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Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Oi Oi. A new blog post? Whats all this about then? Its about time, thats what. Been just about the busiest Ive been ever recently (to those of you who know me, thats not that busy) so not had chance to keep this webslab updated with fresh word-corpses.
I'm sure i've got loads and loads of nonsense to spout, but cant for the life of me think of any at the mo. I'm sure i'll add to this post as time goes by, with a recap from the mind-rubber. PWEI are still Incredible by the way. Bit late but the New Years 04/05 pictures are here in case anyone who hasnt seen them wants to see them
2046
The much anticipated, 5 years in the making, epic meditation on lost love from Wong Kar Wai is finally here. The film stars Tony Leung as the central character, a womanising yet broken-hearted writer of newspaper columns , and is set mainly in Hong Kong in the 60s, in two apartments, 2046 and 2047. He is also writing a sci-fi novel, set in the year 2046, where people go to recapture lost memories and nothing ever changes..... The film takes us through the women in Leung's life, in a series of moments, encounters, and beautifully shot scenes - oh, and Zhang Ziyi's in it, which gets the film a bonus point automatically as far as im concerned. There's a few jumps in time which take some fathoming, and apparently its an unnoficial sequel to In the Mood For Love which may have made things a bit clearer if i'd have seen that film, but its nowhere near as hard to follow as other reviews have lead me to belive it might be. But for me, the film was less of a narrative than an attempt to capture a mood, a feeling - a feeling of trying to recapture that lost love . Id like a repeat viewing to maybe reveal the exact details of the plot - but i'm worried in case it reveals the movie to be as shallow as it is beautiful, sort of like sex with an android might be. 
Million Dollar Baby
Clint Eastwood is a gruff and gravelly and Morgan Freeman is even more gravelly as two old-timers who teach waitress-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks Hilary Swank how to box. Most of the film is a standard sports movie rags-to-riches type tale, albeit a very well acted and well directed one. However, the last part of the film is altogether something darker - not so much a twist as an unexpected change of direction and tone. Million Dollar Baby is a good movie, solidly made and the three leads give a lot of depth to their stereotypical characters. (Though if I was trying to pick flaws I'd say it does seem a tad contrived in ticking the boxes needed for Oscar nomination - triumph over adversity etc) Whether its an enjoyable movie is another matter, any feel-good factor built up in the rise to the top is laid flat on the canvas with the downbeat final third, but its definitly a film worth seeing. Sideways Sideways is a road-trip buddy movie about two guys on a mission to get drunk and laid in the week before one of them gets married. What lifts this above a billion other teen comedies is the fact that both guys are middle-aged, and their mission to get drunk involves a wine-tasting tour through californian wine country. Miles is the divorced failed author and wine snob, and Jack is his womanising former actor buddy who's about to get married - think Swingers aged ten years or so, or even Harold & Kumar aged twenty. Its consistantly funny in a quiet chuckle kind of way rather than a laugh out loud way, and would definitly be best enjoyed with a bottle of wine or two in the cinema (Pinot Noir of course) but it definitly is a very enjoyable, oak-aged, dense yet transcendant film with a hint of musk and desperation, like a middle-aged man in his underpants reading Barely Legal Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle Soon to be released as "Harold and Kumar get the Munchies" in the UK, this film is from the creators of "Dude Where's My Car" - which tells you pretty much all you need to know, in fact in one scene the characters lose their car and say "Dude, Where's My Car?" Well it isnt quite all you need to know - this film's USP is that Harold and Kumar are chinese and indian respectively, adding an ethnic twist to the over-populated teenage stoner-movie genre. There are jibes at racial stereotypes throughout, but the message (if there is one) seems to be simply that even over-acheiving asian students will turn into witless idiots obsessed by fast food after a couple of tokes just like any other american will. Noble sentiments deifinitly. Its not all bad, there are a few funny jokes amid the by-the-numbers stereotypes and scatalogical situations. Neil Patrick Harris makes a genius cameo, and the two heroes ride on a cheetah. All in all, one for the teenage boy within us all (and we've all had one of those in us at some time i'm sure) and it is funnier than "Dude Where's My Car", but then again so is war and pestilence. Team America : World Police Is it funny? yeah, it made me laugh. Is pretty much the only joke that its an action movie played entirely by puppets? Erm, yeah. There's plenty of cock jokes too, but anyone expecting the satire of some of South Park's finest moments will be dissapointed. It starts off brilliantly with Team America: World Police arriving on the scene and blowing up Paris in order to kill a few terrorists. So far, so anti-american heavy-handed brainless interventionism. But then, in South Park style (ie. take the piss out of everyone equally) the film turns its sights on anti-war Hollywood actors. In fact, it ends so gung-ho American that you can imagine George W Bush shouting "America, Fuck Yeah" at the screen, at least until one of his advisors tells him it was only a puppet of Michael Moore that blew up. If its a satire at all it works best as a spoof of Bruckheimer action movies rather than saying anything about the war on terror. Interestingly enough, due to the puppet sex-scene, the movie was given a NC-17 Rating by the MPAA. The scene was edited twelve times before it received an R rating. That probably tells you more about America than this film does. House of the Flying Daggers "From the producer of Crouching Tiger and the director of Hero" should give you a good idea of what this film's all about - more beautifully shot martial arts and unrequited love thats what. This time the indescribably lovely Zhang Zhiyi is a blind swordswoman who's a member of the "House of Flying Daggers" - a sort of ancient chinese robin hood type gang. The ingredients are all there but it shows how much i've been spoiled by Crouching Tiger, Hero & Zatoichi that this film was slightly dissapointing. The film feels unbalanced - story at the beginning, action scenes in the middle, but then the final third gets bogged down with the love story and endless shots of trees. |
