Beau Travail
The Others
Rat Race
Shrek
Suzhou River
Hey!
My simple deductions are that the film was about being obsessed with living perfectly, which is brought out by the rather pointless routines done by the Legion, the way their strange "workouts" in the desert are so well choreographed, and the obsessive way they ironed their pants and Galoup [who is an officer in the French Foreign Legion, played by Denis Levant; the film's meager and rather inconsequential plot is about his hatred, which may be related to attraction, of a popular newcomer and how it ruins his life] made his bed. The scenes in Merseilles contrast so much with the desolate scenes in Djibouti; the city life that Galoup is forced to return to is not perfect and is hectic- he was going in a straight, monotonous line when he was with the Legion but now is directionless- so he kills himself. Agnes Godard knows exactly where to place the camera and it's as if the men have been swallowed up by their surroundings, and she also indulges in some serious ogling, accentuating all that homoerotic stuff that everybody talks about. It seems the whole film has an underlying tension, until it lets loose in that burst of energy at the end; it kind of has a sense of humor, maybe equating freedom (or heaven) to a disco.
[...]
See ya later,
[FEB. 10, 2001]
Beau Travail (1999) (B+)
A very slightly tidied-up excerpt from an email to a film friend on the latest Claire Denis film:
I came out of the theater a little dazed because, despite my love and complete "enjoyment" of "L'Avventura," [we had both agreed that the film was rather Antonionian] "Beau Travail" was challenging for me, and, now that I've digested it, absolutely amazing. I'm not used to seeing non-narrative movies, which is what I expect the Kiarostami movie is too (which I'm also seeing tonight at 7PM; hope to see you there), and this movie was really beautiful, very rooted in art and poetry, and had the randomness of memory. While I thought the cinematography and the landscapes were just gorgeous, they also had a very heavy feeling of isolation and loneliness, and its just interesting how the Legion was like its own little universe, closed off from the world, and it became like a family (since a lot of the men were orphans.)
Andrew
The Others (2001) (C)
I went to see The Others with friends on a Saturday night, and I believe I would have enjoyed it a little bit more had there not been a pack of young individuals cackling their heads off at the slightest impetus. But this is the kind of reaction you would expect teens of today to get from this subdued chiller, and I couldn’t blame them because I was finally laughing along with them. In the movie, Nicole Kidman is the stern, intense mother shielding her hapless, sunlight-allergic children from the outside world. The sets are dull mud brown the way Cries and Whispers was saturated in scarlet, and the mood is similar, but Bergman was able to seamlessly weave the startling sexual and violent images in with the plodding, haunting pace, while Alejandro Amenabar is just being a bad director, slowing the action down to almost a halt and then pulling out his shock editing “boo!”-effects on us. He creates a copycat atmosphere out of The Sixth Sense, and, as the sole writer, he wraps the whole thing up in a very similar, flashy, poorly executed surprise ending. We get some really memorable cinematography from Javier Aguirresarobe, a man who obviously has a great eye for space and color and lighting and those suffocating movie fogs. The Others tries so hard to be austere that it at least manages to feel, completely and unmistakably, like a ‘40s black-and-white movie, with all the fashion photography gloss smeared away. Kidman does an admirable job and helps make the psychological terror a little more tangible. Her character is a nutcase choked with Catholic guilt and, as the grinning Freudian subtext sometimes suggests, an unquenched lust for her husband who perished in a war. The children ask her if people who die in battle go to heaven and, in one of those thematic lightbulb scenes, she tells them they do if they fought for the “good” side, a statement that is certainly pertinent today in the midst of horrifying terrorist attacks, different cultures at odds, and all the racism and demonizing that comes from both sides. The movie juts out in a way The Sixth Sense, for all its faults, didn’t; its artsiness is forced, and the whole thing is built on a few good gimmicks and some really stale ones (those draped windows and closed doors and candle-lit hallways are wasted somewhat; they could have been so eloquently and absorbingly explored). The woman with all her pent-up emotions and sins and ritualistic religious beliefs and practices is at last confronted with the big question mark of God and the afterlife. But The Others is just too unambiguous to pose any real question, and it just comes across as an attack on the validity of religion, instead of a challenge on blind, complacent acceptance. On top of this we get some appallingly generic and laughable performances from the supporting cast, as if Amenabar and the actors wanted to inherit all the things in old horror movies that don’t hold up today and augment them for nostalgic effect. The kids who were laughing that night had every right to. [SEPTEMBER 15, 2001]
Rat Race (2001) (B-)
This remake/rip-off of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World has a cast of funny men and women who aren’t really my picks for the best comedians of their generation (Spencer Tracy, from the earlier film, does not fit that bill either). Frankly, I don’t know who I’d bestow that lofty label upon but I do know I have quite an affinity for Chris Rock and Janeane Garofalo, who are nowhere to be found here. But I would just like to say, here and now, that I have never tired of Whoopi Goldberg’s shtick. She plays a riff on her debut role, Celie, this time meeting up with the lonely-business-woman biological daughter she gave away many years ago. She doesn’t get to do much though. Nor do any of the others, for that matter. Jon Lovitz and Kathy Najimy act like the good actors they are; Cuba Gooding, Jr. has a few good moments with physical comedy; Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean routine isn’t very interesting; John Cleese’s part is almost microscopic. Rat Race is intelligently plotted and much swifter, funnier, and better than the Stanley Kramer epic. (The man had very little self-restraint; branching off into comedy – a detour from his usual message movies – he had to make his production huge, as in over three hours, with cute trademark ethics.) The moralizing is less grating here for some reason, even though it takes place on a grander scale. Maybe because there’s some welcome frivolousness to Jerry Zucker’s approach; he isn’t trying to make “the comedy to end all comedies.” And he hasn’t. The greatest evil committed here, involving a heart transplant, is even more menacing than any of the examples in Mad Mad Mad Mad World. The situations are generally amusing and funny, and I felt like I was in capable hands. There are few highlights so we are carried from snippet to snippet without getting bored or overly excited. The setup takes just as much from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days as it does from Kramer’s movie; there’s a showcase of vehicles – including everything from hot air balloons to helicopters to trains to a car owned by Nazis – to complement the showcase of stars. I don’t remember ever being disappointed by a Zucker movie before (the focus is obviously never on him): A Walk in the Clouds is sickening sap now, but when I was younger, it was the greatest movie in the world to me, and I don’t understand why people hate Ghost so much. Like My Best Friend’s Wedding and the Naked Gun movies, this is likable, lightweight stuff. You don’t feel guilty about liking it and you don’t think it’s great, or even very good. And I don’t.
By Andrew Chan [AUGUST 30, 2001]
Shrek (2001) (B-)
I grew up with fairytales; I adored them and spent much of my younger days watching video interpretations of them. I was always entranced by those evil femmes fatales in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "Sleeping Beauty"; the damsels in distress bored me. I was also quite bemused by how quickly the girl and her Prince Charming decided to get married, only seconds after they had met. Shrek, the latest animated movie from DreamWorks, is a message movie for little kids being fed sexist, unrealistic ideals by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. It pumps decency and its set of modern values into a cute, unexceptional tale about the titular ogre (a delightful Mike Myers) who loves, and is loved by, a misled princess (a spunky Cameron Diaz). The movie should teach kids some valuable lessons about love and prejudice, but the whole thing feels formulaic, like the stories I heard as a young child. It's a bit curious to me that I would feel this way because the movie creates a relationship between Shrek and the princess and you can feel them falling in love, unlike traditional fairytales in which the man of the girl's dreams appears for the first time at the end, a trophy for all the hardships the poor thing suffered with her wicked stepmother. There are some interesting sparks between Myers and Diaz. As the beast, Myers has never sounded so mellow. The sidekick is a donkey played by Eddie Murphy in a way very similar to his amusing voice-over for Mulan. Contrary to popular opinion, I found his jokes and performance woefully unfunny and self-conscious, and the computer animation, while technically brilliant, didn't have the warmth and inventiveness of the Pixar movies. The film's use of (often sexual) innuendo doesn't always work, but it does, at least to me, seem to indicate that youth are more knowledgeable of adult comedy than they ever have been. There is a calculated feel to the movie, but there is also the wonderful feeling that this story could happen in real life if you replaced the ogre with a toothless wanderer and the princess with a gorgeous model. [JUNE 14, 2001]
Suzhou River (2000) (B)
The elegantly composed Vertigo, a Hitchcock classic and one of my two or three favorite films of all-time, has been relocated to Shanghai near the filthy Suzhou River. Director Lou Ye claims that he hadn’t even seen the movie his so unmistakably resembles when he was making it, but the music by Jörg Lemberg makes so many allusions to Vertigo’s famous score that I was looking for Bernard Herrmann’s name in the credits. When the film begins it fades into the image of a river, and I expected it to be glistening and mythic but, humorously, it turns out to be full of litter and junk. The ever-present narrator takes us through the setting; he’s a videographer and he’s obsessed with his camera. Lou never bothers to apply this idea to the whole movie – the idea of cinematography becoming the equivalent of human seeing. Even though it would seem that Mardar (Hongshen Jia) takes the place of Jimmy Stewart – he passionately searches for his one true love who dived into the Suzhou after he betrayed her, and he finds a look-alike in the videographer’s girl (Xun Zhou’s split performance is a delight and borrows heavily from ‘40s femmes fatales) – I think it’s really the narrator who has the most meaningful of the dual obsessions. He videos Meimei, his showgirl lover, like Stewart dressed Kim Novak. She begins to paint her nails and tie her hair up to look like the woman Mardar has described to her; it’s no longer the man who’s molding her into his dream image because, in an eerie feminist twist, girls are doing it themselves. Suzhou River is obsessed too, with romanticism and its kinship with the concept of destiny, and love affairs in which you have to suffer to prove yourself. But the narrator is outside all this and finds his form of love in other people’s stories, in moving on, and in absorbing all the glad misery of the couples on the river. He is both active in life and removed from it, like Mastroianni in 8 1/2. The movie has a good amount of ideas and emotions to delve into but it never fleshes them out; Mardar’s love for his lost soul mate is intangible, and the theme of life as cinema is kind of weak. Yu Wang is so jittery with his camera that the movie is hard on the eyes, but the Wong Kar-Wai imitations achieve a kind of soft/hard texture. It’s a stimulating hybrid melodrama that builds something new out of the tragic love from fairy tales, films noirs, and the Hitchcock movie, but it’s retro references are balanced by the fantasies of the modern cameraman with a pager. The combination is as romantically murky as the cinematography and the title river itself. [AUGUST 13, 2001]