Category: Movies

El espíritu de la colmena

This is probably the experimental and obscure movie I have watched since awhile; it’s so unknown that there is not even a german Wikipedia article about the film. I heard about it, because it is supposed to be one of Mohiro Kitoh’s favourite movies. (I’m sorry for linking to the german article, it’s simply much better than the english.) While watching this movie, I would have my favourite mangaka’s works in mind the whole time: Kitoh’s horrifying portraits of children, his latent pedophilia (in my opinion) and sexualization of children, his unusual and eccentric views on life and death. Just as I expected, these elements are all beautifully reflected in this movie, tehe.

The weirdness of the movie mainly shows in the focus on small details and the extremely slow pace of the story. Now that I have gotten used to slow paced movies by now, I still think that this one is outstandingly dragging, without creating too much of an intense atmosphere. But that’s probably a personal thing – I have to admit that the cinematography and the symbolism of the elements shown are simply brilliant. The slowness aside, you can see how well-chosen and composed every single picture of this film is. It is a pity that I am going for the easy way and use posters as pictures for my postings: This film really deserves a screenshot as eye candy for a review – and there are way too many screenshots to pick from.

In my opinion, the strongest point of this movie are still the characters, as well as Ana Torrent’s wonderful acting. I could look at her big, childish eyes forever, really. Yet again, it could be because I am biased (I quickly take a liking on characters and pay lots of attention to character development), but I think the critics’ claim of this being a “film about children” is fully justified.

I wonder if I should even dare to talk about the latent sexuality of the girls here. You see them shaking their butts, putting on make-up and cologne, playing with death (their own and – what symbolism! – a black cat’s), coloring their lips with their blood. They even wear innocent-looking skirts, frilly white dresses and long night gowns that a ‘professional’ lolicon will immediately recognize as very, hm, enticing *cough* (I hope this film never gets released in Japan.) You may think about it whatever you want, but in the context of this film, it seems meaningful and beautiful to me.

After seeing Almodóvar’s films and “Los lunes al sol”, I have taken a strong liking on spanish films – El espirítu de la colmena is no exception and even strengthens my impression. I am unable to tell what I find so ‘spanish’ in this film though, besides the looks and the environment making its setting so clear.

In the end, I’m actually wondering how these little children cope with the roles they play. Ana Torrent seems to be a successful actress today; and it does not surprise me. However: How much of the film did she actually understand, for example did she understand the cruelty and sexuality of this film? I doubt it. But if not, how could she have played it so well? How can this role not have an impact on her – when even the character has her actual name? (Just like all other characters, in fact.) I know how Hollywood movie-goers complained about the rape scene with this one 12-year old actress whose name I’ve forgotten – but isn’t this subtle cruelty much worse?

I’d also like to make clear that Shii’s comment on the film is so much better than my own. Then again, I also feel that no comments can do justice to this film really; it just has to be seen.

Metropolis

So I’m finally at the last movie I have to review. What a sad thing to see that I have only watched four movies in two months. The biggest problem is to decide what to watch next, heh.

In that sense, watching Metropolis wasn’t exactly a production of my active decision, because it was shown at the Maison Heinrich Heine with live piano. Of course I couldn’t miss it, even though it cost 5 euro. Every single cent was definitely worth it though, the live piano was simply spectacular. I think nobody in the audience expected the accompanying piano piece to be so energetic, intense and forceful, it must have been a horrible physical effort to play like that. I was so impressed.

Compared to that, I wasn’t all too impressed by the movie itself. The style and atmosphere are gorgeous of course, same for cinematography and direction, but the overly simple story was a little bit of a push-off. From a science-fiction story like this, I have rather high expectations for the story and would always have the likes of 1984 and Brave New World in mind, and there was no way this one-dimensional story could have done justice to it. Of course, Metropolis is far from being a bad movie, I just wished for a better story.

All in all, especially with the live piano, it was an amazing experience.

I’m a Cyborg, but that’s OK

Whenever I blog about a movie, I would first check out its Wikipedia article first. (Yes, I hate Wikipedia, but I can’t help but using it…) I was so surprised when I saw that this movie was actually a box-office flop, especially considering the fact that I hated “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” (not to be confused with “Sympathy for Mrs. Vengeance” which was absolutely gorgeous) and that didn’t do all too bad at the box-office.

What could have made this movie fail? I have no idea, besides… it’s a love comedy and not some gory drama? Really, it features everything that I would wish a love comedy would contain: Good-looking, unusual characters, great cinematography and CG, a suspenseful story and especially a great ending. Of course this is not exactly your typical Park Chan-wook movie, but it is – more than your typical love comedy – a great depiction of human character with good actors.

Recently, I have been ranking my favourite Park Chan-woo movies. They are clearly as follows:
1. JSA
2. Old Boy
3. I’m a Cyborg, but that’s OK
4. Sympathy for Mrs. Vengeance, and far behind
5. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

I’m looking forward to his next film now…

Ratatouille

As you can imagine, I didn’t really choose to watch Ratatouille. It’s one of those movies that you have to watch when it’s Christmas and you are invited to your parents’ friends’ place. I have yet to meet anybody among their friends’ children who has a decent movie taste, so I have to say that I was really lucky with Ratatouille this time.

Surely this is a multiple award winning Pixar movie: The animation was smooth, the character design quite great and the mouses simply adorable. (The final scene with the mouses running the whole store was plain gorgeous, awww!) On top of that, the typical Disney humour never fails to entertain me, despite its lack of, hmm, originality. Therefore, there is not much to say about this story besides the fact that it was, yet again, entertaining.

I am definitely looking forward to what they will come up with next, even though Pixar movies have been a hit (A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, Ratatouille) or miss (Toy Story, Cars) for me.

Now I want to eat Ratatouille. Arrr.

Bande à part

I’m currently re-watching some german movies to make Alstan be more familiar with the sound of the german language. We watched “Das Leben der Anderen” and “Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei”, what else what should watch? Hmm…

I originally wanted to put everything into one post, but I think it doesn’t do justice to the movies, so here onto the post:

The most memorable parts about this movie are two short scenes: The dancing in the café and running through the Louvre. (I want to do that!) Both are barely important for the storyling to develop, and don’t show all that much about the rather unlikeable, illogical characters, so what’s so great about them? Well, it’s the originality of these particular details and the style that make this movie so beautifully french.

I didn’t get fond with the story itself though – we have another slightly stupid and annoying female main character and two rude and unlikeable males who use and rob her, even though both develop some kind of feelings for her. Oh well, even there these feelings are of rather egoistic and sexual nature. At the end of the day, the characters are not what you should care about in this Nouvelle Vague movie: it’s the storytelling, the style and those details I mentioned that made “Bande à part” worth a watch for me. I can see why this movie is a classic, but I definitely wouldn’t recommend it unless to a Nouvelle Vague fan.

Finally I managed to implement a plugin for the latest comments on the sidebar – I don’t particularily like it so far, but I find it useful enough and maybe I’ll work on it later.

Harold and Maude

As I have already announced, I could not simply put Harold and Maude into the stream of rather annoying backlog postings I had to write, but now I have this feeling that words cannot express how great this movie is. Outstandingly good humour, really extraordinary characters and especially the most unusual relationship I have ever seen leaves me with no words to explain the greatness of Harold and Maude.

My favourite part was the seppuku scene, I think. Closely followed by the comment of the psychologist (“But you want to sleep with your grandmother”) and the monologue of the priest who talks about “withered flesh” and finishes in an absolutely hilarious way with “It makes me want to… vomit.” Ahahaha! I laughed several times while watching it. This movie made me realize again how much I love dark humour, although at the same time, I find the movie rather optimistic: Despite all those suicide scenes, the movie propagates the beauty of nature, of small things in life and is full of enjoyable activities behind the eyes of society.

I love the aspect of hanging around cemetries, by the way. Paris not only made me a museum person, it also made me a cemetry person. I love walking through them, especially because they are even greater when the sky is actually dark and grey. I walked alone through the Père Lachaise with a black umbrella when it rained cats and dogs: The atmosphere was so intense and beautiful, aah. I don’t feel solemn or start to think about death or dead people though, I just enjoy cemetries.

If I may talk about another side note: I am a vivid follower of Harold’s clothing style, these jackets are so stylish, even though they might not be the manliest. It seems like I really like the 70s style. And now that I’m about to finish this blog post, I started Wikipedi-ing with this site and of course the Wikipedia article on the history of western fashion. The 19th century is so interesting already! It makes me wonder if the ladies (and few gentlemen) of the Gothic Lolita scene are actually aware of the complexity of the history of fashion.

I have been starting to record movies on TV and randomly watch them while knitting. Since they are mostly in german, I can hear some parts of the dialogue and do not necessary have to look for subtitles which is very practical. Also, even though knitting is a rather monotoneous thing to do (less than crocheting though, it seems), I prefer to watch a movie that does not take up all of my concentration. Also, I would never want to miss anything good from a seriously good movie. So here we go with three interesting, but not particularily outstanding titles.

Blow

Actually I did not know that this guy existed. I like Franka Potente and Penelopé Cruz to some extent, and I especially like Johnny Depp, so basically he was the only reason why I ended up watching the movie. Even though I had no idea what would await me, I wanted to see the movie; and now I finally did. It ended up being what I have expected, a solid movie with rather good actors without being boring at all, but nothing special.

I found it especially sad that his daughter really did not see him at all. At some point, she would grow up and understand a bit, right? Then again, Penelopé Cruz had a perfectly obnoxious character *g* I loved the scene in which she starts yelling at him in the car, asking him to fuck her. Harr.

The Life of David Gale

I have read that Roger Ebert gave this movie a 0, and every single review I have read so far was negative. Aaah, maybe I am just stupid, because I did not expect the story to turn out exactly like it did, also I found Kevin Spacey just as brilliant as he usually is, and because I actually had fun watching the movie. Of course the movie itself does not bring out the truth about the problems of death penalty and it shows nothing of the ridiculousness of the discussions, but this is a Hollywood movie after all, ah well.
Politically, this movie surely is rather problematic both in the lacking arguments for its message and the execution of the story, but somehow I did not realize it while watching it (maybe because fortunately I never had to lead many discussions about death penalty in general) and I had a rather enjoyable time watching it. Maybe this is the problem though, the movie was not supposed to be enjoyable.

Spider-Man

I haven’t seen any of the Batman movies and the only comic adaptation I have seen before was Sin City (which look fabulously, but I was unable to understand the story especially since I was only watching it with one eye basically). I was recommended to watch V for Vendetta, and Spider-Man is a movie that I used to refuse to watch, but now I am wondering why it is so successful.
I was told that Spider-Man, much unlike other superheroes, actually is more interesting since he also has very human problems such as relationship problems. This may be true, but it still does not refrain the movie from being horribly stereotypical and the dialogues extremely dumb. But oh well, again it was a nice story that was rather enjoyable to watch while knitting.

I feel like the next movies I am going to watch are going to be similar. But then again, one day I might die of boredom and I have a backlog of good movies that could fill up my computer if I had them, so there is no way I am going to become a mainstream movie watcher after all ;)
A propos backlog, oh God, I watched Harold and Maude and forgot about commenting on it! I cannot believe it…

Garden State

In fact, I don’t know how many years ago, we started watching Garden State at Pochi’s place (what a great pun on Mohiro Kitoh’s best short story, haha), but after half of the movie, I just couldn’t stand watching it anymore. The character of Natalie Portman annoyed the hell out of me, and I didn’t see any good in the relationship or the progress of the storyline either.
Maybe I have become a different person, but yesterday, the characters did not annoy me at all. Maybe it’s because we watched the german version so that I didn’t have to listen to Natalie Portman’s loli voice which I found very annoying back then. But whatever, the main thing is that enjoyed the movie thoroughly this time without finding it depressing at all, especially when they stood in the rain and cried out loud – yay!

The only thing that I found weird was how sometimes, sudden things would happen, like how he says “I like you” totally out of the blue, or that kiss after crying in the rain. Somehow I would have expected things like these to develop slower (yes, even slower!), I guess.

I was listening to the soundtrack again this evening and it made me realize again how much fun it was to watch the movie and recognize all the songs again. Maybe this is the only movie where I have known the soundtrack so well and for so long before actually watching the movie itself.
Besides the horrible placement for “Caring is Creepy”, I was mainly shocked by “Let Go” as ending song. I mean, hey, how can a happy couple kiss at the end to lyrics like “There is beauty in the breakdown”?

It’s weird how I feel like there isn’t much to say about this movie, especially since it was on my “To-do-list” for such a long time, but at least I can say that it met my high expectations for it. I did expect something rather ‘meaningful’ than funny, and that’s what I got: If you take aside the psycho stuff, it’s a portrait of the indieness of our generation.

PS. I see myself changing my opinions quite a lot recently. When I listened to the Iron&Wine version of “Such Great Heights” three months ago, I found it totally boring. Today, it doesn’t sound too bad to me.

Casablanca

Most definitely not. But I haven’t watched a movie together with my parents since ages and I know that they like old Hollywood love stories, so I figured they would like Casablanca as well. I was even more surprised that they actually haven’t seen it yet, but it’s only natural, I guess. It’s a story with a sad ending and it propagates western ideals and stuff, so it obviously would not be particularily famous in China.

I hate the “Ich schau dir in die Augen, Kleines”, but aside from that, the love story itself was rather cute and understandable. Both of them, but especially Ingrid Bergman, are fabulous actors and make the ridiculousness that goes with Hollywood love stories somehow realistic and touching. My adoration for Ingrid Bergman has now nearly reached Audrey Hepburn’s. They are like two sides of a coin (blonde – dark-haired, petite – tall, cute – elegant etc.) but they share a naturally beautiful, rather smart looking face with expressive eyes and an incredible talent for acting.

Back to the politics: Despite the suspenseful and beautifully kitsch love story and La Bergman, I still believe that the (questionable!) political message is still the main reason behind its popularity is still the message. I dislike how Italians are shown in such a bad way, how all the Germans are so generically bad (the truth is much more complex of course), how the city of Casablanca itself is basically reduced to some exotic stage, how I had to read in the Wikipedia article that lots of german actors had to play roles of Nazis even though they had to flee from Germany themselves. Besides that, I rather doubt the way patriotism and western ideologies such as democracy is shown: it’s just stated that these values have to be protected, not why – of course you can’t expect more than this from such a movie. The Marseillaise is still a song of war, bloodshed and fights; the democratic values of the French Revolution still go hand in hand with “La Terreur”… maybe I should not talk about politics, I guess, it’s too outraging. Especially not in relation to a Hollywood movie.

Another thing I find interesting about the movie is the strength of its citations. Even more since the german translation is so horrible (like I mentioned before with “Ich schau dir in die Augen, Kleines”). But when I’ve re-read all the quotations on Imdb and Wikipedia, I immediately recognized them and were able to relate them to the specific scene, like “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” or “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.'” and especially “Round up the usual suspects.” (ahaha, so funny). Maybe it’s just that the most simple things in movies are also the most memorable.

Finally, the most important part of the movie is still the end. I expected Lazlo to die in fact because I could not believe a famous story like Casablanca to end without a happy end. But I figured that this aspect of forsaking love for something bigger must also have contributed to its popularity; and I think so too. Love is beautiful, but letting go of the true love for something more important, something like responsibility, is even more so. That’s why “The Bridges of Madison County” would have been a beautiful story if the book was a bit better written and the character a bit more complex (in my opinion). In the end, I could totally identify myself with Rick, but what, nowadays, is more important than love anyways?

Huo Zhe (To Live)

This film was brilliant. Just brilliant. I don’t really know what to say about the movie especially since I didn’t know anything about it before. I was even more surprised to see that my parents have loved it as well and that my father is a fan of Zhang Yimou… somehow I always have expected Zhang Yimou to be the “movies for the western world” kind of director, but that’s only half of the truth. “To Live” is a masterpiece of chinese culture, going through the most dramatic times of chinese history. My parents have always said that every generation has go to through some hardships – for our grandparents it was the wars, for them it was the cultural revolution… and since I was small, I feared a WW3 or something equally devastating so I promised myself I would become strong-hearted. *hrr* Pretty stupid, I know, but without purpose, my parents’ education have accidentally made me very sensitive about war, the cultural revolution and other humanitary catastrophes. I also am the kind of person who starts to cry when I see books burning and the thought of doctors and teachers to be tortured is one of the most depressing possible, considering the nature of their profession (health and education are the most important things for a man after all!) and the huge amount of work they had to put into forming their skills. To me, it’s not the holocaust, it’s the cultural revolution in China that is the worst thing humanity has ever brought out; besides my strong opinion about war being the worst thing that can happen to you. I’m not exaggerating.

Back to the movie, it’s just SO chinese. And the fact that it was banned adds up to it. It’s not the characters (Ge You is more than brilliant!) and not only the touching story, it’s the message behind it that makes it so chinese. Of course the whole story is about life, but it especially is about how you have to continue living no matter what happens. If China has survived until now and has brought it so far, it’s not only because it’s a bunch of smart merchants, but also because they are traditionally raised to be able to overcome hardships and support difficulties. It’s probably considered the most important virtue, and this is so presented in such a touching, beautiful way in this movie. Aaah, how much I love it! I was lucky that I only saw good movies since I came to Berlin (or at least as good as I expected), but this movie’s brilliance tops it all. No matter how interesting and important movies or sex or relationships or politics are, this movie really is about life and that stands over everything.

I’m sorry for ranting so much and not having said anything really substantial about the movie itself (besides the fact that with this, I have finally acknowledged Gong Li as a good actress and not just some nice face), nothing about the most touching and funny scenes, and nothing about how happy I am that I can speak chinese so I could get all the small linguistic nuances of the dialogue.