The Graduation 2002

Shinichi Tsutsumi‘s performance of a catatonic social misfit whose soul is so tortured (for reasons never made entirely clear) he can barely speak is so good it spoils a good chunk of the movie. The beautiful Yui Natsukawa wants to marry this guy so I tried to imagine them having sex and couldn’t, pulling the plug on my suspension of disbelief and deflating any drama from that angle. Then there’s the unappealing Rina Uchiyama stalking him. I could imagine them having sex but it might be illegal, if not simply counterproductive to the gene pool, so scratch that angle. All we’re left with is shot after shot of people standing in the rain being serenaded by the worst version of “The Way We Were” you’ll ever hear. There is a decent story hidden in this movie but it’s never made very clear and the plot points we’re treated to just don’t add up. Sorry, Shinichi. Great job but I’m voting thumbs down.

My Father and I (Wo he ba ba) 2003 Xu Jinglei

Xu Jinglei is a talented actor, writer, and director (and gorgeous), all of which she performs here. This is her directorial debut, produced while still in her twenties. It shows lots of promise. The characters are engaging, the direction mostly assured (up to a point), and while the story arc is worthwhile overall, the script used in bringing it to fruition comes up a little short in the third act. The first two acts setting up the characters and relationships are wonderful but when it comes time for the drama to enter and make something of the relationships, things start to meander and too much is stirred in too quickly to create a satisfying conclusion. A little restraint, leaving the film as a slice of life rather than a big meaningful drama would have been better.

Sidebar: I wrote in another thread that I didn’t care much for the sound of Mandarin. Now, later, after having seen enough Zhou Xun and Zhao Wei, and now My Father and I, I think it’s the most beautiful language on the planet. I wish I knew what dialect, or whatever, it is that makes this whispering syrup so satisfying. My Father and I is worth seeing just for the Mandarin.

To go slightly off topic with that last - sitenoise, if you haven’t listened to Faye Wong, I suggest you start. Mandarin or Cantonese. If her cover of Passengers doesn’t have your heart melting inside thirty seconds, then I don’t know what to say to you.

Also, back on topic, seek out Letter From An Unknown Woman if you haven’t seen it yet. While it’s nice to see Xu Jinglei getting more widespread fame in mainland China I wish she could get back to directing… she’s wasted in stuff like Confession of Pain and Warlords. (And for the millionth time I dearly wish someone would fansubtitle Dreams May Come.)

Xu was kind of wasted in Shinjuku Incident too. I’m real interested in her Letter From An Unknown Woman, not only ever since crushing on her via Spring Subway, but I think My Father and I showed some real directorial talent. I’m not sure I would encourage her to keep writing her own screenplays (for me, the big shortcoming of an otherwise pretty good film), but I’ve only seen the one film so far.

Another appeal of Letter From An Unknown Woman is it is cinematographer-ed (sorry;)) by Lee Pin Bing. John Pais recommends Claustraphobia, something else I’m interested in.

I’ll go YuoTubin’ for some Faye Wong, although singing is a different animal. I’ve seen her sing a cover of Sinead O’Connor’s “Thank You for Loving Me” ... in English, probably a bad start, as I think Sinead’s got one of the best voices on the planet, but I remember thinking it was OK.

sitenoise - August 31, 2009, 11:38pm

Xu was kind of wasted in Shinjuku Incident too. I’m real interested in her Letter From An Unknown Woman, not only ever since crushing on her via Spring Subway, but I think My Father and I showed some real directorial talent. I’m not sure I would encourage her to keep writing her own screenplays (for me, the big shortcoming of an otherwise pretty good film), but I’ve only seen the one film so far.

Another appeal of Letter From An Unknown Woman is it is cinematographer-ed (sorry;)) by Lee Pin Bing. John Pais recommends Claustraphobia, something else I’m interested in.

I’ll go YuoTubin’ for some Faye Wong, although singing is a different animal. I’ve seen her sing a cover of Sinead O’Connor’s “Thank You for Loving Me” ... in English, probably a bad start, as I think Sinead’s got one of the best voices on the planet, but I remember thinking it was OK.

I don’t think I mentioned it in my brief posting, but yes, the cinematography on Claustrophobia is excellent.

Letter is much better than My Father and I in that respect, and yes, the cinematography is class, though I haven’t seen Claustrophobia. She seems to have got short shrift in Overheard, too. Eh, flower vases… hopefully it’s paying well.

Letter from an Unknown Woman 2004 Xu Jinglei

Xu Jinglei, may I have some more, please? This film really excites me about Xu Jinglei. The directorial hand is very mature and accomplished. The film has a great period feel to it, like something from Hollywood in the 40s. The cinematography by Lee Pin Bing is gorgeous and I’m sure that helped. The acting is all quite good. Strange, then, to have to say that I didn’t really enjoy the movie. :( Again, as with My Father and I, it’s the story that let me down. I know it’s an old story, one I haven’t read nor seen any previous adaptations of. I think it might work on paper, in outline form, but I couldn’t get on board with this particular presentation.

There may be some cultural nuances that were lost on me, and I do have to say that the subtitles that came with the film were really, really bad. Here’s where I got lost: The character development didn’t seem secure enough for me to accept the first disappearance of the writer after the initial affair. Frankly, it shocked me. I went along with it for the sake of the story, but it left me twitching a little. Then when they meet again and the writer doesn’t recognize the woman, I fell off the bandwagon. I can accept not recognizing someone with a different hairdo eight years later but once you’ve gotten to the naughty bits, I don’t think so. I imagine this is all nit-picky to the point of a story about the sadness of an extremely one-sided love affair, but I wanted something to assure me that this one-sided love was warranted and I didn’t get it.

Again, maybe I just missed some of the cultural nuance, some consciousness that would have helped me also understand how the woman supported herself and her child. I read somewhere that she did this by being an escort. Maybe it was the subtitles that let me down or I’m rather naive when it comes to recognizing the giveaways, but I didn’t get that from the movie. I know there’s always people who never seem to work, yet survive just fine in the movies. So what’s my problem?

I would recommend this film to anyone who enjoys a good love story. It’s a beautiful film, and if you’re not a lion in the tall grass, stalking, just waiting to pounce, like me, when you think that Xu Jinglei has failed in her exposition, the story is probably pretty good too. Stories for movies often come from outside sources but it ultimately falls on the director to tell the story in a convincing manner. Xu Jinglei, I’m officially a fanboy. Get to work.

Claustrophobia (Chan mat) 2009 Ivy Ho

Hmm ... I really don’t know what to say about this one. It’s an anti-film, I presume, in the sense that it doesn’t want to pay out in any of the ways we expect films to payoff. It looks nice, very nice, and there’s a certain maturity and charm to its realness but it has the dynamic range of a sine wave. No drama, no tension, no passion, no plot. Nothing. The “story” is typical office gossip plus nothing. I don’t feel the need to necessarily dis the film, there’s nothing particularly objectionable about it, but I can only recommend it as a soothing trip down numbing lane.

All the characters are drawn and depicted well enough ... arrrrgh! Why didn’t this film give me anything? I must have really missed something. Karena Lam is good, but, ya know, I’ve seen a handful of her films and nothing has yet matched her performance in Koma.

Brass Knuckle Boys (The Shonen Merikensack) 2009

Color me bummed. I’ll watch anything with Aoi Miyazaki in it but it was extremely tough this time. She’s fabulous, of course, and the film starts off with a refreshingly bizarre sense of humor, but it quickly devolves into toilet humor. The film confuses punk with childishness and fails to create characters that anyone will care about for the length of the movie. They start off OK but all they leave you with is hope that they will become endearing in some way, but they never really get there. For every quick and funny moment that works, and there’s a bunch of them, there’s umpteen that don’t. And the sibling rivalry, family drama subplot is painfully uninteresting. I’m a huge Aoi Miyazaki fan but a two hour fart joke is a bad vehicle for her.

A two hour fart joke?
 
“Color me bummed” sounds about right, then! 

sitenoise - August 21, 2009, 11:49pm

Just when I think I won’t see another film for a while that will take my breath away ...

Eureka (Shinji Aoyama)

After three and a half slow paced, sepia toned hours experiencing pain and anguish I still watched the credits roll. The film starts off with a guy hijacking a bus and killing most everyone on it. The driver and two middle school kids survive and we spend the rest of the film watching them live with it. We watch them fall asleep watching television and stuff like that but there is not a wasted frame in this movie. The only thing I might quibble with is the scene where Yakusho punches the cousin. It felt forced, maybe a little wrong, but the cousin’s line of dialog as the bus drives away made it right. There are a remarkable number of plot points that keep the film moving forward (I liked the serial killer subplot) but it still feels like suspended animation. Koji Yakusho is sublime and Aoi Miyazaki, at like twelve years old—and without saying a word the whole freaking film—is mesmerizing. I know I’m a fanboy of hers but the kid is amazing. Eureka is a masterpiece.

I totally get the Daydream Nation inspiration.

Sitenoise, this must be one of the most beautifully shot B&W films (or sepia toned, to be exact) I’ve ever watched, right up there with Wings of Desire, et. al. Little dialogue, but like you say, mesmerising film. And what terrific locations—a Japan like I’d never seen before. I believe the film starts off in Fukuoka, which is just a short ferry ride from Busan. Now I’m seriously thinking of heading there one of these days… I watched the Artificial Eye version, which DVDBeaver rated much lower than the now OOP Japanese edition. The image has noticeable aliasing from time to time, but very good contrast, strong blacks, and the largest English subtitles I’ve ever seen in my life!

Happy to see another positive note for Eureka. Lots of good things to say about it. Somebody should (see it and) write a proper review of it for the Twitch Archive. ::cough::Kurt::cough::

Here’s another long one:

Love Exposure (Ai no mukidashi) Sono Sion

As a mild Sono fanboy I had high hopes and expectations for Love Exposure and it exceeded them. I can only explain the coolness of the film by acknowledging that Sono isn’t just a film maker, he’s an artist, poet and musician, street-level. What struck me about the film is how it felt both intricately constructed and made up on the spot at the same time. It’s like Sono is making a stew. He knows exactly how it’s going to turn out but seems to improvise his way there. Four hours was nothing. As usual, the music is deployed masterfully. This film was a lot, a great big lot, of fun.

The Most Beautiful Night in the World 2008   160 min.  Japan

This is a very unique film experience. I really should write a real review.

Michie Itô is great as the genius girl who breaks out in an allergic rash when she gets near stupid people, and who gives birth to the girl who has no bellybutton because she was born in an egg. It’s all here. The reason for wars and other bad things is that people are not sexually satisfied. So, create a potion that will make everyone want to have sex all the time, all the unhealthy people will die from exhaustion, and then the world will be overrun with children. The march of civilization will stop but at least so will the wars and corruption. Interesting idea, but the acting and the storytelling in this nearly three hour film are so bad it can only work by virtue of a train wreck curiosity. It may become a cult classic. It’s got full frontal nudity and a naked orgy at the end. You can’t take this film seriously but it does make a case for taking pity on it. It’s bad, frighteningly bad, but it’s shooting for being so bad it’s good, hoping to create a pathetic charm. And it succeeds, to a degree.

indeed. Is it actually a pink film, or is it just weird with added sexual content?

Eight Rooks - September 14, 2009, 12:43am

indeed. Is it actually a pink film, or is it just weird with added sexual content?

It’s definitely not a pink film and I even hesitate to call it weird. It’s more just earnestly bad. There’s a wholesome quality to it as well. It’s strangeness doesn’t seem typical to me of Japanese weirdness, it’s more like midnight-movie camp. I really don’t know how I sat through the thing. It’s structure is that of a fifteen year old girl (the one without a belly-button) narrating the secret of why her small community has such a high fertility rate. “It all started fourteen years ago when ‘that man’ came to our village”, and then it takes its sweet time getting to the present. There isn’t really an allure that something erotic might happen, although Michie Itô‘s character has a way of leading you to the edge every time she shows up, but there is a continuing implication that the story might unfold in an interesting and fulfilling way.

It’s not Christopher Guest weird, where everyone seems to exist in their own orbit, and it’s not Satoshi Miki witty weird, it’s more like Godzilla ... with animated sequences from a third-grader thrown in.

I can’t say I enjoyed the film but it is telling that I seem unable to simply dismiss it.

The Housemaid

I caught this film on Auteurs.com, and being a fan of Kim Ki Young, I just had to watch this. I think Kim Ki Young is a master of showing you something so wrong in a character but makes you believe that character would do that. So far out of all the films I’ve seen of his, he always has such a haunting image that just stays with you for awhile. The acting in housemaid is over the top melodrama, but there was also a hint of comedy in the film that was a little disturbing. Great film. Many Korean film directors list Kim Ki young as an Influence, and many of them list this movie as one of the best. You can definitely see Ki Young’s influence in a lot of current film directors.

Tokyo!
I’ve been waiting to watch this movie for awhile, and finally did the other day. Out of all three, I particularly liked Bong Joon Ho’s short the most, mostly in due part that it had Yu Aoi. I had a lot of fun watching it.

On my list:
Mother by Bong Joon Ho
Thirst by Park chan wook (finally playing at a theatre near me)
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs by Mikio Naruse