This is my first Tati experience in a theatre, and more than most films that I have seen both on DVD and in a theatre, Mon Oncle proves to be designed to be seen in the highest resolution possible and with a large audience. There are details that I never even came close to noticing either time I saw it on DVD, and the laugh track of the audience becomes a Tati-esque element unto itself. In the same way that I am so aware of the fact that I am watching a film in a theatre when I watch a David Lynch film, watching this film I was well aware of the fact that I was in a dark room filled with complete strangers laughing at a wall. Tati dissects the humor in his film over and over again in a way that I have not seen in any other comedy, first showing a joke, then later showing a character learning from the joke, itself becoming a joke, and then other characters reacting to that character’s joke. It’s easy to say that I am overanalyzing Tati’s sense of humor. He is just a guy who shows his sense of humor on screen in a very simple way. It’s not that I think that Tati mulled over the humor in his films so meticulously that it ended up being so perfect, but I think that he was able to take what had been seen as funny in film and made a joke out of that, which gives his humor such a feeling of layering upon layer. Mon Oncle is my second favorite Tati film, still worlds behind his epic Playtime, my holy grail of films to see in a theatre.

I do have to note that I was not happy that the Cinematheque Ontario showed this film with an English dub, instead of in French with subtitles. Many scenes that I usually think are funny were hurt by the dubbing, and it makes me wary of seeing Playtime in a theatre, thinking that they might show it with the awful “international” audio track.

This was as good as I was hoping it would be on a first viewing. I definitely enjoyed watching it more than I did Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, but I do prefer, at least right now, his Ordet.

The first half of the film was pretty much perfect. The set up is genuinely creepy; the look of everything, along with its narrow aspect ratio and significant film damage, is beautiful. The shadow chase is a spectacular use of the medium of the moving image, and extremely impressive for its time period. The film began to lose momentum about halfway. It never becomes boring, but I caught my attention wandering off a few times near the end. Many people attribute this to the frequent appearance of text, as the protagonist reads a book on vampires to learn about what they are, but when these passages showed up on the screen, they were actually what regained my attention. My only issue with the text was that is often stayed on the screen for too long. I was able to read it almost 3 times through before the text was removed from the screen. No biggie.

I love that there isn’t really a monster in this film; no creature with fangs, or blood-sucking, or flying. The film limits itself to the more spiritual ideas of a vampire, like eternal damnation and avoidance of the afterlife. I look forward to the next time I see, because I am sure that I will like it even more.

The trend of watching films that I really enjoyed a few years ago and now thinking they are actually not very good at all continues with Requiem For A Dream. American Beauty, Donnie Darko, and Dancer in the Dark: none of them are doing it for me these days. I decided that for Requiem, it is because the film seems to be aimed at a younger, MTV minded audience. Which makes sense, and is probably a good thing, given its message is a capslocked “DON’T DO DRUGS.” And this is a good thing to get ingrained into the heads of a young audience, because, clearly, they shouldn’t do drugs. But I wonder, the entire time that I am watching this film, why a filmmaker in his late twenties or early thirties would want to make a film like this after he made such an interesting film about religion and mathematics in Pi. There are those who argue that Requiem is not just about drugs, but about the entire idea of addiction. But I think that is difficult to argue, given that all four of the characters’ downfall is some form of substance abuse.

A very interesting film could have been made by Aronofsky, with these characters, and maybe even based on this book. If we were shown the motivations for the younger characters to be drug dealers, and were given a more plausible, original path in which the characters end up in tragedy, then I could see myself being moved by the film. The only character who comes close to this is Ellen Burstyn’s Sara Goldfarb. I see that she loves watching television with her lone living room chair stationed directly in front of the television, I can understand her reaction to being notified that she has won a slot on her favorite TV show, I can understand that she wants to be thinner so that she can once again impress people and maybe even find a new man to replace the deceased husband that she so deeply misses. Her methods at attaining all of this are stupid, but believable, and in the end pretty heartbreaking. The younger characters, though, I have no sympathy for. You shoot up in that arm, in that spot again? Of course you deserve to lose your arm. You sell your body for a little bit of coke? Of course you deserve to look like a whore and get fucked in a massive anal orgy. Aronofsky has made one good film to date, The Wrestler, fortunately his more recent one, showing that maybe he is actually learning something from these didactic and unsubtle early films.

This is a strange and compelling film about – I’m not very sure what. What I do know is that Taiwan is experiencing a massive drought, watermelons have become portals into a woman’s vagina, and there is a lot of sex. A woman named Shiang-chyi is attracted to an old friend named Hsiao-Kang(or maybe he’s an ex? or a complete stranger?) who happens to be an actor in pornographic films. I wouldn’t be surprised if Hsiao-Kang’s porno scenes were figments of Shiang-chyi’s imagination. Oh, and there are also 4 or 5 musical numbers spread throughout the film, some where characters are now dragons, or penises, or lost in a field of watermelon umbrellas.
Not to mention a couple of ant attacks. This is a very surreal film that is mostly very entertaining, but I didn’t feel anything for any of the characters, and I wasn’t completely wowed by the intentionally campy showstopper songs. I did laugh quite a bit, and found the whole film to be pretty well paced. This is the first film that I have seen by Tsai, who is supposedly one of the true masters of contemplative cinema working today, so hopefully some of his other films carry a little more weight.

To say that Sleepaway Camp is one of the best horror films ever made is not giving it enough credit. This would, without question, land in a Top 10 Films of the 1980’s list that I would create. In creating a film about adolescence and transsexuality, Robert Hiltzik perfectly realized this film to have its climax be both shocking and explicable. What is misinterpretted as campiness and quirks and 1980-isms proves to be a subtle build-up to what should have been obvious all along. In showing us just how obvious everything is, it becomes questionable. In Todd Haynes’ Safe, Julianna Moore plays a woman who is physically reacting to something, but we don’t know what. The film makes a judgement of what it could be, and halfway through, decides to follow this diagnosis. While it is the most logical conclusion to follow, the fact that it is being followed so closely and matter-of-factly makes the viewer question whether or not the filmmaker is just leading us further and further into a rabbit hole.

When the killer in Sleepaway Camp is revealed, it is one of the most expertly crafted scenes I have ever seen. The triumphant trumpets, the zooms in and out of the killer, the computer distortion, and the hybrid of human and animal wheezing came together to create the only cinematic sensation that has prompted me to physically back away from the screen, while at the same time try to look closer to understand just what exactly it is that I saw. This movie is perfect.

This is my third Jia Zhang-ke film, and probably my favorite. The characters have a perfect level of melancholy throughout the film to be believable without ever even approaching melodrama. The film follows two characters. A male character searches for his daughter and the mother of his daughter whom he hasn’t seen in 16 years, and a nurse who is searching for her husband, whom she has not seen in 2 years. To make matter worse (and to give this film its plot), the town that both of them are searching in has recently been submerged under water. Jia ‘s usual themes of modernization, nostalgia, and artificiality are present, with occasional, jarring moments of otherworldy sci-fi. The views of the newer buildings in Still Life evoke Antonioni’s L’Eclisse. This is a very relaxing film, I saw it on a flight, and it eased, or numbed, my fears of my plane crashing. The cinematography is among the more beautiful that I have seen this year, and I prefer it to the lensing in 24 City and The World.

The experience of watching this film was actually somewhat painful. The film follows three naive women who are some of the more annoying female protagonists of any film that I have seen. They are giggly, bitchy, superficial, and completely delusional. But, the film has a pretty stellar finale that mostly makes up for almost the entire film that preceded it.

The film has many of the features of the French New Wave, a movement that never really interested me. The film is all shot on location around Paris.

Along with the aforementioned issues I have with the women, the men are almost just as bad. The men flirt with any woman they see, feel them up, harass them in swimming pools, and even bang their heads on tables in restaurants. I despised everyone in this film, which I learned was the point. What happens when young, attractive women are so naive and careless? What happens when men get their way over and over again with the relentlessly submissive women? The last scene of Les Bonnes Femmes happens; and for me, it felt so very good to watch.

1. La Mujer Sin Cabeza (Martel)
2. Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt)
3. Night and Day (Hong)
4. Summer Hours (Assayas)
5. A Light in the Fog (Rezaee)
6. Encounters at the End of the World (Herzog)
7. Melancholia (Diaz)
8. Un Lac (Grandrieux)
9. Soi Cowboy (Clay)
10. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Fincher)

*grey signifies that I have now seen this film.

* This is the first time that I have seen this film in any version, so I cannot comment on its similarities and differences with the original, theatrical cut.

I think this film is a mixed bag. First the good, the film looks amazing. A scene near the end when two characters tear through a brick wall to reveal deep space was breathtaking (especially in Blu-ray!). The film takes place entirely at night, and the film noir style that it goes for in its first half is beautifully photographed. The film is also stuffed with great ideas about the past, memories, and individuality. When The Matrix was pointed out to me after the film, it does become very obvious that it is very influenced by Dark City.

To me, though, the strong ideas that are presented in this film are in the background to a film that really just wants to be an entertaining showcase of CGI and an explosive confrontation between good and evil. Almost all of the good ideas in the film are spelled out in expository dialogue from the often annoying Kiefer Sutherland. I kept wanting them to show me these scenes of Murdoch’s memory being shuffled over and over again. They show this once very briefly and I didn’t know what was happening, but I feel like this film would actually have a very good prequel that is all about all of the memory shuffling that takes place before this film starts off (not that they should actually do this, I can settle with thinking of Dark City as a missed opportunity).

The climax of the film spins out of control with Murdoch destroying the evil empire with his mind. On one hand I can appreciate it for its camp value, but it just goes too far, and felt that Proyas took it more seriously than he should have. He could have either taken it further and turned it into something truly fun and hilarious, or stepped back and let the resolution happen more subtly. Instead it lies somewhere in the middle and I was getting borderline angry that I was having to settle for a Hollywood grand finale instead of something more rewarding for the interesting build-up.

A very exhausting film to watch late at night. On the whole really impressive, Jia Zhang-ke’s The World, like his 24 City, is basically about the modernization of Beijing. My biggest compliment for this film is that it frequently reminded me of my favorite film, Playtime. The real life “World Park” in Beijing is a giant tourist attraction that exhibits most of the world’s great monuments at an advertised 1/3 of their actual sizes. There are women dancing around the park to music from all around the world, with the women appropriately dressed to matched the corresponding origins (one song is recognizable as the influence for M.I.A.’s “Jimmy”). When the film is looking at the wonders and peculiarities of this massive park and how horrifying it is, the film is spectacular. But the park isn’t really Jia’s main concern.

The film closely follows three or four women who are dancers at the park, and their relationships with friends and lovers. While many of the interactions are very interesting and moving, I thought that most of them were meandering, too melodramatic, or boring. The fact that the film runs almost two and a half hours didn’t help. The film feels way too long by at least half an hour, and I thought that the ending was random and kind of angsty. It was completely the wrong note to leave the film on and left a bad taste in my mouth for a film that I actually liked well enough. I would see this again, and there are enough fun moments to make it a rewarding experience, like the 6 or 7 animated sequences involving flying people and cell phone interactions. The music is kitchy but also very good.