SCREENING LOG - 12/30/2002-1/5/2003

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I watched THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS, THE HOURS, ADAPTATION, ICHI THE KILLER, JEROME, WHERE IS MY FRIEND'S HOME? and THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES. All this, after having tried to sow my wild oats with the one minute drill (http://uk.imdb.com/board/bd0000010/thread/508118). In order of preference:

Through the Olive Trees (1994, Abbas Kiarostami)

The concluding chapter of Kiarostami's "Koker Trilogy" (including WHERE IS MY FRIEND'S HOME? and LIFE AND NOTHING MORE) features actors from both films playing themselves, focusing on the "director" (a stand-in for Kiarostami) as he directs a scene from LIFE AND NOTHING MORE featuring a young couple who were married the day after an earthquake killed 50,000 people, including their own families. In reality, the young couple are played by an illiterate peasant hopelessly in love with his demure and educated co-star, but whose advances are returned by stony silence, presumably because he is of a lower class upbringing than she. Set in a beautifully verdant pastoral backdrop, the ensuing antics resemble the best of Shakespearean romantic comedy a la A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM and THE TEMPEST, in that the film examines the nature of and the choices involved in artistic creation, love, class mobility, filmmaking and the rebuilding of both one's life and one's community in the wake of disaster, and yet all of this is handled so casually, so effortlessly, that it is both easy to take for granted and difficult to describe. Of the many beautiful moments of fleeting beauty that grace this film, the extended climax is the piece de resistance, in which all of the aforementioned ideas form a perfect circle that bind the central characters in a communal vision brimming with hope for the future.

Where Is My Friend's Home? (1987, Abbas Kiarostami)

The first masterpiece in Abbas Kiarostami's career is both his most conventional and his most suspenseful -- a young boy goes on an exhaustive search for his classmate's home to give him his notebook, otherwise his classmate will be expelled for not doing his homework. This "innocent's quest" schema of storytelling has dominated third-world filmmaking in the past decade, most notably in China, Africa and Iran, and perhaps this film has something to do with it -- and Kiarostami has gone on to more radical experimentation with the medium. But even this deceptively simple tale has such a wealth of observations about Iranian society -- every person that appears onscreen seems to contain a feature-length story in themselves -- and serious questions about the relationship between social responsibility and social order, that it leaves its successors in the dust. In its ability to instill a tremendous fascination with the world and its inhabitants, and have us think about our conduct in this world, the only recent film worthy of comparison to this is Hayao Miyazaki's SPIRITED AWAY.

Adaptation (2002, Spike Jonze) second viewing

The second time around, I could appreciate how for the first 90 minutes the film is generally quite restrained in asserting its brilliance; for the most part it creates a cinematically rich world for the viewer to discover that on their own. There are a lot of little things, on screen or in between scenes, that deserve a sigh of "wow", in that they help the film go beyond hip irony and towards a sincere examination of not only what's wrong with Hollywood formulas, but how formulaic ideas in themselves may be the only way we have of connecting with other people, an insight that the film earns with moments of amazingly tender observation before junking itself with an infuriatingly lame climax. I had previously praised Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper for putting all of themselves into their fictional creations, but Nicolas Cage deserves a great deal of credit for portraying two very different twin brothers and establishing a genuine rapport of affectionate rivalry between them. Brian Cox is a hoot as the script guru whose vision rules over the third act of the film; his performance brilliantly contains all of the paradoxes of the film. And yes, the fact that there is so much good acting and so many good moments in this film cannot be placed solely at the feet of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, but I would still love to see what Spike Jonze can do with somebody else's story.

The Hours (2002, Stephen Daldry)

Virginia Woolf lite -- less filling, but tastes great. This adaptation of Michael Cunningham's contemporary adaptation of Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" is handsomely mounted and immensely watchable, though it continues Cunningham's watering-down of Woolf until she is little more than a feminist empowerment diva with a bad attitude. The real-life Woolf's expansive vision helped open the world of literature to the dazzling complexity of the 20th century; she breathed in all the sensations of the world around her and restlessly tried to piece them together in an ever-shifting system of meaning. Here, Woolf's achievements get sentimentalized into sloganeering woman's lib, practically pounded into the viewer's brain by a standard-issue Philip Glass score but saved otherwise by an integrity on the part of all involved towards the film's purpose, however narrow it may be compared to Woolf's. In descending order of achievement, Meryl Streep as a modern-day Mrs. Dalloway, Nicole Kidman as Woolf and Julianne Moore as a 50s version of Dalloway each lend major actressy firepower to their stories, and the overall results are often impressive and moving (though only Streep's character retains the complexity afforded to her in the novel; the others are simplified). The three parallel plotlines clumsily share a handful of tropes (morbid suicidal thoughts, cracking eggs, lesbian kissing) to underscore the similarities of their heroines rather than examining their differences, but otherwise the different settings and characters themselves lend much material for comparison and contrast. All in all, I don't mind seeing Woolf's art converted to melodrama, if only the people responsible had shared more of Woolf's vision, that of opening eyes to the liberating potential of the world rather than making them weep for their own suffering.

Jerome (1998, Thomas Johnston, David Elton, and Eric Tignini)

Sort of the contemporary companion piece to Edgar G. Ulmer's unlikely noir masterpiece DETOUR, this copies the basic template of an innocent but troubled man driving cross-country who victimized by a femme fatale and his own well-meaning complicity. A series of CITIZEN KANE testimonials by the man's acquaintances clutter the film, which otherwise has long stretches of silence as the characters drive down desert roads towards their fates, creating a vapidity worthy of Antonioni (though the directors, all three of them, don't seem to know quite what to do with it). Despite the derivativeness of the story (which leaves the implausibilities of the original intact), the one-track atmosphere is refreshing in a sea of hip MTV post-modern noirs -- in fact this is one of the better independent films I've seen over the past few years.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002, Peter Jackson)

Maybe it's just me, but this world is starting to get old fast. Everything that was fresh and exciting about the first film now feels repetitive and noisy. Moreover the themes of heroism and good vs. evil seem both too abstract and too simple for a world that demands a bit more thought, for all of the problems facing the present. If anything, this spectacle of immensely bloodless warfare will serve to whet people's appetites until the real thing hits our TV screens later this year.

Ichi the Killer (2001, Takeshi Miike)

A heavily scarred hitman (who uses safety pins to keep his mutilated mouth intact) is hot in pursuit of the man who butchered (and I mean BUTCHERED) his boss, and runs into a timid young man who kills with a nasty blade attached to his boot. Brought to you by the director of AUDITION (who has also made another dozen films in only the past few years); I was thoroughly nauseated by the relentless display of vicious ultra-sadism and buckets of blood giddily spilled onscreen, but many hours later the 10-year-old in me is curious to open the basement door again sometime (not anytime soon though). I have to admit that Miike's films, which strike me as an extremely nihilistic variant of Sam Fuller-esque superpulp, is brilliant in the same way that Hitler or Jeffrey Dahmer were brilliant. I'll take note of some of the clever cinematic techniques employed and try to erase the rest from my memory, for the sake of my mental health.

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