About Chocolate Parfaits

Control

After spending nearly two hours on reading Wikipedia articles and the talk page of “comfort women” Why is it so fascinating to read those discussions? The ridiculousness and pretentiousness of Wikipedia discussions make me want to be in the scene – and avoid the scene as much as possible at the same time. I feel the same about academia, by the way.

When I think about that, I realize why I enjoy art so much. Even when I loathe the ‘artistic scene’ as much as the academic, I’m actually much happier with what they produce and I find discussions on them much nicer because of the freedom of speech, the diversity of people and a general higher acceptance for different things.

At the same time, I also strongly believe that being a highly artistic person necessarily makes you unhappy. In the same way I find the portrait of Hagu in Honey & Clover fascinating because she is the only, really the only ‘true’ genius that the (comparably shallow) medium of anime has ever depicted, I think that “Control” is doing a great job of showing the person behind Joy Division’s fairly brilliant singer and song-writer. Being a genius comes with being a complicated, typically rather egocentered person who has problems different from others and hence is difficult to be with. It’s true that the slow pace and the calm, stylish atmosphere of the film makes it difficult to get deeper into the complex personality of Ian Curtis, but I think it still is a fair portrait in its framework. In every moment, I think that the audience is aware that this film tells a story and wants to promote the music and life of Joy Division’s members more than anything. That was brilliantly done, and it makes me want to listen to their music actually, haha.

Similar to most things I am watching, I am not sure whether I can give a fair accessment of how good it is – I see a lot of strong points in this film and some weak points (I especially disliked the simple nature of Ian’s relationship to Annik compared to the great portrait of his relationship to Deborah). The same goes for the music – yes, I’m definitely curious about Joy Division’s music now and I find their visual style very appealing, but at the same time I’m also not able to really get into it on the emotional level.

Finally, I am sure that this film is a feast for Joy Division fans, and just like with Sakuran, the fact that Anton Corbijn primarily is a photographer definitely contributed to the film’s great visual style.

Down by Law

Losing e-mail drafts and postings is a common thing, I suppose; and the longer it took to write them, the more frustrating it is. However, I managed to lose this one posting two times in a row right when I was planning on publishing it! Argh. Anyways, onto the film:

I watched it a few days ago and it was admittedly mainly because I wanted to finally have watched every single feature film Jim Jarmusch has brought out. Indeed, Down by Law was exactly what I expected: A slow, very atmospheric film with Jarmusch-typical music. The style is absolutely excellent and the actors all brilliant. Even if I hadn’t known that this is a Jarmusch work, I would have recognized it and once again, bowed down in front of this great artist. However, a Jarmusch film always also bears some kind of ennui, it was especially the case for the first part of Down by Law.

Luckily, two aspects made the movie great again: First, the great and in my opinion outstanding performance of Ellen Barkin as angry girlfriend in the négligée; second, the interaction between the characters. Especially with Roberto Benigni showing up, the whole story got a subtly funny turn and became thoroughly enjoyable for me. It doesn’t surprise me that the trailer of the film nearly only shows scenes of the main characters together – and the poster of the film (see above) even shows one of the last scenes of the film. It’s a film that doesn’t care about suspense and what happens, it’s about how it happens and what kind of people are involved. And Jarmusch is just so incredibly brilliant at picking strong characters.

In conclusion, you will see Down by Law very low on my list of Jim Jarmusch films, because the others outshine it even more.
1. Night on Earth
2. Coffee & Cigarettes
3. Mystery Train
4. Ghost Dog
5. Dead Man
6. Stranger than Paradise
7. Permanent Vacation
8. Down by Law
9. Broken Flowers
But I’m finally done! And I can’t wait for his next film, especially since the idea of combining Jim Jarmusch and Gael García Bernal is too exciting. I hope he gets a sweet role and I should keep myself up from having too high expectations for this.

Welcome to Dongmakgol

My first encounter with this film was at the Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften (of all places), when we participated at a korean movie quiz and got quite a few cute prizes including a small tea cup. Anyways, this film was shown besides the obvious “JSA” (Joint Security Area), “Taegukgi” (Taegeukgi hwinalrimyeo), “Double Agent” and another one whose name I have forgotten.

First of all, I have finally given into being a dedicate fan of korean films. The ones I have seen so far are “JSA”, “Oldboy”, “I’m a Cyborg but that’s OK”, “Bin-jip”, “My Sassy Girl”, “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance”, “Sympathy for Mrs. Vengeance”, “Wonderful Days”, “A Good Lawyer’s Wife” and this. They are very similar to films about war: either extremely brilliant or extremely horrible. I still remember how brilliant “Jarhead” was, and a plethora of other touching war stories come to mind. In the setting of wars, the great extremes and the darkest sides of humankind comes to the surface as well as the strongest bonds in interhuman relationships. Therefore, a korean movie with war or the intra-korean conflict as main topic means either that the film is going to be the best I’ve ever seen or incredibly horrible. “Welcome to Dongmakgol” definitely is among the best films I have ever seen, and I think I need to update my list of favourite movies (“Huo Zhe”/”To Live” and Dongmakgol definitely need their place in the top 10).

And now I have come to a writer’s block, because there is no way I could ever be able to find the right words to describe why this film was so extraordinary. I am surely going to dedicate a long passage to the nitpicking on this movie on Imdb, but first of all, let me just say that this film is the most outstanding one about humans, life, laughters and everything that I have seen since “Huo Zhe”. On top of that, it brought my love for films back. When I watched it, I thought I am glad to be alive because this is the kind of films whose enjoyment and meaningfulness make life worthwhile. If life has a meaning for me, then it is the eternal pursuit of something as enjoyable and sad and intense as this. (There is more than just films, of course, but right now I feel that films like Dongmakgol stand above anything else.) If I look at the list of films I have watched since I started blogging about them two years ago, there is only “Donnie Darko”, “25th Hour”, “Huo Zhe”, “Brick”, “Das Leben der Anderen”, “Harold and Maude”, “Jules et Jim”, “M” and “No Man’s Land” that have impressed me so much. (I’m going to call my son Jim!) To me, all of these films (some more than others) portray the beauty of being human, in different ways. They were all enjoyable and meaningful, only few of them are funny and all of them flesh out their characters in an extremely intense way.

So, as I hinted before, the origins of why I enjoyed Dongmakgol so much lies in its premise: It’s a korean film about the inner korean conflict during the war. On top of that, Dongmakgol is a comedy about 3 north korean soldiers, 2 south korean soldiers and 1 american pilot all stranded in a tiny village that has never seen guns completely isolated from the rest of the world. And boy, is this premise well executed. I laughed hard, so very hard that my laughter likely has drowned out the other germans’ happiness about winning the game against Portugal. Even now, I feel like crying whenever I think back at the end, and there were enough scenes that made me want to cry. The actual scene that inevitably shot tears into my eyes was the one when the naive south korean said that they “are an alliance too! It’s the north-south-korean alliance”. I found that so beautiful, as beautiful as I found their friendship. I could strongly feel with the american of not having gone to the mission with the others; if it were me, I probably could not live anymore.

Which brings us to the very asian character of the film: Just like “JSA”, and very much unlike “Oldboy” (for example), I think it is difficult to fully understand the greatness of Dongmakgol and its characters’ motivations. If your friend dies, and died because of you even when you didn’t want it, you have no reason to live anymore. If you are in the situation of the emo south korean soldier, you have every reason in the world to be emo and angsty. If you have killed your soldiers because they were weak and couldn’t walk anymore, you have no reason to live. On the other hand, Dongmakgol is trying to be very human, and especially shows the american as being one simple human being who ultimately opened himself to the koreans and genuinely became friends with them. He also had planned on going with them on their mission and only a well-calculated reason has kept him up from going with them – here, the korean scriptwriter has given the american a heroic character trait that usually is considered very “not american”. American heroes always try to survive, asian heroes are always willing to sacrifice themselves.
Today, I also watched an episode of “Eureka Seven” that involved bombings. I immediately thought of Dongmakgol and feel that I am never going to see bombs in the old light again. I guess the image in the film was just too powerful.

In the same way, I find people’s nitpicking about this film extremely ignorant. The main issue definitely is the bad way americans are portrayed in the film, which I can kind of understand (but it really does not matter), and another much sillier issue is how there actually exist people in the world who find it ridiculous that there are south koreans shooting “their own side” (the americans, that is). The actual message of the whole film is anti-war in general, and they were not shooting the others in the first place, they were deviating the bombs. Gosh. Oh well.

Finally, the last scene had quite an impact on me actually, especially since the “all the characters sleeping together” image is one of my favourite. Sleeping together has a stong symbolism for me, partially because of superstition I suppose. The last scene of Dongmakgol is very similar to how the last scene of JSA is constructed and bears the same tragedy, however, I think that there still is quite a difference: In Dongmakgol, the characters were never torn apart and had the luck (?) of staying together until the end; in JSA, the message of political issues tearing brothers and friends apart is underlined by the last scene in which the characters are shown together. In that respect, I understand why the last scene of JSA coupled with a beautiful song ultimately had a stronger impact on me than Dongmakgol.
On a side note, I ended up watching JSA again the next day, and I realized that after the 4th and 5th time I am watching it, I don’t feel the story that intensely anymore. Besides the fact that I have known about the story, I think parts of it is that I wanted to avoid getting affected by the tragedy too much and so I was actively trying not to let its sadness get too close to me.

Now that my attempt of writing a blog post worthy of the film has completely gotten lost, I shall stop now. As you can see from my rambling tone and the length, the film has had a strong impact on me and I heartily recommend “Welcome to Dongmakgol”.

Kiss me, Stupid

Erm, well, it’s a very typical Billy Wilder movie, I suppose. It took me a little while to get into it – see a pattern? Apparently most older comedic series start off a little boringly and then become really funny and enjoyable later on. Now that Billy Wilder has avanced to the no.2 director when it comes to the number of movies I’ve seen, I can only say that this was very expected fun. I laughed a lot, and that says everything. Blogging about funny movies is just that difficult and I suppose the name of Billy Wilder is enough to indicate a genuinely enjoyable comedy classic.

On a side note, the actress for Zelda is pretty cute (Jack Lemmon married her after all!), but I liked Polly’s actress better.

I need to watch Sunset Boulevard. I will never be able to completely watch the entirety of Billy Wilder’s movies (like I am attempting with Jim Jarmusch and Audrey Hepburn), but I will definitely at least watch that one.

Ghost World

…but not in this movie, really. I have expected witty sarcasm, funny and interesting characters and a somewhat meaningful story, but in the end, the only thing I got was the somewhat meaningful story. I really liked the end of the movie, and that’s pretty much it. I know that everybody I know has liked the movie so far, but that didn’t help on my opinion on the movie at all, it rather left me with disappointment.

First of all, the dialogue was not funny at all. The interaction between the characters was interesting to see, but there simply was nothing in the whole story that made me smile, let alone laugh. Second, there is nothing in the story or in the dialogue that I would have considered witty – in my eyes, it was rather full of misanthropic comments without any substance behind it. I love coming-of-age movies and I love sarcastic characters, but in my eyes, this is one example of a really badly done sarcastic character who seems to just look down on everything in a pretty lame and unmotivated way, without providing any reason for her arrogance. Gah.

Oh, and that one scene… I was like “Oh god, you guys are not going to kiss now, right?” Aaaargh. Haha.

Besides the ending, the one other thing I liked was the conception of art in the whole thing. I liked that Enid was an artist (according to the cliché, emo kids are always artists after all) and the stuff she did truly was pretty good, although it’s totally not my style. The fact that she won this art prize and then lost it because of silly american political correctness was quite brilliant. Ultimately I admit that the movie wasn’t entirely stupid and had its smart parts here and there, I just expected more of Enid’s character, I suppose.

A propos the ending: The reason why I liked it so much was that it brought the only nice motive in the movie back – the bus that this old guy was waiting for. I found that metaphore very nice and the fact that Enid ended up leaving the town was the best the movie could have ended with: Just going away and leaving is my dream, preferable with a fake name. If I had no relatives who cared for me, I would totally do that.

Tre metri sopra il cielo

In fact, we watched this film two weeks ago (in two sessions) in our italian class. Oh God, I have to study for italian or otherwise I won’t be able to do anything at all in the exam…

But whatever, how should I put it – it’s been awhile since I’ve seen such a clichéd, typical teen movie. More than that, it reminded me exactly of the constellation that all Bollywood movies seem to be made of: Guy is a rebellion and head of a motorbike gang, girl is a model student at some catholic school; they meet through their friends and fall in love with each other. Obviously their relationship is quickly getting complicated due to his lifestyle and her arrogance and morality, well, as easily predictable.

However, I guess there were two main points that kind of attracted to the film even though it really is clichéd and silly: The first one is the music, the second one is the rather romantic love story itself. I really want the soundtrack to the movie and the love story just touched my silly young girl’s heart. I can see myself in 20 years re-watching this movie and thinking that this must have been the feeling of falling in love when you were young. And for some reason, it’s this silly italian pop music that brings these feelings out of myself (and not the music I used to listen to when I was young and blindly in love).

It should be noted that it’s been six months since I’ve seen the movie and I still find it somewhat memorable. At the same time, I’ve shown the key scenes (the silly sex scene that is) to Shii and it soiled “Gabriel” by Lamb for him – I’m so sorry, because I find that song very beautiful myself. Typically I don’t go for the technically rather uninteresting, but atmospheric trip hop, but Lamb is an exception. If one has to dissect and over-analyse the song, I’d even say that there is a ‘climax’ to it that could go well in a sex scene, but let’s not delve in that further. It is indeed a little bit like this scene in Kare Kano, only that Kare Kano was a thousand times more tasteful. What should I say now after 6 months? My youth is over, haha.

À bout de souffle

Actually her short hair attracted me when I first saw a poster of the movie about a year ago, but now that I see the “actual thing”, I realized that I really like it. Instead of looking like some wannabe lesbian, Jean Seberg actually looks sweet and somehow cute with that hairstyle.

This is another one of these movies that starts off extremely weirdly and then becomes extremely great. For the first 10 minutes, I have been wondering if I am going to force myself through the film. Yet again, how wrong I was! I feel like I have forgotten Godard’s movies, it really are the little details and the outstanding style that are so great about his movies: the fact that Belmondo says “nonente-neuf” and “huitante-sept”, or the tidbits of dialogue that are so classy that I’m wondering why the “quotes” section at IMDB is actually so short. The dynamics between Belmondo and jean Seberg are truly brilliant. The clash of those characters is what makes this movie so great. It doesn’t even matter that much that they are french and american. In my eyes, they are just different personnalities with this weird, stylish way of dealing with their relationship that is so special in french movies.

Back to the dialogues: They are the reason why this show is so great, and I realize that a collection of quotes is not doing justice to the style of the film, because it’s the cinematography, the actors and especially the swift changes from one topic to another that makes this film so interesting. Still, these are the ones that I still would like to note down:

~ ~

– Elle est jolie?
– Elle est drôle, je l’aime bien.

– Je reviens dans une seconde.
– Les francais disent toujours une seconde pour dire cinq minutes.

– Patricia, regarde moi. Je t’interdis de voir ce type […] Hélas, hélas, hélas. J’aime une fille qui a une très jolie nuque, de très jolis seins, une très jolie voie, une très jolie poignée, un très joli front, de très jolis genoux, mais qui est lâche.

– Si je pouvais creuser un trou par terre pour que personne ne me verra, je le ferai.
– Non, faut faire comme les éléphants. Quand ils sont malheureux, au contraire. Ils partent. They vanish.
– I don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m not free, or if I’m not free because I’m unhappy.

– Tu es encore plus folle que moi. […] Je m’intéresse toujours aux filles qui ne sont pas faites pour moi.

– Pourquoi tu es venu ici, Michel?
– Moi, parce que j’ai envie de recoucher avec toi.
– Ce n’est pas une raison, je trouve.
– Évidemment, si. Ca veut dire que je t’aime.

– Souris-moi. […] Bon, je compte jusqu’à 8. Si à 8, tu ne m’as pas souris, je t’étrangle. […] 1…2…3… 4, 5, 6… 7… 7 et demi…. 7 trois-quart… Tu es tellement lâche que je paris que tu vais sourire. Elle sourit.

– Est-ce que tu pense à la mort quelque fois? Moi j’y pense sans arrêt.

– Je vais vous regarder jusqu’à ce que vous ne me regardiez plus.
– Moi aussi. They kiss in the next scene.

– Quand tu as peur ou tu es etonné, ou les deux en même temps, tu as un drôle de reflet dans les yeux.
– Et alors?
– Je voudrais me recoucher avec toi à cause de ce reflet.

– Tu connais William Faulkner?
– Qui est-ce? T’as couché avec lui?
(Oh, I had to laugh when I heard this!)

– Pourquoi tu fermes les yeux?
– J’essaie de fermer mes yeux très fortes pour que tous devient noir. Mais je n’y arrive pas. C’est jamais complètement noir.
– Ton sourire quand on le vois de profile, c’est ce que tu as de mieux. Ca c’est toi.

– Quel est votre plus grande ambition?
– Devenir immortel et puis mourir.

– C’est triste le sommeil. On est forcé de se sépar..
– -rer.
– On dit de “dormir ensemble”, mais c’est pas vrai.

– Quand je parlais, je parlais de moi. Et toi de toi.
– Je sais que je suis idiote.
– Tu aurais dû parler de moi, et moi de toi.
– Je ne veux pas être amoureuse de toi!

~ ~

The end of the film was brilliant, for some reason. The dialogue between Patricia and Michel seemed very powerful to me, and the “punchline” was great.

The first time I stumbled upon this film was in my edition of the Lonely Planet Paris in which “À bout de souffle” is one of five recommended movies about Paris. It’s true, with so many shots of Paris and the fact that one element of the Nouvelle Vague is the use of hand cameras in real settings, it is indeed a good example. But at the same time, the film does not make me want to go back to Paris. Is it because it’s a black and white film? Or because it’s the Paris from 40 years ago? Or because I actually have never seen Godard’s Paris?

PS. At some point in the middle of the movie, during the interview with the writer, the talk about men and women has made me remember my plan of meeting Milan Kundera in Paris. Too bad it didn’t work out.

21 grams

I remember very clearly how difficult I found it to write about Amores Perros, and I also had my problems writing about Babel. 21 Gram is about exactly in the middle of them, considering everything: It’s easier to write about than Amores Perros and more difficult than Babel, it’s less love-story related than Amores Perros but more than Babel, it’s less indie than Amores Perros (with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts) but much more than Babel, it tries to be more meaningful than Amores Perros but much less than Babel. After seeing Amores Perros and Babel, it seems like I can’t help but seeing it as the interpolation of these two films.

I will be trying not to do that though: All in all, I think Inarritu’s typical non-linear storytelling works great here, much better than in both of his other films. I also feel more for the characters here than both of the other films. Naomi Watts was beautiful in the scene where she knew about her family’s death – in fact, it was more powerful than anything in the other two Inarritu films.
Another surprise to me was that 21 Grams is rather pleasant to watch. I didn’t find the storyline difficult to follow, because you can guess rather well what is going on. Maybe I am trained by watching Baccano or something, haha, but I really found the story rather simple. At the same time, I don’t felt so forced watching it as it was the case for Amores Perros, and I didn’t feel crushed by clichés about japanese society.

For some reason the most memorable thing of this film will most probably be my annoyance of Mary. I have no idea why, but I found everything about her incredibly unpleasant. On the one hand, I do feel sorry for her, but on the other hand, I feel like everything she does is wrong. Both her and her husband are horribly selfish, ignorant and whatnot. Or maybe I just disliked her way of talking?
In the same way, I’m not a big fan of the love story between the protagonists, just licking each other’s wounds.

Finally, I’m sorry that I could not stop thinking of Inarritu’s other films while watching this one. It’s possible that it kept me up from truly getting into the film, but I actually liked it a lot despite my inability of thinking of “Amores Perros” and “Babel”. Well, I have had that disease before it seems.

Brokeback Mountain

So Prog says I should blog about this movie, and I think I should comply :3 The problem is that I started writing this post right after I watched the movie, and I must admit that the complexity of the film has left me speechless. I felt like nothing I write could do justice to what I felt while watching it, and I think I needed a few days to process my feelings. The least thing I could say is that it had left me a huge impression on me, as tragic relationships mostly do – but these two were tragic on a complete different level than your typical Romeo-and-Julia-stuff. With the “real life” they had and the ending, this story seemed much more complex to me.

This brings us to the title: I really liked the movie because I were perfectly able to relate to the characters. Considering that my parents are prejudiced against homosexuality, I am wondering why they ended up liking this movie and even telling me to watch it, when there are such explicit scenes and talking about sex. Okay, the actual scenes were minimal and the relationship was (luckily) the focus in the story, but that is even more an indication that they must have accepted their love and felt empathy for them. To me, that’s really interesting.

Therefore, I will start with the most controversial part of the story: The weird, random sex scene at the beginning. Besides that I was wondering about technical details such as how they actually knew how to do it and apparently immediately decided on who is top, it feels like in this very moment, they completely forgot about everything in their life, which is somewhat impressive but at the same time really unrealistic to me. As if gay men would always jump onto each other like that. Doesn’t that foster any prejudices? Personally, however, I thoroughly enjoyed that particular scene… maybe there is a yaoi girl sleeping in me? I also liked the scenes from “La mala educación” a lot, to be honest.

As you can imagine, I kept fangirling over Jake Gyllenhaal the whole time. I wouldn’t even say that he is outstandingly good-looking; in my opinion, he’s “only” cute. But he has these charismatic eyes and such a sweet smile. If he (or Gael Garcia Bernal) it’s somewhat difficult to keep your eyes away from them to the point that it distracts from the film…

The only thing that bugged me a little bit was how one of them went off sleeping around in Mexico basically because he couldn’t control his libido. Maybe that’s realistic for men, but it still left me with this feeling of “unnecessity”. I don’t go sleeping around because I can only have sex once or twice in a year, and I doubt that I’m inhuman or frigid, au contraire. And I believe quite a lot of singles would agree.

Now that it’s been such a long time that I watched it, it’s also interesting for me to see that I am able to remember the majority of what happened in the story, that they left such an intense impression. More than anybody, I felt sorry for Ennis’ wife who has known about their affair and suffered so greatly. I imagine it to be a much more horrible thing to have to compete against a man than a woman, really. At that point, there is nothing you can do and if you are already at a stage where you can’t just forget him, you’re done. Compared to that, Jack’s and Ennis’ long-term and desperate relationship seemed much more ‘straightforward’ and beautiful to me (if that makes any sense, I guess not).

The end actually came as a great shock – they parted after an argument, and then… If I were Ennis, I would have wanted to die.

Finally, I’m sorry for ranting so much and having such a biased and probably somewhat narrow-minded opinion, because, well, I am a sucker for desperate and complex relationships (see Jules et Jim). When this aspect of a movie is there and is so carefully executed as in Brokeback Mountain, I cannot help but just focus myself on that.

PS. Wikipedia says that Gus van Sant was interested in directing Brokeback Mountain. Now that would have been interesting.

A Fish Called Wanda

Completely ignoring the large backlog of movies I have to blog about, I just had to talk about my impressions on this classic. It took me about 5 or 6 tries to finally watch it: I have it lying around for over a year now and every time, I couldn’t get over the first 5 minutes. The characters were absolutely horrible, the story confusing based on the beginning, the actors funny but visually not too interesting. (Also, I really don’t see anything attractive about Jamie Lee Curtis.)

But how quickly that changed! I knew the movie would be brilliant because I know at least one person who claims it to be his favourite of all times. Even though “Some Like it Hot” outshines it by far in terms of entertainment, I must still say that this british humour is very exquisite. I have been told the story of the three dogs, and oh God, even though I always felt so sorry for Ken, I must admit that those scenes were pure comedic gold. My other favourite is the “love triangle” between Wanda, Otto and Archie (ahaha, what a name!). First of all, let me tell you that I love the comparison scenes between Archie and his wife going to bed, and Wanda and Otto “going to bed” at the same time. How beautifully funny – this scene develops into even more hilarity when Archie comes up with his italian. The idea of a foreign language to be stimulating is quite realistic (and interesting!) actually and here, it’s so perfectly parodized. I love it.

Even though there wasn’t all too much I could say about the film, I think it totally does justice to its reputation of being a cult film and heartily recommend it. (And you all know that I rarely do this.)