20th Five Films, 2007
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12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu) at Film Forum. They handed out a few DVDs of the director's short film, Liviu's Dream, beforehand--this is his first feature. I got a copy but haven't seen it yet. The feature is hilarious and paced more briskly from what I'd expected per the reviews. While the recording of the television show is funny in a lot of ways, for my money the firecracker gag is the best.
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They Were Expendable (John Ford) as part of MoMA's John Wayne series. Includes some beautifully evocative shots with great lighting, particularly in the first half. The best image might be John Wayne and Donna Reed silhouetted on the porch after the dinner party, although their scene at the dance is perhaps more interesting. I didn't really like how peripheral the love story was, though that could have been helped by chopping of 15-20 minutes of the last half of the film. The visual parallel between the hospital and the rescue plane (an otherworldly or underworldly tunnel of unpleasant escape) was also nice.
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Dog Bite Dog (Soi Cheang) at the IFC Center for the New York Asian Film Festival. Nasty, brutally nihilistic, and very loud. it's also rather thrilling with moments of effective but extremely dark comedy. Bizarre, distended epilogue. Not sure I could or would stomach this again.
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Hard Boiled (John Woo) in a 15th anniversary screening at the IFC Center for the New York Asian Film Festival. I think this might have been partly sponsored by the producers of the videogame sequel Stranglehold, that's supposed to come out later this year. It's impressive to note how much more compressed the sound is in this compared to Dog Bite Dog. The gunshots in that movie are so loud as to provide a new shock time each time you hear one, but in Hard Boiled they play at roughly the same volume as the dialogue. This, though, is loads more fun, more action packed, and certainly more physically dazzling. I think at least half of the two hour running time is devoted to gun battles--IMDb lists the bodycount at 230. Also, bonus points for a mob hit taking place in the library.
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Manderlay (Lars von Trier) at home on DVD. Critics complained a lot about the bizarre racial commentary here, but I think it's just not as good a film as Dogville. That film felt more densely packed with story, more fable-like, whereas here the focus is somewhat more on the expressions actors, who aren't given great lines and seem to speak them all sotto voce. I don't quite understand why anyone involved felt all dialogue needed to be delivered at or just above a whisper, but it got maddening very quickly.
J. Hoberman: "Dogville was an allegory as elemental and slippery as the songs of John Wesley Harding. Manderlay is far less ambiguous." As I've always been a sucker for allegory, this could be a big reason for such different reaction to a pair of films with so many similarities.
12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu) at Film Forum. They handed out a few DVDs of the director's short film, Liviu's Dream, beforehand--this is his first feature. I got a copy but haven't seen it yet. The feature is hilarious and paced more briskly from what I'd expected per the reviews. While the recording of the television show is funny in a lot of ways, for my money the firecracker gag is the best.
+ + +
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They Were Expendable (John Ford) as part of MoMA's John Wayne series. Includes some beautifully evocative shots with great lighting, particularly in the first half. The best image might be John Wayne and Donna Reed silhouetted on the porch after the dinner party, although their scene at the dance is perhaps more interesting. I didn't really like how peripheral the love story was, though that could have been helped by chopping of 15-20 minutes of the last half of the film. The visual parallel between the hospital and the rescue plane (an otherworldly or underworldly tunnel of unpleasant escape) was also nice.
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Dog Bite Dog (Soi Cheang) at the IFC Center for the New York Asian Film Festival. Nasty, brutally nihilistic, and very loud. it's also rather thrilling with moments of effective but extremely dark comedy. Bizarre, distended epilogue. Not sure I could or would stomach this again.
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Hard Boiled (John Woo) in a 15th anniversary screening at the IFC Center for the New York Asian Film Festival. I think this might have been partly sponsored by the producers of the videogame sequel Stranglehold, that's supposed to come out later this year. It's impressive to note how much more compressed the sound is in this compared to Dog Bite Dog. The gunshots in that movie are so loud as to provide a new shock time each time you hear one, but in Hard Boiled they play at roughly the same volume as the dialogue. This, though, is loads more fun, more action packed, and certainly more physically dazzling. I think at least half of the two hour running time is devoted to gun battles--IMDb lists the bodycount at 230. Also, bonus points for a mob hit taking place in the library.
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Manderlay (Lars von Trier) at home on DVD. Critics complained a lot about the bizarre racial commentary here, but I think it's just not as good a film as Dogville. That film felt more densely packed with story, more fable-like, whereas here the focus is somewhat more on the expressions actors, who aren't given great lines and seem to speak them all sotto voce. I don't quite understand why anyone involved felt all dialogue needed to be delivered at or just above a whisper, but it got maddening very quickly.
J. Hoberman: "Dogville was an allegory as elemental and slippery as the songs of John Wesley Harding. Manderlay is far less ambiguous." As I've always been a sucker for allegory, this could be a big reason for such different reaction to a pair of films with so many similarities.
Posted on Saturday, June 30, 2007
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