Mud Songs

Anything directed by Jim Jarmusch is worth watching, even though his movies don’t always do much for me (Dead Man and Coffee and Cigarettes). His camera quietly observes people in an unobtrusive way that brings out the subtlties of character and has us feeling for them because they’re just so unremarkable. Broken Flowers, a road trip movie about a guy (Bill Murray) looking for a woman who leaves an unsigned letter in his mailbox informing him that he has a son, is Jarmusch’s most conventional movie to date, and as good as anything he’s done.

Saint Ralph is an excellent Canadian film that — like most Canadian films — didn’t have a chance to be seen because of all the Hollywood crap that controls the market in North America. It’s a cliched, by-the-numbers underdog story, but it’s still the most enjoyable family movie I saw this year. (I enjoyed it much more than Millions.)

House of Flying Daggers may not be as good as Hero, but it sure looks and feels like an epic martial arts film. Surreal at times, and beautifully shot. I can watch this with the sound down and still get into it.

If you like Johnny Cash, you’re going to like Walk the Line. It’s a typical biopic that glosses over the hard stuff, but excellent performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon keep things going. (They sing pretty good too.)

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is one of the most engaging family movies I saw is 2005, with CGI characters that seem like the real thing. It’s a fairy tale with a message, and it works.

Donnie Brasco has to be one of the best and most overlooked gangster movies ever made. An entertaining but sympathetic look at the personal lives of criminals and the cops who go after them. Al Pacino doesn’t get any better than this, and Johnny Depp doesn’t miss a beat. Impressive all around, gets better with each viewing.

Wonder Boys stars Michael Douglas as a writer who can’t finish his second novel, a novel that keeps growing and growing and growing. I saw the movie when it first came out a few years back, and I enjoyed it even more this second time around. Well drawn characters. All the actors are perfectly cast, and fun to watch. Some might think it’s slow, but it feels honest (and therefore hilarious) to me. Anyone who’s ever worked at their writing, and knows how much fun that blank page can be, will enjoy this movie. It also features Bob Dylan’s excellent song, “Things Have Changed.” (The DVD includes the video, which I laughed at all the way through.)

Valiant is about carrier pigeons during WWII. It is the worst computer animated film I’ve seen to date. It is so dull, uninteresting, unfunny, I would have walked out of the theatre when I saw it if I was by myself. I could smoke a pound of weed and write a better script than Valiant. It may have worked as an animated short, but there’s not enough to hold out for a full-length feature. And not a thing to look at it. Computer animated movies for kids should be at least visually stimulating, give the kiddies something goosh about. But there is nothing to see here, folks. The most vibrant colour I saw was grey. Skip this movie. It’s a stinker.

Daniel Day-Lewis makes this movie. Man, is he good. The movie is about a guy who lives on what used to be a commune, growing his own food, generating his own electricity, etc. All the other commune folks left years ago, and he’s holding out with his daughter in their old wooden house while suburbs are being built all around him. If you’re not so fond of “progress” as made manifest by Wal-Marts and rows and rows of houses that look exactly the same, you’ll like The Ballad of Jack and Rose. I totally dug it.

Calendar Girls is a sweet little film about a bunch of older women in Yorkshire (which looks like a beautiful place to live) who were the first group of women to pose nude for a calendar to raise money for cancer. Everyone does it nowadays, but it’s fun to watch how it first began. Helen Mirren is great actor. Not a great film, but, like I said, sweet.

Claire Danes is good, for the small role she has (she’s usually good), but everything else is a waste of time. Igby Goes Down is supposed to be a Catcher in the Rye kind of story. It’s not.

I saw George Lucus’s THX-1138 years ago when I was about 13 and it put me to sleep. I saw the “enchanced” version yesterday, and it put me to sleep. Makes you wonder how George Lucas ever made it in the movie business. Give him some toys to play with and he can come up with a few neat tricks, but he is otherwise — what’s the word for it? — unoriginal.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring is a movie that doesn’t rush to get to where it’s going: A Buddhist monk and his young apprentice live alone on a houseboat in the middle of a lake surrounded by hills and forest. They sweep the floor, they read, they meditate, they row a boat to shore where they pick wild herbs for making soups and teas. Then one day someone drops by looking for spiritual guidance. From beginning to end, there might be 5 minutes of dialogue. It’s pure cinema. I love it.

I saw Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine last night, a documentary about the 1997 chess match between Garry Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue. Kasparov lost and then claimed IBM cheated. IBM’s behaviour was indeed suspicious. They had something like 30 grand masters as “consultants,” but you have wonder if some of these guys were in a back room somewhere over-riding some of Deep Blue’s moves. It’s an intriguing subject for a documentary, but the approach to it is stupid. Instead of letting the facts stand on their own, a variety of techniques are used to dramatize the events. An inaudible voice-over narration where two guys whisper the whole time as if they’re watching a chess match. Interviews where the camera is constantly going in and out of focus, moving all over the place, or filming from behind an office plant (like a hidden camera?). Music that sounds like it was written for Darth Vader. After-the-fact slow-motion close-ups of Kasparov’s eyes. All of this is done so badly, it makes the subject laughable and distracts from the real drama of the events. Too bad. If they’d just done a straightforward documentary, it could have been good. (More research about chess would have helped too.) If you want to watch good movie about chess, check out Searching for Bobby Fischer instead.

Himalaya tells the story of some Nepalese villagers who trek down the mountains to trade their mountain salt for grain and try not to get killed along the way. The plot is simple but contains all the elements of a great story. The magnificence of the Himalayan landscape provides an epic feel to every single frame of the film. The DVD bonus material, “Himalaya: The Making Of,” shows how it was shot entirely on location under environmental conditions that put all their lives at risk, and makes you wonder how they ever finished it. Deeply moving, astounding, and compelling in every way. This is my favourite movie of 2005.

Click the image for non-subtitled YouTube clip. It’s a good clip.

Ingmar Bergman’s films are hit-and-miss with me. He’s made cinematic masterpieces that bore me into a stupor. But sometimes when he comes in close, like he does in Persona, the result is so psychologically intimate, I sit back and marvel at the accomplishment.

Antonia’s Line is a family-tree on film, one that begins with a fantastical introduction and maintains that quality like a fairy tale providing a surprise around every corner. It’s a deliberately charming and nostalgic story that give us permission to imagine things slightly eschew (every character seems to have their own brand of reality). It’s not the real world, but, like a good fairy tale, it allows the audience to reflect on a variety of human conditions and experiences that everyone in some way can relate to. It is a wonderfully rich and rewarding film, a beautifully well-told story. [Commentary originally from 2004.]

I thoroughly enjoyed Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill - Vol. 1 for what it is. I plan to see it again before it leaves my local theatre and I’m looking forward to Vol. 2. It’s a shallow movie with nothing underneath the surface, but the surface is so lovingly made — I just ate it up. It was a fun ride. A good ole fashion revenge flick. Uma Thurman going out to get everybody who did her wrong, and she gets ‘em good. And that’s it. Criticizing the movie according a to more complex criteria than that seems foolish. It’s not Pulp Fiction, nor do I think it is meant to be. It is a wonderfully crafted kung-fu, Samurai, kill-em-all and kill-em-good, revenge flick. The protagonist is defined mainly her ability to kick ass than her ability to carry on witty conversation. As entertaining as it might be to listen to two gangsters discuss the deeper meaning of a foot massage, that kind of extended dialogue would slow down the kinetic energy of the all cool kung-fu that’s going on in Kill Bill - Vol. 1. If you don’t like gory and violent revenge flicks, you won’t like the movie. Don’t go. But for what it is, it is extremely well made, stunning and amazing at times, and — I hate this phrase — but a pure cinematic delight. It’s like Homer Simpson discovering triple-chocolate ice cream. Kung-fu revenge flicks don’t get much better than this. [Commentary originally from 2003.]

Just because The Grey Zone is about the Holocaust doesn’t make it a noble movie worth watching. It tells the story of a group of people who organized an an armed uprising at Auschwitz in 1944. To make a movie about this kind of historical event, you have to do it right or not at all, and this movie doesn’t exactly do it right. It seems to be a competent telling of the story (if they got all their facts straight), but it’s almost an embarrassment too. The first mistake — and it’s a big one — is having all the “good guys” speak with pure 100% American accents, and all the bad, evil Nazi commanders speak with German accents. I had no idea there were so many Californian Jews in Auschwitz. I thought they were mainly Hungarian and Polish. It’s details like this (and there are plenty of them) that kind of give it away, kind of blows their cover, if you know what mean. It feels a bunch of actors walking around in Nazi outfits trying to look tough. Some scenes are almost comical — and I really don’t think that’s the effect you want to go for in a movie like this. Although The Grey Zone presents a story worth telling, certain aspects of this particular presentation of it seem to undermine the profundity the historical facts. I don’t recommend it. Read Miklos Nyiszli’s book instead. [Commentary originally from 2003.]

Near the end of the 1995 documentary, Anne Frank: Remembered, there’s a two-second clip of Anne Frank — 1943, ‘44, something like that, six months or so before she and her family went into hiding. A wedding was being filmed by someone with an early home movie camera. After taking some shots of the bride and groom in the street, the camera pans up to get a shot of some spectators looking down from the balcony of their apartment at the wedding party below. There is a young girl leaning over the railing of the balcony; we barely get a glimpse of her. She quickly turns her head and goes back into the apartment. They slow the film down and play it back. And it’s Anne Frank. Motion picture footage of Anne Frank. The real person. That is the most powerful, emotionally profound moment I’ve experienced watching a film. I totally lost it when they showed that two-second clip of Anne Frank. It cut me half. There was no denying that what I had just seen in the previous 100 minutes of the documentary was real. It hit me so hard I couldn’t talk about it for weeks afterwards. And I can still get choked up trying to talk about. Rabbit-Proof Fence has a moment like that. For me, not as powerful as that moment of seeing Anne Frank, but for some people it will be. And if for nothing else but that moment, that possibility, I have to recommend the film. Rabbit-Proof Fence tells the story of three Australian aboriginal girls who run away from a school that is essentially a prison. They trek through a desert for 9 weeks to be with their families. It’s an enlightening and still entertaining film (with a powerful soundtrack by Peter Gabriel). [Commentary originally from 2004.]