Filmlog for April

4-4-06: 2046. *6+* (2005, dvd, n.) Wong Kar-Wei is definitely something; I’m just not sure what. His latest is a quasi-sequel to In the Mood for Love, and my admiration remains distant. This critical darling (#2 in Village Voice critics’ poll for best of 2005) is lushly designed and shot, heavy with atmosphere, light on coherence. Tony Leung is excellent as ladies’ man pulp writer, and the ladies -- oh my! -- are the likes of Ziya Zhang and Gong Li, so the film is easy to watch if hard to make sense of. (MC-78.)

4-9-06: Gunner Palace. *6* (2005, dvd, n.) Not as coherent as Occupation: Dreamland, but nearly as essential in coming to terms with just what American troops are being asked to do in Iraq. This film follows an artillery unit bivouacked in the half-wrecked palace of one of Saddam’s sons and going out on raids and patrol in Baghdad; it’s more exclusively from the perspective of the Americans than the other doc, but still it puts you there, where we so clearly should not be. (MC-70.)

4-10-06: Head-On (Gegen die Wand.) *7* (2004, Sund/T, n.) L’amour fou among Turkish emigres in Hamburg, Germany. Just like the lead actress, Sibell Kekilli, this film from young director Fatih Akin makes you ponder whether it is just interesting-looking or profoundly beautiful. Adrift between worlds, two attempted suicides meet cute in a mental institution. She latches onto him (Birol Unel) as the Turkish husband who will placate her traditional Islamic family, and in a platonic marriage of convenience allow her to continue her pursuit of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. Of course they fall in love, but nothing else about this film is pat or predictable. Its a sympathetic glimpse into strange but familiar lives, recommended if you’re willing to take the journey. (MC-78.)

4-11-06: Neil Young: Heart of Gold. *8* (2006, Images, n.) Shows what a concert film can be. Not just a record of a performance, but a visual narrative in its own right. Jonathan Demme already has Stop Making Sense under his belt, but this rivals Marty Scorsese and The Band’s Last Waltz for best rock film ever. I didn’t go in as a big Neil Young fan, though inevitably he is part of the soundtrack of my life, but he definitely made the sale with me, premiering his “Prairie Wind” album at the Ryman in Nashville, and then going on to reprise some of his more famous hits. Backed by his wife and Emmylou Harris, and a gang of old buddies, as well as horn and string and gospel choir sections, Neil Young gets across his straightforward but incantatory lyrics in an intimate and impassioned manner, with the camera perfectly framing his storytelling and preacherman ballads. Soul-stirring and completely satisfying. (MC-85.)

4-15-06: Paradise Now. *6* (2005, dvd, n.) While it is certainly worthwhile to get an even-handed Palestinian view from the West Bank, the mixture of elements in Hany Abu-Assad’s film do not quite cohere. There are some fascinating documentary street scenes, but more than anything this is a fairly glossy ticking-bomb thriller. Will they or won’t they? Two lifelong friends are selected for a suicide bombing mission; they are not wild-eyed religious fanatics but young men interested in women, hookah-smoking, and Arab pop music. One grew up in a refugee camp and feels the need to erase the family stain of his father’s collaboration with the Israelis. The other values the posthumous celebrity the mission may bring him, though his farewell videotape is comically bungled. But they both have plenty of room for second thoughts, and debates with a pretty young women on what options they have for responding to the continuous humiliation of occupation. Everything hangs in the balance till the very last frame, but ultimately we don’t come out understanding any more than we did going in. (MC-71.)

4-17-06: Kings and Queen. *6+* (2005, dvd, n.) I am partly won over by critical acclaim, partly by the appeal of the actors, and partly by director Arnaud Desplechin’s hommage to Truffaut in his dvd interview with Kent Jones, but watching this film was not for me the joy it is for many cinephiles. Its idiosyncracies did not speak to my own. Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric lead a large and largely convincing cast, who seem believable even amidst the gaps and twists of the story. She’s a gallery owner, but is she at the mercy of, or merciless toward, men? He’s a musician tossed into the loony bin, but is he crazy or not? Once they were married, or at least together -- one dumped the other, but which? At any rate, she now wants him to adopt her son by a previous “husband” -- who may have killed himself, or she him? -- so she can marry a sugar daddy. Does her doe-eyed demeanor betoken fragile strength or carnivorous deceit? Are we to sympathize or recoil in horror? Laugh or cry? Truffaut or Hitchcock? The only truthful answer is all of the above. (MC-84.)

4-20-06: Code 46. *6-* (2004, dvd, n.) Filling out the prolific Michael Winterbottom filmography, this sci-fi romance about genetics is not as good as Andrew Nicoll’s Gattaca, but does conjure a plausible future out of contemporary Shanghai, Dubai, and India, well-suited to his on-the-fly filmmaking. Tim Robbins is palpably uncomfortable with such a guerrilla shoot, though Samantha Morton does get with the program. There is little chemistry between them, however, in this quasi-Oedipal drama. Code 46 is a regulation prohibiting incest in a world where cloning and in vitro reproduction are common. Turns out the woman he falls for is genetically identical to his mother. There’s “eternal sunshine” memory erasure, “empathy” viruses, and other futuristic apparatus, but the central love story does not grip. (MC-57.)

Last Days. *5* (2005, dvd, n.) You have to give Gus Van Sant credit for sticking to his guns. He’s definitely a filmmaker who follows through on his conception, whether inspired (Drugstore Cowboy, To Die For) or cuckoo (shot-by-shot remake of Psycho.) This follow-up to Elephant, his dreamy evocation of Columbine, quasi-documents in long shots and long takes the last days of Kurt Cobain in a decaying lakeside mansion. If you cared about Nirvana (and personally I couldn’t identify “Smells Like Teen Spirit” if you played the whole song for me), maybe you could fill in the state of mind of the protagonist as he drifts through slow and pointless scenes, albeit with a certain drugged loveliness to the cinematography and Michael Pitt’s performance. I note that Manohla Dargis of the NYTimes called this film “indisputably great” and it ranked #10 in Village Voice critics’ poll for 2005 -- but me, I hit the fast forward button to keep from falling asleep. (MC-67.)

4-23-06: Tropical Malady. *NR* (2004, dvd, n.) Here’s another film that defines my taste as not very highbrow, upper middlebrow at best. Thai filmmaker Apitchatpong Weerasethakul (who wisely goes by the name of Joe) takes us on a meandering path through fields, forests, and city streets, whose strangeness and beauty keep us watching through the slow and enigmatic twists of the tale. At first it seems like a rather sweet gay romance between a soldier and a country boy, who engage our interest; we want to see how their love goes. But then the film breaks, and the two actors reappear, the soldier the same but on patrol alone at night in the forest, and the boy become the wandering naked spirit of a tiger. The soldier stalks, sights, and finally confronts the tiger/boy. This may be a film that needs the immersive effect of watching on the big screen; the night scenes in the forest seem pretty on a tv, but may be overpoweringly magical on the big screen. There is bound to be some metaphoric payoff between the two halves, but the film was paced too slow for me to keep paying attention. I’d hit FF and then not be sure what speed the film was showing at, since the framing was so static. (MC-78.)

4-26-06: Trees Lounge. *6+* (1996, Sund/T, n.) As an actor, Steve Buscemi always infuses his characters with authenticity, humor, and pathos, and here he does the same as writer and director as well, in an apparently autobiographical story of life in a working-class dead-end town on Long Island, centered on the nondescript concrete-block bar of the title. He gathers a lot of friends and familiar (or not-so, or soon-to-be) faces to people the little community he depicts, from Chloe Sevigny to Samuel L Jackson. There’s no story as such, just a series of incidents that gradually fill in a group portrait. Nothing is underlined, but a picture emerges nonetheless. If you liked the book, The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer, you would like this film -- or vice versa. Both setting and sensibility are similar.

4-28-06: Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. *6+* (2004, dvd, n.) Frankly I’ve been a bit wearied by my steady diet of good-for-you critical favorites, and craved a bit of junk food. As such, this was quite a tasty combo of gross-out humor and stoner comedy, with a special sauce of multiculty flavors. Danny Leiner is crude but effective in his direction of the appealing Korean-India duo of John Cho and Kal Penn, entry level financial analyst and reluctant med school applicant respectively, hardcore tokers both. An attack of the munchies sends them on a nightlong quest through the wilds of New Jersey. Of its kind, this buddy pic is about as good as it gets. (MC-63.)

Working that same vein, I took a look at the first disk of the only season of Undeclared, Judd Apatow’s follow up to the similarly beloved-but-cancelled TV series, Freaks & Geeks. I’ll definitely watch the rest. Though it is a half-hour sitcom rather than the latter’s hourlong multi-layered dramedy, it does advance a similar group of characters (and actors) from high school to the first year of college. This is shameless TV you can enjoy without shame.

While on the subject of highly watchable TV, let me give a big thumbs up to three HBO series I am currently enjoying immensely: the current seasons of The Sopranos and Big Love, and catching up with the second season of Deadwood, in anticipation of the third coming soon. With these and Bleak House and The Best of Youth, my favorite viewing these days is long-form, novelistic series.

4-29-06: Cafe Lumiere. *6* (2004, dvd, n.) Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien offers this as a centenary tribute to Japanese director Yasijuro Ozu. There are recognizable elements of Ozu in this story of a young woman (played in low-key naturalistic style by Japanese pop idol Yo Hitoto) separating from her parents; maintaining distance from her closest friend, a bookseller with a passion for trains and a knowledge of Maurice Sendak; and refusing even to consider marrying the unseen boy in Taiwan who has gotten her pregnant. There are many transfixing shots of Tokyo trains, but it’s the interior shots that seem to refuse intimacy, that keep us fixed for prolonged periods at an awkward angle, unable to get close to the characters or even see their faces. There’s a slow tempo one has to adjust to in Ozu, but there’s also a directness, which is frustratingly absent in this film. It took me three tries to make it through.