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Monday, March 29, 2004
The Station Agent
A film about a monosylabic trainspotting dwarf (called Fin) who inherits a run-down ex-railway depot somewhere in New Jersey, moves there hoping for some peace and quiet, but instead finds people only too willing to become his friends whether he likes it or not. In particular, two characters, a ditzy artist called Olivia and an over-friendly hot-dog vendor called Joe, seem drawn to Fin despite his initial reluctance to engage with the world, and its the story of their growing friendship which forms the basis of the story. Its a slight story, but the characters and atmosphere are so nicely drawn, that any overt drama would be unwelcome. Its heart-warming without being sentimental, and funny without going for any obvious gags about the lead character's size. A nice little film about a not-so-nice little guy who turns out to be quite nice once you get to know him.  Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Zatoichi
The legend that is "Beat" Takeshi comes down from his castle to direct and star in this homage to the great samurai movies of yesteryear. "Beat" plays Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, who shuffles into a small village to help out the peasants being picked on by gangsters in stripey dressing-gowns. The traditional "man-with-no-name" storyline is sliced and diced with cartoon-style limb-hacking violence, slapstick comedy and cross-dressing, and even the odd musical number. As much fun as watching skinny Japanese men in glasses fall into a lake - genius! 21 Grams Like the director's previous film (Amores Perros), this film follows three seperate characters linked by a car crash. However, rather than presenting the stories one after the other, here he opts to chop them up, throw them up in the air and present them as a random collage of beautiful and depressing images. It's a move which at first leaves your head spinning like a drunk on the tea-cups at Drayton Manor, but if you persevere with it, you'll find yourself slowly piecing together the jigsaw of pain and suffering into a sublime picture of love, loss and terminal illness. The acting from the three leads (Naomi Watts, Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro) is superb, and the photography is absolutely stunning, all of which when combined with the thriller-like structure turn what could have been a harrowing and over-emotional tear-jerker into something resembling a work of art. It's a bit long, and definitly not a "saturday night after a few beers" type of movie, but for a maudlin wednesday afternoon, its a quality chunk of cinema. The title, by the way, is explained here Friday, March 05, 2004
Dogville
Allegedly, once filming had finished on Dogville, Nicole Kidman turned teary-eyed to the notoriously off-his-bonce and still-not-satisfied director, Lars Von Trier, and begged him to tell her what actually would make him happy. To which he replied, "Fuck me, and give me all your money." An apt illustration of the harrowing filming process of Dogville, and the harrowing process of actually watching it. The story, set in depression-era America, involves Nicole Kidman's character, Grace, who is on the run from gangsters, ending up in the small mountain town of Dogville. She begs the residents to let her stay, which they do - but there are conditions - and that's when Dogville starts to bear its teeth and get nasty. Like von Trier's previous work, such as Dancer in the Dark which featured Bjork as the well meaning woman who is churned up into dogmeat by the evil machine of life, here too Kidman must endure some pretty nasty stuff. And also the fact that there's no walls anywhere. The film is shot entirely in a studio, with the bare minimum of props, with houses and even the town dog suggested by white lines on the black floor. Whether this is a Brechtian device to highlight the artificiality of film, or just von Trier attempting to make life difficult for himself and his actors, I'm not sure. It does at times serve as a powerful device in telling this simple story - highlighting the characters and leaving the setting deliberately ambiguous. Although, despite the constant movement and close-ups of the hand-held camera, it is rarely cinematic enough to come across as something as daring as "a film without a set" and instead looks like the filming of a play on a particularly sparse stage. Visiting Dogville is an ordeal - it is overlong and pretentious, yet the performances and unusual style may well draw you in, even if you don't particularly feel all that happy about it. Infernal Affairs A Hong Kong cop movie exploring the standard genre idea, "the duality of man", through the two main characters, an undercover cop buried deep in a triad gang and a mole in the police force working for the triads. Before their inevitable face-off on a roof, there's plenty of shouting into telephones, men in suits and slow motion deaths. Its all done quite stylishly, with some decent performances from the two leads and an interesting, rather than intense plot. The violence here is perfunctory and serves the story as opposed to the John Woo style of film-making where the dialogue is just a means to an extended slow-mo shoot-out. Which I found quite disappointing, being a big fan of the old two-gun action. All in all, its a perfectly functional Hong Kong thriller, and therefore a notch above most American ones, but there's nothing to set it apart from millions of other films of the same genre. |
