Life is Beautiful

Peppermint Candy (1999) - Lee


The film chronicles key events in the life of Kim Young-ho (Sol Kyung-gu). It opens with Kim stumbling into his school reunion outing near an idyllic creek under the railroad tracks. After making a scene, he throws himself in front of an oncoming train. Tracing backward into 20 years, it shows the dehumanizing effect that the violence has on a person. With a crooked smile and bad temper, Kim is not a nice guy. But he wasn't always like that. It's hard to believe that he was once a young man who liked looking at wild flowers and wanted to be a photographer.

The Gwangju Masssacre in 1980 in which thousands of pro-democracy students lost their lives by the military force, deeply scarred a generation of Korean people. Peppermint Candy deals with that incident in a personal storytelling that is amazingly effective. Kim's sneering detachment, unhappiness and violent nature of his later years is explained slowly through traveling back in time in an absorbing, revealing way. Its accumulative power in making us sympathize with this deeply detestable person is undeniable. Lee Chang-dong is a gifted writer/filmmaker whose use of 'time traveling' device here is much more elegant and resonant here than the likes of Memento and Irreversible. His attention to detail and use of different cinematic devices (music, phrases and especially peppermint candy) for connecting different times are not showy but beautifully done, almost reminding me of Kieslowski films- again, much more resonant given the historical/personal context. I can't say anything more than that it's an amazingly beautiful, touching film.

Miner's Woe

Black Republic (1990) - Park



Kim (Hong Sang-soo regular Mun Seong-gun)arrives in a small, dying mining town in the midst of nationwide labor protests. He is an educated labor organizer from Seoul, wanted by the police for his activities, trying to lay low. The mining companies are shuttering its doors due to strikes and low employment and Kim can't get a job without proper identification. He finally gets hired by a small coal Briquette manufacturing company. It's a dirty, back breaking work. The company owner's spoiled, loan sharking son (Park Joong-hoon) somehow takes a liking to Kim (possibly because they are around the same age, and Kim looks like a learned man unlike dirty faced country hicks around him?). Song (homey Shim Hye-jin), one of his girls at the cafe (mostly pay-dates,just above being downright prostitutes), takes a shine on Kim. She wants to escape the small town and be free.

Park Kwang-su's social realist melodrama has well drawn characters and brings out sympathy for down and out 'ordinary people'. The Korean title roughly translates to 'They are Like Us'. By that, what Park means to say is that these small town people are like us- they go through life's hardships, fall in love, rage against injustice, get jealous, etc. I liked it.

Buddha in All of Us

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The Life Chaotic

Elle Veut le Chaos (2008) - Côté






Enigmatic in its beautiful black and white images, Denis Côté's Elle Veut le Chaos/All That She Wants tells a slight story of Coralie (Eve Duranceau), who ekes out a living in nowhereland next to a highway near Montreal. Côté seems to have a knack for lightly sketching out these sort of small time outsiders while keeping their mysterious origins intact. Coralie lives with Jacob, an older man/father figure. Their lives seem forever indentured to the violent gang, headed by Alain, next door. Their relationships are never clearly defined. As the film plays out, one can guess that they (including Coralie's crazy mother who runs away in the beginning of the film) all belonged to the gang at some point. And they are all somewhat related to Alain.

Pierrot (Laurent Lucas), just came out of jail, comes back and tells Coralie that he wants to take her away to his home in France. But that's not what she wants. Jacob wants to kill Spazz, the most violent of the gang, and get away. Coralie doesn't want that either. Meanwhile, the gang brings in two young Russian girls whores who can't speak French, for their entertainment.

Cause and effect don't really apply to Côté's films. Violence happens abruptly, motivations hidden and unclear and things turn out unexpectedly. The mood he creates is absorbing and has a somewhat otherworldly quality to it. Oh, and fireworks look beautiful in black and white.

Rock'n'Roll Mom

Mama (2013) - Muschietti

Surprisingly decent horror movie despite its title. Jessica Chastain finally plays someone other than a Mid-Western housewife (haven't seen Zero Dark Thirty). She is Annabelle, a dark haired, tattooed bassist for a rock band (styled after Chrissy Hines I'm sure), far from mother material who's thrown into one when her artist boyfriend Luke's long lost nieces were discovered in a secluded cabin in the woods, living wild-child style. After a child psychiatrist helps them win the custody, under the condition that he will be observing the kids as a case study, Annabelle moves into a clinic owned manor house with the newfangled family. It's totally not her thing, but she can't abandon Luke now. It turns out kids were raised by some unknown woman they call Mama with the diet consists of cherries, rats and raccoons for 5 years. They think it's the kids' imagination gone wild, some kind of mental illness, split personality disorder maybe. Then strange things start happening in the house...

Did I say Chastain is great in this? She is. Her character's nicely drawn: her interactions with kids awkward and awesome. Did I say she has giant octopus tentacles tattooed on her shoulder? Pretty hot. Mama has that dark signature Guillermo Del Toro children's movie written all over- tragic ghost story with a not so evil, just creepy antagonist. Has some real scares. It's the best J-horror a Hollywood production can muster.

Showboating

Bronson (2008) - Refn





Perhaps I enjoyed this way too much than I should've, but I can't deny the fact that I was dazzled by it. Refn is no fluke. His unabashed operatic, Kubrick-esque stylings and Tom Hardy's showboating, over-the-top performance are totally magnetic. I loved all the unmotivated angles and dolly shots. A great soundtrack too: it has the best use of a Pet Shop Boys song ever. A blast!

Evolutionary Biology

Mon Oncle d'Amerique (1980) - Resnais





Built around physician/philosopher Henri Laborit's ideas on evolutionary biology, the film follows three subjects from childhood - Jean (Roger Pierre) a writer from a privileged background, Jannine (Nicole Garcia), an actress from a proletariat household and René (Gerard Depardieu), a famer's son/struggling everyman. Using lab rats as an example, Laborit lays out how people avoid painful situations by moving, and if there is no escape, psychosomatic symptoms develop. And in defensive action, people turn violent against each other. But the film is much more than that. Resnais slightly interweaves these 3 lives without turning them into lab rats. Their melodramatic stories are rendered sympathetically and their problems relatable. The film is not cynical in any way, except for the notion of that mythic 'American uncle' who'd solve all our problems but never actually shows up.

Resnais counters Laborit's deterministic view with poignant montage sequences, constant cutting back to childhood memories and old movie clips featuring the heroes of our protagonists. The beauty of Mon Oncle d'Amerique is that it leaves me with more questions than answers. Are we all prisoners of our biological origins, that if one brick from our building blocks is removed, we are bound to crumble? Can our good memories trump our childhood traumas? Are we capable of leaping over our biological makeup of self preservation and think of the others? Beautifully constructed, playful and thoroughly thought provoking, Mon Oncle d'Amerique is one of my new favorites.

Film as History

City of Sadness (1989) - Hou





Hou quietly observes a prominent Lin family in a mountain town as it breaks apart during turbulent times in Taiwan after WWII. Handsomely photographed static interior shots accompanied by naturalistic performances, City of Sadness looks and feels like Ozu. Sung Young Chen is great as boisterous eldest son, so as Jack Kao as the middle child who suffers from PTD who were drafted to fight in a Japanese army and later is tortured by Kuomintang as a collaborator. Young Tony Leung also shines as the youngest, sensitive, deaf (because Leung couldn't speak Taiwanese, I found out, but it works him being as a slient witness) brother of the family. It's he and his long time family friend and later wife Hinomi (Xin Shu Fen) who bear witness to the changing times.

I had a very little knowledge of Taiwanese history going in City of Sadness: didn't know about their 51 year Japanese Occupation (compared to Korea being under 30 year occupation, and we still hold grudges) and the rather unique colonial past (as the first Japanese colony since 1894, taking cues from the Brits, the Japs governed them differently at first and to this day, I hear Taiwanese don't have too much adversarial feelings toward Japs as the rest of Asia do) , didn't know about their diverse ethnic groups, culture and languages, didn't know about Kuomintang's atrocities after the WWII against its own people. It is rather wrong to base your knowledge of a certain people's history solely on one mere film, but knowing Hou and his detached yet humanistic approach, I'd take his film over any dry history textbooks.

Lights! Camera! and Hold!

Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters (2012) - Shapiro





I like Crewdson's large format, cinematic photographs. I was excited about this documentary coming out but missed the chance to see it in theaters this spring. The native Brooklyn photographer is known for capturing scenarios of lost (white) American dream in the suburban/small town setting that New England writers are so fond of (apparently, Russell Banks and Rick Moody are big fan of his work and are interviewed in the film). As Crewdson talks about Cindy Sherman and David Lynch as inspirations, you can see where he's sensibilities are coming from. Unfortunately, Shapiro's doc is all about the process- how he shoots his massive scale photos working with a DP, production designer, set decorators and editors. It is indeed interesting stuff that he regards his photographic process as a film shoot with same amount of people and equipment as a moderate indie movie set. Instead of 'lights, camera and action!', it's 'lights, camera and hold!'

The doc never delves into how a well to do Brooklynite became photographing suburban decay. Crewdson comes across as a nice enough guy and his meticulousness (shouting from a cherry picker, "move your left hand about 2 inches up and to the right!") is pretty cool. But what motivates him to gravitate toward his subjects? Also, his post-touch up heavy process made me wonder about being an artist in the tech heavy age. Call me old fashioned, but I feel ambivalent about his compositing final product from many different takes, physically removing certain things from the frame and whatnot. I guess what matters at the end is selling your photos of poor folks for upward of one hundred thousand dollars to rich folks.

Spy in Our Midst

Shadow Dancer (2013) - Marsh

Shifting loyalties regarding family, cause and country are the basis for Shadow Dancer, a sensitive and affecting new political thriller from director James Marsh (Man on Wire, Red Riding: 1980). It boasts a great ensemble cast that includes Clive Owen, Gillian Anderson, Domhnall Gleeson and a relative newcomer, Andrea Riseborough in the central role. 

Soon after witnessing a senseless family tragedy in 1973 in the Occupied Northern Ireland, we are transported to 1998 London, where a sullen Republican member, Collette (Riseborough) reluctantly disposes a bomb in the tube station stairways. Then, she is swiftly scooped up by two ready MI5 agents and delivered to an interrogation room. The whole wordless botched bombing attempt and following apprehension sequences are tense and swift. There, Collette is given an ultimatum by an MI5 officer Mac (Clive Owen): become an informant in her own community and her family or lose everything and go to jail for 25 years. Fearing her young son's fate with the prospect of her being locked up, and after Mac's pledge to become a protector of her and her son from any harm, she accepts being a mole in her radical IRA household.

Back home, with the news of The Good Friday Agreement between the elite Republicans and the British Government looming, Collette's brothers, who belong to a more radical faction of the IRA and are frustrated by nimble politicians, plan an assassination of a high level judge. Collette, being under suspicion from the Republican higher-ups and radicals alike after her supposed unscathed escape from British authorities, is once again pushed into taking part in the terror act. Her absolute last minute phone call to Mac results in the death of her brother's colleague and the failure of their plan. The pressure and suspicions mount. Not wanting to harm anyone by her spying activity, Collette wants out, but Mac's boss Fletcher (Gillian Anderson) won't have any of it. Furthermore, she is willing to give Collette to the dogs when push comes to shove. "There are other informants," she coldly declares to concerned Mac.

Even though it's a classic 'pawn in their game' film, with its deliberate pacing and mood, Shadow Dancer never stays too far from its characters. Handsomely shot in grainy, anamorphic widescreen by Rob Hardy (Boy A, Red Riding: 1974, The Forgiveness of Blood, Inni), the camera often lingers on Collette and Mac's anxiety-ridden faces in close-ups. Working from his own novel of the same name, Tom Bradby's script beautifully sketches out sympathetic characters and their dilemmas without ever being sentimental, all the while pointing out the ugly circumstances brought on by years of systematic humiliation.

Not only is Riseborough fantastic as our morally tangled heroine, always dependable Owen also gives a fine tuned performance as an MI5 officer trying to do right by his subject. Domhnall Gleeson (Harry Potter series) turns gritty as Collette's militant younger brother. Most surprising is Gillian Anderson in a small but meaty role. Her double dealing MI5 commanding officer, Kate Fletcher, is an imposing presence in every frame she's in. Ever since re-relocating to London, Anderson is having a sort of renaissance of her career all across the pond - after her critically acclaimed performances in BBC's Bleak House and Great Expectations, she currently stars in an Irish TV series The Fall and NBC's Hannibal. Anderson's beauty is well utilized by Marsh here as a source of intimidation.

I see this film as a perfect antidote for often faceless, visceral filmmaking that has become the standard for today's action thrillers, which I call the 'Paul Greengrass school of filmmaking.' Shadow Dancer is understated, classy, solid filmmaking with intelligence and soul.

Party Like It's 2001

Millenium Mambo (2001) - Hou





Gorgeous, just gorgeous. With mangled timelines and sporadic and repetitive voiceovers, the film focuses on a beautiful wayward youth Vicky (Shu Qi). She is in a sadomasochistic bind with controlling Hao Hao (Tuan Chun-Hao), breaking up and going back to him many times. While working as a bar hostess, she meets Jack (Jack Kao), an older gangster type who takes her under his wing. I loved the scenes shot in snowy Hokkaido where Vicky loses herself to her surroundings. Colors, compositions, all amazing. With Hou, it's all touch and go for me. I adored Cafe Lumiere, Goodbye South Goodbye but meh about Flight of the Red Balloon. Mambo really clicked with me. And like with all Hou, the film, the characters are in love with its past. It's a 2001 movie told in 2011 being nostalgic about 2001! A free flowing, beautiful film.

Streaming Lives

Love Streams (1984) - Cassavetes
Sarah (Gena Rowlands) is going through a horrible divorce. Her husband (Seymour Cassel) and their daughter don't want anything to do with her. She is not stable enough. For her, love never stops, it's a continuous stream. Then there is her brother Robert Harmon (John Cassavetes), a famous writer whose life is soaked with booze and one-nighters. They both are impulsive, nutty mess: they make rash decisions thinking as if they are the most logical solutions which always lead them into disasters. My favorite scenes with Harmon are the ones where hits up with a pretty lounge singer, insists on driving her home in her car while drunk, crashes her car and ends up chatting up with her mother, and where he gives his 8 year old son (of whom he hasn't seen since his birth) beer to drink and leaves him alone all night in a Vegas hotel. Sarah is just as crazy. She thinks her brother needs something to love in his life, something fuzzy and cuddly, so she goes to animal shelter and brings in the whole zoo into his LA house- two miniature horses, a hen and a dozen chicks, ducks, a goat and a dog. Harmon obviously is in no shape himself to take care of his nutty sister, but insists that she stays with him. But she is dead set on reuniting with her estranged family who doesn't love her any longer.

Cassavetes's world of the lives of mental, emotional wrecks is often funny and poignant precisely because of the character's complete lack of self-awareness. Both Rowlands and Cassavetes are amazing in this funny and sad film.

Dirty Old Man

Comedia de Deus/God's Comedy (1995) - Monteiro








João César Monteiro's God's Comedy is perhaps the epitome of 'a dirty old man movie'. Monteiro himself plays a João de Deus, a well dressed, studious old bachelor who works at an ice cream parlor, making such fabulous concoction as Paraíso and others. He only hires beautiful young girls to work there, emphasizing on maintaining impeccable personal hygiene. As the movie plays out, we get to learn his weird sexual kinks these girls supply him with. He collects girl's pubes with special notes in a handsome bound book named "Book of Thoughts". There is Rosarinho (Raquel Ascensão), a curly haired, luminous beauty, of whom João takes a special interest in. Then there is 14 year old Joaninha (Cláudia Teixeira), a butcher's daughter whom he gives a milk bath, with the intention of making ice cream out of that tub of milk. The thing is, with long, intriguing face, João is not in the least creepy. His actions might cause him repercussions in the form of bodily harm and unemployment, but enough wit and charm, he is no different than Woody Allen. There are many other funny in-jokes in the film- especially the João's hilarious, long winded speech at the possible joint venture celebration with a French businessman (his name is Antoine Doinel and doesn't look anything like Jean-Pierre Léaud and João mentions that).

God's Comedy is an offbeat, often funny film and it showcases the director's unique comedic style. But clocking at almost 3 hours, the film is a slog to go through. It could've easily been a deft 90 minute film.