Financed by the state-owned China Film Group Corporation to the tune of $80 million, John Woo’s Red Cliff is the latest “most expensive Chinese film ever made,” following quickly upon such prior contenders as Curse of the Golden Flower and Hero. Woo’s film is of course a massive-scale martial arts epic like its spendy predecessors, both of which were directed by Zhang Yimou. And Woo’s take on the Asian blockbuster is very much like Zhang’s: the cast is packed with innumerable Chinese superstars (Tony Leung, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Zhao Wei, Chang Chen, etc.) who play heroes that do everything from catching spears in mid-air to ripping arrows out of their own bodies and stabbing others with them. And as in Zhang’s films, the carnage is immeasurable: hundreds of thousands of people are sliced, jabbed, or burned alive over the course of the film’s bloated running time, which has itself been chopped for U.S. distribution. Click here to read the rest of Leo Goldsmith’s review of Red Cliff.
Much can be said about the concept and implications of globalization. That it’s good for corporations, indifferent to local economies and cultures, rough on the working class. Here’s another: globalization inspires very bad art. Besides Jia Zhangke and Olivier Assayas, who understand commercial exchange as being inseparable from life, and see business as transforming but not necessarily debasing human relations, most filmmakers approach globalization as an existential death-match between capitalism and the human soul. Now that we’re so connected, goes the thinking, we struggle to connect. We want to go home, but we’re spiritually lost. Fractured stories reflect our fractured selves. Modern life is an Edward Hopper painting, with everyone everywhere staring off into the distance, texting into the void, and muttering about the media and America.
The one helpful thing about Paul Haggis’s Crash winning the Best Picture Oscar in 2006 is that future historians will have an easy time identifying the pop-psych foolishness of our era. “We’re always behind this metal and glass,” goes that film’s opening monologue. “I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.” Hollywood doesn’t have a monopoly on fortune cookie existentialism though, as freshly exhibited by Swedish writer-director Lukas Moodysson’s dismaying career killer Mammoth. Click here to read the rest of Eric Hynes’s review of Mammoth.
With so many films about the Iraq war come and gone, the arrival of The Messenger, a becalmed, observant drama about Casualty Notification Officers (those whose work it is to stoically inform next of kin of their loss) seems oddly appropriate, especially as it’s released at that moment when the public’s attention is being wrenched towards Afghanistan and the ongoing situation in Iraq drifts ever further from consciousness. Oren Moverman’s directorial debut is structured around absences—those who’ve died, actions taken elsewhere. His protagonists are largely obsessed with aftermaths, even as they works towards becoming actors in their own lives. From our vantage point in 2009, the film feels a period piece, some kind of elegy for those hazy pre-surge summers of 2005 or 2006 when casualties were at their height and the war promised to loom large over upcoming elections. Largely stripped of politics, aside from a generalized “war damages” sensibility, The Messenger is not here to serve as nagging Iraq War reminder. In fact, it’s in many ways not quite the movie you’d expect.
With the recent announcement that no less than 20 films were submitted for this year’s Best Animated Feature Oscar, 2009 can rightly be labeled something of a watershed year for the format. Of course, some of those entries are bland generic staples—the new Ice Age movie, the Chipmunks sequel, Battle for Terra, Monsters vs. Aliens—shiny, machine-tooled baubles designed to attract and pacify the youngest-audience quadrant for big studio profits. But considering entries like Coraline, 9, Ponyo, Up, the forthcoming A Town Called Panic, and Wes Anderson’s just-released Fantastic Mr. Fox, a strong case could be made for animation reemerging as not just a medium for displaying up-to-the minute technologies, but for personal artistic expression. This is no longer just a Pixar/Miyazaki world. Given that a director’s craft depends so fully on imagining the layout of a frame and then re-creating it before a camera, it’s surprising that more established directors haven’t tried their hands at animation—it’s a control freak’s paradise. Click here to read the rest of Jeff Reichert’s review of Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Richard Curtis, creator of Blackadder and Mr. Bean, is one of the most powerful people in British show business. His laudable and dedicated career-long work for the charity Comic Relief, which has gained a political dimension since his involvement with the pressure group Live 8, has given him one of the country’s most illustrious contact books; his forthcoming knighthood has almost certainly already been minted. Of course he has also written and/or directed a number of highly successful films destined for the U.S. market, among them Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually. As such, it is incumbent on us to take him seriously as an auteur of sorts, especially since the world he has created through his movies (Curtis’s Britain, with all the cracks papered over, like a tourist board video) is so vividly singular.
How ironic, then, that his latest offering, a nostalgic rock ‘n’ roll movie called Pirate Radio (original British title: The Boat That Rocked) might have been saved from shipwreck if only Curtis had gone back to his roots and written it as a sitcom instead. Click here to read the rest of Julien Allen’s review of Pirate Radio.
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