Posts Tagged ‘film reviews’

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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Yet another evening of Hong Kong classic cinema, this time with King Hu’s Shaw Brothers classic from 1966 Come Drink With Me/Da zui xia/Big Drunken Hero, starring drop-dead gorgeous (and Shanghai-born!) Cheng Pei-Pei/Zheng Peipei, as Golden Swallow, prancing around the screen like a prima ballerina and applying a major bad-ass hurt-on to all the baddies.

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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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Sure, I know, it took me too long enough, but I finally got around to seeing Jia’s The World last night and I’m still ruminating on how I should feel about it. I need a few more days.

In any event, today is a great opportunity to scribble a bit more about modern Mainland Chinese filmmaking styles, and why the art form is slow to make a decisive breakthrough into Western film-going markets.

Jia Zhang-ke/贾樟柯’s back story is an interesting one. His reputation as an indie Chinese filmmaker based in the PRC was fully cemented during his badboy days of shooting films outside of the State-approved film sector. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been almost twenty-three years since the release of the first Wall Street franchise and I recently had the chance to see the Stone classic once again in a bid to familiarize myself with its crisp dialogue in anticipation of Money Never Sleeps, commonly referred to as “Wall Street 2.” During this go, however, I watched Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen’s exchanges with a new perspective and with a maturity borne of more than two decades that have passed since then. Read the rest of this entry »

Yet another weekend of classic films, this time with a pair from the ‘60s (I’m just in that sort of mood) enjoyed over some beers and dry snacks. This was a Kirk Douglas fest, with two of his pictures from back in the day: John Frankenheimer’s black and white masterpiece Seven Days In May and the coming-of-age post-WWII war Middle Eastern 1966 drama, Cast A Giant Shadow.

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