Author: Sasa

Alien

…just like “Alien” has ruled them before. Okay, not really. The one most pivotal science-fiction movie in history is actually “2001”, but if Kubrick had died of measles as a small child, the spot would probably go to “Alien”. I mean, “Star Wars” is a mainstream space soap opera, I have never seen “The Terminator” but assume it’s the same, “A Clockwork Orange” (which, incidentally, also would not have existed in the hypothetical Kubrick child death case) does not really look like a space film, I don’t like “Solaris” that much and “Stalker” also doesn’t look like science-fiction at all. That leaves us with “Alien”, a film which takes place in a spaceship and where humans and aliens actually come into contact.

Two people I know count “Alien” among their favorite films of all times, so my expectations for the film were already very high. Just like with “Blade Runner”, a film I didn’t like as much partially because of high expectations, I went into “Alien” with the hope of a scientific revelation, something along the lines of “Brave New World” and “1984”, the two books that revolutionized my youth more than Horváth, Ibsen or Shakespeare ever did. “Alien” is less than that, and I am beginning to suspect that – when it comes to science-fiction – movies are generally less grand than books are.

“Alien” comes quite close to what I’d say is an epic film, and in many ways it reminded me of the first time I saw “Moon”. Not very much variety is given in “Alien”: It’s really all about the discovery of a malicious alien lifeform which then proceeds to trying to kill everybody. Nothing more than that. Unlike “Moon”, it doesn’t even have a lot of existential theory behind it, it doesn’t really ask any questions about life and beyond. But that would be a too easy way to dismiss “Alien” whose qualities lie elsewhere: Direction, style and especially the characters. Somebody mentioned how “Alien” differs from your typical science-fiction of horror film in how old the characters are. Indeed, the characters are not action types, they are smart and logical thinkers who don’t overreact to what is happening to them, but who deal with the situation in a level-headed way. (Except for Lambert, whose great fear of dying represents the audience’s fear and heightens the suspense.) For that reason, the characterizations are quite brilliant and the entire cast displays awesome acting skills.

All in all, “Alien” is a breathtakingly beautiful movie, revolutionary in its own way and totally recommended to everybody who doesn’t have an aversion against science-fiction films or menacing aliens. It’s almost the best horror movie besides “Shining” and is definitely up there in the realms of superior science-fiction films. I also think it’s better than “Blade Runner”, even though the latter might be more influential to contemporary science-fiction.

Lust, Caution

The main reason why I ended up watching this film was because of Joan Chen who plays the utterly unimportant wife of the main character. She works pretty well in this role, but really, she didn’t have to do very much.

Instead, the main female character is this youngster upon whom the entire story is lying on. (Of course there also is Tony Leung, but not even his brilliancy could have saved the film if the main actress was bad.) And what can I say – she is pretty amazingly cast for this role as well. I don’t think I can imagine any of the established actresses to properly play this role simply for the reason that there is this little bit of innocence and tragedy, and this huge amount of sex that comes with it. I just can’t see Zhang Ziyi do a sex scene like that in any believable way.

Awhile ago, I read an article on how Wong Kar-Wai thinks that the main characters from “In the Mood for Love” are perverse and screwed up. (He probably did not use these words, but it’s close enough.) I was a little surprise because ultimately I thought they were very normal and viewed their restraint as something quite high and powerful. I can probably get behind the idea that there is something wrong with those characters, completely obsessing about this love they cannot attain. But “In the Mood for Love” completely pales next to “Lust, Caution” when it comes to perversion. I’m not talking about the sex scenes; they are rather bad but it’s sex, not violence. I don’t think super-bloody slashings happen in real life, but that kind of sex does happen in real life, and what goes against showing something like that in a film? The perversion in the film is in the relationship of the characters. The first time the guy ever sleeps with Tang Wei’s character, he practically rapes her violently. And by violent I mean he rips her clothes, throws her onto the bed, whips her with his belt, ties her hands with the belt and then takes her from behind. There is no way a sane woman in her right mind would proceed onto having a relationship with this man unless she is masochistic. Indeed the main characters did not wish for such a treatment in the first place, she slept with him because of her political motivation to assassinate him. This is almost a plot hole, because if she cannot convince him that she wants that kind of sex, she is practically confessing that she has other motives for sleeping with him, i.e. trying to kill him. But it was not that way, and it could just as well be that the main character was so big of an asshole that he assumed she’d like it. How screwed up is that?

There was another thing which is almost even worse – there is another scene in which the guy tells the story of how he had to torture another man who he knew from before, they went to school together and he could not stand having to torture and kill him. But then he produced this image of how that man in front of him gets on top of the female main character, so he got enraged in jealousy that he started hitting the man and killed him. How unbelievably sick is that?

There is yet another scene in which they are in this Japanese restaurant, and Tony Leung’s character tells her how he hates Japanese songs, because they sound like scared, crying animals. Indeed the Japanese are portrayed in a horrible fashion in the film (probably not too far from how it really is), and all of their atrocities are explained with “fear”. It was the one scene in which the unusual circumstances of life during WWII comes to light the most clearly in this film and it made me wonder – if the aggressors are so bad, isn’t it even worse to collaborate with them? Certainly it’s a tough situation, but really, the mere concept of opportunism is perhaps more perverse than anything else. You are not really aggressor, you are not really victim, it’s the something in between that makes it so despicable. Passive-aggressiveness, that’s pretty much it.

The last scene I would like to mention is how the key of the entire film relies upon a… diamond. She realizes his love when she saw what a beautiful ring he bought for her. Can a diamond, no matter how large, possibly ever be the crucial display of a man’s love? In that respect, I am all with Nora – I want that men would be willing to give anything I would have be willing to give them, and if it’s something as ridiculous as “honour”. I should a poll asking what is the sickest part of the film – the SM sex scene, the torture story or the diamonds.

I am almost shocked at how the film reflects myself. It’s the incredibly eroticism of qipao, the mix of Chineseness and Westerness in 1940’s Shanghai and finally, the female main character. She’s a young student, extremely willing to learn, passionate about love and – to some degree – politics and she made the two most important decisions in her life because of her love for (two different) men. Smart yet emotional to the point of being masochistic and suicidal, I don’t think such a character exists anywhere else in film world. I shouldn’t even have to mention that her favorite hobby is to watch movies. She could have been me, and that makes (this horribly perverted!) movie even stranger. It took me awhile to reflect upon it, I needed a little distance from it.

All in all, I don’t think Ang Lee reaches the greatness of Wong Kar-Wai with this film, and in general, I thought it was a weaker film than “Brokeback Mountain”, both in terms of the story and directing. But it was definitely worth a look, and it hit me hard.

Man with a Movie Camera

Oh wow. I have been meaning to watch a Russian silent for awhile and pretty much randomly ended up choosing this one. I don’t know very much about Vertov and I was intrigued by a film about film-making.

Now, “Man with a Movie Camera” is much less about film-making but much more a slice-of-life type film in the veins of “Berlin, Sinfonie eider Großstadt”, even though it partially depicts the filmmaking process. Unlike Ruttmann’s portrait of Berlin, there is no special interest of mine in the topic of “Man with a Movie Camera”. Instead, I am just amazed at how it’s made. Just as Wikipedia describes, Vertov uses an absolutely shocking amount of filming techniques, such as “double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations and a self-reflexive style”. How in the world is it possible that the 20s (and beginning of the 30s) were just so incredibly creative in terms of avant-garde? Literature, fashion, music, visual art, architecture, cinema – everything was so fruitful in between the wars. I bow my head in front of expressionism in cinema which is probably my favorite style of all times. I love the experimentally of the times and wonder when we will ever come to such a point of creative outburst again.

With a little over an hour, “Man with a Movie Camera” was really short and as such, a nice look into Russian silent films. Next thing I want to see is a Dovzhenko. On a side note, I think I definitely prefer Russian films that are not overtly political in any sense. “Man with a Movie Camera” only is in a very limited way (in the sense that I barely see it), and that was awesome. More than anything else, the film is a self-reflective on the interaction of movie makers with city life. I have no idea where they got all the money to make a film like this, but I certainly will not complain.

Paris, Texas

Instead watching another ME’s outfit lecture yesterday, I watched a movie. I felt a little bad about not sticking to my plan of watching a lecture per day but oh boy it was so worth it.

When I saw the film, I said it did not hit home. It didn’t touch my feelings in the same way that, say, “The Darjeeling Limited” did, and it never made me cry or burst into anger. But “Paris, Texas” was damn close to it. I thought it was beautiful, well-written and, as Roger Ebert put it – “true, deep and brilliant”. Considering how much I hated “Der Himmel über Berlin”, I was astonished to see how much I loved the film.

The one detail that singlehandedly catapulted “Paris, Texas” into my almost-favorites is the fact that, just like “In the Mood for Love”, it has a character who imagines herself talking to somebody else. Just like “In the Mood for Love” where the main character imagine how it would be if they separated, Jane imagines how it would be if she talked to Travis. And then she realizes that, in the moment she actually could talk to him, that she didn’t know what to say. That is exactly what is meant with “true, deep and brilliant”. People do that (or at least I do) and such a simple detail in somebody’s life describes humanity in all its glory, creativity and emptiness. “Paris, Texas” is a simple film, using mostly simple shots, yet at the same time it creates an amazing atmosphere with the landscapes of Texas and the camera angles (such as driving into the city through the view of a child in the car).

Apart from that, I am unable to say a single bad word about the film. I didn’t think it was slow at all, and I also don’t think that nothing happened in the film. Au contraire, I thought it was full of character development and suspense. It also had a pretty straight-forward story – guy finds son and then goes on to find his wife.

I am in love with Nastassja Kinski. I think her face has some fascinating trait that puts her on par with Ingrid Bergman. She’s not just simply beautiful, there is something about her that makes me crazy about her almost not moving face and her intense glaze. She doesn’t necessarily have to look into the camera though, I think she even looks awesome in a shot like this.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if I tend to have a habit to say too many good things about movies. But then again, I wouldn’t watch a movie without the expectation that it will be good somehow, right? As for “Paris, Texas”, it absolutely deserves its high standing in everybody’s opinion, including mine. Now I am almost willing to see “Der Himmel über Berlin” again, because I want to see its sequel, “In weiter Ferne, so nah!”

The Untouchables

I think film critics do not tend to use the term “campy”, even though it perfectly describes cult phenomena like “The Blues Brothers” (which, by the way, is absolutely brilliant and not at all that campy!) or Ed Wood’s films. Some movies are just so bad that they become great due to their badness. That’s precisely what campy is about and while they might appreciate this phenomenon in some sense, it seems like there is not enough Selbstironie to dare to put it into one concise word.

Even I find it hard to call “The Untouchables” campy. Nobody else seems to do it and a lot of aspects of the film are downright great. The cinematography of the opening scene is quite beautiful, as are most other scenes involving a grinning, evil Robert de Niro. Direction and cinematography certainly made some scenes memorable and suspenseful: Malone’s murder was one of them, and the Potemkin stairs reference shoot-out was another. The film was very suspenseful and I thought the characters were all extremely likable, especially the nerdy, slightly awkward accountant guy. It goes without saying that I really liked Sean Connery’s performance, and have a little thing for Andy Garcia.
On the downside, I don’t like Kevin Costner as much. His acting skills look on par with Josh Hartnett’s and his character was a little bit like a stock character, but all that is okay. I was much more surprised when I suddenly found myself in a horse-riding Western with some scenes ridiculously dragged out, accompanied by really strange and awkward dialogue.

I would also like to point out that I find Patricia Clarkson much more beautiful today. Perhaps it’s because I have only seen her when she was older, but boy it looks good on her. The wrinkle-less, smooth face of a young woman just doesn’t look as attractive on her, I don’t know why. Her extraordinary skills were also completely on this wife character whose only role is to take care of her children and be worried about her husband.

I am glad that I got recommended to this film, it certainly re-instated Brian de Palma as a director who can actually direct, unlike in “The Black Dahlia”. I’m sure if I would go out and say “Watch this movie, it’s great!” but it definitely was worth a look.

Solanin

While watching the film, I couldn’t help but nag about it the entire time… It was so stupid. The actors were downright horrible, the film did everything wrong that it could: They left out almost all of the nice details of the manga, they rushed through the story especially for the first part of the film and whenever they tried to linger at one scene, it looks absolutely stupid – shitty scenery, sappy music all over the place. The director’s bad vision probably ruined every single good line of the story, and there are a lot of them. Sometimes, when the characters say something important, the audience should be able to see it. I didn’t really get the feeling that the characters were lost in their lives and I couldn’t always feel with them. The feeling the film gives you is totally different from the manga.
With this criticism, I should perhaps mention that it’s the first time I have seen a manga to film adaptation, and it’s also obvious that this was never attempted to be more than a B-movie. So perhaps my expectations are too high. Nevertheless, I think “Solanin” deserved better.

At the end of the day, though, I think the makers did alright. They even tried to imitate the fashion from the manga. But it’s probably hard to turn an Asano Inio manga into a movie, and they probably just didn’t have the brains to do it. At least the songs sounded good, they got the style of the film (slightly B-movie-ish with somewhat bad music and very cute clothing) and some of the scenes were very emotional, just like I have expected. I totally liked the side characters – Billy, Katou and his girlfriend – they were all incredibly likable. I wanted to like the “Solanin” film, and because the story is just that strong, I did.

Unfortunately that’s all. “Solanin” is a nice movie, and it could be recommendable for people who don’t like manga. Otherwise, read the manga, it’s a million times better. More dramatic, funnier, and especially more heart-wrenching.

Mars Attacks!

I liked it! Surprisingly enough, considering how it’s a somewhat famous movie, but the entire critics world seems to dislike the film for being not funny and too shallow. Certainly the film is shallow as it compresses way too many characters into one film, and none of them is developed. It also is not really funny in the same way every bad science-fiction movie in the world is not really funny. But, amazingly enough, I thought the movie was enjoyable. I didn’t think any of the action scenes was over-the-top (though I do think that they overused the shots in which the Martians’ heads explode) and certainly they could have .

I didn’t think the Martians were stupid, albeit they obviously seemed that way, but in fact they totally make sense. Apart from the fact that they were probably just intended to be bad guys, they are not entirely pointless and ‘stupid’ if we look at humanity itself. Humans are not too smart either and some, if not a lot, are prone to sadistic tendencies, especially when they consider their adversaries lower than themselves. The Martians – with their superior technology – are not acting much more dumb than any European colonialists for many centuries who had better firepower because a few smart ones developed the technology. They went to another place, pretty much randomly killed off other races after pretending to negotiate. The Martians’s behavior is not so far off from humans really.

But even if that doesn’t matter, I’d say that I just enjoyed seeing some of those actors’s faces, especially Jack Nicholson. Certainly some characters were completely superfluous (Art Land’s character was rather pointless indeed), but the president certainly had some deadpan faces reminiscent of “Dr. Strangelove”. The latter is also most obviously the better movie in almost every aspect – it especially wins for being an actually smart film – but as long as “Mars Attacks!” was fun, it’s perfectly enough for me.

Tim Burton is such a mixed bag. “Mars Attacks!” is part of those movies I’d say are not so bad, but also not mind-blowing. I used to love Tim Burton back in the day with “Corpse Bride” and “Ed Wood”, but now, after seeing the infuriating “Alice in Wonderland” while bitterly remembering the stupid “Big Fish”, I can only say that Tim Burton is probably the director I feel the most emotional about, but I certainly don’t call myself a fan anymore.

You will meet a tall dark stranger

After a number of nice Woody Allen production, it seems like fate has to bring you at least one bad Woody Allen film, and this definitely is one. I think it’s almost even worse than “Celebrity”, but then again, I love Anthony Hopkins and Naomi Watts, so ultimately I guess I like this film better.

So what has gone wrong? I don’t know. The dialogues are okay, but that is pretty much all of it. I didn’t find any of it very funny nor witty in any way, the film was even lacking something like the end of “Hannah and her sisters”. I didn’t particularly like that film, but when Woody Allen watches this Marx brothers film and then realizes how life is worthwhile because of these small things, the film suddenly made some sort of sense. For “You will meet a tall dark stranger”, the topic of the day is faith, and incidentally, belief in something obviously completely stupid. Infuriatingly enough, Woody Allen even lets the nonsense take over the film, where the lady who believes in it achieves some sort of happiness whereas the rest of the cast is turned unhappy because of her. (At least her daughter is directly affected.) I like it when Woody Allen is self-deprecating and funny, and it is only then that I have an understanding for the characters, who are typically not without fault and downright human. I don’t really want to see a film about bad people doing bad things when their actions are not fully developed. Woody Allen has done any of those things – complicated relationships, neurotic characters, Crime-and-Punishment-like topics – in a much better way in his previous films. So what’s going on?

I’ve seen a few nice films these days and besides blogposts here, I also wrote some short commentary on them to Loris. In the process of writing those, I realized that – even though I was practically doing the same thing, that is review a film – I have been writing something completely different. The way I am thinking is entirely different when I have a specific person in mind, when I know his background and when I feel like I should write about what he wants to hear. This should be true even when I write a blog post, but I find it much harder to do. Strangely enough, however, talking/writing to a specific person about a film makes me realize things about it that I would not in the process of writing my blogpost. In this case, I’d have to tell Loris that I unfortunately disliked “You will meet a tall dark stranger”.

“Midnight in Paris” shows that Woody Allen can make extremely great movies these days, so I am not too worried about his future films. It’s just too bad that now that he finally cast Naomi Watts, he gave her such a bland role in which her acting was rather bad. It’s a shame.

Solaris

“Ivan’s Childhood”, “Andrei Rublev”, “The Mirror”, “Nostalghia”, “The Sacrifice” – Tarkovsky only made 5 other feature-length films I have not seen yet; also, only one of them is under 100 minutes and most are significantly longer. It suits Tarkovksy to make only a few films, and the description of every one of them sounds extremely intriguing.

In comparison, though, I find it hard to like another Tarkovsky film as much as “Stalker”, considering how incredibly impressed I was by it. “Stalker” had a cinematography I have never seen before, it had a smart story and with only three characters, it felt almost like a theater play, except a theater play could never achieve such a haunting atmosphere. Tarkovsky makes films like I have never seen before, and with that in mind, I keep perceiving “Solaris” as a film that is a lot like “Stalker”, but without blowing my mind as much.

I heard of “Solaris” a long time ago, I think the remake was showing on TV around the time I started watching films, which must have been 2006. Ever since, I have been mildly interested in both adaptations of Lem’s novel, even though I knew that they would deviate from the original, just like “Stalker” deviated a lot from “Roadside Picnic”. My interest was not totally unfounded, throughout the film, even though it only happened in later parts of it, I have become increasingly interested in Hari and her feelings, which is even further complicated due to the fact that she is some means of communication with this sentient alien life form. The desire for past times, unlike in “Midnight in Paris”, is not merely romantic nostalgia here, it’s a symptom of human suffering, perhaps one of the deepest possible. Not to be able to let go from something that happened in your past, and the element of having your feelings being manipulated and threatened by an alien, it all makes the premise of the film extremely interesting. However, besides the troubled love between Kris and Hari, the film was surprisingly lacking feeling, for me at least.

In typical Tarkovsky fashion, “Solaris” was incredibly stylish, of course. I liked the music, the white interior of the almost Apple-like spaceship and there were a few scenes which gave me the chills. For instance, the scene where Kris and Hari looked at historical artwork was quite beautiful. I also read that “Kontroll” was inspired by “Solaris”. It doesn’t surprise me too much, and oh wow, it makes me want to re-watch “Kontroll”, a film from my youth. That is nostalgy.