3 Recent Releases

Another 11 days between posts - terrible. Anyway - today, outside, we have an unmistakably spring day - what a joy! Kiju Yoshida retrospective playing in town - that will be good. These things keep me occupied and in a good mood, though they are perhaps not the best incentive to write.... So once more, some quick notes on some recent films, to try to maintain the illusion of being a blogger...

Sita Sings the Blues - *** - a neat animated musical adaptation of the Ramayana - inventive, funny, smart, a fine film all around. I'm not sure I have much to say beyond that - don't suppose I need to say much. Very enjoyable....

Watchmen * - I suppose I have something to say about this.... I didn't plan to see it, actually - considering it completely pointless. But there it was, and there I was, and so... It could have been terrible - I feared it would be terrible, but it was not. For all the slowmo and attempts at spectacular imagery, it's a remarkably conventional looking film. The fancy shots are all static - probably because they are copied from the comic book. It's an object lesson in a problem with adapting comics - films exist in time and space, comics just in space: the film uses a lot of the look of the comic, but the comic can plaster the words on top of the images, alongside the images - the film has to play the words over the images, in time. And that forces the filmmakers to find something to do while people are yapping away - and what Snyder does is what every B movie director since the invention of sound has one - he cuts back and forth between the people talking in a perfectly normal series of shot/countershots. Which is not quite a criticism - classical filmmaking has lasted all this time because it works very well. It is legible - and this film, dull as it is most of the time, is utterly legible. Now - things get a bit dicey during the action scenes - still legible, but also even more dull than the dialogue. Though here and there Snyder tries to get creative - show something from a distance, in a longer take, something like that - which just exposes the lame handling of the action itself. The actors can’t fight - the violence is slow and boring and unbelievable. There’s a reason modern American actions films slice up the action and blur it and confuse matters - they don’t know how to stage or perform fights. Snyder doesn’t either. The result is something that looks like an old Republic serial. Anyway - one reason I went was to find out if the film had anything interesting to say about adaptation - the answer is mostly no. The film removes most of the critical material from the comic - its exploration of the comics form, its attention to the media world, its relentless focus on signs and meanings, on reading - all gone, and not replaced by anything that could be considered a film equivalent. (And there are no lack of films dealing with those kinds of issues, from Fritz Lang to Frank Capra to Godard to the better Batman films.) All that’s left is the story, which is exposed as being very thin indeed; and the world - which has lost most of its depth, but is still pretty interesting. That’s about all that save the film, that and Snyder’s surprising B movie style eptitude...

Hunger **** - now this is an extraordinary film. About the death of Bobby Sands, but starting elsewhere - starts with a prison guard, showing his routine on the way to the jail - then a prisoner, Davey, who is brought in and introduced to the life - only slowly picks Sands out of the rest of the prisoners, getting a particularly bad beating. Continues to develop, slowly, showing the prisoners fighting, losing - finally building to Sands (and others) starting their strike. With the decisive moment shown in a central sequence - 20 plus minutes, including one very long (17 minute) take - of Sands and a priest discussing his plan. It’s a riveting scene: it might seem stagy, but it is not at all - the balance on the screen, two men in profile smoking and talking, on increasingly serious matters, while the light changes and wreathes their heads in halos - is utterly powerful, and what film was invented for. (And probably a reference, at least in part - at least reminiscent of - the train ride in La Chinoise - though more serious, and more balanced.) The rest shows Sands starving to death, sometimes in the same objective observational style, but sometimes with moments of subjectivity - as he loses control and slips into hallucination. Extraordinary film.