Category: Movies

Dead Poets Society

“Oh Captain! My Captain” is the line that was in media everywhere, not just the traditional ones but also in social media. Pip and I were having a connecting flight in Doha and we randomly saw a message about Robin Williams’ death on TV. I made a deadpan comment about it along the lines of “Oh wow, Robin Williams is dead”. Just as I was going to make more silly comments, the guy in front of me in line was like “Yes, it’s incredible. So terrible. They say he committed suicide” which in turn made me put on a compassionate face and agree that it’s absolutely terrible. I am so glad that I haven’t said anymore; as much as I love to take serious situations with a grain of salt, I don’t want a stranger to think I was lacking piety.

The only other Robin Williams-related incident I remember was how I was on a Megabus to New York City, and I struck up a conversation with the girl sitting next to me. She was studying acting at Temple University, and adored Wong Kar-wai and Robin Williams. She thought he was the funniest man alive and was on the way to see a Broadway show of his.

Pip and I decided to see some of Robin Williams’ old films. But since I saw “Good Will Hunting” and he saw “Good Morning Vietnam” and we both saw “Mrs. Doubtfire”, it was almost obvious that we would end up picking “Dead Poets Society”. Considering that I read Kleinbaum’s book version a long, long time ago (and was quite impressed by it), it is surprising that I never picked up the film. I was actually interested but I had no idea how to get the film, it was long before I even started frequenting videotheques. With knowledge of what the film would be (mostly) about, and also knowing what was happening to Neil, I had a weird feeling watching the film. In the end, it was a straight-forward and simple film, just the way I was expecting it. If I had been younger, it probably would have deeply touched me, but from the standpoint of an adult, I am merely looking at the film with the eyes of something who has luckily survived these troublesome times of youth.

With that said, I am surprised how cute Ethan Hawke used to be. I only know him as young charming idiot in “Before Sunrise”, the irresponsible dad in “Boyhood” and other older roles, but it’s refreshing to see him in the role of the shy boy who ends up displaying a great deal of courage. I was quite smitten with the boy.

Apparently “Dead Poets Society” was something like the “Donnie Darko” of the 90s, and I can definitely see why. It’s definitely a lovely film for young people, and definitely a classic.

The Two Faces of January

I am getting closer to finishing my blog postings (and I am so indescribably happy about that) though it is a little ironic how I perceive seven films to go as “getting closer”. I used to exasperate over the prospect of having to write seven blog postings but now I am starting to make a list of films I want to see soon. I know, it’s incredible.

The most special thing about “The Two Faces of January” is that I made two serious attempts at seeing the film – once at the Berlinale (and then I decided that I don’t want to see a Hollywood film that was going to come out in theaters anyways) and once after the film was actually in theaters. In the end, Loris and I ended up exploring the Flaschenhalspark and the Viktoriapark instead. Even though I knew I couldn’t pass on the opportunity to see Oscar Isaac and Kirsten Dunst in stylish 60s clothing, I had this nagging fear that the film would be another one of those nice looking thrillers with a weak story. I was actually not a huge fan of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” either, so perhaps I’m really just not that much into Patricia Highsmith’s thrillers.

Surprisingly, however, “The Two Faces of January” was really good! I got Pip into watching it with me, so I am glad that we both enjoyed the film. It was a suspenseful, stylish film with surprisingly likable characters. I could get behind both the old guy who developed fatherly feelings as well as the young guy whose father complex remains something like a mystery. Oh and I am in love with Kirsten Dunst’s dresses and the beautiful Greek landscapes. Maybe I am just that superficial after all, but it’s more likely that this film was actually fairly well written.

“The Two Faces of January” is nothing ground-breaking but rather beautifully old-fashioned, and a nod to Hitchcock’s stories. Perhaps it caters to my contemporary tastes a little bit too much, but all in all, I took great pleasure in watching this film.

Transcendence

Do you want to become God? Well, I don’t. It’s been awhile since I have seen a Johnny Depp movie, and despite my general dislike of Rebecca Hall, I figured I should give her a chance. I expect female characters in Hollywood sci-fi films to have relatively little screen time, so it can’t be that bad.

Unfortunately, it was just that bad. Hall’s character is a rather boring case of a damsel in distress, and I cannot describe how distressing the film’s anti-scientific message is. It’s one of those “oh if robots are given too much power, they would take over the world” kind of films, except here it’s about how a human being is going to want to become ‘God’ if he gets too much power. Only monotheistic cultures could conjure up such a story, because logic would dictate that if one person can become “God” so can others, making it an entire world full of Gods (which actually makes the whole thing a little less menacing).

For me, “Transcendence” is the perfect example of what happens when non-scientists make half-hearted attempts at imagining a world with better technology than today governed by irrational fear. It reminds me much of the voices from 200 years ago which said that watching a train go at higher speeds than 45km/h will give people a headache. Now that technology is plateau-ing for a few years and everybody is more interested in Twitter than real innovations, it’s not even timely to be afraid of technological advancement anymore. On top of all that, the dialogue in the film was just plain dumb and pretentious, or so it seemed to me at least.

Next time, I have to choose better movies to watch on my flights.

Bushi no Kondate

Here begins my Singapore days which, film-wise, of course start with films on airplanes. My first instinct was to choose a movie I’ve been really wanting to see. In fact, I typically find at least 6-7 films on a given flight which I would want to see, but various reasons keep me up from watching the films. For example, on one flight I wanted to see “North by Northwest” but then realized that I had trouble understanding a single word due to the bad audio quality and lack of subtitles. This time, I started watching the first few seconds of “La grande bellezza” but quickly got frustrated with the terrible visuals. I could tell that this was a film to enjoyed in HD and I decided to keep it for later. In fact, the best strategy to tackle flight movies is probably to choose films that are enjoyable but not too important or meaningful. So here we are with “Bushi no Kondate”, a Japanese food comedy. It was one of those food films presented at the Berlinale this year where you could get a dinner and a movie for something like 70 euros? It was ridiculous.

Well, the film does justice to the food. Its presentation always makes it look and sound incredibly delicious, and strongly made me crave traditional Japanese food. If I was given unlimited funds to go to a single restaurant, I would want to go to a kaiseki restaurant. The food we see in this film is pretty much just that (from what I can tell), so it was easy to get into.
Story-wise, “Bushi no Kondate” was pretty forgettable. Demure, cute woman becomes wife of some a kitchen samurai who must learn to cook – yawn. This movie is a typical example of the usual terribly scripted, terribly acted, bland Japanese film that makes you wonder how anyone in the country manages to produce gems like “Departures” and “Like father, like son”.

It felt good to cross one movie off the list of Berlinale films I wanted to see, but if I had known beforehand I would probably have skipped on this film despite my enjoyment of the food porn.

Carnage

There were many reasons for me to watch this film. 314 mentioned it as a solid film, Loris had watched it and, most importantly, it’s based on a play with few characters (though the typical chamber play has two characters, so maybe “Carnage” could already be perceived as having a lot of characters). As you probably all know, I love chamber plays to pieces and “Carnage” ended up no different.

While the story in the film is set in New York, I knew that the original version was Yasmina Reza’s “Le Dieu du Carnage”. As a result, I couldn’t help but notice how incredibly French the film was. According to statistics, gender disparities are much higher in France than they are in the US. The film reminded me a lot about the book “Bringing up bébé” (perhaps the only non-fiction book I have read in forever), in which Druckman postulates that French women work much more in the household and take care more often of the children while at the same time being happier with their lives than American women. She claims they just happily settle into their low expectations in their husbands, uh… OK. “Carnage” lays these tendencies bare. Nowadays, why would anyone want to have children with a man who hates them as much as the men in the film? Other than these shockingly exaggerated male characters, I was especially in love with how the women were depicted. Every single time Jodie Foster’s character started crying, I wanted to laugh. “I know everything about the suffering in Africa!” was the best line in the whole film. (The second best line was said by Jodie Foster too: “My Kokoschka!” Hahaha.)

Other than that, I was in love with the character dynamics and how it switched from couple vs. couple to men vs. women to everybody against everybody really. It feels so realistic how screwed up relationships can be, how much people can hate each other and most importantly, how incredibly funny that is. I think I have read criticisms on how the film was dry, over the top and not particularly realistic. Well, I appreciated it that way and totally got into their heated arguments.

Finally, I thought it was a nice gesture that the hamster was alive and that the children made up. The more important question now is: Will Ethan and Zachary turn into their parents one day? Polanski managed to get four of the most talented character actors on screen, and together they did a fantastic job. I am so tempted to see the film again.

Caché

Shii, there are 11 film reviews I have to write and a wonderful e-mail of yours which I want to respond to. What to do first? I tend to want to get over with the less pleasant things first, and ironically, “Caché” is one of your films. You recommended it to me so many years ago (and hey, I still have not seen the last few films on your 30 movies list!) and I finally saw it. Now I’m listening to “I Follow Rivers” while writing a review. Isn’t that perfect?

The main reason why I put off watching “Caché” is because the internet is having super long discussions about it. It kept me away from “Inland Empire” and I just generally have an aversion against overly confusing movies. Surprisingly, “Caché” was absolutely not confusing at all! Even though I missed the end and had to look up what it was all about, I had my suspicions which were only confirmed by the detail at the end. With this fairly simple interpretation, the film’s core ideas are actually very clear. It’s unfortunate that it had to be an Austrian (as opposed to a French director) who made the most impressive movie on French colonialism in Algeria, even though it approaches its subject from the most indirect way possible, by depicting and criticizing how contemporary France deals with its past.

It seems like “Caché” is a film that people either love or hate, how typical for Haneke. Either you like the background and the message this film brings forth, or you find everything utterly boring. Even though the film itself does a great job at portraying the horror of the main characters when their life is turned upside down by the simple fact that someone is taking videos of them all the time, the colonial theme is a powerful backdrop and you have to either love or hate that, I suppose. Personally, I think the naysayers don’t realize what a taboo “Caché” is tapping into in France which only now is slowly starting to recognize its past. This is an important topic and, most importantly, “Caché” is a film which has artistical merits besides its political message. It also has another dimension: How do you deal with the wrongdoings of your early childhood? Japanese media is full of examples of children who committed some of the most atrocious crimes yet are innocent from a legal standpoint. “Caché” is similar, it’s about conscience rather than culpability, a difference which I find fascinating.

I suspect that “Caché” may be Haneke’s best film, though personally I preferred “Das weiße Band” and I am very curious about “Amour”. In any case, “Caché” is a must-see and I can’t believe it took me so long.

Her

Whenever Pip and I don’t know what film to watch, we end up with some film that got a bunch of Oscar nominations. This year, he has already seen “American Hustle”, we all have seen “Gravity” in a 3D movie theater and nobody truly wants to see “12 Years a Slave”. So we ended up with “Her” this time. I remember that Gorp really liked it, so I was quite optimistic.

In the end, I thought it was a fun little movie and so so so self-reflective. Unlike in “Where the wild things are”, Spike Jonze managed to keep the self-obsessiveness to a healthy level, resulting in a film that was pleasantly self-indulgent in the way only Woody Allen is sometimes. I thought it was refreshing to see a movie in which people essentially spend the entire two hours talking about their feelings where somehow, these feelings actually made sense. Pip said he liked it and I was like: “But you never talk about your feelings!” Seriously, though, these characters do nothing but live in their own world of feelings and interpersonal relationships, as if their jobs, anything like other hobbies and other things that make any person’s life livable don’t matter. Even though that is not the case for me (and, thinking about it, it has never been), I can strongly relate to the purity of these relationships, how they exist in this little vacuum of interpersonal tenderness completely untouched by societal pressure (hey this is the relationship between a human and an AI after all!) or even something like family. I really enjoyed it, it made me feel like I was young again when I too cared little about those environmental aspects.

There was also something very fascinating in how the main character and Samantha made love just by speaking to each other, and it also totally reminded me of my youth hehehe. That particular scene could carry the whole movie single-handedly and made it almost as memorable to me as the make-believe dialogue in “In the Mood for Love” and the end of “Before Midnight”.

Also thank God we only had to see a little bit of Amy Adams. I can’t wait till in 10-15 years we won’t have to deal with any of these current Hollywood favorites like Carey Mulligan, Natalie Portman and, my least favorite of them all, Amy Adams.

I’m not a huge Spike Jonze fan (and I am a little suspicious of his following), but “Her” definitely redeemed him for me.

Boyhood

Oh boy. I know that I haven’t seen many movies this year, and amongst those I am not sure if any of them will make it into my list of 30 favorite films of all times. Nevertheless, I thought “this is the best movie I have seen all year” multiple times: The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Painted Veil, Coming Home, Like father like son, Inland Empire – all of those would have been candidates. But honestly, so far “Boyhood” actually deserves the title best movie of 2014.

When people were pissed that “Bai ri yan huo” got the Golden Bear and “Boyhood” mostly got snubbed, I was sceptical about the film. All that Linklater love weirded me out, and I thought it was just a hype. We are always suspicious of big name Hollywood films at the Berlinale. Nevertheless, it was a Linklater so I had to watch the film. I feel so lucky to have seen it with Shii! It was at a super comfortable, old-style movie theater and the movie was so good that I did not fall asleep during it, despite having an average 1.5 hours of sleep the four nights before. It may also have been my sleeplessness that made me love the film even more. But, just a few weeks later I was able to put that to a test. Pip, Pixelmatsch, another friend and I went to see the film in my beloved International, and while Pip and I got there 10 minutes late, I spent the entire rest of the film mesmerized by it again. The film is essentially a slice of life, so I didn’t care one bit about whether it was suspenseful or not. In fact, because the film is composed of vignettes from Mason’s life, I spent most of the film looking forward to certain scenes I remembered, and there were a lot of those scenes. One of the most memorable moments was Samantha’s embarrassed face when her dad says “Force Garrett to use a condom!” Priceless.

Perhaps my favorite part of the film was Mason’s relationship with Sheena. The way it grew and then ended absolutely hit me, perhaps because they went from hugging at dawn to breakup argument in like an instant. Nevertheless, it was the mom who was my favorite character. Somehow she had even more depth than Mason and it’s just as much her film as it is his. They should have ended the film at her breakdown when Mason moved out.

When I watch a movie on vacation, like the PIFFs, a film is automatically elevated into the special feeling of being on vacation. In this case, “Boyhood” and Vienna are forever intertwined, because Shii and I decided to spend those few precious hours we had on a 3 hour long movie. But remembering how we put the legs up in the cozy Gartenbaukino, laughing together at the many funny scenes, was just so worth it. Nevertheless, rewatching the film just two weeks later didn’t make the film any worse and I was convinced that it would be that way. I think this kind of impact of a film is unprecedented. Best film of 2014 after all.

The Third Man

Loris, who had been bugging me to blog forever, asked me whether I still remember the films well. With a backlog of 3 months and over 10 films, I was surprised to see that I did indeed remember most of them fairly well. “The Third Man” is perhaps the only big exception. I read Graham Greene’s novel a long time ago, and almost completely forgot the story. (I only remembered one thing – that Harry was not dead.) Back in the day, I knew that the film was a classic and didn’t want to watch it because I thought the book ruined the story for me. This time, it’s been over 2 months since I saw the film and yet again I have forgotten most of the story. Maybe it just means that “The Third Man” has a curiously forgettable story, which allows you to enjoy it over and over again, feeling the suspense anew.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really perceive the film as particularly suspenseful. While I was really into the book back in the day, the film mostly left me cold. I acknowledged the stylish film noir elements and dark atmosphere, but that’s all there was to it. Honestly, I just wanted to see Alida Valli whom, amongst Italian actress, I now prefer over Monica Vitti, and that says something. Unfortunately she was essentially powerless in the entire story, and that ruined her role a little.

Another classic I have always wanted to see – check. Recently I have been mostly watching things I had a craving for, and it’s probably better that way.

Soshite chichi ni naru (Like father, like son)

I’ve known this film ever since it was announced, since I am (loosely) following a blog which lists every film that comes out in Japan. The overwhelming majority of it (like… 99%) is utter crap, but then I saw a poster of “Soshite chichi ni naru” and Hirokazu Koreeda’s name associated with it. I have very very mixed feelings about Koreeda, I think he is a good film maker, but up until now I loathed his stories. It certainly didn’t help that critics are irrationally in love with him, and I will never get over how hateful the characters in “Still Walking” are. But with the premise of “Like father, like son”, nothing could go wrong, right? How can you screw up a story about two babies being switched out at birth, where the story is all about cute 6 year olds finding out about their family identity?

Well, this time, Koreeda didn’t disappoint. When Gorp told me he saw it on the airplane, it was only a month after the last time I tried to procure the film. After the PIFF, I tried again and voilà, I was finally able to get it. The film did not disappoint even for a second. It was everything I expected (and I had high expectations to begin with) and then it was even more. More than just asking about family, it was also about different family ideals. Koreeda spends a lot of time showing Keita’s room and his lifestyle, as well as his seemingly sweet relationship with his parents. It reminded me of ourselves with O, and makes me wonder how I would deal with the possibility that O may not fulfill the expectations we had in him. What expectations do we have anyways? “Like father, like son” deals with these questions in a subtle, sensible way. There are no people crying or screaming at each other, and these underlying problems they have show in the smallest details, much like in real life. Koreeda’s script analyzes a child’s heart carefully and gently, then puts it on screen with the utmost respect. That is almost better than Keita’s father’s development, who finally had to come to terms with the demons of his family past.

Gorp said “Like father, like son” was one of the best movies of the year for him. Well, I have to admit that I had a lot of “oh wow, best movie of the year!” moments this year, and this film was definitely one of them. I would watch it again anytime.