I DON'T LIKE MONDAYS Saw The Girl From Monday at the Siskel yesterday. It's the latest film by Hal Hartley, the truly independent American film-maker. I'd never seen a film by Hartley before and he's a Long Island boy, so I was curious about Monday. As it turns out, I should have gone the gym instead.

Here's the premise: In the near future, a corporation called MMM (Major Multimedia Monopoly) has taken over America and installed a "dictatorship of the consumer." People are encouraged to spend as much as possible in order to increase their personal value as human beings. The hero, Jack (Bill Sage), works for MMM, but is trying to sabotage it with the help of a few ineffectual counterevolutionaries. Other plot points concern Jack's coworker Cecile (Sabrina Lloyd), who evolves from corporate tool to political radical, and the mysterious titular woman who falls from the sky just as Jack is about to kill himself.

Weird stuff, huh? The weirdness was fine, but it was the poor quality of the film-making that turned me off to The Girl From Monday. The film was shot with digital video cameras that used some sort of effect, (sorry, I don't know that much about digital video), that blurred the background of any shot whenever the camera moved. The cameras also filmed the action at a slightly slower speed than is usual. The coupling of these two effects gave the film an odd, jerky feel that might have been interesting had there been any point to it.

I bring this up because The Girl From Monday's off-balance style did nothing to help its actors. I don't want to beat up on these people too much, as I'm sure they're just trying to making a living at what they've always wanted to do, but the performances in the film weren't very good. Most of the actors delivered their lines as if they were reciting something that they had memorized, rather than performing them. Bill Sage in particular was awful; he was more of a haircut than an actor.

As for the content of the film, it had potential as a satire of consumerist, terrorist-fearing America, but Hartley didn't take his satire far enough. His joky insights on capitalism were sometimes amusing, but didn't have the stinging wallop of the best satire. He also married his satirical attempts to a feeble thriller-ish plot that was as muddled as it was boring.

Oh well, on the whole, it was a good week. From the highs of Head On, to the flawed but thought-provoking Masculin-Feminin, to this misfire. I'll close by paraphrasing something I read in a column about baseball this week, "If they were all the same, we wouldn't keep comin' back for more."  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 comments

  THE CHILDREN OF MARX AND COCA-COLA Saw Godard's Masculin-Feminin at the Music Box last night. I bought some popcorn when I got to the theater since I hadn't managed to eat dinner before the film. I know I complain a lot about movie theaters and moviegoers, so I have to admit I was one big pain in the ass last night. First of all, I was like Goldilocks trying to find a seat: too hard, too close, too far...ah, just right. Then I proceeded to devour my popcorn like Jennifer Connelly's home phone number was waiting at the bottom of the bag. I got butter all over my fingers and face, and since I forgot to get napkins, I wiped my fingers on the seat. I was eating so fast that the salt on the popcorn was stinging my lips and I made enough noise with the bag to turn several heads my way. I'm surprised that the other people in the theater didn't give me a beatdown.

So, on to the film. Hmmmm...Hmmmm...Hmmmm. I don't suppose I can keep doing this for a whole entry, huh? Well, I guess I could start off by saying M/F was, uh, very Godardian. I mean there wasn't a lot of plot, not even really much of a story. M/F announced in an opening title that it was going to present fifteen precise facts and there did appear to be about fifteen episodes to the film, although I can't really say if they were either precise or factual. There were proclamations, slogans, non-sequiturs, word play, eccentric behavior, and long conversations about politics and\or nothing in particular.

Jean-Pierre Leaud plays Paul, a Frenchman in his early twenties who has recently finished his military service. Paul is in Paris now, looking for something to do. He meets Madeleine (Chantal Goya) and starts working for the same magazine as her, doing interviews. Paul pursues Madeleine, who is pursuing a pop-singing career. He is something of a radical: he appears to be a member of the Communist party and, in one memorable scene, spray paints anti-Vietnam war slogans on the car of an American military official. These political scenes are intercut with other scenes that are typically Godardian in that they are like shabby parodies of American film noir. For example, at the beginning of the film, a man, played by Godard himself, is shot to death outside of a bistro by his wife. Later, a man in an amusement parlor pulls a knife on Paul, but then stabs himself in the chest.

M/F didn't quite work for me. I wasn't bored or irritated by it, but it didn't interest me either. One scene summed up the film for me: Paul is interviewing Mademoiselle 19, a young woman that appears to have won a beauty or modeling contest. He asks her personal questions about sex and politics in a condescending, hectoring tone. Paul comes off like a humorless jerk, while Mlle. 19 manages to hold on to her dignity and charm. M/F felt like a fight between Godard's humorous, playful side and his solemn political side, with politics taking the day. I don't have a problem with political film-making, it's just that when Godard starts to lecture on politics through the mouths of his characters, I start to feel very suspicious of him. His Marxist, anti-American lectures are so bullying that he starts to seem like someone who, if given his way, would make the world worse, not better. Indeed, the manner in which he places his political discourses is very telling. When talking about politics his actors appear to be nothing more than puppets repeating slogans that he has put in their mouths. At these moments, Godard loses a lot of humanity as a film-maker, and I do think that loss is related to his politics.  ¶ 7:36 AM 0 comments

  LOVE WILL TEAR US APART AGAIN Okay, I'm back, after a mini-hiatus. I really hadn't expected to be gone for a couple of weeks, but I just haven't been up to going to the movies as much as I have been. I think Sin City left a bad taste in my mouth. I thought about going to see The Best of Youth, the six hour Italian film, but I just couldn't psyche myself up for it. I think it was imagining spending those six hours in the ass-breaking seats of the Music Box that put me off the idea. Anyway, on to a new review.

I recently saw Head On, by Turkish-German director Fatih Akin, at the Esquire theater. First of all, what happened to the Esquire? I hadn't been there in about ten years and, while it was never a particularly beautiful theater, it used to be like any of your other pleasant, new or newly renovated theaters. Now, it's dark and dingy and has the stink of failed movie theater all over it. You know, the kind of place where there are way too many employess just standing around doing nothing. They actually seemed surprised that someone was there to see a movie. I wouldn't be shocked if it closed within a year or two.

So I go into the theater and have to sit through that awful DeNiro, American Express commercial. You know, the one where he talks about how much he loves New York and how he could never live anywhere else and how much New York means to him, and blah, blah, blah. So, you're thinking it's going to be about some September 11th charity or, at the very least, some kind of ad for New York City toursim, only you find out it's for American Express. What a focking whore! Does he really need the money that badly? Don't his shitty movies pay the bills?

Where were we? Oh, yeah. Head On is the story of Cahit (Birol Unel), a forty-ish Turk living in Hamburg. In the opening scenes of the film, he drives his car into a brick wall while drunk and high. Recovering in a hospital, he meets Sibel (SibelKekilli), a young Turkish woman there because of a suicide attempt. She asks Cahit to marry her, so that she can break free from her oppressive family, particularly her brutish older brother. Cahit begs off at first, but soon comes around to the idea. They get married, but both continue to have sex with other people, all the while using copious amount of drugs and alcohol. Eventually, Sibel and Cahit begin to develop feelings for each other; feelings that each of them is reluctant to admit might be love. The film then turns from a dark, yet funny, opposites-attract story to a tragedy.

All I can say is that that Head On really knocked me out. It moves with that kind of fantastic logic that some great films have, where nothing is really predictable, but each new scene builds on the last and causes you to say to yourself, "That's it! That's right! It would happen just like that."

The performances are tremendous. Birol Unel looks like a cross between Benicio Del Toro and Charles Bukowski and slowly allows us to see the lonely, haunted man beneath the drugs and booze. Sibel Kekilli is simply stunning. I'm not sure if she's a great actress, but what a presence. She has a compelling, unconventionally pretty face with one of the most interesting noses I've ever seen. (Indeed, if you have a nose fetish, Head On is your movie.) Her character is at times girlish and slutty, sweet and vicious, likeable and repellent. Kekilli makes you see all of these facets of the character. It's one of those performances that doesn't even seem like acting. Absolutely ferocious.

I suppose I could say something about Head On's possible subtext. Something like displaced people that are not of one culture or another have a particularly difficult time finding their places in the world. I believe that idea is there in the film, but I'm not that interested in it because I thought that Sibel and Cahit were so crazy that it would be a stretch to say that their story is representative of the Turkish immigrant experience in Germany. Let's put it this way, if both characters had grown up and lived their lives in Turkey, I think that there would have been a good chance that they would have turned out the same way.

Indeed, Head On didn't leave me thinking about the Turkish-German immigrant experience, but feeling that this was one of the more romantic films that I've seen in a long time. It was crazy, violent, and unplesant, sure, but romantic all the same.  ¶ 7:49 AM 0 comments

  EAST v. WEST Over the weekend, I saw Sin City and the Korean film Oldboy. Both films are about revenge, so I thought I'd write about them together.

Sin City is based on the comic books, (no, I won't call them graphic novels,) by Frank Miller. I noticed that several reviewers pointed out that the film's scenes often look like they were lifted directly from the comic books. I thought this was strange for two reasons. First of all, I wondered if these reviewers had actually read Sin City or if they had at best looked at a few of its pages online or in publicity materials. Whatever the case, my bullshit detector started tingling. I just didn't see these critics persuing copies of Sin City at screenings and making notes. The other, more serious, problem that I had with these critics was the air of praise and admiration that they had for this extraordinarily faithful transfer from comic to film. I don't see why this is praiseworthy in and of itself. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be comic book movies and there shouldn't be movies that look like comic books, I just don't see why a film that looks exactly like the comic book it was based on should be singled out for praise. Wouldn't it have been better if the movie had looked like the comic book, but had some originality and vitality of its own?

The biggest reason that I had a problem with critics praising the way that Sin City looked, is that I didn't think it looked all that special. I really can't remember a single thing about its visuals. Sin City was dark and noirish, that's about all that I can tell you. I don't remember anything about any of the backgrounds or foregrounds or interiors or exteriors. I wonder how hard it was to come up with the look of Sin City anyway. In every shot it has to be night in a city. That's it. I know many people don't like the recent Star Wars films, but if you're looking for scope and detail in digital animation, you couldn't really do any better.

Even worse than Sin City's bland noir rip-off animation were its boring storylines. Each of the three main stories had a standard revenge plot, but since they all had to be compressed into the film's two hour framework there was no room for plot or character devlopment. Basically, each character told you why they were going to get revenge and then went out and got it, typically in the most gruesome manner possible. Indeed, Sin City is a repellently violent film, with the violence taking the place of interesting plot developments. I mean, after all, if you can't think of anything else to happen, why not have people tortured to death and then fed to dogs? To make matters worse, each story is narrated by its lead actor in the most embarassing pulp-fiction tough guy prose imaginable. The narration alternates between being laugh and cringe inducing. Each narrator sounds the same too; they might have wanted to try giving each character a distinctive voice.

The only good thing about Sin City were the performances of some of its actors. Mickey Rourke was compelling and sympathetic, Clive Owen was charismatic, Bruce Willis was understated as usual, and Benicio Del Toro was great playing the human equivalent of a slug. I thought it was nice that these actors were able to transcend the blue-screen emptiness that surrounded them.

Now, Oldboy.

Oh Dae-Su is a Seoul businessman being held in a police station due to a high level of intoxication. It's unclear, but he seems to have been in some kind of physical altercation. He is loud and boisterous, but the police let him go when a friend agrees to take him home. Oh wanders off to make a phone call on the street and then, in a sudden cut, wakes up in what appears to be a hotel room. He soon discovers that he is imprisoned in this room. He has a TV, from which he learns that he is presumed to have murdered his wife. The only thing that keeps Oh going during this time in the room is his desire for revenge on whoever has put him there. Fifteen years go by until Oh wakes up one morning on the roof of his prison, a free man.

He then sets off to find the person or persons responsible for keeping him locked up for so many years. Rather quickly he finds himself in front of a Japanese restaurant where a homeless man hands him a cell phone and a wallet full of cash. Oh enters the restaurant and strikes up a conversation with Mido, the sushi chef, a pretty young woman. After consuming an entire live octopus, Oh passes out and wakes up in the apartment of the chef, she has taken pity on him and brought him home. Oh tells her his story and she agrees to help him track down the people that imprisoned him. (If this sounds implausible, don't worry, all is revealed at the end of the film.)

It quickly becomes clear that the man behind Oh's imprisonment wants to be found. In fact, he introduces himself to Oh not even half way through the film. Oh spends the rest of the film figuring out the identity of his tormentor and then, once he has accomplished this task, meets him for a final confrontation.

I'm not sure what to make of Oldboy. It certainly took the idea of revenge much more seriously than Sin City. Oh Dae-Su notes several times during the course of the film that his quest for revenge has changed him, and not for the better. He realizes that he is not really himself anymore, but just a thing consumed by revenge. Similarly, the villain of the film, Woo Jin Lee, remarks near the end of his film that his life will have no purpose once he has had his revenge on Oh.

Oldboy's concern for the destructive power of revenge is certainly admirable compared to Sin City's countless conscienceless murders, but I thought its concern was less than sincere, as Oldboy is itself extremely violent. Even if a film says all the right things about what a terrible thing revenge is, you can't help but be suspicious when its main character beats up a gang of thugs with a hammer or dispatches a duo of henchmen with a toothbrush. The film tells us that revenge will destroy you, but pretty much wallows in violence.

With that said, I would recommend Oldboy, but only to the non-squeamish. It's one of the more disturbing movies that I've seen in a long time and one that has stayed with me after seeing it.  ¶ 8:33 AM 0 comments

  PURPLE RAIN Saw Purple Butterfly at the Siskel on Friday night. A certain Ms. Vivian C. Wong was in attendance with me. The film appears to have been released in China in 2003, but is only now being distributed in the U.S.

Plot: In late 1920s Shangahi, Ding Hui (Zhang Ziyi) is romantically involved with Itami (Nakamura Tooru), a Japanese man. Very early on in the film, Itami leaves Shanghai to return to Japan. They both appear saddened by the occasion, but do not make any grand gestures to each other. Ding Hui doesn't even say good-bye to him at the train station. Their lack of direct communication with each other actually suggets that their feelings are more intense and deeper than we understand. Soon after Itami leaves, Ding Hui watches as her brother is brutally murdered by a Japanese nationalist.

The film jumps to 1931. Ding Hui has joined Purple Butterfly, a violent, anti-Japanese group and Itami has returned to Shanghai as part of Japanese intelligence. His mission is to find and destroy people like Ding Hui. Her fellow members of Purple Butterfly realize that Ding Hui used to be involved with Itami and ask her to get close to him once again. They want information from Itami that will lead them to Yamamoto, the head of Japanese intelligence in Shanghai. Ding Hui agrees to meet Itami again.

Sounds pretty melodramatic, right? Well, it's not. Purple Butterfly is a subtle, harrowing film, more interested in recording moments in the lives of its characters than in thrilling us with its plot contrivances. The director, Ye Lou, does not appear interested in making a conventional, historical film with lots of impressive sets and costumes filmed in stately long shots. Instead, everyone in the film wears drab, threadbare clothes and Shanghai appears to be a city of grime and constant rain. The director shows us the ordinary people buried under the weight of history.
In fact, the film does not present history as a coherent and easily understandable series of facts, but daringly chooses to present many of its incidents in a non-linear form. There are flashbacks and flashforwards and even flashsideways. Some might see this choice of a fractured narrative as art-house pretension, I saw it as an attempt by the director to demonstrate what the chaos of the time must have felt like to the people that lived it. At times, the action is almost unintelligible, but you wonder if events appeared that way to the people living in Shanghai during the Japanese Occupation.

There actually isn't much of a plot to Purple Butterfly, it's more a series of incidents that creates a mood of a time and a place. The characters circle each other warily, each trying to figure out what the other wants, their maneuvers only interrupted by sudden, terrifying bursts of violence. Indeed, Purple Butterfly is an extremely violent film, but it uses violence in the best possible way that a film can. I never felt excited or amused by the violence, only sickened and saddened.

The film builds to a confrontation between the two leads that literally gave me chills and then moves on to a final flashback that recasts and deepens all the preceding events. I've never really before understood what people see in Zhang Ziyi, she's seemed like the Chinese version of Winona Ryder to me, (that's not as big a put-down as it sounds), but she gives a remarkable performance throughout Purple Butterfly. As there isn't a lot of dialogue in the film, she has to do most of her acting with her eyes and her body, and she succeeds splendidly. It won't be easy to forget the look on her face near the end of the film when crucial information is revealed to her character.

I don't know if there's really a message to Purple Butterfly, perhaps just that fate can be remarkably cruel, particularly in times of war. People that otherwise might have been able to lead quiet, peaceful lives are destroyed for no greater reason than being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.  ¶ 8:35 AM 0 comments