Archive for September, 2008

Kikujiro (1999)

September 29, 2008 at 3:29 pm · Filed under It stinks ·Tagged

I didn’t buy into this film at all. In fact it got increasingly irritating.

Mainly cus Takeshi Kitano – the director – overacts the lead role of Kikujiro; his pratfalling joker-cum-loser wannabe small-time gangster “antics” come across as clumsily flat-footedly attention-seeking. You don’t warm to the guy as a charmingly clownish buffoon (the persona Kitano was trying to affect ) – you just want him to stop being such an idiotic show off. And wise up. Or grow up.

Anyway, the story is: he befriends a cute kid and they go on a road trip together to look for, find – but essentially not find – their moms.

The kid does passable cute ok, mostly by bowing his head and looking down alot with a vacantly sad mute face. It’s blatantly manipulative; Kitano wants the little boy lost thing going on cus he wants the audience to identify, and sympathize, with how forlornly orphan-like the kid – but also he – is. “We’re both lost little boys” seems to be the message. Both lost our mommies.

It’s exploitatively self-pitying this film. In a shamelessly Hollywood kind of way (even the soundtrack “theme” has a Disney feel to it)  I was thinking: this isn’t a Japanese film – it’s American slushy sentimental pap. Wants me to suck on it’s cutely contrived sweetness till I’m, well – doing a snotty little cry into the sleeve of my shirt.

I didn’t wipe away any tears. But i did feel very snotty. With scorn.

Dir: Takeshi “Beat” Kitano, Japan

3/10

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Summer with Monika (1953)

September 25, 2008 at 12:37 pm · Filed under Good ·Tagged

It would have been great seeing this in 1953 as a young guy. (Not as the young guy i would have been then – stupidly ignorant – but as the young guy i am now!… Lol…. )

“I’m crazy about you. You’re like someone in a film” says 17 year old Monika to 19 year old Harry. Don’t we all want to be like someone in a film? And being like Harry would have been ok with me.

Chucking my dreary factory job in to spend a fun “Summer with Monika” – flighty, feisty, fag-smoking little Monika, chugging around on our little wooden boat, sleeping by the sea, dipping in lakes, lighting fires, pinching food, frying wild  mushrooms for breakfast, drinking, singing and dancing, laughing, fucking. “Monika, – you and me will make something of life” says Harry “We’ve rebelled against them all“.

Only they haven’t. Only problem is – she’s got in the family way. Up the duff. Their fun time together stuffed. “We’ve been dreaming ourselves” says sensible Harry. Back to dull work doing 9 to 5 drudgery, studying to be an engineer, and having to grow up into little adults all too soon.

As it turns out – far too soon for Monika, “you need fun when you’re young” she cries. She doesn’t want to look after crying shitting babies. She wants to carry on smoking and be going out, and fuck somebody who isn’t the dull dad of her kid.

So it all goes wrong in the end. All that too soon love. The romantic ideal of “free love” gets dumped on. She dumps Harry and buggers off, leaving him – literally – holding the baby.

What a great film it must have been back in 1953. It’s still pretty good now.

Dir: Ingmar Bergmann, Sweden

7.5/10

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Dear Diary (1993)

September 23, 2008 at 3:37 pm · Filed under Tedious ·Tagged , ,

Nanni Moretti – the director – is scooting around the deserted streets of Rome on his vespa. “My secret dream has always been to dance well” he confesses. Next thing we see him jumping on stage in his crash helmet to sing along with a samba band. The couples tangoing together carry on dancing oblivious to his intrusion.

It’s a wryly amusing scene which illustrates the “a bit off” off beat, but good-natured nature of this film.

Morretti is likeable, and i share his wryly gentle self-mocking take on life. He’s the bemused spectator of life’s funny little ironies and droll absurdities. Best to keep your crash-helmet on even when you’re not riding your bike. Just in case. You get smacked on the head with a loosely lobbed rotten tomato.

The film feels slight tho, thin. It’s – Morretti’s – point seems to be to poke gentle fun at: critics, intellectual pretension, alternative and orthodox medicine, the Italian over-indulgence of “bambino’s”, and his own neurotic anxieties.

He dries out his satire on a slow moving wheel of idiosyncratic, but passively ineffectual, whimsicality.

The whole last third of the film is taken up with his concern re an itch that he can’t get rid of  – which turns out to be Hodgkins lymphoma, a treatable cancer. Woody Allen does this kind of hypochondriacal anxiety better and funnier, wittily and painfully enrolling you in his neurotic angst; so that you get to a point where it feels all too ridiculously personal, and all too scarily human. Moretti is too drily detached to get you engaged or caught up with worry or genuine care in his illness.

Nothing much seems to be vitally at stake. Not even having cancer (strangely enough) The film – Moretti’s life – is lulling and lolling through – with ocassional but brief, amused or amusing little ironic interludes to provide sardonic relief.

I think i only kept it cus he’s got 5 minutes of Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert playing over the sequence where he’s riding – and being tracked from behind – on his vespa, searching for Pasolini’s grave.

Otherwise, there’s not much to get your teeth into. Or your heart.

Dir: Nanni Moretti, Italy

5/10

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The Colour of Paradise (1999)

September 22, 2008 at 7:49 am · Filed under Good

Blind Mohammed sits outside school waiting for dad to to turn up. Dad isn’t coming.

So he fumble fingers his way thro leaves to rescue a distressed baby bird; scrambles up tree to return it to its nest. Good kid Mohammed. Big heart.

But cute blind kids saving cute little fluffy birdies. Isn’t this going to be abit, well – too much?

Feeling, fingering, touching. The swaying alfalfa. Dipping hands in streams of clear water. Splashing. Sipping mint tea. Picking wild flowers to dye the wool “and weave a beautiful rug to give away as an offering to God“. Listening. To woodpeckers tapping and talking.

A paean of praise to the natural world it is. You can’t be ill-disposed to a sweet film like this. To be too critical is to be too cynical. Unharden your heart Ian. Let the sweetness of (its) nature in. So i do.

Dad doesn’t want Mohammed, wants to get rid. Lovable granny objects but its no good: dad sneaks off with kid into the woods and gives him away to a blind carpenter. “Nobody wants me, nobody loves me” cries Mohammed, sobbing his blind little heart out. I cried then too.

Occasionally its sticky sentiment can feel bit too cloying and over-sugared.

But a touching film. Touches you with it’s gentle fumbling fingers.

Dir: Majid Majidi, Iran

7/10

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Someone else (2006)

September 21, 2008 at 10:13 pm · Filed under It's ok ·Tagged

Isn’t Stephen Mangan (he of Green Wing fame) just a bit too comedy sketch show to convey serious dramatic intent?

Yes is the answer.

It feels more like a limp comedy-drama for TV than a “proper” film.

There’s too many yawningly familiar telly actors. (and that horrible bulldog-faced John Henshaw is in it too – as an implausible swinger)

The relationship-roundabout for thirty-somethings in Camden. Jumping on and off one another. The constant whirligig of vapid emotions. “Relationships are about Moments“.

Stephen Mangan is falling in love. Then falling out of love. With this one. Or not with that one. But, ok – with that one. He’s far too oily to be credible as an angsty loser-in-love. Can’t quite shake his smooth-operator smirk. I kept expecting him to come out with smarmy sarcasms.

But the piss-taking punchlines aren’t there. Instead you get awkward silences. And sensitive eyebrows (Mangans)

It’s all trying to be knowingly low-key. No big romantic gestures ala Richard Curtis. No sweet ending.

Go and have a mope on that solitary park bench Mangan. You lost.

Dir: Col Spector, England

6/10

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Une Liason Pornographique (1999)

September 19, 2008 at 10:24 am · Filed under It's ok ·Tagged ,

They’re off to a hotel in a minute. To do their fucking.

They’ve met thro a personal ad cus she wants to act out some kind of pervy porno peccadillo (we never get to see or know what it is – altho she does say, puzzlingly, “It was an act of love“)

You don’t get to see them doing the porn, but you do get to see them once making the love. Which, altho satisfying isn’t as fulfilling as the fantasy fucking, “It was too nice. I felt too good“.

Nathalie Baye is the woman (she was in Venus Beauty) and i find her a bit too actressy and self-regarding (she reminds me of Helen Mirren) Good old Serge Lopez is the man. He’s solid enough.

There’s vicarious wish-fulfillment being enacted in this film: An “adult” liason. Two beautiful French actors. Meeting in Paris cafe. Off to Paris hotel. For Fuck. Yes – we’d all want some of what they’re having. A sex intense couple of hours on a rainy Thursday afternoon. To be decanted back into those Parisian streets to reflect and revel about it – perhaps while sitting and drinking a cafe au lait – suffused in a glowy fucky bubble.

Of course the film can’t leave it at that like that. Too simple. There has to be “development”. Which means they have to sully their sex with feelings of love. So she’s declaring love for him, wants to grow old with him and wear his dentures (correction: “wear dentures with you“)

“We don’t know one another “he says. So they have to start knowing one another, stripping the clothes of anonymity off one another. Which is gonna end up ruining their “liason”.

“What’ll happen to us?” she says. They’ll break up.

They break up.

But not before one last one.

(Up her bottom is my guess. With a utensil)

Dir: Frederic Fonteyne, France

6.5/10

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Ma nuit chez Maud (1969)

September 17, 2008 at 8:19 am · Filed under Tedious ·Tagged ,

Wintery scenes in black and white. Made me nostalgic for snow.

That’s Jean-Louis Trintignant declaring love to Francoise, the blonde catholic bird he’s capturing (in his tight-arsed arms) – and gonna make his little wifey.

He’s just come from spending the night sleeping with Maud. On top of her bed next to her but not in her bed in her. “Thanks to you I’ve made a step towards sainthood” he says.

Maud was lying on the bed tempting him with sultry smoking and all he wants to do is talk about “Pascal’s idiosyncratic conception of Christianity“.

It’s baffling to me why sexy-smart Maud or sweet-pretty Francoise are interested in his chilly reptilian dullness. I don’t get the attraction. But maybe that’s cus I find Mr “Rubber Lips” Trintignant unappealing as an actor (I didn’t like him in “Un homme et une femme” either)

If you were in a seminary training to be a catholic priest you might find the pious pontificating about Moral Good and Free Will ambiguously fascinating.

Or you might find it – like i did – laborious. Gives you a cold in the head. Tortuous head-heavy talking bunging up your ears and sticking down your throat.

Near the end Francoise says, “I should have sent you packing” to Trintignant.

Yeah, you should have.

Gone and found yourself a man with a simple straightforward cock.

Preferably one that doesn’t think it’s a (catholic) saint.

Dir: Eric Rohmer, France

4/10

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Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)

September 15, 2008 at 9:46 pm · Filed under Tedious ·Tagged

A tractor pulls a trailer with a stuffed whale down a darkened street. It comes and goes. Nothing much to look at apart from coming and going. For 3 long minutes.

There’s coming around corners. There’s walking about (as in pic) There’s a lot of long minutes.

There’s a general air of doomy gloomy misery.

Film opens with a neat demo of a solar eclipse involving trampy alkies in a bar (I now know how the sun, earth, and moon interact with one another)

I liked a scene of a girl slow kissing her bloke; tenderly looking her eyes into his mouth.

The whale is plonked down in the town square where silent men stand solitary around.

The silent men become a menacing mob marching on the hospital; kick and punch patients out of beds (staged violence; the kicking and punching is amateurishly acted, or maybe just badly directed)

More walking. Into and out of.

Then there’s running along rail tracks to escape town. A helicopter circles threateningly overhead like a buzzy insect.

The film makes about as much sense as this review I’m writing.

Significance could no doubt be extracted from it’s doleful depths.

I was thinking of buying this on Dvd. I’d have wasted £17.

Dir:Bela Tarr, Hungary

4.5/10

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Morvern Callar (2002)

September 11, 2008 at 7:57 pm · Filed under It's ok ·Tagged

“I’m sick of your fucking moods. We could have been clubbin it. What planet are you on?” so says Morverns raver chick girlfriend Lanna.

Yes, Morvern Callar has been in a bit of a mood for most of the film. On account of finding boyfriend dead (he killed himself) chopping his body up into chunks in the bath – then burying it/him with a trowel on lonely Scottish moorland.

Understandable really. That she’s gone a bit oddbodball. Off on her planet Morvern.

Working in a supermarket on fruit and veg isn’t really gonna cut it anymore. And you’ve passed your dead fella’s novel off as yours and 2 publishing twats from London are gonna give you £100, 000 for it.

Life is unreal (and barely credible) So you gotta scram, get out of that small dreary Scottish town – and take off on adventures into somewhere far out. Of course you could end up in a loony bin.

The fruitcake Morvern Callar: just starting out on her long and loopy journey thro mental illness – is a distinct possibility.

She looks like she’s on planet Morvern in that pic. Samantha Morton does lop-sided loopyness pretty good. She keeps you interested in her even tho she doesn’t seem that interesting (is that shop assistants vacancy she’s looking at you with? Or petrified instinctual emptiness?).

You wanna put your arms around her and give her a hug; and you want to give her a good slap too – to snap her out this moral turpitude she’s stuck in, get her to wake up out of the trance of ambivalent amorality that seems to have tripped up her soul.

Dir: Lynne Ramsay, Scotland

6/10

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Y tu mama tambien (2001)

September 10, 2008 at 5:21 pm · Filed under It's ok ·Tagged

A Mexican road trip. Off to find “Heaven’s Mouth” beach are 2 young “pricks” and Spanish Luisa.

Of course they want to exercise their pricks in Luisa. And they do. Cus she takes them. Has both of them. Altho they’re both rubbish fucks, “You both come too quick” she says, “These boys don’t know how to eat a cunt“.

They aren’t going to satisfy her. Nothing will. Cus she “knew all along she was dying“.

Riddled with cancer. Which you only get to hear about after she’s died of it at the end.

Plenty of profanity. There’s 2 copulations in the first 4 minutes. And tossing spunk off on diving boards into warm pools like flob.

Casual rudery. What the fuck. Who gives a flying.

I didn’t. And didn’t go along with it the way I’d done 5 years ago. Too crude. In the smutty sex-obsessed way of most juvenile pricks.Too crass.

Beavis and Butt-head never really appealed to me.

Dir: Alfonso Cuaron, Mexico

6/10

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