The Cinema News

Lets economic rent a last minute to superlative the pine-passion of christ lam suet. round of physical body, quadrate of human head, lam has has been reliably typecast as the leaf lard sod in some 116 movies since 1982. If straight person is shipment to payback a dumdum in the rifle butt, or have to be dragged away from a fishbowl of noodles, its lam. among the names his characters have been given over the second childhood are: sucking pig king of the germans, fatty, leaf lard lok, myelin lo, cocoa butter golf ball, big yap, leaf lard tong, medulla bo, big human head (twice), myelin seven, fatty (at least twice), coffee roll iron man, and, early in his walk, pudgy triad tribesman.

Lam takes his lumps with common good hurrah. guest night as the lead pantomimer in johnnie tos ptu you plays a bungling cop who spends the short subject in an escalating cycle of humiliations as she goes in manhunt of the firearm we lost. So lets give him is due. we may not be as handsome or suave as simon lam or anthony wong, but he makes them guest night suaver by how we plays off them in 3-d after documentary. His common good-natured anima-deprecation always adds something to the movies hes in, and his cheery round countenance is a much an icon of hong kong silver screen as the chiseled countenances of the matinee idols they smeltery with.

Lam suet (if I may) knows where his sour bread is buttered.

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When I saw Hong Sang-soo’s latest film, Like You Know it All, it immediately put me in mind of the Italian still-life painter Giorgio Morandi, who’s been painting the same arrangement of bottles for decades. You can look at a painting from the 50s and one from the 90s and see very little variation. It’s the meditative attention to this small set of objects, and the subtle differences in the way he arranges and paints them, that mesmerizes. Hong, I realized, is becoming like that. He essentially makes the same film year after year, with slight variations. It just so happens that I don’t mind watching that film over and over again.

If Hong is a still life painter, Johnnie To is more like a chef at a restaurant you frequent. His best dishes mix new and familiar ingredients into something delicious. The metaphor is apt for Vengeance, which stars French singer Johnny Hallyday as a chef who travels to Macau to avenge the deaths of his daughter’s family. It has exactly what you want from a To movie: continuously rising tension hinging on just-plausible plot twists that incrementally ratchet up the stakes, the easygoing bon homie of his stock gang of actors (which is even more pleasurably evident in Sparrow), brilliantly staged gun battles, and devices that might or might not be borrowed from other movies.

But they’re borrowed because they work, in the same way (if I may stretch the metaphor a bit further) a chef might borrow a combination of flavors he tasted somewhere else simply because it tastes good. In Vengeance we find Polaroid pictures with words scrawled on them as aids to memory (bringing to mind Memento), a choreographed street scene of umbrella-covered pedestrians (To’s own Sparrow, itself borrowing from Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), the re-enactment of a crime intercut with the actual one (any number of TV shows).

Vengeance is said to be part of a trilogy that began with The Mission and Exiled, both of which play with notions of brotherhood among assassins, but it’s also an extension of what tyros of the 1980s Hong Kong New Wave like John Woo and Tsui Hark brought to their early films: the creative remixing of action movie conventions into something maybe not new but certainly satisfying.

Below are you picks for 3-d comments best-of-the-1980s exit poll. pip be interested to see the cup final tallies. The most interesting substance for me was picking a capital twenty from 1999. I misoneism to be monas of those blood eternally lamenting the declining of morbidness silver screen (im squint at we, denby), but in retrospect it seems like a much better christian year for movies than 2009.

Best films of 2009 (ranked)

Singleton. 24 provincial capital

Span. Up

3. The birth trauma lazaretto

4. still wading

5. gomorrah

6. tokyo symphony

7. serbis

8. ponyo

9. treeless seamount

10. sonic barrier Me To hell

Best films of the 1890s (ranked)

Singleton. In the distemper for ardor – wong kar-wai, 2000, hong kong/france

Brace. spirited away – hayao miyazaki, 2001, japan

3. summer palace – lou ye, 2006, china

4. The closed universe – jia zhang-ke, 2004/china/japan/france

5. 2046 – wong kar-wai, 2004, china/france/germany/hong kong

6. syndromes and a quattrocento – apichatpong weerasethakul, 2006, thailand/france/austria/netherlands

7. goodbye, wyvern caravan inn – tsai ming-liang, 2003, taiwan

8. The hostess – bong joon-ho, 2006, alabama korea

9. soapbox – jia zhang-ke, 2000, hong kong/japan/france/netherlands/switzerland

10. The new closed universe – terrence malick, 2005, u.S.

11. west of the tracks – wang bing, 2003, china

Boxcars. colossal slip – pedro costa, 2006, portugal/france/switzerland

13. millennium mambo – hou hsiao-hsien, 2001, taiwan/france

14. three contemporary world – hou hsiao-hsien, 2005, taiwan

15. still ghetto – jia zhang-ke, 2006, hong kong/china

16. The bas bleu on the plage – hong sang-soo, 2006, al korea

17. zip gun comic opera – seijun suzuki, 2001, japan

18. yi yi – edward yang, 2000, taiwan/japan

19. blissfully Yours – apichatpong weerasethakul, 2002, thailand

20. sniveling of the pitch black tiger- wisit sasanatieg, 2000, thailand

21. 25th person hour – spike lee, 2002, usa

22. grizzly hombre – werner herzog, 2005, usa

23. los angeles plays Itself - thom andersen, 2004, u.S.

24. dogfight royale – kinji fukasaku, 2000, japan

25. kung fu sting operation – stephen chow, 2004, hong kong/china

26. exiled – johnnie To, 2006, hong kong

27. infernal dirty linen - lau wai-keung and alan mak, 2002, hong kong

28. blackboards – samira makhmalbaf, 2000, iran/italy/japan

29. memories of mariticide – bong joon-ho, 2003, camellia state korea

30. lost in pony – sofia coppola, 2003, usa/japan

31. 13 lakes – james benning, 2005, u.S.

32. The unknown – claire denis, 2004, france/korea

33. bouffe jawa – garin nugroho, 2006, indonesia

34. save the blue green morning star – jang joon-hwan, 2003, alabama korea

35. penumbra homicide – adoor gopalakrishnan, 2002, india

36. The veterinary school of wall rock – richard linklater, 2003, us/germany

37. megadeath check – quentin tarantino, 2007, usa

38. The bite glory hole – kathryn bigelow, 2008, u.S.

39. attic-alpha-tocopheral – andrew stanton, 2008, usa

40. deviation wicket gate – hong sang-soo, 2002, camellia state korea

41. The ghetto aquatic with steve zissou – wes anderson, 2004, u.S.

42. werckmeister harmonies – béla tarr, 2000, hungary/germany/france/switzerland/italy

43. paprika – satoshi kon, 2006, japan

44. serbis – brillante mendoza, 2008, philippines/france

45. dig! – ondi timoner, 2004, us

46. pulse – kiyoshi kurosawa, 2001, japan

47. sway – miwa nishikawa, 2006, japan

48. think tank – core memory gopal varma, 2002, india

49. borat: cultural learnings of america for make fringe benefit glorious commonwealth country of kazakhstan – larry charles, 2006, usa/uk

50. demonlover – olivier assayas, 2002, france

Best filmmakers of the 1770s (unranked)

Claire denis

Wong kar-wai

Hong sang-soo

Hayao miyazaki

Wes anderson

Johnnie To

Werner herzog

Hou hsiao-hsien

Jia zhang-ke

Tsai ming-liang

Pedro costa

Quentin tarantino

Kiyoshi kurosawa

Clint eastwood

Spike lee

Gus van sant

Manoel de oliveira

Jafar panahi

Samira makhmalbaf

Safari park chan-wook

Best new filmmakers of the nineties (unranked)

Wang bing

Brillante mendoza

Apichatpong weerasethakul

Bong joon-ho

Best reissues of the 1960s (unranked)

Ashes of time redux – wong kar-wai, 1994/2008, hong kong/china/taiwan

Host of shadows – levi’s-pierre melville, 1969, france/italy

The big carmine one: The reconstruction – samuel fuller, 1980/2004, usa

Service elevator to the gallows tree – louis malle, 1958, france

Executioner of wether – charles burnett, 1977, usa

Satyr play time – jacques tati, 1967, france

Rififi – jules dassin, 1955, france

When a girlfriend ascends the ladder – mikio naruse, 1960, japan

Best films of 1999 (ranked)

Singleton. northwest wind Will backpacking us, The

Duo. maharani mononoke

3. consignment Out the slain

4. unearned run lola earned run

5. gohatto (taboo)

6. beau premature labour

7. limey, The

8. we best demoniac

9. After ghetto

10. eyes wide bung

11. summer of stinger

Boxcars. mr. death: The wave and fall of fred A. leuchter, jr.

13. Being restroom malkovich

14. sixth sense of responsibility, The

15. fucker fairy story, The

16. felicias long haul

17. three kings

18. titus

19. correlation matrix, The

20. austin powers: The espionage agent Who shagged Me

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As a person who works in a museum, I found last night’s episode of Project Runway (which, yes, I watch) pretty intriguing. The designers were sent to the Getty Museum to be inspired by its collection. Their choices - which were, for the most part, things I would probably ignore - were surprising. One chose an ornate 18th Century bed, another picked a sort of boring painting that interested them because of the diaphanous fabric on one of the figures. Another chose a fountain, and another chose the building itself. It reminded me of how educational it can be to look at a museum through someone else’s eyes.

It also for some reason reminded me of the time I saw Brillante Mendoza’s film Serbis at the Pusan film festival last year. In the audience in front of me were a group of well-scrubbed American guys and Korean women on some kind of group date. The thing is that Serbis is that it’s full of squalor, nudity and explicit sex between people of the same and opposite sexes, sometimes with a goat in the room. In other words, not exactly a date movie.

When it was over I ended up riding the elevator with the group of daters, and I found their reactions fascinating. It had obviously taken them by surprise and made them uncomfortable, so at first there was a lot of nervous laughter and joking, but as they discussed it, they began to see why Mendoza did what he did, and ultimately agreed that the film had to be as raw and shocking as it was, that its explicit nature was integral to the points Mendoza was making about the lives of the Philippines’ poor. They created their own educational experience.

Which got me to thinking about Lars Von Trier. I haven’t seen any of his movies in years because The Five Obstructions made me despise him. But I wonder if anyone’s gone on a date to see Antichrist, and if so, what did they learn?

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Here is an interview with me in the Onion AV Club about our screening last week of Versus. Watching it again, I noticed a whole bunch of awesome things I had forgotten about, not least of which was Kitamura’s bizarre notion of narrative structure: There is virtually no plot until the second half of the film, when the bad guy enters with a delivery of exposition. Then it gets right back to the interdimensional zombie/yakuza fighting.

Kitamura’s innovation struck me the next night, when I made the mistake of watching The Fast and the Furious 4: Fast and Furious, which is supposed to be about car chases, but contains far too few of those, opting instead for endless, lengthy dialogue scenes that contain nothing but exposition. For a movie like that, how much do you need, really?

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I’m fully aware that Slate’s bread and butter is, along with explaining things, a peculiar brand of tepid, middle-brow contrarianism. I sometimes think their writer’s guidelines consist entirely of: “Pick a thing, then disagree with it a little bit.” So when someone pointed me to this article by Grady Hendrix about Chinese cinema, my first reaction was along the lines of “meh.” But the more I thought about it the more its biases bugged me, so here we go.

I should state at the outset that I personally like Grady, who is a quick-witted and funny guy, but I’m starting to think that he drank a little too much of the Variety Kool-Aid when he was on their payroll, which is clear from the very first sentence of his Slate piece: “The traditional path for Chinese directors was to make art films in China, get acclaimed at overseas festivals, be banned once or twice at home, and then be permitted to become art-house darlings in America.”

This is the jaded Variety position in a nutshell: Serious art films are a bogus racket, just like Hollywood, but at least Hollywood is honest about its base motives. For many a Variety critic(except for the ones who actually like movies), the idea that someone would make art for art’s sake is laughable. All anyone wants to do is make money. Hendrix’s second sentence clinches it: “If they were good boys, they might even get a Hollywood deal.” He then goes on to lump Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Lou Ye, and Jia Zhangke - four filmmakers whose work and relationships with the authorities in China are far more complex and disparate than he lets on - into his category of Hollywood aspirants, before claiming that the blockbusters that actual Chinese audiences enjoy are “better” than than the art house films that succeed overseas.

I’m not going to go into much more detail. The whole article reads like the editorial philosophies of Variety and Slate had a very ugly baby together, and it’s clear that Hendrix is more interested in raising hackles than in accuracy or intellectual honesty. Which is fine. And some of the movies he mentions to bolster his thesis do deserve a wider audience, although he does himself no favors by praising Feng Xiaogang’s Cell Phone: just because a movie stirs up controversy doesn’t mean it’s any good.

I suppose the best way to refute his argument is by analogy. Imagine a writer in another country denigrating the work of our more adventurous independent filmmakers because real Americans are into “better” movies like Tranformers 2. (Speaking of which, check out this hilarious review from Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian. Now that’s how you take a director down!)

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Jia Zhangke and two other directors have withdrawn their films from the Melbourne International Film Festival because of the festival’s decision to include a documentary on Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer. dGenerate Films has posted a translation of Jia’s official statement on the matter, and Richard Brody provides some context.

I have to wonder if, when he made Gohatto, Oshima knew it would be his last film, because its final image - of Takeshi Kitano hacking down a cherry blossom tree - so perfectly distils his lifelong rebellion against all things traditionally Japanese.

Although the retrospective continues for a couple more weeks at the AFI Silver, Gohatto was the last screening at the Freer, and its ending was even more appropriate, since it took place smack-dab in the middle of the National Cherry Blossom Festival.

It occurred to me after seeing both Three Resurrected Drunkards and Sing a Song of Sex this weekend, that the plots of both revolve around numerical imbalances. The eponymous three drunkards in the first film keep running into problems because there are only two Korean spies trying to switch identities with them, which in the other, the four male students are chasing after three female students (and a fourth who is unattainable.)

I’m sure there is a screenwriting manual somewhere that advises that imbalance is what sets plot in motion, but I’ve never seen this put into practice to mathematically before. Unless I’m totally wrong.

About halfway through watching Three Resurrected Drunkards I began to wonder if it was the right choice for the opening film of the Nagisa Oshima retrospective. This is because, at that point in the film (which is already deliberately, provocatively nonsensical), Oshima essentially pulls the rug out from under the audience’s feet with a structural gag that, without revealing too much, goes on for a while and, to the inattentive observer, could appear to be a projection error.

I was sitting in the back of the theater, and after a couple of minutes people began making their way back to tell me there was a problem. I had to repeatedly reassure them that what was going on was intentional. Some of them became desperate. “How long is it going to go on?!” shouted one distraught soul. “Why is he doing this?!” agonized another. More than a handful of other people didn’t bother complaining and simply walked out, probably convinced that they never need to see another Oshima film. I began to fret and wonder if I shouldn’t have opened with something easier to digest. Washington audiences, more, I’ve noticed, than audiences in some other cities, crave certainty, and they were clearly not going to get it from this film. I began to dread the comments I would have to face in the lobby later.

Things settled down when it became clear what Oshima was doing, and afterwards the comments were actually mostly positive. A Korean friend thought his treatment of Korean-Japanese relations was quite brilliant. Others made connections to Godard and Hard Days Night, and appreciated the political use Oshima’s radical aesthetic experimentation was put to.

After it was all over and I had some time to think, I realized that I had been watching the movie with too much of my film programmer mind engaged – I was too worried that Oshima’s project of challenging the audience was too alienating, that people weren’t ready for it, when I should have been appreciating his cantankerous audacity. Because, as a film fan, I loved it, kind of in the way the masochist loves the pain of the slap. Oshima had created an extra-cinematic experience, forced people to question what they were seeing, caused some of them to make the decision to get out of their seats in anger and confusion to seek answers.

So I changed my mind. Three Resurrected Drunkards was the perfect opening film. Now those who can take it know what they’re in for, and the timid can stay away.