Recently Viewed New Films

We're moving into fall - the film choices ought to be getting better, it certainly feels like there are more and better films to choose from - though the results, the last couple weeks, aren't quite there. This is an odd run - some major filmmakers, doing good work, but with material that doesn't quite stack up...

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame: 9/15 - Tsui Hark returns with a mostly ridiculous story set in Tang China. As work is completing on a massive Buddha, built in honor of the first Empress of China, about the take the throne - people start bursting into flame. Is it magic? is it murder? it's a mystery - so the empress brings back Detective Dee, languishing in prison all these years.... he sets out to find the killer, with the help of the Empress's pretty girl sidekick and an albino detective. Much plot ensues with plenty of action, lavish sets (real and CGI), and name actors (Andy Lau, Carina Lau, Tony Leung Ka-fei) carrying on. Being a Tsui Hark film, you know at least one of the main characters is going to switch genders somewhere in the middle - hell! maybe he/she will even switch species! All told, it's very silly, but very exciting - a weird blend of almost naturalistic detective story and supernatural woo - but who cares? Tsui Hark does what he does, and keeps it all moving, and keeps going for more spectacular imagery - as usual... fun stuff.

Restless - 9/15 - another major auteur returns, Gus Van Sant, with a strange little film. A boy (played by Henry Hopper) who attends the funerals of strangers in strange, hipster formal garb, meets a girl (Mia Wasikowska, looking altogether too cute to die) at one of these - she's impressed and turns up at a funeral herself, in time to rescue him from being run off by the funeral director... This leads to true love. Unfortunately, however, she was at that funeral because she was a patient in the cancer ward - and soon it's back, a brain tumor that will kill her in three months - giving their love affair a bit of urgency, and causing angst in poor Enoch (for that is his name), whose Problem is that he lost his parents in a car crash, and even, himself, seems to have Gone Over to the Other Side for a bit.... Add to this a ghost, a Kamikazi pilot who always wins at Battleship.... Anyway - the story succumbs to the expected amounts of sentimentality - indeed it is cloyingly twee - with its cutesy kids and their little characteristics - she loves Darwin, and birds! he throws rocks at trains and plays battleship with the ghost! oy... She dies, of course, very photogenically (pale and wistful and pure like a 19th century poet), and there are flashbacks at her funeral, where Enoch seems all too much at home... Jesus - it sounds horrible, describing it - and the script, I suppose, is every bit as bad as it sounds. But: Van Sant does not step wrong in all this - he and Harris Savides make it look as good as any of the other films they've done together, which is to say - ravishing to look at.... The stars are quite good - Wasikowska is lovely and smart and almost makes the character seem human - half ghost already, you might say, which doesn't hurt.... Young Hopper is more uneven, but has moments, and is equally lovely to look at, when you get down to it - and, Christ, but there are moments, he'll do something, turn, they'll catch him a certain way, and his father comes out, as if he's a ghost (young Dennis) haunting the boy.... It is a strange film - absurd story, but damned gorgeous looking, nicely acted, and put together with a very sure hand. And it is every inch a Gus Van Sant film - beautiful kids, Portland - and like almost all his films, an examination of death. It's not Elephant, but it's a good deal better than the story deserves.

Black Power Mix Tape 1967-1975 - 10/15 - fascinating documentary about black power leaders, through Swedish TV footage and interviews, plus contemporary commentary. Very interesting material, but very scattershot - a mix tape. A nice introduction to people like Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, and so on - as well as some nice interviews with less famous men and women, talking about conditions in the late 60s and 70s. It is probably less effective as a documentary than it is at whetting your appetite to find out more about the people and movements it shows - but not bad...

Ides of March - 8/15 - I feel a bit guilty about that rating - that's lower than Restless or Detective Dee - but it has a bit in common with those films.... It is a very handsome, well put together backstage political melodrama, featuring an all star cast who are all on their game, and a neat attention to the details of the campaign - that is betrayed by a very hackneyed plot, that as good as comes out from behind the filmmaking to wag fingers at you and explain the Moral of the Story. And - well, politically, it occurs in cloud cuckoo land - a politician who wants to ban the internal combustion engine!? bring back the draft!!?? who says he is not a Christian? on National TV?? the heck?... anyway - we're backstage on the eve of the Ohio primaries with George Clooney's candidate one big primary win from clinching the nomination - and if he can win the endorsement of Jeffrey Wright's senator (a failed candidate for president), he won't even need to win Ohio. But - over there, seething and glowering as only he can do - it's Paul Giamatti as the Other Candidate's Campaign Manager! will the tricks be dirty? will the crossing be double? Is there a pretty young intern with loose morals (played by Evan Rachel Wood)? Is Ryan Gosling playing the same character he played in Drive? Kinda wish he was - this could use some head stomping. Instead... I was distracted more than once by the casting, I have to say - there's Gosling, emoting like the Driver; there's Giamatti calling some situation a win win... there's Philip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei flirting - but no heads get stomped; no one gets naked, thought there's some sorta sex... I dunno. I was wishing the film could switch like that - they are the characters from Before the Devil Knows Your Dead! or Albert Brooks shows up with a fork - something. This became stronger once the Plot kicks in - I was not impressed by the Plot, nor the lessons it purports to teach.... I was also somewhat distracted by the thought that this would make a pretty good Columbo episode - the intern's fate begs for some dumpy policeman uncovering levels of not very carefully hidden plot devices. Hell, even something as simple as the cops subpoenaing her cel phone records - did you say cel phone? what cel phone? Anyway - that kind of thing (I mean, the lazy plotting, the very predictable melodrama) is very disappointing, and undermines the many virtues of the film. Clooney is becoming this generation's Clint Eastwood - actor turned director who has a fine touch as a maker of conventional, old fashioned Hollywood style films... it needs a better script, something a little less obvious - a lot less obvious... Or some honest to god sex and violence - if you're gonna do lurid melodrama, make it lurid!

Love Crime - 10/15 - speaking of films that should have been Columbo episodes! This is a handsome French office thriller directed by Alain Corneau, starring Kristin Scott Thomas as a truly horrifying boss, and Ludavine Sagnier as an underling who either loves or hates her.... well - Thomas steals credit for Sagnier's good work - so Sagnier pulls a fast one on her boss - so the boss uses their mutual lover (a seedy lawyer) and the office security system to humiliate poor Sagnier at a party - so Sagnier starts taking pills and twitching and buying knives and such, and then - well, it would be fun to see some French Peter Falk take this one apart! I don't think he'd have too much trouble - there's an elaborate plot hatched and executed but it seems a bit too easy.... But I don't really care. It's all great looking - the two actresses are magnificent, and that's more or less enough, especially since here, the Plot does not attempt to teach us something Important about - I dunno - Capitalism, maybe...