto Wanderer is available on DVD from Netflix and Facets. The Criterion Collection DVDs of Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill both feature interviews with Seijun Suzuki.

(Originally published at Gapers Block on October 15, 2004.)

Directed by Shane Carruth.
Starring Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden, Anand Upadhyaya and Carrie Crawford.

We live in a pretty interesting time for movies, from a technical standpoint. They’ve become so cheap to make that any two-bit hack can get a camera, shoot his own feature and edit it on his Mac. And, here’s the best part: Hollywood will actually distribute it. This is both good and bad. You get outright crap like The Blair Witch Project, you get derivative crap like Napoleon Dynamite, and then, on a really good day, you get surprising, impressive stuff like Shane Carruth’s $7,000 debut feature, Primer.

Carruth hides his extremely low budget pretty well. Shooting it on film rather than digital video was a good choice. For the most part, he knows what to do with the camera, too — the colors are terrific, and the film is mostly well-framed, only infrequently suffering from too-eager-to-impress camerawork. Much of the dialogue in the first half hour seems to have been re-edited, with lots of shots obscuring the actors’ mouths and more shots where the voices and the mouths don’t really match up. It’s a common enough trick for avoiding extensive reshoots, but it’s not usually used as pervasively as it is in Primer‘s first act. The result is a little bizarre, but given the film’s budget, you have to overlook some of the film’s technical quirks.

The worst parts of the movie should have been easier to avoid: the narration and the music. Most of the time, narration in movies is totally unnecessary and distracting, and that’s the case in this film as well. The fact that the narrator talks like Kiefer Sutherland’s character in Dark City, all halting and monotonous, makes it even more annoying. The music — also by Shane Carruth — struggles to be eerie, but comes off sounding like someone who doesn’t know how to play any instruments screwing around with the “spooky” sounds on his MIDI keyboard. Fortunately, this failed attempt at a score is generally pretty spare and ambient so it doesn’t get in the way too much. The fact that the distributor didn’t put up a few bucks to hire a proper musician to re-score the film before releasing it just boggles my mind, but I guess not doing it left the film intact as Carruth created it. Even Carruth has expressed some regrets regarding the making of Primer, though, and it’s hard to imagine that the music isn’t one of the first things he’d have fixed if given the opportunity.

Of course, the most important thing about Primer is its story, and as luck would have it, it’s also the best thing about the film. Abe (David Sullivan) and Aaron (Shane Carruth) are half of a group of engineers who are working on some kind of small-scale anti-gravity device in the off hours. At some point, Abe makes some peculiar observations that lead him to put his watch in the machine, and he notices that when it comes out, time seems to have passed faster inside the small metal box than outside. Abe runs off about the possible explanations for this for a bit before Aaron spells it out for us:

“You’re talking about making a bigger one.” And so they do. I’m not one to call a movie hard to follow. Ordinarily, people call a movie hard to follow because they are too distracted by their laundry or talking to the person next to them to bother paying attention to the plot. Then, when they have missed effectively half the movie and can’t tell what’s going on, they say, “This movie is hard to follow.” But Primer is one seriously hard-to-follow film. While I appreciated the fact that the characters speak to each other as if they actually know each other and as if they actually understand the words coming out of each other’s mouths, more clarity early on regarding the names of the main characters might have been nice, for one thing. It took me a bit to figure out that the other “Abe” and “Aaron” the protagonists talk about in various scenes are their doubles — themselves from some point in the future.

As for the technical dialogue, I read Discover and Scientific American often enough to have grasped (if not fully understood) what the characters talk about most of the time — enough that I was impressed by how much research went into the script. I got lost at one point when Abe discusses the growth rate of some fungus (procured from his day job) that he had put into the device, but the point was clear: it was growing faster than expected. The scene helps capture the sense of geek enthusiasm the characters have for their project, but people who are less nerdy than myself might want to shrug off the dialogue and pretend it is an endless stream of Star Trek-like technobabble. Most of the big words go away after about the half-hour mark, however, as the story concentrates on the more philosophical ideas raised by its premise, following them to their logical conclusion. Or a logical conclusion, anyway.

The script, like Memento before it, works better as a puzzle to be solved than as a finished picture. But, unlike Memento, Primer does not give you all the pieces. That is, it doesn’t show you a number of events that would have made the story somewhat clearer. The film may give you enough of the pieces, but I would have to see it again to be totally sure, and, one of these days, I probably will. My guess is the story is being told chronologically, which, in a time travel movie where guys are jumping back a few hours or a day at a time, is bound to get confusing. But don’t quote me on that, because I might be wrong.

Primer is a fascinating puzzle to observe, to try to solve and to discuss, and Carruth is a promising new talent. At times visually reminiscent of George Lucas’s own first film, THX-1138, which was made on a budget of $777,000.77, Primer is only limited by its miniscule budget in how successful it is on a technical level. But how inventive the film is on its $7,000 bodes well for any film Carruth might make on a real budget. Considering how opaque the story is, though, Primer is bound to turn off some viewers for many of the same reasons I enjoyed it. Four people walked out of the movie when I saw it — two middle-aged couples, to be specific — before the plot had even gotten underway, perhaps scared off by the techie dialogue. Their loss. Some people just like the airplane to fly into the hangar a little more linearly, I suppose.

(Originally published at Gapers Block on November 5, 2004. After a second viewing, I only loved this film more. It is without a doubt one of the smartest science fiction films of the past decade.)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Charlie Kaufman is without doubt the most imaginative screenwriter working in Hollywood today. His resumé gets more impressive every year: Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind are all terrific, funny and highly imaginative movies, though each is flawed in its own way. Michel Gondry’s previous attempt to turn a Charlie Kaufman screenplay into a movie, Human Nature, though definitely enjoyable, was the weakest of the four, mostly due to surprisingly uninspired work from the director of several wonderfully inventive music videos (for Björk, Radiohead and the Chemical Brothers, among others).

With Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, working from a story developed with Michel Gondry and artist Pierre Bismuth, Kaufman improves on all of his previous scripts by adding a touching, melancholy love story, as well as several achingly beautiful, often fleeting, insights into the nature of memories and relationships. It also benefits from having the strongest ending of any of his scripts — Being John Malkovich, in particular, suffered from a somewhat disappointing final act that didn’t live up to the promise of its nearly flawless first hour. Eternal Sunshine is at the same time his most coherent, most insightful and most out-there script to date. For Mr. Gondry’s part, he has filmed not only the best Charlie Kaufman film to date, but one of the most visually exciting films in years.

Clever yet mostly subtle use of special effects (both the old-fashioned kind and, less often, the computer generated kind) and quick, jittery cuts inside Joel’s mind make for perhaps the most authentically dream-like dream sequences ever filmed: These giddy, trippy, slightly disjointed scenes alone, which make up a fair chunk of the movie, are worth watching the movie for. While we’re outside of Joel’s head, Gondry and Kaufman reveal the “real world” events somewhat out of sequence, and as a result, we end up piecing together Joel and Clementine’s relationship the same way that the mind creates our concepts of ourselves and of other people by filling in the gaps between a handful of isolated experiences and impressions.

Cinematographer Ellen Kuras’s work isn’t flashy as, say, Newton Thomas Sigel’s on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, but it brilliantly underscores the film’s themes. By choosing to employ a muted color palette reminiscent of old photographs and shooting the scenes in Joel’s brain almost exclusively with hand-held cameras, she makes the whole film feel like a bittersweet memory but still, more and more, upon reflection, a fond one. The photography motif occurs repeatedly, most vividly in chase scenes within Joel’s mind lit only by an incredibly strong spotlight, which reminded me of the harsh flashes of instant cameras.

Jim Carrey contributes the most understated — and best — actual acting of his career (and I for one think he was excellent in The Truman Show and, though the movie itself was uneven, Man on the Moon) and Kate Winslet is terrific in a role that at first seems better suited to, say, Jim Carrey. (It sometimes seems as if, like Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, they decided to switch roles prior to filming.) As for the supporting characters, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood and Tom Wilkinson turn in fine performances, but their involvement with the story is almost entirely in service to the plot and limited to little more than what we need to know in order to follow the story.

The ’70s-influenced costume design, the set decoration (a picture frame around Clementine’s TV is a nice touch), and the slight score by Jon Brion all fall into place terrifically, too. The most artfully crafted, flawlessly told film since The Royal Tenenbaums, this modern-day fable has emotional resonance in spades and enough ideas to keep them rolling about your head for days; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a masterpiece.

(Originally published at Gapers Block on March 24, 2004.)

movie:

| DVD:

Written and directed by Sofia Coppola.
Starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson.

Remember how with back in the olden days of videotapes you had to fast forward through the trailers to get to the movie? Well, those days are back with the Lost in Translation DVD, a textbook example of annoying DVD authoring. You get a self-promo ad for Focus Features (the production company), trailers for 21 Grams, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Swimming Pool — five and a half minutes in all, if you choose to watch it all. I wouldn’t have minded much if you could skip it easily, but the Menu buttons on your DVD player are disabled; the Track/Skip buttons are disabled, too; hell, even if you wanted to hit Pause (to check out Kirsten Dunst … er, I mean, read the credits in the Eternal Sunshine trailer, perhaps) — that’s disabled, too. You can Fast Forward past the trailers, but I thought that never having to do that again was part of the charm of the DVD format.

Once you get to the movie, it’s brilliant, of course. For those who haven’t seen it yet (shame on you, it was in theaters forever), Lost in Translation is about two Americans, aging has-been movie star Bob Harris (Bill Murray) and aimless photographer’s wife Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), who meet in Tokyo and find a strange, deep connection with each other that is beautifully romantic yet almost totally platonic. Some will argue that Lost in Translation is all atmosphere and no plot, but so what? The fact that they don’t profess their undying love for each other and cheat on their spouses doesn’t make for very good melodrama, but under Ms. Coppola’s guiding hand, Bill Murray and the far-too-talented-for-being-only-19-years-old Scarlett Johansson communicate volumes with just a glance or a gesture; sometimes, in both movies and relationships, words just get in the way.

Lost in Translation has been accused of being racist, which makes me wonder if I happened to see an entirely different movie, because quite to the contrary, I felt that Lost was about Bob and Charlotte, and if anything, that the bits “about” Japan were rather affectionately humorous. Although I found other examples, the only even marginally intelligent one was at lost-in-racism.org, whose press release had this to say:

The humor and lampooning of the Japanese in the film has a distinctly racial element. The film portrays the Japanese people as a collection of shallow stereotypes. The audience laughs AT the Japanese people and not with them. Japanese characters in the film include the weird prostitute and other Japanese who mispronounce their R’s and L’s; an ineffectual film director, strippers, and doctors who assault you with the Japanese language; the stoic arrogant sushi chef; and an emasculate colorful talk show host and partygoers.

The main characters’ callous treatment towards these stereotyped Japanese is unfair and offensive. The main characters are portrayed as normal people while the Japanese are bizarre. The main characters prey on the Japanese and their inability to understand English. Particularly offensive are the hackneyed stereotypical jokes such as the overdone juxtaposition of L’s and R’s, mocking them because they bow and are short, and references to their disgusting food. The main characters visibly express disdain, and make insulting remarks and jokes in the direct presence of Japanese characters. There are no redeeming Japanese roles in the film, nor is there any significant dialogue between the main characters and the Japanese characters. They merely serve as buffoons for the main characters to ridicule.

Real-life Japanse talk show host Matthew Minami would probably find it amusing to learn that he is an offensive stereotype, but that’s beside the point. While I will grant that the “lip my stocking” call girl was definitely bizarre, nothing in the film indicated to me that her character was some kind of commentary on Japanese women, much less Japanese society in general. Similarly, at no point in the movie did I feel that Kelly, the pathetic Cameron Diaz clone played note-perfectly by Anna Faris (Scary Movie), was any kind of commentary on white women.

Bob and Charlotte’s “callous” treatment of other people was quite equal opportunity: it’s directed at the other white characters and each other every bit as often as it is at the Japanese characters. Kelly and the white lounge singer are portrayed as far more lame than the vast majority of the Japanese characters, for instance the completely not-bizarre Santori reps and hotel employees that the press release neglects to mention, who all spoke English quite well — at least as well as my Japanese professors in college and better than many Japanese people I’ve met in America who have not the excuse of living in a Japanese-speaking society to account for their inability to speak English fluently and without an accent. The “doctors,” for instance — one doctor, actually, who had one line — acted as any doctor would trying to communicate “your toe is not broken” to someone who didn’t speak their language: nodding and smiling and pointing at an X-ray. Another scene where Bob tells his wife that he would like to start eating healthier food (“like Japanese food”) was conveniently forgotten about when they composed the line about “references to their disgusting food,” too.

But that’s how these things go: people with no sense of humor who are out looking for something to get offended by will find something and conveniently ignore everything that doesn’t support their agenda. For the most part, Japan was simply depicted, appropriately, from the perspective of outsiders who did not speak the language: very different, a little strange (relatively speaking, especially Japanese TV), and at times overwhelming (they are in a city of well over 25 million people, after all). Japanese culture, to those who are entirely unfamiliar with it, is strange, compared to the pre-processed, mass-produced excuse for culture we have in America; but what I see in Lost in Translation is a strange kind of beauty, not the ugliness that lost-in-racism.org wants so badly to find.

Beyond the movie, the extras on the DVD are hit and miss: a few deleted scenes (mostly overlong and adding nothing to the story), a mildly amusing “conversation” with Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray, a mostly uninteresting behind-the-scenes documentary (partly shot by Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola’s then-husband), a music video for Kevin Shields’ wonderful “City Girl,” and Lost in Translation’s theatrical trailer, of course. But the most interesting extra was the excerpt of Matthew’s Best Hit TV, the previously-mentioned TV show that Bob Harris appears on in the film.

All told, this first edition of Lost in Translation is a decidedly barebones affair. Unless you think you’ll watch the movie often enough in the next six months or so, the absence of a director’s commentary and the annoying Focus Features stuff that automatically plays every time you insert the disc are enough for me to advise anyone in love with Lost in Translation to wait for the inevitable Criterion Collection or Platinum Series release.

Lost in Translation is available on video and DVD at stores everywhere.

(Originally published at Gapers Block on March 24, 2004.)