Goyokin

Saw Goyokin, another samurai movie. The previous buch that I've seen were all directed by the same guy (Eiichi Kudo) whereas this one was directed by Hideo Gosha, so it feels much different. It's more evocative, less about the heist and more about the characters, haunted as they are by their past. It opens on a woman returning to her village to find evidence of a struggle and that everyone has vanished. Crows are everywhere. It feels like a horror movie. It's very effective and interesting.

As the plot continues, we meet our grim-faced samurai hero and we meet up again with the woman from the opening sequence. There's a heist (of course) but this time our rag-tag team of heroes is trying to prevent the heist. This is an interesting inversion from the previous films where the heroes are usually overthrowing tyrannical rulers. This time they're upholding their honor and therefore the law. There's a scene near the end where one of the characters points out that the law they're upholding only really benefits the rich and powerful, throwing an interesting double-negative into the film. I'll have to keep an eye on the relationship between these lone-wolf samurais and their relationship towards authority. In America, authority is always suspicious and burdensome. In Japan, I suspect, that's not the case.

Anyway, the film is interesting. It is, after all, a samurai movie, so we get the endless sword fights and slow, dainty, cat-like posturing. And of course there's a scene where a big gang of guys runs at the hero, only to be cut down one by one. There's the standard boilerplate, but there's also glimmers of a more mysterious, more emotional film sublimated underneath. Not one of my favorites but worth a look, I suppose.

Providence

Saw Providence, a clever film that opens on a court scene where a soldier is being interrogated for shooting down a werewolf. The scene is being narrated by an old man, as though he too is watching the same film we are. It soon becomes clear however that this man narrating the film is an author, dying and drunk in bed, writing one last story. This story is what we are seeing. The characters slosh about, one becoming the mother of another, a bit-character incongruously showing up where they didn't belong, as the author loses track of the plot and begins to slip into his own reminiscences. A high-concept premise which is more-or-less given justice by the film. Good show.

The film was made in the 70s and has the same man-raging-against-society themes that were so hot back then. If I were in a less charitable mood, I'd probably be annoyed at the author's self-described assholishness. As is however, he is very visibly and obviously dying, so his strange raging at/celebration of his past life makes more sense. Not everything in the novel universe is explained or even tied up in any meaningful way, but we end on a high note which is nice.

This was a clever, fun film that I liked. It has some weak spots but seeing real life poke obtrusively into the story was fun, and extrapolating what this meant was fun too.

The Five Obstructions

Saw The Five Obstructions, an outrageously clever documentary that follows a series of five challenges that noted sadist Lars Von Trier gives to his friend, Jørgen Leth. Jørgen has created a short art-house film called The Perfect Human. Here it is:


Von Trier's challenges are designed to deconstruct this chilly little short. No more serious long takes - all edits must be 12 frames long. No actors, Jørgen himself must play the perfect human. No more abstraction, the film must show human suffering and need. It becomes a sort of game between Jørgen and Lars. Lars tries to find the one thing that Jørgen is using to express himself, Jørgen attempting to avoid compromising his integrity and vision.

Lars characterizes this as "therapy" to help Jørgen grow artistically, however Lars Von Trier is a cruel sort of man, and their relationship is quickly compared to Faust and Mephistopheles. Lars capriciously changes the rules and punishes Jørgen for slight transgressions, but always in an oh-so-clever, artistic way. At one point, Jørgen does not follow one of Lars' instructions so Lars, like a sulking child, says the next obstruction is no obstruction at all. Jørgen must remake the short film. Now Jørgen is forced to produce something derivative and compromised, but no: he re-imagines the short as a film noir. Brilliant!

This is a film where it probably helps to have seen a few Von Trier films and probably some of Jørgen Leth's work (I haven't however) to get a feel for the people involved. This is not a film for everyone, concerned as it is with the role of the director as both artist and subject of their own work, voyeuristic and yet also exposed. Like the caviar they eat after each successful obstruction, it has a strong flavor and an acquired taste. It is fascinating in all kinds of ways however, if only as commentary on the artistic process. The ending is absolutely perfect and reveals Von Trier's motivation for this exercise.

Not a delightful film, but a chilly, intellectual, fascinating one. I really enjoyed it.

Cloud Atlas

Saw Cloud Atlas, an ambitious and pretentious film about a bunch of intertwining stories, stretching through the past and the future. The same characters play many parts and talk about an existentialist sort of afterlife, using film and literature to evoke a life after death, a legacy of goodwill and noble deeds forever rebelling against oppressive governments, brutal tribesmen, and overbearing nurses. Alas, because the same characters play many parts, this requires the use of some sometimes truly god-awful makeup to change the gender and race of the actors. It's very jarring, for example, to suddenly recognize Tom Hanks's face on some asian doctor's body. For some actors this works well, but Tom Hanks especially sticks out like a sore thumb. Frustrating.

The film keeps cutting between the different stories in a sort of collage, weaving one revelation with a setback in another story. This keeps things breathless and interesting but the film is 3 hours long and it wears after a while. This is intentionally used to drive the simultaneous climaxes of the different stories together into a hysterical crescendo, with the string section going crazy, men screaming in anguish and in slow motion, and women sweeping away in arch triumph all at once.

I really liked this movie. It's very much a mess and has deep flaws which contemporary reviews pointed out with hooting delight, but it's heart is in the right place and I'd rather see a fascinating mess than a smug masterpiece any day. It feels like a poor man's version of a lot of different films (Synecdoche New York and Tree of Life spring to mind.) It's very beautifully shot and told but also expects you to accept with total seriousness Halle Berry saying "you have to do whatever you can't not do". It feels most like Zardoz to me: definitely onto something interesting, extremely self-serious, and deeply silly at parts. Without an enduring box-office hook as good as Sean Connery in a red bikini, I think this one will eventually fall out of memory. Which is sort of a pity.

The Great Killing

Saw The Great Killing, another samurai movie. This one follows a group of samurai who are conspiring to kill the next in line for the shogunate. They're planning on ambushing him and killing him which seems to be the only way anything got done in old timey Japan. The film opens with most of the conspirators being captured and tortured in horrible and graphic ways. This film predates some of the other samurai movies I've seen lately but it feels the most modern so far. It feels like a gangster movie, juxtaposing dry discussions of politics with frank violence. The fights in this film are shot on drunken-feeling handheld cameras, swooning around the action and intercutting jarring close-ups of grimacing faces or jerking bodies. The technique is very interesting, very visceral.

So, the samurais left over after the opening raid continue to plan the assassination, but each is haunted by the sacrifices they've made (and make throughout the film.) These are not the usual stoic badasses but quaking, haunted men, one of them explicitly insane with religious zeal. This surely does not feel like the usual, entirely justified insurrection of other films. The characters are motivated only by off-screen narration flatly telling us that the shogun is cruel. The ethics feel muddy here. The film finally crystallizes into a climactic street-brawl/sword-fight and things feel more comfortable then, but even there there's surprises and changes in expectation.

So, very modern and ambiguous feeling. Darker than I'm used to, which is sort of nice. I had a hard time following the politics of the film so I probably missed many important themes. Such is life. An interesting upset of the samurai genre.

Satantango

Saw Satantango, Bela Tarr's seven-and-a-half-hour long film. Yes, folks. I did it! I'm not sure that this feat, which requires me only to stay conscious and pointed inthe right direction, counts as an accomplishment, but it feels that way. This film is both very good and very slow.

It follows the dozen or so inhabitants of a small Hungarian village. We follow each in turn, their paths crossing, forking and joining. Several scenes are shown twice from different perspectives. The film is very dour and kind of pessimistic. It has a fairly wholesome theme of the ties that bind us together, but these ties are depicted as ugly, scrabbling. Spiders and spiderwebs are a recurrent image, poetically we leave for intermission while a trio of spiders are spinning webs. The connections of these villagers are via crime, adultery, shared guilt more than shared humanity. The film is comic at parts as well however and is described as a black comedy.

I saw it as a fairly straight tragedy but with richly observed scenes. The opening scene of cows plodding across the town square is often cited as a seductive, mesmerizing sequence but my favorite was the introduction of the village doctor. He sits by his window, obsessively noting down the movements of the villagers, pausing only to refill a flask of brandy and to reveal that he is deeply drunk. He's a fat, disgusting slob and I loved watching him wheeze and belch and stumble. Horrible and entrancing!

The film opens with a mysterious church-bell ringing. There is no church nearby so where are the bells coming from? The film suggests first that it is all of the echos of bells from neighboring villages, all ringing at the same time, joining together to make a distant bell noise just at this village. It then reveals that a retarded man is banging on an iron poll on the outskirts of town. This is a nice nucleus for the film. We are together, but only because of our shared ugliness. But we are together. But we are ugly. But we are together.

The characters often listen for quiet noises, try to identify subtle smells, peer into the darkness for an approaching figure. They are often hunting and looking for something. The only character to find this sense of connection and to find a pattern in all of this does so at the end of their life. Again, the film seems to both celebrate our quest for shared meaning and experience and also to mock the futility of this effort. If only the most primitive, animal things connect us, are those connections worth having?

The film's full of lingering shots. Everything is shown. When a man walks down a road, we watch him go until he's a dot on the horizon. A party breaks out and we follow it from reluctant start to passing-out finish. The effect is to make things feel very clinical, very expository. This is the whole of the village, I felt, even the boring parts. I'm not sure it justifies 450 minutes, but perhaps this is the price we must pay for this feeling.