If he weren’t so damn likable and talented, it would be tempting to begrudge Pedro Almodóvar his success. Almodóvar—always a gifted visual stylist—turned an artistic corner a decade ago with All About My Mother and its follow-up, Talk to Her. To the eye-popping color, self-conscious deconstruction of genre, and playful performativity that had characterized his earlier work, those films added an emotional maturity and clarity that his previous movies only hinted at. They were serious, and they were seriously fun to watch. Since then, Almodóvar has honed a brand of cinema that weds respectability and commercial viability so seamlessly that Cannes invites and U.S. distribution now come pro forma. That bankable Almodóvar brand, coupled with his larger-than-life personality, has made him one of the few breakout directorial stars of contemporary international cinema. People and critics love to love him and his movies. As a result, he’s difficult to criticize. Click here to read the rest of Chris Wisniewski’s review of Broken Embraces.
Updating the private investigator film with September 11 shadings is not a terribly novel idea, but writer/director Noah Buschel isn’t an idea man. He likes feelings, atmosphere, actors, and emotion, and he originally said he was inspired to make The Missing Person because he was reading Raymond Chandler around the time of the attacks—but then he told indieWIRE that he was being slightly disingenuous when he originally said this, as his motivations were more vague. Buschel’s deprioritzing of tagline-ready storytelling mechanics is evident as his movie gawkily transitions between various plots. Surprisingly, it’s two elements that might seem like drawbacks that glue the pieces together and (somewhat) sustain the appeal of this mess—the consistently ugly graininess of the HDCAM and super-16 (itself digitally altered to look like DV) and Michael Shannon’s rewardingly repetitive performance. Click here to read the rest of Justin Stewart’s review of The Missing Person.
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness opens with Emperor Hirohito’s radio announcement renouncing his divinity going unremarked by a Taiwanese family as they gather around a newborn son, establishing both the distance of power from the everyday and its invisible pervasiveness. Hou’s tactic is not simply a clever way of handling a tale of people caught up in the world historic, a clichéd notion which simultaneously aggrandizes the individual’s tragedy while subordinating him to the seeming untouchability of historic forces. The oblique scenes in which Hou depicts Taiwan’s White Terror are truths in themselves, not cryptograms to be decoded for the historical answers they contain, not mere indicators of something beyond the limits of the frame.
It is one of our more damaging and persistent fictions that identifies power with truth—as opposed to honesty, which almost no one would accept—because it spawns the further fiction that those who hold the former possess the keys to the latter. Click here to read the rest of Andrew Tracy’s review of The Sun.
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.
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