What was the last movie you saw at the theaters?

Yeah I think they remade it for kids. I'm not going to see it just because I love the original Pink Panthers too much. I wish they wouldn't remake movies they have no business remaking.

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"Directing ain't about drawing a neat little picture and showing it to the cameraman. I didn't want to go to film school. I didn't know what the point was. The fact is, you don't know what directing is until the sun is setting and you've got to get five shots and you're only going to get two." - David Fincher

Caché (2005 - Michael Haneke)

Michael Haneke's latest is an allegory wrapped in Hitchcockian mechinations. While the subject is an important one and hasn't been addressed much by French filmmakers, unfortunately it works more as an intellectual polemic than a satisfying or emtionally engrossing filmgoing experience.

Daniel Auteuil (The Girl on the Bridge) stars as Georges, an extremely comfortable upper-middle class intellectual who hosts a popular television show where guests debate art and politics. His wife Anne, the ever lovely Juliette Binoche, is surprised to find on their doorstep one afternoon an unmarked videotape. All that is shown for the entire running time of that cassette is static, unblinking surveillance of the front of their apartment, taken by a camera placed somewhere about half a block or so up the street. No note, no explanation, just an ominous alert that they are being watched by someone. They don't really know what to make of it. Is it a prank or a threat? Then come phonecalls with nobody on the other end of the line and another tape, this one showing somebody driving the back country roads to the home where Georges grew up as a child. The couple, now fearing this may be something serious and wanting to protect themselves and their teenage son, go to the police. But as there is nothing overt in the annoyances, there is nothing they can take action against.

Georges has a theory of who the perpetrator may be, though he doesn't share his suspicion with the police or even his wife at first. Seeing his rural childhood home makes him think it may be an Algerian orphan who his parents almost adopted, who had spent some time at that home with them. Georges tracks down the grown man, Majid (Maurice Bénichou of Amélie), who he hasn't seen since they were children. Majid denies any of the accusations about video tapes and phonecalls, but Georges is sure he has his man.

What followed that set-up could have been a taut thriller, but while there are sequences and the frame of the plot that use the conventions of the suspenseful mystery, that's not really what Haneke is aiming at. Anyone unversed in the dark history of 20th Century France will have to pay close attention to one sequence in the home of Georges and Anne where a television newscast gives the important underlying context. Or perhaps before you see Caché at the very least watch Gillo Pontecorvo masterwork The Battle of Algiers (1965) so we dumb Americans know a bit about the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), a bloody revolution where the North African Algerians rose up against the occupying French. Because THAT is what Caché is really about. Majid was orphaned because of that war, and Georges' treatment of him both as a child and as an adult is the allegory that fuels the story more than any mystery or thriller. Georges, Anne and their son as well as Majid and his son are all representations of the sociopolitical fallout from the Algerian revolution; the pain, guilt, empathy, cruelty, hope, sadness, resentment and the lack of recognition are all embodied by these five main characters. Sadly for me, once that all kicked they all stopped working as human beings to care about in the story and their actions and attitudes function only as metaphor. That's holds some interest intellectually, but really kills any emotional connection to the story. And this is despite some good acting, most especially Daniel Auteuil and Maurice Bénichou.

However, even though it gets too stuck in its own allegory for my taste, there is a nice final sequence that brings it back to the kind of movie it might have been if the elements of a mystery and a polemic had been better blended. The way the film is constructed, the final shot of the film forces the audience to debate the clues and possible answers of the mystery. Is this last shot another surveillance tape to be sent and further the reeducation of Georges? Do the characters we see meeting in this shot mean they are co-conspirators? The mystery, which had been left dangling in the final third of the film, is brought back. But for what purpose? Maybe so that we the audience become Georges for a moment, and all he represents. Instead of focusing on the underlying causes and addressing them, we are drawn into the question of who made the videotapes? There's a brilliant movie somewhere in all these pieces, but it never quite comes together as a whole.


GRADE: B

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

This last sentence sums up my complete thoughts towards Cache. The film is, intentionally, just like the joke told by one of the couple's dinner guests. Prolonged and sustained build delivered with the utmost sincerity towards a punchline, which must be respected for its function, but objectively isn't as satisfying as the build itself.

Damn fine review, Holds.

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Horror's Not Dead
Latest Movie Review(s): Too lazy to keep this up to date. New reviews every week.

The Giant Buddhas (Christian Frei, Switzerland)

This is a documentary about two enormous stone Buddhas that the Taliban destroyed in Afghanistan back in February of 2001. The Buddhas were made in the side of a cliff in the Bamiyan Valley more than 1,600 years ago, and after a decree that all non-Islamic icons be destroyed, Taliban fundamentalists blew them up. As a movie I found The Giant Buddhas only partially successful. The senseless desruction of the gigantic statues (the larger of the two standing at 53-meters high) that survived everything from Genghis Khan to the Russian occupation is interesting, but the tangential excursions the narrative takes are even more so, such as the French archeologist who after reading Silk Road accounts of the 7th Century monk Xuanzang is convinced there is a larger (300-meter!) reclining Buddha that would have been the eighth wonder of the ancient world buried somewhere else in the valley, or the trip the filmmaker takes to China to find a full-scale replica of the Bamiyan Buddha that was comissioned and built after the original was destroyed - but nobody there will tell you where it is or why it was hidden after its construction. Those episodes are fascinating and fun and have a great energy to them. The larger points Frei tries to illuminate about the dangers of fanaticism and the loss of culture are much more flat and standard. Still, it's an intersting story and worth discovering.

GRADE: B




Masjävlar - Dalecarlians (Maria Blom, Sweden)

Mia (Sofia Helin), a successful computer programmer in Stockholm, returns to her small hometown in the Swedish countryside for her father's seventieth birthday. She is independent and headstrong and one of the few denizens of this backwater burg to ever leave and make it - certainly the only one in her real and extended family. Pretty standard dramady follows, with tensions and resentments between Mia and her two older sisters (Kajsa Ernst and Ann Petrén) and the other townies boiling back up. Secrets are revealed, hard truths and naked jealousies exposed, and some of the characters realize they really do love each other under all of the dysfunction. Sofia Helin is very good in the lead, Joakim Lindblad and Lars-Gunnar Aronsson are the stand-outs in the supporting cast, and it works best when it is playing with dark comedy. But Dalecarlians never finds enough original voice or a consistent tone to rise above the dysfuntional family drama clichés. Though I admit I did kind of fall for the Helin, and will be looking for her in other Swedish films.

GRADE: C+

"It sucked. Nobody came, nobody settled, nobody shopped."

The Wild Blue Yonder (Werner Herzog, Germany/U.S.)

The Wild Blue Yonder is a visionary "Science Fiction Fantasy" from Werner Herzog that is both mesmerizing and fitfully hysterical. Brad Dourif (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, "Deadwood") is the narrator of this piece and also appears on camera. He tells us he's an Alien from the Andromeda Galaxy, who came to Earth with many others of his kind after their world died. He recounts some of their history on our planet, though they are mostly embarassing failures involving flying machines, shopping malls and the CIA. Then the narrative - such as it is - becomes about an expedition of Earthlings that venture back to that distant planet of frozen liquid hydrogen and explore it in hopes of colonizing for us one day. All the footage that isn't Dourif in this movie is stock footage, mostly from NASA and divers in Antarctica, cut together to tell Herzog's wild blue tall tale. Oh, and my goodness the music! The amazing soundtrack is an otherworldly collaboration between a classically trained cellist from Vienna, a choir from Sardinia and a vocalist from Senegal. The music they create is hypnotic, stunning and overwhelming, and when combined with this fabulous and unusual footage as well as Herzog's darkly cynical yet somehow marvelously funny point of view (the rants about the sins of domesticating pigs and climbing mountains are Herzogian brilliance), the result on screen is cinematic poetry. Now if you go into this movie looking for any kind of standard narrative, even a documentary narrative, you will be sorely disappointed. But if you let the unique feel and sound of this film wash over you, you're in for quite a journey.

Actor Brad Dourif was in attendance at the screening, introduced the film and stuck around for Q&A afterward. He has some good anecdotes about Werner and his process (this is the second time they've worked together, the other being 1991's Scream of Stone), and some information about the genesis of this project that makes it all the more interesting. Such as Herzog only tried to get access to the NASA footage after he heard James Cameron wanted to use it for something but was turned down in all his requests, thereby making it a mission for Werner to see if he could succeed where Cameron failed - he didn't even know what the footage really was at that point. And the diving footage was sent to Werner in connection with another project entirely - one that he wasn't at all interested in, a rather standard Jacques Cousteau type of straightforward nature bit that you can find on The Discovery Channel 24/7. But while he found the bulk of the footage ordinary, what fascinated him immediately was the extra material that was on the ends of the reels, the bits the divers shot that weren't at all intended for use. Those visuals combined with this idea he had of blending these disperate musical styles (which was apparently largely improvised in studio) and the idea that Aliens actually suck - that's just the kind of inspiration Werner Herzog thrives on. And it was also mentioned that when asked what he really thought about the exploration of space and the possibility of colonization off-world, Werner responeded quickly and bluntly, "It's all bullsh!t, we're never getting out of here." If that isn't pure Herzog, I don't know what is.

GRADE: A-




Kosmos kak Predchuvstvie - Dreaming of Space (Aleksei Uchitel, Russia)

Set in Russia near the Finnish border in the winter of 1957 after Sputnik's launch, Dreaming of Space is a nice character piece and glimpse into how Russians view their own past. Yevgeni Mironov stars as "Horsie", a young man full of restless energy but naïve about how his meager hopes and dreams might survive in a small Communist town. At the gym he meets a tall, strong, mysterious man (Yevgeni Tsyganov) who he tries desperately to befriend. This man is everything Horsie is not: quiet, dignified and capable. Eventually the two men do develop a bond, though Horsie has suspicions about his new friend, as in he may be plotting an escape either by swimming for freedom or maybe even flying away somehow. Is this man a spy or a defector or, as he claims, a cosmonaut secretly training for the day they put a man into one of those rockets? Horsie is an interesting character, and well played by Mironov, and Tsyganov has great fun playing the more stoic yet still charming Gherman. The narrative gets a bit bogged down in plotlines invloving Horsie's girlfriend and her sister (Irina Pegova and Yelena Lyadova), and there are some intentionally awkward editing jumps toward the last third of the film that detract from the pace and tone that narrative had been traveling. But the loving recreation of late '50s Mother Russia and the souls left dreaming inside of her borders despite the cold darkness, drawing inspiration from each other and grand ideas like space travel, is delightful.

GRADE: B-

Damn, is there a film festival going on or something?

I have got to see that Herzog.

Yes, the 29th Annual Portland International Film Festival. It will be consuming my days and night for the next two weeks. If I'm not working or sleeping, I'll be watching movies. I saw twenty-eight and a program of shorts at last year's fest, and I hope to see at least that many again this year.

I hate you.

I was a bit harsher on The Wild Blue Yonder with my review (it screened on BBC4 over here) but it's definitely worth watching. The music is fantastic, as Sir Pike says, and builds the tone really well. I just felt some sections were a bit patchy and blocked some of the story's immersive swells. Still, it's got that biting Herzog charge running through it. You can't really go wrong

(Altho i probably wasn't 'harsh' enough when i tried to summarise Herzog's aims in that review )

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

Walk the Line- For a second time.

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

Was "Walk the Line" good??? I have yet to see it.

Yes, it was a real good toe tapper.

I'll have to go find out if it's still playing...

Capote

Yes, Philip Seymour Hoffman will win the oscar for Capote. I saw Capote many times on talk shows in the 60s and 70s and Hoffman was amazing.

I wasn't real excited to see this movie but I wanted to see Hoffman's performance. And it's as good as everyone says. There are many layers to Capote's character (not all of them nice) and Hoffman does a brilliant job in depicting them.

Capote, as portrayed in the film, was a strange little man with a big intellect. He seemed to have a need to be the life of the party and a need to be accepted and respected. The latter, qualities he shared with convicted killer, Perry Smith.

It's a strange relationship between Capote and Smith. Capote recognizes their similarities and they seem to have a friendship. But is Capote only using and manipulating (something he's quite adept at) to finish his book or is there a genuine "affection" between author and killer?

The movie shows how a "different" person like Capote can have difficulties with the "common people" of America's heartland. But his celebrity (and his gift for manipulation) quickly overcomes the obstacles and he's able to get the information he needs. (With the help of associate and soon to be famous author, Harper Lee.)

We don't (or at least I don't) think of someone like Capote having trouble with Middle America. But the early 60s were a different time and he really was an oddity then. The scenes in New York? showed him back in his comfort zone, a place where different is accepted.

Hoffman not only got the speech and mannerisms right, he conveyed a myriad of emotions from within the Capote character. But it wasn't only a great performance by Hoffman, it was a very good movie with several good performances. Most notably by Clifton Collins as Perry Smith.

But I don't think this will be thought of as a "major" movie in five or ten years. It may be remembered for Hoffman's performance but the movie itself will drift off into relative obscurity. The one oscar nominated movie that will be remembered...in five, ten or fifty years...is Brokeback Mountain.

So, I've now seen four of the oscar nominated movies and four great lead performances. Hoffman will win, although Ledger, Phoenix and Strathairn were damn good. But IMO, Best Movie is still an easy pick... Brokeback Mountain.

Philip Seymour Hoffman as Capote: A+

Capote, the movie: B+

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My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.

Yesterday the first thing I saw was a program of nine short films, most running about thirteen to sixteen minutes and the shortest at four minutes. It was a mixed bag, though none of them were awful.

"At the Quinte Hotel" (Bruce Alcock, Canada)
This is the late Al Purdy (kind of a poor man's Canadian Charles Bukowski) reading his great poem, with Alcock providing animation. He throws up just about every animating style there is in only four minutes, and it's fine but Purdy's words are so descriptive and alive that having visuals to go with it is ultimately unnecessary. Nice little piece I suppose, but the highlight is really hearing Purdy's reading of his own work. You can watch a piece of the short HERE.

"The Act" (Kraker & Ware, U.S.A.)
This one stars Debra Jo Rupp ("That '70s Show") as a stand-up comedianne. We see her act on stage, which is mostly about what a lazy, no-good bastard her ex-husband is, intercut with her alone at home dealing with real pain. The idea that comedians turn the tragedy from their life into material for the stage is not at all new, and the slight "twist" of the ending doesn't make it any more satisfying.


"My Dad Is 100 Years Old" (Guy Maddin, Canada)
This one is the biggest reason I had to see this collection of shorts, and I wasn't in the least bit disappointed. Guy Maddin directs this wonderfully odd and heartfelt love letter from his Saddest Music in the World star Isabella Rossellini. Her Dad was the Italian director Roberto Rossellini, one of the Neo-Realists from the '40s and '50s who's best known work is probably Rome, Open City (1945). Isabella wrote this exquisite little film in which Roberto is embodied as an enormous talking stomach, as his big belly was something she and her siblings remember fondly from their childhood. All the other parts in the film are played by Isabella herself, and they are Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, David O. Selznick, Charlie Chaplin and Isabella's mother, Ingrid Bergman. The film consist mostly of these characters all meeting in a movie theater and debating the merits of Roberto's work with his belly - Hitchcock, Selznick and Fellini all critical of his style, Chaplin and Bergman praising it. Beyond what it has to say about Roberto Rossellini's philosophy of filmmaking, it has bigger things to say about art vs. commerce and very specific personal points Isabella wants to make about her father as a man other than his artistry. It's funny and weird and sad and tender and the kind of surreal trip only Maddin could have filmed for Isabella. This is a wet-dream for film buffs.

"Jelly Baby" (Rob Burke, Ireland)
Little piece that feels more like a commercial than a film - though I don't know what they'd be selling (other than Grecian Formula). It's about a young father and his crying baby who he can never seem to calm down, and the twisted opportunistic way he corrects the problem one sunny day in the park. There are a couple nice visual gags, but this was the weakest of the nine.

"Through My Thick Glasses" (Pjotr Sapegin, Norway/Canada)
Sweet animated piece about a grandfather trying to get his young granddaughter to put her hat on to play in the cold outside by telling a long story of his experiences as a boy in World War II. Genuine, but nothing that really knocked me out.

"Hibernation" (John Williams, Great Britain)
A bittersweet piece that mixes animation and live action to tell the story of a yopung boy who died of cancer and his two friends scheming in their treehouse for a way to bring him back to life. It's more than a little schmaltzy, but the bits of dark comedy running through help even it out a bit. Two boys dressed as animals electrocuting themselves is kind of fun, after all.

"Rain is Falling" (Holger Ernst, Germany)
In an unnamed Middle Eastern country (filmed in Morocco), a small girl travels miles of barren landscape to bring water to her sick mother. There is almost no dialogue in the film, and the little girl (Fadma et Tagoum) is captivating on screen. A sad little piece, exquisitely shot, about survival and love.

"Dying of Love" (Gil Alkabetz, Germany)
Animated short about two caged parrots who try to awaken their owner as he sleeps so they can be fed. They start by imitating the sounds of the city they can hear from the window, but soon are recreating in sound the day that they were brought from the jungle, inadvertandly unlocking a secret the man didn't know for all these years. Builds to a decent punchline, but at 14 minutes it felt about seven minutes too long.

"Fluent Dysphasia" (Daniel O'Hara, Ireland)
This one was pretty good, though far from great. It stars Stephen Rea as a man who awakens one morning to find he no longer understands or can speak English, but is now fluent in Gaelic. This is quite distressing, but his teenage daughter, who is studying Irish in school, is able to help calm him. I liked the Bugs Bunny solution to the problem and Rea is good as always, but there wasn't much meat to this one. It does have a sweet ending though, and a few good, hardy laughs.

Tsotsi (Gavin Hood, South Africa)

A violent thug who only calls himself Tsotsi (which is street slang for gangster), played by young Presley Chweneyagae, roams Johannesburg looking for marks and scores, unafraid to strike out with brutality on the slightest whim and for only a few bucks. Even the members of his own crew aren't safe from his violence, as one of them finds out in the opening minutes. It's not clear at first what has made Tsotsi so amoral and cruel, but we're given clues that it has something to do with his childhood in these same slums. One night while on the prowl alone in the rain, Tsotsi decides to commit a crime of opportunity when a wealthy woman has to get out of her car when the gate to her expensive home doesn't open with the remote. He jacks her car, but she tries to stop him. Tsotsi coldly puts a bullet in her and speeds off. Once he gets away he realizes there is an infant in the backseat; this bit of fate will change his life. Through taking care of the baby, Tsotsi regains his own humanity. In stages anyway. It certainly doesn't come easy to him, but when it does take hold it's an epiphany. But has it come too late to escape all the destruction he has left in the world? Like 2002's City of God did for Rio de Janeiro and 2000's Amores Perros did for Mexico City, Tsotsi is a startling and fascinating portrait of the chaos and humanity in the poverty of modern day Johannesburg. Adapted from the only novel by South African playwright Athol Fugard, it's a good morality play with plenty of authenticity in setting and character. Well directed without distracting camera tricks and flourishes, it's emotionally moving and well acted. It's no wonder this is the front-runner to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

GRADE: B+




Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (Marc Rothemund, Germany)

Yes, another film about Nazi Germany. I know most have probably reached a saturation point where you can't take another gut-wrenching tale about one of the darkest periods of human history. But wait, Sophie Sholl is an excellent film, and different from the likes of Schindler's List and The Pianist. This is a dramatization of the true story of Sophie and her brother Hans, who were part of an underground resistance group in 1942 and 1943 Germany that called themselves The White Rose. They were not a violent resistance about bombs and guns, they hoped to build a groundswell of support with ideas and words among the other silent masses of citizens who may not have been aware of the depth of horrors under Hitler. Hans Scholl had been to the Russian front as a medic, and others in the group had seen or heard first-hand accounts of the Concentration Camps and other atrocities. They felt the war was unwinnable and the regime's policies immoral. Though dissent was obviously illegal under the Nazis, they risked their lives to print leaflets and paint slogans on the sides of walls in the cities. During one of these missions at a University in Munich, Sophie and Hans are caught almost red-handed. They are arrested and interrogated, knowing that any false step could lead to death.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days mostly chronicles the few days between her arrest and trial, and is chiefly spent in a battle of verbal cat and mouse with her interrogator. Through their discussions we get an intellectual breakdown of all that was wrong with that Germany, how some could delude themselves into thinking it was something else, and how others had no choice but to stand up against what they saw as an absolute evil - those who's consciences drove them into action. Julia Jentsch, who starred in one of my favorites from last year's festival, The Edukators, is excellent as Sophie. Gerald Alexander Held (The Downfall) is also good as Mohr, her interrogator, who becomes impressed by her resolve and even shows signs that he sees her treasonous point of view. Sophie, her brother and many of their White Rose network were sentenced to death for their dissent, but the way we get to know this woman, her courage and everything she was fighting for, the ending is almost a happy one. No, she doesn't escape her sentence, but the way she expresses her higher morality in the face of opression is ultimately an uplifting message, and the film tells her story very well. By not showing the death and destruction of the war machine but framing the issues intellectually, much like Wannseekonferenz (1984) and Conspiracy (2001), Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is powerful in a different way than naked wasted bodies and tanks.

GRADE: A-

I was really surprised when I saw an add for Tsotsi today, wasn't something I ever imagined would be adapted to film. The strange thing about it was it's been years since I read the book but somehow just catching a couple glimses of the trailer with the sound off I immediately recognized it... guess I'll have to see it now.

Fugard had a brief appearance in that 1980's Cambodia movie and there was an adaptation of one of his plays - Boesman and Lena I believe - with Danny Glover... not sure how that turned out.

I went to see King Kong back in Decemeber. I thought it was an ok movie. Peter Jackson seems to be steadily going downhill from LoTR but I don't see how he could ever hope to top those films. I was also reminded why I don't frequent the theatres more often. All the rowdy members of the audience really ruin the movie for everyone else.

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I caught Final Destination 3 a couple days ago. I dont mind this trio of films however I think it should definitely stop here. I guess the only difference between the other films are the shock of the kills.

One thing that always amused me though. When the bodies get hit the disentergrate into a million pieces. I highly doubt that to be possible.