New Reviews

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse - ***1/2 - I saw previews for this last summer, getting my hopes up for a proper release - oh! folly! Lately, I have been seeing previews for the American remake. I despair. But happily, I despair too soon - for here it is! For a grand total of 6 shows, I should note. And having sampled 33% of those 6 shows - rather sparsely attended 6 shows. It might be time to gin up another post about the Death of Cinephilia.

The movie itself - is a horror film, more generically so than most of Kurosawa's films. (That I've seen.) It's got ghosts in the machines, from the internet - Ur@Nus Online, it seems - who haunt 2 groups of kids. The first thread follows a group of kids working at a greenhouse - one of them comes to grief, the others see strange images in his computer disks, and start getting mysterious phone calls... The second thread follows a student who tries to go online, but instead, the internet comes to him - asking if he wants to meet a ghost. He takes this to a pretty computer science student, who tries to help him - she in turn introduces him to a grad student who made a model of human relationships - ghostly dots floating around, avoiding each other but drawn to each other. This grad student offers some theories about ghosts spilling into the world of the living - and sure enough, ghosts start appearing, and people start disappearing. Then it gets strange. It's apocalypse in slow motion, but as much about trying to connect and failing to connect, and about death itself, then about ghosts or horror. No one ever exactly answers the question posed by the pretty computer scientist - how are we any different from ghosts? Stylistically, Kurosawa does not go for the big shock - he doesn't use shock cuts or reveals very often. He is more likely to slide things into the back of the frame - a figure appearing in the background, walking through the frame without any sense of urgency. We aren't surprised - the characters sometimes are. The effect is to create a sense of inevitability and dread, and to give us time to think about the poignancy of the ghosts' situation... It's a fine film - maybe less masterful than his best films (Cure, Charisma, Doppelganger), mostly because it is less glorious looking than they are, and there's not enough Koji Yakusho... But it is a powerful work, about mortality and solitude and the internet (all those ghosts sitting in front of their computer screens), how technology keeps us apart... about the necessity of other people, and the difficulty of connection...

C.S.A.: Confederate States of America - *** - written and directed by Kevin Wilmott, an alternative history of the US, in which the south won the civil war - told as a British documentary, interrupted with contemporary ads from this imaginary CSA. It's not a pretty picture, what with the CSA invading South America and staying out of the European half of WWII, and with Canada getting all the decent artists and musicians (not to mention dominating the Olympics). That stuff is very funny, but what really bites is the way Wilmott uses this alternative reality to critique real history, from the fake ads for real products (the gold dust twins, niggerhair cigarettes, black sambo axle grease and so on), to the white-washing of the reasons for the Civil War war. The film talks about how history and art soft-pedaled the north's position on slavery, and the role of slavery in the war - in exactly the terms that real literature and history and art soft-pedaled the south's position on slavery (and the north's, really), and the role of slavery in the war. As a film, it's rather crude, but it is very funny, and it is a first rate essay. The clips from imaginary films made in this CSA are probably the weakest point of the film - they look truly awful - though Wilmott gets around some of that rather cleverly, with the suggestion that art in the CSA would develop into straight propaganda. (The fake movies also get off one of the best jokes of the film, in a scene showing Jefferson Davis' slave telling him him to reintriduce slavery in the north - the slave is played by a Shakespearean actor in blackface, of course, and he does a perfect Stephen Fry as Jeeves bit to solve the problem. A capital joke.) This idea - the rotten art of the CSA - also illustrates another of the film's devices. There's nothing in the film about communists - the USSR disappears completely - and the cold war is replaced by a cold war (complete with a wall) with Canada and the abolitionists. The CSA, meanwhile, comes to be a lot like Soviet Russia - the socialist realist art, the repression and paranoia, the political violence...

Nightwatch - ** - Speaking of Russia, specifically, post cold war Russia - here's an apocalyptic fantasy from Moscow... the first in a three parter - the idea is this: there are "others" living among us, light and dark, who have been battling throughout history over the - over something. They were at the point of massacring one another in 1342, but called a truce - doomed to last until a virgin is cursed and a Great One is born. In 1992, a schlep tries to curse his estranged wife and her unborn child, but changes his mind at the last moment - and in come the cops! 10 years later he's a cop... He's trying to save a kid from some vampires - then he's trying to do something with the virgin before a vortex of damnation opens up and sucks something.... it isn't awful. Moscow does look pretty ghastly - the light and dark Others seem like some kind of allegory for the government and gangsters in russia (that's how they act anyway) - there are some neat images among the mayhem, and some nice character turns. Unfortunately - it sort of lurches around, flitting between bits of Blade Runner, a gloomy version of Ghostbusters (from which it steals about 70% of the plot, actually), and, I don't know, Highlander maybe... and whatever other filsm the director has seen. It's got enough going for it that it's kind of a shame it's so tiresome.

Springtime in a Small Town - *** - Tian Zhuangzhuang's return to filmmaking, 10 years after Blue Kite. This is a remake of a Chinese classic - set at the end of WWII in a house in an almost abandoned town. A young man with a cough, his wife, his lively little sister, and one old servant live there - then an old friend arrives, who happens to not only be the man's old pal, but the wife's old flame. Melodrama ensues, but very politely, until the wine starts to flow, and they start singing to one another. All of this is done quietly and slowly, with simmering passions. Tian keeps distance - telling the story from a neutral point - not getting too close to any of the characters, etc. Shot by Mark Li Ping-bin, Hou Hsiao Hsien's regular DP, and one of the best - this looks a lot like Flowers of Shanghai, with the constantly circling camera, though without the penetration of the space Hou used. Here, the camera stays behind the line, as it were - which theatricalizes the material a bit, which in turn tends to (very subtly) defamiliarize it. The characters are flattened out a bit. It is an astonishing looking film, even on DVD, and the material rewards the approach.