Hong Sang-Soo's film The Day He Arrives fits squarely in a category of "oblique movies," films that function as much as a pure art film as it does as storytelling. There is basically a beginning and end, but the middle gets rather murky -- on purpose -- and it is in this fog, and because of this fog, that the tale comes alive and turns something banal into something wonderful.
Concentrating again on the reflexive world of "film culture," as he did with his last film Woman on the Beach, the movie focuses on the day film professor and director Sangjoon arrives in Seoul to meets up with his friend Youngho. Sangjoon first visits an ex-girlfriend, and walks down the street meeting and talking to several strangers. He meets a trio of film students who recognize him and invite him to eat a meal with them. He later meets up with Youngho and a woman who works with him. The waitress at this restaurant is flirty and they all four begin to talk. At the end of the night they leave as normal.
The next thing we see, without any explanation is the same story beginning again (or, at least beginning after Sangjoon leaves the ex's apartment). Most of the specifics about the thread are different, conversations has some similarities although people meet in different places and go in different directions, but the important structural elements (such as Sangjoon eating at a restaurant and leaving with a woman) remain intact and recognizable. We see three full cycles of the same story, each a bit different.
Of course, the first thought in any film-goer's mind is that this seems like a twist on Rashomon-type story, where the reason for the variations is because different people remember the situation differently. However it doesn't seem to be that straightforward. This isn't so much about different points of view of the same story, but different possibilities of the same very small events. It also doesn't involve multiple narrators, but just a single third-person omniscient one.
It's never clear, nor does it matter, whether each of these scenarios actually plays out in Sangjoon's life, if he imagines the same situations happening differently (maybe he ends up with the waitress at the end of the night, maybe with Yongho's colleague), or if it's just Hong riffing on a small idea -- possibly a meta work on the nature of the medium with screenwriter/filmmaker playing god at the human chessboard. There is a sense that Hong is improvising on a theme the way a Jazz saxophonist might twist and expand a standard, so you know what you're hearing, though you never heard it this way before.
Hong really gives us no clear answers about what he's looking to achieve here (unlike with the Kurosawa, where it's pretty clear he's exploring the nature of subjectivity) and this is what makes the film interesting and fun. It has a playfulness and an alacrity that raises this essay from purely theoretical and alienating to familiar and warm. We get into the game of the film, waiting for the next story rhyme, enjoying how variations from past events will come back. At one point a highway sign flashed for less than a second in the first shot of the film comes back near the end -- not creating any great meaning, but highlighting that the act of film viewing is deep and should be engaging.
Stars: 3.5 of 4
10 Mayıs 2012 Perşembe
7 Mayıs 2012 Pazartesi
Post Mortem (Friday, April 13, 2012) (38)
The final sequence in Pablo Larrain's Post Mortem is one of the most interesting, evocative and incisive images I can remember in any film in a long time. After watching the main character Mario (Alfredo Castro) deal with his uneventful and lonely life for 90 minutes, he finally cracks and starts acting out the psychological difficulty that's inside him. Out of emotional desperation he has become friends with his neighbor, a stripper and cabaret star, Nancy (Antonia Zegers). Theirs is really not an emotional friendship, nor really much of a friendship at all. They both function as some external power forcing the other to connect with something else in the world.
They both are struggling to deal with the events of the moment, namely the Pinochet coup d'etat over Allende in 1973 Chile. Mario works in the morgue and is involved in the autopsy of Allende himself, after his assassination. This act, and the coldness and passivity of his job shakes him to his core. He is rather incapable of connecting to people on an emotional level and his very gray life seems to be filled with nothing but difficulty. In one magnificent scene, Mario and Nancy sit at opposite ends of his small kitchen table and quietly begin to weep, for no particular reason, though we know it has to do with the overwhelming pain and struggle of their respective lives.
Back to the last scene of the film, through a series of events, Mario gets involved in helping Nancy's family who are leftist radicals. He hides her brother in the shed in his back yard and after finally cracking, starts to pile stuff and junk in front of the door. Tables, chairs, coffee tables, small things, big things. He's literally trying to keep his feelings inside, lest they get out and overwhelm his life.
This might seem like a bit obvious (the tightly wound man breaks down and seems to go crazy with a physical action that represents his internal turmoil), but it's performed and produced beautifully and deeply emotionally. What's more is that it's not a simple act, but a long and drawn-out one that seems to go on past the point of normal limits, past the point of our comprehension. It moves from a simple, superficial psych tick to an important symbolic action, to an extreme cry for help, unlike what you find in typical storytelling.
Meanwhile, as is typical of the New Chilean Cinema style, this scene, and the whole film, has a rigorous naturalistic, neorealist tone. Everything is washed-out gray-brown-yellow, shabby and bleak. People are more interested in simply fucking their co-worker (not Mario, but people he works with) than making any real connections. The inner turmoil every character suffers is internal and poorly expressed because they're all broken people.
Larrain does a wonderful job with this very small story and makes it much more powerful than it might seem on the page. The film runs on an internal inertia that seems contained mostly in the gaps between actions. It's not the Allende autopsy that throws Mario, per se, but the constant pushing of his workaday life and the difficulty he has making connections. There is a lot of silence in the film and that becomes very powerful. Castro's performance, in particular, really leads this film and moves it along. He always seems on the edge of a cliff, about to jump off, but terrified of making any action. Larrain uses this dual tension brilliantly to create an eerie but relateable tone.
Stars: 3.5 of 4
They both are struggling to deal with the events of the moment, namely the Pinochet coup d'etat over Allende in 1973 Chile. Mario works in the morgue and is involved in the autopsy of Allende himself, after his assassination. This act, and the coldness and passivity of his job shakes him to his core. He is rather incapable of connecting to people on an emotional level and his very gray life seems to be filled with nothing but difficulty. In one magnificent scene, Mario and Nancy sit at opposite ends of his small kitchen table and quietly begin to weep, for no particular reason, though we know it has to do with the overwhelming pain and struggle of their respective lives.
Back to the last scene of the film, through a series of events, Mario gets involved in helping Nancy's family who are leftist radicals. He hides her brother in the shed in his back yard and after finally cracking, starts to pile stuff and junk in front of the door. Tables, chairs, coffee tables, small things, big things. He's literally trying to keep his feelings inside, lest they get out and overwhelm his life.
This might seem like a bit obvious (the tightly wound man breaks down and seems to go crazy with a physical action that represents his internal turmoil), but it's performed and produced beautifully and deeply emotionally. What's more is that it's not a simple act, but a long and drawn-out one that seems to go on past the point of normal limits, past the point of our comprehension. It moves from a simple, superficial psych tick to an important symbolic action, to an extreme cry for help, unlike what you find in typical storytelling.
Meanwhile, as is typical of the New Chilean Cinema style, this scene, and the whole film, has a rigorous naturalistic, neorealist tone. Everything is washed-out gray-brown-yellow, shabby and bleak. People are more interested in simply fucking their co-worker (not Mario, but people he works with) than making any real connections. The inner turmoil every character suffers is internal and poorly expressed because they're all broken people.
Larrain does a wonderful job with this very small story and makes it much more powerful than it might seem on the page. The film runs on an internal inertia that seems contained mostly in the gaps between actions. It's not the Allende autopsy that throws Mario, per se, but the constant pushing of his workaday life and the difficulty he has making connections. There is a lot of silence in the film and that becomes very powerful. Castro's performance, in particular, really leads this film and moves it along. He always seems on the edge of a cliff, about to jump off, but terrified of making any action. Larrain uses this dual tension brilliantly to create an eerie but relateable tone.
Stars: 3.5 of 4
Monsieur Lazhar (Friday, April 13, 2012) (37)
French-Canadian Philippe Falardeau's film Monsieur Lazhar was one of the nominees for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2012 Oscars. It is a celebration of everything that is wonderful about modern multiculturalism and how people are good inside if you give them the chance to show you what's in their heart. This sentiment makes me a bit sick as it's so sunny and saccharine it's almost impossible to be interesting. Even with a story that has some rather dark and challenging moments, the film really only falls into the predictable category of "movies about teachers and students who seem different but connect with love."
Bachir Lazhar is an Algerian immigrant to Montreal who turns up at an elementary school the day after a popular teacher has hanged herself in her classroom on a school morning. As the administrators and kids come to grips with the loss of their friend and guide, he explains that he was a teacher in a similar school in his homeland and is the process of getting his asylum status in Canada. At first he's an odd fit for the school, which has a rather liberal view of educational (teachers are called by their first names, students are encouraged to sit in a circle rather than rows). He has a more traditional process, including an autocratic style and dictation from old texts involving complex, arcane language.
As he comes to learn about the pain the students are feeling (one boy and one girl who witnessed their teacher killing herself moments before class began), Monsier Lazhar begins to relax and thrive in this environment. At the same time, it seems he wasn't entirely forthcoming about his background and his status in the country and in the school could be in doubt.
This is a nice film, but nothing very interesting. The real tension rests on whether the kids accept him as positive force, but we've seen this movie dozens of times before and know they always do. Then there's a bit of tension based on the silly and incidental fact that the school doesn't do a thorough check of his life before hiring him... but that's not really interesting and has nothing to do with the emotional development of the story.
This feels much more like a prescribed series of events than any story I can become particularly invested in. We know there will be tension with the students and other teachers, we know he'll come to be loved, we know there will be ongoing cultural disconnections, we know it probably can't last. At no point do we really care what happens to the moving parts, because they really only function as parts in the greater banal story.
It's very nice that this was nominated for the Oscar, but it's clearly not as good as other foreign language films that were also (it's not even the best French-Canadian film from 2011). It has all the hallmarks of sweet movie (and I generally like any movie that begins with a grizzly hanging), but none of the oomph of something I really care about.
Stars: 2 of 4
6 Mayıs 2012 Pazar
The Vow Aşk Yemini izle 2012
The Woman in Black Siyah Kadın (TR Altyazı)
Tür:Dram, Gerilim, Korku,
Yönetmen:James Watkins,
Oyuncular:Daniel Radcliffe, Ciaran Hinds, Janet McTeer, Paul J. Dove, Alexia Osborne, , Nastia Walsh, Aoife Doherty, Sidney Johnston, Alisa Khazanova, Mary Stockley, Teresa Chrcher, David Burke, Shaun Dooley,
Senaryo:Susan Hill, Jane Goldman,
Konusu:Oğlunu terk edip Marsh Malikanesinin Yeni vefat etmiş patronunun , iş hayatında devam ettirmek zorunda olduğu projeler için Avukat Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) Başından geçen olayları özetliyor.. Gizemli bir kadının, Kipps`e sürekli cani tehditlerde bulunarak , Korkuyu tamamen etrafa salmıştır.. Biryandan ölümle yaşam arasında piskolojik bir travma geçiren Kipps`in , Kendisine yönelik tehdit ve Garip olayların döndüğü küçük kentte , Tüm bu engellere rağmen kendinden habersiz dönen şuursuz işlerin , ve kötü gidişatın önüne geçmek isteyen bir adam..
3 Mayıs 2012 Perşembe
THE AVENGERS Starts The Summer Movie Season Off Right
THE AVENGERS (Dir. Joss Whedon, 2012)
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After years of baiting fans with cameos, visual nods, and Easter Eggs embedded in their movies, Marvel Studios puts them all together in this masterful smash-up/mash-up assemblage of their major comic book characters, which starts the summer movie season off right.
Joss Whedon's snappy screenplay and energetic direction really delivers the goods, with a cast and special effects crew that never stops trying to entertain, right up to the after-credits bonus material.
For those who haven't been paying attention, we've got returning champ Iron Man/Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), along with Captain America/Steve Rodgers (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth); both fresh from their summer hero hits last year, Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), and The Hulk/Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo; the only actor here who hasn't previously played their character).
Samuel L. Jackson as S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury, and Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow are also on hand to provide extra fire-power against the film’s villain Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who was also the antagonist in “Thor” (maybe my least favorite of the Marvel movies), as he’s Thor’s adoptive brother and rival.
Loki, with the help of something called a Tesseract and an alien army, is trying to take over the world (of course), but those pesky Avengers keep getting in the way.
You know the plot isn’t what folks are coming to see here, but this movie’s not just about breathtaking bombast, furious fight-scenes, and spectacular sequences stuffed with eye-popping CGI – although there’s lots of that.
What elevates it is that the film actually cares about how its characters interact and clash with one another. Evan’s Captain America is rubbed wrong by Downey Jr.’s snarky arrogance (Whedon gives Downey Jr. the sharpest funniest lines, as expected), and everyone is on edge about just what Ruffalo’s Hulk will do when his rage famously takes hold.
Ruffalo’s take on Banner is one of many strong elements on display in “The Avengers.” It’s a more nuanced and edgy performance than what Eric Bana and Ed Norton brought in their respective portrayals. Now I’m looking forward to seeing Ruffalo own his own Hulk movie.
Clark Gregg, as S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Coulson, finally gets a more substantial role after his glorified cameos in the previous Marvel movies, and he makes the most of it. A surprising yet fitting addition to the ever expanding universe is Cobie Smulders (Robin on the sitcom How I Met Your Mother) as another Avengers ally, Maria Hill. Smulders gets a considerable amount of screen-time, and like everybody else here, she doesn’t waste it.
The New York City battle finale outdoes the fun destruction of just about every other super hero movie ever (take that Superman, Spiderman, X-Men, etc.!), and it's hilarious to boot.
Whedon does a fantastic job juggling this vast array of characters while arranging mighty action set-pieces (particularly the sequence aboard the ginormous S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier).
So there you have it - the must-see super hero movie event of the summer. That is, until THE DARK KNIGHT RISES comes out.
More later...
.jpg)
After years of baiting fans with cameos, visual nods, and Easter Eggs embedded in their movies, Marvel Studios puts them all together in this masterful smash-up/mash-up assemblage of their major comic book characters, which starts the summer movie season off right.
Joss Whedon's snappy screenplay and energetic direction really delivers the goods, with a cast and special effects crew that never stops trying to entertain, right up to the after-credits bonus material.
For those who haven't been paying attention, we've got returning champ Iron Man/Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), along with Captain America/Steve Rodgers (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth); both fresh from their summer hero hits last year, Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), and The Hulk/Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo; the only actor here who hasn't previously played their character).
Samuel L. Jackson as S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury, and Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow are also on hand to provide extra fire-power against the film’s villain Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who was also the antagonist in “Thor” (maybe my least favorite of the Marvel movies), as he’s Thor’s adoptive brother and rival.
Loki, with the help of something called a Tesseract and an alien army, is trying to take over the world (of course), but those pesky Avengers keep getting in the way.
You know the plot isn’t what folks are coming to see here, but this movie’s not just about breathtaking bombast, furious fight-scenes, and spectacular sequences stuffed with eye-popping CGI – although there’s lots of that.
What elevates it is that the film actually cares about how its characters interact and clash with one another. Evan’s Captain America is rubbed wrong by Downey Jr.’s snarky arrogance (Whedon gives Downey Jr. the sharpest funniest lines, as expected), and everyone is on edge about just what Ruffalo’s Hulk will do when his rage famously takes hold.
Ruffalo’s take on Banner is one of many strong elements on display in “The Avengers.” It’s a more nuanced and edgy performance than what Eric Bana and Ed Norton brought in their respective portrayals. Now I’m looking forward to seeing Ruffalo own his own Hulk movie.
Clark Gregg, as S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Coulson, finally gets a more substantial role after his glorified cameos in the previous Marvel movies, and he makes the most of it. A surprising yet fitting addition to the ever expanding universe is Cobie Smulders (Robin on the sitcom How I Met Your Mother) as another Avengers ally, Maria Hill. Smulders gets a considerable amount of screen-time, and like everybody else here, she doesn’t waste it.
The New York City battle finale outdoes the fun destruction of just about every other super hero movie ever (take that Superman, Spiderman, X-Men, etc.!), and it's hilarious to boot.
Whedon does a fantastic job juggling this vast array of characters while arranging mighty action set-pieces (particularly the sequence aboard the ginormous S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier).
So there you have it - the must-see super hero movie event of the summer. That is, until THE DARK KNIGHT RISES comes out.
More later...
2 Mayıs 2012 Çarşamba
The Deep Blue Sea (Tuesday, April 10, 2012) (36)
Filmmaker Terence Davies makes really beautiful, interesting and eerily personal melodramas and psycho-sexual dramas. He's clearly inspired by masters of the genre, like Douglas Sirk, but also imbues his films with an organic normalcy that you don't find in some of the great 1950s melodramas, which highlighted physical beauty and colorful technical details, functioning almost like fairy tales. Davies' pictures are gritty and bleak, mostly set in post-war England (Davies grew up in 1950s Liverpool, one of the bleakest places ever imagined by industrial-era people), and mostly dealing with impossible love, the burden of memory, and the general sense of dissolution entropy.
The Deep Blue Sea, adapted by Davies from a play by Terrence Rattigan, opens with a few big crane shots of post-war London, its gray rubble and sad honor made lush by such a classic technique. Yes, these grand shots foreshadow the pain and destruction that is to come, but they also invoke some of the more memorable shots of classic high melodramas (think of the romance of The Wind Will Carry Us).
This is the story of Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz), a woman who marries an older, more-well established man, Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale). She has a young lover on the side, Freddie Page (Rom Hiddleston) whom her husband knows about. Sir Williams lets his wife cheat, because he knows their marriage is already a bit non-traditional (due to their ages), and because he's madly in love with her beauty and mind.
Hester, on the other hand, is uncomfortable with the situation and decides to leave her husband, throwing away his money and status, for the upstart Freddie. The only problem is that, for Freddie, the relationship was perfect when she was a married woman and he was merely her lover; he doesn't really want to be with her all the time, as he deals with his post-war troubles (PTSD, bleak job prospects, poverty). After she throws herself into her lovers arms, she finds that she might have ruined the thing she had going before as well as that which she was trying to create.
The story is mostly told in flashback, after Hester has seemingly ruined her life, and Davies explores the concept and weight of memory in a beautiful formalist fashion. Most of the film is shot, by Florian Hoffmeister, with very low lighting, making most scenes somewhat obscured and muted. This not only translates a sort of warmth and nostalgia, but also suggests that Hester's memories of the events are less than totally clear. Living in each moment, she might not have seen everything clearly at the time, and might have a somewhat overly emotional feeling about them now. There is also an interesting break between moving cameras in the present and static cameras in the past, a suggestion, perhaps, that our memories are very specifically fixed and difficult for us to understand completely.
In the past, with films like The Long Day Closes and Distant Voices, Still Lives, Davies used juxtaposition and montage beautifully to tell a story from disparate elements and strong contrasts. The cutting style here is much more naturalistic and human (less artistic), but still beautifully helps to tell the story in a particular way. Davies, more than most other directors working today, uses editing and shot sequence in an efficient and haunting way to tell a story from a narrative point of view, but also from a psychological one. We see jumps from one moment to another, sometimes creating surprisingly strange connections between two elements, only explainable through the character's innermost feelings.
As much as it is a riff on the melodramatic form, the film feels much more set in our world than some of the great works by Sirk and Delmer Daves. It seems to be less dreamy and more tied to our human experience. Those classic films seem to function on pure emotion, even if they have cynical social commentary in them, whereas this one seems connected to our world as a gritty drama. This is really a romantic short story, told in a melodramatic style.
The most evocative question this film leaves me with is whether Hester is a response to the stereotypical trope of women who turn their good lives into bad ones through their sexuality (like Jezebel) or if she is merely a pawn in the bigger societal problem of women necessarily depending on men. Is she pushing back against a system in which she has no rights, or is she a victim of that system? Is it her fault that she got into her complicated relationships or is she just a symbol for the post-war degradation of English (or world) culture.
Stars: 3.5 of 4
The Deep Blue Sea, adapted by Davies from a play by Terrence Rattigan, opens with a few big crane shots of post-war London, its gray rubble and sad honor made lush by such a classic technique. Yes, these grand shots foreshadow the pain and destruction that is to come, but they also invoke some of the more memorable shots of classic high melodramas (think of the romance of The Wind Will Carry Us).
This is the story of Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz), a woman who marries an older, more-well established man, Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale). She has a young lover on the side, Freddie Page (Rom Hiddleston) whom her husband knows about. Sir Williams lets his wife cheat, because he knows their marriage is already a bit non-traditional (due to their ages), and because he's madly in love with her beauty and mind.
Hester, on the other hand, is uncomfortable with the situation and decides to leave her husband, throwing away his money and status, for the upstart Freddie. The only problem is that, for Freddie, the relationship was perfect when she was a married woman and he was merely her lover; he doesn't really want to be with her all the time, as he deals with his post-war troubles (PTSD, bleak job prospects, poverty). After she throws herself into her lovers arms, she finds that she might have ruined the thing she had going before as well as that which she was trying to create.
The story is mostly told in flashback, after Hester has seemingly ruined her life, and Davies explores the concept and weight of memory in a beautiful formalist fashion. Most of the film is shot, by Florian Hoffmeister, with very low lighting, making most scenes somewhat obscured and muted. This not only translates a sort of warmth and nostalgia, but also suggests that Hester's memories of the events are less than totally clear. Living in each moment, she might not have seen everything clearly at the time, and might have a somewhat overly emotional feeling about them now. There is also an interesting break between moving cameras in the present and static cameras in the past, a suggestion, perhaps, that our memories are very specifically fixed and difficult for us to understand completely.
In the past, with films like The Long Day Closes and Distant Voices, Still Lives, Davies used juxtaposition and montage beautifully to tell a story from disparate elements and strong contrasts. The cutting style here is much more naturalistic and human (less artistic), but still beautifully helps to tell the story in a particular way. Davies, more than most other directors working today, uses editing and shot sequence in an efficient and haunting way to tell a story from a narrative point of view, but also from a psychological one. We see jumps from one moment to another, sometimes creating surprisingly strange connections between two elements, only explainable through the character's innermost feelings.
As much as it is a riff on the melodramatic form, the film feels much more set in our world than some of the great works by Sirk and Delmer Daves. It seems to be less dreamy and more tied to our human experience. Those classic films seem to function on pure emotion, even if they have cynical social commentary in them, whereas this one seems connected to our world as a gritty drama. This is really a romantic short story, told in a melodramatic style.
The most evocative question this film leaves me with is whether Hester is a response to the stereotypical trope of women who turn their good lives into bad ones through their sexuality (like Jezebel) or if she is merely a pawn in the bigger societal problem of women necessarily depending on men. Is she pushing back against a system in which she has no rights, or is she a victim of that system? Is it her fault that she got into her complicated relationships or is she just a symbol for the post-war degradation of English (or world) culture.
Stars: 3.5 of 4
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