Thursday, June 15th, 2006
Chan / Park / Miike – Saam Gaang Yi (2)
The odd and interesting concept of combining three short disturbing cinematic visions from Korea, Hong Kong and Japan into a single feature film pays off mostly because of the contrast between the three directors’ very distinctive approaches to scaring or shocking the audience. Where Chan uses colourful unscrupulous hedonism to post a moral warning, Park delves almost sadistically in his usual subject of revenge, guilt and the impact of violence and Miike creates a rigid, melancholy and inescapable atmosphere of enormous and unresolvable guilt. I’m not sure any of the three stories would have worked as standalone works, but seen together they seem to take on a deeper meaning and complement one another.
Trondheim’s marvellous style, applied to a quirky story of alien mishaps, told in hardly decodable symbol language and asynchronously. The result is a delightfully trippy little comic book. An interesting side note concerns the preface, which seems to have been written specifically for the american edition (which I assume is otherwise identical to the french edition, unless there are different kinds of unintelligible geometric symbols in the two cultures) and mentions a camping trip of Trondheim’s into the Catskills. Merely translation of ideas rather than words, or an attempt to conceal the European original of the work for sales’ sake? 
A powerful meditation on innocence lost and the mixed blessings of civilization and progress, this is essential Malick. Of course that also means a healthy dose of pathos and a certain slowness of plot, but when so beautifully shot and arranged, who would want to bicker. I have not seen the story of Pocahontas told any other way before, and I don’t think I shall.
It could have been a delightful superhero spoof, with touching undertones of melancholy and underdog happyness. But bad direction, design and editing destroy much of the movie, which occasionally shines (the confrontation betwen Captain Amazing and Casanova Frankenstein is hilarious, for example), but most of the time drags. It’s too bad, the writing is good, and some of the acting and improv (Stiller mentions in the specials that the script wasn’t fixed and actors would ad lib) could have been quite hilarious. Maybe it was meant to be watched in large groups, and the gaps are so people can finish laughing without missing a joke, but I’m not sure whether that would make the bad editing better or worse.
I enjoy watching movies with advertised surprise endings, not attempting to guess the twist beforehand so that it can have maximum impact. Here, I vaguely suspected the ending about halfway through, enough to take away the bottomless feeling I distinctly remember from having in The Sixth Sense, which is too bad. That doesn’t say anything bad about the movie, and I just mention it to justify my not talking at all about the plot of Oldboy. I cherish surprises, and so should you. Besides, if you want to be spoiled, there are plenty of places online for that.
I like LeGuin’s work in general, but this tale of freedom and repression is not her best work. Two groups of exiles coexist on a wild, uncharted planet, one composed of the descendants of prisoners, the other of political exiles, sent away for their disturbing pacifism. When some people in the city try to increase their power and wealth by exploiting the pacifists, whom they perceive as weak, a struggle ensues, that ends in a murky compromise and further exile for a subgroup of the pacifists, who realise that they can only live their dream in complete isolation.
Oh boy, where do I start? It was sombering to see that the concept that so beautifully worked in In the Mood for Love could fall so flat. While this loose sequel explores similar themes, none of the characters got me the least bit interested, the plot was see-through-thin both in terms of what happened and the emotional content, and the pretentiousness of it all just unbearable. Had I seen this in a theater, it would have been one of the rare occasions for me to walk out (though the cinematography, admittedly lost on a TV, might possibly have kept me). At home I sat through it, and I’m glad I did, for the last half hour picked up a bit. But not remotely enough to make this worthwhile. Stay clear.
While Clooney did seem a bit too proud of the things he’s been doing lately at the Oscar’s, the things he does are indeed pretty great, and he wasn’t quite deserving of the scorn heaped upon him by pop reactionaries Parker and Stone in a recent South Park episode (that puts him in a league with recently mocked Al Gore. Apparently poop jokes aren’t controversial enough any more. But I digress). This movie depicts, in rather beautiful black and white cinematography, the courageous act of a few TV journalists at CBS defying overpowering senator Joe McCarthy, and contributing significantly to his eventual downfall. An inspiring and encouraging story at any time, the present context makes this indispensable.
This should by rights have been an awesome movie, with awesome music and an intriguing story, and it didn’t quite fail at achieving it, but it didn’t quite make it, either. Phoenix and Witherspoon were doing an amazing job, especially with the music, but several aspects of the script left me wanting more. We don’t really understand why any of the people do what they do, especially so for the negative influences, his father and his first wife. We get hardly a glimpse of why they act the way they do, and I didn’t really connect to Cash’s reactions to them, either. And the predictable story arc of success – gutter – redemption and it’s edifying connotations may have been unavoidable in a Cash biopic, but still disappointed me in its simplicity. The music made up for much of that, though, and the cinematography and design helped a lot, too.
I’m not sure whether entering a field of knowledge through a basic introduction, or from the middle of an ongoing controversial debate is preferable. Bix’s book represents both aspects, being aimed at those familiar with Japanese history, arguing the case for a change in the perception of wartime emperor Hirohito, from benevolent onlooker and powerless figurehead to bearing full responsibility for Japanese war atroctities and aggression both before and during the second world war. At the same time, it adresses the general reader, using the Sh?wa emperor’s biography as the focal point for depicting the making of modern Japan. The balance between these two different books is worked out fairly well, with some passages dragging on a bit too long, due partly to an overabundance of detail and a flurry of Japanese names and concepts that are sometimes not introduced well enough to properly keep track of for the non-initiated reader.