First off, let me thank the Fruit Stand/DVD and CD Store that helped subsidize this festival. Without their 10RMB (that’s ~$1.25) rate for DVD’s, none of this would have been possible. Obviously, they’re taking a monetary loss for the free advertising I promised them in exchange for being the exclusive supplier.
Most film festivals have some sort of theme, sometimes something “cinematical” such as “new wave directors,” sometimes geographical. Given the current circumstances, let’s say the theme was geographical, as in movies made by the US. (To be honest, the second choice was funded by European money, but it’s an American franchise as far as I’m concerned, even if the movie took place in London and had only one American star.
It was a lot like this… except it was summer, in a hotel room, and instead of the crowd it was just me.
American Psycho opened the film festival, a movie I had not seen since its theatrical run in 2000. At the risk of this mini-review being too mini, I’ll say that the slasher elements of the second half of the movie are considerably less interesting than the earlier sections, establishing the main character as more of a “ridiculous” crazy than “crazy” crazy. It’s a bit of a cop-out, but it’s safe to say that the movie is polarizing, and those that would like it have probably already seen it and those that would not like it won’t have their minds changed, nor ever watch it, especially because of this mini-review. I won’t waste my time convincing people to see the movie by describing it, so I’ll leave with how I’m glad that the setting for the movie (and the book on which it was based) was the 1980’s. Placing it in 2000 would have dated it too much, not allowing such wonderfully absurd setpieces as the Huey Lewis monologue. It only works because of how we remember Huey Lewis (and later, Genesis); had it been placed in 2000, the movie would not have aged well as it did not have the benefit of hindsight in picking songs that could serve as a “soundtrack of the era.” Very good movie. If you haven’t seen it for a while, let me recommend a repeat viewing.
Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction. I’ll make the title its own sentence, if only to draw attention to itself. Yep, it’s that bad. In simplest terms, if I fall asleep during an “erotic thriller,” it’s neither very erotic or thrilling. Out like a light, and this was in the mid-afternoon. “Twists and turns”, blah blah blah, and I just didn’t care about how it ended. It’s odd to see a movie seem so right with making London look as non-American and modern as it supposedly is, and showing off enough contemporary modern design to serve as a timecapsule for the mid-2000’s, but have absolutely nothing going for it beyond that. Bad writing, all but unrecognizable actors in the non Sharon Stone roles, and, again, the power to put me to sleep. And I don’t fall asleep during movies. No good.
I’ve never seen all of a Spike Lee movie before, and at this point, not all of his movies are about racial issues or whatever is stereotypically thought of as being his “topics.” The final movie, Inside Man, was very much a a “robbery movie” where the details of the “heist” are more interesting than what is being robbed and the grisly cop (Denzel Washington) and the too cool for the room robber (Clive Owen) share a manly man moment of bonding, realizing they have something in common but are on opposite sides of the law. I guess putting it in those terms sort of cheapens it, and that’s not fair. Movies like this are always this close to leaving the audience feeling manipulated instead of surprised by the (again) “twists and turns,” but everything in the movie seems plausible enough as its happening, though it’s probably not the best movie to think about after the fact. It’s pure hype to call the movie “unlike any heist movie you’ve ever seen!” being that that quote references the fact that an important plot point is that the robbers seemingly aren’t stealing anything, but instead have some other goal in mind. The quote makes it sound like it’s something new and different, but it’s been done (not to take anything away from the movie, though). I mentioned the part about Spike Lee, and I guess that makes it so I had some unfair preconceived expectations, but when the little kid has a moment with the head robber and the robber is disgusted at the Grand Theft Auto look-alike he’s playing, it’s not exactly subtle social commentary. Similarly, the very obvious moment of a Sikh employee of the bank getting hustled by the police for being an Arab isn’t left at that; a line is later delivered about how ‘Sikh’s aren’t Arabs’, in case anyone had missed the direct scene minutes earlier. Likewise, and I say this more as a joke than anything, but I couldn’t help but notice that the true bad guy in the movie was an aristocratic white guy… Anyway, consider this movie highly recommended. A word of warning though: I’m not one to really care much about movie soundtracks or “scores,” but the one in this movie was just plain awful, drawing attention to itself at all the inopportune moments.
The First Annual Shenzhen Film Festival receives three-and-a-half stars, as the opening movie was a “safe” choice, being that I had seen it before and the middle pick managed to put me to sleep. Of course, the final selection brought everything back together and left the audience wondering when the next Shenzhen Film Festival would be held. Also, minus some points because I’ve realized I don’t really like writing movie reviews, no matter how brief.
IWRY
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[…] July 16th, 2006 Dan Once again, the generous sponsorship of the Fruit Stand/DVD store made this review possible. Be sure to stop by and enjoy a 50% discount if you’re not American! I’ve said I don’t enjoy writing movie reviews, so I’ll try to skirt around specifically “reviewing” the movie in that exact term, but it’ll be tough considering the movie is intertwined with its message. Usually when someone goes out of his or her way to create something “deep,” “thought-provoking,” “challenging” or the like, the final product doesn’t end up being any of those things, if only because if it draws too much attention that goal (“deepness”) instead of the movie itself. It’s incestuous, but I’ll link here to my review of Inside Man with my brief commentary on its very out-of-continuity “thought-provoking” scene of the seemingly vicious bank robber being disgusted by a Grand Theft Auto-look-alike. A History of Violence practically begs for over-analysis starting with its vague but simultaneously pointed title. The director, David Cronenberg, is very much on the record talking about the philosophical issues raised by his movie. All That You Can’t Leave Behind. (bonus points for invoking a U2 song in a faux-deep manner!) Most “deep” movies become grossly over-analyzed, with the arguers forgetting what the movie was about and what happened in it (or what the movie wasn’t about and what didn’t happen it—Donnie Darko fans, I’m looking in your direction). Throw in some psycho-babble (“Munich was about how Israel became self-actualized in the 1970’s and 80’s”), and you’re good to go. Without putting it terms of whether it was a good movie or not, Munich certainly had enough going on it to not need this over-analysis. (Okay, to be fair, some people have complained that not much of anything happened in the movie, other than Eric Bana sweating like a maniac when he was getting is pump on.) Oddly enough, “A History of Violence” needs this discussion; not a whole lot happens in the movie; it could basically be considered an immediate and direct sequel to Goodfellas. (I liked A History of Violence enough that I won’t ruin the “how” and “why” that lingers throughout the story for our readership, but if you’ve seen Goodfellas, you’ll understand what I mean about it being the next step in the Goodfellas story.) Sure, plenty happens in A History of Violence, but the characters spend so little time onscreen reflecting on it; the extent is really “how long have you lied to me? And did I marry your past or just an identity you arbitrarily created?” The viewers are in the same position as the characters after the open-ended conclusion of the movie. Like the characters, the viewers are asking themselves, “What’s in me? What am I capable of if something needed to be done?” “Would I be able to leave behind my ‘history of violence’?” “How far removed is sex from violence?” And most importantly, “what would I do to leave that history behind me?” The movie doesn’t provide an answer beyond implying that people will do ‘what it takes’ and leaving violence in the past doesn’t mean that it won’t find you. Oddly, any discussion of the movie uses the term “violence” as if it is something more than just a concept, as if it’s a physical thing, like a jacket, a car, or a computer. Is this violence as presented in the movie worth considering a physical object? No one talks about happiness in such terms. In fact, the only other concept that gets this treatment is love. It would be convenient to say that there’s some “duality” between the two, one being a requirement to survive and one being involved in the process of making more of oneself, but that would be the unnecessary analysis I talked about above. But, this is entitled “Navel Gazing,” so I’ll stand by my statement, intellectual preposterosity or not. That’s why the movie works in spite of it being a rather thin story. It hits all the right notes to leave the audience asking questions “with” the movie, not “at” the movie. It’s a dangerous angle from which to make a movie, but it was pulled off with great success. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t at least thought about the issues it raises after seeing it, whether or not the train of thought evolved/devolved (I vote for devolved) into a Plato-esque debate about the increasingly less-and-less abstract concept of “violence” as presented by the movie. I guess the singular moment from the movie that led to me writing at some length about this was actually not in the movie itself, but in the DVD’s special features which showed snippets of interviews with David Cronenberg at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005. Almost in passing, he said something along the lines of: Humans are the only animals on the planet that could conceptualize a world without violence. (Of course, for the smart-alecks out there, I know that animals can’t really conceptualize anything, it’s more about what an ideal world would be for other animals versus what would seemingly be the ideal world for humans.) There’s something to be said for that; we’ve been doing the human thing for a while, and there has been and always will be plenty of violence to go around. Is our ideal world really one without violence? Navel Gazing Part 1: A History of Violence receives four stars because as a philosophical treatise, it was a rather superficial and derivative train of thought stemming not from an original idea, but a movie which had an explicit goal of “getting people to think about how violence works.” Of course, the movie gets all the credit in the world for succeeding in “getting people to think” when that goal is usually a superficial ploy to attract pretentious white people (meaning NPR listeners—for future reference, NPR did pimp this movie like crazy). […]