We hate to admit it, but it's sort of been stagnant city on the Cinecultist Netflix queue lately. Do you ever do this? Put a movie you know you should see in the queue, move it down the list as long as you can, and then once it comes in the mail, leave it to sit, unwatched, for weeks on end? That was CC with The Seventh Seal and Cranes Are Flying which have been at our house for nearly three months. But in a fit of mid-winter cleaning, we watched both of them this week. It was a real triumph over laziness.
The two films don't really have much in common, in terms of country of origin or story line, but Cinecultist was struck by their use of stunning black and white photography. Even without color, there's so much richness in each image. Check out that still above from Cranes, as our tortured Veronica contemplates throwing herself Anna Karenina style in front of a rushing train because she's betrayed her soldier lover Boris. It's a really evocative and intense moment. You can practically feel yourself rushing headlong down the snowy street with Veronica, the camera work is that good.
Both discs are out on Criterion Collection so you know the transfer looks great too. 1957 was obviously a good year for international cinema. Although if CC had to choose a painful ye olde era we had to live through, the plague in Sweden seems to have been much worse than World War II Russia. Whenever you see production stills from The Seventh Seal, it's always of that iconic tableau of Max Von Sydow playing chess with Death. But we found the images of self-flagellators parading their desiccated bodies past the fearful kneeling villagers equally as memorable. To live in a world without the security of logical science explaining most things would be really scary.
Also, on a less serious note we'd like to mention that young Max Von Sydow was h-o-t-t, in a freakishly tall, Nordic sort of way. We used to just know him from his middle-aged The Exorcist or Hannah and her Sisters days, when he'd already become a kind of parody of the pretentious Swede. But as an intense young man struggling with issues of love and faith, he's just great. We've already added a bunch more of his films made with Ingmar Bergman in the '60s to the queue. Hopefully, we'll still be inspired to watch them when they move to the top of the Netflix list.
Cinecultist caught a glimpse of The Simpsons-ified Empire State building while heading home on Tuesday night and snapped this picture. If you didn't already hear, as a promotion for the release of The Simpsons Movie on dvd Dec. 18, the geniuses at Fox talked the historic building into changing the colors to Simpsons yellow. Cinecultist expects to be watching this movie at least a few times over the holidays with our spider pig lovin' little brother. Though if CC worked for News Corp. we would've already gotten a copy of the film for home viewing and wouldn't have to buy it, like some ordinary joe schmo. Boo. [More coverage of the marketing event on Gothamist.]
Other new dvds Cinecultist thinks are worth adding to the collection include the sweetly romantic musical Once, and the ultimate collector's edition of the sci-fi Ur text Blade Runner.
There aren't a lot of movies that Cinecultist has walked out of, but Robert Altman's Short Cuts is one of them. Our Dad took us, and our sister, to see it when it came out in the theaters in 1993 because it was playing at the local art house theater and M.A.S.H. was one of his favorites. But Short Cuts's a meandering 189 minute movie about a bunch of vaguely interconnected, dysfunctional people in Los Angeles, and understandably we were all bored. But as CC learned more about cinema, we'd always felt bad that we never appreciated this supposedly great Altman flick, so we put the Criterion version in the Netflix queue and finally watched it this weekend.
Fourteen years later, and with an arguably more worldly perspective, CC can see both sides of the story. Granted, it's still a long, convoluted movie. Plus with a 13-year-old and a 16-year-old in tow, it was pretty racy material for our movie going group. CC even remembers being shocked then by Jennifer Jason Leigh's bored housewife/phone sex operator dialog. No wonder our Dad was willing to leave. Then as the movie grinds on, you begin to wonder if any of these sad souls captured on screen are redeeming. They all seem so lost, depressed and mere moments from doing something immoral or illegal.
But then again, CC can see why it garnered Altman his fourth Oscar nomination for best director and won the cast a special ensemble award at that year's Golden Globes. To have that many distinct characters running around and for them all to seem like real people, not mere sketches, is quite a feat. It takes a real master like Altman was to orchestrate that much modern day malaise on screen, and you can understand why later directors like Paul Thomas Anderson so blatantly stole from his model. (Though PTA's raining Biblical frogs are obviously not as cool as RA's med flies and 7.4 earthquake.)
Maybe you have to be a certain age before "bleak" is an adjective that you can enjoy in a movie watching experience. Certainly some of our favorites from this year's roster, like No Country For Old Men, The Savages and There Will Be Blood, are decidedly unhappy films filled with unhappy characters. Or maybe CC just has more patience now at 30 for a 3 hour movie to unfold slowly and with little obvious purpose, than we had at 16. At 16 it's tough to understand why you'd want to spend 3 hours watching sad people live sad little lives in Los Angeles. At 30, it starts to look a little more like art.
Not dead. Promise. While we know it's one of the cardinal sins of blogging to let said blogging diminish to such a meager frequency it only consists of brief check in posts, that's what has happened to CC.
In lieu of lame apologies, some bullet points of what's been tickling our fancy lately:
* We bought a copy of the new translation of War and Peace put out by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky which the Times and the New York Review of Books have been raving about. Cinecultist promised our friend Adriane we'd set up a schedule of reading so we could discuss it, but apparently we'll not be able to beat the Bill Keller reading pace. Damn dude, you devoured 1273 pages (including summaries and appendixes) in a week, while also running the NYT? Impressive.
* Sometimes for giggles, Cinecultist tries to horrify the salespeople at Kim's on Saint Marks' with our DVD purchases. Unfortunately they're a pretty jaded bunch, but we thought we'd at least get an eyebrow raise when CC put Ratatouille and the Special Collector's Edition of Flashdance on the counter last Saturday. No dice. Both DVDs come with some nice extra features though. On Ratatouille, which is just as charming as it was in the theaters, you can enjoy a hilarious short about the history of rats as narrated by Remy and Emile. Flashdance also includes an extra disc of six classic toe-tapping, nose-blowing audio tracks. In fact as we type right now, CC is bopping along to "What a Feeling." Don't be surprised to see us decked out in leg warmers and t-shirts with the neck cut out shortly.
* If you aren't enjoying Gossip Girl on The CW already, Cinecultist suggests adding it to the DVR sched. It's surprisingly geeky and fun. Case in point, last week when the young Dan (Penn Badgley) wanted some tips when wooing experienced Serena (Blake Lively) he rented I Am Curious Yellow! References to kinky, experimental Swedish cinema from the '60s in a teen-sploitation soap? Awesome.
Last week Benten Films, a new DVD distribution company based in Brooklyn, put out their first title, Joe Swanberg's LOL. Cinecultist touted it as our DVD pick of the week on Gothamist and also conducted a little interview with Benten's founders and fellow NYC film critics Aaron Hillis and Andrew Grant.*
Hopefully our playful connections between Grant and Hillis's impressive critical abilities and their new endeavors in DVD production doesn't come across like a bitter hater. CC is honestly super impressed by anyone who finds time to keep their apartment clean and live their life in addition to seeing as many movies as these dudes do, let alone found a new company. Kudos! We're psyched to see the rest of their up coming releases and promise to no longer mention the "m word" in association with them.
* It's official: coming up to Cinecultist in a crowded indie film industry party and announcing "you should interview us for Gothamist" can actually get you an interview. CC is that easy to pitch (sometimes)! We're like the slutty cheerleader of NYC movie interviewers.
Sometimes what we see on screen gives Cinecultist bright ideas. In this Norwegan/British movie from 2000, Aberdeen that we watched a week ago, one of the main characters Kaisa (Lena Headey) stops by the side of the road to take a break during a hellish car trip with her estranged father (Stellan Skarsgård). Looking up, she sees a massive horned beast just above the highway and nearly falls over from fright. Laughing, Tomas says he can't believe she's so freaked out, it's only a reindeer. Even though she's a sophisticated London lawyer now, Kaisa spent much of her childhood with him in Norway and shouldn't be afraid of them. This scene has been on the Cinecultist's mind lately because we half expect to see one of those big guys in the middle of Second Ave, as we've traversed from our cozy apartment to the subway through the bitter cold. Seriously, the city should think about importing some of those majestic reindeer for the East Village, it would make this frigid weather much easier to bear.
Besides the similarities in weather from that movie and real life, Aberdeen has been nibbling on our mind ever since we watched it on DVD. It's a small movie, but it sticks with you surprisingly well. First of all, the acting by all of the cast members is really wonderful. From Charlotte Rampling, who only has a small part as Kaisa's dying mother, to the utterly humane Ian Hart, as Kaisa's reluctant romantic object, everyone is spot on. Of course those two are just small roles, the leads Skarsgård and Headey are both totally great as well. The more their story unfold, the more we can see how scarred and fucked up this father and daughter are, yet their neurosis never becomes over the top or unrealistic. As addicts (Tomas is a drunk and Kaisa sneaks bumps of coke in rest stop bathrooms), their behavior can be erratic to say the least,but that almost seems to make them worthy of the camera. Watching a great character study like this one, reminds CC that cinema is really made for the exploration of larger-than-life personalities like this family.
We fell for Skarsgård from his heart-wrenchingly brutal performance in Breaking the Waves, and this film is of a similar ilk. Add it to your rental queue, you won't be sorry. As for his lovely costar, we looked up on iMDB and discovered Headey is in the cast of 300, that historical epic-y movie about the battle of Thermopylae based on the Frank Miller comic. It comes out soon, Mar. 9 to be exact. Cinecultist is anxious to see more of her work, even if it's set in the sands of ancient Greece rather than the icy snows of modern Scandinavia.
"My neighbor Totoro, Totoro, Totoro, Totoro, plays an ocarina on moonlit nights. My neighbor Totoro, Totoro, Totoro, Totoro, if you should ever meet, wonderful fortune will come to you."
Leading up to the vacation, Cinecultist was feeling a little movied out. A scary thought, we know, but it does happen at the end of the year. Fortunately over the long New Year's weekend, Cinecultist got a bit of the movie yen back. Whew, right? Part of what helped get CC back on the horse was immersing ourselves in some cinema screen magic courtesy of Hayao Miyazaki and Chris Marker.
On DVD we watched My Neighbor Totoro, then at Film Forum on Monday night we went to see The Case of the Grinning Cat. Coincidentally both movies are about seeing something no one else can see and the cuteness of animals. Though interestingly, they're also both about sadness and loss, including depressing elements like mothers in the hospital or international wars.
If you need your "awww" reflex realigned, Miyazaki is your guy. My Neighbor Totoro made us want to hug everything in sight. Two little girls, Satsuki and Mei, move to the countryside with their Dad so they can be closer to their Mom who is in the hospital for TB. There they discover they can see forest spirits like the dust creatures that live in their house and their neighbor, Totoro, a rabbit/cat/owl looking thing that has teeth, roars like a lion, flies, and appreciates the loan of an umbrella during a rainstorm. This movie is so ridiculously charming that it even softened our usual dislike for the child actress phenom Dakota Fanning, who does the voice of Satsuki in the English version. Watching Dakota and her sister Elle, who plays Mei, clowning around during the voice recording, the Miyazaki cuteness washed over our past annoyance at their precociousness. See how powerful his movies can be?
Chris Marker also understands the power of cute to sooth. He noticed a graffiti artist in Paris decorating the city with perilously perched smiling orange cats and began filming their appearances and disappearances. Marker equates the "chat" with Parisian life, and sees that spirit as similar to the French tendency to take to the street in protest. Politics, art, graffiti, mystery and cute kitty cats are all woven together by Marker's charming observational abilities. He has such a deft touch, with the editing and the voice over, keeping his movies light but not insignificant. That's another element that he and Miyazaki have in common, being able to make their viewers feel without beating them over the head with meaning.
A well-balanced movie diet for Cinecultist includes both new releases and canonical classics. Hence our efforts to catch the new print of The Rules of the Game at Film Forum* a few weeks ago and renting Double Suicide on DVD last weekend. This Japanese movie from 1969 by Masahiro Shinoda is really spectacular; it gob-smacked CC. Based on bunraku puppet play, the story is about a middle class paper merchant who is in love with a renowned courtesan. He has promised to redeem her from sexual enslavement and in return she has reserved herself for him alone. Unfortunately, his wife's family doesn't really approve of their son-in-law squandering all of his money in the red light district. Jihei (Kichiemon Nakamura) and Kohura (Shima Iwashita) decide they must kill themselves in order to be together in the next life, even if they can't be in this one.
What's so arresting about this film is Shinoda's visual flare. The movie begins with a scene inside a theater, a director has some last minute consultations over the phone as performers prepare for a puppet production in ominous looking black costumes. But rather than fading away when the movie transitions to live action, the puppeteers remain as extra-textual elements reminding the movie audience about the story's artificiality. Shinoda also has an intriguing "double" theme running throughout, with Kohura and the dutiful wife Osan being played by the same actress and a mirrored opening and closing reference shot of the dead lovers stretched out on a reed mat. Also the refracting of the actors with wooden slats, screens and other architectural elements is really beautiful. You can tell each shot was painstakingly composed.
On a Great Movie high, CC decided to scan through the Criterion discs available on Netflix but quickly got waylaid in the riches. Sheesh, there are a lot of them out there and dauntingly, the company keeps producing more. Guess, that's what a whole life's worth of movie watching is for.
*BTW, Rules has been held over at Film Forum, so get your butt down there to see it.
PS. RIP for Robert Altman, the beloved director who passed away on Monday at 81. His film Shortcuts is one of the few that Cinecultist ever walked out of, though in our defense, CC was only 16 and our Dad and sister Laurie weren't into the film. Maybe now is the time to add it to the rental queue for a rewatch, it is available on Criterion after all.
Ever since sitting through the lamiosity that was Step Up, Cinecultist has been thinking about all the much better high school dancing musicals we've loved. Our first favorite in this genre was probably Fame, so we popped it onto the Netflix queue. When it arrived in the mail earlier this week, we actually held off on seeing it right away so that we could savor its awesomeness on Saturday afternoon, nestled deep in the couch post morning yoga class. Ironically, Entertainment Weekly also had high school movies on the brain this week, publishing their top 50 list, with our recent rental coming in at #42.
If like Cinecultist it's been many, many years since you've enjoyed the high kicking, '80s excess of Fame, we highly recommend a re-watch. It's a bit like American Idol only with less pop gloss, as we follow a group of high school from audition to graduation at the Performing Arts High School in New York. Our two favorite characters are probably Coco, because as played by Irene Cara she has a spectacular screen presence, and Doris (Maureen Teefy), because we always love the awkward, smart Jewish girls. But of course the best scene involves music student Bruno Martelli (Lee Curreri). His proud working class papa gets a hold of one of Bruno's slammin' homemade tapes which he broadcasts from his cab on the street outside the school. The kids stream out of the doors and take their dance party to the midst of Times Square traffic, which is completely silly yet totally joyful and exuberant. See the clip in the YouTube window above.
As for EW's list, we'd first like to point out that we've seen all but 9 of the flicks listed. CC thinks that's a little bit impressive, when it comes to a pretty solid genre overview. But we don't think we'd put The Breakfast Club at the top of the heap. While it was one of the first movies we ever owned on VHS, it really wasn't ever a flick CC truly loved. It's mighty entertaining but we never identified with the characters the way we did with other John Hughes creations like Some Kind of Wonderful (which isn't even on the list) and Sixteen Candles (only #49). If we want to get analytical about why, it's probably the awkward, smart girl factor. How can CC really bond with Ally Sheedy when there's so much to love in Mary Stuart Masterson's Watts and Molly Ringwald's Sam Baker.
Some movies don't have Pirates of the Caribbean or Miami Vice boffo box office in the theaters, but they can still end up being winners for producers via the magic of DVD. Certain movies, whether they're cult favorites or small stories better suited to a personal-sized screen, actually become even more popular years after their release and can lead to further franchise advancement. Reading this article in Variety about the phenomenon, Cinecultist found it interesting (though not surprising) the movies they sited as examples of the trend. Here's a brief breakdown, bullet-style:
• Lord of War ($44 mil. in DVD sales, over 1 mil. Netflix rentals alone)
• The Notebook ($81 mil. theatrical box office, $160 mil. DVD sales)
• Napoleon Dynamite ($45 mil. theatrical box office, tripled in DVD sales, now releasing a new special edition version)
• The Pacifier ($112 mil theatrical box office, $116 mil. DVD sales)
• The Transporter, Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, Austin Powers all lead to sequels from DVD sales. Also considering sequels to Van Wilder and Waiting from DVD popularity.
• Actors who do particularly well on DVD: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal and Wesley Snipes
• And of course, Donnie Darko ("Every month thousands of them have sold," says Adams Media Research VP Jan Saxton. "It's stayed hot forever, and that's unusual.")
There's not a whole lot that Cinecultist loves more than a smart samurai movie. A flick which is aware of its genre's legacy and yet willing to riff on the tropes to make it modern. We'd been meaning to catch Takeshi Kitano's* remake of the classic Japanese samurai character, Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, for ages and finally got around to it this past weekend.
Kitano wrote the screenplay, directed and stars in the film about a wandering ronin who poses as a blind masseur but ends up saving a village from some warring gangsters. With its quirky villagers, detached but kind hero and flashback structure to fill in character motivation, Kitano's filmmaking is obviously indebted to both Kurosawa's morally fuzzy freelance samurai and international art house directors' whimsy like Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
There's also another stylistic cross-pollination going on which a friend pointed out to us as we were extolling the virtues of this fun film--our over-rated nemesis, Quentin Tarantino. In all of the sword work, the opponent is quickly dispatched with a well-placed flick of the sharpest blade ever (it cuts through a stone lantern at one point!). According to commentary on the making of docu on the disc, Kitano thinks this is more realistic. What's not so much grounded in realism is the geysers of blood shooting out of each of the adversaries. A hand is loped off and then the fountain starts with the blood digitally set in stark relief to the background. So very Tarantino, and damnit kinda cool. Though we guess it probably wasn't such a good idea to be eating lunch in front of the TV while this movie was playing.
Despite a bunch of icky moments, the film has such a delightful sense of fun about it. More movies should seem this joyful. Also, they should have Tadanobu Asano in the cast and end with a tap dancing musical finale. That would be our recipe for more successful moviemaking.
* Everyone knows that Takeshi's nickname is "Beat" but we feel sort of dopey typing it in between his first and last name. Seems there's something lost in the translation with that moniker. So just imagine that we've acknowledged it, yet also are treating him like an ar-teest deserving of full name only respect.
The Cinecultist's Netflix queue these days has been a little clogged with Michael Winterbottom movies, as we're on a kick to see everything that's available from the English director. We've seen good things (Code 46) and slightly less good things by him (Nine Songs) but it's all been varied and all thought-provoking. Our most recent was his 1997 film, Welcome to Sarajevo with Stephen Dillane, Woody Harrelson and Marisa Tomei.
We actually recall when this flick came out, probably because Sarajevo was a hot button subject at the time and we'd liked his previous film, Jude with Kate Winslet. However, we also remember we thought it sounded sorta heavy and we have an automatic aversion reaction to all things Woody Harrelson, so we avoided it at the time. Watching it recently on DVD, our initial bias wasn't too far off the mark but nearly 10 years after it's release, CC knows better what's good for us in terms of viewing habits and Welcome to Sarajevo is a thoughtful movie about an important subject.
Dillane plays Michael Henderson, an English journalist in Sarajevo covering the war. The city is under siege and his group of reporter friends (including Harrelson) are struggling to both get the real story from the war on their home news channels and to keep from getting killed. Both are quite a challenge. Henderson becomes emotionally attached to a group of orphans whose poignant stories he hopes will get them safe passage out of the war zone. He teams up with an aid worker (Tomei) to try to get one particular young girl, Emira, who he particularly feels for, in her convoy of children leaving the country. It's as much about the horrors of war, as the ways that people touched by the ordinary folks caught up in war can't help but get involved in their plight.
One of the most interesting parts of this movie came from noticing in the final title and from the credits that the young girl who plays Emira is actually named Emira and comes from Sarajevo. Actually, in the scene where the orphans tell their stories to Henderson's news camera, these are their actual lives they are recounting. In a way, you can see how Sarajevo couldn't help but touch Winterbottom and the rest of the filmmakers, even as they make a fiction film meant for entertainment. Though of course, this isn't your run of the mill entertainment then, it's a movie with a purpose. Not your usual summertime fare but certainly worth our 2 hours in front of the TV. Oh, and it's actually a pretty entertaining movie.
Summer means no good TV so Cinecultist has been dipping into our DVD collection for entertainment. Last weekend we swooned over Paul Bettany and his champion tennis playing again in Wimbledon and tonight we fall all over again for Lilo and Stitch. This adorable animated feature from 2002 about a little orphan Hawaiian girl and her weird pet is such a classic. We remember seeing it in our local theater the summer we lived out in Brooklyn and it put such a grin on our face.
A horrible destructive alien experiment, #626 escapes from the Intergalactic Federation's troops and makes off (in the red cruiser, no less) for Earth, set on a rampage of some cities. However, he lands in Hawaii, is mistaken for a dog, is adopted by Lilo and her older sister Nani, becomes familiar with the works of Elvis Presley and must learn the importance of family before his alien captors catch up with him.
Maybe one of the reasons why CC loves this movie so much -- besides the inherent cuteness of a mean, blue, koala-looking thing like Stitch -- is how much it's indebted to post-modern reference. With allusions to Japanese cinema, particularly anime, disaster flicks, Roswell and Elvis's surf movies swirling about, it's a cornucopia of pop culture trivia. But all of this winking to a segment of the audience that may be aware of the cultural context does not take precedence over the kid's movie unfolding on screen. It's a wise animated movie that can tread that knowing yet wide-eyed, heartfelt line. The Incredibles and Iron Giant are two others that succeed in this arena as well and we're waiting with curious anticipation for Pixar's Cars out later this summer.
Next up on CC's summer trip through our DVD library: will it be skating rom com The Cutting Edge or the classic Gene Kelly musical about moviemaking Singin' In the Rain?
A few months ago in the process of doing some research about Shirley MacLaine for le Day Job, Cinecultist discovered that she and Jack Lemmon and director Billy Wilder had teamed up again three years after the making of the Apartment to do the madcap comedy, Irma La Douce. The Apartment is one of Cinecultist's all time super in love favorite movies, so we promptly put Irma in the Netflix queue and finally watched it this weekend. While it's no where near the masterwork that the Apartment is, Irma's still a lot of silly fun and worth a rental for the serious Wilder fan.
Based on a popular musical play, Irma is the story of a French streetwalker who falls for an honest cop who loves her so much he concocts an elaborate plan to keep her from sleeping with any man but him. Lemmon and MacLaine's delightful chemistry keeps this ridiculous plot afloat as his sweetness is perfectly matched by her sexy honesty. MacLaine also makes her character's green accented wardrobe look completely fetching. CC may need to find ourselves some bright green stockings just so we can emulate her style. There's also some very charming physical comedy in the picture, particularly a great fight scene in the local bistro which involves a pool ball in the mouth, a lamp to the head repeatedly and then the destroying of a pinball machine.
According to our Conversations with Wilder by Cameron Crowe book, Wilder never thought this movie worked despite its Oscar win (for best score and a nom for MacLaine) and its hit status at the box office. Wilder told Crowe he didn't think actors should ever "play foreigners in a foreign country with an American accent." Coming from the man who co-wrote Ninotchka, a foreign characters comedy that really zings, we'll believe him. Though really in CC's opinion, you shouldn't let Wilder's artistic bias against one of his lesser films keep you from enjoying the nubile Shirley in those snazzy green tights.
When tragedy and disaster happens either of the "your office burns down over the weekend" variety or the "your husband and the father of your 3 month old son is hit by a train" ilk...actually, it's entirely unfair to compare the Cinecultist's feeling this weekend discovering that our Day Job office building has sustained a major fire and the experience of Yumiko in Hirokazu Kore-eda's Maborosi. That experience took her years to bounce back and really CC and our fellow staff members are mostly fine but for the annoyance of working off-site for a few days. There's really no equivalent.
More so even than his lovely and affecting later features After Life and Nobody Knows, Marorosi is like a painting on screen. Meditative shots of city walk ways, seascapes, children running through green-lit tunnels and a father with kids and a dog playing on the beach become an interplay between space and form. Like a Japanese wood cut painting of a mountainside and one tree, Kore-eda's obsession with symmetry is hypnotic as the figures more from one part of the screen to the next. What may seem slow or ponderous at first glance about the not much of anything plot (woman widowed, woman remarries) leaves more than enough room for the cinematography to shine.
Towards the end of the film the depressed Yumiko tells her new husband she can't get over the idea that her suicidal husband looked into the abyss and gave in, even with herself and their young child as a teether to this world. In response, he tells her a story from his fisherman father of seeing lights on the sea's horizon which calls to you. There is a moment then, when all of us can choose whether to acquiesce or not. There's something excessively sad about that thought and yet it seems to cheer Yumiko. She's heard the maborosi calling but she does not heed them. The possibilities of life are too strong. We can rebuild again.
On Saturday night on the way home from a dinner party in Brooklyn (thanks again Matty and Jori, mucho tasty salmon!), Cinecultist stopped in to Kim's Video on St. Marks. We'd got it into our head to watch again one of our favorite movies from last year, The 40 Year Old Virgin and so wanted to pick up a DVD copy. Kim's is usually movie fanboy central much to our glee, but on a Saturday night at 11 am, it's particularly so.
However, Cinecultist didn't have much of a chance to oggle any fanboys in one of their natural habitats because we were too distracted by the fact that Kim's has changed their DVD categorizing since the last time we'd browsing. Those Kim's employees are so clever, for instance they put Francis Ford's film's all together but the movies by his progeny, CQ, The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation by Roman and Sofia respectively are grouped just under "Coppola Children". Heehee.
Though the more we thought about it as we wandered, we couldn't remember the last time we'd gone a browsing and buying at Kim's. In graduate school, any spare bit of money not devoted to food, rent or drink was earmarked for film screenings, DVDs or movie books. "Research," you understand. And Kim's was our local pusher of choice. We knew it was bad for us to go there, but we reasoned we only needed one more hit to tide us over. In fact, now that we think about it, our entire DVD collection (all 100 plus beautiful discs) was acquired since we've moved to NYC four and a half years ago. We only got a disc player when we moved here, so all of these DVDs cluttering our tiny apartment came from an obsessive need to possess certain films. We loved them, so they had to be ours.
Yet, as we wandered the aisles, lingering longingly in the Japan and Korea sections, we realized that impulse seems to have (mostly) faded. Funny, where did that obsession go? Sure, we still heart the movies with a love that grows more and more each day, but we don't feel the need to have them all at our fingertips. The fact of the matter is we have DVDs in our collection that we've not even watched yet, let alone more than once which was our old litmus for plunking down the credit card. Also, it seems that the spare cash we do have lately goes towards different kinds of luxuries like taxi cabs, dropping off the laundry rather than doing it ourselves, pedicures during the summer and more dinners out with friends. Guess that's what they call cha-cha-changes.
And by the by, 40 Year Old? Not quite as funny as when we saw it in the theater but still pretty darn good. Though the chest waxing scene does get more hilarious with time. Good luck at the Golden Globes tonight, Steve Carrell and all our other favorites!
Too tired from a long work week and a few too many beers at Orchard Bar last night, Cinecultist stayed home Saturday sans Halloween costume with a VHS of Whit Stillman's brilliant, The Last Days of Disco. Des, Jimmy, Josh, Alice and Charlotte may not dress like the Misshapes kids, but it all felt eerily similar for some reason. Scary. Josh's (Matt Keesler) final impassioned plea for the beauty and longevity of disco also cracks us up.
Disco will never be over. It will always live in our minds and hearts. Something this big, something this important and this great will never die. Maybe for many years it will seem passe and ridiculous, caricatured and sneered or worst, even ignored. People will laugh about John Travolta, Olivia Newton John, white polyester suits and platform shoes and going like this! But we had nothing to do with that and still loved disco. Those who didn't understand will never understand. Disco was much more and much better than all that. Disco was too great and too much fun to be gone forever. It has to come back someday. I just hope it will be in our own lifetimes.Sorry, I've got a job interview this afternoon and I was trying to get revved up. Most of what I said believe.
Die yuppie scum. Viva la disco nouveau wave, lower east side hipsters!
Cinecultist received an advance copy of the new special edition DVD of the 1979 film, The Warriors in the mail and finally last night got around to watching it with a little Chinese take-out at the Capn's Brooklyn abode. After properly freaking him out by correctly identifying both the guy who plays Richard Wright from Sex and the City and then Oscar-winning actress Mercedes Ruehl from the film's cast, Matty still agreed to discuss the kitch-tastic film with Cinecultist. Here goes.
CC: All right, so then. The Warriors.
Matty: Warriors.
M: rawr.
CC: so i found out from my coworker today that as we suspected, what is added in this special edition dvd version is the comic book interludes. other than that, it's the same movie.
M: gotcha.
CC: i don't know if this makes the new version more cohesive, but i can understand why the director thought no one would get those references (as he says in his commentary track) because other than what was added, i didn't see it in the original footage. what did you think? upon a little more reflection was it too cheesy for words or good wholesome, gang-related fun?
M: It didn't hit me the way I'd hoped. Certainly, it was entertaining and "Warriors, come out and plaaa-aaay!" will be stuck in my head for all eternity, but the characters weren't memorable enough.
CC: yes, it's a movie that relies mostly on cliche, rather than characterization. cliche and really weird costumes.
M: i think i might be a fury for halloween. Either that or the guys with the purple vests. So hot.
CC: any one of those weirdo costumes would make great outfits for halloween, except for maybe the orphans. there was something so downtrodden and hang dog about them, i don't think anyone would want to be pretending to be in that gang. i also thought one of the other kitchy fun bits of the film was the soundtrack. serious synthesizer for the closeted williamsburgher in us all.
M: definitely. The composer talked about that in the special features. Apparently synths were pretty new and he was really excited about it. You may remember his work from the Exorcist III. A true classic.
CC: really, who can forget that soundtrack? if they've seen it. which i think i might have -- in the 6th grade.
M: I jest, but I did like the music. It was the glue that kept this film together. That and the animated sequences that were added for the directors cut. E III, it was one of the defining moments in my life. That and learning to walk. They're neck-and-neck for importance. Were you down with the whole Greek battle/myth thing the director was going for?
CC: well, it's one of those things where i guess i see it, if i squint my eyes and turn my head slightly to the left but mostly, it seems like a stretch. a stretch to make this movie seem more like a "classic." why can't it just be kitchy fun that is totally of and for it's era? what's so wrong with being that?
M: I'm with you there. The fifteen minutes on the "phenomenon" of the Warriors was ridiculous. All of the actors are telling us how this film was the defining moment of their careers. Of course it was, because most of them went on to do bit parts in various crappy movies. Then again, maybe we would feel differently if we had actually seen this when it was released. People do seem to be mildly excited about this release.
CC: People in my office knew about it right away, when I mentioned it today. It's a thing, apparently.
M: So, we lack that personal connection. You can't call something a classic if it doesn't resonate with snarky twenty-somethings a couple decades later.
CC: i concur. we should be considered the litmus test on snarky and twenty-something.
M: Litmus is my maiden name. (Not really, but it's more interesting than middle.)
Cinecultist has been in a bit of funk lately, even with the leisurely long Labor Day weekend barely behind us. We feel a little like Chicken Little, though instead of calling out the "sky is falling" to our neighbors, we've been huddled for the last week over our laptop reading the New York Times hurricane Katrina coverage obsessively. It's glum work, we don't have to tell you.
On Friday night we had the rom zom com, Shaun of the Dead in from Netflix and we thought surely the defying of genre conventions and droll British wit would perk us up. Except, like the time we rented Moonlight and Valentino with our friend whose Dad had just died and we realized too late it was a comedy with Jon Bon Jovi noless about death, a movie about the zombie apocalypse seemed a bit too close to home. Looting, shot gun use, vainly trying to save one's Mum can all be very cute if it's not happening but a few states south of your little apartment.
Granted, this is a darn clever movie with good acting and a bright premise. Ordinarily we would've enjoyed it very much and found it's joking tone and good-natured but reverent ribbing on the zombie movie conventions quite diverting. Instead, a ranting call from our Mom put the movie on extended pause and once we got off the phone, we spent a good 20 minutes glued to the television Nightly News. Sigh. The zombies looked much less threatening than what was happening in New Orleans.
Dude, even Thomas Crowne, er Pierce Brosnan is coming out to say the whole kit and caboodle has been poorly handled. At this point in time, even escapist movies can't help us keep our fingers over our eyes. We need to do, and then after that we can go back to the regular daily business of art-making.
Coincidentally enough, with the arrival last week of this year's New York Film Festival's line-up, Cinecultist had finally got around to watching on DVD the opening film from last year, Agnes Jaoui's Look At Me just last weekend. This is such a great little movie, we can't believe it took us this long to watch it. Like a Gallic-Bridget Jones's Diary only less silly, the movie follows an unlikely heroine, the overweight daughter of a famous novelist.
If you've ever wondered what kind of complexes Sofia Coppola must have had before she was an Oscar-winning director and style icon, when she was merely a daughter with a famous name, a struggling clothing line and an interest in photography, Look At Me might shed some light. The parent-child relationship is one of the most complex ones we ever have. The desire to live up to their expectations, to compete with them or even surpass their accomplishments but also to feel validated and loved by them. Then throw in some body images issues and a step-mother who is your age, only thin and blonde, and you can understand why our main character, Lolita (the wonderfully natural Marilou Berry) is a bit neurotic.
Always fearing that her friends or boyfriends only like her for her famous father's connections, she's still a person accustomed to getting what she wants by association. Even Lolita's singing teacher Sylvia (played by the director) is initially drawn to helping Lolita because of Sylvia's admiration for the father Étienne Cassard's work and the way he can help Sylvia's husband Pierre's struggling writing career.
The complexity of these characters and their relationships, as well as the simply human ways they react to various situations, really sneaks up on you while you're watching the film. You don't realize how much you've come to care for them and how strongly you are rooting for a just or fair resolution. This is where Jaoui and her long-time writing as well as life partner Jean-Pierre Bacri (who plays Lolita's father) really succeed. The movie ends just as you would hope it would in your most sappy Hollywood-ish fantasies and yet it feels as naturalistic as the rest of the picture. That's a precarious and delicate balance to achieve, and the product of a real narrative master.
Review from the Reverse Shot folks on indieWire back when it had theatrical release earlier this year and an indieWire interview with Jaoui.
In case you haven't noticed, there's a lot of movies out there. Even if you spend quite a bit time like the Cinecultist going to the movies, renting movies, boring perfect strangers at parties with movie talk, there's bound to be a few classics that slip through the cracks. One of those was Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander which CC is now happy to have in our "seen" column. Well, "seen and loved" actually.
The story of the Ekdahl family in the early 1900s Sweden, it meanders over a number of years as the extended family celebrates, mourns and supports each other. Part costume drama, part childhood nostalgia piece, part psychological character study, the movie has a richness and depth you don't see very often. Watching this movie feels like snuggling down with a good long book. Clocking in at three hours in the theatrical version (Bergman also created a 5 hour television cut), there's plenty of time to really fall in love with these characters like you can with a novel. Of course, now we have to rent that 5 hour version that's in the other part of the Criterion box set.
As an aside, Fanny and Alexander is a movie that our friends, the newly married Adriane and John have been trying to get CC to watch for ages and we can't believe we waited so long to do it. Just goes to show, when you have friends whose movie opinions you trust, you should always take their rental advice sooner rather than later.
There's something about the autobiographical impulse that is so darn appealing. Not for the audience always, but surely for the artist. Because really, is there anything more fascinating than ourselves and our neurosis? Certainly not says the essayist, memoirist, blogger and autobiographical documentarian.
Cinecultist watched tonight Sherman's March by Ross McElwee, a movie from 1986 about McElwee's travels through his native South following the route of Sherman's March to the Sea and about McElwee's search for a wife. The film won best documentary at the Sundance Film Festival that year and it's not hard to see why, as it's an incredibly compelling navel gazing that runs over 2 and half hours long.
It sort of feels like a Nick Hornby book on screen with less pop culture references and is much better than like minded ilk such as that dreadful 50 First Dates* or My Date With Drew (which CC hasn't seen yet but just looks sucky). There's a fine line between self-absorbed and universal in it's miniscule examinings. Fortunately this movie stays on the good side of the law.
We particularly loved the looks everyone's sporting without any self-consciousness. 1986 was a fashion minefield, people -- if you don't recall. High waisted jeans, huge sunglasses, feathered hair and roller skates as the height of sporty chic. Ye-ouch. Also, McElwee is a bit obsessed with Burt Reynolds in the movie, after one of the girls he's dating who's an actress thinks meeting Reynolds would help her floundering career. CC kept picturing the old guy in promo pictures for Dukes of Hazzard wearing Tom Wolfe's white suits but in '86, Reynolds was hot stuff especially to Southern women. He's like their Brad Pitt, but with a mustache.
Despite the dating of the material with these silly references, Sherman's March is wonderfully human and engaging. Trying to find lasting love, and hopefully yourself in the process, is a subject that doesn't get old even if the hairstyles and celluloid hunks do.
* We're thinking not of the Sandler/Barrymore rom com but that documentary from 8 or 9 years ago where the guy filmed all of his first dates and then met a nice girl and settled down? Is this ringing a bell with anyone? Please email if so. Update: readers Kristi and Josh clued us in that we mean 20 Dates (1998). Thanks guys!
If you think Cinecultist plays the movie geek online, you should see us at the Day Job. We're positively "that's Cah-yay d-oo Cin-eh-ma, you neophytes!" annoying. But occasionally, the co-workers put in a specific recommendation request and following our recently wrapped Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto-themed issue one of our favorite but soon-to-be-departed c.w.s, Miss Chiaki Bates, asked for an Asian film tutorial. Here is our list for her, most of which are suitable for a quick click thru to your Netflix queue for simple adding.
Mainland China: Red Sorghum -- Sadly, Zhang Yimou's first feature and one of the film's that made the world sit up and say "hey, they make movies in China!" in the mid '80s is only available on VHS. However, having to drag your dusty tape player out of storage is no reason to by-pass this gorgeously shot historical drama. Anyone who caught Zhang's recent Hero or House of Flying Daggers knows the guy loves to use bold colors in his shot composition but Red Sorghum, a tale of a young peasant bride as recounted by her son, even has the signature hue spelled out conveniently in the title. If you're anything like CC, and Zhang for that matter, this movie will trigger a long love affair with the stunning Gong Li who was the It Girl of the 5th Generation. [Psst: Each group of Chinese filmmakers educated by their government is dubbed a generation and the '80s wunderkinds were called the Fifth.]
Korea: Chunhyang -- We're a sucker for a well-made historical drama and this retelling of a famous Korean folk tale by director Im Kwon-taek is completely gorgeous. A courtesan is wooed by a handsome, young scholar but will he stand by their secret relationship when the local magistrate wants to claim her? The film cuts back and forth between this world imagined by the filmmaker and a modern Korean audience listening to a traditional folk performer singing the old tale. Like we know the end to Cinderella, these listeners already are certain how the story ends yet the film's viewer can see the power of this man's voice still brings them to tears. If a story makes you weepy on the five millionth listen, imagine how it could blow you away the first time.
Taiwan: The Hole -- Jumping forward from the past to the uncertain future, Taiwan's Tsai Ming-liang composed his idea of what 2000 might look like for a French television series commissioning films before the turn of the millennium. In this future dystopia it will not stop raining and people seem to be coming down with some sort of weird disease that makes them act like cockroaches. In a quasi-abandoned Taipei apartment building, an isolated man and woman are still trying to eek out a day to day routine, going to work, making noodles, trying to fix the leaks, that sort of thing. A handyman creates a literal hole between their apartments floor/ceiling but it also opens up a metaphorical connection between them. But where that plot description might make this film seem like it might be logical or causal, it's artistic and moody and delightfully confusing. Modern malaise tempered with musical interludes, imagined perhaps. Awesomely weird, this movie is.
Hong Kong: Days of Being Wild -- It has the perfect HK triumvirate of Cheung-Leung-Cheung (aka Leslie, Tony and Maggie) and it's directed by Wong Kar Wai, a filmmaker whose use of Christopher Doyle's stunning cinematography with Wong's trademark measured pacing makes movies for savoring. Sure, Chungking Express, In the Mood For Love, Happy Together and hopefully, 2046 are all essential viewing at some point too, but D.o.B.W. has a freshness and a wit that tempered by the pathos and all of that freakin' typhoon-level rain makes it a wonderful intro to this national cinema.
Japan: All About Lily Chou-Chou -- You might think we'd recommend to little Chiaki something from Japan perhaps starring her namesake that has some ass-kicking or manga-style. However, the lyrical loveliness of Shunji Iwai seems like it could be up her alley and if you haven't seen Chou-Chou, we urge you to watch it as well. Based on a fictional pop star the director invented, created a web community for and then recorded the postings of her rabid teenage fans, All About Lily Chou-Chou treads in the very stuff of Japanese modernity, juxtaposing shots of endless rice paddy in a Tokyo suburb with obsessive text messaging and an electro-pop soundtrack.
By the way, don't be mad that we left out films from India or Thailand or Singapore or any of the other amazing Asian national cinemas finally tickling our shores. These are just a few flicks to get started with, hopefully a sampling like this will encourage the more casual movie renter out of the well-worn new release aisle at the video store. Stop the Hollywood hegemony! Oops, sorry. There goes our virtual megaphone when we just wanted to offer a few friendly suggestions.
Cinecultist's favorite part of Passover is the bitching. "I can't eat bread or rice or pasta or various other things with leaven for eight whole days," we whine. "Feel sorry for us, our people were afflicted." and "mwah, all we really want to eat is a measly piece of pizza." Doesn't that sound fun? Okay, maybe not for the people around us who are listening to yet another discussion of salad for lunch but there's something rejuvenating about getting back to our kvetching roots.
However, on the way home last night from Passover seder in Queens with the Lifshitzs' (thanks for the brisket and Gus's gorky!), we started thinking about all of the classic Passover cinema. Well, actually we couldn't think of any Pesach movies. Does Ten Commandments count? We've never actually seen it but we think there are plagues in there. Although if that's the deciding criteria, we might also call Magnolia a Passover movie, what with the falling frogs and all. Sadly, the self-imposed food restrictions keep making Cinecultist think of Mystic Pizza, the anti-Pesach flick.
All of this mental grappling for Jewish themed movies reminded CC of a Sunday School favorite, The Frisco Kid. For some reason, when our synagogue pedagogues ran out of material on Tu BiShvat and the founding of Israel, they'd turn to the Gene Wilder oeuvre for time-filler. This flick features Wilder as the worst rabbinical student ever, sent West by the council of Rabbis to Gold Rush era San Francisco, where he's supposed to meet his betrothed and his congregation. However, various Wild West hijinks ensue when he meets a hunky, young Harrison Ford who's robbing Wilder's cross country train (if we remember the plot correctly). Anyhow, Ford is a bad guy who later becomes good once he gets to know Wilder, and we recall being highly amused by a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid-ish scene where the two jump off a cliff into a rushing river together. Ford yells "oh shit!" as he goes over, while Wilder screams out "oy vey!" Also, we think we recall a scene wherein Wilder tries to catch a chicken by promising, "I doesn't want to hurt you, I just want to make you kosher." Jewish comic gold, people.
With this in mind, Cinecultist has decided that we're going to mark every Passover with a screening of The Frisco Kid. So just picture us every spring, curled up on the couch covered in matzo cracker crumbs, swigging Dr. Brown's kosher cream soda and guffawing loudly at nebbish little Gene.
Cinecultist is turning into a bit of a Japanaphile lately. We've been cramming our Netflix queue with various horror and action flicks we've never seen and have been devouring articles and prints related to artists like Takashi Murakami, who's contributing to the Japan Society's exhibit "Little Boy" which is opening very soon (this Friday to be exact).
A film we've been meaning to see for ages and finally did over the weekend, the first in our personal mini-series "Japanese Films CC's Been Meaning To See," was Battle Royale. We think perhaps CC may be using this phrase so much that we'll wear it out over the next few weeks but here it is: "This movie is really fucked up and totally awesome." It's not so much conventional horror, with monsters or supernatural mayhem, but rather people thrust into a horrific situation. We're in post-apocalyptic Japan where violence in schools is ranging so out of control that the government has passed the BR Act. This law allows for a lottery to choose a ninth grade class which participates in a Survivor/Lord of the Flies To The Death game. Armed with an array of weapons, from guns and hatchets to fans and soup pan lids, only the last teen standing is allowed to go home.
With all of the witty ultra-violence, it's easy to see why Quentin Tarantino loves this movie and cast Chiaki Kuriyama (who plays one of the particularly brutal girl contestants) as the assassin Go Go in Kill Bill.The combination of satirical humor, spattering blood, expansive classical music on the score and the teen emotions so familiar from any show on the WB is very Tarantino-esque. Or perhaps it's just very Japanese or very Kinji Fukasaku-esque as he's been making movies since the '60s.
If you want to get into these questions of artistic imperialism or the Western market capitalizing on a new-found fascination with a foreign national cinema, it can get quite hairy. What looks so new to our eyes is perhaps something they've always been doing or has intrinsic roots in the culture. But white movie-goer guilt aside, Battle Royale is surely worth a viewing for the sheer fun the film seems to be having with moviemaking. It's as though Stanley Kubrick or Joss Whedon were Japanese and perhaps spent way too much time playing shoot 'em up video games. An incongruous but unique mash-up to be sure.
As coincidence would have it, Battle Royale is the Dekk Restaurant Superfilm movie night this week so you could head down there at 7:30 pm tonight. Also, in terms of the exhibits at the Japan Society, their film on Friday at 6:30 pm, Otakus in Love about two manga artists who meet cute sounds like it could be quite fun.
As we mentioned briefly on Friday, Cinecultist bought with childish glee the DVD of the Incredibles last week. After an incredibly (pun intended) long work week the week before, a few computer generated supers was about all CC could handle on a Saturday night. We intended to leave the house, honest, but instead we just sat on our ass watching all of the DVD's extras on the second disc plus the full film on the other one.
Highlights included the much advertised "Jack Jack Attack" short film constructed from deleted scenes detailing the time the surprisingly powerful baby Jack Jack spends with the unaware babysitter Kari, a visual essay with the voice of Violet, writer Sarah Vowell and extensive making-of documentaries.
While these documentaries are geeked out and detail oriented to the nth degree, the do give the casual viewer a real sense of the undertaking involved in making this film. With footage from the very first day Brad Bird set foot on the Pixar lot, through to concerns about the script, composing realistic hair and water on computer, down to details about set design and lighting, it's clear this was a massive project. Making movies are always collaborative efforts but from the docus this movie seems like the experience was closer to that of building a city than making a piece of entertainment. Which we suppose makes it all the more incredible that it's so darn good.
But you don't have to take our word for it. Just ask CC's brother Mark, age 8 who got the DVD too as an Easter present and promptly made our family all sit down to watch it together. So here's the score if you're keeping track at home -- Cinecultist has now watched the Incredibles once in the theaters, a second time on our new DVD two weeks ago, a third time on the airplane to California on Friday night and then again on Sunday because the excitement in Markie's eyes was just too freakin' cute to ignore. Also, he finds our impression of Edna Mode, designer for the supers, pretty amusing and always chuckles when we say "machine washable, dahling, that's a new feature" or "it's a hobo suit, dahling." Gotta love that. And in case you were wondering, the movie just gets more charming and appealing with each viewing.
Over on Chutry Experiment the other day, Chuck and his readers were having a discussion about movies which are cinematic comfort food. Cinecultist found this quite coincidential as we devoted the last Sunday to a little apartment cleaning, a Chipolte burrito and some cozying in with a rental one of our hibernating movies, La Reine Margot (1994).
However, our big clue that perhaps this flick isn't the most obvious choice for a weekend afternoon curled up on the couch occured when CC's Dad called mid-movie.
CC's Dad: What are you doing?
CC: Oh, just watching Queen Margot again. I rented it from Kim's. It has Isabel Adjani and Daniel Auteuil in it.
CCD: Oh, they're good. Sorry to interrupt.
CC: That's ok. We're to the part where they kill all the Protestants.
CCD: Uh...
Yes, that's right -- two and a half hours of pretty people in period costumes set against the backdrop of religious war and massacre in Renaissance France! The definition of fun fun, right? Actually, all self-mockery aside this movie is really fantastic. Based on the Alexandre Dumas historical novel about Catherine d' Medici's four children and their struggle to maintain the throne, this film won director Patrice Chéreau and his cast a number of awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the French Oscars that year. It's one of those movies that can't help but spring to our mind when you discuss the golden age of Miramax, the American distributor that released the picture here.
Adjani's really spectacular as Margot, not least because the actress is 38 during filming playing a 20 something historical character. She does haughty, and she does passionate. She can do it all. But let's not forget Vincent Perez as her lover and protector, La Mole, who's birth and religion precludes a real relationship with the Catholic princess. Zowie, that Perez is h-o-t-t. Distracting, he is. The sweeping vistas, the brutal sword fights, the vast court scenes, the violent death of a very young Asia Argento caught in a palace intrigue, Queen Margot is epic filmmaking at its peak.
This movie is so great, it makes us hopeful for Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven merely because it's of the same genre. Now that's a movie hope that really springs eternal.
Cinecultist's newest film fascination, via the day job, is in the search for the hot young thing on screen. How to find these ephemeral figures about to burst onto the scene in that moment just before everyone else does? Our self-tutorial includes going back to watch the break out works of some currently over-played inhabitants of the mainstream. At least that's how we're spinning the realization that we spent Saturday night watching a war film directed by Joel Schumacher with our buddy Ilana.
Too sick still to navigate the E/V trains over the water to the G then to god-knows-where Greenpoint for what was surely a lovely housewarming get together, CC and Ilana ate Japanese food in the West Village before on Ilana's suggestion, taking in some Colin Farrell goodness via his first American role as Bozz in Tigerland.
Farrell has on display his very considerable talents in this film, and when we say "talents," we want you to imagine our most lascivious tone accompanying that euphemism. Damn, girl. What a physic on that one. Yet his performance and the buzz which surrounded it upon the film's release is more than just the sum of his looks. Farrell has the charisma only true screen stars can exude on film. A swagger punctuated with a tenderness and even an reluctant intelligence in his Vietnam-era bad boy army soldier character. What a surprise when a part could be just one note, particularly in these "war story as told by a sensitive, outsider writer type" movies. The war film isn't a genre which usually piques our interest, so when a film holds our attentions beyond the yelling and shooting it's a mean feat indeed.
Interestingly, this movie was also co-star Matt Davis' first film role in addition to being Farrell's first major part in US movie (before that he was probably most known in the UK for a role on the soapy "Ballykissangel" tv program). Davis went on to be the boring but hunky boyfriends in Legally Blonde and Blue Crush but has yet to really "break out," in that magazine buzz parlance. Davis is certainly good in Tigerland as the sensitive buddy but he doesn't have Farrell's magnetism. Is it only the really extraordinary who can escape the strictures of their good looks? Farrell may be in some pretty bad movies but you couldn't ever describe his characters as good looking but boring. Maybe the moral of the story is that it's not enough to have the physic of a Ken doll. Or maybe it's just that some people got it, and some don't, kid.
Ok, we're going to stop now before CC turns into some demented Robert Evans.
An Aside: Apparently, Anthony Lane can actually write less than totally snark-filled reviews. His talents are so demonstrated in his comments on Head On in this week's New Yorker [link not the perma kind so click now, while ye can]. He invokes the new German film in the same sentence with Lukas Moodysson's Lilya 4-Ever, so now we have to go see it.
Even before this article in the Times magazine last week, Cinecultist has been on a kick to watch all the Maggie Cheung available DVDs on Netflix. It's not such a daunting task in the face of her whole career's output, we suppose in these small cases its an advantage that the US doesn't import all of the Asian movies to our region's players. There's 26 of them and CC's now seen half, what with our Friday evening rental, Farewell, China.
This movie was brutal, we wouldn't necessarily recommend it to those who like to see their Maggie upbeat, preferably kicking ass in black latex, or even looking longingly at Tony Leung in a vintage cheongsam. Actually, Maggie does pine for a Tony Leung is in this movie, though it's not the one that CC usually thinks of when we think TL goodness. It co-stars Tony Leung Ka Fai, who was also in Ashes of Time and loads of other stuff according to his profile. He's very good in his own right, but he's not TL Chiu Wai just so you know.
Anyhoo, Tony confusions aside, this movie is about the process of illegal immigration to the states from China. A young wife finally gets a student Visa and leaves her husband and aborable chubby son to seek her fortune in New York. However, when the letters start being returned unopened, the husband sneaks into the country as well via South America and searches all over scummy '80s Manhattan and the outer boroughs for her. When he finally accidentally discovers her after a protracted journey and an introduction to the underbelly of poverty, the rendezvous is bittersweet. Living all alone in a foreign country has done something to her and it's not good. We don't want to give away the upsetting ending but let's just say CC loves Maggie even when she's nutso and wielding a screwdriver.
13 more to go on the list, and we're loving every minute of it. Next up: exhausting the extensive collection Kim's Video!
In preparation for the upcoming House of Flying Daggers release (Dec. 3 in NYC and LA), Cinecultist has been on a little bit of an Andy Lau kick. We don't want our first love, Tony Leung to be jealous or anything, just sometimes CC needs a little variety in our HK viewing. Recently, we rented Fulltime Killer, a movie Lau made with director Johnny To in 2001. To be honest, we couldn't remember when we put this flick on our Netflix queue, the queue got a little unwieldy there for awhile, but when it arrived it was a lovely little surprise of ass-kicking cinephilia.
Lau plays Tok, an upstart assassin who wants to be known as the best hitman, but he has to battle O (Takashi Sorimachi) for that illustrious title. Kelly Lin is their shared love interest, she runs a video store and cleans O's apartment for a little extra cash. Tok capitalizes on her movie love to win her over, in a weird little scene he shops in the store in a variety of rubber American President masks, just like the bank robbers in Point Break. She agrees to go on a date with him, even before she sees his face, so we see this adorable bookish Asian girl holding hands in the cineplex with one of the ex-Presidents. Bizarre and cute, all at the same time.
Later, when Tok reveals his plan to Chin asking her if she'd like to be a hitman's girl, he takes her to an abandoned building to learn to shoot. He thinks his moves are too smooth for words, but Chin pointedly tells him that she knows this scene is from The Professional. CC's a fan of anything smartly self-referential from the outset, but this movie's transformation of a simple hitman rivalry actioner into something more by its cinephilia is great. Could this be because Johnny To gets tired of churning out the same shoot-em up plots? Or is the savvy HK audience in need of a little meta infusion to get through the day? All interesting possibilities for us.
Two other Hong Kong cinema bullet points of note:
* If you love HK film, you should bookmark LoveHKfilm.com into your favorites list, it's quite the compendium of info with reviews, features and loads of photos.
* Also, Kino is having its Christmas sale, 25 to 30 % off, on their DVD catalog right now -- including some stellar silents and the Wong Kar Wai lovelies. Want to make a cinecultist happy this season? The Kino Ultimate Box Set Collection in the Chrismakkah stocking is sure to do the trick.
The sacred promise of the indie filmmaking scene from the '90s was that this rarified artistic and commercial product could be made by any shmo with some credit cards to max out, a semester or so of film school, former employment at a video store and a dream. No one in our current glutted category of "American Auteurs" typifies this as well as Kevin Smith. Sitting down with the three disc anniversary edition of Clerks this weekend, Cinecultist got to thinking about our long and tumultuous love affair with the films of Mr. Smith and generally the last ten years of indie films. Sure that's a dauntingly large topic, perhaps the stuff for a book, but here's a few stabs at it by way of Kevin Smith fandom.
The news that Smith plans to make a sequel to Clerks, titled The Passion of the Clerks, isn't really such a surprise what with the nostalgia overload kicking in on the DVD. What made Smith's persona and whole back story so damn appealing initially was his every guyness, and the DVD extras really celebrate that aspect of the film. Here's a chubby fellow in a trench coat from a small town in Jersey who spends one semester in film school and then spends a year writing and making a movie about what he knows — dead end jobs in backwater Jersey as told by sex and pop culture obsessed buddies. Everyone loves these formation stories, how the young filmmaker came to be (see the current buzz about Tarnation). Especially when they can report on how he made the movie with but a ball of twine for a budget, the sweat from his ass as film stock and his five best buddies from pre-school as the cast.
Despite the ease with which it was tout Smith for his humble beginnings, he still had such an accessibility and was a vocal proponent for it that CC always forgave him. When Smith came onto the scene he was like that guy you knew from high school who was always so funny, but spent a few semesters in community college, still lives at home with his folks and doesn't seem to be going anywhere in particular. CC knew loads of people like that growing up in the 'burbs and Smith's subject matter plus his rise to fame made him their poster boy of what could be.
What's interesting on the DVD's documentary, "Snowball Effect: The Making of Clerks" is how much Smith seemed himself to be in awe of those who'd gone before him (like Richard Linklater's Slacker) and how important it was to him to give back once he succeeded. From the docu, you'd think Smith funded every pipe dream and half-baked movie project his buddies ever had. And goodness do they love him for it. The other thing abundantly clear on listening to the commentary track while watching the original version screened at the IFFM at the Angelika in '93, is that Smith has to go back to doing low budget, talky comedies. The film looks like crap, even he jokes that his most innovated shot formation is a two shot, but still it's so compelling.
Any idiot could have made Jersey Girl, all formula and no substance. That's the problem with indie cinema, in that it became the establishment and morphed into something completely overblown. Kevin, we beg of you, go back to writing what you know. And here's a suggestion that maybe you don't want to hear — you're a writer, a pretty good writer, but you're not really a director. Let someone else imagine where to put the camera while you come up with the dialogue and the scenarios.
Then you could have something even more lasting on screen, beyond the fading schtick of Jay and Silent Bob. Cinecultist thinks he has it in him, do you? Leave it in the comments.
In case you were wondering what exactly ace pilot Xander Barclow says to Carmen Ibanez as he approaches her on the flight deck with a calming cup of tea in Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, it's something like, you think you're so great with the star maps, now that "You Licked My Navs." Cinecultist knows this because we watched it on instant replay for about 5 minutes with Matty and Jen last night. We weren't certain actor Patrick Muldoon accused Denise Richards of taking her tongue to other nether regions, but it sure sounded like it.
Rewinding and leaning into the DVD player, ears wide open still didn't resolve the query. Thank goodness for the subtitle feature on DVDs. Though, when exactly they included the word "navs" into the english language we're not sure.
Also thanks to Michelle for IMing the answer to our Samuel Pepys inquiry yesterday. "Pepys was the Earl of Sandwich's secretary and he did stuff for the navy and wrote in code. That first part was from our head by the way, but then we caved and Googled him. Now I'm reading his diary because it's more fun than work and more uplifting than the economist article about Darfur." CC's always glad we can help to distract people from their work day!
What is this gentle breath of fresh air, this tendril of a breezy caress? No, that’s not the onset of the red-gold autumn chill. That would be Seattle Maggie waving “buh-bye” to The Man, at least for the time being. Yes, we are now officially unemployed, having finally come to the end of our tether with office politics, administrative drudgery and wacked-out bosses who make sweeping decisions about the future of their employees, yet can’t for the life of them adjust the brightness on their monitors. On top of that, when our CEO was canned because he had the temerity to come down with a bad case of cancer, and replaced with a backslapping frat boy with typos in his cover letter, we thought perhaps it was time to move on before we came to work one morning with a flamethrower and a quest to purify the place.
So, for the time being, we are coasting along on our savings and our rescued sense of self-respect. Is there life outside the cubicle? Seattle Maggie hopes so. While we know that ending up back by the water cooler may be inevitable in this day and age, we feel we have struck a small blow for our own sense of decency and intelligence by putting our proverbial foot down. In celebration of this, we turn our investigational eye toward – what else? – the movies. Apart from the classic Office Space, which quite literally everyone and their mother has seen thanks to a near-constant run on afternoon Comedy Central, all you desk jockeys out there can rejoice in several other very fine films celebrating the inane and soul-shriveling nature of modern office culture.
For those of you suffering trouble with commitment, give Haiku Tunnel a try. Based on monologuist Josh Kornbluth's one man show, this light n’ entertaining film explores the trials and tribulations of a temp worker turned perm. While Kornbluth is entertaining in a shaggy-dog sort of way, the movie does get a little exasperating as the plot concerning the unsent letters drags on and on (just stamp 'em and post 'em, dude, it's not rocket science). However, it is almost worth the price of the rental just to watch Kornbluth have voluptuous fantasies about his bed, which coyly peels its covers open before him like a shy concubine. Seattle Maggie confesses that our bed has the same allure.
Also on the temporary career path is Clockwatchers, starring some of our favorite indie female talent. A quartet of temps, including Toni Collette, Lisa Kudrow and brash young thing Parker Posey, form an unlikely bond in an office full of permanent employees. When things start disappearing around the office, the lowest members of the proverbial totem pole are blamed, and the temps begin to turn on each other in an attempt to save their already uncertain jobs. This is a great movie for anyone who has ever suffered the anonymous indignity of temporary work, and the elevator music soundtrack is sure to wedge itself in your unused brain cells for a good long while.
Perhaps one of the weirdest movies we've seen in a long time was Bartleby with Crispin Glover, the man who defines quirk. While Seattle Maggie did plow through the original story by Herman Melville in Freshman English, we found it was not necessary to appreciate the modern film version. With every firm, soft-spoken repetition of Bartleby's mantra "I would prefer not to" we found ourselves growing amused, then irritated, then concerned, then desperate to understand the reason behind the words. We, too, would prefer not to. Add in a blink-worthy color scheme and an excellent supporting cast of office misfits, and count yourself rescued from another long afternoon of Judge Judy and Pokemon reruns.
Last, but not least, is Seattle Maggie’s all time favorite anti-office, up-with-the-people movie, Joe Versus The Volcano. Tom Hanks is everyman Joe Banks, beaten down by the endless rote of his joyless life, but indirectly rescued by the diagnosis of a “brain cloud”. Meg Ryan, pre-Sleepless in Seattle, stars also as the various women in his life. This modern fable, scribed and directed by one of our favorite playwrights John Patrick Shanley, always lifts our spirits, and we long to find our own volcano to conquer. As it is, to have our time back, even for this short while, is indeed like gold in our hand. Seattle Maggie is giving that forbidden valve a good turn, and who knows on what fabulous shores we may wash up on.
After having the Guy Maddin* DVD of Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary for over a month from Netflix, Cinecultist finally took a Monday evening of poor television offerings to watch it. Now, we're smacking ourselves upside the head, yelling, "what took youse so long?" Sexy and weird and arty and intriguing and beautiful are not too shabby adjectives to describe a movie we'd been meaning to see for ages but only just sat down to watch, practically under duress.
So much of what Maddin does that's so delightful to a cinecultist like ourselves, is the foregrounding of moviemaking. He wants you to know it's a movie, in other words, and he uses the silent film techniques of melodrama, tinting, iris transitions, fish-eye lenses and a host of other gee gaws to constantly make the viewer aware of his game. While this adds quite a bit to the artistic intentions of his project, it also prompts such ruminations for CC best kept to ourselves like, "why don't more filmmakers use inter-titles?" and "nobody does good spot color hand tinting these days!" You'd think we were Peter Bogdanovich with these fancyings for ye olde silent film prompted by Maddin's work.
But if the techniques seem old fashioned, the sensibility is completely modern (in the sense of presenting "now" on screen, rather than the turn of last century). You can watch a zillion and one Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes and get that horror conventions are yet another metaphor for the fear of female sexuality, but Maddin's staging of this Royal Winnipeg Ballet's production makes it all so real once again. See, it's like, the Virgin Lucy writes in the pages of her diary that she really longs for the Vampyr just as she wants to possess all three suitor, and Harker's diary entry detailing his stay in Transylvania gets Mina all hot — it's all so obvious when you see it danced out in front of you.
Zhang Wei-Qiang, the actor/dancer who plays Dracula, with his eyes spot colored in blood red hypnotizing us from the screen is on par with Murnau's Nosferatu framed in a round doorway. It is not a horror image easily forgotten.
*Canadian experimental film director. Not to be confused with the guy named Steve who makes shoes.
One of the more anticipated DVD releases is out now in stores, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Eternal Sunshine is the sort of movie that even while Cinecultist was watching it in the theater, we were imagining it in our DVD collection already. We imagine it will only ripen with further viewings. You can read our original ecstatic review here.
If you're a regular reader of Lindsayism.com, like Cinecultist is, you may recall that she loved the movie so much last March, that she said she was going to be Clementine for Halloween. Personally, having met Lindsay a bunch of times now, we think she would be a rockin' Clementine, she has all of the quirky, bubbly, goofy prereqs. And like CC, she also has much younger siblings, so the thought of planning the Halloween costume in March isn't really as bizarre as it sounds.
However, we probably wouldn't have remembered that off the cuff statement if she hadn't blogged just this week, that now she plans to be Joel Gion for Halloween, after having seen the docu DIG! about indie rock band, The Brian Jonestown Massacre. How's that going to work exactly? Blue or orange wig, zipped up hoodie and glued on brillo pad sideburns? (We think Gion's the one with the 'burns, as we haven't seen the blogosphere's favorite movie yet, but we hear they're into the facial hair.) Now that's an outfit we have to see.
Any movie or movie character inspired Halloween costumes for you? Leave them in the comments. (Don't worry, we can talk without reproach about Halloween now, as tomorrow is October. Crazy, no? Where did the summer go?)
We all know that curiosity killed the cat, but Seattle Maggie could not resist temptation. It had been taunting us from its shelf at Video Vertigo for a long time now, the lurid image of a woman in black vinyl gloves coyly wielding a wicked syringe. Yes, it was Takashi Miike's infamous Audition, a film that reaped as many accolades from film reviewers as dire warnings about gruesome made flesh on screen. We had been been tempted by this film ever since its US debut at the 2000 SIFF, where the tantalizing rumor was that some unfortunate festival goer had stumbled from this screening into the theater lobby and either puked, fainted, or both. We wondered what could be so bad as to inspire public regurgitation and/or swooning, then immediately wondered if we really, truly wanted to know.
Seattle Maggie is into the horror genre, but we do not have a taste for gore. The most disturbing thing we had seen to date was an accidental screening of Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, which included illegal kidney transplants, graphic scalpel stabbings and a horrifically explicit electrocution torture scene - we say accidental because we were lulled by the beautiful but emotionally-wrenching Joint Security Area the year before and had expected something along those lines. We still can't get some of the images out of our head, and we weren't sure we wanted yet more disturbing cinematic experiences crowding out more useful bits of our brain, such as the quadratic equation, or our social security number, or Hamlet's soliloquy.
We turned to the experts for help. Rob, the nice chap behind the counter at Video Vertigo, had these words of wisdom for us: "If you don't watch the last ten minutes, it's just like a John Hughes movie." Huh. Intriguing. And still the question remained: what on earth could possibly be that awful? With our finger poised and ready on the stop button, we ventured forth into Audition.
Well, as it turns out, Rob was right. Audition is the story of an middle-aged Japanese widower who decides to remarry after seven years of mourning. In order to find the perfect mate, he holds a phony audition for a fake movie, giving him the chance to screen many young and beautiful women. An ex-ballerina with a shy smile catches his fancy, and he decides she is the one for him. They bond quietly over dinners, drawn to each other by past disappointments and tragedies. During a romantic weekend getaway, the widower decides to propose...and this is where John Hughes goes out the window and into a giant threshing machine. We won't ruin the shockfest ending for those of you with a taste for the macabre, but we can say it was brutal, sickening, and strangely compelling. Let's just say that once the piano wire came out, we had to resort to the fast forward button for a bit. And while we did manage to keep a hold on the contents of our stomachs, we admit that the bowl of chili we were going to have for dinner no longer had a lot of appeal. Audition packs a punch that some may not be able to handle, but Seattle Maggie squeaked through, peeking through our fingers, and now we know what all the fuss is about. At least we have a newfound appreciation of our feet - Trust us, after this, you will too.
Cinecultist's friend Ilana has a few directors, nay auteurs, that she considers in the "pantheon." Alfred Hitchcock. Jean Renoir. Jean Vigo. Michael Bay. (And you thought our taste was ecclectic!) Of course, there is also on that list, Lukas Moodysson, the Swedish director whose heart-wrenching film Lilya 4-Ever was on Cinecultist's top ten from last year.
His 2000 feature, Together has sat in our Netflix to be released queue for ages but while at Mondo Kim's on Saturday, we discovered it's already available on DVD. It didn't take much to convince Ilana to add it to her already impressive collection, as he is in the pantheon, and then loan it to us straight away. Lordy, it's good to have cinecultist friends who are so easy to influence for our self-serving purposes.
The collective house in Stockholm 1975 called Tillsammans, meaning "together," seems like the kind of place the girl from I Am Curious: Yellow would have lived in a few years later when she wanted to raise a family. The residents have all of that youthful intensity and idealism still but with a touch more pragmatism and compromise. In fact, the dramatic arc in the film follows how the partipants must learn to compromise to live as a group and if they can't, they either leave or are kicked out. Without wanting to give away too much of the plot intricacies, ie who sleeps with whom, because the discovery of the story as it unfolds is one of this movie's great charms, we'll just say it ends of a very upbeat note. That's quite a change from Lilya which is equally as powerful but more of a movie to slit your wrists to, rather than something which reinvigorates your belief in human being's ability to connect.
Like the ABBA song which plays over the credits, Together wants to send out an SOS, telling the audience we need each other in order to go on. Maybe Cinecultist isn't such a cynic afterall, if that sentiment delivered with so little guile is enough to keep us smiling long after the credits finish rolling.
So Cinecultist inadvertently rented the most popular film of 1950 this week, Cheaper By The Dozen from Netflix. Well, renting the film wasn't by accident, it's been on the queue since we saw the Steve Martin film of the same title last year (notice we didn't call it an update or an adaptation as it was neither). CC just didn't set out to see the most watched movie in the year 1950. That sounds like the most square movie-watching endeavor ever, doesn't it? Like proposing to make your own ice cream with a hand crank ice cream maker on a Saturday night or suggesting knitting socks for the soldiers overseas in your free time.
This factoid about the film came courtesy of an extra on the DVD, a short newsreel film where the president of Universal Pictures and Ernestine Gilbraith Carey, the co-writer of the book Cheaper By the Dozen about her childhood growing up the 20s and 30s, are awarded some sort of prize and $5,000 for making such a lovely family film. The most watched film of 1950 is a designation they place on the film, and maybe CC is too trusting but we believe them, despite being unable to corraborate it with the expert help of Google.
The thing we find most intriguing about the popularity of this movie in 1950, real or trumped up by folksy pre-PR spin, is that even in 1950, an era our politicians love to fetishize as innocence personified, they too were nostalgic for an earlier era. Cheaper By the Dozen tells the "real story of an American family" which is apparently a beautiful cinematic fantasy of democratic family meetings, a self-sacrificing wife and a charming but kind brood of rugrats. But even in 1950 this pure family couldn't exist in their present day, it had to be imagined from their past, as a representation of an idyllic childhood recalled. It's an example of movies as our collective unconscious of what we wished was, not what was actually there.
If like Cinecultist, the novel Cheaper By the Dozen was a part of your idealized childhood, we strongly recommend seeing the 1950 version and leaving the 2003 one to the fans of Hilary Duff Duff, Ashton Kutcher and stupid, formulaic Hollywood filmmaking.
Quickie reviews on three movies Cinecultist watched this week, which when put next to each other have no obvious relation other than their proximity of viewing. Any connection inferred would be entirely of your own doing.
Dead Ringers (1988) -- Cinecultist finds David Cronenberg intriguing but we'd never had a chance to see this feature, despite having read a bunch about it. Jeremy Irons gives such a bravura performance as the twin brother gynecologists, we're definitely going to be creeped out through next week just thinking about him and those tools for mutant women. What puts Cronenberg above and beyond your usual horror director is his sense of aethetics in terms of production design -- their futuristic examining room, the all red operating clothes, the lush appointments of their favorite restaurant all could not be more perfect. An excellent example of mid-80s technological paranoia, we highly recommend this movie if you can catch it on tv as we did or add the Criterion version to your Netflix queue.
Donnie Darko: Director's Cut (2004) -- As Josh Cultivated Stupidity and CC walked out of this movie we turned to our budding director friend to say, "Now let that be a lesson to you to know when to leave well enough alone." "Yup, sometimes less really is more," as Josh said. We still really admire Richard Kelly for producing this high quality film on a first outing and Jake Gyllenhaal still totally cute as ever, but the obviously added effects and the quotations from The Philosophy of Time Travel do nothing for the picture as a whole. Honestly, more explanation did not make for a more pleasurable viewing. CC still recommends catching it on the big screen in a midnight screening but be sure it's the old version rather than this director's cut. Unless you're a die-hard Jakie fan (and we know you're out there, we've seen our stats) and must consume all things Jake G.
Shaolin Soccer (2001) -- Our biweekly movie group (it's like a book group, only we watch movies), Cinema Ahh*some met this week to watch Matty's pick, the Chinese kungfu soccer comedy directed by and starring Stephen Chow. We know we've implied this before but now we're going to say it out right -- Miramax sucks. They purchased this movie for distribution ages ago, they sat on it and then released it as a dubbed version in the theaters for about two seconds. And it's hilarious. You really should see it if you haven't and you even just a little bit like kung fu movies. Although sadly, when you see it you probably won't get the patent-pending Cinema Ahh*some running commentary to enhance your viewing experience. If CC could bottle up some Fiona giggling and ship it to you with a copy of this DVD, we totally would.
It's hot these days in Seattle - that's right, we said HOT. While Seattle Maggie knows that she would probably be instantaneously reduced to a puddle of goo by one tiny whiff of NYC summertime humidity, the fact that the temperature hovers in the 80s is enough to make her droopy with heat. While we have been reduced to periodically sticking our head in the freezer and going to sleep splayed out on the floor like a water buffalo, nothing beats the heat like a little shiver up the spine.
While surfing our beloved Encore channels, we came across Below, a good old-fashioned supernatural thriller. While we were originally drawn to it from catching a glimpse of Scott Foley in the previews, aka Noel from Felicity (yes, once again, the WB rears its perfectly coiffed head), we were pleasantly surprised to find a gripping story and one or two inadvertent yelps of surprise. Below takes place on the American submarine USS Tiger Shark during WWII. After a long seven weeks at sea, the crew is instructed to pick up three survivors of a recently torpedoed British hospital ship. Once the survivors are aboard, among them a lone female nurse, the obligatory strange and creepy things begin to happen. As the bodies and the questions begin to pile up, the claustrophobic confines of the sub and the dark water around it presses in, unrelenting. It is a neat set-up, and it works for this movie. There are several nail-biting moments, including a depth charge sequence so exquisitely excruciating you will only realize you have been holding your breath once you let it out.
With an impressive creative team, including director David Twohy (Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick), writer Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream), and some great character actors including Olivia Williams (Rushmore) and Dexter Fletcher (the reluctantly crazed chef from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), it is a shame that this movie basically slipped by without notice.The tone and style of this movie really makes it a winner, with a supernatural evil in the movie that is definitely present, but not all up in your face with a chainsaw. It is refreshing when a horror film makes the your skin crawl without resorting to all-out bloodfests, in the style of the much-abused Blair Witch Project and the masterful films of M. Night Shyamalan. Another great film we can't recommend enough (also ignored in the box office) is Session 9, with the creepy, yet compelling David Caruso in an abandoned insane asylum filled with asbestos. If anyone is looking to beat the heat on either coast, take a chance with these chills n' thrills - but don't blame us if you need to sleep with the lights on.
PS Seattle Maggie was so inspired by this film that she paid a visit to a real live Russian submarine docked at Pier 48 - All we can say is, we really hope all the sailors were short, as even our squat Asian stature didn't get us out of bashing our noggin on various pipes and valves on more than one occasion.