Author: Sasa

True Grit

…for this Coen brothers film which is totally not a Coen brothers film. Where is the absurdity, where is the over-the-top black humor, where is the desperation in the human condition, where is Frances McDormand? None of these things are to be found in this movie and surprisingly enough, that makes it great. The Coen brothers still love their characters and portray them in their usual deep fashion, and perhaps the combination of Mattie and Rooster is more brilliant than any other Coen brothers character because most of them had to act alone (think of the Dude or Javier Bardem in “No Country for Old Men”) whereas we get a rare glimpse of constant interaction and something like character development, fairly unusual in these Coen brothers films.

Apart from that though, “True Grit” is probably the most ‘boring’ one of their films – it’s based on a relatively generic book and is some sort of remake of a popular old movie, what can you expect? I don’t even want to delve into why the Coen brothers would make a “normal western” at this point in their career and will definitely not want to blame them for reaching a larger audience. In fact, I couldn’t care less, because “True Grit” left me with this amazingly good feeling after watching a film that I haven’t had for a long time. Since I have a tendency to watch films that are either just entertaining (and thus often lack artistic merit) or films that are just smart or artsy (and thus are, almost by definition, not very happy), I rarely have a film where I’d think “Wow this was good” at the same time as getting this giddy happy feeling that feel good movies like “Golden Slumber” would provide. Somehow that makes me want to watch “Good Will Hunting” now. At least it used to be a feel good movie for me – I have no idea what I would think today. Perhaps the film would bore me?

The rather unexplicable feel good factor coupled with the Coen brothers’ great filmmaking are what make this film so special, almost a miracle for me. It makes this film outshine all those movies like “Fargo” or “No Country for Old Men” or even “Burn After Reading” which have many great characters, wonderful dialogue and in general a much greater depth than “True Grit”. At the end of the day, I would say that I am a simple person after all, and I like these simple, almost generic stories which entertain me. It seems the mixture of Dude x Western genre was exactly perfect in this film.

I still think that “The Big Lebowski” was the best Coen film, among the ones I have seen so far, and if I had to give a recommendation, that would definitely be my first, as I also doubt that “True Grit” will ever attain the cult status despite or maybe because it was so popular at the box office. Ultimately this is a film that is somewhat less meaningful but tells a good story. In that respect it’s a shame, but I enjoyed it very much.

The Hurt Locker

Sometimes I feel like watching these films which got rave reviews is like taking the easy way out. I pretty much have a guarantee that this will be a well-funded film which can’t be all too bad. “The Hurt Locker” is the perfect example of such a case. (I love how my spell checker just turned my typo “p erfect” into “p erect”.)

I was going to rant on how much I liked the film: it’s been awhile since I saw a war movie and while I grew up seeing an innumerable amount of trash films that were just glorifying war and violence, I now love my healthy dose of war films, thanks to Kubrick et al. But while “The Hurt Locker” is wonderfully down to earth in some respects and mostly shows the actual cruelties of war, at the end of the day, I realized that the film lacks one major thing – the emotional impact such a film typically makes on me. I am not talking about pathos which is the exact opposite as that makes things feel fake. What I mean is the depiction of that would touch me like, say, “Cool Hand Luke” would. Or the death of the Vietnamese girl at the end of “Full Metal Jacket”.

I do feel sorry for those people who are in this job and will see a film that describes it as dramatic and filled with psychopaths. Now I am rather curious how “Jarhead” is doing when it comes to that. Without having any sort of experience of my own, that one just feels more realistic. My esteem for the film is indeed so high that I dared to mention it to soldiers whom I had a conversation with during a long wait at an airport.
But really, imagine you have one of the world’s most dangerous jobs and then somebody goes out there and makes a movie that makes everything spectacular in the way they want to. It would probably not be for me, and in the case of “The Hurt Locker”, where it really is about life and death, I personally deal much better with realistic films like “Jarhead” or, much better even, with satires and parodies such as “Dr. Strangelove”, “Full Metal Jacket” or “Paths of Glory”.

The main character was too much of a crazy psychopath for me to be able to relate to it, even though I was majorly touched when he bonded with this Iraqi boy, and then did his best to save this civilian. As much as I liked these very human parts of the story, I had a hard time not thinking about how much he put his colleagues in danger. I adore brave and hate reckless people, and obviously the line in between is extremely thin.

Whenever I read the critical reactions on “The Hurt Locker”, I totally feel like it’s about some other movie, but indeed, it was a good film and perhaps one of those movies you should see. In terms of personal enrichment however, I probably gained less than I expected.

Mother

Today, an old man walked up to me and asked me for directions. As usual, I expect people to speak Chinese to me, but he didn’t. My first thought was that this language sounds familiar so it must be Japanese… but no, then he went on asking me if I was not Korean! Wahahahaha. I have officially turned into a kiwiaboo now, though the number of Korean films I am watching is still nothing compared to the many Japanese series I have seen.

The small number of films ensures that I end up watching great films most of the time, and “Mother” is no exception. The story is dramatic and I don’t even want to go into the details because the plot twists are pure brilliance. At the end of the day, the solution to the mystery was amazingly simple and loaded with fore-shadowing, but the revelations along the way are what makes the film so suspenseful and gripping. Personally I thought the beginning of the film was a little bit slow and I was just waiting to know more about the background. But when the mother has finally started investigating on the right track, I was all excited and from there, the speed of the film grows exponentially until the very last scene, which beautifully ties back to the first scene. (A scene that made me laugh, by the way.)

Personally I enjoyed “The Host” more, but to some degree, these two films totally cannot be compared. Whereas “The Host” is designed to please a large audience and be both suspenseful and funny, “Mother” has had its funny moments but is mostly a fascinating character study and mystery film. Well done, now I really have to see “Memories of Murder”.

The Housemaid (2010)

In theory, “The Housemaid” deserves a lot of attention and things I could say about it. There are the main characters who were all extremely interesting considering that it was one of those films that are very much like plays: They mostly take place in one house, have a very limited set of characters and the story is mostly focused on their interaction. In comparison to the great plays I am thinking of, Molière’s comedies or Shakespeare’s plays or Horváth’s dramas or even most operas, “The Housemaid” cannot compare, and it probably doesn’t try to. This is a story with a lot of melodrama, funny and tragic at the same time. I wished somebody had pointed out beforehand how incredibly much black humour is subtly integrated in this film, finding its pinnacle in the very last scene. At first, I must admit that I disliked the child – she does feel incredibly unnatural and bored, doesn’t she? But later on, it becomes obvious that she is the secretly rebellious outsider in her environment, the only person who truly sees through the evils of the main character. In that respect, she saves the film!

Compared to the 1960’s film, there is virtually no similarity except for the title. In the one film, it’s the evil woman who seduces, in the other film, she is the betrayed victim; one film is full of atmospheric horror, the other one is virtually a black comedy mixed with k-(melo)drama elements. Film-wise, I thought the 2010 version absolutely cannot compare to the haunting atmosphere of the older film, but as a stand-alone it was at least interesting. I am mildly amused that Roger Ebert liked the movie – how random is that?

On a side note, MUBI is still a horrible website and Imdb just looks too horrible. No matter whether it’s movies or anime or anything else, there seems to be no such thing as a website that is as convenient as, uh, say, Facebook. What to do? As for myself, I am still most happy with my own painfully maintained blog index. XD

Waltz with Bashir

A few years ago, I saw this film on display at the Fantasy Filmfest, back then when I didn’t want to spend 8 euros on those movies I expected to be able to see later anyways. In the end, I only saw some of the short films which I expected to be rather difficult to get later.

About a year later, after “Waltz with Bashir” got a theatrical release in Germany, I heard about the film a second time. Somebody at university mentioned to me how much he was impressed by the end of the film, and that its brutality was totally shocking to him. Despite having heard relatively much about the film including somebody’s recommendation, I am surprised at how unexpected the movie turned out to be. I had no idea that it was a documentation, and a relatively plotless one at that. In fact, even 30 minutes into the film, I thought that this would rather be something like a crime mystery in which the main character’s memories are going to be revealed piece by piece.

The end itself – the change from animation towards real news footage – was even more surprising. It is definitely not the end I imagined, but nevertheless these are gripping pictures, even more so after an hour of bad animation.

Speaking of bad animation… it really was that bad. In the end, I think they could have done a better job if they shot the film with real people and then used the same technology as for “A Scanner Darkly” to animate the film. But approaching it in the conventional way makes the animation look horrible compared to what you are used to see elsewhere. I find it remarkable that the small team has managed to do this (normally you’d see significantly more names involved in the animation process), and it’s a pity that this had such a bad impact on the animation quality.

Finally, I am sure that a film like this has many problems in terms of its political meaning, and the politics are surely one of the reasons why the movie was such a hit with the critics. (The other one being the innovation of making an animated feature-length documentary, but really who cares about that?) As for myself, I would probably say I liked parts of the film, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. It is ultimately a documentary after all.

PS. I almost wrote “Waltz witz bashir” – Freudian slip?

Black Swan

Lately I got this urge to see the films so prominent at this year’s Oscar. How the heck did they manage to overtake the brilliance of “Inception” and “The Social Network”, I wonder?

In the case of “Black Swan”, it is fairly easy: Certainly there is no better female performance when most of the movies are predominantly male. You can’t really count that weird girl who played Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend or little Ellen Page in Inception after all. When it comes to the other nominated movies, I have barely seen any of them so I don’t know. But at any rate, Natalie Portman was sure to get this Oscar, and even though I really like her acting, I found it to be mostly boring in “Black Swan”. It’s almost like she is doing nothing new – she seems to have done all of this before already, and her acting genius ever since “Leon” did not actually improve all that much. On the bright side it means that she was quite great to begin with, on the other side she probably spent too much time being glamorous and worrying about Israel.

Enough ranting onto the film itself: It was indeed as ‘female’ as I have expected it. The most interesting character was actually Lily who you never knew if you should consider her an actual threat or if she was just the naughty girl from next door.

One thing I noticed was that I didn’t find the main character to be all that crazy after all. She kept having hallucinations but she never became ‘evil’ until very shortly before the end, when she was finally able to do her black swan right. In that respect, all the promotion with the black make-up is rather misleading – she remains quite true to herself, she remains the tight-assed, nervous, overly serious girl right up to the end. She just became crazy, but then again, who would not become crazy in such a situation?

My personal biggest irk with the film is probably my own perception of “Swan Lake”. Over the years, I have seen it in many productions; in fact, this ballet, along with “Sleeping Beauty”, is perhaps the only product of theatre/ballet/opera that I have seen this often (i.e. more than twice and throughout my entire life). Just like certain movies which I have rewatched several times over the years, such as “Amelie” or “The Dreamers”, my impression of “Swan Lake” has evolved over the years and I am looking back at fond memories associated with it. As a little girl, I believed that the white swan was absolutely good and the black swan was absolutely evil, later on I even tended to interpret the black swan as this character who uses her sexuality to “steal away” the guy, making her a rather generic chick flick character. Even though this might be generic, I think that hits the core of Swan Lake and so I don’t quite believe in this “your black swan has to seduce the audience”. Ballet is charming but not that overtly sexual (truth to be told, the most dignified and beautiful ballet dancers look like they have not eaten for 20 years – is that really sexy?) and unless a production has a very modern, screwed up choreography it will not seduce an audience, nor will it try to. It’s much more subtle than that, and I felt like there was a misunderstanding of ballet altogether here.

Speaking of sex appeal, I was very amused at how quickly hands move towards the main character’s vagina without ever having any sex. It reminded me very much of smutty manga for older girls.

All in all, I am changing my impression on Aronofsky from “absolutely unwatchable” to “interesting”, and “Black Swan” was at least interesting and very, very entertaining. I guess now I have to watch “The Wrestler”.

There Will Be Blood

For some reason, I feel like this movie could be a Coen brothers film, which I recently read an interesting (German) article on. Maybe it’s because the title sounds like “No Country for Old Men”, maybe it’s because the title sounds like one of those Coen brother films full of black humor, or maybe it’s also because the famous Pokemon parody actually looks like it could just as well be based on a Coen film. I have no idea.

What I do know, however, is that the film totally deserves its fame. It kicks ass, so to say. It is indeed a long, very long film, and more than anything else, I am absolutely fascinated by how incredibly long the Wikipedia article to the film is. How is it even possible that one single movie is getting so much analytical depth from Wikipedia writers? Most of all, of course that means that these damn Wikipedia writers are doing a bad job on other films, and it would be great if such an article could become the standard for films that deserve it. “There will be blood” surely has an incredible depth to it, and its main character is, if you ask me, significantly more interesting than Kane who doesn’t really have all that much character besides being rich and lonely. Plainview truly hates the world, uses schemes and ruses, is an alcoholic and doesn’t feel any remorse about using people to the point of killing them, yet acts affectionate towards his son. His antagonism against Eli Sunday especially is so much more fascinating than any human interaction with Kane. I guess I am being too harsh on Orson Welles here.

Basically, “There will be blood” is a movie without any weakness. If it had one, I’d say it is mostly that there is practically no likable character in the whole film, and it draws a world that is almost as black as the one of the Coen brothers. But then again, that is where its strength lies as well, and as such, Plainview is certainly one of the greatest characters of the decade.

Welcome to the Uchuu Show

Ever since the amazing greatness of “The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya”, I think it would be appropriate to include any types of animated movies in here as well. Sometimes you can’t really make a difference (what is “A Scanner Darkly”?) and sometimes animated movies are the best out there (“Spirited Away”, “Paprika”) which I hold in higher esteem than almost everything else I have watched. So, although “Princess Arete” was such a disappointment that I don’t even want to blog about it, I think that I should keep up the anime movie blogging with this film. It deserves it.

With the earthquake going on, it feels incredibly wrong to watch movies, let alone anime. But that would be hypocrisy – it’s not like any day is better or worse to be entertained and thereby ignoring the disasters going on in the world. But… Uchuu Show is so lovely? Made by the team of Kamichu, a lot of it is reminiscent. The amazingly cute flock of little aliens presented here have a very similar design to the Shinto gods in Kamichu, and that is where its charm lies: The characters and how they cutely interact. A lot of the anime reminds me of “My Neighbor Totoro” – and this is also why I don’t understand the criticism towards the movie. Both films have cute fictional creatures, a little girl who goes missing and needs to be found/saved, and rather generic main characters. Even the tomboyish-older-sister-little-girl-pair is the same. Even the so-called slow half of the film, in which the characters are just randomly playing around, is similar (note how the actual totoros only appear very late!) The benefit of “My Neighbor Totoro” is that it’s older and, well, higher acclaimed. As for myself, I enjoyed the first part of the film very much – it was a feast of lovely alien characters, especially Ink! She is the cutest of all! Almost as cute as Itezora Konayuki… and she looks like an enhanced version of Miimu XD (Note to self: Take a screenshot.)

I think the main reason why I could potentially fail as a movie critic is the fact that I don’t tend to criticize things unless I feel like I have a really good reason. (I also go into rage mode when that happens.) I see some sort of merit in almost everything I do see or do, and sometimes I don’t like harsh criticism on a good movie which is perhaps not revolutionary but still… good. “Welcome to the Uchuu Show” is a good film. Totally underrated.

The Ramen Girl

…to warn people, or so. This one is an absolutely impressive prime example of a bad movie, and I don’t even know where to start: Her slutty (yet somewhat pretty) dress? The fact that almost everybody in the movie smokes? The portrayal of her unnecessary excessive suffering prior to becoming a, uh, ramen chef? It’s difficult to say.

The movie had a few good points though: The Japanese characters. While I found her love interest a little bit awkward, everybody else was mostly pure comedian gold. I also can’t believe they got Goro Tsutomu Yamazaki to play the old ramen master – how brilliant is that? I feel sorry for such a cult actor to have to play in this kind of movie though…

At any rate, it’s not like I didn’t enjoy the movie. It had a cute premise and there was some odd joy I derived from watching it, very much unlike for Princess Arete which I thought was shitty and boring. I am looking forward to… better films. Did you notice how, after seeing too many crime thrillers, I am totally in the mood for comedies now? :D (Any recommendations?)

Humpday

I was sad at the end of the film, but hey, I should not have expected anything else – we are talking about two straight guys attempting to, err, have sex. How can that not become a funny disaster?

Amazon is full of reviews of normal people (seems like “Humpday” tends to be watched by people who tend to be “normal” instead of film buffs who seem to be used to even more shocking crap than opera-goers) who are either bored or appalled at the film. The one I found the most interesting was this gay man whose feelings were hurt because he had to sit through two men literally talking about how disgusting they find each other. lol If the same story was played with a gay man and a lesbian woman, it might have required a little more of a brain twisting, but ultimately would have worked just as well. I don’t think I am hurt by the concept that some guy might find my body repulsive if it is because he’s gay.

Enough ranting though, because the film does not deserve it: It was really great. I laughed out loud quite a few times and thought that the actors (who seemed to be more or less playing themselves or at least not be professionals to me) were doing a wonderful job at looking awkward. The guy who played Andrew was the best – how is it even possible to improvise these lines that make me laugh so spontaneously? “Humpday” could have been the perfect PIFF movie, but it’s alright, we’ll find something else thanks to Gorp’s brilliant recommendations. Unsurprisingly, this one was one of his recommendations too.

For unknown reasons, this film also prompted me to finally get my hands on “Les amours imaginaires”, another one of those triangle stories. (Though this one isn’t really.) In the past it seems like I have either loved or hated them, but in general I should probably say that I like the tension that arises from relationship stories involving more than one person – Humpday is no different, and funny movie is almost always better than one which is not.

By the way, I stumbled upon the term “mumblecore”. Now that is spot-on in the best sense of the term! (If that is even possible.)