Goodbye, Telluride 2004

It's been fun. To recap, here are my ratings for this year's movies:

  Being Julia ............... 8/10

  House of Flying Daggers ... 6/10

  Finding Neverland ......... Skipped

  Kontroll .................. 8.5/10

  Enduring Love ............. 7/10

  Bad Education ............. 6.5/10 

Now let's see what the big-name reviewers have to say when the movies get commercially released.

Movie Impressions - V

Finishing off the Telluride @ Dartmouth festival tonight was the highly-anticipated Almodóvar movie "La mala educación" ("Bad Education"). Since his last movie, "Hable con ella" ("Talk to her") was quite a success, and critically acclaimed to boot, comparisons are inevitable. Neither storyline nor mood put the present movie anywhere near the last one, but similarities in form are noticeable: both films are tragicomic, present their most significant events in narrative flashbacks, and depict present-day interactions between characters united through cataclysmic events in their past.

Storywise, "Bad Education" is structured like film noir and ends up parodying the genre. Since any discussion about the plot of a film noir is a spoiler, I'll refrain from providing any; the mini-description at the Telluride website is a good enough teaser. I'll just add that the movie depicts lots of sex and no naked women.

Was it good? Certainly, but it wasn't great, and didn't come close to being the capstone that "Talk to her" was. That movie worked so well because we, the viewers, cared deeply enough about the fates of its characters to be drawn into the bizarre details of their pasts. I get the feeling that this time around Almodóvar got so engrossed in providing us those bizarre twists from the past that he forgot to first develop his characters so that we actually cared. Thus, for the last third of the movie, I knew that the final pieces of the puzzle were going to be revealed but I didn't really care how things turned out. Sad.

I would give this a 6.5/10. By way of comparison, "Talk to her" gets a 9/10.

Movie Impressions - IV

I did not have time last night to write about yesterday's Telluride movie, the British film "Enduring Love". This is one of those movies I probably would not have been tempted to watch had it not come with the recommendation stamp and the accessibility of Telluride. And I would, therefore, have missed a damn fine movie. The movie stood out among this year's selections for being the only decidedly introspective one. The direction is skilful enough to keep you from noticing the slow pace. Somehow, despite the lack of kinetic action, the movie builds up enough tension to make you hold your breath as you watch the serene and talky park scene that ends the movie. In fact the entire audience I watched the movie with exhaled a huge collective sigh as the tension was finally broken.

"Enduring Love" is framed as a stalker story, but with a twist: the stalker is homosexual. Within this context, the film ponders about the arbitrariness of the life-changing incidents, the butterfly effect, the cold biological basis of love, and of course, the stalker mindset. Rather than write my own synopsis of the story, I'll lazily point you to a nicely-written review of the Ian McEwan novel on which it is based.

The movie is fairly faithful to the novel and does not add any touches of cinematic brilliance. With source material this good, perhaps the decision to use a straightforward and restrained approach was a good one. I rate this 7/10; as a stalker movie and as a philosophical one it falls two notches below the utterly brilliant Audrey Tautou starrer "À la folie... pas du tout" (known, for some reason, by the very different English name "He loves me... he loves me not") — that movie gets a well-deserved 9/10.

Movie Impressions - III

Telluride tonight featured the Hungarian movie "Kontroll", superficially a good-versus-evil thriller, but with twists and subplots so bizarre I'm not at all sure how to review it. I don't know how to explain its brilliance without your knowing what occurs on screen, and I can't tell you much about what happens while avoiding spoilers.

The movie's events occur over the space of a few days in the subway system of an unnamed Eastern European city (it's shot in Budapest, but the title "Kontroll" is meaningless in Hungarian). A mysterious badguy is pushing commuters to their deaths in front of arriving trains. Our protagonists, a bunch of nutcase homeless ticket inspectors who seem to live in the subway's underground world, are up against this badguy... as well as a slew of commuters who don't give a damn about their authority to actually inspect tickets. Other colourful characters that pop in and out include

• a woman who rides the trains dressed completely in a teddy bear outfit,
  
• a subway driver who works in a state of permanent inebriation, and
  
• a slippery punk kid called "Bootsie" who taunts the ticket inspectors by spraying them with shaving foam.

Don't let this discourage you if it sounds confusing; all will be clear when you watch the movie!

"Kontroll" is liberally peppered with comic moments and is very fast-paced -- a rarity in Eastern European cinema. The camerawork is just superb and shows the subway system in all its messy and grimy detail: you can smell the place! You eventually long to get out and smell fresh air, and the movie builds up tremendous anticipation for the moment when you'll finally do that. There is, of course, the badguy who must be dealt with, so you might think that makes for a predictable ending. Wrong! In fact, I would bet that no ten-minute sequence in this movie is predictable.

Watch it and find out how it all really plays out.

The movie has a cool official website, and there's a bunch of nice stills at the National Film Archive of Hungary website.

Movie impressions - II

Continuing the Telluride @ Dartmouth festival tonight was the Chinese film "House of Flying Daggers". Since it's totally in the same genre as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", and even stars Zhang Ziyi from that movie, comparisons are inevitable. Indeed, I've already told you 90% of what you need to know about the movie. All that remains is to point out the major differences.

The storyline of HoFD is simple: set in 10th century China, with the Tang dynasty's power waning, it pits the corrupt government against a shadowy rebel group called Flying Daggers. Hero works for govt, heroine for FD; you can guess what transpires. They both end up on the run from the police and run into occasional ambushes featuring martial arts and lush forest scenery. So far so good.

Though gravity-defying action sequences abound in HoFD, they are much more believable than those in CTHD. Unfortunately, HoFD goes for a more ludicrous kind of fantasy: defying conservation of mass. I mean mass, as in human bodies! We repeatedly see our two protagonists begin a fight sequence against four enemies and end the same fight having felled about twenty. Why do I feel so bothered by this? After all I'm forgiving them the flagrant violations of conservation of angular momentum (the daggers which fly and whirl in eye-popping fashion). And I'm even forgiving them the ridiculous set up they used to give the plot two wicked twists.

Talking of plot, it's thicker than you might expect based on what I've outlined above, but overall it's a disaster. It's not because of the set up I've mentioned above; it's because the twists come a little past the halfway point. After this, the movie plunges rapidly into cheesy Bollywood territory with mortal wounds failing to be deadly for just long enough to allow three different characters to weep, howl, and show the power of love.

I would give this a 6/10; it did have a spectacular first half. Yesterday's "Being Julia" deserved an 8/10. For comparison, I gave last year's Lars von Trier film "Dogville" the only 9/10.

Movie impressions - I

The Telluride @ Dartmouth mini film festival has begun and I look forward to five nights of watching some very good films. I like recording first impressions of any notable movies I watch, so watch this space as I report on a nightly basis for the next several nights.

Tonight's movie, "Being Julia", is easily the most refreshing new movie I've seen this year and blows away all competition (those who've been following along know that I'm yet to watch the acclaimed "Maria Full of Grace" and "Before Sunset"). A free adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's penultimate novel "Theatre", it tells the story of the successful 45-year-old actress Julia Lambert hitting a crossroads in her life. In a foolish attempt to seek the sensual love that she never got from her husband and manager, she falls for a young American fan of hers who, having made the conquest, tries to use his new-found emotional power over her. Around the halfway mark one might wonder if the movie hasn't run its course, but soon there comes the long punchline that makes up the final quarter where Julia finds the inner strength she needs for her unique form of revenge.

The movie features cute costumes and sets depicting 1938 London, plenty of charming and very English repartee, and the occasional sage observation about life, the universe and everything (this being 1938, they hadn't yet computed the answer which is, of course, forty-two). The acting is superb all around and is very effective at bringing out the undeniable higher love that does exist between Julia and her husband; I expect this latter point to be overlooked by casual watchers who don't pay attention.

For the usual details such as credits, look this movie up on IMDB.

Fiction on NYT op-ed page

Today's NYT is running a decidedly quirky and Calvino-esque piece of fiction called The Sixth Borough, by one Jonathan Safran Foer (an unknown person to me). I'm not sure what to make of it, and parts of it are rather cheesy, but it was a welcome change on the op-ed page.

Where to dine in Rome

Epicurious has a nice article on the topic. It should be useful in just over a month!

Falling Bodies

The NYT is running a well-written article about the poor souls who jumped off the WTC's top floors rather than burn to death inside on that fateful day. Ghastly, painful stuff, but well worth reading.

Brian Wilson to finally release "Smile"

So says this article from the NYT. Based on the fragments that showed up on the "Smiley Smile/Wild Honey" CD, which I possess, this should be a fascinating album no matter how smooth or rough it turns out.

Some new films I'd like to see

The NYT article Serious Films for Popcorn Season has a useful list of "serious" films that I would like to catch up on, including "Maria Full of Grace", "The Door in the Floor," "We Don't Live Here Anymore", "A Home at the End of the World", "Before Sunset", "Bright Leaves", "Garden State", "Bright Young Things", "Intimate Strangers", "Mean Creek", "Stander" and "Festival Express". This is easier said than done, given my geographic constraints (not to mention the soon-to-come temporal ones), but it's good to have these things bookmarked. One never knows when opportunities to watch these will arise.