The bad sleep well

This is a movie where the story takes center stage. It is the age old tale of a loner taking on corruption entrenched in the system, and the inevitable descent into marginalization this involves ... but nowhere have I seen this story told quite so compellingly.

Suicides, kickbacks, revenge, and in the midst of it all a love that bloomed like a flower in darkness .... you have to shake your head in wonder at the deftness of it all. From the opening scene where a cynical reporter introduces the main players to the train wreck towards the end that had seemed in passing incidental the techniques used to effect the narration never jar. The story is set in Japan in the early fifties. Corruption at the highest levels of government were topical then. Yet Kurosawa makes us feel part of that time and space in an almost intimate way without ever taking away from us our wide eyed shock at how inevitable is the unravelling of a life once the choice is made to walk down the path to obsession. This is Hamlet made relevant stunningly, brilliantly and almost bitterly beautifully. Mifune as usual is nothing short of brilliant, but it is his always laughing friend, his evil father in law, his playboy brother in law, the loyal assistant of his father in law he saves from suicide, his self effacing wife, the other assistant who goes insane that make the characters and their relationships to one another quite so compelling in the movie.

Movie magic

Sometimes a movie comes along that makes everything else a little more lack luster, that much less imaginative ...

Mirror Mask has a decent story, decent acting, but the movie's visuals hmmm decent doesn't even begin to describe it. Miyazaki and Lewis Carroll have between them taken the girl lost in a make believe world to surreal heights ... in Spirited Away and Alice in Wonderland respectively. But to have Gaiman and Dave Mc Kean pull off the same feat is almost unbelievable. Yes, this movie is in the same league in terms of both the stunning visual experience of Miyazaki's spirited away, and in the make it all make sense lunacy of the make believe world of shadows and light that define the two kingdoms in the world our heroine finds herself in ..

I'm sure there are other reviewers waxing ecstastic or panning the movie out there on the wild wild web. Allow me to not join the crowd. All I want to say is whenever Gaiman and Kean decide to make a movie together again, I definitely won't be waiting for Tuesday night specials. No sirree give me the lineup for the first show, first day and I'll be there waiting knowing expectations will be met nay blown away :)

Flicks ...

Blood ... Japanimations answer to Buffy the Vampire Slayer? At 40 mins long, it feels like it ran out on money. The movie itself never really develops. Peter tells me there's a series now that builds it out. Animation is top notch eye candy. But it's hard to bring myself to watch it over a second time. Qualifies therefore as a flick which in my lingo is a movie worth watching once, as in flicking through ...

White Dragon ... Somewhere in the midst of beautifully shot sets and locations a story could have developed but then we don't watch a chinese kung fu movie for the cinematic heights they will scale do we? To rate the fights I'd have to think back to a time before Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, before Iron Monkey, before even Shogun's Ninja. In other words good but not great. Another flick worth watching once.

The Returner ... Takashi Kaneshiro is always watchable and the dude wears an Armani trench like nobody else, but style alone doth not maketh a movie. Well done sci-fi story not withstanding, the cute anne suzuki's undoubted histrionic abilities not withstanding in the end there was nothing compelling about the movie. But it's definitely worth watching once and it is extremely well directed bar the slow bits here there. To me, movies like this should be Speed ... insane adrenaline rushes that go from high to high like the sky's the limit ... The action scenes, esp. the bullet time cuts are as is usual with Japanese movies executed to the point of perfection but without an original compelling script there's only so much story to fill in the blanks in between ...

Zatoichi ... the movie was good real good, and I'll probably watch it again for some incredibly deft action scenes what makes this a compelling movie is the signature touch of Takeshi nee Beat Kitano's characterizations ... a blind masseur, the nephew, the siblings seeking revenge, the honorable samurai turned bodyguard, the mysterious boss all come to life in an almost Kurosawesque fashion. Given the incredible attention to detail, the choreography of the samurai sequences this is an eminently enjoyable movie, something like a Kill Bill taken to the next level, but it is definitely not a classic. I do like Takeshi's wonderfully understated, dead pan portrayal but I miss Shintanu's self deprecating humor. But what the movie is missing is the originality of the classics before. The story is a rehash, town at the mercy of a gang, who have hired a master samurai ... but neither the battle scenes nor the town life portrayed come across with the authenticity or the understated deftness of say a Mizoguchi or a Kurosawa and I only say this because he has been likened to a modern master. That being said, this movie carries the rehash off with style to burn and it passes my favorite test. Not a minute that is boring or yawn worthy ...

And for the week that's all folks. Next week should be good. Tale of two sisters a modern Korean horror movie, Mirror Mask a Neil Gaiman original should be a feast for the eyes if nothing else, Jin-Roh and a lot else just waiting on the shelves ...

Slowing down

At three hours long, Once upon a time in the west is not your typical movie.

A tale of two cops that takes it's own time, Chungking Express can also make you feel like you just sat through a three hour movie.

Leone's movie is all about tense moments and drama, Wong Kar-wai's movie is all about loss and longing. One uses Claudia's searing sensuality, and Bronson's smouldering intensity. The other uses Tony's serene subtleties and Faye's elfin charms. Nothing in common you would think not in theme, not in tone, not in style, not in plot ...

But what they have in common is a repeating motif, the harmonica tune in the first, and the Mama and Papas song 'Californian dreaming' in the other.

Watching Bronson announce his arrivals with a harmonica seems kind of contrived until you realize what the harmonica was about to the man with no name at the very end. And hearing the song California dreaming seems almost irrelevant until the end where Faye realizes her dream.

Chungking Express (translates to Midnight Express) is the name of a takeout that becomes the centre of two tangential love stories. Once upon a time in the West signifies the passing of the old (the gunfighter) and the coming of the new (the railroad) almost in the same scene. They are set far apart in time and space, but both movies succeeded in making me feel an almost palpable, achingly real sense of loss ... in one the scenes are almost maudlin, they're that grounded in the hustle and clatter of the hong kong experience. In the other, the scenes feels like they've been shot with sepia toned edges, it's that nostalgic a look at the wild wild west. Yet both succeed not because of their locales, but because the locales bring to life their inhabitants to the point where they feel they could belong nowhere else. And when you're kind of glad you had the time to get to know them real well, you know you've watched a really special movie.

Pistol Opera - Stylishly delerious

Pistol Opera - I guess you could call Seijun Suzuki's style collage moviemaking .. stitching together situations and scenes without anything more than an overt nod to narrative cohesion.

The lushness of the colors and some of the scene layouts were most times eyeshockingly good. And while this made for a visually mesmerizing experience, it was thematically totally underwhelming. It made for an interesting viewing conflict though!

Locations especially the mountain of snow in the last scene, the steps to the temple, the interiors of the house ... eye candy indeed, especially the forest where she shoots it out with the blond wigged killer. But .. but the exchanges between #0 and her, the monologue after the climb up the steps to the temple, the friend describing her dream, the exchanges between the duelers in the forest ... strictly drone talk all the way through.

But then there's also the plain wierd makes no sense parts ... like where the girl asks Miyaka to take her head, and then scenes later her sawed off head hanging off the gun of the agent as they do their shoot out, followed by both of them freeze framing their positions on the rotating tableaux ... quite a few times I did end up shaking my head, and like I said if the scenes hadn't been so drop dead gorgeous and if the music wasn't so emotionally resonant I'd have given up and gone to sleep that much earlier ...

Music, the tunebites used to spotlight certain scenes I mean was superbly apt and brilliantly timed. The fact that the score consisted of variations on the same tune made for an added layer of pleasure. But the fact that the actors in the scenes themselves were schizophrenically pretentious bored me to death simultaneously ... y'all beginning to see the point I made earlier about an interesting conflict?