I recently gave a talk to young Vietnamese filmmakers.
Please click on title above for the link to the report.
Sep 9, 2009
Sep 5, 2009
The Lush Interview
Hosanna Leong interviews Roger Garcia on Singapore radio, September 3, 2009.
Click on link below (website page with interview will open and start playing after a slight delay depending on your connection and computer speed. Scroll down to bottom of website page for audio control).
Singapore Lush Interview
PREMIER SCREENING OF BLOOD TIES IN SINGAPORE
L to R Chia Yee Wei (Director), Roger Garcia, Jason Lai (Producer)
Click on link below (website page with interview will open and start playing after a slight delay depending on your connection and computer speed. Scroll down to bottom of website page for audio control).
Singapore Lush Interview
PREMIER SCREENING OF BLOOD TIES IN SINGAPORE
L to R Chia Yee Wei (Director), Roger Garcia, Jason Lai (Producer)
Aug 7, 2009
G.I. Freud
G.I. JOE - The Rise of Cobra (Stephen Sommer, 2009)
To the unsuspecting, G.I. JOE is being marketed as an action film based on Hasbro's time-honored action figure dolls that takes place in the not too distant future. In fact the film is something like the diary of a madman, written by a deranged Freudian who is falling in love with his Dominatrix.
The whole film can be seen as an allusion to an intoxicating session in a S&M house, perversely encoded as childhood pain and the pleasure of innocent love. The characters wear quite macho leather-type outfits (even the foxy Rachel Nichols whose battle suit shows her snugly encased breasts); the evil doctor (Joseph Gordon Levitt) wears an oxygen mask and sounds like Dennis Hopper in BLUE VELVET; and all the goons wear masks and head-gear that make them look like denizens of some domination dungeon. The "rush" of the action is all about physical thrills and endurance of the beating kind, even the use of armed weaponry is depicted graphically as waves (of pleasure, of pain). This is all brought to a head at the end where the evil doctor, demanding to be called "Commander," puts on a very phallic looking silvery head mask - an image that gives greater dimensionality to the sub-title of the film "The Rise of Cobra". Can you get anymore S&M than that? A movie inspired by Action Figure Dolls? Hardly (or perhaps at some sub-conscious level of Freudian play - very deeply).
There is much more but let me settle on one or two "dreams." In a sustained action set piece, two of the "Joes" (the ostensible white hero, Duke, and black side-kick Ripcord) don special suits which enable them to run faster, jump higher, and shoot endless rounds of high-velocity bullets all in the blink of an eye. Looking like a cross between mini Robocops and Buzz Lightyear, they chase the bad guys all over Paris, speeding through the streets like two crazed spermatoza desperate for survival and trying to save the symbol of French potency, the Eiffel Tower, from being eaten (yes, eaten!) by metal crunching nano-ants. It all seems somewhat reversed to me - two spermatoza looking for the phallus - but then we have seen a number of Hollywood entertainments that seem enamoured of reversing the natural order of things by fiddling around with the space/time continuum from Back to the Future, all the way to Benjamin Button.
There are explosions, phallic play of gun and sword that you normally see in action films but here also are instances which might be called Freudian male fantasies. Proto-lesbian bitch fights where Sienna Miller - a Mother and Whore character - toughs it out with the younger Rachel Nichols who rejects men at first until she finds some sympathy in a black man (every Hollywood film reflects the President in power, and this is the Obama factor).
There are fantasy sequences coded as flashbacks - in particular infantile regression where bad guy Storm Shadow (Lee Byung-hun) flashes back to his childhood when he was a kung fu rival to good guy Snake Eyes (Ray Park). No matter that they seem to be performing a hybrid version of Chinese kung fu in a Japanese temple with a Chinese monk who would seem more at home in Thailand; what's important is that they have watched Sammo Hung and Jet Li movies from the 1980s and are now imitating them badly. Part of this infantile regression is signalled by the old school Hollywood racism of the film - when will studio pictures reject the stereotype of Asian men as faintly gay and dangerous villains, and African American sidekicks as just modern updates of Jack Benny's Rochester, a figure of fun and abuse?
We know from Freud that infantile sexuality in its first phase is characterized by an inability to distinguish between oneself and the external world, and that pleasure is derived largely from sucking which is equated with eating. Thus, the scene of young Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes fighting each other with the violence of adults, is set in a kitchen and centered around hunger and food (Storm Shadow catches Snake Eyes stealing food from the kitchen and fights him). And it is a fight - in patterns and behavior - that the protagonists bring into their current lives. In that sense, the characters are still marked by infantile sexuality and cannot distinguish the past from the present, fantasy from actuality, the Real from the Fake. They have yet to grow up. Precisely like this movie.
To the unsuspecting, G.I. JOE is being marketed as an action film based on Hasbro's time-honored action figure dolls that takes place in the not too distant future. In fact the film is something like the diary of a madman, written by a deranged Freudian who is falling in love with his Dominatrix.
The whole film can be seen as an allusion to an intoxicating session in a S&M house, perversely encoded as childhood pain and the pleasure of innocent love. The characters wear quite macho leather-type outfits (even the foxy Rachel Nichols whose battle suit shows her snugly encased breasts); the evil doctor (Joseph Gordon Levitt) wears an oxygen mask and sounds like Dennis Hopper in BLUE VELVET; and all the goons wear masks and head-gear that make them look like denizens of some domination dungeon. The "rush" of the action is all about physical thrills and endurance of the beating kind, even the use of armed weaponry is depicted graphically as waves (of pleasure, of pain). This is all brought to a head at the end where the evil doctor, demanding to be called "Commander," puts on a very phallic looking silvery head mask - an image that gives greater dimensionality to the sub-title of the film "The Rise of Cobra". Can you get anymore S&M than that? A movie inspired by Action Figure Dolls? Hardly (or perhaps at some sub-conscious level of Freudian play - very deeply).
There is much more but let me settle on one or two "dreams." In a sustained action set piece, two of the "Joes" (the ostensible white hero, Duke, and black side-kick Ripcord) don special suits which enable them to run faster, jump higher, and shoot endless rounds of high-velocity bullets all in the blink of an eye. Looking like a cross between mini Robocops and Buzz Lightyear, they chase the bad guys all over Paris, speeding through the streets like two crazed spermatoza desperate for survival and trying to save the symbol of French potency, the Eiffel Tower, from being eaten (yes, eaten!) by metal crunching nano-ants. It all seems somewhat reversed to me - two spermatoza looking for the phallus - but then we have seen a number of Hollywood entertainments that seem enamoured of reversing the natural order of things by fiddling around with the space/time continuum from Back to the Future, all the way to Benjamin Button.
There are explosions, phallic play of gun and sword that you normally see in action films but here also are instances which might be called Freudian male fantasies. Proto-lesbian bitch fights where Sienna Miller - a Mother and Whore character - toughs it out with the younger Rachel Nichols who rejects men at first until she finds some sympathy in a black man (every Hollywood film reflects the President in power, and this is the Obama factor).
There are fantasy sequences coded as flashbacks - in particular infantile regression where bad guy Storm Shadow (Lee Byung-hun) flashes back to his childhood when he was a kung fu rival to good guy Snake Eyes (Ray Park). No matter that they seem to be performing a hybrid version of Chinese kung fu in a Japanese temple with a Chinese monk who would seem more at home in Thailand; what's important is that they have watched Sammo Hung and Jet Li movies from the 1980s and are now imitating them badly. Part of this infantile regression is signalled by the old school Hollywood racism of the film - when will studio pictures reject the stereotype of Asian men as faintly gay and dangerous villains, and African American sidekicks as just modern updates of Jack Benny's Rochester, a figure of fun and abuse?
We know from Freud that infantile sexuality in its first phase is characterized by an inability to distinguish between oneself and the external world, and that pleasure is derived largely from sucking which is equated with eating. Thus, the scene of young Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes fighting each other with the violence of adults, is set in a kitchen and centered around hunger and food (Storm Shadow catches Snake Eyes stealing food from the kitchen and fights him). And it is a fight - in patterns and behavior - that the protagonists bring into their current lives. In that sense, the characters are still marked by infantile sexuality and cannot distinguish the past from the present, fantasy from actuality, the Real from the Fake. They have yet to grow up. Precisely like this movie.
Jul 2, 2009
Toys Gone Wild
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Poor planet Earth. It's always being invaded by strange creatures, or getting in the way of asteroids from outer space, or - for the umpteenth time - threatened with the Apocalypse. Earthlings are scorched in vast numbers as their cities crumble. Survivors do not fare much better - men are abducted, women raped, children enslaved. If it's not aliens, it's the environment. Earthlings pay the price for ignoring signs of global warming (and who can blame them when those signs are freezing snow, pouring rain, electrical storms and a President - in The Day After Tomorrow - who looks like Dick Cheney?)
Michael Bay's latest addition to the Hasbro Transformer toy genre is the second film in the series and begins by laying waste to Shanghai. There's no organic connection between this and anything else. But it doesn't matter anyway because this teaser is really a revenge fantasy of the American worker against outsourcing toy manufacturing to China (even if the Shanghai scene was shot in Pennsylvania). However I doubt if that's what the censor at 国家广播电影电视总局 (aka State Adminstration for Film, Radio and Television) had in mind when he asked for trims of a Chinese police car being crushed.
It takes Michael Bay about two and a half hours to explain these aliens who have insisted yet again on bringing their battles and personal hang-ups to earth. The mythology is not too different from a Star Wars movie and to be fair to Michael Bay, it also took George Lucas about the same amount of time to explain the same story. Revenge of the Sith, Revenge of the Fallen - same difference! But I think the Cesar-inflected hard-edged look of Michael Bay's Autobots are preferable to Lucasarts' soft-toy floppiness of Jar Jar Brinks. (Cesar was the French artist who made a career out of exhibiting blocks of crushed, compacted cars in the 1960s.)
Reportedly Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is one of the worst reviewed mainstream films of recent times so some critics may dispute its characterization as a movie. I'm not one of those but the film should be seen as a component of a totality that includes - and this was a surprise even to me - hands-on playing with toys.
Now, just as not everyone has directed a movie, not everyone has played with Transformer toys. It's not that difficult. As a prelude you "deconstruct" them from familiar Earthling vehicles (truck, sports car, compact) into creatures that could have been Masters of the Universe until the onset of the Great Recession (more of a threat than Aliens or Global Warming). In this supreme mode, your toys are ready for battle. You hold one in the left hand, and hold one in the right hand. Then you weave and bob them around each other, exchanging glancing blows which sometimes knock off an arm or a leg. It all leads to the inevitable climax which is to smash one figure into the other in any number of creative ways (feet first, head down, crotch angle and so forth) all the while making a range of sounds that go from squealing to spittle static to full-throated explosions. And you have to do this all before bedtime.
There is collateral damage of course. Other toy figures (often of the military variety but occasionally some hapless barnyard animal types or dinosaurs) scattered on the carpet are crushed underfoot, upholstery gets ripped, that oh-so-precious china handed down for generations is smashed.
So too with Michael Bay's choreography in his latest action ballet. In fact I have not seen a film that quite so accurately simulates the feeling - albeit on a fairly gigantic scale - of playing with toys. The toy characters - by which I mean the Autobots, Prime, Decepticons but one could also include star Shia LaBoeuf (where's the beef?) Megan Fox (what's with all these animal names?) - are all brought to life by the swoops, dives, jumps, barrel rolls orchestrated by CG and camera technicians. The Transformers beat each other up from California to Egypt flattening ancient temples and passing camels with wanton abandon. The intervention of US airforce planes and ground troops, despite heroic background music, is rendered as irritating as gnats at the end of their short lives.
Probably for the first time in film history, we have a film whose mise en scene is wholly based on playing with toys as opposed to playing with story, or even girls, both of which Bay tiredly includes. It's obvious that he's more interested in the movement and grinding conflict of robots, the transformative arcs of cars and motorbikes. For example, the camera lingers on the curves of a motorbike as much as the nubile Megan Fox. And the dynamics of twisted, clashing, clanking metal as Prime engages Decepticon in gladiatorial combat is more interesting than LaBoeuf's TV soap opera struggle with his dumb parents.
In truth, the sensation of watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is overwhelmingly like reverting back to childhood and playing with toys in your hands while running amok in your parents' living room making strangulated dog sounds. To some, it is pure nostalgia. To others (usually big sisters with bratty brothers), it is as irritating as it ever was. And still to many more, it evokes irrelevant bemusement (aka entertainment).
While Steven Spielberg (a producer of this film) evokes childhood as a state of innocence (think: starchild at the end of Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey ), Michael Bay presents childhood as a state of violence without consequence. Toys serve the will of the imagination rather than the circumstance of reality. With all its desert war scenes, and apocalyptic ideologue-driven inter-galactic war, it suggests that recent American foreign policy has been something of a childhood phase which we've all grown out of. You might say that's one of the reasons why this movie - apart from its politically-regenerative title - has been one of the fastest and largest grossing box-office movies of all time.
Poor planet Earth. It's always being invaded by strange creatures, or getting in the way of asteroids from outer space, or - for the umpteenth time - threatened with the Apocalypse. Earthlings are scorched in vast numbers as their cities crumble. Survivors do not fare much better - men are abducted, women raped, children enslaved. If it's not aliens, it's the environment. Earthlings pay the price for ignoring signs of global warming (and who can blame them when those signs are freezing snow, pouring rain, electrical storms and a President - in The Day After Tomorrow - who looks like Dick Cheney?)
Michael Bay's latest addition to the Hasbro Transformer toy genre is the second film in the series and begins by laying waste to Shanghai. There's no organic connection between this and anything else. But it doesn't matter anyway because this teaser is really a revenge fantasy of the American worker against outsourcing toy manufacturing to China (even if the Shanghai scene was shot in Pennsylvania). However I doubt if that's what the censor at 国家广播电影电视总局 (aka State Adminstration for Film, Radio and Television) had in mind when he asked for trims of a Chinese police car being crushed.
It takes Michael Bay about two and a half hours to explain these aliens who have insisted yet again on bringing their battles and personal hang-ups to earth. The mythology is not too different from a Star Wars movie and to be fair to Michael Bay, it also took George Lucas about the same amount of time to explain the same story. Revenge of the Sith, Revenge of the Fallen - same difference! But I think the Cesar-inflected hard-edged look of Michael Bay's Autobots are preferable to Lucasarts' soft-toy floppiness of Jar Jar Brinks. (Cesar was the French artist who made a career out of exhibiting blocks of crushed, compacted cars in the 1960s.)
Reportedly Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is one of the worst reviewed mainstream films of recent times so some critics may dispute its characterization as a movie. I'm not one of those but the film should be seen as a component of a totality that includes - and this was a surprise even to me - hands-on playing with toys.
Now, just as not everyone has directed a movie, not everyone has played with Transformer toys. It's not that difficult. As a prelude you "deconstruct" them from familiar Earthling vehicles (truck, sports car, compact) into creatures that could have been Masters of the Universe until the onset of the Great Recession (more of a threat than Aliens or Global Warming). In this supreme mode, your toys are ready for battle. You hold one in the left hand, and hold one in the right hand. Then you weave and bob them around each other, exchanging glancing blows which sometimes knock off an arm or a leg. It all leads to the inevitable climax which is to smash one figure into the other in any number of creative ways (feet first, head down, crotch angle and so forth) all the while making a range of sounds that go from squealing to spittle static to full-throated explosions. And you have to do this all before bedtime.
There is collateral damage of course. Other toy figures (often of the military variety but occasionally some hapless barnyard animal types or dinosaurs) scattered on the carpet are crushed underfoot, upholstery gets ripped, that oh-so-precious china handed down for generations is smashed.
So too with Michael Bay's choreography in his latest action ballet. In fact I have not seen a film that quite so accurately simulates the feeling - albeit on a fairly gigantic scale - of playing with toys. The toy characters - by which I mean the Autobots, Prime, Decepticons but one could also include star Shia LaBoeuf (where's the beef?) Megan Fox (what's with all these animal names?) - are all brought to life by the swoops, dives, jumps, barrel rolls orchestrated by CG and camera technicians. The Transformers beat each other up from California to Egypt flattening ancient temples and passing camels with wanton abandon. The intervention of US airforce planes and ground troops, despite heroic background music, is rendered as irritating as gnats at the end of their short lives.
Probably for the first time in film history, we have a film whose mise en scene is wholly based on playing with toys as opposed to playing with story, or even girls, both of which Bay tiredly includes. It's obvious that he's more interested in the movement and grinding conflict of robots, the transformative arcs of cars and motorbikes. For example, the camera lingers on the curves of a motorbike as much as the nubile Megan Fox. And the dynamics of twisted, clashing, clanking metal as Prime engages Decepticon in gladiatorial combat is more interesting than LaBoeuf's TV soap opera struggle with his dumb parents.
In truth, the sensation of watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is overwhelmingly like reverting back to childhood and playing with toys in your hands while running amok in your parents' living room making strangulated dog sounds. To some, it is pure nostalgia. To others (usually big sisters with bratty brothers), it is as irritating as it ever was. And still to many more, it evokes irrelevant bemusement (aka entertainment).
While Steven Spielberg (a producer of this film) evokes childhood as a state of innocence (think: starchild at the end of Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey ), Michael Bay presents childhood as a state of violence without consequence. Toys serve the will of the imagination rather than the circumstance of reality. With all its desert war scenes, and apocalyptic ideologue-driven inter-galactic war, it suggests that recent American foreign policy has been something of a childhood phase which we've all grown out of. You might say that's one of the reasons why this movie - apart from its politically-regenerative title - has been one of the fastest and largest grossing box-office movies of all time.
Jun 11, 2009
The Real Bruce Lee?
I just watched the truly appalling "The Real Bruce Lee" with Bruce Lee, Bruce Li, and "new sensation" Dragon Lee and "produced" by Serafim Karalexis. Even its use of 1950s Hong Kong Bruce Lee film clips is inept. To claim as the credits do, that it is "directed and edited by Jim Markovich" (he of the equally despicable "Riot on 42nd Street") is surely stretching the limits of credibility and borders on the insulting. This is what happens when you pick up cheap videotapes (and it really is cheap - it's one of those 30 minute VHS cassettes where the 90 minute film has been recorded at extended play to save tape) at the local supermarket.
Jun 5, 2009
My Cannes 2009 - V
Epilogue
The most interesting film in Cannes - from the point of view of symbolism, metaphor and all-round significance - was very short and concise; was seen by all the Cannes audiences but will not be seen outside the festival; and featured no stars, indeed it contains no actors nor any dialogue.
What fascinating work is this? Of course, it's the festival trailer.
A CGI work sans actors and words, it nevertheless conveys perfectly an attitude, moral philosophy, and hegemonic aesthetic all in one, and all in the space of about a minute.
The film (and it deserves this moniker more that some of the other rubbish on display) begins UNDERWATER. To a music soundtrack that mimics Bernard Herrman's score for Hitchcock's Vertigo, the "camera" ascends the red carpet stairway whose correspondance with reality is all too real since the audience (at least in the Grand Palais) has just walked up the real version of these steps. We surface - presumably on the Bay of Cannes - water all around but still those stairs and that crazy compelling music lead us onwards and upwards. The stairs go higher and soon we are in the clouds (good weather, no rain, no thunder, no lightning) and keep going until we are in OUTER SPACE! Yes we are in Star Wars territory; there is no frontier, just twinkling stars. Suddenly a huge sign flips up in front of us, it says in gold, and surrounded by gold palms, "Festival de Cannes."
This film contains not just an apotheosis fantasy (that confirms the semiotics of the tribute ritual I described in My Cannes 2009 - 1), but also an evolutionary myth that in its simplest form suggests that cinema has evolved much like life itself. It moves from the basic form (fish) from water, to surface (ok there isn't actually land in this movie but which film really has its feet on the ground anyway?), all the way up to the stars where "heaven" is the Cannes film festival.
To paraphrase, you have died and gone to Cannes. The trouble with Cannes-as-heaven is: would you really want to spend eternity with these people, let alone these films?
The most interesting film in Cannes - from the point of view of symbolism, metaphor and all-round significance - was very short and concise; was seen by all the Cannes audiences but will not be seen outside the festival; and featured no stars, indeed it contains no actors nor any dialogue.
What fascinating work is this? Of course, it's the festival trailer.
A CGI work sans actors and words, it nevertheless conveys perfectly an attitude, moral philosophy, and hegemonic aesthetic all in one, and all in the space of about a minute.
The film (and it deserves this moniker more that some of the other rubbish on display) begins UNDERWATER. To a music soundtrack that mimics Bernard Herrman's score for Hitchcock's Vertigo, the "camera" ascends the red carpet stairway whose correspondance with reality is all too real since the audience (at least in the Grand Palais) has just walked up the real version of these steps. We surface - presumably on the Bay of Cannes - water all around but still those stairs and that crazy compelling music lead us onwards and upwards. The stairs go higher and soon we are in the clouds (good weather, no rain, no thunder, no lightning) and keep going until we are in OUTER SPACE! Yes we are in Star Wars territory; there is no frontier, just twinkling stars. Suddenly a huge sign flips up in front of us, it says in gold, and surrounded by gold palms, "Festival de Cannes."
This film contains not just an apotheosis fantasy (that confirms the semiotics of the tribute ritual I described in My Cannes 2009 - 1), but also an evolutionary myth that in its simplest form suggests that cinema has evolved much like life itself. It moves from the basic form (fish) from water, to surface (ok there isn't actually land in this movie but which film really has its feet on the ground anyway?), all the way up to the stars where "heaven" is the Cannes film festival.
To paraphrase, you have died and gone to Cannes. The trouble with Cannes-as-heaven is: would you really want to spend eternity with these people, let alone these films?
My Cannes 2009 - IV
Impressions...
Attendance: Opening night - Empty streets, last orders in bars at midnight. Closing night - crowds on the Croisette, Majestic Bar empty, restaurants quite full. Conclusion - more people at end than at beginning!
Water: no free bottles this year, so tank up on free Nespresso - but then you get quite wired on this highly caffeinated fuel. No wonder I couldn't sleep in some of the more boring films.
Le Petit Paris Bistro: can get quite expensive. Got stomach ache after eating a salad there. A lot of Italians go there for breakfast - so I was told.
Sushi Time: actually it's a Korean restaurant. Decent bibimbap.
Le Monnot: reasonable Lebanese food. Good dinner.
Majestic Bar: still one of the best places to see people. $12 pastis...
Carlton: lot of people looking lost, looking for a deal.
Gay Night at American Pavilion: The US contribution to international village culture - not very gay but a lot of fun. One of the few places to get a worthwhile sized cup of coffee.
Le Crystal: despite non-stop European soccer blaring from the TV screen, still a good place to sit and have a pastis (for $4) while people-watching. For some reason (unknown to me) a lot of manly looking women walk past this place.
Chez Astoux: classic seafood place and decent plateau des fruits de mer. But with a dinner bill of almost $300, I do expect a little less rudeness from the maitre d'. Next year, another place.
Chez Louis: shared antipasti (French style) and shared desserts book-end individual entrees. Variable but good atmosphere - hey, there's John Boorman at the next table.
Taiwan party: a mixture of panache, chaos, good food, and great location, still the best place for Asian celeb spotting - hey, there's Shu Qi, and Anthony Wong... and Ang Lee and Zhang Yuan, and Tsai Ming Liang and...
Hong Kong party (known this year as China Party): good, unending flow of French champagne. Long live one country, two systems!
Red carpet: how do they keep it clean?
Attendance: Opening night - Empty streets, last orders in bars at midnight. Closing night - crowds on the Croisette, Majestic Bar empty, restaurants quite full. Conclusion - more people at end than at beginning!
Water: no free bottles this year, so tank up on free Nespresso - but then you get quite wired on this highly caffeinated fuel. No wonder I couldn't sleep in some of the more boring films.
Le Petit Paris Bistro: can get quite expensive. Got stomach ache after eating a salad there. A lot of Italians go there for breakfast - so I was told.
Sushi Time: actually it's a Korean restaurant. Decent bibimbap.
Le Monnot: reasonable Lebanese food. Good dinner.
Majestic Bar: still one of the best places to see people. $12 pastis...
Carlton: lot of people looking lost, looking for a deal.
Gay Night at American Pavilion: The US contribution to international village culture - not very gay but a lot of fun. One of the few places to get a worthwhile sized cup of coffee.
Le Crystal: despite non-stop European soccer blaring from the TV screen, still a good place to sit and have a pastis (for $4) while people-watching. For some reason (unknown to me) a lot of manly looking women walk past this place.
Chez Astoux: classic seafood place and decent plateau des fruits de mer. But with a dinner bill of almost $300, I do expect a little less rudeness from the maitre d'. Next year, another place.
Chez Louis: shared antipasti (French style) and shared desserts book-end individual entrees. Variable but good atmosphere - hey, there's John Boorman at the next table.
Taiwan party: a mixture of panache, chaos, good food, and great location, still the best place for Asian celeb spotting - hey, there's Shu Qi, and Anthony Wong... and Ang Lee and Zhang Yuan, and Tsai Ming Liang and...
Hong Kong party (known this year as China Party): good, unending flow of French champagne. Long live one country, two systems!
Red carpet: how do they keep it clean?
May 27, 2009
My Cannes 2009 - III
Film Notes
Agora (Alejandro Amenabar) - 4th century AD in Alexandria is not only the home of the fabled library of the Ancient World, but also a hotbed of different religious factions - pagans, Jews, Galileans (aka "Christians") all ruled over by the Roman Empire. Instead of being fed to the lions, the Christians have now been legitimized by the Romans and their militant wing, the Palebeni, parade around in filthy black designer rags looking and behaving like the Taliban. Over a number of years, the Christians gain religious (and political) control by provoking the pagans and terrorizing the Jews. In the process the Christians destroy and burn the library with its scientific and philosophical texts. All of this is mixed in with the narrative of Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) an astronomer who grapples with the major questions of the day: do the planets revolve around the earth, why does the position of the sun change, how do I handle that hunky student who declares his love for me by playing the pan pipes in front of my dad? Great production design with epic values but the film suffers from the weight of trying to balance all-out kick-ass religious war with explanations of the ellipse that will be lost on the teen demographic who prefer mano-a-mano Ancient style over Egyptian interpretations of Greek math. Weirdo shots of Alexandria and Egypt from outer space punctuate the film and confirm what we've known all along - the pyramids were built by aliens who also authored Egyptian cosmology; and they loved to watch all this from their eye-in-the-sky perch.
Addendum: French actor Michel Lonsdale plays Hypatia's dad. A favourite since appearing as an exhausted theater director in Rivette's Out One: Spectre he appears here to be channeling Charles Laughton in the unfinished I, Claudius. A curious grace note to a curious film.
Les Yeux Sans Visage (Georges Franju) - nice restoration of Franju surrealist classic establishes the pedigree for the gruesome fetishes of this year's Cannes entries like Antichrist, Kinatay, and Enter the Void. A surgeon's assistant kidnaps suitable young women so that her boss can do secret face grafts on his daughter (who lost her face in a fire). He hasn't succeeded yet so the hapless "donors" end up dead and strewn all over the place. Franju's insistence on the details of cutting off one face to transfer to another, and the generally dungeon-like conditions of his operating room set the tone not only for dismemberment films like Kinatay but also the terrorism of the innocents in the Saw and Hostel series.
Here (Ho Tzu Nyen) - a guy murders his wife and gets sent to a loony bin to recover. The inmates all make therapy videos where they act out stuff - unfortunately it's all really boring and neither Straubian, Warholian, Fellini-esque nor even Herzogian. But the parade of people is quite earnest and serious - would you expect anything else from a film from Singapore? Some of the people in the film are really from the asylum but hey, you wouldn't really know it as they seem kind of normal... but maybe not by Singaporean standards. British shrinks preside over the crazies and explain what it's all about in a really dry way - I tried to sleep through those parts but failed. Possibly the major flaw in this film is its protagonist (the wife killer) - he is butt ugly with greasy long hair that would stain the collar of any shirt adorning his unattractive torso. He seems nice enough - for a pyschopathic killer - but he's definitely not date material. Actually his greasy face is pretty horrific, you think he really needs to stop eating fried noodles. Apparently rehabilitated, he's sent home where he freaks out again and thank God, they return him to the nut house, hopefully forever. In between all of this is stuff that could be read as political metaphor - the "tea party" as affirmation that you're normal (read: acceptable to the ruling politicos), the imprisonment of minds (read: the island nation), and so on. As a short film about an ugly psychopath this might have worked. As a treatise on the imprisonment of minds, it's numbing.
Antichrist (Lars Von Trier) - Charlotte Gainsbourg (CG) and Willem Dafoe (WD) are having wild sex at home watched by their baby son who then promptly falls out of a window and dies. OK - sex and death are immediately signalled by Lars (LVT). CG goes into a deep funk and contrary to all the rules about intimacy with clients, WD who is a certified therapist - takes her on as his patient. They hike up to a cabin in their woods - she, looking very LL Bean in yellow parka and he looking tres European in blue wool jacket. This is after all supposed to take place in the Pacific Northwest where LVT has never been since he has a fear of flying (and it seems of the US). In this cabin in the woods, the therapy turns into something that looks like Ingmar Bergman doing Eli Roth, or maybe more accurately Tobe Hooper doing Stanley Kubrick. Anyway it's all art in the service of horror with WD having a stone wheel attached to his lower leg (some kind of Sisyphus ref), and CG cutting her clit off with a pair of scissors (LVT discovers the female phallus and it scares the crap out of him). The very end (I won't give away the end before the end) is some kind of reference to Carl Theodore Dreyer (another Dane), Cecil B. DeMille, Martin Scorsese and probably God Himself. WD stands on a hill looking like Christ (and there is a reason why WD is cast in this film: after all he played Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ) in films by all those aforesaid Anointed Ones. The movie is dedicated to Tarkovski - we don't quite know why other than his Russian orthodoxy makes him Christ versus the Antichrist of the USA. It's framed as a series of chapters but really since each intertitle is written artfully on a chalk board, it's more like classroom catechism, and it also shows that after his (real-life) post-breakdown therapy, LVT still harbours unmitigated anger against women and his therapist. Plus ca change, baby! Antichrist is not as bad as the bad review in Variety, and it is at once serious and thoughtful. Second best film in Cannes? Maybe.
Samson and Delilah(Warwick Thornton) - according to this movie, life on an Australian Aboriginal reservation consists of sniffing glue all day (Samson), helping granny make native art (Delilah) until she kicks the bucket, all against an unending drone of reggae music played by three guys who seem to have nothing else to do in life. S & D share one characteristic - they don't talk (S is a particularly inarticulate loser) so when they escape the reservation and end up in White Man's town, they are Alienated and live under a freeway. At this point, the film tries to spice things up by pairing them with a talky homeless guy who takes pity and shares his canned spaghetti and spam with them. Even writing about this film seems tedious so let me just say that this is a film with about five endings of which the most desirable one is where we think they have both expired - D gets knocked down by a car while S is sniffing glue so he doesn't notice it; S then hides under a blanket and sniffs glue for days without moving - fade to black. At this point you think oh how tragic but then there is a FADE UP and D comes limping back to the freeway home on a CRUTCH (for crying out loud!) and the blanket QUIVERS - S is still alive! All that spam and glue have kept body and soul together. The film goes on for another lamentable 10 or more minutes as D takes S to her hut in the middle of some godawful desert, skins a kangaroo, and feeds them. Please put us out of our misery - yes, the film ends there! This film is a project by the Adelaide Film Festival so unfortunately it has a life. Also it won Camera d'Or at Cannes which leads you to wonder what the jury was smoking when they watched this irritating pile of kangaroo doo. Worst film in Cannes? Possibly.
Visage(Tsai Ming-liang) - Poor Fanny Ardant, first her famous husband Francois Truffaut dies on her and then she has to soldier through this tedium of scenes that are supposed to reflect on the Salome narrative (though it's hardly explained here). Tsai regular Lee Kang Sheng is supposed to be making a film in Paris with Antoine (Jean Pierre Leaud) but he seems too busy jerking off guys in the bushes, fooling around with deer, and clambering around the bowels of the Louvre, to actually get behind a camera (we never see a camera, only a TV monitor). At the same time his mother in Taipei has died but you wouldn't really know it because she's still around as a ghost and anyway with that actress you don't really care if she's dead or alive. Various references to cinema (predictable), and Louvre artists (David, Delacroix, Rembrandt) don't add up to anything understandable. French iconnes Jeanne Moreau and Nathalie Baye also put in an appearance but if you nod off, you'll miss them because they appear in a very short scene sitting at a table, waiting for someone who never appears. Wonder how much they got paid for that day's work...My main impression was that if you asked a French director to make a Tsai Ming-liang type film,this would be the result. However the best film to deal with the relationship between painting and cinema is still Godard's Passion. Against that, this one looks like some youtube doodling. Final thought: we've all watched Jean-Pierre Leaud grow up in the cinema. He's now 65 years old and looking like a seedy, dirty old man. It would be an act of kindness, not to mention beneficial to his career, if he never appeared in a film again.
Map of the Sounds of Tokyo(Isabel Croixet) - another Spanish movie shot in English (cf. Agora). This time however it's set in contemporary Tokyo and features a Tsukiji fish market girl who not only knows how to slice a mean piece of sushi but is also a hit woman on the side. She's contracted to off the Spanish owner of a wine store but falls in love with him. So, instead of checking his movements and the best time and place to terminate him, they check into a love motel and have a lot of sex in a mock up of the Paris metro. It's all shot in a Wong Kar Wai emulation - with saturated photography and Latin-style music (OK they're Spanish filmmakers so the latter makes some sense). Since I hope you will never see this film I'll give away the ending: the hit-girl dies saving the Spanish lover from being shot by the henchman of the guy who ordered the hit. It's a typical racist Western fantasy (usually male so it's doubly offensive that this is made by a woman) of the Madam Butterfly Asian sacrifice for the White Knight. Anyway this film is so stupid (think: tourist travelogue with guns) that not only do you wonder what it is doing in COMPETITION in Cannes, but why anyone would want to make such drivel.
Agora (Alejandro Amenabar) - 4th century AD in Alexandria is not only the home of the fabled library of the Ancient World, but also a hotbed of different religious factions - pagans, Jews, Galileans (aka "Christians") all ruled over by the Roman Empire. Instead of being fed to the lions, the Christians have now been legitimized by the Romans and their militant wing, the Palebeni, parade around in filthy black designer rags looking and behaving like the Taliban. Over a number of years, the Christians gain religious (and political) control by provoking the pagans and terrorizing the Jews. In the process the Christians destroy and burn the library with its scientific and philosophical texts. All of this is mixed in with the narrative of Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) an astronomer who grapples with the major questions of the day: do the planets revolve around the earth, why does the position of the sun change, how do I handle that hunky student who declares his love for me by playing the pan pipes in front of my dad? Great production design with epic values but the film suffers from the weight of trying to balance all-out kick-ass religious war with explanations of the ellipse that will be lost on the teen demographic who prefer mano-a-mano Ancient style over Egyptian interpretations of Greek math. Weirdo shots of Alexandria and Egypt from outer space punctuate the film and confirm what we've known all along - the pyramids were built by aliens who also authored Egyptian cosmology; and they loved to watch all this from their eye-in-the-sky perch.
Addendum: French actor Michel Lonsdale plays Hypatia's dad. A favourite since appearing as an exhausted theater director in Rivette's Out One: Spectre he appears here to be channeling Charles Laughton in the unfinished I, Claudius. A curious grace note to a curious film.
Les Yeux Sans Visage (Georges Franju) - nice restoration of Franju surrealist classic establishes the pedigree for the gruesome fetishes of this year's Cannes entries like Antichrist, Kinatay, and Enter the Void. A surgeon's assistant kidnaps suitable young women so that her boss can do secret face grafts on his daughter (who lost her face in a fire). He hasn't succeeded yet so the hapless "donors" end up dead and strewn all over the place. Franju's insistence on the details of cutting off one face to transfer to another, and the generally dungeon-like conditions of his operating room set the tone not only for dismemberment films like Kinatay but also the terrorism of the innocents in the Saw and Hostel series.
Here (Ho Tzu Nyen) - a guy murders his wife and gets sent to a loony bin to recover. The inmates all make therapy videos where they act out stuff - unfortunately it's all really boring and neither Straubian, Warholian, Fellini-esque nor even Herzogian. But the parade of people is quite earnest and serious - would you expect anything else from a film from Singapore? Some of the people in the film are really from the asylum but hey, you wouldn't really know it as they seem kind of normal... but maybe not by Singaporean standards. British shrinks preside over the crazies and explain what it's all about in a really dry way - I tried to sleep through those parts but failed. Possibly the major flaw in this film is its protagonist (the wife killer) - he is butt ugly with greasy long hair that would stain the collar of any shirt adorning his unattractive torso. He seems nice enough - for a pyschopathic killer - but he's definitely not date material. Actually his greasy face is pretty horrific, you think he really needs to stop eating fried noodles. Apparently rehabilitated, he's sent home where he freaks out again and thank God, they return him to the nut house, hopefully forever. In between all of this is stuff that could be read as political metaphor - the "tea party" as affirmation that you're normal (read: acceptable to the ruling politicos), the imprisonment of minds (read: the island nation), and so on. As a short film about an ugly psychopath this might have worked. As a treatise on the imprisonment of minds, it's numbing.
Antichrist (Lars Von Trier) - Charlotte Gainsbourg (CG) and Willem Dafoe (WD) are having wild sex at home watched by their baby son who then promptly falls out of a window and dies. OK - sex and death are immediately signalled by Lars (LVT). CG goes into a deep funk and contrary to all the rules about intimacy with clients, WD who is a certified therapist - takes her on as his patient. They hike up to a cabin in their woods - she, looking very LL Bean in yellow parka and he looking tres European in blue wool jacket. This is after all supposed to take place in the Pacific Northwest where LVT has never been since he has a fear of flying (and it seems of the US). In this cabin in the woods, the therapy turns into something that looks like Ingmar Bergman doing Eli Roth, or maybe more accurately Tobe Hooper doing Stanley Kubrick. Anyway it's all art in the service of horror with WD having a stone wheel attached to his lower leg (some kind of Sisyphus ref), and CG cutting her clit off with a pair of scissors (LVT discovers the female phallus and it scares the crap out of him). The very end (I won't give away the end before the end) is some kind of reference to Carl Theodore Dreyer (another Dane), Cecil B. DeMille, Martin Scorsese and probably God Himself. WD stands on a hill looking like Christ (and there is a reason why WD is cast in this film: after all he played Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ) in films by all those aforesaid Anointed Ones. The movie is dedicated to Tarkovski - we don't quite know why other than his Russian orthodoxy makes him Christ versus the Antichrist of the USA. It's framed as a series of chapters but really since each intertitle is written artfully on a chalk board, it's more like classroom catechism, and it also shows that after his (real-life) post-breakdown therapy, LVT still harbours unmitigated anger against women and his therapist. Plus ca change, baby! Antichrist is not as bad as the bad review in Variety, and it is at once serious and thoughtful. Second best film in Cannes? Maybe.
Samson and Delilah(Warwick Thornton) - according to this movie, life on an Australian Aboriginal reservation consists of sniffing glue all day (Samson), helping granny make native art (Delilah) until she kicks the bucket, all against an unending drone of reggae music played by three guys who seem to have nothing else to do in life. S & D share one characteristic - they don't talk (S is a particularly inarticulate loser) so when they escape the reservation and end up in White Man's town, they are Alienated and live under a freeway. At this point, the film tries to spice things up by pairing them with a talky homeless guy who takes pity and shares his canned spaghetti and spam with them. Even writing about this film seems tedious so let me just say that this is a film with about five endings of which the most desirable one is where we think they have both expired - D gets knocked down by a car while S is sniffing glue so he doesn't notice it; S then hides under a blanket and sniffs glue for days without moving - fade to black. At this point you think oh how tragic but then there is a FADE UP and D comes limping back to the freeway home on a CRUTCH (for crying out loud!) and the blanket QUIVERS - S is still alive! All that spam and glue have kept body and soul together. The film goes on for another lamentable 10 or more minutes as D takes S to her hut in the middle of some godawful desert, skins a kangaroo, and feeds them. Please put us out of our misery - yes, the film ends there! This film is a project by the Adelaide Film Festival so unfortunately it has a life. Also it won Camera d'Or at Cannes which leads you to wonder what the jury was smoking when they watched this irritating pile of kangaroo doo. Worst film in Cannes? Possibly.
Visage(Tsai Ming-liang) - Poor Fanny Ardant, first her famous husband Francois Truffaut dies on her and then she has to soldier through this tedium of scenes that are supposed to reflect on the Salome narrative (though it's hardly explained here). Tsai regular Lee Kang Sheng is supposed to be making a film in Paris with Antoine (Jean Pierre Leaud) but he seems too busy jerking off guys in the bushes, fooling around with deer, and clambering around the bowels of the Louvre, to actually get behind a camera (we never see a camera, only a TV monitor). At the same time his mother in Taipei has died but you wouldn't really know it because she's still around as a ghost and anyway with that actress you don't really care if she's dead or alive. Various references to cinema (predictable), and Louvre artists (David, Delacroix, Rembrandt) don't add up to anything understandable. French iconnes Jeanne Moreau and Nathalie Baye also put in an appearance but if you nod off, you'll miss them because they appear in a very short scene sitting at a table, waiting for someone who never appears. Wonder how much they got paid for that day's work...My main impression was that if you asked a French director to make a Tsai Ming-liang type film,this would be the result. However the best film to deal with the relationship between painting and cinema is still Godard's Passion. Against that, this one looks like some youtube doodling. Final thought: we've all watched Jean-Pierre Leaud grow up in the cinema. He's now 65 years old and looking like a seedy, dirty old man. It would be an act of kindness, not to mention beneficial to his career, if he never appeared in a film again.
Map of the Sounds of Tokyo(Isabel Croixet) - another Spanish movie shot in English (cf. Agora). This time however it's set in contemporary Tokyo and features a Tsukiji fish market girl who not only knows how to slice a mean piece of sushi but is also a hit woman on the side. She's contracted to off the Spanish owner of a wine store but falls in love with him. So, instead of checking his movements and the best time and place to terminate him, they check into a love motel and have a lot of sex in a mock up of the Paris metro. It's all shot in a Wong Kar Wai emulation - with saturated photography and Latin-style music (OK they're Spanish filmmakers so the latter makes some sense). Since I hope you will never see this film I'll give away the ending: the hit-girl dies saving the Spanish lover from being shot by the henchman of the guy who ordered the hit. It's a typical racist Western fantasy (usually male so it's doubly offensive that this is made by a woman) of the Madam Butterfly Asian sacrifice for the White Knight. Anyway this film is so stupid (think: tourist travelogue with guns) that not only do you wonder what it is doing in COMPETITION in Cannes, but why anyone would want to make such drivel.
May 26, 2009
My Cannes 2009 - II
Film Notes
Spring Fever (Lou Ye) - three gays, one wife, one girlfriend. Everyone wants to sleep with each other, and if they can't at least they can spy on each other. Well, what else is there to do in Nanjing anyway? It's an exercise in narcissism especially since they all look the same. Directed with the fervour of Just Jaekin and the fantasy lust of Bernardo Bertolucci, this is a film again inflected by Hitchcock - especially his speculation on the exchangeability of women. In Hitchcock, the girls would look the same but one would be blonde, the other brunette. For Lou Ye, the difference is made by long hair and short hair. Semiotics was never so simple.
Air Doll (Kore-eda) - one geek, one inflatable sex doll, and some thoughts about disposability in contempo Japanese society. What makes it all watchable for more than 10 minutes is the fabulous Bae Doo Na (BDN) who becomes the fleshy realization of the inflatable sex doll (we are waiting for BDN inflatables to hit the market now). When owner's away (waiting tables in some low end fast food chain where he is regularly insulted) BDN becomes a hot cosplay girl in maid's outfit who goes and works in a video store where - yes! - she attempts to learn about cinema. But as an inflatable, she's full of air so learning for her is something of a zen experience. Mainly the film is a riposte to Spielberg's AI, another movie about an imitation human who develops emotions. Although they travel different paths, the two fantasists reach the same destination - human society doesn't want machines that talk back. The main differences? Kore-eda can do it cheaper, and Hayley Joel Osment has absolutely nothing on BDN.
Yuki & Nina (Nobuhiro Suwa & Hippolyte Girardot) - one hip Japanese filmmaker who has yet to score in Japan, and a French actor turning director make charming tale of two young girls. Yuki is half-Japanese/half-French (her French father is played by Girardot) while Nina is her French neighbor. Everyone's family is disintegrating and Yuki's mother decides to return to Japan to live. Yuki wants to stay but reject's Nina's crazy plan to bring that about. The tussle between the two is perhaps a reflection of and a reflection on the problems of making cross-cultural relationships.
Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa) - Art house darling films diva Jeanne Balibar (JB) and music group rehearsing, recording, and performing (in Tokyo, we know this because of one arty insert shot of two aging Japanese waitresses taking a cigarette break). In between we see backstage of some Offenbach musical opera in which JB is performing. Music is pleasant enough but the filmmaker's focus seems intent on form (black and white, long static shots). Forget it, the movie is like an MTV shot by the Straubs. The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Balibar - coming soon to your TV set.
Like You Know It All (Hong Sang Soo) - First Half: Woody Allen-ish filmmaker with no hits serves (or snores) on jury at Jecheon Film and Music Festival and gets into trouble with both the festival director (a woman who has no problem voicing her problems) and his ex-business partner's New Age wife. Second Half: 12 days later, our filmmaker is giving a talk at a film college in Jeju Island. Once again he gets into trouble with his ex-teacher's young wife, and a girl student. Hong's world is plagued by strong women towards whom he means no harm but inadvertently provokes into sometimes violent reaction. It's an apologia for Hong himself, or rather a fantasy version of himself - the modest artist who goes about doing his work quietly but treads on so many emotional landmines that everything blows up around him. Best film in Cannes? Probably.
Thirst (Park Chan Wook) - Song Kang Ho plays a priest who volunteers for a blood infection experiment in Africa (it's always the Dark Continent). He turns into a vampire and fools around with the abused wife of a friend. They have a lot of sex with each other so he turns her into a vampire as well. Big mistake: she wants some kind of independence and loves jumping over buildings and killing innocent guys. It all gets too much so he forces their death by watching the sun rise over the ocean. They turn into variations on Giacometti - something between a spoiled fireplace log and bacon bits. Whatever happened to the good old stake through the heart? (We assume already that garlic doesn't work because they are Korean and eat a lot of kimchee.) This is a movie with a beginning and an end but no middle. And despite all that blood, it's also a movie with no heart.
Kinatay (Brillante Mendoza) - A moral tale. If you're going going to do drugs, make sure you pay your bills otherwise you're going to end up like the poor prostitute in this relentless, gruesome account of kidnap, rape and dismemberment. And if you do buy drugs, it's better not to get them from the type of guys in this movie who are all corrupt cops (is there any other type in the Philippines? Mendoza seems to ask). And don't place any faith in the rookie of the crew to save you out of sheer horror. In this movie the new chop chop recruit is a young police trainee trying to make an extra buck for his young family. Although he tries to change his mind and maybe save the prostitute, he doesn't. He survives the horror of this descent into the heart of darkness but the new day doesn't seem to bring any respite. You know he's going to do it again. For Mendoza the country is enveloped by this dark, seamy side of crime and officialdom. What a downer, and it's all done with no sense of irony at all. Which means that it could be a good REMAKE property for Russia. Vodka with your balut?
Spring Fever (Lou Ye) - three gays, one wife, one girlfriend. Everyone wants to sleep with each other, and if they can't at least they can spy on each other. Well, what else is there to do in Nanjing anyway? It's an exercise in narcissism especially since they all look the same. Directed with the fervour of Just Jaekin and the fantasy lust of Bernardo Bertolucci, this is a film again inflected by Hitchcock - especially his speculation on the exchangeability of women. In Hitchcock, the girls would look the same but one would be blonde, the other brunette. For Lou Ye, the difference is made by long hair and short hair. Semiotics was never so simple.
Air Doll (Kore-eda) - one geek, one inflatable sex doll, and some thoughts about disposability in contempo Japanese society. What makes it all watchable for more than 10 minutes is the fabulous Bae Doo Na (BDN) who becomes the fleshy realization of the inflatable sex doll (we are waiting for BDN inflatables to hit the market now). When owner's away (waiting tables in some low end fast food chain where he is regularly insulted) BDN becomes a hot cosplay girl in maid's outfit who goes and works in a video store where - yes! - she attempts to learn about cinema. But as an inflatable, she's full of air so learning for her is something of a zen experience. Mainly the film is a riposte to Spielberg's AI, another movie about an imitation human who develops emotions. Although they travel different paths, the two fantasists reach the same destination - human society doesn't want machines that talk back. The main differences? Kore-eda can do it cheaper, and Hayley Joel Osment has absolutely nothing on BDN.
Yuki & Nina (Nobuhiro Suwa & Hippolyte Girardot) - one hip Japanese filmmaker who has yet to score in Japan, and a French actor turning director make charming tale of two young girls. Yuki is half-Japanese/half-French (her French father is played by Girardot) while Nina is her French neighbor. Everyone's family is disintegrating and Yuki's mother decides to return to Japan to live. Yuki wants to stay but reject's Nina's crazy plan to bring that about. The tussle between the two is perhaps a reflection of and a reflection on the problems of making cross-cultural relationships.
Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa) - Art house darling films diva Jeanne Balibar (JB) and music group rehearsing, recording, and performing (in Tokyo, we know this because of one arty insert shot of two aging Japanese waitresses taking a cigarette break). In between we see backstage of some Offenbach musical opera in which JB is performing. Music is pleasant enough but the filmmaker's focus seems intent on form (black and white, long static shots). Forget it, the movie is like an MTV shot by the Straubs. The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Balibar - coming soon to your TV set.
Like You Know It All (Hong Sang Soo) - First Half: Woody Allen-ish filmmaker with no hits serves (or snores) on jury at Jecheon Film and Music Festival and gets into trouble with both the festival director (a woman who has no problem voicing her problems) and his ex-business partner's New Age wife. Second Half: 12 days later, our filmmaker is giving a talk at a film college in Jeju Island. Once again he gets into trouble with his ex-teacher's young wife, and a girl student. Hong's world is plagued by strong women towards whom he means no harm but inadvertently provokes into sometimes violent reaction. It's an apologia for Hong himself, or rather a fantasy version of himself - the modest artist who goes about doing his work quietly but treads on so many emotional landmines that everything blows up around him. Best film in Cannes? Probably.
Thirst (Park Chan Wook) - Song Kang Ho plays a priest who volunteers for a blood infection experiment in Africa (it's always the Dark Continent). He turns into a vampire and fools around with the abused wife of a friend. They have a lot of sex with each other so he turns her into a vampire as well. Big mistake: she wants some kind of independence and loves jumping over buildings and killing innocent guys. It all gets too much so he forces their death by watching the sun rise over the ocean. They turn into variations on Giacometti - something between a spoiled fireplace log and bacon bits. Whatever happened to the good old stake through the heart? (We assume already that garlic doesn't work because they are Korean and eat a lot of kimchee.) This is a movie with a beginning and an end but no middle. And despite all that blood, it's also a movie with no heart.
Kinatay (Brillante Mendoza) - A moral tale. If you're going going to do drugs, make sure you pay your bills otherwise you're going to end up like the poor prostitute in this relentless, gruesome account of kidnap, rape and dismemberment. And if you do buy drugs, it's better not to get them from the type of guys in this movie who are all corrupt cops (is there any other type in the Philippines? Mendoza seems to ask). And don't place any faith in the rookie of the crew to save you out of sheer horror. In this movie the new chop chop recruit is a young police trainee trying to make an extra buck for his young family. Although he tries to change his mind and maybe save the prostitute, he doesn't. He survives the horror of this descent into the heart of darkness but the new day doesn't seem to bring any respite. You know he's going to do it again. For Mendoza the country is enveloped by this dark, seamy side of crime and officialdom. What a downer, and it's all done with no sense of irony at all. Which means that it could be a good REMAKE property for Russia. Vodka with your balut?
My Cannes 2009 - I
Does anyone take Cannes seriously anymore? And does anyone actually enjoy it? You wait in line for hours, only to have some obnoxious "cinephile" push in front of you five minutes before the doors open. There is no reward for following the rules.
And definitely rule-breaking is a philosophy that's adopted by successive juries who preside over each festival. When actresses chair such a body of "professionals" - as with Isabelle Huppert this year - they want to make their mark in the same way they want to upstage their co-stars in a movie. Never mind the quality, feel the controversy.
It's all a show anyway, designed basically to buttress up the pre-eminence of cultural France when its influence has gone down the drain all over the world except with tin-pot dictatorships in Africa and arms sales to dubious nations.
The "problem" with Cannes is that it is constructed around the domination of the auteur - this is the much-maligned creature from the time that Cahiers du Cinema promoted him (and it was resolutely him at the time).
"Auteurs" at the time were considered masters of cinema, not imitators of cinema. It's a mark of our era that we have moved from celebrating the former to fawning over the latter. And whether it's one or the other, auteurs have their "on" and their "off" days. The selection in Cannes is not so much based on films as on filmmakers so in any one year, the quality will be inconsistent and almost always an unsatisfying mix of the unfinished, the half-baked, and occasionally the sublime. It doesn't really matter because these hapless artists are being used as fences to protect one festival dictatorship's territory against poaching attacks from another festival. Barbarians at the gate? All the time!
The pomposity of ritual that demonstrates a festival dictatorship's power has an undeniable symbolism that everyone seems to accept. Going to main competition screenings in Cannes is something like going to church or more accurately, going to the Vatican. You need to dress correctly, and your place in the hierarchy of worship is defined by your "professional" (read: "social") status.
The Anointed One (the auteur who feels justified by Cannes more than the box office) proceeds with his/her entourage of stars, producers, distributors, hangers-on along the red carpet in the forecourt of the Grand Palais (the "bunker" but really, the St Peter's of cinema). The Anointed One pauses for iconic photographs that will define him/her forever so it's not only important to look good, but to stand next to good looking people. The Anointed One then leads his procession up the long long flight of red-carpeted stairs towards the Pope (I mean Festival President) and his principal Cardinal (I mean Festival Director) who glow smilingly on the faithful child returning to show Papa his/her latest indulgence.
Whether it's like a prodigal son returning after deserting Papa for enemy territory, or a faithful son who obeys every word of Papa (including snipping the film here and there to make it more acceptable to the festival), or a newly Anointed One, the ritual not only re-affirms the Anointed One's place in the firmament of cinema Heaven, but also re-affirms the Anointed One's legitimacy in Papa's eyes, the only eyes that count.
And definitely rule-breaking is a philosophy that's adopted by successive juries who preside over each festival. When actresses chair such a body of "professionals" - as with Isabelle Huppert this year - they want to make their mark in the same way they want to upstage their co-stars in a movie. Never mind the quality, feel the controversy.
It's all a show anyway, designed basically to buttress up the pre-eminence of cultural France when its influence has gone down the drain all over the world except with tin-pot dictatorships in Africa and arms sales to dubious nations.
The "problem" with Cannes is that it is constructed around the domination of the auteur - this is the much-maligned creature from the time that Cahiers du Cinema promoted him (and it was resolutely him at the time).
"Auteurs" at the time were considered masters of cinema, not imitators of cinema. It's a mark of our era that we have moved from celebrating the former to fawning over the latter. And whether it's one or the other, auteurs have their "on" and their "off" days. The selection in Cannes is not so much based on films as on filmmakers so in any one year, the quality will be inconsistent and almost always an unsatisfying mix of the unfinished, the half-baked, and occasionally the sublime. It doesn't really matter because these hapless artists are being used as fences to protect one festival dictatorship's territory against poaching attacks from another festival. Barbarians at the gate? All the time!
The pomposity of ritual that demonstrates a festival dictatorship's power has an undeniable symbolism that everyone seems to accept. Going to main competition screenings in Cannes is something like going to church or more accurately, going to the Vatican. You need to dress correctly, and your place in the hierarchy of worship is defined by your "professional" (read: "social") status.
The Anointed One (the auteur who feels justified by Cannes more than the box office) proceeds with his/her entourage of stars, producers, distributors, hangers-on along the red carpet in the forecourt of the Grand Palais (the "bunker" but really, the St Peter's of cinema). The Anointed One pauses for iconic photographs that will define him/her forever so it's not only important to look good, but to stand next to good looking people. The Anointed One then leads his procession up the long long flight of red-carpeted stairs towards the Pope (I mean Festival President) and his principal Cardinal (I mean Festival Director) who glow smilingly on the faithful child returning to show Papa his/her latest indulgence.
Whether it's like a prodigal son returning after deserting Papa for enemy territory, or a faithful son who obeys every word of Papa (including snipping the film here and there to make it more acceptable to the festival), or a newly Anointed One, the ritual not only re-affirms the Anointed One's place in the firmament of cinema Heaven, but also re-affirms the Anointed One's legitimacy in Papa's eyes, the only eyes that count.
Feb 9, 2009
The Shock of Conscience
Let me put it this way: during the Bush era, the notion of conscience (and in extenso guilt) was replaced by dogma masquerading as faux-morality. It's a typical strategy adopted by manipulators or should we say, social engineers.
If the cinema is anything to go by, Conscience (yes, with a big C) is making a come-back. How do I know? I've just seen two films at the Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival) that shine a light on the way ahead. They tell us things that maybe have been lurking at the back of our minds or maybe just absent or worse still, forgotten as we hurtle uncontrolled, deregulated, maxed-out credit-wise, into consumer society.
FOOD INC. by Robert Kenner is making its US debut soon. It is a film that consolidates many of the arguments and exposes we have seen in the press - about lax standards in the Bush FDA (lobbyists for the food industry were appointed as heads of FDA and other standards institutions); about misplaced government policies that have led to the Corn-is-King notion of agriculture (it can do everything from clean your house to feed the cow that provides your hamburger); and the deleterious effects of fast food. Traveling the length and breadth of the country, Kenner - aided by advisers Michael Pollan (a Berkeley based writer) and Eric Schlosser (author of "Fast Food Nation")- looks into how large conglomerates have applied manufacturing industry practices to the production of food. That is, factories (because that is how our food is now produced, not by farms) employ workers to do just one thing all the time - that worker does not need much training, can be easily replaced and therefore can be paid the lowest of wages. In the course of 50 years or so, the number of slaughterhouses/companies in the US has shrunk from many thousands to just a few thousand. The slaughterhouse has become one of the most dangerous places to work in the US and not only to the workers - as we have seen over the years, outbreaks of sometimes deadly e-coli have come from everyday foods like ground beef and peanut butter. For those of you who may wonder about e=coli, much of it comes from faeces so your burger may not taste like you-know-what but if you have a stomach ache afterwards you have eaten you-know-what (you want fries with that?)
Kenner's film puts all of this in clear and concise terms. It does not set out to demonize conglomerates nor to appoint accusing fingers. Rather it sets out to try and introduce a balance and perspective to a food production and consumption culture that has led to high rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes - we are on track to having an almost one-third child population in the US inflicted with Type 2 diabetes.
There's a story in Kenner's film of a lower-middle class family. The mother explains that they are on the go just trying to make a living from 6 am. to 10 pm. It's cheaper and easier to buy burgers for themselves and their two girls, than cook at home after a hard day's work. The father has diabetes and the parents know that feeding their two girls in this way could bring on the disease, yet they keep doing it. The reason: when they visit a supermarket, a pound of broccoli costs more than burgers.This does not reflect economic reality. It reflects agricultural lobbyists devastating effects on government policy. It costs more of course to produce a pound of ground beef than a pound of broccoli but government agricultural subsidies keep the beef production low while healthier broccoli is left to market survival. This does not take into account of course the ballooning costs of health care as more and more people require treatment for obesity and diabetes.
While Kenner's film is issue-oriented and important as a step in understanding our "intimate relationship" with food (as he puts it), it is by no means a singular work. We've seen in recent years a sub-genre of films dealing in what can only be described as one of the most direct interfaces between audience and film - the dangers of the stomach. Films like SUPERSIZE ME (surely a pioneering film of sorts, in the same league of self-abuse as Werner Herzog eating his shoe as filmed by El Cerrito's most famous filmmaker Les Blank), Richard Linklater's FAST FOOD NATION and Ruth Ozeki's book MY YEAR OF MEATS have brought these issues to the fore.
Kenner's film is a good illustration of de-regulation gone destructive in one important sector of our society. Michael Winterbottom's new film THE SHOCK DOCTRINE takes a broader and just as conscience-stricken approach.
Winterbottom's documentary (or rather, essay-film) is based on Naomi Klein's trenchant and long overdue critique of Milton Friedman's terrifying theories of free markets. Klein, who is one of the foremost anti-globalization writers and activists today traces the doctrine of shock therapy to experiments carried out in Canada in the 1950s that led to the torture techniques that are still used by the CIA and others today. Sleep deprivation, electric shock and isolation are essential ingredients to re-creating the compliant human being. The idea is to wipe clean the memory of the subject and to replace it with messages that the controller wants to instill. In this case it is the instillation of "free market" practices into governments and the population.
Winterbottom goes through the terrorist economics of the Chicago Boys and Friedman's denial of any real complicity in any of its consequences. It's his god-given position you feel, that lies behind his delusion that just about no government is good government, and that prices should be allowed to find their own level. (Winterbottom notes importantly that in the 1950s he and his school were regarded as crackpots.) His dirty little secret of course is that prices never find their own level, they are fixed - by corporations and governments trying to work out their competitive strengths and weaknesses in a world ruled by global politics, good or bad. Indeed the engine that implemented Friedman's concept of free market economics was the war-profiteering machine (as we all know, Eisenhower warned against the rise of the industrial-military complex). You need tanks, bombs and planes to force your population into accepting lower wages, higher costs of essential commodities, and the enrichment of the rich elites at the expense of the poor.
Winterbottom articulates all of this wonderfully well. He reminds us also of a history that many of us who lived through it have never forgotten but only seen fade away like the thousands and thousands who suffered the consequences of the Chicago Boys. And he also reminds us of more recent history that we may have forgotten. To encapsulate it broadly - Chicago Boys economics is the underlying thread of the Pinochet Terror of the 1970s (for that is what it truly was), the Argentinian disappearances of the 1980s, the Thatcher-Milk-Snatcher repression of the unions and creation of the Greed Class, the divisive Reagan Years that replicated the Thatcher loathing of organized labor and an almost religious intensity for free markets, the chaos of the post-Soviet Union Yeltsin years, right up to the Winter Meltdown of capitalism at the end of 2008. From Friedman's meetings with Pinochet right up to his 90th birthday party at the Bush White House attended among others, by Donald Rumsfeld, a Friedman acolyte, it's Friedman's free market economics that paradoxically inspire the most controlling, insidious, paranoid governments. We reflect back now on why Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in the mid-1980s, an act that are a grave insult to the victims of this insidious doctrine (Winterbottom's clip of this in his film speaks volumes).
In an apochryphal story, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE relates that on September 10, 2001, Rumsfeld main preoccupation as he announced proudly was a war on the Pentagon bureaucracy. Shouldn't he have been concerned with other, more pressing matters?
Winterbottom's film gives us the throughline of a well-informed historian who can connect the dots of the big picture. Its one weakness - in terms of really anchoring the film in a memorable reality - is a lack of depth about Friedman's motivation. We come away from the film knowing what he thought, how his thoughts were implemented at great cost to all of us, and who did this. But we don't really know why or how he arrived at this complete embrace of de-regulation. He was not deluded but he was the ultimate ivory tower academic, a man so out of touch with reality that his economics became a fantasy (or rather fatal nightmares to countless thouands and untold misery on millions). A man of power without responsibility - the most dangerous animal in a democracy. It was as if his thoughts were given flesh by Thatcher and Reagan. It is a strange phenomenon that we still do not quite understand.
Nevertheless, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE remains a powerful film and one that should be shown in as many venues as possible - from high schools to the White House screening room. It is a film that demonstrates why economics is not taught from the earliest years of high school. If it were, the current reality would be too scary to contemplate and the next generation would actually improve the system. If only that were possible.
Let's end by saying: Michael Winterbottom is not only the ablest chronicler and cinematic thinker of his generation but also remains the best filmmaker in Britain today. He has inherited the noble mantle of Ken Loach. He is the Conscience of his times. It is an honorable tradition and a proud one.
Berlin, February, 2009
If the cinema is anything to go by, Conscience (yes, with a big C) is making a come-back. How do I know? I've just seen two films at the Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival) that shine a light on the way ahead. They tell us things that maybe have been lurking at the back of our minds or maybe just absent or worse still, forgotten as we hurtle uncontrolled, deregulated, maxed-out credit-wise, into consumer society.
FOOD INC. by Robert Kenner is making its US debut soon. It is a film that consolidates many of the arguments and exposes we have seen in the press - about lax standards in the Bush FDA (lobbyists for the food industry were appointed as heads of FDA and other standards institutions); about misplaced government policies that have led to the Corn-is-King notion of agriculture (it can do everything from clean your house to feed the cow that provides your hamburger); and the deleterious effects of fast food. Traveling the length and breadth of the country, Kenner - aided by advisers Michael Pollan (a Berkeley based writer) and Eric Schlosser (author of "Fast Food Nation")- looks into how large conglomerates have applied manufacturing industry practices to the production of food. That is, factories (because that is how our food is now produced, not by farms) employ workers to do just one thing all the time - that worker does not need much training, can be easily replaced and therefore can be paid the lowest of wages. In the course of 50 years or so, the number of slaughterhouses/companies in the US has shrunk from many thousands to just a few thousand. The slaughterhouse has become one of the most dangerous places to work in the US and not only to the workers - as we have seen over the years, outbreaks of sometimes deadly e-coli have come from everyday foods like ground beef and peanut butter. For those of you who may wonder about e=coli, much of it comes from faeces so your burger may not taste like you-know-what but if you have a stomach ache afterwards you have eaten you-know-what (you want fries with that?)
Kenner's film puts all of this in clear and concise terms. It does not set out to demonize conglomerates nor to appoint accusing fingers. Rather it sets out to try and introduce a balance and perspective to a food production and consumption culture that has led to high rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes - we are on track to having an almost one-third child population in the US inflicted with Type 2 diabetes.
There's a story in Kenner's film of a lower-middle class family. The mother explains that they are on the go just trying to make a living from 6 am. to 10 pm. It's cheaper and easier to buy burgers for themselves and their two girls, than cook at home after a hard day's work. The father has diabetes and the parents know that feeding their two girls in this way could bring on the disease, yet they keep doing it. The reason: when they visit a supermarket, a pound of broccoli costs more than burgers.This does not reflect economic reality. It reflects agricultural lobbyists devastating effects on government policy. It costs more of course to produce a pound of ground beef than a pound of broccoli but government agricultural subsidies keep the beef production low while healthier broccoli is left to market survival. This does not take into account of course the ballooning costs of health care as more and more people require treatment for obesity and diabetes.
While Kenner's film is issue-oriented and important as a step in understanding our "intimate relationship" with food (as he puts it), it is by no means a singular work. We've seen in recent years a sub-genre of films dealing in what can only be described as one of the most direct interfaces between audience and film - the dangers of the stomach. Films like SUPERSIZE ME (surely a pioneering film of sorts, in the same league of self-abuse as Werner Herzog eating his shoe as filmed by El Cerrito's most famous filmmaker Les Blank), Richard Linklater's FAST FOOD NATION and Ruth Ozeki's book MY YEAR OF MEATS have brought these issues to the fore.
Kenner's film is a good illustration of de-regulation gone destructive in one important sector of our society. Michael Winterbottom's new film THE SHOCK DOCTRINE takes a broader and just as conscience-stricken approach.
Winterbottom's documentary (or rather, essay-film) is based on Naomi Klein's trenchant and long overdue critique of Milton Friedman's terrifying theories of free markets. Klein, who is one of the foremost anti-globalization writers and activists today traces the doctrine of shock therapy to experiments carried out in Canada in the 1950s that led to the torture techniques that are still used by the CIA and others today. Sleep deprivation, electric shock and isolation are essential ingredients to re-creating the compliant human being. The idea is to wipe clean the memory of the subject and to replace it with messages that the controller wants to instill. In this case it is the instillation of "free market" practices into governments and the population.
Winterbottom goes through the terrorist economics of the Chicago Boys and Friedman's denial of any real complicity in any of its consequences. It's his god-given position you feel, that lies behind his delusion that just about no government is good government, and that prices should be allowed to find their own level. (Winterbottom notes importantly that in the 1950s he and his school were regarded as crackpots.) His dirty little secret of course is that prices never find their own level, they are fixed - by corporations and governments trying to work out their competitive strengths and weaknesses in a world ruled by global politics, good or bad. Indeed the engine that implemented Friedman's concept of free market economics was the war-profiteering machine (as we all know, Eisenhower warned against the rise of the industrial-military complex). You need tanks, bombs and planes to force your population into accepting lower wages, higher costs of essential commodities, and the enrichment of the rich elites at the expense of the poor.
Winterbottom articulates all of this wonderfully well. He reminds us also of a history that many of us who lived through it have never forgotten but only seen fade away like the thousands and thousands who suffered the consequences of the Chicago Boys. And he also reminds us of more recent history that we may have forgotten. To encapsulate it broadly - Chicago Boys economics is the underlying thread of the Pinochet Terror of the 1970s (for that is what it truly was), the Argentinian disappearances of the 1980s, the Thatcher-Milk-Snatcher repression of the unions and creation of the Greed Class, the divisive Reagan Years that replicated the Thatcher loathing of organized labor and an almost religious intensity for free markets, the chaos of the post-Soviet Union Yeltsin years, right up to the Winter Meltdown of capitalism at the end of 2008. From Friedman's meetings with Pinochet right up to his 90th birthday party at the Bush White House attended among others, by Donald Rumsfeld, a Friedman acolyte, it's Friedman's free market economics that paradoxically inspire the most controlling, insidious, paranoid governments. We reflect back now on why Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in the mid-1980s, an act that are a grave insult to the victims of this insidious doctrine (Winterbottom's clip of this in his film speaks volumes).
In an apochryphal story, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE relates that on September 10, 2001, Rumsfeld main preoccupation as he announced proudly was a war on the Pentagon bureaucracy. Shouldn't he have been concerned with other, more pressing matters?
Winterbottom's film gives us the throughline of a well-informed historian who can connect the dots of the big picture. Its one weakness - in terms of really anchoring the film in a memorable reality - is a lack of depth about Friedman's motivation. We come away from the film knowing what he thought, how his thoughts were implemented at great cost to all of us, and who did this. But we don't really know why or how he arrived at this complete embrace of de-regulation. He was not deluded but he was the ultimate ivory tower academic, a man so out of touch with reality that his economics became a fantasy (or rather fatal nightmares to countless thouands and untold misery on millions). A man of power without responsibility - the most dangerous animal in a democracy. It was as if his thoughts were given flesh by Thatcher and Reagan. It is a strange phenomenon that we still do not quite understand.
Nevertheless, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE remains a powerful film and one that should be shown in as many venues as possible - from high schools to the White House screening room. It is a film that demonstrates why economics is not taught from the earliest years of high school. If it were, the current reality would be too scary to contemplate and the next generation would actually improve the system. If only that were possible.
Let's end by saying: Michael Winterbottom is not only the ablest chronicler and cinematic thinker of his generation but also remains the best filmmaker in Britain today. He has inherited the noble mantle of Ken Loach. He is the Conscience of his times. It is an honorable tradition and a proud one.
Berlin, February, 2009
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