Thoughts From a Red Rug - Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

From San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Anyone who’s read this blog in May knows of the uber-love I feel for the Cannes Film Festival. That’s the festival that excites me most as a cinephile, because, more than any other, Cannes plays the films I want to see. So, after getting my pass, I was very excited to see that SDAFF was playing Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, because, for the very first time, I would have a chance to see a Palme d’Or winner on the big screen. Thus far, I’ve been relegated to watching the big films from Cannes long after the fact on my admittedly much smaller (though still awesome!) LCD television.

Sadly, my excitement would die quickly enough once the film was underway. I could BS you with numerous platitudes and flowery descriptions, but I think that simplicity is the best way to go about this. Look, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives sucks. I find it staggering that it was seriously considered for the Palme, and even more so that it ended up the winner.

Whenever a jury is deciding awards, it’s bound to allow for interesting results. A small group of people is choosing from among a clearly defined sample of films, and, depending on the makeup of the jury, anything can happen. Certainly, it’s not surprising that any jury with Tim Burton as its president might choose a title that’s a bit further off the beaten path than most. Still, this year’s festival had a number of films that generated a lot of buzz that seemed to be major contenders for the Palme. Another Year, The Housemaid, Of Gods and Men, and Biutiful come to mind. So . . . what happened???

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is the story of a dying man who lives on a farm in the midst of the jungle. As he nears the end of his life, his sister-in-law and a few other people come to be with him. It’s a quiet, meditative film. Now, just exactly WHAT it’s meditating on is something that I can’t tell you.

Writer/director Apichatpong Weerasethakul has a clear penchant for long, unbroken takes that remind me of Antonioni more than anyone else. However, with Antonioni’s films, there was a latent sense of quiet desperation and a somewhat ambiguous sense of angst that made the pacing work to his advantage. Conversely, Weerasethakul tends to focus on things and objects for much longer than I’d argue is necessary. For example, take the first sequence of the film. A small group of people is camping(?) in a field with a water buffalo tied to a tree. The animal escapes and trots off, only to be retrieved by a man from the group. Let me tell you, I saw far more of that water buffalo than I wanted to. I found myself giving silent instructions to the director: “ok, aaaaaaand it’s time to cut now, dude.” Still, a proclivity for deliberately long takes isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

It’s in the writing that Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives falls short, and it’s really too bad, because the early going is promising. There’s a very strong scene where Boonmee and his sister-in-law are visited by the his dead wife's ghost and long-lost son, and the conversation swirls around the dead’s relationship with the living and the presence of spirits/ghosts in the world. It’s at that moment that the film peaks. Unfortunately, it’s almost all downhill from there.

Not long after, the film takes a left turn that it never recovers from. We’ve been on a farm in the present with Boonmee, and now . . . we’re in the forest about 300 years prior with an emotionally/sexually frustrated princess who ends up having sex . . . with a catfish??? And the CATFISH does most of the work? I kid you not. It doesn’t actually play nearly as disturbed as it sounds, but the sheer oddity of the shift in time/place/subject doesn’t make much sense within the narrative. Then, without any explanation, we’re back in the present and the film continues with the story of Boonmee, albeit without any explanation as to how and why things are happening as they are. By the time the film ends, I was completely lost. I still have no idea how, even in the strange, fantastical reality of the film, the final scene is possible.

Glimpses of a good film shine through in bits of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. It’s a shame that those moments weren’t allowed to serve as the axis around which Weerasethakul could have framed the rest of the story. Then, it might have made for something truly meaningful. As it is, it’s an uneven, frustrating, and ultimately thankless experience.

1 ½ stars (out of 5)

It's coming!

I am a lucky guy. The past year, I’ve found myself working very closely with a major film festival. As a result, I’ve been able to gain access to a ton of screenings, events, parties, and other festivals that I’d have been hard pressed to get into otherwise. The past few months have been particularly lovely, in terms of both the quantity and quality of what I’ve been able to do, so I thought that it’d be a shame to let all this go past without taking the chance to tell you about it.

So, I’m going to be starting a regular column right here called “Stories from the Circuit.” Or maybe I’ll call it “Festivalations” or “Thoughts from a Red Rug.” Or something like that. I plan to use it to write about the movies I’ve had the chance to see, many of which have not yet enjoyed release, limited or otherwise. Over the next week or so, keep one eye right here, because there’s a lot coming, given my prolific schedule of late.

And I’m open to ideas about the name.

Baddest Next-Door Neighbor. Ever.

When I first saw the promotional material for the American remake of Let The Right One In, the Swedish film of now almost mythic proportions, I wasn’t terribly optimistic. Fact #1: I don’t usually go for horror films, and Let Me In looked nigh terrifying. Greetings and salutations, flaming hospital beds. Fact #2: American remakes of foreign films are often unnecessary, not to mention insulting. Ah, so those little American idiots can’t keep up with a couple lines of white text at the bottom of the screen? No problem! Let’s stupefy the things that made the idea work in the first place and make everything ten times bigger, louder, and more incoherent. No big deal.

Having gotten some (a mere fraction!) of that veritable load off of my chest, I’m pleased and somewhat surprised to put forth that Let Me In is actually quite good. As I have not seen the original, I was able to go into the film fresh, with only a basic understanding of the premise to guide me.

In the current climate of films like The Twilight Saga, The Vampire’s Assistant, and so on, Matt Reeves’ direction is remarkably elegant and, for the most part, restrained, choosing a wonderfully classical style of shot construction that eschews a lot of camera whirlygigging for the beauty of careful composition. Instead of piling on the camp, the story takes the idea of a young boy’s encounter and eventual friendship with a vampire trapped in the body of a 12 year old girl very seriously. To its credit, by sticking with a real-world setting and lived-in characters, Let Me In allows the viewer to experience the fantastical world of the film on its own terms, without a ridiculously over-arching series of convoluted vampirical mythology to deal with. Kodi Smit-McPhee deserves particular merit for his strong turn as Owen, the film’s emotional anchor. He may only be 12, but this kid’s got range and the potential for a bright future.

Unfortunately, the film’s not perfect, with the chief problem being several poorly executed VFX shots of Abby in full vampire mode. Some early comments have noted that she looks like Gollum, although I contend that Gollum looked better. A lot better. I would have much preferred that Reeves had simply cut from one location to another without feeling the need to show exactly how she arrived there. One of the film’s best moments involves Abby arriving at a second-story apartment and, when pressed as to how she got there, she simply says, “I flew.” I’d have much rather seen more of those moments instead of unnecessary, second-rate attempts at digital trickery. While these moments don’t torpedo Let Me In, they certainly slow the film’s momentum, which is unfortunate, given the wonderful balance between reality and fantasy that much of the film strikes.

In lesser hands, Let Me In might have been another gorefest of a bloodsucker flick, or even worse, another overwrought exploration of teenage angst as filtered through the vampire tradition. While it'll certainly be bread-and-butter to folks who love vampires, this film is a rare thing. Let Me In is a genre piece that appeals to a wider audience without (much) compromise, a modern action film that pays the viewer the respect of actually allowing him/her to see what's going on, and a genuinely entertaining experience.

Recommended: 4 stars (out of 5)

We have someone on the inside!

The Toronto International Film Festival is upon us! Their line-up is wonderful, their festival awesome, and their city a joy, but I will not be there. Fortunately, Amanda, a colleague of mine, will be! What's more, she'll be blogging from the Festival with updates on the films she's seen and her impressions of the grand shindig.

TIFF's program this year contains almost every single film that I've been excited to see for the remainder of 2010, and I'm eager to hear Amanda's thoughts. You can link directly to her site here.

Don't Say Much and Carry a Big Knife. You'll Do Fine.

On a hot summer night several years ago, a group of dudes sat around a card table with a superior stash of booze and a lot of time to kill. One of the dudes, Robert (it’s his house, see) says to the group, “man, somebody should make a movie about a disgraced Mexican dude who used to work for the U.S. government on stuff too dirty for them to risk their own people on.” His idea gets instant support from the bleary-eyed duderage assembled around a pretty boring game of 5 card stud. QT, already close to passing out, says, “YEAH! And he should carry around a huge machete and kill people with it!” Again, props come immediately. You’d have a tougher time getting an amen in a Pentecostal church than you would saying anything to this group.

If this isn’t the way that the idea for Machete was conceived, then it’s got to be pretty close.

If you read this blog, you know that I'm pretty particular. I'm not going to go and just see anything that's out. If a film doesn’t appeal to my taste/sensibilities, I’m not going to go out of some sense of obligation that I need to see “everything.” But you probably know much (if not all) of this already.

Look, dudes. Machete ROCKS. I hadn’t planned to see it, but found myself on an outing with a friend and it was one of the only films on the marquee that I hadn’t seen that seemed at all interesting.

Robert Rodriguez is a bit of an outsider as far as Hollywood goes, and that’s a good thing. The concept and title character for Machete debuted as one of the fabled fake trailers in the underachiever that was Grindhouse. Expanded to feature-length, Machete is one of the more enjoyable films I’ve seen all year, and just might sneak its way onto my Best of 2010 list. No promises.

Now for the laundry list: the performances service the film pretty well. Look, if you’d told me beforehand that I’d see Steven Seagal AND Lindsay Lohan in a film and actually be able to look at them without feeling an unbearable sense of sadness, I would have disagreed. Possibly strongly so. Robert De Niro has a lot of fun with the role of a ridiculously corrupt senator with a penchant for approving hilarious campaign ads. And Cheech Marin almost steals the movie as a wonderfully colorful man of the cloth. He’s got a line of dialogue that’s one of the best I’ve heard all year. I’d reproduce it here, but kids and Catholics visit this site.

Danny Trejo manages to sell almost every inch of the Machete character by playing the guy completely straight. There are no winks or nods to the camera here, thank goodness. I am in awe of the way that a grizzled, tattooed, (dare I even say) ugly man manages to spend quality time with Michelle Rodriguez, Lohan, Alicia Rachel Marek, AND Jessica Alba within the stretch of 1 hour and 45 minutes. Jerk. I am curious, however, about the remarkable ability of an unmanned movie camera’s ability to zoom in on some of the hanky-panky. An aside? Yes, but still something I noticed.

Another thing that’s worth noting is the film’s political bent. Think you’re just going to watch a movie about a lot of splatter? Rodriguez is NOT happy about the situation at the Southern border of the United States, and he’s not shy about it. That said, Machete is not without a sense of humor at the expense of all involved, which is great, as the somewhat preachy quality of the politics gets offset by some inspired sight gags.

Machete is a gory, hilarious, rip-roaring throwback to the grand tradition of the B picture. Your $11 (or less, if you’re a not a city slicker) could be spent much, much worse. My hat is off, my shortest, squattest digit is upraised, and my understanding of the human intestinal tract has been expanded. What more could you want from a movie like this?

4 stars (out of 5)

I know how I feel. How do YOU feel?

The Standard Spoiler Warning

If I mention a particular film, I just might go into explicit details of the plot. Read at your own risk.

I have often lamented the fact that Annie Hall’s vaunted influence seems to be a thing that exists in name only. If I had a dime for each voice that proclaimed the film once known as "Anhedonia" to be the first real modern romantic comedy . . . you get the point. The thing is, in addition to its deserved place in cinema’s hall of fame, Annie Hall has a special place in modern romantic comedy because the hero and heroine don’t end up together, and you know as much from the first 2 minutes of dialogue. Name another rom-com that tries THAT. I’ll wait.

(Adam waits as you frantically sift through endless memories of reasonably attractive pink-skinned actors running through airports/disrupting weddings to the “wrong” man/ultimately falling in a messy heap before the objects of their affection to declare undying love.)

Can’t do it? OK, I will. (500) Days of Summer.

At first glance, this is a funny little indie movie with some strange ideas of what tonal consistency is. I’d be lying if I said that every little nuance and flourish worked equally well to move the narrative forward, but, ultimately, this thing achieves a remarkable sense of emotional resonance.

I was surprised at how well this film captures the complexity of human relationships. It’s all too easy to do what just about every rom-com does and tell a story about two drastically different people who learn they can’t live without each other. (500) Days of Summer takes the opposite approach and runs with it, which I think is much more difficult. It’s about two very similar people who find that, try as they might, they just won’t be able to make things work.

Tom and Summer’s relationship defies easy classification, which is unusual for a modern film dealing with matters of the heart. (I very much wanted to just call the thing a rom-com, but I don’t think that using that label would be completely honest.) Usually, all we get are films with characters who are very clearly right for each other or not right for each other with very little grey area. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in a relationship that wasn’t technically a “relationship.” Would drive me nuts.

When the story begins, it’s very easy to demonize Summer by thinking that she’s treated Tom poorly without any reason. She gets very close to him very quickly, both physically and emotionally, and then, after a while, jumps right out of the frying pan and walks off. Not only that, but she seems to fully expect that he’ll be ok with all this and ready to be “just friends” just as quickly. It seems like she almost expects him to have an on/off switch for his feelings.

Summer reminds me of people I’ve known and interacted with, with varying levels of intimacy. She has an inclination toward being somewhat flighty and sometimes emotionally impenetrable from a readability standpoint. She’s got a strong penchant for doing things for their own sake and rejecting the need for them to fit within a larger framework of values and norms. That said, I felt like I understood where Summer was coming from when the credits rolled. She’d been honest up front with Tom that she wasn’t interested in a real relationship and didn’t want anything serious, although I still can’t help but feel that, to a degree, she used him and his feelings for her own purposes.

Near the end of the film, there’s a scene where they “bump” into each other in a park, and have a chance to really talk. Without this moment, I don’t think that the film would have worked nearly so well as it does. I really admire the way that the two of them completely level with each other. He holds her accountable for her actions toward him, and she is completely honest about the way that she didn’t love him like she wanted to/should have/felt like she ought to. The way that she takes his hand, squeezes it, and he doesn’t move it at all is great. He’s not allowing himself to be drawn back in any more than he has to be. Of course, her mere presence is enough to pull him toward nostalgia and thoughts of what might have been, but he’s trying really hard.

The thing that rang true for me was how she said that she had fallen for the man she married so completely in a way that she had never really felt for Tom. She said it in a way that made me think that she had spent a lot of time thinking about that. Maybe she even tried really hard to make herself feel that way because she thought that she “should.” I can identify with this. Who hasn’t spent time asking oneself over and over and over again if you’re feeling the way you ought to about someone? “Do I care enough? Do I care too much? Am I in love? Should I be?” Like Tom says in the film, movies, pop songs, and greeting cards make it really clear how “normal” people feel about things of the heart, when the actual truth is that things are incredibly different in the so-called real world.

This scene reminds me of what my college speech professor used to call “peak communication.” It involves two people communicating exactly what they’re feeling, without holding anything back. He said that it wasn’t possible to really do this, but I wonder. Without this moment of genuine human communication, (500) Days of Summer would feel like an incomplete indie sketch with a lot of homage-style winks to the camera thrown in for good measure. With it, it’s wonderfully tender and remarkably poignant. It’s not common for a modern film, much less a modern American film, to portray relationships so honestly. This film touched me, and I’m grateful for that. Those don’t come around every day.

Was Summer the “one” for Tom? I think so, at least in the way that a certain number of people could probably qualify as being the soulmate of one person. All that stuff is primarily related to geography anyway. Was he only remembering the “good” stuff about her, as his little sister seemed to think? I don’t think so. Well, to a point, yes, he probably was, but I think that he really did love her completely despite her personal inconsistencies. But I understand where she’s coming from. I really do. The look that Tom gives her in the park when her head is down before she gets up to leave is just wonderful. It’s what a broken heart looks like, but that's not all. It's so much more than that.

I think you understand.

"Strudel, party of 1, your table is ready."

In the 2 years that the blog's been active, we've been very lucky to have the steady support of a core team of writers. But times change, people embark on new endeavors, and we've recently found ourselves with only one active team member/blogger. Me.

From the beginning, I saw this blog as a collaborative place where a group of people with different worldviews, tastes, and areas of expertise could come together to engage an audience with articles that were insightful, enjoyable, and, above all, could start a discussion. In the world we live in, it's not enough to just have a site where a person or group of people sit on a mountaintop and deliver maxims to the masses without allowing for the 2-lane highway of effective communication.

As such, when Megan & Christopher left to begin writing at Suspension of Disbelief, I knew that I didn't want to be the only person writing here at the blog. This is for 2 primary reasons. First, I didn't (and still don't) see myself as being prolific enough to be able to write a steady stream of articles that could not only attract new visitors, but also encourage people who stumbled across us to stick around. Second, my tastes, while eclectic, contain certain gaps that will simply have to be dealt with. I'm certainly not apologizing for what I like or don't like, but I want this blog to represent the diversity of preference that exists among cinephiles.

So, it's with great pleasure that I introduce a new member of our team. Kelly's been a friend of mine since the day we met as 2 parts of a guerilla marketing campaign gone (slightly) awry. She's not only a talented writer, but she also has a genuine passion for the movies that's just infectious.

I'm sure that she'll have more to say in the way of introductions, so I'll leave the rest of that to her. Just know that I'm glad to have her as a member of the team, and hope that you'll enjoy her take on the movies as much as I do.

-Adam

Totems & Trances

I've tried very hard to avoid putting any spoilers in my review. That said, if you want the freshest experience possible with the film, it's probably best to watch and then come back to read.

Christopher Nolan is one of the smartest men in show business. He’s got an incredible knack for taking a story that you’ve heard before and giving it that little extra something to propel it into territory you’ve never visited. He’s done it with murder mysteries, superheroes, and magic tricks, and with Inception he tries to tackle the single most complex entity on the planet: the human mind.

Does he succeed? That’s going to depend in large part upon your definition of success. Is it the accomplishment of a certain set of goals and objectives predetermined by the narrative, or the ability to take the expectations of a viewer and supersede them? I suppose that I think of success as a combination of both variables, with the overriding hope that the piece is going to hold together thematically, conceptually, and emotionally.

To answer my question about whether or not Inception succeeds: well, mostly.

Ironically, the story that had seemed to be incredibly complex is actually rather straightforward. Cobb (a strong Leonardo DiCaprio) works as an extractor of information by infiltrating people’s dreams. In the real world, he’s unable to return home to his family because of some trouble with the law, and voila! Saito (Ken Watanabe, solid although sometimes unintelligible) offers him a dream job (no pun intended). If Cobb can plant an idea in the mind of his business rival, Saito will make all of his problems disappear.

One thing that struck me about much of the film is how much of it involves talking heads. Now, we certainly get our share of action, but there’s a ton of time where characters talk to one another explaining exactly what will happen later, what might happen later, and what they didn’t say originally about what could have happened later. Not necessarily a flaw, but certainly a point of interest in a film that seemed to promise a world of visual wonder after visual wonder. In fact, the biggest “wow” moment was already revealed in the trailer when the city folds back on top of itself and becomes, essentially, its own horizon.

The performances are uniformly good, with particular notice going to Tom Hardy. I thought he was great in Star Trek: Nemesis, and he’s very good here as a charming and very effective “forger.” I hope that he gets a chance to shine in a lead role sometime soon. Marion Cotillard, one of my favorites, is solid here, if not ascending to the heights that she’s capable of. (note: is it a coincidence that Edith Piaf’s Non, je ne regrette rien has such a pivotal role in Inception, given Ms. Cotillard's recent history? I think not.) Sadly, Ellen Page might have bitten off a little bit more than she could chew. Verbal comedy, her strength, is on a positively spartan diet here, and the way that she interprets some pivotal dialogue is very nearly groan-inducing. It’s great for the car to handle well when you’re driving through the countryside, but when it’s a matter of life and death, you’ve really got to hope that the thing’s going to be able to take the quick turns.

The real star of Inception is Christopher Nolan’s concept. The idea of people being able to enter dreams at will, to dream collectively, and to find endless amounts of time present in dreams within dreams is fascinating, to say the very least. The way that he deals with certain logistical problems is inventive, effective, and follows dream logic as “rationally” as possible. I’m very grateful for the fact that someone with Nolan’s clout is using the resources and talent available to him to make high-concept films that attempt to break new ground. In today’s cinematic landscape, filmmakers like him are sadly few and far between. We live in a world where it’s much safer to spin the same yarns over and over again with faces and minor details changed than it is to try to tell a truly original story that no one’s ever heard before. Sure, The Matrix and Minority Report come to mind as precursors, but Inception has an innovative spark of invention that sets it apart.

So why the hesitation? Why not proclaim it the cinema's newest masterpiece? Why not wax eloquent about how great Inception is?

Because, sadly, there are flaws. What’s incredibly unfortunate is that I cannot go into very much detail at all without discussing major plot points, and I wouldn’t dare spoil anything for someone who’s not seen the film. I will outline a few. While Nolan’s a brilliant conceptual thinker, I didn’t feel anywhere near the amount of emotion that the material should have been capable of generating. Some of the major plot motifs seemed simplistic and, while some of his directorial flourishes are nice touches, there are certain pivotal slow-motion shots that were unintentionally silly.

My single biggest problem with Inception is the ending. Unfortunately, I figured out a big part of it midway through the picture. With films, we may enjoy being one step ahead of where we feel we’re “supposed” to be, but what we really want is to be slapped sideways by something we never saw coming. While it ends (I suppose) the only way that it really can, I think Nolan painted himself into a bit of a corner. By ending it on the note that he did, he was forced to do something with the final shot of the film that I can’t help but think is a major cheat. I love the idea that it be the last image we see, but don't think that it works in execution.

I'm sure that a number of people are going to say, if they haven't already, that they can't wait to see Inception again (and again) to grasp the supposed riches within. I've felt similarly about many, many films in my life, but, strangely, in this case I'm not sure that a second viewing would really help me understand anything any better. We'll see. . .

Should you shell out some hard-earned cash for Inception? Yes, I’d say you should. Nolan’s risk-taking is something that you don’t see often enough, and it’s the single most audacious film you’re likely to see all summer. What’s unfortunate is that something that sets out to be this daring in its approach needs to be flat-out incredible to fulfill its potential, which Inception isn’t. Look, I enjoy a good game. I’m just not someone who loves being toyed with.

3.75 stars out of 5.