Recent Film Viewing

It's been a while since I have posted anything about movies - all the way back to when I saw the The Notorious Bettie Page - that was a while ago. (I'll leave you with Stephanie Zacherek's Salon review - maybe more positive than I would give, but no harm in that.) I haven't seen an awful lot of films int hat time - fortunately, I have been able to see a couple good ones... So let's see if we can round things up.

Three Times **** - the new Hou Hsiao Hsien film. Three love stories starring Shu Qi and Zhang Zhen, set in three different eras, 1966, 1911, 2005, shot in different styles, that evoke his earlier films from similar times. The first story has the lovers shooting pool in 1966 - he's just been called into the army; she works as an attendant at pool halls. Hou returns to something like his classic, 80s style - the long, fairly static shots (though the camera tends to float these days) from a limited set of positions, often with doors or windows opening up to the outside world in the back of the shot. The boy comes back on leave, looking for the girl, and when she is not there, goes looking for her, riding around Taiwan trying to find her. All of this to a series of pop songs - "Smoke gets in Your Eyes", "Rain and Tears" - in place of dialogue... Romantic and simple and very affecting... The second part, in 1911, is set in a brothel, like Flowers of Shanghai, and adopts that's film's rich colors and gliding camera, as well as its restrictions - everything occurs within one set, the 2-3 rooms where Shu Qi's courtesan lives. She's in love with a rich married revolutionary who disapproves of concubines, though he's willing to help one of the other girls when she gets pregnant - thus unintentionally crushing "his" girl. This section is also "silent" (no diegetic sound, just music) - it's a strange effect, the silent movie conventions combined with the colors and camera style. But it's effective, conveying the claustrophobia and inevitability of Shu's circumstances, as well (I suppose) as the political hopelessness of the Zhang's Taiwanese patriots.... The third section is set in contemporary Taipei, and looks contemporary - the crowded streets, narrow, dank apartments, noisy clubs, electronic pop music, computers and phones and beepers - shot in long takes, camera skulking around through these spaces, light and sound blurry and encompassing... Hou has used this style for most of his contemporary films - Millennium Mambo, Goodbye South, Goodbye, the modern half of Good Men Good Women, Daughter of the Nile... The three sections, revisiting as they do, different parts of his career, different subject matter in his career - and different filmmaking styles - make an interesting survey. Hou's reputation is immense - but it seems sometimes critics have some difficulty getting their minds around what he has done. He doesn't quite have a recognizable style - or rather, he has 2 or 3 recognizable styles, on display here. And he has been moving between them for the past decade or so, exploring how to tell stories, how to examine the spaces of the stories, how to relate space to story... It's an adventure.

I am a Sex Addict **1/2 - Caveh Zahedi's latest, an amusing sexual autobiography of sorts, concentrating on his addiction to prostitutes and the damage that did to his relationships. It's a neatly constructed film, with its direct address to the camera, slipping in and out of fiction and documentary modes, commenting on the processes of filmmaking, especially no budget filmmaking and the rest - it's funny and smart, but it tends to overstay its welcome. Not that it gets boring exactly, it just stops surprising you at some point.

Art School Confidential * - The reviews have been bad. They were right. It starts out okay, a fairly conventional geek goes to college routine that makes a nice starting point for skewering the art world - unfortunately, after half an hour of amusing comedy about artists and art school, the plots start to kick in. The hero is one of those high school losers who never made it with the ladies - so he worships the symbolic girls, and soon enough manages to meet one, only to suffer fresh humiliations - this is complicated, not in a good way, by a serial killer plot. The hero, Jerome (played by Max Minghella), doesn't get the recognition he wants so steals it - from the wrong person... Whatever. The whole thing sinks into misery and cliche, which is a shame - there was some bite at the beginning - John Malcovich is around to embody a mix of cynicism, self-promotion, self-pity and predation, plus intermittent flashes of sympathy; and Jim Broadbent is on hand as an old, drunk madman, mean and depressed, but still talented - Charles Crumb in the flesh. He's fascinating, and deserves better than the fate he suffers in the film.

Badlands **** & Days of Heaven *** - Should I complain about the weather? It has been raining - a more or less uninterrupted downpour since Friday night. So it is good to spend at least one day in the shelter of a Terence Malick double feature. I hadn't seen these two on a big screen before - video, and Badlands on TV, a few times - though apparently always the very beginning or the end - I had completely forgotten about the interlude in the woods. Badlands really is a great film, justifying Malick's reputation. Malick's an odd case - he can tell a story, though he does it obliquely, getting the story info across, but dwelling on other things. In Badlands, he dwells on the characters and the world they live in - in later films, he starts to dwell more on the look of things. So Days of Heaven, though gorgeous to look at, and efficiently enough told, comes off static, abstract - there's no time in the film - no duration, no spaces - scenes don't develop, there's no dramatic development, no chance for people to emerge as anything more than ideas. I don't want to make too much of that - for one thing, it works a lot better on the big screen than video - seeing it on film once more opens up the spaces of the film. But still - Malick's other problem, on display in Badlands, a little, and The New World a lot, is that the stories he comes up with are just a bit too generic - and because he abstracts them so much, their blandness serves as a kind of void in the images - the beauty becomes weightless because the stories are weightless....