Spring Film Roundup

I have fallen back out of the habit of posting occasional roundups of recent films - not even monthly anymore. The last one I can find is from January... youch. I can take some comfort in the fact that I've managed to actually write about a few movies in that time, but I think the shorter pieces have their place... So here goes, again, a month or so worth of new films...

Bridesmaids - 10/15 - Very funny film with Kristin Wiig as Annie, whose best friend gets married and asks her to be the maid of honor. But - KW is broke (put all her money into a bakery and lost it), has a crappy job, crazy roommates, a lousy lover (a rich guy who throws her out every night) - she has no money for the gig, but everyone else in the party has money to spare.... hilarity ensues. It's quite single minded in being about money - everything that happens happens because Annie is broke and the rest of the party is not. Everything - the Brazilian barbecue, the dress fitting, all that happens because ANnie is saving money; the trip to Vegas goes like it does because Annie is stuck in coach; the shower? Annie offers a person gift and Helen tops it by flying the bride to Paris - an idea she stole from Annie. I mean, everything is about money - even the romance - a busted taillight that Annie can't afford to fix? It's rather unusual for that direct attention to money as such, sometimes interesting with bits of class as well - especially the way everyone tries to pretend that they are all equal, even while cash considerations create obvious problems. It's a pretty sharp look at people with similar backgrounds - and here, creative, smart people at that - who have significantly divergent fortunes. A phenomenon I've seen in my day... and here, played out with lots of variation around the edges - the people who have money and those who don't, the old money and new money, etc... Not bad...

Princess of Montpensier - 10/15 - set in the 16th century religious wars in France, a girl marries a prince instead of the duc she loves (the duc of Guise, head of the catholic league in future) - she is tutored by a mercenary turned pacifist who also loves her - and eventually runs into the duc of Anjou (brother of the king), a fop (a rather brilliant fop) who also loves her and makes trouble for everyone else. A very handsome film, and also very sharp in its delineations of the politics, obligations, social positions of these people, and the complications of their loves and wars.

The Trip - 10/15 - Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon tour the north of England, eating at gourmet restaurants and visiting historical sites. The story is formulaic, the actors playing caricatures of themselves - Coogan the restless movie star worried about his career, compulsively womanizing, etc. - Bryden joking his way through the trip, doing impressions and underplaying his real jealousy, with a wife and kid waiting at home... But it is a handsome film to watch, and they are hilarious when they get going...

Nostalgia for the Light - 12/15 - Gorgeous documentary about Chile's Altacama desert, where the clear skies and perfectly dry climate create perfect conditions for looking at the stars, and preserving the dead. ALternating between astronomers and their telescopes, scanning the skies, looking for the story of where the universe came from - and the story of political prisoners, kept here in camps, murdered by the thousands, buried, then exhumed and reburied to hide the crimes.... And the women, searching for the dead. And a third perspective (alongside the astronomers and political victims) - archeologists studying the remnants of the millennia of inhabitants of the desert - their sites and bodies preserved in the dry earth...) Beautiful, very moving film.

Blank City - 9/15 - Documentary about the film movement in NY in the late 70s early 80s, where Jim Jarmusch, Ann Magnuson, Steve Buscemi etc. got their start. It's an interesting story, but the film is rather bland. There are a fair number of clips from the films of the day - but they seem very bland. Hard to tell if this is because the films aren't very good or because they are badly chosen and integrated, or maybe because the aesthetic depends too much on patience and duration so the editing drains them, or something else. Where it does work (both the films in the film and the film itself, as a documentary) is as a documentation of NY in the late 70s. It's a fascinating time and place, and the film does a decent job of showing it to us.

Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen - 6/15 - Donnie Yen as Chen Zhen, the character from Fists of Fury - here, he's survived, and comes back from WWI (where he wiped out a platoon of Germans with a pair of bayonets) with a new identity - he gets a job working for a gangster - he's surrounded by intrigue - Japanese, Chinese warlords, cops, assassins, bargirls, etc. - he's part of a secret organization fighting the Japanese... and - lots of death and posturing and traces of romance, lots of flashy camera movement and hinted musical numbers (that don't come off), plenty of anachronism (from the name of the nightclub to the 40s style cars) - in the end - the girls are all spies, his allies mostly get killed, and he wipes out the Japanese, in a less interesting fight than you would hope. All this was made worse by being digital projected from a DVD, which killed off the opulance of the sets and cinematography (which is a big part of what appeal the film has). Nothing terrible, but nothing very impressive either.

13 Assassins - 11/15 - conventional seeming assassin story, set in 1844, the usual thing - the shogun's nasty half brother is getting too close to power - the shogun's advisers decide to kill him and recruit Shinzaemon Shimada (Koji Yokusho) to do it. He recruits a band of samurai, 12 total (then they pick up a peasant to make 13), and ambushes the lord... mayhem ensues. It's firmly in the tradition - the recruiting, the retainers and retainers of retainers, there is the inevitable sword expert, a spear expert who does it for the money, a dissolute nephew, etc. - and the peasant, who they cut down from a cage in the woods, who leads them out amd joins them and has a blast... On the other side - the mad lord, his faithful retainer who is, of course, Shinzaemon's old pal - etc. It's relatively restrained, though given the kinds of things you saw in old chambara, that's a relative term indeed - you do get a couple Miike specialties - a woman with her arms and legs and tongue cut off.... a bunch of wild boars with fire strapped to their back... the immortal peasant... and a steady string of details - the village, samurai swinging hopelessly away in their death throes, a fight shot upside down from the POV of a dieing man, etc. And a very cool villain, who'd be right at home in Ichi the Killer - deliberately walking into the ambush - "the foolish road is more fun" - and carrying on during the fight in perfect delight - dying in the mud, in agony, thanking his killer for the best day of his life... In this - his love of war and the others' mixed feelings - you see Miike, a bit - the fight starts exciting but becomes drudgery, people slogging around swinging at eash other... though then it ends for the inevitable duel, though this is undercut by the lord commenting on it - that happens a lot - there's plenty of monologuing, but a lot of it is metacomment - commenting on the duel, etc... He doesn't undercut it as he is sometimes wont to do, but he doesn't seem quite willing to let anything stand as a straightforward representation of some kind of grand serious politically motivated bloodbath.... Great stuff anyway.

Meek's Cutoff - 11/15 - I think Kelly Reichardt is well on the way to becoming one of the great American filmmakers of the age. May or may not be fair to say she is there (the level of the Coens, Lynch, Anderson and Anderson, etc.) - but she's well on her way to becoming one of them. This story is set in the old west - a small wagon train, 3 wagons, 3 families - are following a mountain man on a new route to Oregon. They begin the film by crossing a river, but tat is the last water they see for a while. Things go badly - they scheme against Meek, the guide - then they spot and Indian, then catch the Indian, and compel/convince him to lead them to water. Which he may or may not do. The film is slow and patient, a hard story about hard people in a hard land, and Reichardt conveys the sense of a bunch of farmers looking for a better life, with everything at stake.... It is interesting, though, to think of how it compares to the history - the real story it is based on involved hundreds of wagons - though I suppose plenty of people crossed the west in groups of 3 or 4 wagons... Sometimes, though, I think the real story competes with the story on screen - the small party gives it more of an abstract feeling, a kind of dream state, that maybe contradicts the matter of factness of the real story. Certainly the scale of the real story, the scale of the whole westward migration in the 1840s and 50s. Either way though - this is a fine movie...