Posts Tagged ‘film review’

Thanks again to the good folks at Chinese indie film distributor dGenerate Films, I finally had the chance to catch Liu Jiayin’s (pictured above, far left) cute “no-budget” flick Oxhide this past weekend.

Sipping on several tall Gambrinuses, I was amazed at how such a puny little film succeeded in making its splash on the festival circuit, given how Oxhide’s plot unfurls via a truly novel – and potentially unsettling — series of long static takes. Director Liu’s small DV cam doesn’t creep an inch from its fixed focal point, sequence by sequence, once we get settled in the scene. It’s a technique which normally blares “student film alert!” yet thanks to a combination of strong Czech beer and the tale’s emotional crescendos and swoons, I was pulled in mightily by the picture’s first quarter-hour.

Normally, I don’t appreciate this kind of artifice, though in Liu’s case – again, unsure whether it was due to the lingering effects of those brewskis I drank — I liked how Oxhide’s message crept up on me like that, drawing me in gradually. It made me admire director Liu’s clever use of her camera to mask the obvious budgetary shortfalls which would otherwise permit her to decorate her sets more lavishly and convincingly. Instead, whether we’re staring at a printer-adorned desktop or at a fixed position towards the family couch, for instance, the action takes place well away from the camera and we’re forced to listen intently for clues and cues. Liu’s long, sometimes twenty-minute, exposures draw us magnetically into Oxhide’s story by forcing us to rely – most unusually for a film – upon our ears rather than our eyes. It takes a while to get into, yet once your brain acclimatizes itself to the unchanging reality that her camera will never track along with her characters – Liu (as Bei Bei), mother (Hui Lan), and father (played by Liu’s real parents) — you drop all annoyance and begin to enjoy the story. You sharpen your listening skills and imagine the things you might not be seeing behind camera rather intently.

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Readers who have been diligently monitoring my RSS feed over this past week will know I’ve been drawing richly from the deep well of film gems which is Chris Jones Vimeo channel.

You know, I’m funny like that; when I really fancy something I tend to go long. I get downright streaky. I’ll tinker with something, push its envelope, and go dangerously into “burning the midnight oil” territory until I’ve just about learned as much as I can from the thing under the microscope. Those videoblogs on offer at the Living Spirit site are remarkable examples of how to keep your dedicated audience engaged about your film long after your production has wrapped and your film’s in the can.

And – for the record — I’ve been learning a heck of a lot. Chris Jones appears to be one of the indie film community’s truly remarkable – yes, remarkable, folks – online and offline personalities. Like I’ve been sporadically commenting below some of his videos at the site, it’s astonishing how Jones has gained industry notoriety as a director – the film industry’s equivalent of the all-American quarterback, or in European soccer parlance, the A League striker – while it was as a film producer that he cemented his reputation within indie circles. Admire the poise, the concentration, and the sheer outspokenness (no “ums,” “uhs,” or other oral hesitations) as Chris describes the mechanics of several stunt scripted sequences in Genevieve Jolliffe’s Urban Ghost Story clip:

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I admit, I’m a huge sucker for flicks that have my name in their title.

There of course was this one and another flick I caught sometime last year on a recommendation from the old man called Young Adam. In the case of both of these pictures, I learned something truly vital about my personal approach towards relationships over the course of their respective 90-minute runtimes, which clearly demonstrates that when people strongly recommend something to you there’s usually a valid enough reason why they’re doing so.

So let’s have a little chat about Adam, shall we?

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We’ve all seen Wo hu cang long/Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon several times in the past. We’ve been dazzled by the spectacular fight choreography, the captivating CG efforts recreating the Qing-era walled capital of Beijing, and, in my case, stood awestruck by the truly heartfelt relationship existing between Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-Fat that completely stole the show (at least for me).

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Okay, so now that we’ve got that windbag blog title out of the way (how did I do, folks?), let’s get down to the brass tacks of the matter: the iconic and often-imitated-rarely-duplicated cinematographic marvel which was once Zhang Yimou’s Hero/Ying xiong, the 2004 swashbuckling flicker picture that dazzled and titillated, yet somehow didn’t intellectually connect.

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I recently tracked down a copy of Lisa Cholodenko’s latest The Kids Are All Right (c/o Script Shadow – thanks Carson Reeves!) penned with script partner Stuart Blumberg, a screenplay I blew through within half an hour. Practically leaping off the paper, Kids appeared to be yet another remarkable story which practically all viewers could relate to and another signature Cholodenko ensemble picture

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For those of you tuning in for the first time, I’ve been woodshedding these first several weeks of the New Year, catching up on books, for the most part, and bolstered by dozens of films which escaped my notice during the years 2005 and 2006. It’s been an intense month with a gruelling sleep and viewing schedule, and as happens each and every January, I’ve been spinning out a ton of content.

Stephen Frears’s The Queen arrived the other day in the mail and like the promised Oscar hype of the time, I wasn’t to be disappointed. Read the rest of this entry »

I’d been almost entirely out of the movie loop during the years 2006 and 2007, so for this woodshedding month of January 2010 I’ve been madly catching up on films from then. I’m on a tear these past couple of weeks, as I review the following four flicks from this past weekend for your reading pleasure while I deliberately hack my way through the couple hundred or so titles which remain must-sees.

Let’s begin… Read the rest of this entry »

During what’s turned out to be a splendid woodshedding month of January, I finally had a chance to catch the special features section of M. Night Shyamalan’s 2006 The Lady in the Water and once again I wasn’t disappointed. Read the rest of this entry »

So what do you really know about the travesty of justice that took place in Rwanda back in April 1994?

There teenagers just sliding into adolescence right about now who likely have never even heard of Rwanda, so I pose the question to them: what do you know? Can you even locate the Central African statelet on the map? What do you know the genocide that occurred more than fifteen years ago? Read the rest of this entry »