I’m under the impression that people settle on an all-time favorite movie at a relatively early age. With time they become increasingly difficult to displace, no matter what cinematic greatness may follow. This is what best describes my experience with “Jaws” (1975). Eventually I may have acquired a greater admiration for “The Godfather” films but by then it was too late. My first viewing of “Jaws” felt perfect. I later learned it wasn’t.
In the biochemistry class during my naive undergraduate years, the professor jokingly said the capability of metabolizing alcohol depends on our genetic makeup. Thanks to the variations in the genes, some people can produce more enzymes or more active enzymes to take care of alcohol in their body. They can be heavy drinkers, or the ones less susceptible to the hazards caused by alcoholism than their fellow drunks.
That may explain the existence of Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), the “laureate of American lowlifes” who lived a relatively long life despite many days and nights of bottles and women at the bars. As Stephen King says in his insightful book “On Writing,” writing usually has no business with drinking (“Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it’s what alkies are wired up to do.”). Sometime there are exceptions like Bukowski. Drinking and writing always came together to him, and he had no problem with that.
You may find it disturbing to see audiences laughing while watching “The Exorcist”(1973), but you will probably not see any problem in having some laugh with “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968). It goes without saying that they are two of the most chilling modern horror films, but, while the former unsettles us with its utmost solemnness parodied many times since it came out, the latter has a spooky sense of humor immune to parodies. How can you make an effective parody to undermine a horror film if it already has a devilish tongue slyly placed on its dark cheek?
Mike Leigh’s Another Year (2010) is like a tender, swollen, beating heart that you hold within your palms: the soft flesh expands and contracts with every breath, and through the tiny crevices in between your fingers, life juices flow.
“Life is not always kind, is it?”
Gerri looks at Mary and quietly let those words slip. Mary catches her gaze, briefly. The letters settle over them like a mild fog, unmistakably present and non-disruptive, and the day proceeds on as it does.
Another day. Another year.
Through uncanny realism and probing characters, Leigh’s latest film speaks of the pervasive dilemma of our kind: how do we live in this world in the presence of those so different and similar to ourselves at once? How do we make sense of each of our own way of life?
While it is one or two steps behind “Dr. Strangelove,” “The President’s Analyst” (1967) is a very good black comedy sniggering at Cold War paranoid. Maybe it’s not as ruthless as that great comedy, but the movie romps cheerfully on its subjects with a take-no-prisoner attitude. And during this loony joy ride we eventually discover that the movie foretold something very accurate more than 40 years ago.
We have seen many psychiatrist whose lives become more burdensome than usual thanks to their unusual patients in the movies (“Analyze This”) and TV series(“The Sopranos” and “In Treatment”), but I think no one can top our hero Dr. Sidney Schaefer (James Coburn). His new patient is none other than the president of the United States, the most powerful figure in the world who incidentally does not appear on the screen.
“Wait until you see the rest of my forest,” says Aisling, before she leads Brendan to the top of an oak tree. That remark by a guardian of the forest describes “Brendan and the Secret of Kells.” This deceptively simple story of a young Irish monk has hidden dimensions beneath its lush, exuberant visuals. To praise its beauty alone becomes an understatement. Its beautifully realised storytelling is rich in symbols, analogies and themes, some obvious and others not so, that give weight and meaning to a seemingly uncomplicated story, set against a mixture of history, fantasy, reality and myth.
When I reviewed Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” a few months ago, several readers brought up the point that when a filmmaker constantly uses extreme violence in his films, there surely must be something wrong about the director himself.
I don’t buy into that theory, but while watching Quentin Tarantino’s films, which I mostly enjoy a lot, I have to admit I have a hard time disassociating my diagnosis of the filmmaker with his own work, especially “Pulp Fiction” which is clearly a film with an amazing understanding of violent criminals, the drug culture and the fine art of original cursing.
It’s a sunny, unseasonable 80 degrees as the 2012 Santa Barbara International Film Festival kicks in, but all I want is to be indoors. When you peer at a schedule listing nearly 200 films jammed into 10 days, and you just can’t wait, you know you’re an addict. This is my third SBIFF so I recognize the signs.
Suddenly each January, there’s an extra bustle in this appealing, laid-back town. Downtown on lower State Street, trucks appear bearing vivid banners, soon to be festooned overhead. Special lights and rigging go up at 2 central venues – the precisely restored, historic Lobero and Arlington Theatres. Locals watch to see whether Festival Director Roger Durling changes his hair: one year it was spikey, another year purple. This time it’s rather like Heathcliff – longer, romantic.
I love the Dark Knight Trilogy for one simple reason: it gave me the permission that I didn’t know I was looking for to dislike all the rest of the Superhero movies. The high point of my dislike came in the highly ambitious “The Avengers” of this past summer. Don’t get the wrong idea: as far as superhero movies go, it is one of the best, or at least it is one of the biggest. But something was wrong. It suffers from the same thing that the whole genre has suffered from. First and foremost, we are watching a bunch of costumed adults pretending that they’re children in an expensive suburban Daycare. Second, the genre has otherwise exhausted itself to the point of exciting ritual. Third, the movies in the Dark Knight trilogy are solid and smart entertainment (though not without their flaws).
When a great influential film comes out, we usually get a backlash of cheap knock-offs. After James Cameron’s “Titanic” we suffered through Michael Bay’s “Pearl Harbor.” When “Pulp Fiction” came out people praised its genius but its influence drove the genre to a creative blockage. Everybody wanted to be the next Tarantino. Directors probably asked themselves “What would Tarantino do?” before violating their own originality. Like most imitations, of Rolex watches or anything else, they look the same but don’t work the same.
Ben Affleck’s “The Town” (2010) is an impressive effort from a third time director whose acting choices almost derailed his Hollywood career. With the clear exception of “Changing Lanes” (2002), this film is better than everything he ever did before and the reason is simple: instead of choosing to be involved in another blockbuster wannnabe, Affleck wrote, directed and starred in this heartfelt project about a fascinating borough that he seems familiar with. It is also a work of numerous, obvious inspirations, raising the question of whether said fact makes it any less worthy.
Thinking about this movie, I had to go to a thesaurus to find any synonyms for “underdog.” Try it. The point is that I had little interest in watching another dark horse movie because they tend to follow the same unique long shot formula to such a degree that there are not many synonyms even for the word that describes them. Further, the admittedly exciting trailer for Gavin O’Connor’s geometrically constructed “Warrior” (2011) seemed to give away all of the film’s secrets, including the most preposterous plot points. More than that, all the villains in these Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) matches seemed too familiar and too cartoonish. But, a few friends recommended the movie; then, my fellow Far Flung Correspondent from Cairo, Wael Khairy, appreciated this movie somewhere in his list of the Best Films of 2011.
Post World War II British Cinema was one of the richest periods in film history. Finally free from budget and stylistic constraints saddled during wartime, some of the greatest filmmaking talent the filmdom had arisen. John and Roy Boulting, David Lean, Laurence Olivier, and Carol Reed were just a few of the notables whose directorial prowess had struck the scene. But a pair which was the period’s most prolific was Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; The Archers.
A young boy curious about his birth. A priest with the long past behind him. A countess who gets involved in a doomed affair and then trapped in an unhappy marriage. A count who commits cruelty out of frustrated love. A criminal who accidentally gets the chance of lifetime to change his social status. A vengeful society woman who manipulates others to anger the man she is obsessed with. They might look like the characters randomly selected from several different books, but they are all the denizens of one labyrinthine tale which slowly reveals how their lives are intertwined with each other more than we thought at first.
What’s the last great love story you’ve seen on film? I don’t mean your typical “rom-coms” with contrived meet-cutes that rely heavily on celebrity star power. I’m talking about a genuine romance between two richly defined characters. If your mind draws a blank, you’re not alone. Hollywood, along with much of the filmmaking world, seems to have either forgotten how to portray love affairs in ways that once made us swoon. Whatever the reason, be it due to our changing times or priorities, we might not see any significant ones for some time.
The other day I was discussing the physicality of objects with a fellow Far-Flung Correspondent), Grace Wang. We were mourning the death of physical objects. Like me, she shares this preference of actual physical books over e-books, letters over emails, photo albums on a shelf over digitalized photo albums on Facebook. There is something unique about the physicality of them all, something that will always be absent from their digital replacements. Of course recycling these objects goes without saying.
The smell of a book as you turn a soft page, or the excitement of checking the mailbox for snail mail is something many of us will always prefer over clicking a ‘Next Page’ icon in an e-book or checking an inbox full of emails. It’s why the Jimmy Stewart film “Shop Around the Corner” worked better as a romantic comedy than the Tom Hanks remake “You’ve Got Mail”. Yes, both may contain the same content but content has nothing to do with it. I would rather slam a book with anger or crumble a letter than double click a delete button. This need for physical objects is more than just an act of nostalgia; it’s a predilection.
Behind every great fortune there is a crime. – Balzac
So states the prologue of Mario Puzo’s novel, “The Godfather,” a debatable statement that rings true nonetheless. It certainly feels like “the truth” after visiting this world. Does it mean that the Corleone family was completely amoral? Not at all, and that is what separates this material from just about every previous gangster film. This family provided justice and protection to those who couldn’t get it elsewhere. They also gave them gambling, women and liquor–but heck, they did draw a line at drugs. If there is one thing that Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola evidently were clear about, it’s that black or white characters aren’t particularly exciting.
The phenomenal success of the Godfather Trilogy can basically be attributed to the decision on the part of Paramount executives to put their helm in the hands of a master filmmaker at his very peak who also happened to be one of the few raised in a family with the precise sensibilities required to take the material from Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel and make it feel absolutely real.
I have a small childhood memory indirectly associated with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “Santa Sangre”(1989). I remember well about how it drew the attention of people when it was introduced in South Korea in 1994. One tagline was simple brutal honesty that I still recall with smile: “This is no doubt the cult!” And here is another nice one that makes my eyeballs still roll: “Today, You will be infected by the cult!”They were blatant enough to draw the attention from an 11-year-old boy, but the problems were that (1) I was too young to get the chance to watch it, and (2) my hometown was a local city far from Seoul. However, that was a blessing in disguise. They showed the audiences the butchered version with a considerable amount deleted due to local censorship. In those days, bold, controversial films like “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover” were never introduced to South Korean audiences unless they were heavily chopped. You probably think it is kind of weird considering some uncompromisingly violent South Korean movies made nowadays, but it did happen a lot when I was young.
I’ve had to defend myself for loving “The War of the Roses” so much. The majority of people I’ve discussed it with found it too mean-spirited. I realize it deals with an ugly subject but this is a prime example of a movie being great at how it is about its core subject, no matter how touchy. This is one of my all-time favorite films.
“The Terence Davies Trilogy” is a work of such profound sadness and despair that watching it has to result in either obliteration or catharsis (unless it provokes a walk-out). Six years in the making, the three black-and-white shorts took their time oozing from Davies’ personal experience and one can see the growing assurance of their director’s hand. “Children” (1976) try out things in a tentative way, “Madonna and Child” (1980) solidify them into a steady mode of expression and “Death and Transfiguration” (1983) present a mature, stunningly poetic cinematic voice. Now that the three movies are only shown spliced together (and became available on a Region 2 DVD released by British Film Institute), one can see the emergence of Davies’ techniques and savor what remains his most direct and devastating work to date.
