Lost In Translation

Avatar

I just saw Avatar the other day and it is an event-like experience in that it is worth going to the theater to have the 3D experience in order to inhabit another world. There wasn’t much of a story, but I don’t think it matters all that much. It actually reminds me of Apocalypto, Mel Gibson’s, adrenaline thrill fest, in its intensity and simplicity of enjoying the ride so to speak. You gotta respect Cameron's ability to make entertaining spectacles that get butts in the seats.

The Insect Woman

I was intrigued by Shohei Imamura and his preoccupation of the lower classes the first time I read about him in Ina Buruma’s book Behind The Mask. Insect Woman is the first film I saw at a retrospective of Japanese film at The Japan Foundation. Now seeing it in context to two of his other films (Pigs And Battleships and The Pornographers), I can see it as being fairly representative of his vision as a film maker. The Japanese title is “Nippon konchuki” or “Japanese entomology,” and this suggests a sort of scientific distance from the subject. Imamura also has a penchant for sensuous women who survive in the face of struggle through her resilience. Tome, the heroine, has lead a difficult life by the time she has escaped from her agrarian existence and birthing of a bastard child to Tokyo where she manages to find some success and happiness, as a Madame of a brothel before falling again. The introduction and closing provide bookends to story showing an insect and woman struggling up hills. I find Imamura’s films fascinating because he chooses to chronicle the unofficial version of Japan that of pimps, prostitutes, and other people from the underbelly of society. The Criterion edition includes the usual excellent bonus material: a fascinating essay by Dennis Lim, a conversation between Shohei Imamura and critic Tadao Sato, and an interview with critic and historian Tony Rayns.

New Cult Canon: Bad Santa

Bad Santa, probably my favorite Billy Bob Thornton film and a holiday classic, gets the New Cult Canon treatment:

Point being, Zwigoff is the rare filmmaker who knows how to do smart lowbrow. Respected directors aren’t supposed to do fart jokes, and they’re also not supposed to touch material as vile and misanthropic as 2002’s Bad Santa, the ultimate in holiday counter-programming. But Zwigoff, who emerged on the scene with the great documentary Crumb, has a Crumb-like contempt for fancy-pants elitism even as he operates outside of the mainstream, so he’s a stranger to both worlds. At the same time, his films have to appeal to someone, especially a genuine studio comedy like Bad Santa, so he has to straddle those worlds as well, which here means a tone that pushes the boundaries of good taste while holding just a little back. Zwigoff’s sour, inebriated mall Santa is bad, but in his perverse way, he has as much universal appeal as jolly old St. Nick: Unless you have a superhuman tolerance for the hassles of the holiday season, there’s a downside to the most wonderful time of the year.

Nevertheless, Disney was deeply unhappy with Bad Santa in the months and weeks leading up to its release. Owning Miramax (and its genre-movie label Dimension, which ultimately releasedBad Santa) had always given the studio some degree of plausible deniability; it could reap the benefits of adult-oriented fare like Pulp Fiction without sullying its squeaky-clean image, and claim to respect the sovereignty of Bob and Harvey Weinstein if any controversy took hold. But Santa Claus is a sacred figure, and the movies had never really questioned that before, much less turned him into an insatiable boozehound and ass-man who’s the primary source of nearly 300 profanities in 90 minutes. The contentious back-and-forth between Zwigoff and his bosses resulted in a tacked-on ending that tried to give audiences a softer landing, plus at least three different DVD cuts, including a longer “unrated” cut called Badder Santa and a “director’s cut” that’s actually three minutes shorter than the theatrical version. The movie turned out to be a hit in spite of Disney’s transparent embarrassment over it, which speaks to how strong a chord the film struck with people thirsting for holiday fun without the obligatory treacle. 

More End Of The Decade Film Lists

Slate has an interactive list that rates movies according to their position on different end of the year lists. 

Salon has a series where different film makers and critics select one film that was their favorite of the decade.

Pigs And Battleships

Pigs and Battleships was  Shohei Imamura’s breakout film. Imamura was an assistant director under Ozu before striking out on his own and the two directors couldn’t be more different in style and content. In this film Imamura has a moving camera and one that retracts to give an anthropological view of the proceedings taking place within the screen. Ozu focuses on the middle class and such conflicts as leaving family for marriage, but in this film Imamura looks at the poor inhabitants of Yokosuka that live near an American Navy base and depend on them for their livelihood. The main character, Kinta, is a low-level yakuza member who is helping the yakuza raise pigs with scraps from the American Navy base. His girlfriend, Haruka, is what would become the typical plucky Imamura heroine, wants him to quit the gang and get a straight job at a factory in nearby Kawasaki. Conversely, she is being pressured by her mother and sister to become a kept woman for one of the sailors on base, but is reluctant to do so. In this film and subsequent films (I’ve previously seen The Insect Woman's [1963] original title translates as Entomological Chronicles of Japan, and the subtitle of The Pornographers [1966] is Introduction to Anthropology) Imamura focuses on the lower orders with an anthropological view from a distance. It is also a black comedy, one of the yakuza bosses thinks he is dying and provides comic relief. Imamura see the Japanese as the pigs and has little regard for these people who are ruled by their pursuit of material wealth and an easy life. The Americans fare no better, the half-Japanese American middleman from Hawaii swindles the yakuza and deserts his mistress. The rest of the Americans are seen as simple brutes only looking for a good time.  Imamura takes on some big themes with good results, and my only criticism would be some sloppy action scenes where violence takes place and some over acting in places. Otherwise a very satisfying look at postwar Japan-warts and all. This Criterion edition (part of the Pigs, Pimps, and Prostitutes box set) contains an interview-like special from French television, an interesting essay by film critic Audie Bock, as well as a discussion segment from critic Tony Raynds.

DVD Extras: Gomorrah

I'd call Gomorrah a revisionist mafia film and it is out in a special 2 disc set. This is from a review in Slate:

The thinking goes like this: No matter how bleakly mob movies end, they are invariably intoxicating. (What is Goodfellas' famous Copacabana tracking shot if not a virtuoso dance of seduction, tugging us tipsily through the warm belly of underworld privilege?) Gomorrah, by contrast, is great precisely because it's repulsive. The film, about the Neapolitan organized-crime syndicate the Camorra, starts with the gruesome slaughter of some half-naked thugs in the sickly blue light of a tanning salon; it reaches a quietly nauseating crescendo with a shot of rotting peaches grown from mob-polluted soil; and it ends with the image of a bulldozer indifferently scooping up the corpses of two freshly murdered youths and hoisting them to the sky like a sacrifice. A two-hour-plus stranglehold, the movie sends us back into the world gasping.

Gomorrah is a deeply moralizing film, brooking no ethical ambiguity or mitigating factors in its hellish vision of organized crime. But Garrone is smart about his moralizing. He curates the film's ample stock of outrages with a cool head, dry eyes, and a steady hand. The source material, a best-selling book by the investigative journalist Roberto Saviano, is so potent that Garrone needs only stage, frame, and edit it for maximum impact, then step out of its way.

It's impossible to avoid comparing Gomorrah to the iconic gangster movies that have preceded it, and the film itself makes one explicit comparison early on, when two of its younger characters playact a shootout from Brian DePalma's Scarface with real handguns. "The world is ours!" they shout. "I'm Tony Montana!" But how does the film really relate to genre staples like Scarface, Goodfellas, and The Godfather? Is it more honest? Less sentimental? More authentic? And if we agree on what these shaky terms mean and decide that Gomorrahdeserves them, is that the same as saying it's better?

Best Films of the 00s

I have been keeping pace with the  AV Club post on the the best of the 00s. But there are several other good lists out there.  Glenn Kenny did the Top 100 and Time Out NY did the best 50. Here's my Top 10, which was hard enough:

1) City of God (2002)

2) Last Life In The Universe (2003)

3) In The Mood For Love (2000)

4) Memento (2000)

5) Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004)

6) Children of Men (2006)

7) Amores Perros (2000)

8) Adaptation (2002)

9) Lost In Translation (2003)

10) Sexy Beast (2000)

Zombieland

Zombieland didn't seem to get much press when it came out, which is unfortunate, because it is an entertaining little film. I first heard it get raves on Slate's Cultural Gabfest. It clocks in at just under 90 minutes. It stars Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harreleson, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin as survivors in the post apocalyptic America now known as Zombieland. Eisenberg has survived by following a set of rules for survival which show up in the film as graphics as they are referenced. In this universe zombies can be killed by guns, so there is a lot of video game-like violence and lots of dark humor. There is a lot of great cinematography-slow motion sequences the Wax video homage of the zombie running on fire at the beginning-this sequence in particular is impressive. It has a good soundtrack as well-Band of Horses among others. There's a surprise cameo, but I won't spoil it.

Top Japanese Films

Saw this at F***ked Gaijin:

Film magazine Kinejun has published a list of Japan's all-time greatest films to commemorate their 90th anniversary. They did the same exercise for previous anniversaries and, each time, "Seven Samurai" took the top spot. This time, however, "Tokyo Story" was voted best. The full list:

1. Tokyo Story (東京物語 )
2. Seven Samurai (七人の侍)
3. Floating Clouds (浮雲)
4. Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate (幕末太陽伝)
5. Battles Without Honour and Humanity aka The Yakuza Papers (仁義なき戦い)
6. Twenty-Four Eyes (二十四の瞳)
7. Rashomon (羅生門)
7. Sazen Tange and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo (丹下左膳余話　百万両の壺)
7. The Man Who Stole the Sun (太陽を盗んだ男)
10. The Family Game (家族ゲーム)
10. Stray Dog (野良犬)
10. Typhoon Club (台風クラブ)

The most recent film is "Typhoon Club", which came out in 1985, so it's only changing tastes and a different set of critics which have affected rankings since the 1999 list was compiled. In that one, A "Fugitive from the Past" aka "Straits of Hunger" (飢餓海峡) was ranked 4th but doesn't appear at all this year. The same goes for "Murderous Instincts" (赤い殺意) and "Tales of Ugetsu" (雨月物語). Twenty years ago, Kurosawa's "Ikiru" (生きる) and "Yojimbo" (用心棒) made that year's list but not since. "The Life of Oharu" (西鶴一代女) has also fallen slightly out of favour in the same way.

I certainly need to see some of these, but also surprised not to see "Ikiru" or any films by Shohei Imamura or Juzo Itami.

Inglourious Basterds

I think most viewers have an idea of what a Quentin Tarantino film is going to be like. That being said I was surprised, entertained, and was a bit put off about the some of the graphic violence in Inglourious Basterds, but not enough to nullify my enjoyment of the film. There were some really wonderful performances in the film in particular those by Melanie Laurent, Christopher Waltz, and Michael Fassbinder. There were some really great set pieces and the usual Mexican standoff that Tarantino has used in his films since Reservoir Dogs. I also like dhow he recycled David Bowie’s great theme for Cat People “Putting Out A Fire (With Gasoline).” However, I can see why this film was controversial. But I think you just need to approach it in the mindset of a film universe and accept it on those terms alone as a fantasy. I’m glad I saw it on the big screen.