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Author: Bryant

Been there saw that

Saw was passable but not all that and a bag of chips. The setup is brilliant: Cary Elwes and Leigh Whannell wake up in a dingy bathroom, chained at opposite sides of the room. They have no idea what they’re doing there. And they soon discover that one of them will need to kill the other, or horrible things will happen to his family.

It’s tense as hell. Really good. But then the movie gives up the claustrophobia and tension by going into extended flashbacks that take place outside the room. By the time Danny Glover has shown himself to be an incredibly inept cop, I’d more or less given up on the whole thing.

The last five minutes come pretty close to redeeming the whole thing, though; the final plot twist is beautifully planned and elegantly executed. Still… a lot of wasted potential. The core bit, two men chained in a puzzle room, that’s great. The consistent exploration of people who watch rather than act — that was good. But it wasn’t worth breaking the tension repeatedly by letting us think about something other than Elwes and Whannell.

I gave it a 3 on the rating card (out of five) — 1 point for setup, 1 point for being a movie, and 1 point for the conclusion.

Filling your head

Air America has arrived in Boston (1200 AM and 1430 AM), so like the liberal sheep I am I’ve been listening to it for the last few days. Conclusions: it’s exactly the same as right-wing talk radio, except the bias leans differently. This is probably what the Democratic Party needs; it’s not really what I want, but c’est la vie.

When I say exactly, by the by, I mean exactly — down to the ads, which are the same mix of adverts for herbal nostrums, local merchants, and political paraphernalia you get on right-wing talk radio. I suspect Air America will prove to be completely financially viable.

Marking the days

I still have a lot of respect for Pat Tillman, and I think that Jake Plummer ought to be able to honor him by wearing a patch on his helmet for as long as he wants. Off Wing Opinion has more.

(I think this is a general principle — if Tom Brady wants to wear a patch honoring his grandmother, he ought to be able to do so — but one crack in the wall at a time.)

Slicing and dicing time

My schedule for the BFFF appears to be something like this:

Thursday, 10/14

Saw (9:30)

Good buzz on this. (Buzzsaw. Heh.) It’s a low budget horror flick starring Cary Elwes with a claustrophobic one-room setup — the gimmick is a serial killer who always convinces his victims to kill themselves. I was hoping this would drift through Boston sometime.

Friday, 10/15

Infernal Affairs (7:30)

The hot Hong Kong police thriller of the moment. The premise: both the mob and the cops planted an undercover agent in the opposite ranks. Fifteen years later, violence ensues. This series replaced the Young and Dangerous movies as the top Hong Kong action series, which is kind of unsurprising since they share the same director. I liked Young and Dangerous a lot and I’m gonna like this too. It’s currently being remade by Martin Scorsese with Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio; the remake is set in Boston and centers on the Irish mob rather than the triads. You can feel the Boston mob movie trend juggernaut gaining steam, can’t you?

Alive (9:30)

SF action flick from Ryuhei Kitamura. I have heard depressing word of mouth on this one, but his zombie samurai movie (Versus) was superb and I loved the trailers for his historical samurai movie, Azumi. So I may well see it anyhow.

Saturday, 10/16

Five Children and It (3:00)

The BBC thought this was hopelessly twee. But, you know, so was the book and I love it to pieces. Also, Eddie Izzard is not to be missed. So I could pretend that I don’t want to see this but I would be lying.

Appleseed (7:30)

I’m not a huge anime fan but I probably want to see this anyhow, in the interests of exposing myself to new goodness. Giant mecha fighting in the future? OK!

The Bottled Fool (9:30)

Yeah, I dunno. This sounds quite honestly like the kind of lengthy dragging Japanese psychological drama I don’t enjoy. But I’m curious. Film Threat liked it in a tentative way.

Perdita Durango (midnight)

Far as I can tell, nobody liked this. Oh well. Quasi-sequel to Wild At Heart, which is about the biggest weight on the “see it” side of the scales. My decision on this will be based on stamina.

Sunday, 10/17

Freeze Frame (7:30)

This hasn’t been anywhere on my radar — I kind of suspect it of being an average thriller that I wouldn’t care about if it were a Hollywood production. I like the idea of a man who films everything he does to provide an alibi for himself, though; it’s very David Brin and it might well be enough of a framework to hang a movie on.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (9:30)

I’m big-time excited about this. I did not so much like this director’s next movie, Old Boy, but hey — maybe it was the viewing conditions, maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood, and maybe Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance won’t be as much transgression for the sake of transgression. And Old Boy was certainly technically exceedingly proficient.

Monday, 10/18

A Tale of Two Sisters (7:45)

Not the incredibly awful looking Adam Rifkin movie. Rather, more Korean horror, influenced by Japanese post-millenial horror. Two girls return from a mental institution to their family home, where their father and cruel stepmother await. South Korea’s film industry is well worth investigation, so I’m looking forward to this.

Local heroes

The Boston Fantastic Film Festival is scheduled and for a second-tier fantastic film festival, this is a very impressive lineup. My thoughts on what’s worth seeing for who will come later, but I do want to note in particular Infernal Affairs and Sympathy for Mr. Vengance. I’m also very intrigued by the Nesbit adaptation, Five Children and It, which stars Kenneth Branagh and features Eddie Izzard as the voice of the Psammead.

Milk run

It’s so rare that you get to watch a single surrealist coming of age movie featuring a lactation scene, I don’t quite know what to make of a day in which I got to watch two. Although when you think it over, a lactation scene is a fairly obvious bit of symbolism for coming of age, so maybe it’s not so odd after all.

Gozu didn’t actually strike me as being as mysterious and weird as the reviews implied, once I’d had a night’s sleep to contemplate it. Minami, the young yakuza who’s ordered to kill his mentor Ozaki and who serves as our surrogate in the languid descent into surreal erotic madness, is a virgin. He feels out of place in Tokyo and he feels out of place in the rural Nagoya. He rejects a couple of offers to initiate him into manhood, including and probably most significantly the opportunity to metaphorically become a man by killing Ozaki. In the end, the transfigured Ozaki makes a man of him in the most primal of ways — the birth scene signifies Minami’s rebirth as well as that of Ozaki. Final significant scene: three toothbrushes sitting side by side in domestic harmony.

See? That makes sense, doesn’t it? A lot of the underpinnings are conveyed in quick sidelong lines of dialogue, but they’re there if you look for them. When the Nagoya yakuza Nose asks Minami if he’s ever killed someone, Minami says no. And at the time you think it’s because he doesn’t want to admit it but in retrospect it seems not entirely unlikely that he’s telling the truth. I consider the context of the movie as well: the average Miike yakuza character is a kill-happy icon of violence. Minami doesn’t even engage in an act of violence — until the antepenultimate scene with his yakuza boss, and there is he becoming a man again.

OK, so it’s an exceedingly surreal flick. (Think David Lynch; then factor in the lack of common cultural referents.) I’d be lying if I said I was certain of my interpretation. Still, I think it’s a solid approach towards understanding the movie, and while Takashi Miike’s movies are always lunatic exercises in excess he is also a consummate craftsman. He uses his camera with too much certainty for me to accept that there’s no underlying spine to Gozu.

How about I ♥ Huckabees? Same movie, really. Jason Schwartzman plays Minami, except he’s named Albert Markovski this time around. His yakuza mentor, his Ozaki, is…

You know, it’s not the same movie. My mistake. There is a lactation scene, though, and poor Albert does progress from being a (ruthlessly parodied) callow young poet-activist to being a reasonably functional human being. Meanwhile, Jude Law’s Brad Stand progresses from being a callow young sales executive to being, likewise, a human being of functional demeanor. Coming of age, see?

Where Gozu uses sex as the driving elements, I ♥ Huckabees uses philosophy. It works but I think the latter choice gives up the possibility of really primal depth; philosophy is great and important and it certainly held my interest, but sex is sex. Philosophy has few if any fluids.

I really loved what Russell did with the screen; like the rest of the American New Surrealists (Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Spike Jonze) he’s impatiently pushing beyond the conventions of what you can do in the movies. Cool stuff, with non-figurative cuts between scenes and visual representations of the philosophical musings of the characters. I also in general loved the performances. Jude Law and Mark Wahlberg both especially shined; they both get the agony of their characters out onto the screen with beautifully understated acting.

Still… I left the theater with my breath still bated. I think Russell was trying to do two things: he was telling a story about people becoming mature — everyone in the movie, just about, undergoes that transformation — and he was satirizing the culture of protest and the philosophy which he used as a tool to tell the story. I think that latter choice weakened the film; I think that once you’ve deflated the pretensions of the philosophers you’ll have a hard time basing a transformative experience on their theories. In the end, Albert Markovski essentially says “You were all only half-right, but I used what you taught me to transcend my limitations anyhow.” Which is optimistic, I suppose, but not entirely satisfying.

Not to say I didn’t like the movie, but when you’re seeing two surrealist coming of age movies (both with lactation sequences) in one day, it’s only natural that one of them is going to be better.

We did that?

An interesting observation about the Duelfer Report: it lists a bunch of people from France, Germany, and Russia who profited illegally from the food-for-oil program. However, the Houston Chronicle notes that “No U.S. companies or individuals were named, but that does not mean they were not involved. A CIA spokesperson cited U.S. privacy laws to explain why no U.S. companies or individuals were listed.” Well, shucks. I suppose that’s fair, as long as all we bloggers remember that the corruption wasn’t limited to Europe.

Via Flit.