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Reviews
List (2011)
A slice of Korean life, Hong Sang-soo style
A Rohmeresque slice of Korean life, about a woman vacationing with her mother, who of course, urges her to get married. The daughter prepares a list of things she wants to do during the vacation, hence the title. By chance, they bump into a famous film director who is recently divorced, and go out to eat with him. Things get awkward when he asks her mother if he can take her out on a date but eventually, she starts to warm up to his advances, albeit hesitantly. The mother suggests this film director stay the night with them in their hotel and he agrees. The film is nicely paced, with many typical Hong motifs and ranks with some of his best work.
Man Without Pigs (1991)
A Prodigal Son Returns to the PNG
A fascinating 1 hour documentary illustrating what occurs when John, a Papuan tribesman, returns to his tribe after receiving an advanced education. He intends to help his tribe ward off foreign logging companies who would seek to tear down their forests and take away their livelihoods, reducing them to beggary.
All does not go well because John has difficulties meeting the expectations of the tribe, as well as those of the neighboring tribes who will partake in a feast prepared to welcome him on his return, involving a web of intricate customs which must be followed in a particular order to please many different parties. Of special importance is the presenting of pigs as gifts, harvesting sago, and determining who is responsible for causing it to rain.
The documentary is well paced, insightful and does an excellent job in detailing the social and cultural complexities of tribal society in the PNG.
Napoleon ist an allem schuld (1938)
Napoleontological shenanigans
A saucy, light-hearted romp, straight outta the Third Reich. Involves a Napoleon fanatic who goes to a conference on Napoleon in Paris and meets up with a blonde floozy showgirl. After the paparazzi snaps a picture of him together with the girl he must pretend to be her father in order to keep up appearances.
He returns back home to his wife with the girl in tow, still pretending she's his daughter and his wife tricks him into thinking she had an affair with his best friend. After a hilarious duel goes wrong, the two gents work up a plot to put a mickey in the showgirl's drink so that she won't make an appearance at a big party and ruin his reputation. But his wife changes the table places and his best friend gets the mickey instead. More hilarity ensues.
This is the one to catch if you're in a 1930s screwball kind of mood but you're tired of Hollywood flicks. Includes a great dream sequence, gags that hold up several decades later, and a quotation from Oscar Wilde. 8 out of 10.
Tinpis Run (1991)
On the Road in the PNG
"Tinpis Run", said to be the first feature film produced in Papua New Guinea, follows the cross country adventures of a bearded village chief and the young man from the city who saved his life after a car accident.
After initially offering the young man his daughter in marriage, the young man, named Naaki, joins him in a business venture in which they purchase a bush-taxi. A series of adventures follows in which they get cheated in a card game with a local politician, and are conned into going with him to an island in an attempt to get back their money. They are the stranded on the island along with their bush-taxi. The local villagers on the island ostracize them due to Naaki's womanizing ways and eventually, Naaki and the elder find their way back to the mainland where they must return to the old man's village where a war has broken out with a neighboring tribe. The tale culminates in a battle scene.
The production values were much better than might be expected of a film of this time period, with an excellent soundtrack of contemporary local music. Acting performances, though not up to Western standards, were more than adequate, and the story sustained interest all the way through the picture. Overall, a tremendous effort, at times humorous, and heartfelt. 10 out of 10.
Die Legende vom Nil - Auf den Spuren von Paul Klee in Ägypten (1991)
Fans of Paul Klee will likely be disappointed.
Primarily a travelogue on Egypt, filled with scenes of the local people engaged in various activities. Little more than a tourist's view of the country, all surface, not much cultural or historical depth other than what appears to be random snippets of a poor translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead that are included in the morose narration.
The title evokes the name of Paul Klee and the film purports to center around his visit to Egypt and yet, for a whole hour we get very little information about Klee or about his visit to Egypt. With regard to Klee, the film gives us barely anything more than occasional shots of several of his paintings, with a few still photos of him, interspersed in an endless sea of travelogue footage.
On the bright side, there are some nice pieces of music on the soundtrack, possibly Egyptian in origin, and the scenes of life in Egypt are evocative. But one word of warning, there are some scenes which show abuse toward camels that some viewers may find distasteful.
If you're looking for an outdated, slowly paced documentary on life in Egypt that provides very little information on Paul Klee, this is the film for you. It's definitely a documentary that's lost in the dustbin of time, and will fortunately remain largely forgotten. Klee was a fascinating artist, innovative in his time, and deserves far better treatment than this.
In sum, a below average documentary, poorly paced and barely salvaged by some decent music in the soundtrack and some tolerable documentary footage of Egypt. 3/10.
He Stands in the Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life (1986)
He Surfs the Internet Counting the Crappy YouTube Videos
Jonas Mekas, by some considered the "godfather of American avant-garde cinema", with this effort proves himself moreso the godfather of countless crappy YouTube videos. The film is a collage of various home movie clips shot by Mekas circa the 1970's to 1980's, jumbled together randomly. Faces, feet, bits of bodies, a chicken, a duck, wide lapels and plenty of lawn parties, all captured in a wandering, choppy hand-held fashion. Most sequences are presented in fast motion time-lapse because if they were shown at normal speed they would crawl by at such a sluggish pace that the sheer monotony would drive the viewer comatose.
The whole thing reminded me of very early John Waters stuff like "Mondo Trasho" only without the knowing camp aesthetic. Instead, we get the impression of a filmmaker so pretentiously self-important as to believe that total strangers might have an interest in seeing two hours of outtakes of his technically poor, aesthetically vacuous, flotsam of random home movie rubbish. Like "Mondo Trasho", this film contains very little dialogue, the soundtrack mostly consisting of forgotten ditties from the early to mid-20th century that seem to be selected primarily because they weren't under copyright and thusly wouldn't cost anything to use. They certainly weren't selected because people might enjoy hearing them.
There is only one minor saving grace to all this, namely the fact that Mekas was lucky enough to rub shoulders with some other folks who are truly innovative noteworthy artists, people like Hans Richter, Roberto Rossellini, Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Andy Warhol. However, the brief bits of footage that we get of these persons, totaling maybe 1% of the film's total runtime, cannot even remotely make up for the two hours lost in each of our lives.
Oh sure, there will be indignant people who won't like this review, believing that I'm "missing the point", that perhaps the film is a grand meditation on the transitory elusiveness of life and the passage of time or some such twaddle, that my comments are too critical, etc. What I have to say to them is: watch this film several times, it's the punishment you deserve.
In short, if your idea of fun is wading through two hours of random garbage video just to get to a few very brief unimportant snippets of archival footage of Fluxus artists or John Lennon eating an ice cream cone, then this is the film for you!
2/10 (the few brief archival bits were the only thing that saved this from a 1/10)
Dias de Nietzsche em Turim (2001)
A very bland, jejune and uncinematic effort with little to offer beyond narration of Nietzsche's texts.
Overall, this is a very disappointing film that attempts to be an evocative portrayal of Nietzsche's days in Turin, just before his impending collapse. While there are some pleasant architectural backdrops here and there, the pace of the film is so excruciatingly slow and the camera work so contrived and pointless that it feels like the work of a novice. Largely, the film depicts an actor walking around aimlessly, not saying or doing much of anything, for great lengths of time, with occasional narrated quotations.
The best the film has to offer is the content of Nietzsche's writings, although the film is quite ambiguous in its use of Nietzsche's works and the viewer never has a clear sense of whether some of the lines being said were actual quotations from Nietzsche or merely the invention of the filmmaker.
In particular, the scene where Nietzsche embraces the horse had zero dramatic effect and didn't even depict what really happened. According to historical accounts, the horse was being beaten and the film didn't show this at all, it just showed a horse standing there quietly while the actor playing Nietzsche lets out a sort of frightened yelp and falls to the ground in one of the worst pieces of acting I've seen in a long time.
I rated this film a 3 only because it could serve as a useful introduction to Nietzsche's life and ideas, albeit a dismally bland and mediocre one. Otherwise, I would have given it a 2. Nietzsche was a deeply profound and influential philosopher who deserves much better treatment than this.
Yûkoku (1966)
Blurs and obscures the differentiation between art and life
"Yûkoku", also known as "Patriotism" and "The Rite of Love and Death", is a definite must see for fans of the famed Japanese novelist, Yukio Mishima, deriving from his own novella. This is the story that anticipates and rehearses Mishima's own attempted coup d'etat and seppuku, an act which shocked the world just a few years after the production of the film.
Very austere and minimalist in its visual style, it demonstrates an indifference toward high production values in favor of an aesthetic purity similar to that achieved in Mishima's own written works. The film contains no spoken dialogue, using instead handwritten title cards to introduce each scene. There is, however, a musical accompaniment from Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" ("Liebestod", which some viewers may recognize from its use in Buñuel & Dali's classic Surrealist film "Un Chien Andalou").
The story is interesting in its comparison between the eros of the sex act and the intimacy of a suicide pact between lovers. The film also raises concerns with regard to the way in which ideals such as patriotism can possess minds and ultimately drive them to self-destruction in some circumstances.
While Mishima's talents as a writer far exceed his cinematic efforts, nevertheless, this film is very provocative and vividly dramatizes one of the author's most important short works.
L'étoile de mer (1928)
A Surrealist coup of untold unspeakable unearthly allure.
"L'Étoile de mer" is a classic piece of Surrealist cinema from the 1920's starring the adorable and timeless Kiki of Montparnasse, and also featuring the divine Robert Desnos. A lovely Surrealist poem written by Desnos accompanies the film, eloquently juxtaposing the images.
A great deal of the sequences are shot through a pane of glass, giving the film a diffuse, dreamy quality, although there are also many stunning shots in sharp focus. The uncanny motif of the starfish is the primary piece of Surrealist iconography, which reoccurs at several junctures, including a beautiful close-up that captures the sea creature's graceful delicacy in locomotion and its multitude of tiny pedicellariae.
Unlike the more striking and barbaric imagery of "Un Chien Andalou", another famous Surrealist short film produced in the same year by Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel, this film is more lyrical and sensuous, evoking with a sense of innate desire and mystery, the concept of the marvelous outlined by André Breton in the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924.
Kiki of Montparnasse superbly portrays the primeval Surrealist muse and heroine, unashamedly stripping off her clothes in one scene, peering nefariously over the edge of a newspaper in another, and slowly climbing a staircase brandishing a long shimmering dagger in one of the penultimate scenes.
This film was way ahead of its time, anticipating stylistic and thematic currents that weren't fully developed until the latter half of the 20th century such as narrative discontinuity, jump cuts, the femme fatale and the dream sequence. A must see for all cinéastes and lovers of the Surreal.