SCREENING LOG - 2/10-2/16, 2003

Back to 2003 Index

I watched SPIDER, THE KID BROTHER, BLISSFULLY YOURS, THE BLUE KITE, DERSU UZALA, and BATTLE ROYALE. In order of preference;

Blissfully Yours (2001, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

This Thai feature about a young factory girl, her older friend and a Burmese refugee with a skin ailment who light out for the forest to enjoy an afternoon picnic is light on plot but heavy on beauty. The first half of the movie involves their mundane attempts to deal with everyday affairs before they can finally go have their fun (once they accomplish their tasks the opening credits finally roll, halfway into the film). The rest of the film chronicles their adventures in the wilderness, mostly wordless and captured in real-time, and occasionally punctuated by graphic sex. The film is truly generous in allowing us to spend time with these characters without pushing a story on us; just by being with them we absorb their personalities and desires and drink in their humanity. This quiet but bold film pushes headlong against several boundaries in contemporary cinema: documentary vs. fiction (Kiarostami), pornography vs. art (Breillat) and mundane vs. sublime (Tsai Ming Liang). It left me with some of the transcendent feelings I got from Sokurov's MOTHER AND SON, though without the warped camera effects; it seems more receptive to letting the beauty of the everyday speak for itself. Highly recommended.

The Kid Brother (1927, J.A. Howe and Ted Wilde)

This is not only the most sustained entertainment vehicle I've seen with Harold Lloyd, but also a fascinating retooling of his character in which his bespectacled wimpiness is brought front and center. Lloyd plays the sissy member of a brawny farm family, but the love for a woman brings out the man inside him. It's worth noting that this is the first Lloyd film I've seen that's set in the countryside, which may have something to do with this reworking of Lloyd's effete city-slicker persona. There are a lot of good bits throughout this film, none quite as singular as the climaxes to SAFETY LAST or HOT WATER, but scene-per-scene this may be his most enjoyable work I've seen to date.

Battle Royale (2000, Kinji Fukasaku)

I don't know what's come over me, but Japanese sicko cinema is growing on me. This bloodfest directed by the recently-deceased septuagenarian B-movie master concerns a high school class that has been selected for a three-day competition on a remote island (run by none other than Takeshi Kitano), in which they must all kill each other until a single student is left to leave. What follows is a remarkably provocative allegory for adolescent angst -- the killings are almost always foregrounded in motives that are disturbingly familiar to the high school milieu: jealousy, insecurity, unrequited love, competitiveness, cliquishness, or sheer nihilistic rage. While not perfect nor to every taste, this film for the most part successfully straddles its dual roles as meaningful drama and as gory, video game-like exploitation: the blood and bullets seem to symbolize exploding hormones. If you don't believe me, believe the Japanese Film Academy: they nominated this for seven Japanese Oscars!

The Blue Kite (1993, Tian Zhuangzhuang)

The film that sent perhaps the most talented filmmaker of China in the 80s and 90s into a ten-year government-imposed exile, this is a highly personal chronicle of a family's undoing during China's Cultural Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, when friends and fellow villagers accused each other of being radical subversives, leading to the persecution and deaths of millions. Compared to his psychedelic Tibetan Western THE HORSE THIEF, Tian's filmmaking here is remarkably subdued; he seems content to let the story tell itself, aware that it needs little embellishment. Only at the end with a balls-out melodramatic climax did I feel he took a misstep; otherwise this is a quietly observant film that lets its sense of despair and outrage accumulate from scene to scene.

Spider (2002, David Cronenberg)

Ralph Fiennes gives a brave performance as a mentally disturbed resident of a halfway house who delves repeatedly into his childhood memories, trying to piece together the events that led to his mother's murder. As in his last film EXISTENZ, Cronenberg explores the warped terrain of psychological reality, but here he does away with many of his auteurial hallmarks: no anthropomorphic toys, no camp humor; in their place is a concentration on silent moments and portentous moods unprecedented in his career. The film's themes also invite comparison with A BEAUTIFUL MIND and MEMENTO, but it has a solemn emotional power that surpasses either of those films and has more in common with M. Night Shyamalan. It's easy to see this as Cronenberg's most "mature" work, one that may endear him to a larger number of people who may otherwise be turned off by the weirdness of his previous films; while this is a formidable achievement, I personally miss the wacky invention of old Cronenberg.

Dersu Uzala (1974, Akira Kurosawa)

If one needs proof that Steven Spielberg and Akira Kurosawa are soulmates, consider this Kurosawa film about a Russian surveying party in Siberia who encounter a swarthy Mongolian scout, who amazes them with a stunning array of nature-boy skills such as hunting, yurt-making, and breathtaking rescues in blizzards and river rapids, and teaches them a few things about love of Nature and their fellow Man. This could be re-titled E.M: The Exceptional Mongolian. Kurosawa himself seems to be taking a few lessons from the landscape-hugging cinematography of Tarkovsky -- quite uncharacteristic of Kurosawa's preceding work (but consistent with his subsequent films), the pacing is slow and leisurely, taking in the grandeur of nature. For all its simplicity, it's a disarmingly heartwarming film, though the macho camaraderie is so thick at times it borders on unintentionally humorous homoeroticism.

Back to 2003 Index