September 8, 2004
Hero
I never really thought about what Zhang Yimou had to do to get his work made and released in Communist China. That's probably because his work that I'm familiar with (almost all starring Gong Li) never needed to be quite so explicit; Raise the Red Lantern and Shanghai Triad came by their messages about capitalist decadence quite honestly, and The Story of Qiu Ju (probably my favorite of his movies, with the radiant Gong Li pregnant, muffled in a peasant's costume, and working her way up the political ladder trying to get justice for her husband, who has been kicked in the groin by the village boss) and Not One Less are stories about the perseverance of villagers in contemporary rural China, removed from the pace of a frantically modernizing country. Both of those are messages that I'm sure the people controlling the movie industry in China were happy to see promulgated. Hero, on the other hand, just burns. The setup is all right; Jet Li's Nameless tells the story of how he, a lowly provincial clerk, defeated the three most feared assassins in the kingdom of Qin: Sky (Donnie Chen), Snow (Maggie Cheung), and Broken Sword (Tony Leung). The king of Qin responds with what he thinks really happened, and Nameless tells the final version of the story. I think Li's Tsui Hark films and the other wirework-heavy movies he made in the early '90s are fantastic, but he has very real limitations as an actor, but as Nameless he's not called to run into his boundaries. Leung and Cheung are both fantastic (the Mandarin title of Hero is Cheung's character's name), and Zhang Ziyi is spunky in her supporting role. And Zhang can simply flat-out compose a shot; the fight sequences in particular are jaw-droppingly gorgeous (my favorite is being the study in reds and yellows as Zhang Ziyi and Cheung duke it out in an autumnal forest), more like painterly color studies than anything else. (There's a similarly nice love scene in blues and whites.) But they're not great fight scenes; Li and Cheung batting down hundreds of arrows on a school rooftop is fantastically kinectic, but Zhang seems uncomfortable just sticking his camera on his actors and letting show off their fight choreography chops. The editing is choppier than I think it really needed to be, and you never quite get a sense of the absurd athletics that go into making a top-notch chop socky fight scene. And then there's the plot, which is what got me thinking about Communist China in the first place; the whole movie is a paean to the importance of sacrificing individual good for the collective whole, in the person of the king of Qin, soon to be the first emperor of a unified China. Subjegation to a strong national leader, even if you despise him, is presented as absolutely the noblest thing possible. I'm sure some of the vibe is Confuscian and not simple propaganda that Beijing signed off on when they funded Hero, but despite the gorgeous tableaus, I can't recommend it; in the end, it comes across not as Zhang Yimou's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon but as Leni Riefenstahl's Once Upon a Time in China.
February 6, 2004
Bay of Angels
The opening shot of Bay of Angels, a gorgeous, high-speed reverse tracking shot away from Jeanne Moreau and down the boardwalk of Nice, set expectations the rest couldn't match. The script -- the story of a young bank clerk, played by Claude Mann, and his wild gambling jag with a broke and desperate Jeanne Moreau while on a vacation in Nice -- asks the viewer to swallow an awful lot. The look on the faces of the two actors is wonderful, as it encompasses the sheer boredom of gambling, and particularly of roulette, a game that has all the appeal for me of wagering my paycheck on a lumberjack contest on ESPN2. There are long moments of bored stillness once the chips are down, punctuated only by Moreau's fingers twitching slightly as she kills another cigarette. But real life doesn't have the timing of a script, and the down-to-the-last-dollar wins the pair keep racking up are just predictable and tiresome, even granting that it's just a movie. The end seems to be missing about five minutes of footage, and whether it's meant to be a happy ending or a cheerfully ironic "happy ending", it has all the subtlety of cinder block dropped from height. The film is aware of its own artifice -- Mann compares Moreau to a novel, her lifestyle to an American movie. The actors are excellent and have real chemistry (although, as V. notes, nobody beats up a woman quite as ineffectually as a Frenchman in a New Wave film); Moreau's performance is particularly good. She has a sort of breathtaking squirreliness, sexy and doomed and dangerous to herself and others; the part reminded me of a number of other self-destructive archetypes (I kept thinking of Sid and Nancy, actually, for very little reason that I could see on the screen). But I was expecting more than this from the director of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; everything felt too much like Demy was purposefully making a Hollywood-style movie, too pat. The opening shot, a high-speed reverse tracking shot down Nice's boardwalk, is wonderful, and for the first half of the movie I thought I was going to get an honest paean to the real pleasures of being young, reckless, and stupid. If Mann had had his wild fling, lost his money, and never seen Moreau again, he could have treasured the memory and the film might have lived up to that amazing opening.
July 26, 2003
28 Days Later
My friend Johnny says that zombie movies are his favorite because they tell the story of what happens when civilization is stripped away. Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave stripped the veneer away from three London yuppies and let them slip into a war of all against all, so you'd think he'd be a natural to make a zombie film. You'd be right; 28 Days Later is really good. The setup -- they're not the walking dead, but victims of some sort of zombifying virus that is transmitted through blood and saliva and takes effect within seconds -- means that the zombies can be something other than the shambling braineaters I know and love, and it works magnificently: the zombies are creepy as hell. The film is lovely, too; I don't normally care for feature films shot on digital video, but it looks just right for post-apocalyptic London. (The cinematographer is associated with the Dogme 95 folks, so video is presumably his métier.) The contrast between London and the bucolic countryside is handled nicely, too. The second half of the film gets a bit too man-vs.-man society-gone-mad for my tastes (a bit too Shallow Grave, in fact). Romero's best movies knew that human conflict is supposed to be the backdrop and subtext for zombie-related carnage, not the other way around, and this falls down on that front, but I still liked 28 Days Later a heckuva lot.
(Bonus: A song by Godspeed You Black Emperor! on the soundtrack. Their music makes my commute feel cinematic and sweeping; it's no surprise that it works well as the protagonist runs through an abandoned London. Extra bonus for the distaff sex: V. says that the protagonist was knuckle-chewingly hot. Extra extra bonus: There's apparently a new ending now playing after the credits; I might go back and see it again, because I am a sucker, yes I am.)
June 29, 2003
Whale Rider
If Whale Rider had been a Disney movie, it would have been absolutely dreadful; made by a bunch of New Zealand indie filmmakers, it came out as a surprisingly intelligent and effective (though certainly not innovative) family drama. The plot -- a spunky Maori girl wins her crusty, traditionalist grandfather's approval, despite not being a boy -- doesn't sound promising. But despite being every bit as sentimental as that summary would suggest, Whale Rider was a charming little movie. Part of it has to do with the lead actress, Keisha Castle-Hughes. Child actors are generally abhorrently cute, but Castle-Hughes' performance as Paikea reminded me of the child actors Jafar Panahi dug up for The Mirror and The White Balloon. She's got a very natural, winning screen presence; I suspect she's going to grow up to be breathtaking; I hope she doesn't lose her on-screen comfort. And her interactions with Rawiri Paratene, playing her grandfather, Koro, are brilliantly underplayed.
Beyond the acting (and the lovely New Zealand countryside), the secret of Whale Rider, V. and I decided, is that it was willing to make her grandfather's resistance to Pai wholly credible. Her grandfather is a tribal leader who has been awaiting a chief who can resurrect the small rural town, seeming entirely populated by Maori, in which he and his family live. Koro's relentless drive to shape a new prophet has driven his eldest son to Europe and life as an artist and his second son -- passed over by the order of his birth -- to a cheerful, beer-fueled, and inert life. Paikea is named after the mythic founder of the Maori people, but she's a girl. We know how this is going to turn out, of course, but unlike the crusty-old-men with hearts-of-gold in Pollyanna or The Secret Garden, Koro's beliefs seem to have had genuine negative consequences. Even though we see that Koro's operating within the framework that he understands, and even though he's depicted flatteringly, he's run off his two children and he's in the process of running off his only grandchild. Until a literal miracle forces him to reevaluate his beliefs, Koro is a sympathetic, nuanced jerk, and children's movies could use more of the type.
May 31, 2003
Gigantic
It was weird walking into the showing of Gigantic: The Story of Two Johns. Usually when I am at an event attended by a deeply geeky subculture, I am at least noddingly a participant in that subculture. But while I think "Anna Ng" is a great song and that the video for "Birdhouse in Your Soul" was fabulous, I'm not really an active fan of They Might Be Giants. The documentary only hints at the obsessive fandom that the band apparently inspires -- a girl bursts into tears after meeting the Johns, choking out that it's the happiest day of her life; a boy, maybe seventeen years old, says that he's seen TMBG upwards of seventy times -- but I got the feeling that every single person in the audience except me knew every lyric of every song in the movie.
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May 10, 2003
Bob le Flambeur
Bob le Flambeur (that's "High-Roller Bob", the Jean-Pierre Melville film that was recently remade as The Good Thief) defied my expectations, and I'm not entirely sure that that was a good thing. With its set-up (semi-retired hood decides to go for one last score, which I hope was less tired in 1955), Melville's clear feel for noir as demonstrated in Le Samourai (one of the most purely iconic crime films I've ever seen), and a screenwriter fresh from writing the great French caper film Rififi, this could have been a great crime movie, if that was what it wanted to be.
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