Category: Reviews

Sideways is a good movie, but not exactly transcendent. Touching and human and delicate, yes, definitely. But I couldn’t avoid a certain detachment from the characters. Or, no, that’s not right. I couldn’t avoid a certain detachment from the world they inhabit.

The characters themselves are sympathetic and interesting, even Thomas Church Hayden’s womanizer, Jack. He is not a particularly good person, but he’s our not particularly good person, and Paul Giamatti is a skilled enough actor to show us why his Miles might be fond of such a man. Even better: when something bad occurs, consequences exist and are not softened. And that makes the characters more believable and brings me closer to them.

But it’s a movie as much about wine as it is about relationships, insofar as wine is the metaphor used for people throughout. Which is also fine; I don’t know much about wine but I respect obsessions, and the movie doesn’t assume that the audience is made up on oenophiles.

What got to me, I suppose — no, that’s not it. I just spent half an hour writing a riff about how everyone in the movie loves wine and that separates the movie from reality, but really that’s not true. Then I tried to write something about how Miles is so much the loser that it’s hard to take wine loving seriously, but really, that’s not it either. If nothing else, the beautiful scene with him and Virginia Madsen on the porch kills off that theory, because wow, the way they use wine as a metaphor for themselves? That’s great.

And then it’s a whole contrast thing between the way Miles hides behind his wine obsession, while Maya — Virginia Madsen’s character — freed herself by way of wine, and that’s really cool. I thought through all that while I was trying to explain why I didn’t wholeheartedly love the movie. Go figure.

So what got to me? I’m not sure. I know that I didn’t feel wholly engaged at, really, any point excepting just possibly the very last shot. Maybe I felt, unfairly, that Alexander Payne wanted me to identify with the characters despite the fact that I had few points of contact with them. Maybe I just didn’t sympathize enough; maybe Miles and Jack were dislikable enough, in the shadows of Maya and her friend Stephanie, that I couldn’t feel warmth towards them. Hard to say.

I hear Alexander Payne selected the wine list himself. Maybe I just don’t drink enough wine.

The Incredibles is really really good, but if you’ve been reading reviews, you don’t need me to tell you that. I teared up a bit, I forgot it wasn’t a live-action movie, yes it really is one of the best superhero movies ever period. I got nothing much to say beyond “Wow, awesome.” Go go go.

I’ve been intrigued by Ryuhei Kitamura’s Azumi since I saw the trailer back at FanTasia. I finally found a Korean DVD with English subtitles, and now I have watched it, and I am replete with satisfaction. More or less.

For the first hour or so, you could mistake Azumi for a fairly serious chambara piece. There’s cool action and swordplay and while your typical chambara movie does not star a teenage girl, the plot — ninjas must kill the warlords who threaten the Tokugawa Shogunate — is pretty straightforward. There are certainly some oddball characters, but the main thrust of the movie is your basic warriors wandering the land, facing the occasional moral crisis and fighting for what will hopefully prove to be justice.

Once Bijomaru shows up, though, the movie is freed from convention. He’s a poetic bishonen killer who lives for violence, waltzing through the movie in pure white robes; his sword has no hand guard, because he has never needed to block an opponent’s blow. High camp. In fact, it started to remind me of Cutie Honey. Azumi is an adaptation of a manga, and like Cutie Honey it is unabashedly over the top (although not half as, well, cute).

All in all, it gave me what I want out of an action movie. The only real quibble I had was that the swordplay wasn’t top-notch. It was OK, and it was well choreographed, particularly in Azumi’s last battle when she cuts loose against an entire town. I really liked the way she kept moving to minimize the number of people attacking her at once. I also liked the way every sword was treated as deadly; this isn’t a kung-fu movie where people take a lot of damage, it’s a chambara movie where one cut with a sword brings death. However, few of the actors were quick enough to make me totally believe in their martial arts ability.

Kitamura’s hyperkinetic camerawork made up for a lot, though. He compensated for any lack of fluidity on the part of the actors with elegant snappy cuts. I tend to expect quick cuts to detract from fight scenes, because you lose track of what’s going on. Kitamura’s cuts flow with the scene, punctuating the action rather than chopping it to pieces. His visual sense is very much on target.

So in the final analysis, it’s a thumbs up. Particularly if you’re fond of female action heroes with great costumes.

Never did get around to talking about Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, did I? Well, I didn’t really like it that much.

I didn’t mind the violence. I didn’t even find it very distressing. Yeah, there’s a lengthy scene during which a young woman gets electrocuted. I’ve seen True Lies; you can’t faze me. I also didn’t have any objection to the theme of the movie — “the desire for vengeance reduces everyone to the same primitive level.”

What bugged me was the farce and the coincidence. I don’t think you can get any serious discussion about the human condition out of a movie that sticks a retarded guy into the middle of the plot for no reason; sure, you needed a character there, but he didn’t actually need to be handicapped. It’s just a chance to chuckle. The kids masturbating to the sound of someone writhing in pain, since they assume it’s passion? That doesn’t have any weight behind it, it’s just something for us to laugh at. And there’s a lot of that sort of thing in the movie.

This is vengeance porn made by a pretty talented director who invites us to snicker at the stupid people. Cause really, that’s the not so subtle message. “These people are dumber than you.” The movie is populated by caricatures and thus forfeits any ability to pretend to be about the general human condition… and once it loses that pretense, it’s just a flick about dumb people hurting each other.

My random book pickup for the weekend was Colours in the Steel by K. J. Parker. It’s an elegant little book, sort of like Swordspoint without the manners aspect and a dose of Glen Cook to liven things up a bit. Bardas Loredan is a fencer-at-law, which is essentially a formalized duellist, who has to save the city of Perimadeia. There is a more or less unexplained system of magic, which isn’t fully understood even by the practitioners. There are horse-riding fantasy tribes. Not really a lot of novel newness.

But I liked Parker’s dry wit and I liked the way he unabashedly used the novel as a way to talk about the construction of siege equipment, not to mention metallurgy, which are clearly subjects he enjoys. It’s a fun book. It’s the first in a trilogy, so that’s either a plus or a minus depending on how you feel about such things. Me, I’m happy to have two more chunks of comfortable reading ahead of me.

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.

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.

So Matthew Leutwyler and the people in his production company put together this movie. Michael Mosher and Richard Redlefsen were all like “yeah, we can bring the gore” and Ever Carradine went like “I can bring my uncle” and Oz Perkins was all like “I’m related to Anthony Perkins” and Jeremy Sisto was definitely all like “I am going to hold this goofy movie together with the sheer force of my charisma” until he gets whacked, oops. But he was way successful up until then.

And then the movie kind of gets sloppy and slack but BOOM Miranda Bailey was all like “I’m executive producer and I get a cameo” and she kicks ass as the chick who guards the records and stars in the sequel, I hope anyhow, and the aforementioned gore artists Mosher and Redlefsen toss in a bunch more blood bags and Zach Selwyn plays “We’re Comin’ to Get Ya” and there’s zombie linedancing. So by the end you’re all like “Wow, I was kind of worried after Jeremy Sisto died but it worked out OK there! Phew.”

Oz was really dull and wooden until it came time for him to loosen up due to the dictates of the story. He needs to not play repressed religious types without an outlet; he’s gotta be the guy who has given every fiber of his body over to God and as a result has realized that anything he does is OK as long as it’s for God’s glory. I see him as John Ashcroft in the inevitable movie about the Bush years. David Carradine was not in the movie very much so don’t get too excited. Ever Carradine really comes into her own when she’s flipped over into full bore Dog Soldiers mode. Miranda Bailey was great and superb and enunciates but I said most of that already. Nobody else stood out in a big way.

That was the bit where I was all like “I ought to talk about the actors some.” Did you know that “Selwyn” means something like “shining ardor” or “holy passion” and it’s Welsh? Me either.

There are three basic approaches one could take to a documentary about Jandek, and none of them are what one might normally attempt in a documentary about a musician: the man is nearly a complete mystery, so you can’t tell the story of his life. You could delve deeply into his music, performing an extended critical analysis that serves as an introduction for newcomers and a reaffirmation for the loyal fans. You could film the mirror, capturing how people react to him and what they read into the Jandek blank slate. Or you could try and unearth the answer to the mystery.

Jandek on Corwood goes for the trifecta, which is probably wise. I can’t imagine any single approach supporting an entire movie; indeed, the trio of approaches only barely keeps this movie going. The problem is that there’s so little to look at. Thirty-seven album covers, some with pictures of Jandek, and the people being interviewed. What else can you show? There’s nothing else known, and the director is reduced to long shots of scenes that evoke Jandek’s lyrics, patient pans over the address of Corwood Industries, and ominous footage of empty rooms and old-fashioned tape recorders which might be something like the environment in which Jandek records. Or not. Who knows?

I think the strongest element of the movie is the understated observation that everyone who listens to Jandek’s music paints their own picture of the man. The director never points this out explicitly, but he doesn’t really need to. We’ve got the magazine editor who thinks of Jandek almost as a spiritual guide, the guy who wrote the first published review of Jandek who uses Jandek as a way to affirm his own importance in the world (“it was my review that really kept him going, you know”), the music critic who reads Jandek as an atonal master who’s deliberately moving beyond representational art — it’s a cavalcade of opinions, which in sum make it eminently clear that when we are deprived of information we blithely make stuff up.

Hey, there’s a message there… nah, it’s just a movie about a guy from Texas who doesn’t want to communicate with people as a musician in much of any way except through his music.

Finale: about ten minutes of audio from a 1985 telephone interview with Jandek. That’s all the mystery uncovering that gets done, despite an awful lot of tease. (Look, it’s a shadowy live shot of a man in an amusement park. Could this be Jandek? Well, no. Look, it’s a close shot of a loaf of brown bread, partially eaten! Did Jandek eat this bread? Not so much.) It’s really interesting stuff for the Jandek fan, though, so all is forgiven.

It’s a good movie. If you aren’t into Jandek… well, consider it as an experiment; Jandek has sustained a complete absence of presence other than his music for over a quarter of a century and more than 35 albums. This is unique. As several of the interviewees point out, it’s part of the reason why we’re fascinated by his music.

Those of us who miss the Warren Ellis who wrote Stormwatch, Excalibur, and Transmetropolitan should check out Ultimate Fantastic Four. I, obviously, already have. The run starts with issue #7 and it is superb. Ellis likes to dislike superheroes, which is a real pity, since it’s his best genre. He’s doing cool things with the Fantastic Four which boil down to “what if they transformed while they were kids,” and it’s working very well.