I saw THE SAVAGES earlier this year (it's great) and am eager to see the rest. Enjoy the insight from Mr. Lo!
Greetings from rain-soaked Vancouver. The Vancouver International Film Festival began on September 27th, and this year I’ve made an effort to go out and see a wide selection of films that interest me. Ideally I’d spend all day at the festival for the two weeks that it runs, but the shackles of a 9-5 inhibit me from more comprehensive coverage. Here is a batch of reviews from this weekend, and stay tuned because there should be about 10+ more on the way in the next 12 days.
GLORY TO THE FILMMAKER!
I kicked off VIFF 2007 with Takeshi Kitano’s “Glory to the Filmmaker!”, a bizarre rumination on his directorial career that is part metaphysical comment on filmmaking and part slapstick variety hour. The bizarre episodes colored with Kitano’s irrational sense of humor are not always successful, but the film is unique enough to be consistently entertaining. This film may come as a surprise for those who only know Kitano from his Yakuza movies or “Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman”, but if you’re familiar with his background in comedy, tapdancing, boxing, television and general showmanship then it might make a tad bit more sense.
“Glory to the Filmmaker!” begins in a clear direction, as a voiceover informs us that Kitano is in search of his next big hit after public declaring that he will stop making Yakuza movies (thankfully inserting a healthy dose of Yakuza in the process.) Initially the film is almost entirely composed several botched attempts at different genres strung together. Along the way we get WWE style wrestling in a noodle bar, hilarious Matrix style bullet dodging, cheesy horror called “Noh Theater”, Zatoichi style ass-kickery in Blue Raven: Ninja, Part II, a sly jab at Ozu, and Kitano being the twitchy master of death that we know and love him for. Whenever the going gets rough, Takeshi morphs into a metal doll that is seemingly impervious to physical harm. The film is at its best when its lampooning another genre. Somewhere near the halfway point, the narrative seems to settle on a directionless tale of Kitano’s marriage to the younger member of a mother/daughter scam artist duo. At this point the film lost a bit of momentum, and some of the gags took on an unwelcome redundancy.
There is really no point of reference for this kind of film in Western culture, so drawing comparisons would ultimately be misleading. I’m quite sure that most of the cultural references scattered densely throughout were entirely over my head. I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about Japanese film, but I can’t keep up with the intertextuality of “Glory to the Filmmaker” for a minute. That this film should still turn out accessible is a marvel in itself, although I’m not even sure if your average person in Japan would consider this to be a normal movie or not. In many ways, Japanese popular culture is all about weird and I definitely get down with weird. Kitano’s film about filmmaking skews more Ed Wood than 8½, but it is definitely its own beast.
To be perfectly honest, I would have rather seen another Yakuza or Zatoichi flick from Kitano. However, I appreciate his efforts to try something novel, and it’s refreshing to see the humility with which he views his own celebrity. Kitano is now 60 years old, and he should be commended for expanding his artistic boundaries when no one expects him to learn any new tricks.
THE SAVAGES
I’m too young to have faced my parents succumbing to the mental and physical deterioration of old age, but I watched (and am still watching) them go through that situation with their own parents. “The Savages” is about the indignities that go along with those last moments of a long life, how the reward for making it to the end is a grim anticlimax. It’s a predictably depressing film, but it’s not without its moments of levity. I don’t particularly recommend it if you’re looking for a fun night at the movies, but as a character study it is remarkably genuine.
The always reliable Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman both give convincing and often uncomfortably real performances in their roles as siblings looking after their ailing father Lenny Savage, played by an almost unrecognizably weathered Philip Bosco. We are introduced to Lenny as he smears his own feces on the bathroom wall to spite a nurse. His dementia limits his character development and quite quickly he becomes a device to explore the midlife crises of his children Wendy (Linney) and Jon (Hoffman). “The Savages” is not only about the death of a paterfamilias, it’s also about crossing the hump into middle age and realizing that most of your big chances to make something of life are gone.
Wendy is almost 40, having bad sex with a balding married man who would look right at home renting out the shoes in a bowling alley. She entertains aspirations of being a successful playwright, but she temps to pay the bills. Life just didn’t seem to happen for her, and Linney hits just the right balance of denial and restlessness. Jon is a drama professor, working on a theoretical analysis of the works of Bertolt Brecht. He’s in a relationship that’s ending because of green card expiry, and he’s perplexingly indifferent about it. Oh, and he’s out of shape. More of a drama than a comedy, “The Savages” still had the VIFF audience laughing fairly regularly, and the biggest laughs were drawn from a scene where Jon kinks his neck with a limp-wristed tennis swing that lands him in ridiculous physiotherapy getup. Wendy and Jon have a difficult time making their father’s last days comfortable, but one can only wonder what will happen to them in old age. They’re both childless, and a family life doesn’t exactly look like it’s on the horizon for either of them.
If “The Savages” has a flaw, the same flaw can usually be leveled at real life. The characters don’t really learn anything or change; no one undergoes any type of significant arc. Again, I don’t necessarily require that of a film, and in this case realism does seem to be the objective. I tend to appreciate films that eschew the conventional point A to point B story structure, but some will simply see this film as saying little besides “life sucks and then you die.” The performances are going to be the main talking points of this film, and there are definite dark horse award possibilities for Linney and Hoffman. “The Savages” is cut from the same cloth as other critical darlings like “Little Miss Sunshine”, “Sideways”, “About Schmidt” and director Tamara Jenkins’ previous film “Slums of Beverly Hills”. If bourgeoisie angst butters your muffin, “The Savages” will probably do the trick.
4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS & 2 DAYS
It doesn’t surprise me that “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, as it shares structural, stylistic and thematic similarities with the Dardennes’ 2005 winner “L’Enfant”. This is my first experience with Romanian film; I haven’t gotten around to watching “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” yet and couldn’t name another Romanian film for a cash prize. My only real knowledge of Romania comes from vampire movies and a job in internet fraud (fighting, not perpetrating.) I do know that their history is rife with struggle and hardship, and although the dictatorial climate of the era sets the context for the film this is an intimate tale that wisely avoids a political agenda. Cristian Mungiu’s powerful story of an abortion in the Bucharest ghetto circa 1980 is the best film I’ve seen at the festival so far, and easily stands with “Rescue Dawn”, “Eastern Promises” and “Zodiac” as one of my favorite films of 2007 to date.
“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” focuses on Otilia, a college student who helps her roommate Gabita get an illegal abortion in a seedy hotel room. The plot doesn’t require more than that single sentence to describe, but incredible dramatic tension is derived from this simple scenario. Each step in the process is riveting and makes the viewer feel genuine concern for the safety and wellbeing of the girls involved, and regardless of your stance on abortion I think most can agree that if a woman decides to go through with that decision then it should not happen with the frightening carelessness portrayed in this film. We watch the girls negotiate the operation with a callously indifferent doctor (ironically named Dr. Bebe), whose clinical approach to the procedure and his fee are chilling and fascinating at the same time. We see the operation, but are left in suspense as to the results when Otilia leaves her friend to briefly see a clueless boyfriend. Finally, there is the disposal, and I won’t get into the specifics for fear of reducing the emotional impact of the film. Suffice to say that I left the theater slightly stunned, feeling as if I had been dropped into a raw moment in someone’s life and yanked briskly out of it at the film’s conclusion.
“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” makes good use of long takes, stretching uncomfortable moments to their breaking point without cutting away or providing visual relief. The cinematography is stark and grimy, but also beautiful. Much like “L’Enfant”, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” is purely diegetic, existing only within the internal world of the film and lacking the embellishments of a musical score or any type of visual and sound effects. Dogme experts could probably point out several instances within the film that disqualify it from that genre, but it takes a similarly stripped down approach and looks to have cost next to nothing to make. The film is necessarily crude, matching the ugliness of its subject matter with its tonality and daring to be honest and unsettling and ugly when it has to be.
Mungiu’s film will hopefully receive due accolades for its portrayal of decision making in a situation where no correct decisions exist. Abortion is a hard choice for any woman to make, but here the conditions and consequences of each possible decision are equally unpleasant. This is a film that captures life with rare accuracy, even if the life on display is that of a girl having a really bad day in the rain-slick ghettos of Bucharest. It is sure to inspire conversation and healthy debate, once you can pick your chin up off the floor. If I didn’t have to make my next show in five minutes, I would have stuck around to hear some of the humbled murmurs of the audience.
SOO
Still reeling from the hard-to-digest “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”, I immediately sat down in the next theater for the South Korean crime odyssey “Soo” and struggled to give it my full attention. It didn’t take long, as each burst of ultra-violence made the grin on my face a bit wider. Set in Japan but mingling a Korean and Japanese cast (at least I think that’s what it did), “Soo” is a gritty revenge flick in the tradition of Takeshi Kitano’s Yakuza films, the “Infernal Affairs” trilogy and early John Woo like “A Better Tomorrow”. It doesn’t quite do anything as innovative as “Oldboy”, but all it really needs is a bad-ass hammer fight.
The plot of “Soo” can easily be described as contrived, but it’s an appropriate clothesline to hang a series of escalating set pieces on. Tae-Soo is a born criminal, and some of his early endeavors get his twin brother Tae-Jin in trouble with drug trafficking thugs. Tae-Jin is abducted, and Tae-Soo spends over a decade honing his assassin skills and looking for him. He finally finds him, but Tae-Jin is plugged in the brain within seconds of locking eyes with his long lost twin. Tae-Soo then assumes Tae-Jin’s identity and life as a police offer (including carving a distinctive scar into his chin, which is amazingly only noticed to be a fresh scar by one person in the entire movie) and pursues his brother’s killers, leading him back to the gangsters that stole his brother as a child. Oh yeah, and assuming his brother’s identity also includes getting friendly with his girl.
“Soo” does a lot of things right. The action in this film is brutal and messy, and the intensity of each fight scene is gradually ratcheted up over the course of the film. The final bloodbath makes the steam-room fight from “Eastern Promises” look like a friendly misunderstanding, although this particular brand of arterial spray got a lot of laughs from the audience where Cronenberg got a lot of uncomfortable shifting in seats. I absolutely loved Soo’s almost total disregard for guns. He enters almost every fight with a knife, and takes a lot of punishment from a variety of hatchets, swords, knives, guns, and baseball bats. The believability factor even holds out for most of the movie, as the editing and choreography make each throat slit and pipe swing a logical extension of the last move. The cinematography is stark and sharp and makes good use of cold, dirty colors. With the exception of Jin/Soo’s shrill girlfriend, most of the performances are entertaining and surprisingly atypical.
“Soo” isn’t quite Shakespeare, but it’s an entertaining film nonetheless. For fans of the Asian-kill-everyone-in-the-room genre, this film is must see viewing that stays comfortably within the parameters laid out by its predecessors. If you like your revenge flicks hard boiled, then you’ll probably be able to overlook the factors that put this a notch below the best of the genre (the melodramatic score and cheesy romantic subplot spring to mind.) Who knows when this will find distribution, but keep an eye out for it if it does.
