...Laddaland calls to mind two recent excellent Asian films: Ho-Cheung Pang's Dream Home, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata. Like Dream Home, it presents a horror-veiled satirical take on the plight of regular folk hoping to own real estate in today's economy, but its humanistic heart echoes Kurosawa's depiction of overwhelming external forces dismantling the unity of an otherwise loving family...Click here to read my full review on Twitch.
As far as Soderbergh films that have been tailored for a non-actress to show off the skills she's known for go, Haywire is more successful than The Girlfriend Experience (which, above all, is fatally boring for a movie about a call girl in the recession played by a pornstar). Gina Carano isn't much more competent a dramatic screen presence than Sasha Grey, but she doesn't really need to be. With an all-star class coyly teasing out their roles, and nicely orchestrated action scenes amidst stimulating locales (Barcelona, Dublin, New Mexico, old...Mexico), Haywire delivers, mostly. I can put my few formal complaints aside (score was awful, Barcelona color pallettes annoyingly sepia'd out to indicate past tense) to appreciate the whole: a smart "lark" that suggests more going on, evidenced in Ewan McGregor's loaded line in reference to the heroine: "Oh, you shouldn't think of her as a woman. That would be a mistake."
The Ghost Writer
Hey, it's Ewan McGregor again! Here Polanski crafts a bizarre world of grey sands and wind, a theatrical CG scape peppered with classically trained Brit thespians that creates an unsettling divide between this strange cinematic place and the real America/Britain being satirized. Enough unplaceable tension and black comedy to bring it to the kind of heights expected from its director, but a disjointed enough feel to keep it from being on par with his finest work.
Diary
The Pang Brothers, those prolific hit-or-miss pan-Asian (and now North American) sometimes masters, sometimes hacks are known for films full of promise that they usually squander by the second or third acts. Speaking as a fan of theirs, I have to say Diary follows the same unfortunate formula. There are some beautifully eerie images present in this Hong Kong psycho-horror from a few years ago (one depicts a giant wooden marionette stomping by in the background of a woman's nervous breakdown), but ultimately it ends up repetitve and over-explains itself.
Just a few quick thoughts on movies recently seen.
Martha Marcy May Marlene Anchored by a pitch-perfect performance from Elizabeth Olsen (far removed from her supremely uninteresting sisters), Martha looks at the after-effects of a traumatic event earnestly, subtly and with enough humor and humanistic responsibility that it never slips into histrionics or pretentiousness. John Hawkes as the Manson-esque cult leader, and the rest of the supporting cast are similarly fantastic; which is not to say that the direction should be ignored. Sean Durkin has crafted a beautifully shot film that won't be easy for me to shake--a feeling that maximizes retrospective empathy for the title character.
Broken Embraces After loving The Skin I Live In as I did, it seemed like Broken Embraces was the next logical place to go. Almodovar's second most recent film is an entertaining piece of self-reflexive melodrama, with a magnetic performance from Penelope Cruz, who is always compulsively watchable. However, the pieces surrounding her story, and the too-revelatory ending scenes end up dismantling the film somewhat. It's a minor Almodovar that encompasses some of his most quintessential themes, and thus is a fascinating paradox if not a particularly good film ultimately.
Paranormal Activity 2 & 3 One of the most effective tools in horror filmmaking is the art of withholding, but my main complaint about the first Paranormal Activity is that it abused this technique to the point that it just wasn't as scary as it should have been. The 2nd, and especially 3rd movies rectify this by showing more creepy shit without ever overdoing it. The 3rd is easily the best of the series and stands as one of the best American horror movies I've seen in a long time (admittedly, I'm not sure that says a lot). The "Bloody Mary" sequence is truly a brilliant feat of minimalist filmmaking, and will stick with me for awhile. Insidious I'd heard good things about this movie, and I tried hard to like it. When all is said and done, though, it's a silly, meandering series of increasingly bizarre (and bizarre in a dull way) scenes that reveal themselves to have been building towards a shallow, cheap, barely-earned twist ending. There are effective moments, but they're few and far between. Passable if one is desperate for a horror fix, but that's the best I can say of it.
...Everything is grey, in a dizzyingly confusing way. When the credits roll--after a sure to be oft-quoted final line--there is no sense of emotional satisfaction. This is perhaps the most brilliant, lingering thing about the movie... Click here to read my full review on Twitch.
...The effectiveness of The Other Californians lies in this passive-viewer style of approach. We can learn a lot about both their lives and our own by simply seeing how the rancheros live, day by day. There are several different ranches featured, some with large families housed inside, some with one single person manning the operations. They milk goats, cows, slaughter the occasional animal for meat, gather water from local springs, break in wild horses, and do whatever else needs to be done...Click here to read my full review on Twitch.
...Shot in gorgeously sumptuous, haunting, high-contrast black and white, The Turin Horse unfolds over the course of six days. We spend the entire time witnessing the repetitive, highly mundane, painstakingly methodical routines of a father and his daughter in a small house on a prairie in what seems like real time...Click here to read my full review on Twitch.
...Quattro Hong Kong 2 is the second instalment in a series of short films funded by and intended to promote the Hong Kong International Film Festival. This year's four shorts come from Brilliante Mendoza (Philippines), Ho Yuchang (Malaysia), Apichatpong Weerasethakal (Thailand), and Stanley Kwan (Hong Kong). Unlike recent compendiums Paris Je T'aime, or Tokyo!, this collection is rather short--all four films total just 65 minutes...Click here to read my full review on Twitch.
...One of Target's main problems is that it favors the personal dramas of its horribly uninteresting characters above all else, making the backdrop of Moscow in 2020 nearly irrelevant. This also leads to the many smaller plots or ideas being either ignored or just underdeveloped (the recurring appearance of Viktor's special glasses that indicate whether the items viewed are good or evil is just one example)...Click here to read my full review on Twitch.
Vickie Leekx, M.I.A.'s new(ish, dropped New Year's Eve) mixtape, seems to be spurring a ton of oops-maybe-she-is-still-good kind of blog posts and articles. After most sane people agreed that MAYA was a silly, largely unlistenable misfire, they used it in conjunction with the negative NY Times piece and M.I.A.'s own headscratching twitter behaviour as evidence that she now, in so many words, sucked. Myself included. For me it hit even harder because I found Kala disappointing aside from maybe 3 tracks, and thus viewed MAYA as the final nail in her coffin. We all moaned about how living in California in an upper-class neighborhood had stamped out her street cred and splitting from Diplo had left her without the sick beats to make up for it. The only glimmers of hope on MAYA were the shallow-but-catchy "XXXO" and "Steppin' Up." The latter is an excellent crashing, bashing anthem on which M.I.A. makes lines like "boy I need a rub, rub a dub a dub dub, rub a dubadubadub" sound intimidatingly cool. It probably comes closest to the aesthetic she wanted to achieve on the album, but it was far from enough to save it.
Thanks to all this, I barely bat an eye when I heard about Vickie Leekx. It wasn't until reading this article--though the author did like MAYA, so I still had my reservations--that I decided to finally download it; I was once a diehard fan of hers not so long ago, afterall. I felt like I owed her one more chance. Within moments of starting it up, I had to stop what I was doing and let it sink in that... I was actually loving it. Piracy Funds Terrorism may have been better than Arular, but if it was, its superiority was negligible. Vickie Leekx dwarfs the accomplishments of MAYA about fifteen times over.
Trying to describe this mixtape, let alone attempting to review it, isn't easy. It's hyper and urgent and completely unfocused, but that all works in its favor. M.I.A. herself sounds sexy, tough, and most of all, fed up--with delightful results. On "Marsha-Britney" she taunts "your shoes could feed a village, you should think about that." On the surface she's dissing some other pop starlet, but maybe it's also self-guilt (she persists "you can have my money, but you can't have me" on the anti-consumerism "Gen N-E-Y"). Throughout Vickie Leekx she tries to balance the angry, world-conscious M.I.A. with the bratty, irresponsible California M.I.A., and the end product--as Nicky Minaj growls "a bad bitch that came from Sri Lanka"--is more endearing than she's been in years. Best of all, she is able to portray all these roles and transmit her ideas (however fuzzy they are) through music that's also danceable and exhuberantly giddy where MAYA was a chore to get through and about as much fun as my dentist appointment yesterday. If you were ever a fan of M.I.A., you're screwing yourself over if you don't hear this.
