SCREENING LOG - 10/9/2006-10/15/2006

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From the New York Film Festival:

Insiang (1976, Lino Brocka)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077740/
Lino Brocka is considered the finest filmmaker to have come from the Philippines, and INSIANG was the first Filipino film to premiere at Cannes. It's a brutal, unflinching account of infidelity -- not so much between an opportunistic young man who cheats both the older woman he shacks up with and his daughter whom he rapes, but the lack of devotion and trust between mother and daughter that sets the path towards domestic destruction in the first place. According to Phillipine film critic Noel Vera, the film was a slap in the face to the twin myths of sanctity of motherhood and family held dear in Filipino cinema even as its real life reflection was crumbling under modernization. Brocka sets it off with cool efficiency worthy of Fassbinder -- the climactic murder that brings the love triangle to a close is most memorable in its disturbing rhythms and the unremorseful expression of one of the characters.
yes

These Girls (2006, Tahani Rached)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0827502/
A teenage girl riding on horseback through a throng of noisy cars in Cairo -- this is the bracingly defiant image that opens Rached's hourlong documentary about Egyptian girls who choose to live on the street. Rached achieves unbelievably intimate access to these girls who are either orphaned or escaped oppressive parents. These girls are boisterous, not afraid to talk back to men, sniff glue, pop pills and trade sex for favors with the local boys, not uncommonly leading to more homeless children entering the world. They often act like boys in order to assert freedoms that are otherwise prohibited to girls, leading to the key question: are these girls forced on the street because of Islamic morality is not being practiced to its ideals, or precisely because it is? Unfortunately the harrowing lives of these remarkable girls are chopped up into all-too-brief vignettes, and there's little sense of organization or development of ideas let alone a story. But the sheer fact of these lives preserved on camera ensure's the work's essential value.
yes

On my very expensive flight to Korea, I got to experience the brand new digital entertainment system installed on my Korean Airlines flight, which included dozens of movies on-demand. Overwhelmed with intriguing options, I decided to watch 20-30 minutes of several films and then decide which to continue watching in their entirety:

Got through 20-30 minutes (will probably finish with a few of these on my flight back)

Click - Got through the set-up to Sandler's first experiments with the remote. Moves pretty swiftly and peppered with typical Herlihy/Sandler non sequitirs in the dialogue to keep things sharp. Very interested to see to what extent the remote idea will get delved into all its metaphysical potential.
Akeelah and the Bee - It's not quite as schmaltzy as I'd expected to be. The first school spelling bee scene with Akeelah getting tested Keanu-style by Neo Fishburne almost brought tears to my eyes, because it was so evident how much of Akeelah's pride was at stake, standing in front of everyone, being outed as a smart person at risk of ridicule. I'm a sucker for these diamond-in-the-rough stories, and my personal history with spelling bees adds to my investment.
Nacho Libre - Light, goofy and enjoyable enough, though I'm not really sure what's at stake. Ana de la Reguera is smokin'.
Cars - The anthropomorphic cars don't quite do it for me as much as fishes and toys, maybe it's an environmental awareness thing I have, a lack of sympathy for gas guzzlers however bouncy and smiley they are. That plus watching TALLADEGA NIGHTS makes this film seem superfluous.
The Breakup - Peyton Reed, wha' happen??????

Watched in their entirety:

Inside Man (2006, Spike Lee)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454848/
Thoroughly entertaining heist flick though it doesn't stay in the mind as much as I expected. Pretty much comes down to an allegorical diatribe against race and class privilege cloaked as a caper story, which is great for Hollywood though perhaps not as deep as it appears to be. First-rate performances all around.
yes

The Devil Wears Prada (2006, David Frankel)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458352/
I enjoyed this more than I expected. It actually makes a persuasive case for the social value of high fashion, as frivolous as it is, insofar as it's a battlefield for people to endlessly refine and contend with fickle matters of taste and subjectivity (how different really is this from the work of film critics?). In fact it perversely triggered in me a reassessment of my wardrobe; in fact I'm in the process of liquidating my closet and steadily acquiring more fashionable duds on Fifth Avenue (though being budget-limited as I am I pretty much keep to a triangle of H&M, Mexx and Zara - still a step up from TJ Maxx in any event). Anne Hathaway has an appropriate coarseness to her character -- she's likeable without being dazzling. These thankless young-neophytes-getting-broken-in roles are typically bland to begin with but her "please like me" eyes and demeanor somehow never wear out their welcome. She's a ripe foil for Meryl Streep, who never plays the bitch queen to the point of self-parody but gives remarkable nuance and sympathy to her interpretation of a monumentally influential and hapless workaholic. Possibly more of a queenly performance than Helen Mirren, she pares her formidable repertoire of thespian skills down to bare essentials to make for maximum presence. Her eyes and voice are amazing in this film, so bitchily discontented and yet strangley fetching. yes

From the Pusan International Film Festival:

12:08 East of Bucharest (2006, Corneliu Porumboiu)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0809407/
Recently someone on this board, in lambasting the Romanian masterpiece THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU, commented that he found it impossible that a group of medical professionals like those depicted in the film could be so mean and cruel to their charges. Notwithstanding that medical professionals the world over are often quite jaded (and have every right to be), having just seen my second Romanian film, I can assume that what may strike that critic as cruel behavior is really just a sardonic tone that's endemic to the culture. There's plenty of black humor in Porumboiu's gently savage skewering of post-revolutionary Romania. A drunken professor dusts himself off to appear on a local television broadcast to recount his escapades leading the revolutionary charge of 1989 in his small hometown, only to have a series of call-in commentators refute his historical claims. This broadcast takes up nearly half the film's running time and basically plays like one joke being beaten into the ground. On the other hand, it's oddly agreeable in its stolid, melancholic view of its people, sort of like listening to a guy at a bar repeat the same sad story of his life over the course of an evening: tiresome yet comforting in its harmless helplessness.
mixed

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006, Larry Charles)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443453/
The most hyped film at this year's Toronto film fest, Sacha Baron Cohen's feature length expansion of one of his TV alter egos is surely one of the most offensive films of the year, but is often painfully funny. Borat visits America to make a documentary for the edification of his Kazakh countrymen, though a glimpse of Pamela Anderson on TV is enough to change his agenda and go on a cross-country odyssey to make her his wife and "claim her chaste vagine" (little does he know...). Along the way he manages to offend pretty much everyone he meets, through a series of gonzo on-camera encounters with unsuspecting Americans who take the ultra-non-PC utterances of their interviewer as the awkward, naive fumblings of a backwards foreigner. American chauvinism gets outed bigtime, and is often just as ugly as Cohen/Borat's outrageous provocations (a conversation with a man at a rodeo is downright chilling in its vehement bigotry, as is a frat boy's espousing of the virtues of date rape after Cohen sets him up with questions about female slavery). Cohen's gift (one that, quite frankly, is Oscar-worthy) is in making his character oddly charismatic and three-dimensional despite his onslaught of sexist and racist comments. The humor becomes tiresomely repetitive in nature about two-thirds of the way through, and by the end I felt it was more gimmicky and oddly less substantial than JACKASS, not quite delivering the incisive social commentary it promises, and certainly not without dubiousness in its methodology. All the same, it should be seen to be believed.
yes

In Between Days (2006, So Yong Kim)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0492463/
yes

Half Moon (2006, Bahman Ghobadi)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0847050/
Commissioned for the New Crowned Hope festival's Mozart festival, the latest by the Kurdish Iranian director of A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES and TURTLES CAN FLY is as manic as his previous works, but, after a slow, conventional beginning, is taken to unprecedented levels of dream imagery. Kurdish Iranian Mamo is an aging musician bent on entering Kurdish Iraq with his twelve sons and a female singer in tow to perform at a music festival. They run into obstacles at nearly every step, pointing out the immense oppression faced by Iranians, Iraqis and Kurds to live and practice their culture (female singing is banned in Iran). The film gets increasingly despondent, surreal and lyrical as it goes along, building to a climax of uncommon poetry.
yes (#16 for 2006 between A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION and BAMAKO)

Fantasma (2006, Lisandro Alonso)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0809427/
Lisandro Alonso's follow up to his hypnotizing nature tale LOS MUERTOS pits the actor of that movie as himself, wandering through a cinematheque in Buenos Aires to watch himself onscreen. Four other characters are spotted wandering through the same theater -- no doubt this is Alonso's take on Tsai Ming-liang's GOODBYE DRAGON INN, and while the premise drags out even at an hour's running time, I'm certainly more appreciative of Alonso's studied observations for naturalistic human behavior within the spaces of the theater than Tsai's assembly of stock types towards the same end. Taken in tandem with LOS MUERTOS, the contrast between rural and urban environments can't help but invite comparison to one of the best films of the year, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul's SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY, but Alonso, more of an analytic literalist than a poet, is not in the same league.
mixed

Withering in the Blossoming Season (2005, Cui Zi'en)
not listed on IMDb
In the span of only a few years, Cui Zi'en has emerged as one of the most vital voices in the burgeoning Chinese underground digital cinema movement, having acted and written in other's films (cf. Andrew Cheng's WELCOME TO DESTINATION SHANGHAI and He Jianjun's PIRATED COPY), not to mention directing several of his own. He's already pretty much usurped Stanley Kwan as the most relevant queer filmmaker in China, for reasons amply demonstrated in this tale of a gay Beijing high school student who shares both a room and an odd, pseudo-incestuous relationship with his sister, who is just starting to date boys. Their mother doesn't even live in the same apartment and throws money at them to keep them at bay; meanwhile the son asks his boyfriend for any kind of assistance to keep his sister in check, including raping her. His stark, Almodovarian obsessions are expressed in a number of beautiful scenes, including one where he feeds his sleeping sister with milk from his mouth directly to her lips. Shot in humble digital video, it plays naturally with what appear to be improvised scenes, and veers from predictable soap-opera salaciousness to jaw-dropping moments of inspired drama.
yes (#13 for 2006 between LE PONT DES ARTS and LINDA LINDA LINDA)

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