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Brideshead Revisited [02 Jul 2009|02:56pm] [ music | Széki Kurva, "Chicken Head (DungHillRoosterMix)" ] Brideshead Revisited may be a difficult work to bring to the screen, as it's short on actual action and long on psychology. The primary characters in the story are so restrained that it's only through written narratives that their dramas play out. Screenwriters rush in where angels fear to tread, however, so we get a literal adaptation which, despite its flaws, msotly works. Little can be said against the star-studded cast wh did their best with what they had: it's hard to make Julia Flyte's vicillations and ruminations on Catholicism come out in a way that keeps the film moving, although Hayley Atwell puts in a creditable effort. The early shunting of Sebastian aside as the central Flyte in favor of Julia seems a bit of a mistake, since Sebastian is definitely the more interesting of the two siblings with the meatier role. Pushing Sebastian aside also makes the film an awful lot less ambiguously gay than the book was (and in my estimation, the sexual tension was an element of the book which contributed considerably to its drama). As regards cinematic concerns beond the script and pacing, Brideshead comes out in a pretty good light. I think it was on-location shooting, because the castles and universities and suchlike have all the right feel. Anyways, I'm curious if anyone can do Brideshead better. This adaptation is passionless and drags a mite, but I can't really see how it could be otherwise. See also: IMDB, Wikipedia. post comment

蒼き狼　地果て海尽きるまで/Genghis Khan: To the Ends of the Earth... [02 Jul 2009|02:38pm] [ music | The Mooseheart Faith Stellar Groove Orchestra, "Wind Chimes" ] A Japanese-Mongolian collaboration seems a bit wierd to me, but I guess stranger things have happened. I can't attest to the historicality of this one, since my knowledge of Genghis Khan's life is limited to the more well-known bits, which are of course represented here. As for actual cinematic as opposed to historical qualities, I'd call this a success. It's epic in scope, and as epics go, it's tolerably short (yes, over 2 hours, but American feature films do that all the time). The cinemacraft is up to the epic qualities, and there are a goodly number of stirring battle scenes competently acted by an enormous crowd of extras. The music is appropriate and unobtrusive. There are plot elements which might be worth mention: some interesting ideas on female autonomy are put forward, which I'm fairly certain are ahistorical, and a significant but not overwhelming drama between Timujin and his son (or whatever the term is for someone who might be the child of a rapist who abducted your wife; the Mongolians probably had a word for that). But at the end of the day, this one stands or falls on a viewer's preferences: if you like sweeping historical dramas, you'll probably like this (I did). If you don't, you won't. See also: IMDB, Wikipedia. post comment

The Dark Knight [02 Jul 2009|02:18pm] [ music | The Beach Boys, "Hold On Dear Brother" ] I haven't kept up very well with the Batman franchise's forays into film. In the main, this has probably spared me much suffering (I have seen Tim Burton's 1989 film, thank you, as well as the deliciously campy 1966 Adam West vehicle), but I guess I've missed out on the rejuvenation which was heralded by Batman Begins. This film received rave reviews in the press, which I will mostly concur with. There was indeed much to like here: the supporting cast clicked completely, in particular Heath Ledger's show-stealing Joker (when does the Joker not steal the show?) and Aaron Eckhart's subtly off-kilter performance as Harvey Dent. The plot's well-constructed in places (except for a few clumsy contrivances), and the script is spot-on both as a Batman adaptation and as a film in its own right. A lot of care went into this thing, and where it works it really works. Of course, there are places where it really didn't work, at least for me. Christian Bale is the most conspicuous and most easily criticized problem. As Batman he's awful, effecting a growl which is not so much "peerless badass" as "recovering from a moderate throat injury" (he's a bit short on neck-bracing in his armor -- I guess he could theoretically be both at once), and as Wayne he's flat and lifeless. The physics and action sequences are, and I realize this is heresy, a place I couldn't give this film a pass either. The car-and-truck (and helicopter, and motorcycle, jsut for the hell of it) chase through Gotham strains both the narrative credibility and the physical verisimillitude to the breaking point. A city police force, expecting an ambush, is caught flatfooted by a single ordinary big-rig truck? Said truck takes stunning amounts of abuse and never loses a tire or tips over or is otherwise incapacitated? Yes, it is all for the sake of the plot, but if your plot demands that impossible thins happen, even in the superhero genre, it might be time to come up with a different contrivance. See also: IMDB, Wikipedia. post comment

Babí Léto [02 Jul 2009|01:56pm] [ music | The High Llamas, "Peppy" ] (A mysterious logjam bug ate the my writeup, so I'm trying again, but I may be a little less clever this time) I don't quite know how this one ended up on my queue. Yes, I'm fond of Central European cinema, but this one seemed unlikely to appear on my radar at all. But it's actually quite good! It's sentimental without being pathetic, with approachable and relatable characters. Franci is horrifyingly thoughtless, but so likeable and gentle that it's hard not to continue to side with him, and on the flip side, Emilie remains sympathetic even in her more despotic moments. Eda doesn't have as much depth, but then, he's not really the central character. Like so many things I like, I have little really to say here beyond a recommendation. It's a gentle and light comedy about confronting the spectre of old age. That may seem a bit mawkish, but really, it's better than I'm making it sound. See also: IMDB. post comment

The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse [02 Jul 2009|01:04pm] [ music | 椎名林檎 (Shiina Ringo), "錯乱 (Confusion) [Terra version]" ] This one is a fairly solid vehicle for both Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson. I picked it up mostly for the Bogart appeal, although his performance is ridiculously hammy, as are most of the career-criminals. Robinson is surprisingly nuanced although one can only do so much with a "miscellaneous scientist" role (presumably he's doing some sort of physiological analysis of psychological stimuli, but the only way to relay that to a 30s audience is by making him obsessively administer physical examinations). Claire Trevor, who gets short shrift to the two stars, actually puts in an excellent performance as their fence. At the end of the day, this is a pretty odd duck. Robinson and Bogart are at home in a WB crime film, but Clitterhouse has a vein of situational comedy that they don't quite seem suited to. I can't help but wonder what might happen in an alternate universe where this film was made a few decades later, and not by WB, who were reaching a bit beyond their usual fare, but by Ealing Studios, who loved stuff like this. The title character could be Alec Guinness, who could probably just reuse his wardrobe from The Man in the White Suit; Rocks Valentine could be Peter Sellers perhaps, and Jo Keller could be, well, still played by Claire Trevor, as far as I'm concerned. Not that this film is bad as it is, mind, but it's reminiscent of a different kind of crime-caper film. See also: IMDB, Wikipedia. post comment

Seventeen: A Tale of Youth and Summer Time and the Baxter Family..., by Booth Tarkington [03 Jun 2009|10:32pm] [ music | Moxy Früvous, "B.J. Don't Cry [live]" ] I remember being seventeen. It was actually pretty good for me, which is not to say I wasn't a bit of an ass. Who isn't, really? Tarkington's opus is a little slice of the life of a seventeen-year-old boy in a semi-rural community in the early twentieth century. The displacement in time and place means things were a bit different, most jarringly for a modern audience the casual racism. Leaving that aside though, we have a story whose generalities are fairly universal in capturing adolescence. The central character is ridiculed pretty obtrusively in the story, which is admittedly hard not to do, but it's a bit of a cheap shot. Anyone can make youthful infatuation seem ridiculous (it usually does it without authorial help, here in the real world). Make the onject of that infatuation a simpering idiot, and the paramours callow and self-centered, and, well, that's where it turns into cheap shots, really. This sort of silly summer romance would be an impressive feat if Tarkington had tried to make it romantic, or even respectable, but playing up its absurdity isn't much of an accomplishment. That having been said, Seventeen has strengths in setting and voice. The characters have distinctive attitudes and voices, even if a little too much use is made of accent. And it also captures effectively its time and place, giving a pretty solid picture of a life which, honestly, doesn't resemble much of anything I know about. See also: Project Gutenberg e-text, Wikipedia. post comment

Eskalofrío [15 May 2009|11:33pm] [ music | Orgone, "Soul Strut" ] I allowed myself to be suckered into watching this one by a tenuous Pan's Labyrinth connection which seduced me into expecting something deeper than it was. The connection is in the production designer, and we can give credit where credit's due: the sets are effectively spooky when they need to be, and effectively stark when they need to be. But the actual plot was something of a disappointment. This may be an incompatibility of preference: I like mysteries, in which at the end the resolution ties together all those bewildering loose ends, but this is a thriller, which means that the resolution can be completely out of left field. The story somewhat lost me after it veered beyond the persecution of the obvious suspect. So I'll give this one props for its visual design, which is indeed the only connection it had really drawign me in, but not much else. People who are fans of thrillers might not like it either; the part I preferred, the languid first half, might not be to their taste. See also: IMDB. post comment

Csak szex és más semmi [15 May 2009|11:07pm] [ music | Lettuce, "Need to Understand" ] Csak szex is as fun as it is predictable. It's a romantic-comedy-cum-sex-farce with all that entails. It doesn't exactly transcend but it shines reasonably well, getting some pretty good situational comedy into its obvious path from point A to point B. There's an interesting aspect of the casting though, which distracted me from the film's other merits. The lead actor is Csányi Sándor, who I guess has a real and thriving career in Hungary, but who is most well known outside Hungary for his leading role in Kontroll. So every time he was onscreen, I couldn't help but think of him as Bulcsú. Apparently other people had the same problem, since they threw us a bit of a bone by having BulcsúTamás getting hassled in the metro by Nagy Zsolt — who also played one of Bulcsú's crew members. Cute. Why am I focusing so colsely on an offhand 2-minute Hungarian in-joke, you might ask? Possibly because there's not much else here. This was an entertaining film but not exactly an envelope-pushing one. It did what it did quite well, and the time I spent watching it felt well-spent, but it doesn't exactly stick in your mind. See also: IMDB. post comment

Sense and Sensibility [15 May 2009|10:48pm] [ music | Baker Brothers, "Piece of Mind" ] It surprises me, to be honest, that people make screen adaptations of, or indeed even read, Sense and Sensibility. One can see in its construction that it's in large part a dry run for Pride and Prejudice, which seems in many ways both a more solidly constructed and more cinematic work. But Austen, like Shakespeare, has a limited canon people keep returning to, and for better or for worse S&S is her third most well-known book. So, on to this particular adaptation. There's much that it does well. It has excellent sets, shot on location and capturing both the beauty and the savagery of Devonshire. It's a TV miniseries, so it has plenty of time to tell the polt without doing short shrift uch of anywhere. It's actually mostly excellent, but it's brought down a bit by the acting. There's very little passion in evidence, whichi is especially destructive to the characters or Marianne and Colonel Brandon, since their story arcs pretty much require them to be passionate. This is a pretty major flaw, but I'm loathe to condemn this adaptation out of hand for it. It's so very beautiful, and hews well to the story, and both of those count for something. See also: IMDB, Wikipedia. post comment

N・H・Kにようこそ/Welcome to the NHK, episodes 1–4 [10 May 2009|09:58pm] I'd heard good things about Welcome to the NHK. Not nearly good enough, really. It's a brilliant black comedy shot through with interesting dramatic elements. Satou and Yamazaki come across as fairly sympathetic, which is already a feat since they're really not terribly attractive human beings, and their hopeless fumbling through life is actually quite keenly tragicomic. It seems like they should be not only repulsive but also inaccessible, what with their disorders falling into categories not really common in America: namely, hikikomori and otaku. But they're drawn with enough life and character that even for people to whom these are a bit remote, their social awkwardness and paranoia provide reasonable handles on the character. Misaki's somewhat more cipheric, but her character, which I imagine is expanded upon later in the series, is surely supposed to be a bit enigmatic at this point. So we have a sad story about the awful life and foibles of two losers. it's also howlingly funny. Not funny in the usual post-Dumb and Dumber style of a lot of American comedy, althoguh it plays on the same basic framework, because I think it hits closer to home (at least for me). Mental illness is not generally funny and most authors tread a thin line trying to make it so. Here it really works, and I couldn't say why. Apropos of technical details, it's generally pretty well-animated and stylistically consistent. The voices sound good even in the English dub, particularly Misaki. And, since this may be the area of discussion this best fits into, it's worth noting that the closing animation is the second most disturbing credits roll I've seen on anime (incidentally, the characters in this appear in the anime itself too, although I'm still hazy on their narrative function). See also: IMDB, Wikipedia, Anime News Network. post comment

Death Note/デスノート [25 Apr 2009|09:12am] I've seen much of the anime, and haven't read the manga, which may color my perception of this a bit. This is, first and foremost, an incomplete story: it ends at a convenient dividing point, but doesn't take too much time to clean up loose threads. The choices made for the film adaptation were largely appropriate: it didn't feel like anything necessary was left out, and even the new material (e.g. everything having to do with Shiori) fit in fairly organically. The only kludge is that we see more scenes than we need of Misa before she becomes a significant character, which from a pacing and plot viewpoint is a bit dubious. But in terms of plot adaptation, it was a good job. Now, what of the actual performances? I didn't even consider the dub, since dubbing of live action makes my brain explode, but I got an excellent feel from most of the principal characters: Light and Ryuk both fit their personalities well, and L's unsettling oddities are well-reproduced and conveyed in his flat line delivery. The only major character who came across as unmemorable was Ray, but his deficiencies are more than made up for by a stellar role in Naomi. I guess the only real disappointment I have with this is that it stops midway through the story. The end of this movie is a break in the narrative, but it's not a tidy package. We have plot-threads all over the place, but, then, since the final scene is essentially a plea to watch the sequel, I might well say that's intentional if a bit annoying. See also: IMDB, Wikipedia. post comment

Iron Man [17 Apr 2009|09:12pm] This is one comic franchise I was neve much into, so one thing you'll be spared is comparisons to the original property. I know that Iron Man is Tony Stark, heard of Stark Industries, had a major character-development arc involving alcoholism, and that his suit is actually an outgrowth of his pacemaker. All of that except the alcoholism is conspicuously present here, so as far as my ignorant viewpoint is concerned, we've checked off the "faithfulness" tag and never have to return to it. A more useful question at this point is: how good is Iron Man, either as a satisfying film or as a representation of superheroes on the big screen? This film makes a pretty good argument that the two are mutually incompatible, because this is actually a pretty good film except for the faily incidental bits involving Iron Man doing actual superheroic things. I don't know what it is about action movies these days, or maybe it's just me these days, but I find the actual action scenes muddled rather than exciting, for the most part. The film as a whole stands up. Robert Downey, Jr. does an awfully good job in his role, managing to be simultaneously believably charismatic, unbelievably crass, and conscientious enough to be sympathetic. The person-to-person interactions work, and largely redeem the fairly silly and thin betrayal plot. The parts of the betrayal that fit into the whole business-and-morality theme (e.g. the continued arms supplies to known terrorists, and Stane's resistence to shutting down large parts of the company) work well, and it's perhaps because they work well that the whole Evil Iron Man Suit bit doesn't actually work. There's an unhappy non-connection between the concept of a corrupt executive obsessed with maintaning and growing the company, and a dude who actually builds and uses a supersuit (this has been a problem in many depictions of Lex Luthor, too). Unfortunately, that killed the character, and most of what was left of the movie, from my point of view. But, still, it's very good, and the superheroic framing works, even if the scenes of actual superheroicness don't. See also: IMDB, Wikipedia. post comment

Unsuk Chin's Alice in Wonderland [05 Apr 2009|11:29pm] [ music | Bachman-Turner Overdrive, "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" ] Unsuk Chin's Alice in Wonderland, which I saw on DVD, is one big kettle of weird. The idea of an opera based on Alice in Wonderland intrigued me, so I got it throguh Netflix despite trepidations abotu modern opera. My trepidations were, it seems, well-founded, since it didn't do much for me. I admit this may be as much a problem with me as with the opera: I dislike both soprano-heavy performances and (and this one is completely irrational) operas in English. I also rather disliked the liberties taken with the source material: I expect some, but it seemed to fundamentally miss the sense of whimsy in the original work, substituting instead a histrionic fervor full of odd, anachronistic references to Aldous Huxley and ovarian cancer. Most of the odd stage effects and the focus on masks seemed unnecessary and offputting to me, but I'll give credit for effective representation of Alice's size chages. There were parts that definitely worked: I was impressed that they included both versions of the Mouse's Tale, even if I didn't much like the music they were set to, and I found the bassoon solo for the caterpillar pretty fitting. But by and large they were offset by adventurous choices which just didn't work in my opinion. See also: Wikipedia. post comment

Niñas Mal [05 Apr 2009|11:09pm] [ music | Bob Seger, "Turn the Page" ] Niñas Mal is proof of something I should probably already know. Being foreign, or even being labeled with a complimentarily quirky adjective in the Netflix summary, does not guarantee that a movie is actually particularly original. We have a collection of girls, one from each cliche type, and a headmistress whom the lead will of course discover is not so very much unlike her. They all learn to love and respect each other. There are laughs, but few amusements which persist beyond the moment. The best parts are reformatory-camp humor reminiscent of "But I'm a Cheerleader!", which is a much better movie, largely for being less timid and more willing to offend. See also: IMDB. post comment

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne [31 Mar 2009|10:51pm] [ music | The Predators, "My Line" ] Tristram Shandy is one of those classic comic novels, and I'm rather fond of period-specific comedy, so I figured I might like it. Unfortunately, it's comic in ways which do not, perhaps, translate to its advantage in the eyes of a 20th-century reader, or at least this particular 20th-century reader. Its problems are perhaps chiefly those of obscurity: a lot of the humor derives from topics of culture or contemporary conceptions of science that an educated reader of the time would find mercilessly lampooned, but which fall flat today. A more conspicuous problem is how much of the humor derives from the central conceit of the novel never actually progressing due to its many diversions. This can't help but make the whole book seem like a grim slog, with no rewards along the way. This might have been considerably mitigated back when the incidental humor was more topical. Then again, the problem here might be me. Evidently other readers, even readers in the last couple decades, have enjoyed the book, so I might be too hard on the ability of its comic value to age. See also: Wikipedia. post comment

The Last Mimzy [19 Mar 2009|11:01pm] The Last Mimzy is an odd little story walking a thin line between charming and unsettling. I'm not sure it was supposed to be unsettling, but the character of Emma becomes creepy pretty quickly. As a fun speculative-fiction "kids discover awesome stuff their parents don't understand" story it mostly works, even with Emma being far too weird. It's got polish which makes it work: Noah is well-characterized and well-acted, and the effects are indeed impressive without ever seeming gratuitous. The ending makes no particular sense, but it's trying to shoehorn in a message which wasn't really part of the story up to that point. The only aspect of the story which doesn't work for me is the damn federal agents, who, as is far too often the case with stories like this, are disbelieving and distrusting to a point transcending verisimillitude. Yes, we are all used to the government not believing our crazy stories, but after you've pixelated your face and levitated things, I would imagine even the most cynical FBI operative would be listening to what you say and taking it seriously. See also: IMDB, Wikipedia. post comment

Oversexed Rugsuckers from Mars [15 Mar 2009|10:51pm] Sometimes I put something in my Netflix queue just for the hell of it, even though it seems like it'll be dreadful. The random-select on occasion works for me and delivers something awesome, but more often I get a horrible pile of crap like Oversexed Rugsuckers from Mars. Yes, Rugsuckers is, alas, a terrible movie. Unredeemedly terrible, even: it's not like a Troma or Ed Wood film which is fascinating in its appalling badness: rather, Rugsuckers channels a pure sophomoric essence which staggers between unfunny gags and cardboard characters. The premise in the hands of a more competent scriptwriter might have shown a certain comic potential, but it's buried here under layers of absolutely stale (and, quite frankly, unpleasant) sex-antics. See also: IMDB. post comment

寝ずの番/Wakeful Nights [15 Mar 2009|09:38pm] Much has been made, by me and others, of the many ways the Japanese are weird about sex (I humbly submit that Americans are also weird about sex, in ways which happen to be orthogonal to the way the Japanese are weird about sex, and that we lack perspective on the whole thing). Wakeful Nights, on the face of it, may seem to further this thesis: after all, it's full of sex-driven humor, and it's undeniably Japanese, but it seems to have a lot healthier an attitude than most Japanese sex-farces. It's unabashedly bawdy and has a hell of a lot of fun with it, almost never straying into creepy territory (the few times it does immediately become so audacious that it's clear they're supposed to be way over the line. Watching Japanese media (chiefly anime) is always a bit weird because while it delights in all sorts of sexual innuendo and play, it always seems to be tied up with shame. So this was a welcome change. Plotwise it's not much, but it's really supposed to be somewhat vignette-style. The actual cultural context here is interesting too, since the framing device for the whole comic aspect is that all of the characters are practitioners of rakugo, a comic-monologue style which I basically knew nothing about. I still know little, which means some of the jokes probably went over my head, particularly since it's a wordplay-heavy medium, but there was enough entertainment here even for an ignorant foreigner like me. See also: IMDB. post comment

Oppenheimer, episodes 1–3 [15 Mar 2009|09:22pm] J. Robert Oppenheimer had a pretty eventful life, and I can dig it. So when I heard about a BBC miniseries featuring Sam Waterston, I figured it had to be pretty good. This series, alas, is not all that good, or at least not at the start. It moves slowly, sometimes painfully so, and the first episode is taken up with mindbogglingly dull details of Oppenheimer's academic work at Caltech and association with left-wingers. In the second episode it starts to pick up pace but even so doesn't really seem to hit its stride, and the actors aren't given much to work with to make it exciting, which is a disappointment. Maybe if there were less Caltech and more Los Alamos, it would've pulled me in quicker. See also: IMDB, Wikipedia. post comment

Hogfather [04 Feb 2009|11:22pm] Man. Now I know how people who haven't read the cult-favorite books that indifferent movies are based on feel. This was actually a miniseries, not a movie, so it runs upwards of 3 hours. The overall experience is kinda indifferent. I perhaps ought to mention right now that I've only read a very few Pratchett stories. I have a feeling they work better as books than as movies (for much the same reason that Douglas Adams's stories didn't work so well on the screen: it's the knack for description, not the things being described, where the comic genius shines). This film managed to simultaneously drag and feel rushed, with overemphasis on weird secondary plots. There are an awful lot of shots of nothing at all happening at Unseen University and at the Tooth Fairy's palace. I get a vague impression a lot of this was included chiefly to satisfy Pratchett fans rather than produce an engrossing story. The plot and its vagaries nowithstanding, there are some good things to be said about this movie. The casting and scenery is mostly spot on, even if the former's pretty hammy. The effects are moderately imaginative, and it's rich from a cinematographic standpoint. It spares no expense in bringing Pratchett's vision to life, but unfortunately "life" isn't what makes Pratchett's particularl brand of something work. See also: IMDB, Wikipedia. post comment

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