July 20, 2007

It's not sad sobbing!

Sometimes it's fun to pop in a fluffy comedy and mindlessly crunch on some popcorn whose chemicals probably cause an unfortunately named condition or eat a pint of ice cream or whatever (both), I mean whatever. That was sort of the idea behind watching Because I Said So. Fluff is nice in many forms — pillows, marshmallow, clouds... All nice things! (Hm. All white things...)

This is possibly the worst movie I've ever seen.

Ok, so I haven't seen a lot of bad movies. Challenging my movie-watching buddy to name a worser movie came up with Spiderman 3, I think it was. Oh, but this was horrible. But not in the good way where it's fun to make fun of the horribleness or even go with it and embrace the horribleness. The possibility of that petered out after about 20 minutes. Even the ridiculous parts sucked. It was like the dementors in Harry Potter who take away all the joy and happiness in your life.

But considering just how much this scene about the korean spa/massage place was super stupid (the English translations for the spa ladies don't match up in any way. One says like "Chuh, crazy lady" and the subtitle is like three lines long. What's the deal??? It's not even funny.) made me think how this might have been a successful "culturally-aware" movie about a korean family of mom and daughters. Take away the sex and underwear talk (substitute with issues of dieting and skin), the romantic pairing with Reverend Camden, the internet, and all that cake-baking and singing and dancing, and you've got yourself a monstrous construction of a korean mother who knows nothing but to hover and who wants to get her daughter married to a rich man, no matter the costs. Then the plot and the characters could have some sort of cohesion.

It could be like a comedy with serious undertones. Culture clash! Who will win! Who will die! Who will she marry? Dun dun dun!!

This movie makes me angry.

Posted by janet at 12:37 PM | Comments (0)

July 20, 2006

The Motel extends its stay in NY

The Motel plays July 21-25 at the ImaginAsian Theater before it's off to like, LA, and Pasadena July 28.

Previous related entries:
I wanna be happy! too
The Motel

Posted by janet at 2:47 PM | Comments (0)

July 10, 2006

I wanna be happy! too

Okay, so there's only two days left for New Yorkers to see The Motel. Hopefully this does really well, and then before you know it, there will be another asian-am. villain with maybe one line on the big screen's next comic book hero flick next to Kal Penn. Presto, progress!

But really, I'm glad that The Motel was good, because I was shilling for it only after reading a bit about it and watching the trailer. So, as my friend told me this weekend after showing me her newly purchased boots, I have a good eye! This movie works, whether you go casual or dressy!

So hooray to my peeps (helloooo Koreans!) and all that good stuff. The story isn't this narrow little experience of an awkward Chinese-American kid going through puberty, splashed in red and gold with squiggly dragons and demure engrish-speaking geishas in a restaurant where it rains fortune cookies. Since the characters are drawn with care and depth, they could have been any race and with a few tweaks, the film would have worked just as well. Or, as director Michael Kang is Korean, he could have very easily chosen to usurp the loose basis of the novel Waylaid to turn the family Korean too. In fact, what was nice was that everybody wasn't all one ethnicity, which differs, obviously, from most other times you see asian actors on the screen, in movies from other countries, or as 'tokens', or in works focusing on a particular ethnic community. Here, the characters who are thrown together are not just eclectic in type, but in roots as well. And they just want to be happy.

Kang draws great acting out of the kids, even in rather uncomfortable puberty stuff, and Jade Wu is spectacular in her portrayal of Ernest's strict mother. There is this wonderfully poignant silent moment which concludes the movie between her and Ernest, and I thought this ending was great, even though a few people I know felt that it was really abrupt. But I felt that the story had finished its gentle arc, addressed a whole lot of stuff in less than 90 minutes without it seeming like a whole lot of stuff, and that a sort of understanding or realization grows out of a silent shared moment seems different and wonderful.

The Motel also goes to LA July 28th. Support this hilarious and honest independent movie, and my next post will not be about this movie. It will be about food.

Posted by janet at 12:13 PM | Comments (2)

June 28, 2006

the motel - review

The Motel got a great review in the Times. Yay!

Posted by janet at 1:29 PM | Comments (1)

June 27, 2006

The Motel

The Motel (not a cartoon) is opening at Film Forum for only two weeks in its theatrical premiere. YOU can decide the fate of this movie! Go watch it so that your cousin in Kansas can maybe see it. And then your cousin won't have to go rummaging around the garbage to look for ruby red slippers to escape the doldrums that is the plains of Kansas. Okay. I don't know anything about Kansas. No offense, Fair Square State!

What is The Motel about? Well, funny you should ask and that I should have this cut and paste function on my computer:

"Thirteen-year-old Ernest Chin lives and works at a sleazy hourly-rate motel on a strip of desolate suburban bi-way. Misunderstood by his family and blindly careening into puberty, Ernest befriends Sam Kim, a self-destructive yet charismatic Korean American man who has checked in. Sam teaches the fatherless boy all the rites of manhood."

The movie is directed by Michael Kang, who says the movie is rooted in a fascination for rites of passage in America and counts as influences for this work the movies My Life as a Dog and the great 400 Blows, and also stars Sung Kang who was in Better Luck Tomorrow. The Motel won a bunch of awards including special prizes from Sundance.

More info about the movie at its site.

Watch the trailer and go watch the movie. You will laugh.

Posted by janet at 10:34 AM | Comments (0)

May 19, 2006

Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse

A couple days ago, I got to one of my lonely Netflix dvd's (sometimes they can sit cold and alone, waiting by the dvd player with naught but a paper sleeve for warmth, for up to a month, cancelling out all economic sense) and watched Agnès Varda's documentary Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse (in the US, The Gleaners and I). Now, I suppose, as with nonfiction books, I don't delve into the documentaries so much. I'm not sure what it is, perhaps the series of heads talking at you, the slightly off-putting feeling that you should be learning something interesting, like about bears or conspiracies or bear conspiracies. Or maybe I find that for whatever reason, the story, because real life is a story too, both overarching or individually per character, often fades away. Though the last couple documentaries I've seen, I've enjoyed. Soooo I dunno.

Glaneurs, though, was sort of touching. It's still, for the most part, a bunch of people talking to a camera, but there's a real personal quality to it, maybe because it's filmed with a handheld digital camera or that we're sort of following Varda on a road trip of sorts and witnessing her personal explorations of aging along with the glaneurs, that bring it more within an emotion.

The project was sparked by an interest in glaneurs, or in English, gleaners. In older times, they harvested stuff, like the painting above. Gleaners pick things off the ground mostly; there's a different term for those who pick off the trees, like fruits. Varda makes a connection between these glaneurs and the ones today – those who glean from the streets in the city, from the garbage or the debris at the end of the day of a food market, and in the country, the fields after the machines harvest crops. A lot of perfectly good produce lies to rot in fields either because they don't meet 'industry'/goldilocks standards (too big, too small, whatever) or just because it's too expensive to hire people to go after the machines.

These gleaners collect food for different reasons; sometimes even fun, some to protest the incredible waste of food, some simply because it's free. Varda gleans some potatoes that look like hearts and takes fondly to them. That she puts herself into the film and yet lets the characters she talks to completely have their own space provides for a good mix. The gleaners are not all picking up food; others are collecting things to make art or use in their homes or what have you. And Varda (the "Glaneuse" of the title) is a gleaner too. She gleans to make her films; it's an interesting comparison, the whole project mainly going back to the idea that somebody's trash really is somebody else's treasure.

I think this interview gets at why I enjoyed Glaneurs, because I feel like I'm being boring and blah and nonexpressive, like watery lettuce. Varda sees films as "cine-writing," putting together the whole package of a work, and this is evident in Glaneurs. I've seen and enjoyed her Cleo 5 à 7 but I think I'm going to queue up some more of her stuff and maybe be a bit more careful about food-buying and throwing out habits.

Posted by janet at 3:25 PM | Comments (0)

September 30, 2005

Call of the haters

I've been meaning to update about Thumbsucker but now it's been over two weeks since I saw the movie and my memory has gone all fuzzy and gray like bread mold. Yes, my brain is one big loaf of bread, no wonder, ready to be disposed of within a week, with no hope of saving by the graces of ginko.

Well, first there was the lag time. I have this bad habit of taking a really long time to digest (all this language of food!) a work. And if I hit the writing at the right time, while the proverbial iron is looking for a/c, I get that balance between actually remembering thoughts and feelings 'of the moment' and integrating that with realizations or useful comparisons to other works or larger pictures. Needless to say, I always arrive when the iron's all icy with unwelcoming, the kind of cold that is: "I've been sitting here waiting and dinner's ruined and the kids are hungry and you come in all devoid of memory and feeling and insight. You're sleeping on the couch tonight."

Secondly, I got stuck on a rather moldy subject indeed – hipsters. Why? Why spend time on this? ...a word that is ammunition enough to make certain people run away in the opposite direction towards the Gap. In the right hands, the reaction is something funny, enjoyable, recognizing both the ridiculosity of hipsterdom and paying attention to it. Otherwise, there is this mirror upon mirrors of hating on supposed haters, the term losing whatever small amount of meaning it had in the first place (perhaps none) and failing to describe either or both artists and their work.

I'd been familiar with the term in the realm of clothes, music, ipods, but not really in terms of movies until more recently. I guess there were always those few Wes Anderson movies, Lost in Translation, or anything with Bill Murray, and Donnie Darko (which I have never seen) that get bounced around in "indie" or "hipster" vocabulary courts. Maybe I've just never paid attention to this reaction before and I'm seeing more movies or maybe it's something that was single-handedly born of Zach Braff and Garden State and Natalie Portman freaking out to the Shins.

But now terms like quirky, hipster, indie, emo, arty are sprinkled on just about anything. And then hated upon by the sprinklers. The culprit for this topical foray was not only the reviews of Thumbsucker that almost without fail mentioned one of the above terms, it was this thread. "INDIE TRENDFEST"!!!! it blares.

The more I read, the more I got confused at exactly what was being argued, what was being hated. (Maybe it's that I fundamentally don't understand the hater attitude. Such strong, all-encompassing, all-knowing feelings!!!) There was being mad at being "indie"/purposefully and mad at being "not indie enough"/original. Perhaps I became frustrated with the real lack of concreteness of what it means to be "indie" and the treatment by commenters that it was. I mean the term gets especially mixed up in a field where one needs an incredible amount of money (ring the commercial bell!) to get anything of feature-length done and distributed and then there's that long trip from birth of script to movie theater. It's harder to be trendy when it takes years to step out the door.

(Plus I got riled up by things like spelling errors. Lack of research. Earnest references to "The OC", spelling errors. I am SO cool.)

And, I found it strange that people take issue with yet-anothers. "I'm sick of yet another..." like yet-anothers is a contagious disease, often in response to plots and settings. There are three basic settings: city, country, suburbia. Soooooo, I mean, really, is it ALL THAT STRANGE to have "yet another" movie that takes place in suburbia? I mean, don't some people live in suburbia?? Don't people feel lonely? Don't adolescents feel alienated? Don't they, and everybody else, and Pink (what happened to her?) feel misunderstood?? Oh no, just another movie about somebody being unhappy at a certain point in their lives and how those around them react! Oh no HOW CLICHÉ!!!!

Isn't the art in narrative forms in how they are told?

Now, if the negativity stemmed from something like, "Oh no not another white soul-searching protagonist male" then I'd be all, you go girl, even if you're a boy. I could understand that argument a little more. I don't start out discussing American movies with "God, I'm so sick of white people in movies. It's so CLICHÉ." because in most cases, in discussing the movie itself, as a work, it's useless commentary.

What's weird is that some of these really disdainful reactions arise out of people who haven't even seen the movie and that these terms are bandied uselessly about by reviewers. But then, there's always marketing to say hello to your preconceived notions, as well as the practice of hating by genre, or saying something like, I'm so sick of label-label-label kind of thing but I decided to give it a chance and watch it and it surprised me and I sorta liked it and so at least it's the best of it's label-label-labelBOX.

Marketing is a trickster! I took a look at the movie poster and I kinda went, "Uh-oh," the sorta "quirky" (UNAVOIDABLE!) hipster alarm bell ringing, the joyous strains of Polyphonic Spree wailing, "You are sooooooooo innddiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeee!!!!! Love it! Accept it!" And I begin to think in boxes too. It's human. Though we recoil against them, we like boxes. Hats like boxes. But ... most of all, we like boxes, with things inside. Which you take outside of them. Like Gifts. And puppies.

Summary of too-long-entry: Stop using useless labels to justify or explain why you like or don't like a movie. I guess it is useful for other things, but it does not help me. Please send me gifts. Not necessarily puppies.

And yes, I will talk about the actual movie. This was all a very bad tangent-dream, life is but a.

Posted by janet at 11:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 1, 2005

junebug

Watched Phil Morrison's Junebug last week. As my roommate referred to it after I recommended it, "Oh, that South thing movie?"

It's an eloquent household here folks. We hold competitions. The awkwardly worded loser takes out the smelly garbage.

Anyhow, yes it's about the south in that it's set in North Carolina (filmed in Winston-Salem). I'm sorta glad that the film was a small gem in my movie tiara. Oh, you know you want a tiara too, even you boyz. Even though I could hardly call going to college in Durham, NC getting the whole or real sense of that state, or the South for that matter, like some, I have that peculiar sort of pride in those places you bestow the title of home. And Junebug is basically about home – and the inertia, rivalry, hopes, gaps found in families. It's a very quiet film, done with such fine acting of complex, dimensional characters and understated humor, treating the old, tired American North-South (sigh, yes, blue-red) opposition with subtlety that I really do hope it gets a wider release than it seems to have now.

The story: Madeleine is trying to get an outsider artist from rural North Carolina to sign up for her gallery in Chicago. George, her husband, happens to have grown up near by so they decide to take the trip and Madeleine will meet George's family for the first time, since they got married right-hot-quick, faster than cracked out bunnies. Madeleine is urban, sophisticated, tall, thin, smart – if she had been cattier and didn't have a British accent, she would've fit right in with the sex and the city girls. And so, the play begins when she meets the in-laws and co.

The whole outsider art aspect works in a broader sense as well, which is kind of neat. Neat as in neat-o! I like! and Neat, a bit purposeful, doilies straight, coffee-table dusted, which isn't necessarily a fault. Not only is Madeleine an outsider into this family, every character is an outsider, alone in some sense. It's seldom that these family members get through to each other or to the heart of matters, while they very obviously love each other. And that is what is so heart-breaking and heart-warming at the same time. You wonder whether this family will crumble from the cracks after the film finishes, or will keep on, keep on, in spite of everything - that thin line where a lot of families teeter.

So this isn't just a movie about the South Thing! These people in North Carolina are real people, kinda like us and our own. Gah, it sounds so simplistic that way, but Morrison succeeds so well in not creating caricatures as well as not beating us over the head with a barbequed pork chop that we.are.just.like.them! Mmmm mesquite! We are and we aren't. They each have good and bad characteristics, are not entirely likable, and one can't really identify with a single person all the way through the piece. It almost doesn't matter Where ths movie is taking place. Complexity, what a lightbulb of an approach! So basically I took two paragraphs to say that the characters and relationships are believable and consistent, shown through third-person multiple views.

Amy Adams is SO great in the role of Ashley that you can't help your heart from breaking open from your rib cage and rushing out to her. She is the pregnant wife of Johnny, George's younger, sullen brother w/pent-up anger/frustration/issues, and she is open, wise, excitable, wild as a child in demeanor, and the only one to welcome Madeleine, treating her like a diva with open admiration, bombarding her with questions and doing her nails cinnamon fizz. She too has her faults and how much puppy energy can one handle at once? But still, Ashley is so naturally kind and sincere and bright, not a shred of dour irony about her, and that all sounds so ridiculously unreal and gag gag, but look, there's my heart, still running on it's ventricley legs out to her, with not a glance back at dour sour me.

Ashley possesses a faith and practices the kind of Christian love that I imagine is our greatest capacity as humans no matter what the religion is called, a characteristic of belief to be taken not at all as any sort of weakness or stupidity. Ashley holds that family together. I liked this treatment of religion here, not extreme, or overblown, or tongue stuck out at, as in that rather hilarious (to me) scene in I Heart Huckabees at the dinnertable with the Sudanese guy and his adopted family.

I could see how some people would think this movie was boring but boo on them. It's slowish, though with a good pace and minimalistic sound (and orig. soundtrack by yo la tengo!). There are shots of empty rooms of the house which seem to be waiting for something and landscapes, giving us a sense of place. There is a good couple minutes of the dad setting up the air mattress. All you can hear is the air hissing and the air mattress sort of coming alive, and it's all mildly humorous. Because, really, air mattresses are kind of funny when you think about them. There were several laugh out loud moments and they usually involved Ashley. And there was this one scene which still makes me giggle. Madeleine has told her mother-in-law, Peg, the name of the kooky outsider artist, David Wark. Except it comes out sort of like "Walk" due to the British accent. Peg sort of looks at her questioningly and repeats, rolling "Waawwolk?" around. Well there I go again making funny things unfunny.

The underdevelopment of George's character, namely, is frustrating and so is the played up eccentricity of Wark. Picking small bones. They're the remnants of my ribcage.

At one point, Ashley tells Johnny after one of his angry episodes: "God loves you just the way you are, but too much to let you stay that way." The audience at the Angelika sort of burst out in gentle laughter; I thought it was the most poignant thing out of the whole movie. What a struggle we have a-foot here; we are who we are, but we hope to change for the better.

Trailer and Official Site

Interview with Phil Morrison on WNYC.

Posted by janet at 1:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 4, 2005

me and you and everyone we know - aka Longest Entry Ever!

Speeeaaking of Sleater-Kinney, women beep beep boop Portland beep beep boop Kill Rock Stars beep Art boop dumdumdoo Video beep beep .... Happy Miranda July!!!!!

The "beep beep boops" are the joyous electro-chorus equivalent of what my middle school put on banners in block letters: "MAKE THE CONNECTION!" So instead of seeing the interception between say, algebra, and making snickerdoodles in home ec, I guide you from a band to a lady of many hats, which includes performance-artist-hat, and maker-of-video-for-sleater-kinney-hat, aaaaaaand maybe you've forgotten by now that I haven't updated in many many days. (Oh my poor five readers. I'm very sorry. I do apologize.)

ANYWAYS, last week I checked out the new IFC Center, née the Waverly Theater. We sat on foamish seats the purple color of the most comfortable, unthreatening Barney. I also felt like I was in a little spaceship. Cool!!! Next destination: Movie!

We saw Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We know. For the most part, I lapped up its quirky sensibilities and carefully sunny colors, deemed it quite enjoyable and warmly funny, and sort of floated out of the theatre in a very good mood.

The movie's eclectic bunch of characters move in and out of each other's lives and we get to watch as July sort of puts the puzzle pieces together of this oddball community so that the narrative threads run parallel, interweave, meander, and sputter through the different sorts of relationships and quirks of, well, the title – me and you and everyone we know.

For the most part, July builds her characters by showing us their oddities and innocence. Sometimes this can all run on the forced, precious side, but on the whole, her hand treats her characters and their unmoored states with a gentle lightness that all results in something surprisingly affecting.

The movie, with its inevitable tangential comparisons to Sideways and Garden State, got me thinking on its varied receptions because after recognizing that I rather liked the movie quite a lot, I immediately felt an ugly little seed of guilt and then realized, oh no! Not only am I susceptible to things deemed "indie" (whatever that means... WHAT DOES IT MEAN????), I'm susceptible to its judgmental, joyless backlash!

My ridiculous train of thought kinda went like: I liked this! But it's just cuz it's my sort of movie. Because I identified with the characters? But is that any reason to like a movie? But was it any good? And then ran through all sorts of pitfalls of criticism ending up in that usually useless, boundless question, what is good art?

Armed with Netflix, a film-obsessed friend, and a crop of non-Loews-types movie theaters in NYC, this year marks the first time I realized how GOOD movies can be. I've watched more movies this year than I've ever seen and keep on running up against this sort of cul-de-sac thinking. Yet, at this point of my movie-watching - because I actually haven't seen very many things that I didn't like - I'm still wary of my critical skills and still trying to gauge how and why I react. I'm not sure how much I'm buying into other people's and filmdom's judgments, although those things inevitably get mixed into the bag.

As for Me and You..., some people will love it. Some people will be very put off by it and invoke "twee" which to me is still a new vocabulary word. I fall behind the opinion of A.O. Scott's "I like it very much, and I hope you will, too."

Ah, Merriam-Webster tell me that twee is affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint. I guess I can see that. But whatever "preciousness" "cloying" or "quirkiness" does not have to be a fault, per se, but a style. Without this aspect, this story might have utterly caved in on itself and become something quite different and flat.

July found herself a really talented cast of kids, especially six-year-old Brandon Ratcliff (his entries in the movie movie blog are awesome), and the 'twee-ness' actually applies more to the adults here. I think this might be because any preciousness of adults is a supremely private thing. The little ceremonies or habits that you have for yourself translate quite differently when taken into the public realm. It's the same reason why you don't want to hear howverymuchinlove somebody might be or how happy they are or how weird they are. So maybe we don't see you pushing a pink circle sticker on your dashboard like a reassurance button as Christine does, but maybe we do see you fixing your hair, smoothing it back, when it isn't mussed up, when you are nervous or unsure.

As adults we become almost afraid of being sincere and as kids, you don't have that cautiousness or consciousness even. Kids usually have no qualms about expressing what they want or need. This quality in adults can cause others to either pity or deem one pathetic. Adults deal with tact and Political Correctness, and most especially Thinking of What Others Think of You, which when you think about it, seems so ridiculous and unwieldy, trying to mirror back what you yourself are projecting, inevitably skewed. The art in the movie is that these struggles of wanting are reflected with kindness, with hope, so that the kids aren't the only ones given the chance to grow up.

Different views.

And don't forget grrlpower. "[The level of sexism] is so insidious that you can't even point a finger," says July. "It's like this silent ill that you think isn't affecting you, but then you realize, oh wait—I'm dealing with this every day. Everyone who deals with me is not used to me being a woman. Because of the way the system's set up, and maybe because it's built around men, it's really hard to have relationships or do anything that isn't ego driven. If you want to do anything really differently, you have to change the whole system. I think there's a lot of different ways that it could look." Grr.

Posted by janet at 10:59 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 17, 2005

2046

On Wednesday, thanks to the quick-clicking mouse of my friend, we got to go to a screening of Wong Kar Wai's 2046 at Walter Reade. And Wong Kar Wai was there! *squeal*. He was wearing sunglasses. And my cinematically-inclined friend informed me that Wong says there are two types of people that wear sunglasses all the time. People who are blind. And people whose hearts have been broken.

Sounds ridiculous right? But beautiful. Like his films. Ridiculously beautiful.

2046 is a sort of sequel to In the Mood for Love and continues the thread of love and timing, memories, and secrets, among other riches and vague words. The visuals are gorgeous, multi-stylized, and the film is infused with both melancholy and humor.

This Time Asia article talks about the movie. Though I found its simplistic reductions of certain aspects of the movie (as well as its style of writing) rather irritating, it did remind me of something that irked me a little bit, though Wong's art is too good to make it a major thorn in my side for this particular film. Just filmdom as a whole.

After quoting John Berger - "The camera is a man looking at a woman." - it continues: Movie romance is certainly a snapshot of a beautiful woman suffering. The main function of Chow—played by Leung as a sensitive gigolo whose smirk can mature into a sigh—is to direct our glance to all the fabulous women in the cast. The camera, mainly manned by Christopher Doyle, prowls around the women like a lover in the first flush of passion. Oh shut up. Prowl prowl.

Oh, beauty and all. Yes, these are fabulous, multi-dimensional women. Yes they suffer. You feel all these large romantic sweeping swooping emotions when these suffering women are beautiful, spilling tears on their beautiful faces and making ugly sad raw noises out of their beautiful mouths. This movie has a lot of beautiful women suffering and crying.

I'm not sure I'm making a point. The quote does say it all. The camera is a man looking at a woman. When is the camera a woman? Would this story have worked had the protagonist been a woman and the others men? I don't think so. Is this a useful question to ask? Probably not. Prowl prowl.

Anyways, I've already verged on incoherency, so watch the trailer. It's US release by Sony Pictures Classics is slated for August of 2005.

Somebody summarized the Q&A session held afterwards.

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May 20, 2005

the holy girl

I've noticed that movie audiences in New York, at least for the smaller movies, are quite vocal in expressing their dissatisfaction at anything in particular. They will talk during the previews, remain relatively quiet during the actual movie, and deliver verdicts as soon as the first credit rolls on the screen. Last night, I watched Lucrecia Martel's La Niña Santa (The Holy Girl). I sat down to immediately hear German-accented tones of disgruntlement and then movement to the right, behind me. I am, as you all well know, a gargantuan giantess and in all east Asian countries, banned from sitting in front rows. Don't Germanically gruntle at me! I'm incapable of, how do they say, obstructing your old lady view!

The movie was sort of like when you take shots of tequila and you're feeling fine and then you're feelin' whatever resembling sober and then it starts hitting you, like it has its own time frame and it's not paying any attention to yours. Because while I enjoyed watching the movie itself, following the events unfold, the weaving of threads, I didn't quite appreciate it all until a couple hours later. More than not, I was left taken aback at the abrupt ending (which prompted a "What, are you kidding me?!" response from grumpy old man in back row).

The Holy Girl is about an adolescent girl Amalia on the cusp of discovering and exploring an entire range of things, as most do whilst growing up, namely sexuality and purpose in life, in this case "vocation." She and her best friend Josefina study along with a group of girls about vocation listening for the "call from God" with an instructor who clearly doesn't have a handle on her students' young-wise questions, doubts, and arguments ("If I heard a voice telling me to kill somebody like God told Abraham, I would think it was the Devil."), responding ineffectually with simple declaratives that start with "We must..."

Amalia and her lonely mother and mother's brother live in a hotel which is hosting a conference for ENT doctors. One of the doctors rubs up against Amalia, not knowing who she is, while watching a street performer playing the theremin. Martel covers a rather breathtaking amount of material in such a low-key, invisible hand way, that it's really not apparent from the start, how many things are going on, consciously constructed by her. She manages to give a depth of story and character not just to everybody from Amalia, the doctor, the mother, the uncle, and Josefina but even the smaller roles like the religious instructor, Josefina's family, the hotel workers are given an entirety with just a few words, just a few gestures, just a few notes. She shows glimpses of a wry humor in the everyday actions of the hotelworkers, the no nonsense responses of the characters and takes the time to spend this wonderful little scene where Amalia's mother is dancing by herself, kind of slow, sensual, by oneself deal, being watched by two little kids. One little boy is sort of entranced. And the other is a little girl, also enthralled but paying attention and trying to dance herself. A near ineffectual echo that will grow up, no doubt, to resemble more that grown woman, when she reaps more years.

What I liked most about the movie was the use of sounds and images, how they resound sometimes alone and sometimes play off each other. It really made me think of echoes, how eerie they can be, how they occur when one is isolated, how they can inform and deceive by their quality because they are reflections. Most of the characters exist, wrapped up in their own little worlds, and either don't listen or can't hear. A.O. Scott's review describes it well: "The intense, unexpressed emotions that percolate through Ms. Martel's story of innocence and desire are conveyed, more than in most films, through sounds -- whispered and half-overhead conversations, the murmurings of water in old pipes, the strange auditory signals that float in from the edges of perception. Her visual style is similarly oblique, as she frames her characters through half-opened doors, at odd angles and in asymmetrical close-ups. To a degree that is sometimes disorienting, Ms. Martel explores the mysteries of the senses. They are our instruments for knowing ourselves, each other and the world, but they also mislead us, bringing pain, pleasure and confusion in equal measure."

Posted by janet at 11:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 4, 2005

turtles can fly

I can be one of those cryers at movies. Like not just crying. Weeping, I think is the better fit, my cinderellas. So while I'd been meaning to go watch Hotel Rwanda and get my weep on, it appears my tearducts had other plans, preview of le deluge. Anyhoo, last weekend, watched Turtles Can Fly by an Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi. Set in Kurdistan on the outbreak, if one can call it that, of the war in iraq, the movie focuses almost entirely on children.

The kids' world here isn't anything remotely near frosted cereals or winnie-ther-pooh. They clear land mines for money. I get a papercut or they run out of coffee and it's the end of the world. Among the maimed, the ravaged, the orphans, there is this incredible strength, warmth, humor, pragmatism, anguish. They are children but at the same time they are little adults, which makes their situation all the more heartbreaking -- they shouldn't have to be adults, little or otherwise. Ghobadi's hand appears to stay removed from the film, which doesn't seem manipulated like a chess game with messages that stay tidily in a box. It also includes the most tense scene in a movie I have ever experienced and this heart-breaking girl, Avaz Latif, who portrays the only female character in the film. Clearly a girl, her stature small, her face and eyes sometimes run a million years old. Or at least middle age. Haunting.

If you have a chance to see this movie, go for it. It's worth your money way more than Constantine is. Okay, you can watch Constantine afterwards. Cuz who would we make fun of without Keanu?

trailer (subtitled in french)

AO Scott's review

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February 16, 2005

you're not in this movie

The foxy public demands some moments spent on Ong-Bak, which I saw over the weekend at the movie theater. It was basically insane. Not like "Oh, let's try 2% instead of skim in my coffee today"-insane you sad poor moppets. Insane insane. Like fighting with your legs flaming on fire insane. I know, I know. Plot spoiler! But when you see it, you'll still say in spite of everything, "That man's legs are on fire. And he's still going after that bad guy!" -- maybe in not such awkward, inelegant sentences, but all the same...

The story barely matters; the movie is basically a list out of some brainstorm session for the star, Tony Jaa playing Ting, the good guy, to show off his Muay Thai glory. Muay Thai is a Thai form of martial arts, which uses lots of elbows and knees for maximum ouchies. Supposedly there are no digital effects or wires or anything. I'm not a fan of the genre or anything, but man, thoroughly entertaining wowee after zowee. Here's trailer and an interview.

Also watched Kurosawa's Ikiru (Doomed to Live) and Fellini's La Strada (The Road) which were incredibly deep and affecting. I love allmovie's "mood" descriptions: 'only human' 'in a minor key'. Both films are haunting me yet.

Leave me paralyzed love.

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September 20, 2004

sky captains <3 Huckabee

Watched Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow on Friday and I have to say, it was quite an entertaining movie. People compare it to Indiana Jones and Star Trek and say it falls short, but I don't think these are the same kind of movie. The plot is almost kind of inconsequential. Apocalypse prevented. Romance. But it brings all these different elements together, like the Wizard of Oz, crazy robots, comic books, this really (I thought) cool art deco aesthetic with a twist, everything made from CGI or something computer-y... the actors filmed in front of a blue screen, new york, nice banter/relationship between Gwynnie's character and Jude's (dreamy sigh), Giovanni Ribisi was not annoying but actually awwww. I did that a lot. I gasped, I 'awwwed' -- it's that kind of movie. One of those you see at the theater with your buddies with some smuggled candy.

My boss sometimes calls me "girl reporter" which I have turned into "super-girl reporter." Does this mean I can wear a cool hat like Apple's mom? Sigh. Of course not.

It's the year of Jude, hey! Durrrr. I'm intensely curious to see I <3 Huckabees. The Nudist Buddhist Borderline-Abusive Love-In offers some intriguing glimpses into the making of the movie.

My favorite part of that article is this:

Perhaps Mr. Russell is trying to free his actors to be as outrageous or ridiculous as he is. The script will require the actors to risk embarrassing themselves thoroughly: Isabelle Huppert is to perform a sex scene while covered in mud, Mark Wahlberg must repeatedly punch himself in the face, Jude Law will vomit into his own hands and Naomi Watts will essentially be driven crazy by her own physical beauty.

The scene at hand is a climactic moment in Mr. Law's character's breakdown, requiring the actor to cry and tear at his clothes. After several takes in which Mr. Law says the lines he has memorized, Mr. Russell is now yelling at him with new lines, even as the camera rolls. Mr. Law, exhausted, finally ad-libs a string of expletives, shrieking and beating his fists into the grass. "I am lost in the wilderness!" he cries. In character (or maybe not), Mr. Hoffman and Ms. Tomlin look on in pained sympathy.

Mr. Russell shouts: "Eeeeee! Eeeee! Keep rolling!"

Mr. Hoffman: "We're rolling. What's `Eeeeee'?" There is no response, but Mr. Law keeps emoting.

Ahahahahahahahahahah! Can you just imagine that scene? It's the 'Eeeeee!'s that kill me.

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August 2, 2004

Harold & Kumar

Eheeheehee... Just watched Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle with lots of applause and cheers, especially when they mention New Brunswick. Cuz that's where it was. More cheers for NJ! And asian people! And Doogie Howser!!

The APA community is all going crazy about this movie, I'm sure. But hey, good reason to, no? It's kinda funny that this movie will probably end up getting cited in textbooks and academic papers. Giggle.

Linktastic!!
Angry Asian Man interviews John Cho & Kal Penn.

"It's so funny that this is revolutionary. It may turn out to be a baby revolution, but it's a revolution." Baby revolution

It would've been nice of NYT critic Stephen Holden to have gotten a clue and gotten the characters' ethnicity correct in his review. Though it's kinda telling, seeing how he glosses over, well, everything in the movie, managing to write nothing that wasn't evident from the trailers whilst actually using "muck of perpetual puerility." AO Scott was much more perceptive.

Posted by janet at 1:10 AM

August 1, 2004

the irony of new jersey

So the question many NJ-ans are asking is: why is Garden State playing in only one movie theater in New Jersey? It doesn't make sense!
Ah, but it does. The Jersey sense. * I think I got the black lung pops...* The kind of sense that explains Jersey pride, how swampy, cranberry-boggy, suburban grounds can give rise to a number of interesting artists, and why it is okay to give a bracing slap to anybody who allows "what exit?" to escape his/her naively grinning lips.

I watched GS this past Wednesday in NYC...

It's being advertised in various ads and things as this year's Lost in Translation and grouped immediately with movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It's just that kind of movie. "Artsy" ... "Indie" ... blahblahblah

Sure. A+ for adjectives! Really, I came to this movie with a certain amount of expectation. It's like when I see Crème Brulée on a dessert menu. I love creme brulee, even without all the accents. It's the kind of food that is easily found in a mediocre state, especially in the unsatisfactory forms of crackly sugar, but since it's one of my favorites, I'm bound to eat it. The kind of movie Garden State was advertised to be was like my creme brulees. [end useless metaphor]

So needless to say, I liked it a whole lot. Yummy. Braff would've majorly had to screw up for me not to. Of course there are some weaknesses, as many of the reviews point out; the relationship with the dad was especially disappointing and unfulfilling.

And then I had some problems with Natalie Portman's character, Sam, at first while she was alternately endearing and irritatingly super Quirky. There's this one part, when she shows Zach's character some funky dance... she has consciously made up her mind to do this thing that is quirky and weird, expressly for the purpose of trying to be original. But then again, she's not like that continuously throughout the movie and I think she ends up, thanks to Portman and Braff, showing a depth of character that leads one who might cringe at these outbursts of whimsy to reconsider her character.

There's the sappy ending but it's mitigated by a nice closing shot and ending with a question. There are some great visuals throughout the movie, though I especially loved the scene with the pet funeral in the backyard. You see the autumn leaves all over the plastic tarp in the pool and you hear the sound of the train in the background. Yep -- that's my home. Plastic and noise pollution. And it can be beautiful? All in all, it was a lovely movie, somehow managing sap and melancholy, and it'll be interesting to see what Braff does next...

And that song "Let Go" by Frou Frou? At first I was like, "ew who is this Dido?" but then it got on the obsessive repeat list. quirky!!! slap!

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July 26, 2004

garden state

I'm still so excited about this movie. I hope my high expectations won't be dashed to the ground like the pinata that ran away to no avail. If I were using a mac, I would know how to key in the squiggly above the 'n' -- what's that called? Now I feel ignant. Aaaaanyhoo, yeah, excited! whoooo!

Remember? This movie's descriptive adjectives are everything I want to be. Those four words.

Zach Braff has a blog about it.

And the official site with goodies. Click/read on lots of things to get different clips to magically appear.

Watch this... The part where Howard Dean goes Waaaaaugh crazy is particularly tickling.
And for Teen Girl Squad fans, there's a new ep up at home.
** Okay, I swear there was a new one up yesterday. It was called Decemberween or something like that. You had to click on the upper right hand corner where they're all like, look at all these fun new updated things. And the girls jump into a lion... and... oh...
what happened to it?

Posted by janet at 1:34 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 14, 2004

These are just a couple of my cravings

I want to see Coffee and Cigarettes, which is out today in some places. Black and white, oh how artsy, vignettes mostly of famous people, which include Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, and those White Stripe sibs, sitting around and partaking of aforementioned items. The NYT likes it. And I like anything with coffee in it.

A.O. Scott is A.O.K. Great, now I can't be his friend cuz I just did that. Dammit. Anyhoo, I like his writing. Here's one on the Cannes Film Festival and Pedro Almodovar.

Also looking forward to the release of Garden State (limited release: 30 July), written and directed by Scrubs' Zach Braff (Such great show!), starring himself and Natalie Portman. It premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and is about a guy who is getting over the loss of his mother and trying to cope with life without antidepressents. Dunno why it's 'Garden State' unless living in NJ is like trying to live without pills. Or maybe it just takes place there. Among AMG's 'Tones" for the movie are: Bittersweet, Wry, Literate,and Quirky.

That's everything I want to be. Bittersweet, Wry, Literate, and Quirky.

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March 23, 2004

the spotless mind

I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a couple days ago and was quite taken with it. Go see it. If you know me, it's exactly the kind of movie that I'd like. If you don't know me, go see it anyway. Watch the trailer and clips at the focus features site ... just click on "media."

You can listen to the soundtrack here . Stars for inclusion of Polyphonic Spree and Beck.

Read about the Science of Eternal Sunshine . It's a rather interesting article about the brain and memory stuff in the movie. Mmmm. Neuroscience. Yummy with milk. I keep on running into the mysterious amygdala in my readings. They say its the seat of emotions and fears, to put it generally. It's got a great name. Amygdala. Don't name your kid that though.

And then, I leave you with the only thing that succeeded in making me laugh all day: Australian tries to unravel the mysteries of American foods. Of course, the majority of the list is southern food and beverage. It's hilarious. Give it a taste.

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