Reviews

Whoa, talk about a mis-marketed movie! Never have I seen a film's trailer do so little justice to what the film actually is. I went and saw this for $1 at my incredibly sleazy neighborhood second-run theater expecting some neat cinematography ('cause I'd already seen some clips on Youtube) and that's about it. Oh how much more this turned out to be. To call this a "Hollywood" film seems grossly inaccurate (save for a few small moments here and there, which I'll get to in a moment), as I can't really think of any Hollywood movie to compare it to stylistically or thematically. It reminds me more of Michael Haneke's "Time of the Wolf" than anything else, but with a camera style which actually recalls Gaspar Noe's "Irreversible" (an almost absurd thought for a big-budget, studio-backed film). It is this insane cinematography which really earns the film such an outstanding score, since I guess I can see how the same screenplay could have resulted in a pretty stupid movie in anyone else's hands. While certainly not cringe-worthy and pandering, the script does struggle with some very clunky exposition (like every time Clive Owen's dead child is brought up, or when the midwife suddenly begins explaining her back story randomly for seemingly no reason), and strains credibility for the sake of plot-momentum at at least one point (namely where Clive Owen conveniently overhears how The Fish killed his ex-wife. The script's reliance on surprise moments also wore a little thin after a while (the scene where we think Jasper is dead but he isn't works, but by the time we get to where we think the prison guard is going to whack Clive Owen but he doesn't it's gotten contrived). I also found the very ending rather disappointing. Having succeeded so thoroughly at creating an uncompromisingly bleak tone, it feels like a slap in the face to the rest of the film when the "Tomorrow" boat appears. If it had ended just a few moments earlier, with Clive Owen and the girl floating alone in their dinky little boat, it would have been amazing. That said, none of these vague flaws do anything in the long run to diminish the sheer impact the rest of the film creates. Through the masterful long takes and unbelievably complexly choreographed mis-en-scene a sense of pure sensory overload and tension is attained unlike anything else I have ever seen. To compare it to the beginning of "Saving Private Ryan" feels cheap and does no justice to the film as a whole, yet it is the only comparison within mainstream cinema that I can think of. But unlike Spielberg's drivel, Children of Men refuses to soften up, or to take sides. The bleakness is overwhelming and deadening, the violence is jarring and frightening, as much the polar opposite of Quentin Tarantino's violence as I can imagine. The few moments of tenderness feel hard-earned and real, and pack just as much emotional punch to me as the film's violence. I find it remarkable now the film refuses to portray either the rebels or the government as admirable. In the context of the violent frenzy, "sides" don't even come into play, it's just pure terror. I loved how the camera would often wander indiscriminately, catching little visual asides and focusing on them for little moments, giving a greater sense of just how much is going on during all these scenes of intense combat, or even just the glimpse of Jaspar and his catatonic wife we get after Clive Owen and the girl leave, something a "normal" Hollywood movie would never do. The entire refugee camp sequence is as masterful a piece of virtuosic visual film-making as I have ever seen. Granted, all of this probably loses quite a bit of impact on a small screen, so I'm glad I saw it in a theater, albeit as shoddy a theater as one can imagine, especially since it's really as much of a last chance to do so as I could possibly get (hell, the movie's already out on DVD).

As a side note, anyone who dismisses the film's cinematography because Emmanuel Lubezki occasionally "cheated" with the long takes by digitally enhancing them is, in my opinion, not only entirely missing the point but also snobbishly denying the possibilities that digital post-production offer, in my eyes not at all different from refusing to listen to music made on a synthesizer or even to refuse to listen to music on compact disc or MP3!

There's no getting around the fact that Matt Dillon cannot possibly make himself ugly enough to look anything like Bukowski actually did, but he does his best to capture the writer's posture and way of carrying himself. If the end result does not resemble Bukowski as much as it does Humphrey Bogart, it is only because Matt Dillon is a good-looking actor. I suppose he could have tried to match Buk's voice more though. In all fairness, the film does try to capture some of Bukowski's harsher edges (his violence against women for example), in an effort to counteract the sense of sterilization brought about by the generally good-looking performers (sure, Lili Taylor may not be the best-looking actress around, but she's still in much better shape than a wino like she depicts would be). The use of very formal, long camera takes is an unexpected but interesting choice (and shows the film's Scandinavian roots), although the distance it brings adds a further sense of cleanliness into what is essentially very gritty subject matter. Of course, the film is supposed to be a comedy, and this camera technique does help to give the film a deadpan Jarmusch/Kaurismaki edge to it (although it still isn't ecstatically funny). Oddly, the screenplay somehow feels over-reverent of Bukowski in some aspects (full Bukowski poems are heard, read by Dillon in a notably un-Bukowski like voice, on the soundtrack), and at the same time too broadly drawn. With it's rambling, episodic structure and predominant focus on Bukowski's relationships with women, the film at times begins to resemble not so much a specific biography but rather any number of other stories about aimless twenty-something aspiring artist types and their relationship troubles (think "Jesus Son"). Luckily in my case, I have a naturally high affinity for these types of stories anyway, so it didn't bother me as it might someone more tired of these "angst and anomie among the young and bohemian" tales. Still, as far as on-screen Bukowski goes, your best bets are documentaries. The recent "Bukowski: Born Into This" is the most expansive, detailed, and definitive, but Barbet Schroeder's four-hour "Bukowski Tapes" is also worth seeing for it's intimate, in-depth nature, although it is exhausting and presented in a way that becomes repetitive. The "Bukowski At Bellevue" live performance video is interesting but unessential if you know the poems. But if fictional Buk is what you're after, I'd say that "Factotum" is definitely the way to go, relative to the limited choices that exist. As far as I'm concerned, "Barfly" is blandly crafted and over-acted, essentially reducing Bukowski to a drunken buffoon. "Tales of Ordinary Madness" is generally considered atrocious, though I have only seen a few minutes of it myself. "Crazy Love" is not really about Bukowski at all, and is a terrible film to boot. "Factotum" perhaps merely trades one cliché vision of Bukowski for another (in "Factotum"'s case, Bukowski as a sort of suave, troubled yet romantic working-class genius), but at least "Factotum"'s I can not only tolerate, but find enjoyable watching.

Small aspects of this film seem a bit dated, but Egoyan makes up for it by being so astonishingly innovative with everything else. It's strange to think that lost among the sea of crap that is most 80s cinema, is this deeply idiosyncratic ode to alienation that predates so much that has been come to be taken for granted in international art cinema. David Lynch is the only other filmmaker in North America I can think of who was even close to doing films this interesting in the 80s. Steven Soderbergh pretty much owes "Sex, Lies, and Videotape", and thus his entire career, to having the balls to steal what Egoyan was doing, relatively unseen, at the time, and passing off his own watered-down version.

How the hell Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is going to top this one is beyond me. He's really delivered a transcendent masterpiece here. As much as 21 Grams was a progression from Amores perros, Babel is at least twice as much a progression from 21 Grams. Inarritu is really moving toward a very pure, poetic form of visual cinema. That he managed to do it within the context of a $25 million dollar Hollywood film is truly an unbelievable feat, a genuine act of beating the system (every bit as much as The New World was, but without Malick's legendary status within the industry to explain it's existence). It's really genius subversion. He obviously used Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in order to get the film made, but uses them in at most 25% of the film. 90% of the rest of it is not even in English! On top of all that, it has a completely un-Hollywood sensibility. Mood and visuals take considerable precedence over plot (far more than in Inarritu's previous work), and the results bare more far similarity to Olivier Assayas's recent work than anything that usually comes out of Hollywood. With this film, I think Inarritu has placed himself at the very forefront of youngish auteurs working within non-commercial cinema, anywhere. Certainly he's the best working (vaguely) within the American system, with this film surpassing even Paul Thomas Anderson or David Gordon Green. Actually, come to think of it, Babel is in many ways the film Magnolia tried but failed to be: An incredibly ambitious epic of intimate proportions, capturing with pitch-perfect accuracy the state of humankind at this moment, in this case not just in America but the world. I would go as far as to say it is THE film of our time, in any larger socio-political sense. Not that the filmmakers are ever didactic enough to reduce their film's scope into any particular "issues" (this is far from Crash II). Guillermo Arriaga's script perhaps shows sign of strain at times (particularly in finding a credible connection between the story lines), but I feel that it's possible under-development (at least relative to the first two installments of their trilogy) actually works in the film's favor. It suffers from little schematicness where it could have, instead letting the individual plot lines exist pretty much naturally on their own. My personal favorite of the story lines has to be the Japanese segment, which showcases the most of Inarritu's visually-dominated narrative approach (particularly the incredible nightclub sequence).

Jon Jost impressed me quite a bit with this. I'll definitely need to check out more of his stuff. The way he combines very formal camera-work with naturalistic, improvisational performances struck me as really great. Best of both worlds, as it were, yet the styles didn't clash at all. I found it had all the life and spontaneity of, say, a Cassavetes film, but without the kind of off-the-cuff hand-held cinematography I've come to expect from that sort of film. It reminded me more than a little of Antonioni, actually. It also managed to be very funny in a great, observational kind of way. It actually really amazes me how it captures that little spark of life, that nuance, while at the same time being visually so thought-out and impressive to look at (with lots of nice breaking of the 180-degree rule too). Unfortunately the DVD transfer I saw was not the best, so i felt like i wasn't quite getting the full experience. Also, a few slightly indulgent moments (though nothing intolerable or even much different from the more trying moments of Angelopoulos or Carlos Reygadas) left the film less than perfect, along with an ending that I felt didn't quite come off the way it should have.

OK, OK... that pun is pretty lame I admit, but no worse than some of the attempts at humor in this film. Which is actually not to say that this film is completely terrible. It isn't, not by a long shot. But it just isn't that good either. I actually enjoyed Amos Kollek's earlier film "Fiona" quite a bit (and I would still be very interesting in seeing his film "Sue"), but this was really nothing like that gritty, slice-of-life, documentary-style film. This was more of a quirky, almost sitcom-ish comedy. To Kollek's credit, this predates the whole quirky indie trend by a few years, so it doesn't quite have the same pre-meditated feel as, say, "Me and You and Everyone We Know", however it has a lot of the same problems as that film did. None of the characters seem at all real, and everything they do or say feels completely scripted to be "witty" or "quirky" (and is only sporadically funny, although at least it is, a little). The whole film gives off a decidedly no-budget feel, with very primitive camera work and often amateurish acting (despite the presence of Louise Lasser), which in and of itself isn't bad, since at least it doesn't have the studio gloss of most recent similarly-minded pseudo-indie films. If anything, i give the film a little more credit than it probably deserves, just for having such a run-and-gun, no-budget feel. I did like the choppy, rough editing, for purely aesthetic reasons. Also it deserves some credit for not having too much of a plot (except towards the end), and a good unhurried pace.

Everything about this work is refreshing and inspiring. A perfect alternative to the glut of trendy, "quirky" pseudo-indie comedies that are smothering the market. Ryan Gosling's performance is easily the best I've seen this year, absolutely pitch-perfect, and his young co-star is brilliantly anti-cute. What could potentially be a tepid "inspirational" story a la Finding Forrester instead hits a note indescribably more profound and elusive. Although i initially felt like the use of the "interrupting cow" joke was ripping off David Gordon Green's film "Undertow", it ultimately allows for one of the best ending scenes I think I've ever seen. Visually the film was also surprisingly fresh, demonstrating how hand-held camera work can be done right, and achieving an unusually high level of poetic beauty for an American film (in the way the film at times lets some scenes drift into more abstract, purely visual moments). Knowing that Broken Social Scene did the soundtrack was enough to get me to watch this, and the film did not disappoint on that front either. I do find it interesting that now two films have used the Leslie Feist-sang version of "Lover's Spit" for moody love scenes (the other being "Lie with Me", but used much more effectively here).

here's a nice alternative. Christopher Doyle's incredible cinematography lends this film a certain inherent value as a Wong Kar-Wai supplement, but in all fairness the aesthetics can only take it so far. Although it is my no means less than a very good film, it's very concept (four short segments taking place in the same motel room) carries with it certain limitations. Whereas Wong Kar-Wai is always able to get very deep down into his characters, this film doesn't have time to allow it's characters much room to develop, so there is a certain surface-level detachment to the entire proceedings. We see these couples (and they are photographed exquisitely), but we don't really get to know them.

Symbolically this film represents the last hurrah of truly underground American film-making before it crossed over into the "indie" cottage industry we know today, as it won the grand prize at the Sundance Film Festival (then still known as the US Film Festival) a year before the levee broke, so to speak, with "Sex, Lies and Videotape". Artistically, it presents a kind of forgotten missing link between Cassavetes and Harmony Korine. The director and star Rob Nilsson (who's performance and double duty here both strike me as a bit of a precursor to Vincent Gallo as well), heavily inspired by Cassavetes, created his own filmic method he calls "direct action cinema" which basically just means complete spontaneous improvisation from the mostly non-professional actors, mostly hand-held camera and minimal lights etc. Nothing too revolutionary by today's standards, but considering this was 1987 not many people were doing this, let alone in America. He also injects a very innovative editing style strikingly reminiscent of what Harmony Korine would do some ten years later, particularly similar to "Julien Donkey-Boy" with it's ultra-grainy visual quality (Black and white 16mm? Analogue video?) and extensive use of still-frame snapshot images. Despite all this remarkable innovation, the film is not without it's flaws and is in some ways actually very dated. A few unfortunate sequences have a glaringly cheesy "80s"ness to them (leg warmers?), and also the overall production quality, while admirable in it's embodiment of true independent spirit, is also a bit rough to say the least. Still, the actual storyline itself is really very good and the acting, for the most part, is engaging (although I may have considered someone else for the lead role besides Nilsson himself, a choice which strikes of a certain egoism). As a kind of forgotten building block in the independent filmic language it is well worth seeing (and I'm pretty sure Harmony Korine must have seen this since it contains the idea of "jokes without punchlines" in a very amusing sequence).

Lone Scherfig has to be the most blandly mediocre filmmaker working today that i can think of. Her Dogme film "Italian for Beginners" was easily the least-inspired entry in that pseudo-series (what else would I call it?) that I've seen, and this sadly fairs only slightly better, and really only because the premise has some inherent potential. The first half hour or so is actually not bad, and has some funny parts, but then it quickly loses focus and just kind of plods around for another looong hour+. Instead of fulfilling the promise of it's chosen subject matter, the film oddly chooses to practically abandon it's initial theme and instead wastes a lot of time with incredibly generic soap-opera plot contrivances. As a whole the film just seems rudderless and oddly uninspired. No sense of tone or craft. Did anyone working on the film really think the horrible sentimental music was appropriate? There are too many unnecessary minor characters each with a too-tidy arch, and a lot of pointless scenes that seem like they were added just to pad out the running time even though the movie already seems too drawn-out. Overall this movie is more just strangely flat than outright bad in almost any sense, full of an overwhelming feeling of dull underachievement.

Overall pretty good, although it could have definitely been terrible. No question it is ridiculously unsubtle and over-the-top, but it has a certain fun, campy appeal. Fortunately it comes closer to early Gregg Araki-style silliness than the trying-too-hard theatrics of a film like say, "Spun", which it could have easily fallen to, although that is not to suggest that the film is anywhere near the truthful, harrowing depiction of child abuse that "Mysterious Skin" is, as much as the general approach strikes me as similar. The amusing cameo appearances from Winona Ryder and Michael Pitt solidify in my mind the degree to which this film is supposed to be taken seriously (which is to say, not very much). It's a good thing because otherwise it would have come off as unbearably heavy-handed. It took a while for me to determine what tone this was supposed to be going for (and thus whether it was any good or not), but eventually I settled into it's entertainingly campy charm. In a lot of ways it reminds me of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" or "Natural Born Killers". Garishly stylish and over-done but not without a certain mindless appeal. I think I slightly prefer it to "Fear and Loathing" though.

With the work of South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-Duk, the viewer has to accept some very fundamental "flaws" that inherently seem to be a part of his work in a practical sense. The production values are always cheap, the soundtrack music is always tacky, the acting is never more than at the most basic level, there are continuity errors... in a word, his films always seem low budget and as if everything were shot in one take. Also he has almost an insistence on breaching realism and lapsing into his own vague allegory. His characters never follow any kind of real internal logic, but rather act according to the scenario he conceives. All of these factors amount to the reason I don't think I will ever be able to consider any of his films true masterpieces.

That said, in return for accepting these inherent flaws, the viewer is rewarded with a candid, unadulterated look into the creative mind of a very interesting person. Kim Ki-Duk's vision is relentlessly idiosyncratic, but very consistent and pure. Watching his films, you gain direct access into his thoughts. This is not film-making by committee, this is "auteurism" in the truest sense. That in and of itself is such a rarity that his films are worth seeing for this reason alone. And this film, "Bad Guy", is probably the purest, most definitive example of Kim Ki-Duk's vision. All the preoccupations that manifest in his other work are here: The mute, inexpressive protagonist, the seeming obsession with prostitution and the degradation of women in general, and also the director's tendency to eventually lead his characters into an incomprehensible fantasy world. Whether or not the viewer is willing to accept these illogical flights of fancy is purely a matter of taste, but personally i find his work fascinating solely because it is so stubbornly idiosyncratic and fueled by a remarkably pure sense of creative expression.

By Claire Denis' standards, this film is a little slight. Which is not to say that it isn't great, but considering she is one of the greatest filmmakers working today (in my opinion of course), anything less than a flat-out masterpiece (as is the case with "Beau travail", "Trouble Every Day", and "L'Intrus") has to be considered a lesser effort from her. The visuals here are as ravishingly beautiful as anything she has ever done (or anything else by anyone I've seen for that matter), but the story (to the extent there is one) is a bit thin to support them. I'm always a fan of minimal plot, but this felt a little empty and sort of contrived. I could have also done without the occasional moments of magical realism that threatened to push the film uncomfortably toward cutesy, whimsical "Amelie" territory. The somewhat over-embellishing music didn't help in this respect either. In many other respects, this film comes as close to perfectly epitomizing what i look for in a film as anything I have seen (elliptical plot, minimal dialogue, endless moody shots of blurry florescent lights through windshields!). I wish all the perfect film-making had been applied to a more substantial narrative though. I like that the film strips the story down to it's barest essentials, but the story itself feels slightly trivial and flimsy.

I don't think anyone besides Terrence Malick and maybe Tran Anh Hung makes cinema on a purer level than Claire Denis. That said, I don't love this, her newest film, quite as much as her 2001 masterpiece "Trouble Every Day" (although it comes very close), which itself is one of my absolute favorite films. It it only because the narrative here is possibly slightly too elliptical for it's own good. Don't get me wrong, the fact that this film barely has a plot at all is really one of the best things about it, but I think Denis took it about one degree farther than it needed to go and consequently the film does flirt with incomprehensibility, and a few key plot points should have been clarified somehow (like that the main character goes to South Korea to get his heart transplant, instead of just showing him there all of a sudden without any explanation of where he is or why he is there). Also some of the other characters seemed unnecessary and as if they were just excuses for Denis to use actors she likes yet again (Beatrice Dalle's character in particular is a little distracting because you keep expecting that she is going to have some significance). Still, the film is incredibly absorbing and the cinematography is beyond amazing. It is definitely very much a masterpiece in it's own way. At least as good as Denis' more highly-acclaimed "Beau travail", if not better. Claire Denis has to be my favorite French director at this point, better than Leos Carax even. Also I have to admit that the South Korean sequence really does do "Lost in Translation" better than that film itself does (and I, unlike some, am a huge fan of that film as well).

In 1980, Nicholas Roeg (who served as the cinematographer on this film) made a groundbreaking, stunning portrayal of a dysfunctional romance told in fractured, elliptical narrative fragments called "Bad Timing". In many ways, "Petulia" serves as a predecessor to that wonderful film, as it tells a similar story using a similarly disjointed technique. However, as a film this one, while not bad, barely holds a candle to Roeg's later masterpiece. Although Roeg's cinematography is often excellent, the story is very promising, and there are even a number of good scenes, as a whole it just doesn't quite come together. For one thing, the film feels more like an attempt at hip, edgy '60s art film-making from conventional Hollywood filmmakers than the real deal (note the overabundance of melodramatic, overwrought soundtrack music). It seems more like a self-conscious imitation of "Pierrot le fou" or "Blowup" than anything that comes close to comparing to the artistic integrity of those films, and consequently has dated very badly in a way those films have not. Also the dialogue is often frustratingly awkward in a way that I am not sure was intentional, or rather what the intended tone of the dialogue was suppose to be. Was it meant to be post-modern and ironic? Or is it really just insipid Hollywood melodrama dressed up with flashy psychedelic cinematography and set design? Considering the degree to which the film disintegrates into pure conventional sappiness by the end (the last scene being almost painfully mawkish), I fear it may be the latter. It is really a shame, because based on the premise alone the film did not at all need to be that way. There are actually enough good moments that it makes it all the more regrettable that ultimately the filmmakers could not overcome cliché.

I still didn't like this as much as "Demonlover" by a long stretch, but I thought it was a bit more well-executed than Irma Vep. The various aspects of Assayas's style are more fully integrated here, but I still find he has a tendency toward extended intellectual coffee shop dialogue (a la Godard) at times that I'm not crazy about, and which still doesn't mesh well with his penchant for moody visuals (in my opinion still is greatest strength). The film reminds me quite a bit of Michael Winterbottom's "Wonderland". Like that film, neither the characters nor the situations of the story are really that remarkable or interesting, but rather the movie derives it's strength from little fleeting moments. And also like Winterbottom, Assayas has an unfortunate tendency here to cut those moments slightly short. I found a number of times wanting scenes to continue longer than they did, building up more of that improvisational sense of intimacy, instead of frequently fading to black while the scene is still underway (similar to Winterbottom's "9 Songs"). Still, there are enough of those moments to make the film more than worthwhile. I definitely think it is Assayas's most approachable, warm film that I've seen. Not that I find he is necessarily a particularly cold or detached filmmaker ("Demonlover", if anything, may very well be a masterpiece of pure detachment and inhumanity, but I think that comes more from the concept of the film rather than the filmmaker, and "Irma Vep" was nothing if not a gushing love letter to his ex-wife, after all), but there seems to be a deliberate attempt in this film to capture something real and immediate, even if Assayas gets side tracked by the unfortunate boats of cerebral, intellectual café chatting.

This is a very solid film, make no mistake, but it tends to play more like a testing ground for various elements of Olivier Assayas' overall style, particularly those which he would later explore more fully in his later masterpiece "Demonlover", than any sort of cohesive narrative statement. It's not very often that a film strikes me as not having enough of a plot, but in the case of this there did seem to be a certain irrelevance to it all. There's nothing really new about the "making a movie" movie, and this doesn't add much to the mix, although i do think it is well done for what it is, and occasionally even approaches a sort of proto-"Lost in Translation", with Paris standing in for Tokyo and Maggie Cheung's Asian "otherness" replacing Bill Murray's fish-out-of-water Americanness. But the film is never really focused enough to compare in any significant way to that film. "Irma Vep" really only comes alive when Assayas gets away from his nagging tendency towards a certain French talkiness and indulges in the moments of pure visual cinema that make up the other half of his general approach (and which seem to be invested with much more enthusiasm here) , such as the scene scored to Sonic Youth's "Tunic" (another foreshadowing of "Demonlover"). Certainly he does have a way with capturing pretty little images of neon lights reflecting through car windows and things like that, enough that I can acknowledge he is definitely a talented filmmaker, but within this film he never quite finds the correct way to integrate his little artistic flourishes into the whole, and overall the film feels more like a collection of separate ideas than a cohesive statement of any kind.

Zooey Deschanel's presence on screen is truly spellbinding as always, but unfortunately this film fails to do her justice despite a promising concept. Adam Rapp is a very good novelist, but for some reason his gift with words completely fails to come across in the stilted, contrived dialogue of this film, and his directorial ability seems to be nil. This film has no sense of flair or personality. It has no real identity and just seems like another unremarkable addition to the rapidly growing number of audience-friendly "quirky" US independent films. Although nothing about it stands out as particularly awful, something within the film just doesn't gel. The cinematography is occasionally nice, but the acting (apart from the luminous Deschanel) is pretty transparent. Never for a moment could I see these characters as people as opposed to the actors playing them. Ed Harris is just Ed Harris and Will Farrell (despite an honorable effort on his part to play down his usual persona) is still just Will Farrell. Nothing about the film stuck out as particularly bad or too overly-contrived (unlike the insufferable "Garden State") but at the same time it never manages to overcome it's own unremarkableness. Ultimately it somehow plays more like an extended trailer for itself than an actual movie.

Fans of a certain type of daring, outrageous, and innovative art film (such as the work of Harmony Korine, Gaspar Noe, and Ulrich Seidl) are probably already well aware of Mexican up-and-coming auteur Carlos Reygadas, but if not they should be. His debut film "Japon" was a mesmerizing, albeit slightly ponderous minor masterpiece which brought to mind Werner Herzog as well as the more overtly minimalistic work of filmmakers like Tarkovsky and Abbas Kiarostami. Now, with "Battle in Heaven", Reygadas completely outdoes himself with this truly mind-bending, insanely brilliant work. Sure to prove just as frustrating to viewers as Vincent Gallo's incredible "Brown Bunny" (and not dissimilar both in pacing and sexual content, although I think Reygadas' is the slightly better film), "Battle in Heaven" will also deliver the subversive delight to anyone exhilarated by truly daring, challenging artistic film-making. It has very much the same type of strange, twisted beauty that Harmony Korine and Ulrich Seidl deal in (and which they inherited from Herzog), and contains spell-binding, innovative camera-work on par with what Gaspar Noe has been doing in his films "I Stand Alone" and "Irreversible". It is also every bit as risky and barrier-pushing as Gallo's film or Larry Clark's (still unreleased officially in the US) "Ken Park". On top of that, the film suffers from none of the vague too-slowness of "Japon". All and all it is one of the most incredible films I have ever seen. If the reclusive genius Harmony Korine never makes another film, I consider Reygadas his immediate and rightful heir.

Such a frustrating movie. On one hand it it full of brilliantly unguardedly "real" almost voyeuristic moments, very similar to Paul Morrisey's trilogy for Andy Warhol (both in content and style), yet at the same time the filmmakers seemed to somehow feel the need to add a few totally unnecessary contrived "plot" scenes that not only feel awkward and contrived within the context of this otherwise free-form, pseudo-documentary film, but which don't even add up to anything anyway. The vast majority of this film works great as a simple, matter-of-fact "day in the life of a drug-addicted prostitute", so I'm not sure what they were trying to accomplish with these laughably superficial, tacked-on scenes such as when the main character kills some policemen (with no repercussions or otherwise relevance to the film) and a whole lukewarm subplot involving the inevitable reunion between her and her mother who abandoned her as an infant. Not to mention the strange ending which seemed to have been filmed simply to give the film "an ending" in the conventional sense when it was really unnecessary. Otherwise this film is great in that it shows real prostitutes and real junkies doing their thing in a totally objective context, and captures some great true moments in the process.

...In which Steve Martin seems to meld his oddly obnoxious romantic fantasy (?) with his awkwardly out-of-touch idea of what contemporary urban twenty-something angst is like. Basically it seems like Martin's own attempt at approximating Bill Murray in "Lost in Translation", but it comes off as painfully derivative and second-hand. The director seemed like they plundered that film (and even more so the overrated "Amelie") for every stylistic idea and then regurgitated them onto the screen. It seemed like the writers tried to do something hip and "indie" (in the most superficial, trendy sense), but ultimately their bland, conventional Nora Ephron sensibility shows through. Did you ever wonder what "Sleepless in Seattle" would be like if they had tried to make it appeal to the Myspace crowd? Well, this is basically it.

Hong Sang-soo really is probably the greatest director almost no one has heard of, at least from Asia if not the whole world. That said, I'm not sure I like this one quite as much as his earlier "The Power of Kangwon Province", if only because it doesn't quite have the same sense of distinct urban anomie that I love. It might be an all-around more well-constructed film though, if borderline too strictly formalist. It's too bad these are the only two films of his available on DVD because otherwise I'd make watching all of them a priority. It's funny that the film has such a rigid sense of structuralism and yet is infused with such a real, intimate sense of humanism. The film is divided into two halves (each with eight chapters), showing roughly the same courtship between a man and a woman, first from what appears to be his perspective, and then from hers (although the specific point-of-view is never directly announced and it is possible they overlap somewhat). This sounds pretty gimmicky, and in a sense it skirts that line, but like I was saying it is presented in such a straight-forward, empathetic way that it barely seems cerebral or detached at all. It's really quite remarkable, i think, what a truly empathetic tone the film has. Although visually somewhat similar to the work of the great Tawainese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, the film has none of Hou's pronounced sense of detachment or aloofness. Instead it feels incredibly intimate and humane. Still, the rigid structural devise, if not quite gimmicky, does create a certain repetitiveness, since unlike "Rashomon" the two versions of events don't usually differ in very overt ways (although there are some differences). I wouldn't normally call the film slow (as minimalistic as the camera style is, it moves along fairly briskly), but the repetition does make it seem like it drags at times over the course of it's two hour length. Still, it's overall a pretty great film. Some of the most honest, heartfelt, no-frills relationship stuff I've ever seen in a film, actually. The last scene in particular is one of the nicest things I've seen in a while.

I found this pretty good, despite still finding a lot of things about the 'USA' trilogy ill-conceived both aesthetically and ideologically. I definitely liked this a lot more than "Dogville" though. I thought that Bryce Dallas Howard did a hell of a better job than Nicole Kidman did, for one thing, and overall I thought the performances were all generally better and less stilted, even though the dialogue is still odd and clunky in parts. I also thought the story was a bit more creative and less recycled than it was in "Dogville", although Von Trier still seems to have a perverse fascination with degrading his female characters. I have no problem with a rape scene in and of itself, but after what, five films now of women getting mistreated with no redemption it seems a little unsettling and frankly a bit immature of Von Trier to keep doing it, especially when he has never even portrayed a male/female relationship that is at all positive in any way (well, maybe the beginning of "Breaking the Waves"?). Besides that, I also think there are a great deal of major flaws with Von Trier's entire approach to this trilogy. Although the sound stage gimmick (yes, I do think it's a gimmick) was less distracting here than in "Dogville" (keeping the background dark a lot of the time helped), I still get the overwhelming feeling of watching what is essentially a human puppet show. The film is not really about actual people, but vessels which Von Trier uses to act out a parable. I've said it before, but stories that are purely allegorical like this one bug me. Of course, Von Trier's films have almost always been this way, but at least in the Golden Hearts trilogy the didacticness was hidden by the real-world, cinema-verite presentation. Because "Mandarlay" has much better, less theatrical acting than "Dogville" did it bothers me much less, but I still found myself actively thinking that the film would be more engaging and in general just better if it had been filmed in real locations. It retrospect it's remarkable that I even found the film as engaging as I did. There is really no reason for the sound stage gimmick. As far as I'm concerned, the use of sound-effects in the film (such as the sound of opening a door when there is none) is just as much empty cleverness as any film can be. Von Trier is just being "different" for the sake of it with stuff like that. It's a good thing that I found the acting as compelling as I did. Particularly from Bryce Dallas Howard. In truth I think Von Trier basically owes the entire watchibility of his indulgent project to her, and ironically he probably treated her as he has all his female leads, which is to say, badly. Although I also found the story to be an improvement over "Dogville", it's not like Von Trier's writing is really getting any better. After seeing "Dear Wendy" his weaknesses in "Manderlay" in this respect seem all the more obvious. In general I dislike such expositional voice-overs (after getting used to Malick, David Gordon Green, and Wong-Kar Wai it's hard to accept anything less poetic), and Von Trier's are certainly no exception. I'm a big believer in the "show, not tell" philosophy. Also, I thought the story sort of fell apart towards the end. The climatic "twist" and denouement didn't really carry as much weight as they were so obviously supposed to. They felt a bit like the climax of "Oldboy" but without the genius twistedness. I felt sort of like yelling "It's a cookbook!" at one point (a "Twilight Zone" reference, in case you missed that). It just gets more and more heavy-handed until it just becomes ridiculous. As much as I generally enjoy his films (including this one), it's becoming a bit absurd that Von Trier feels like he can make such direct attacks at America without even visiting the place. I mean, look, I'm certainly no patriot, but the attitude he expresses through the film contains so much certainty that he should at least make an attempt to know what he's talking about. Really, what does a guy who lives in Denmark know about race relations in the United States? Do they even have black people in Denmark? With that thought in my mind as I watched the final moments of the film, the pure egotism of Lars Von Trier became apparent.

This film is good fun. The type of movie that's good to throw on at a party as a distraction if everyone is really drunk and you don't want to think too much but need some visual stimulation. The first segment "Dumplings" is definitely my favorite (thanks in no small part to Christopher Doyle's lending of his talents behind the camera). The feature-length version of this segment is even better, and is fortunately included on the second disc of the region 1 DVD.

Chan-Wook Park's "Cut" is fun but also another sign that he might not have all that much going for him after "Oldboy" found the right balance of style and genuine intelligence (after the disappointment of "Lady Vengeance"). He lays on the gratuitous flashy camera-work a bit too thick and the plot tries hard but really doesn't carry that much weight. His oddball humor that worked so well when kept in check within the context of "Oldboy" and "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" fails him again here, coming off as incongruously goofy, and here also the ending inexplicably dives into complete incomprehensibility.

Incomprehensibility isn't something Takashi Miike has to worry about too much in his segment "Box", as the short shows him at his most incomprehensible and Lynchian all the way through. It's actually a surprisingly subdued and technically assured piece of film-making from him considering the increasing sloppiness of his feature work.

This is a great film. If this is any indication, than Hong Sang-Soo really is "Asian cinema's best kept secret". It's very similar in style to Tsai Ming-Liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, and covers a lot of the same ground as them thematically, but I think I actually enjoy this more as a whole than any single one of their films. The overt minimalism is slightly less pronounced here than in their work, although it still completely fits that style (the camera never moves even once), and somehow I found the film less self-consciously "slow" than Tsai Ming-Liang or Hou Hsiao-hsien, which I think is part of the reason I enjoyed it more. Plus, it doesn't keep it's subjects quite as detached as Hou does. I felt like the film was also somehow more "complete" and less open-ended (just barely) than some of their work, although that's not to say it had much of anything resembling a forward-moving plot. I would have a hard time believing that Sophia Coppola wasn't directly influenced by this film for "Lost in Translation" (scenes of a young woman wandering around by herself, and languishing in her hotel room wearing punk panties can't help but seem familiar).