Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Saw Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a Tibetan film about the dull, prosaic, awesome, solemn death of an old man. His kidneys are failing him and, as he is dying, he is visited by ghosts and monsters and remembers his past lives. They are not altogether evil, these creatures, they are genuinely frightening but they are also mere facts of life, as simultaneously unexciting and grand as a sunset. The film Lynchianly focuses on the dullness of extraordinary events in order to illuminate the excitement of a fairly dull event: the final death of a dying man.

The film is pretty neat. It's very slow, alas, which made it difficult to sit through but there are moments of absolute mysterious magic that keep it lively. The film opens with the man, Uncle Boonmee, recalling his past life as a cow who escapes from his owners. He wanders into the woods, trailing a broken rope, only to be eventually collected again. As he-the-cow is lead away, the camera moves to the silent, black silhouette of a man standing in the forest, his eyes glowing red. We fade to black. What in the hell, right? The livening moments of magic are undercut however by the contemplative but almost tedious surrounding moments. Like it or not, even as the man lies dying there are bills to pay and the farm to mind. Even the "uncle" in the title underscores how remote we are from the action. He's not our brother, father, or son, but some barely-known uncle.

The film is deep and magical, fascinating and hypnotic. It is very unusual in parts, evoking fairy tales or horror films, and so I don't know if it would be better to risk boredom and see it alone or to risk cynicism and see it with a friend. A remote and difficult film, I think it got the better of me a bit, but it was so strange and I did like it.

Madeo

Saw Madeo, a Korean thriller about an aged mother who must find out who is the real killer of a young schoolgirl after her retarded son is accused of the crime. The son amiably agrees to whatever the cops say and when they suggest that maybe he killed the girl he smiles yes and signs whatever. It's not clear if he can read. This is a sad situation lightened a bit by some comic buffoonery and also by the (to me) totally alien culture. At one point the mother goes on a "Thank-You-Parents Bus Tour." What this is I have no idea, except that it apparently involves dancing to K-pop on a bus. Anyway, The central mystery of who killed the schoolgirl makes up the foreground of the plot but the background is made up of the much deeper mystery of the son's relationship with his mother.

One of the first scenes in the film is of the mother in her traditional medicine shop, watching her adult son fool around across the street as she chops some herbs. Suddenly the son is struck by a car and she simultaneously slices off her fingertip. The son is fine, just knocked down, but the scene serves to symbolically link the mother and son in a deep and significant way. He is her body. She suffers when he does. Their relationship is intense and weird. Incest is implied but, by the end of the film, I believe this is discredited. They are bound together by love and hate and old guilt. Their relationship is the real treasure of this film.

The film itself is paced like a mystery. The reveals of the murder case are teased to such heights they made me shiver and the reveals of the relationship case are no less impressive. The central character, the mother, is amazing. She opens the film in a field dancing to the music of the opening credits. I wondered if this was a sad film and her dancing was black irony or if this was a feel-good film and that her dancing was establishing her as a rakish, puckish character. It turns out it was kind of both. An interesting film.

Edit: according to the message boards over at imdb, the director often ties social commentary into his films. This explains the mother-son relationship being so fraught. The mother is supposed to love the son unconditionally, but at what cost? Must she even sacrifice her own humanity to do it? Apparently this is a much tougher film for Koreans.

The Last Picture Show

Saw The Last Picture Show, a melancholy film about a small southern mining town. The protagonist, Sonny, is a high-school football player of no great skill or distinction. Inexplicably estranged from his family (due to "not getting along" whatever that may mean) he mostly lives out of a combination pool-hall/diner/movie theater strip all owned by the kindly father-figure Sam. The film is about the soap opera lives of small-town folks who have little to do besides watch movies and play bedroom hopscotch. In this town there are few opportunities for happiness and plenty of time to identify and reflect on missed ones.

The film depicts a sad situation with intimacy and immediacy. Sonny has reached the end high-school and the end of his planned life. Now what? He can join the army or go down in the mine. Also he can get married, if he feels that would improve matters. A life of hardship and nothing stretches in front of him. His best friend Duane starts off dating JC, the town beauty-queen, who is even more severely trapped, being female. She spends the film running into the arms of whoever seems like the best ticket out of town. She breaks up with Duane outside of the school Christmas dance. "Merry Christmas, son." says an onlooking chaperon.

The film is also very erotically charged. Many sex scenes and lingering looks, many accommodating relationships. Who does what with whom is the only interesting thing going on in town and therefore of central importance to the film. It's got the fascination of small-town gossip and, under that, its ugliness too and, under that, the sadness and humanity of people with no future. But in that humanity there is warmth that must be protected and clung to, even as the cold wind perpetually howls outdoors.

Crossing the Line

Saw Crossing the Line, a documentary about the strange life of James Dresnok, an American soldier who defected to North Korea. The film is spooky and weird, using a soundtrack of computer bloops and fades to black which invoke an espionage film or an investigation of some kind. This is at odds with the rather warm and human psychological explanation the film seems to offer to explain his defection: that he was simply looking for a family. Born to immediately-divorced parents, he was foisted off on an elderly aunt and uncle who didn't know what to make of him and furthermore didn't want him. From there, he wound up in foster homes and orphanages, his unsettled life daily confronting him with the sad fact that he was unwanted. After a few run-ins with the law (juvenile delinquency, petty theft,) he joined the army and tried to make that his family. But the American Army is a difficult place to live in and eventually, in disgust, he defected to the mysterious land of the DPRK.

There he's used as a propaganda device, reading scripts about how well he lives for psychological warfare and playing the villainous american in their films. But they do take care of him. As with anything from North Korea, it's always unclear how deep the deception runs. Is James lying only to us, or to himself as well? Or does he actually believe what he says. Curiously, there were three other soldiers who defected at around the same time as James, though in unrelated incidents. James talks of one of the soldiers who felt his imprisonment more keenly than James did. James tells how this soldier claims to have been beaten by James, that he was forced to surgically remove a tattoo of a US Army logo from his bicep. James furiously declares that never was he, James, forced to do anything. That he too had removed tattoos but that was because his handlers earnestly explained the impropriety of having US insignia on his body. Does James not understand that this is coercion? Of the beatings, James declares the soldier a liar. "I'd like to kill him" James says, without any apparent irony.

The film is very interesting. As with any human life, James' does not fit into a neat narrative. This explanation of finding a family in the DPRK is tangential to the true thrust of the film which is to examine James' unusual life. He has a North Korean wife. He has children. At one point he movingly celebrates their ability to go to college, a privilege that, ignorant of school loans, he imagines would be denied in the US. All kinds of fascinating odds and ends litter this documentary. Very interesting.

Project X (2012)

Saw Project X (thanks, Emilio.) It was a tedious, depressing film. It follows three teenagers as they plan the most epic rager of a party ever that will turn their lives around and totally get them laid. The way its shot really makes it look like a horror film. It's shot found-footage style with shaky-cams and filmed by a teen who is "weird" (he wears a trench coat.) We see the main character's parents expressing worry about leaving their child alone. The film even opens with the bucolic noises of suburbia, lulling us into a calm which is traditionally soon to be shattered by some terrible event. Of course, the party is the thing which shatters this calm and which therefore is the monster of this horror.

The film was apparently shot on a sound stage where they built a house and invited a bunch of celeb-wanna-bees to party and film it with their cellphones. The resulting footage is pretty much what you would expect: poorly lit, not centered, and boring. They intercut this footage with clips telling the tedious tedious story of the protagonist finally boning a lady. The film is full of cruelty and the sort of mean foulness that seems funny when you're drunk and feeling belligerent. There's a little lap dog, for example, who is shut up in drawers, dyed orange, and tied to balloons. Presumably the film is making some anti-lap-dog statement. Perhaps the filmmakers are more cat people. Doubtful however. this party seemed pretty hostile to all forms of life.

I found the film tedious and deeply depressing. The film is very generous towards the party-goers. It's only near the end of the film, for example, that windows start breaking. The protagonist floats around, freaking out and then relaxing into this wicked-awesome party bro, as his parent's house is systematically destroyed. There's a car, for example, that the protagonist's father asks him to be careful of. This is the car whose submersion into the pool was featured so heavily in the trailers. The central trio keep shouting at each other in shrill teenage squawks that this party is absolutely crazy, but it just looked like a long, awful, dubstep-riddled chore to me. David Mamet argues in many of his works that man is only one bad day away from descending to level of animals. This film argues that we are only one party away, and it's right.

Melancholia

Saw Melancholia, a very pretty film by Lars Von Trier. It's a high-concept sci-fi movie about two sisters, Justine and Claire. The film is composed of two halves, the first focusing on Justine on her wedding night at a sumptuous castle-like hotel. She smiles and hangs on the neck of her fiance, but when she's hugging him, her face goes dead over his shoulder. She constantly sneaks away from the noise and the fun to be alone. At one point, in some kind of art-display-room, she angrily tears down the complex minimalist pictures and replaces them with paintings by Bruegel and Bosch and Caravaggio. She's clearly in some kind of deep and barely-hidden depression. Her antics finally spoil the wedding completely and it's called off, the guests leaving in confusion and disarray.

In part two, we focus more on Claire who must care for a Justine who is by this point so depressed that she can hardly get out of bed anymore. At this point we learn of a planet called Melancholia which is headed towards earth. I belive the metaphor to be obvious: that the planet is Justine's depression. There's debate among physicists whether this is truly the end of the world, or merely a close call.

The film forces us to stay in Justine's presence for a long time. At first there's some romance to this beautiful but depressed woman, but as time passes, we begin to feel the reality of hanging out with someone who clearly does not want to go on living. I imagine many critics reacted as they would to a real severely depressed person, with frustration and mounting impatience. The planet is actually in the sky however and as it looms Claire begins to fall apart as well.

So, not a cheery film, but it is simply gorgeously shot. The opening of the film is a montage of achingly slow, beautifully composed shots. Justine in her wedding dress, walking through a forest, tangled a fisherman's net. A horse rears and falls over. Justine walking with a young boy on her hip, her legs sinking up to the knee into the earth. Justine raising her hands as lighting crawls up her fingers like a Jacob's ladder. They depict tableaux of weariness and depression, but also of a strange beauty.

The film reminds me a lot of the work of Tarkovsky, famous for high-concept but grounded sci fi, whose work is similarly slow and hypnotic. Indeed, in what I consider to be a sort of hat-tip, this painting appears in Melancholia and is also heavily featured in Solaris. I don't think this film will exactly appeal to fans of high-concept sci-fi, but functions well as a drama. It's very slow, but then it's also very pretty, so there's that. Far more comfortable than most of Von Trier's oeuvre.

Dirty Carnival

Saw Dirty Carnival, a Korean gangster film. It was interesting. The protagonist is a low-level gangster looking for better things. He has a sickly mother, a wannabe-gangster brother and an adorable little sister who has 'collateral damage' written all over her. The film involves two betrayals that mirror each other and also involves a filmmaker who is a childhood friend of the protagonist. He keeps prying for information about mob life and hungrily records conversations. Eventually the filmmaker makes a film based on the protagonist's adventures, featuring the recreation of a high-profile murder. The clear implication is that that film is this film which implies in turn that the director has based this film on a real-life crime, an implication which is not backed up (by imdb at any rate.) This is a fiction by implication, underlined (rather heavy-handedly I thought) by a closing repetition of an early scene. The protagonist turns to the camera and says "hey [filmmaker dude], make it a real gangster film, huh?" Dumb little scene, but neat high-wire act.

High-wire self-reference aside, the rest of the film is well executed. The protagonist has an un-gangster-ish, pretty face and both repulses and attracts our sympathy with his actions. One moment he's strong-arming a family into paying their protection money and the next he's singing along to a goofy pop song on the drive home. He's an interesting, complex character, as are many others. The mob-boss is not an emotionless block as mob-bosses usually are, but has feelings and sensitivities as well. This is not full-blown sympathization, mind you, just nuance. Anyway an interesting film.

The Big Sleep

Saw The Big Sleep, the classic Philip Marlowe noir. It's got Bogey, it's got femmes fatale, it's got tommy guns and rich debutants with drug addictions. It's a marvelous old noir in the classic style. I must admit I didn't follow the knotty, knotty plot as well as I should but I feel the contortions of the plot are secondary to cool of Marlowe and to the general fireworks of wit on display. It's a great film. I don't really have much to say about it however. I just let it sort of wash over me. It contains few stylistic surprises and, since it defines the genre, doesn't contain much genre-breaking postmodern stuff either. A good sharp epitome of noir. A black diamond. These reviews are getting better and better!