18th Five Films, 2007
This is probably my favorite crop of five so far.
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Mala Noche (Gus Van Sant) at the IFC Center. Grainy and very dimly lit, though in a thoughtful rather than a slapdash fashion. Another (the first, actually) of Van Sant's young hustlers, though much of the time the film is dealing with the question of who is exploiting whom exactly--slumming white native versus opportunistic Mexican immigrant.
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The Boss of It All (Lars von Trier) at the IFC Center. This film contains possibly the most hilariously absurd ending I know of. Edited in computer-directed Automavision (seemingly random cuts to slightly different shots within scenes) and shot almost entirely in an antiseptic office environment, it's about as far as you can get from beautiful, but that fits the ugly behavior. The narrative is based on the idea that the head of some software company hates to be disliked and thus created the imaginary titular figurehead to take all the blame. He finds an actor to play the role when it's time to sell the company, though the actor becomes much more emotionally involved than either party planned on. Von Trier makes very clever use of omniscient voiceovers in a few key places, hypermediating the experience for us.
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The White Dog (Sam Fuller) at MoMI. I got the sense that, apart from The Big Red One, I'm not really that into Fuller, even his pretty good stuff.
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The Big Red One (Sam Fuller) at MoMI. The rest of his films I've seen are written, shot, acted, and edited for maximum impact, but here Fuller attempts to pull back from the fast and furious violence of the traditional war picture by interweaving the monotony and the fearsome excitement of World War II. None of the performances stood out to me except Lee Marvin's, but it was a nice ensemble and the wry dialogue conveys the message ("the only glory in war is surviving") indirectly very well in both tone and content.
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Exiled (Johnnie To) at MoMI for a Stylus review. This doesn't get a theatrical release until August 24, so the review probably won't be up for a while. Basically it's a great gangster movie (I enjoyed it more than either Election or Triad Election) with a solid sense of humor and full of humane detail.
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Mala Noche (Gus Van Sant) at the IFC Center. Grainy and very dimly lit, though in a thoughtful rather than a slapdash fashion. Another (the first, actually) of Van Sant's young hustlers, though much of the time the film is dealing with the question of who is exploiting whom exactly--slumming white native versus opportunistic Mexican immigrant.
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The Boss of It All (Lars von Trier) at the IFC Center. This film contains possibly the most hilariously absurd ending I know of. Edited in computer-directed Automavision (seemingly random cuts to slightly different shots within scenes) and shot almost entirely in an antiseptic office environment, it's about as far as you can get from beautiful, but that fits the ugly behavior. The narrative is based on the idea that the head of some software company hates to be disliked and thus created the imaginary titular figurehead to take all the blame. He finds an actor to play the role when it's time to sell the company, though the actor becomes much more emotionally involved than either party planned on. Von Trier makes very clever use of omniscient voiceovers in a few key places, hypermediating the experience for us.
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The White Dog (Sam Fuller) at MoMI. I got the sense that, apart from The Big Red One, I'm not really that into Fuller, even his pretty good stuff.
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The Big Red One (Sam Fuller) at MoMI. The rest of his films I've seen are written, shot, acted, and edited for maximum impact, but here Fuller attempts to pull back from the fast and furious violence of the traditional war picture by interweaving the monotony and the fearsome excitement of World War II. None of the performances stood out to me except Lee Marvin's, but it was a nice ensemble and the wry dialogue conveys the message ("the only glory in war is surviving") indirectly very well in both tone and content.
+ + +
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Exiled (Johnnie To) at MoMI for a Stylus review. This doesn't get a theatrical release until August 24, so the review probably won't be up for a while. Basically it's a great gangster movie (I enjoyed it more than either Election or Triad Election) with a solid sense of humor and full of humane detail.
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Posted on Tuesday, June 19, 2007
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