Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

June 6, 2003

Thumbing it down

There are some weeks I start to understand the ol' thumbs-up, thumbs-down. I don't feel like even having an opinion about someone's cute new haircut or the really rotten coffee that was just put in front of me. Can't I have a week without values like somebody in another job, like reality television?

Kafka's "Osbournes"

I've written about Andrew Jarecki's deeply troubling, artfully arrayed documentary of family dysfunction, Capturing the Friedmans, but I intend to run a long Q&A I had with the director of this Kakfa-meets-the-Osbournes chronicle on MCN next week. Ah, transcription. There's a pretty afternoon ahead of me.

Labor pains

I spent too long laboring over a review of Whale Rider, the girl-and-her-whale girl-empowerment fable from New Zealand, for Cinema Scope, and I'm too tired of the subject to offer more than: "Marvelous young actress. Lucky them."

I couldn't find much interesting to say about the 1970s Hollywood Renaissance chronicle, A Decade Under The Influence, and wound up writing about other people writing about 1970s movies. I don't know if I know too much about the subject, have seen too many DVD interviews with the interviewees, or it's just that the feature version flounders around like an overgrown television magazine show. (Which it will be on IFC, starting in August, accompanying the films of the filmmakers spinning yarn on-screen.)

Welcome to L.A.

Hollywood Homicide sneaks this weekend; I'm looking forward to how audiences react to this generous mix of drama and comedy. Seeing it last week, I thought Ron Shelton's latest, a love note to Los Angeles and a morality tale given to sustained slapstick, was grown-up entertainment. I asked Shelton how he juggled the dark and light tones and he lit up, saying, "That's the $64,000 question, isn't it?"

Welcome to Beijing

Chen Kaige's Together opens in more cities this weekend. Critics, unlike audiences, are prone to fearing the line between sentiment and sentimentality, tending to dwell on the question, when does a film have heart and when it is shamelessly plucking the heartstrings? Chen Kaige's Beijing-set modern-day telling of the tensions between a father and his shy son, a 13-year-old violin prodigy, is a lovingly orchestrated portrait of family life. It's scored to a wealth of classical music, and subtly, a critique of contemporary Chinese society and its faith in the necessity of accommodating the fast-paced modern world. Is it a conservative movie? An apolitical movie? A film content to be touching and true? Hardly. Chen has quoted a journalist as telling him that everyone in China lives in economic fear. "Everyone believes there's the potential to become a millionaire, or even a billionaire. That's the major concern in Chinese culture now." Chen's ninth feature, after the straight-to-video English-language erotic conflagration "Killing Me Softly," is tender, if minor-key work from a major figure in contemporary film.

More Choosing

The DVD pile is ominous. Criterion's "by Brakhage: an anthology" thumped through the mail slot this wee, comprising twenty-six of the 400 or so films he made before his death earlier this year. I've put that above the two 1970s Santo and the Blue Demon titles Rise Above was kind enough to send my way.

Welcome to the U. S. of A.

The new issue of Res, the subscriber copies of which always include a generous film and music DVD, contains the sweetest movie I've seen in months. The cover story's on Radiohead's music videos, but pop the DVD in your player (if you get a copy) and watch Olivier and Michel Gondry's video for Lacquer's "Behind." The Parisian electronica group's song is sweet, but the short is sweeter. Gondry's editing his second Charlie Kaufman opus, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and his brother Olivier is an SFX expert. He rigged a 16mm camera in the back of a convertible for a seven-day drive from Los Angeles to New York, filming at one frame per second by day and ten frames per second by night. The four hours of footage were melted down to four minutes, and day becomes night and night becomes day and the breadth of the US becomes an intoxicating, onrushing fever dream.

All wet

A major minor-key work is out on DVD: Shohei Imamura's luscious, loony Warm Water Under A Red Bridge (Akai hashi no shita no nurui mizu). Getting up toward 80, the Japanese master imamura continues his exploration of desire and quirky sex: a jobless city salaryman in search of treasure travels to a small river town and instead finds a woman whose orgasms are accompanied by prolonged geysers of water that make the fish swim and the birds sing. (Yep.) Poetic and sometimes deadpan hilarious, it stars one of my favorite actors, the great everyman, lanky Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance; Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Charisma). He has the floppiest little-boy bangs a grown-man ever had.

 

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