Movies I’m Watching: Un Conte De Noel

I’ve waited a long time to lose the Desplechin virginity, and finally got around to it recently by watching “Un Conte De Noel.” The films tells the story of the Vuillard family, with a history of shared mental and physical illnesses,making their family an atypically unhappy one.

The critics, from what I’ve read thus far, tend to be split along two lines:those that admire the film despite the plot not always being “coherent”, and enjoying the “spectacle” aspects of the film, versus those that believe in substance over style and found the movie to be essentially empty at the core.

There are some real family conflicts here, but I can see how some people think the pathos of that has been lost amid all the black comedy and sketch-like scenes. Part of this is due to the fantastic ensemble cast, including Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Almaric, Melvin Poupaud and others. With actors as talented as these, one would believe that Desplechin would just get out of the way and let them act–which is usually not a bad strategy, but which can backfire when the arc and rhythm of the film are sacrificed along the way.

There are some parts that I found a bit off-putting or confusing, like the bit with the cousin and one of the wives of the sons. The wife is played by Chiara Mastroianni, the daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello. She combines the physical look of her father (esp. the features of her face) and the sultriness of her mother. It’s all that stuff about former, unrequited and uncompleted loves, and whether or not we can go back, salvage some of that emotion, reverse and change, if only for a night, the inalterable.

Almaric’s madcap performance is quite enjoyable, though it kind of grates on you after awhile. Other notable performances include the father and the mother, the latter portrayed by Catherine Deneuve. The elders of the cast were, in my opinion, the best, wearing these roles like old shoes. There is a soothing naturalism to such performances that only happens when you get a good match between actor and role, and that’s something that cannot entirely be prepackaged into a script, even if you are writing that script for a particular actor. In any case, it’s that naturalism that makes these performances so eminently watchable.

Despite the emotional tugs of war, the near catastrophes and the flirting with death and disease, there is some kind of redemption in the movie, thoughI can see why some people would think it a bit too cheap. A movie that just popped into my mind is Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme 95 classic The Celebration, another family implosion drama which is, however, a lot more serious than Un Conte de Noel in many of the themes that it deals with. 

In any case, nothing terribly moving or thought-provoking, but I suspect that my soft spot for talky, intellectual French art films is going to make me a bit more sympathetic to it overall. Worth a watch, though the DVDs I bought only had good Chinese subtitles. I probably lost a lot of the subtleties that are in the French dialogue, but that goes without saying right. 

Overall. definitely worth a watch.

Movies I’m Watching: Tarsem’s The Fall, Deception and Righteous Kill

A lot of critics, such as the NY Times Nathan Lee, did not like this film.
Here’s some of what he says:

The details of this saga, a threadbare patchwork of postcard exoticism, turgid characterizations, stilted duels and lackluster spectacle, are projected via the imagination of a little girl cognizant, it would seem, of the full repertory of high-gloss, empty-headed pictorialism deployed by corporate advertising.

Tarsem, as the filmmaker prefers to be called, made his name marketing soft drinks and sneakers, and “The Fall” bids to sell its audience on a visionary quest full of romance, intrigue, fabulous sights and fantastic creatures (Charles Darwin, swimming elephants, white people with dreadlocks). It’s strictly bargain bin.

Ouch.

Roger Ebert is a bit more sympathetic to the movie, saying:

Tarsem’s “The Fall” is a mad folly, an extravagant visual orgy, a free-fall from reality into uncharted realms. Surely it is one of the wildest indulgences a director has ever granted himself. Tarsem, for two decades a leading director of music videos and TV commercials, spent millions of his own money to finance “The Fall,” filmed it for four years in 28 countries and has made a movie that you might want to see for no other reason than because it exists. There will never be another like it.

That’s the initial wow-factor, a feeling that has any visual sensibility or heck, anyone with a still beating heart ought to share. The images are simply stunning, though I suppose Nathan Lee would argue that this art for art’s sake stuff is still essentially vacuous. I would like to know the locations, spread over 28 countries, where the film was made: there is one place which is MC Escher like in its geometry of strange, angular staircases. When the black-clad bad guys are running up and down the stairs like so many evil ants, it’s just about as good as anything computer-generated in Star Wars (I mean the prequels) or the Matrix. Perhaps it is more stunning knowing that there were supposedly no CGI in the movie at all (just old style special effects).

The film’s style is a mashup of fantasy, historical drama and animation. In the end, you see the characters (in 1915 LA) watching silent films…including the early action and stunt work in films. I suppose I’m a sucker for this meta-cinematic stuff, you know, the Cinema Paradiso-esque love letter to the cinema business, because I do love movies, and of course everyone who loves the movie loves to bask in the glow of kindred spirits. The delight of watching the oh so cute wiggling and squirming faces of children in the hospital ward watching the “flickers” is a mirror with which the narcissistic cinephile gazes at himself.

But, critics will have their criticisms. A bit interesting of a read is the Onion A.V. club’s interview with Tarsem. The stunning locations: he piggybacked them off of commercial ad work.

And then after that, I needed the characters’ backstories, so for those, I went around the globe, saying “I need to go to this location, this location,” places I’d scouted for 17 years. I would only take ads that went to those regions. So I’d shoot an ad, and then bring my actors over to shoot on location.

Anyhow, it’s a great interview, full of interesting things about his filmmaking style and methods, as well as some tidbits about his life. Like this bit about how he got into commercials, videos, and films:

So I told my dad, and he said no way. Every year, we’d go to England, because my dad was in the airlines and he got free tickets, and at that point, he just stopped it. He said, “No, you’re gonna jump ship.” He wouldn’t let me come abroad with him unless I graduated in business. I love science, but business was absolutely something I dreaded. So I barely went to college, I lied and cheated like mad, I had other people sit for my exams, everything possible. And then I got a 99 percentile on the GMAT, which got me—I could pretty much go to Harvard. So we applied out there, and my dad said, “Okay, now it’s done. He’s settled down, calmed down.” And he sent me on my way there. He sent me to visit my cousin in Vancouver, and I called from Canada and said “I’m going to go study film.” And he said, “Get to the other coast and go straight away to Harvard! Ninety-ninth percentile, you should be able to get in wherever you want!” I said “no,” and he said, “Okay, then you don’t exist any more.”

Oh, and as far as Deception and Righteous Kill….well, it’s always a joy watching De Niro and Pacino, but really, this geriatric thriller stuff doesn’t really move me. Plot twists are so common to films of this sort that it makes us jaded, I think, and that’s not good for the cinema in general. Oooh, the good guy was really the bad guy, it was an inside job, he was pulling the strings the whole time, you know how it goes. These are two terrific actors, but really, this and Deception truly belong in the category of Mc Thriller, because that’s what they are, boilerplate thrillers. I know that sounds like a paradox but this, I truly believe, is a new Hollywood genre. They are typically slick productions with your typical repertory of cinematic tricks, the high contrast shots, the moody lighting, the skewed color palettes, etc. Everyone plays their part, which is fine and good, but that’s the problem: you forget these films right after you watch them, because nothing is real and nothing leaves any lasting impression on you.

Tarsem’s film, whatever its faults, is as Roger Ebert said, something that you just have to see because it exists. It’s just an audacious thing and you can’t say that about Deception or Righteous Kill. I know that this might seem like apples and oranges, but its just that these are the last three movies that I happened to watch, so are most recent in my mind.

tarsem, the fall, movies, REM, video, art, photography, life, career

Books I’m Reading: 写给大家的中国美术史

Something’s been running around my mind since I started reading this book: the idea of the scholar-painter. Each of the early Chinese dynasties had court painters, but its during the first centuries AD, after the fall of the Han and during the successive Wei, Jin, Tang, Song, Five Dynasties that you have individual “artists” emerging, and then you have the idea that they are not just painters, but men of letters, scholars — you see it in the development, during the Song and Yuan and afterwards, of paintings that have poems written on them. The written word and the image are, thereafter, wed both in art and artist. It seems that they loved to sing and play various instruments as well.

Jiang Xun mentions that now familiar trope in Chinese high culture: the men of letters that go into seclusion, the wandering (and often drunk) poets, they of considerable talent who, for whatever reason, refuse their services to the new regime, preferring the consolations of nature and poetry.

What follows next might alienate some people (if, that is, anyone is actually reading this): I sometimes think of myself in this light. I might not be completely fit for that lifestyle, but given my druthers I would spend more time wandering, and more time writing than I do now … the parallel interests in writing, poetry, painting and music also seem to describe me. Of course, related to this apposition of various arts is the spiritual crisis or drama of alienation: of course these poets from a millennium ago could not really have experienced the anomie and alienation of we moderns: but there is, of course, much we have in common with them as well, perhaps a certain intellectual aloofness and even disdain from both masses and elites. They are not one with them. They are not for these types of games. They want an exit strategy from the mess, an escape route that can instantly take them far from the madding crowd.

In times of great turmoil or rapid social change, their ontological security is in our intellectual/artistic lineage, our belief that we are part of a loose collection of individuals and groups over human history that have shared this particular orientation. Outsiders, to use Colin Wilson’s concept anachronistically. They offer succor and sustenance to each other, through the centuries.

Grandiose, perhaps. Pompous, arrogant, poncey, overwrought, etc. It’s nothing I use to puff my ego up, to big myself. It’s just a small thought that somehow, for whatever reason I mean, gets me through the day a little easier and gives much-needed rest to the frazzled neurons that are, like those myriad background processes in any computer operating system, constantly eating up my mental and spiritual resources, insidiously and invisibly making the task of making it through the day just that much harder.

2008art, aesthetics, books, literature, chinese, china, culture, history, tang, song, writers, durkheim, jiang xun

Some pictures from Wenchuan

The rest of that series is here. Some photographs from the Magnum photographer Patrick Zachmann are here.

RedBox Art Guide for Shanghai and other cities: a pocket guide for the arty

I was at the Ke Center about a week ago for the opening of their new exhibit, and met the lovely Kat(therine) Don, director of RedBox Studio, who do graphic design and are also involved in the contemporary art scene in China. They made a bunch of these little colorful pocket-sized guides as a bit of a pet project. As you can see from some of the pictures above, the little foldable thing has a map on one side, addresses of some major art venues and galleries in the city, as well as some local and international events. It’s probably a bit more small and handy than having a magazine or guidebook, and perhaps more convenient than common digital forms of information, ie phones (Guanxi, smartphones), especially if you are an out of towner…and just want a simple thing you can slip into a pocket or purse.

I don’t mean to do promo for them. Just something that I noticed and thought was nifty.

art, redbox, guide, information, contemporary, shanghai, beijing, hongkong, scene, musuem, galleries, artists

Movies I’m Watching: Edward Yang’s Terrorizers (恐怖分子）

《恐怖分子》影评：杨德昌的手术刀-搜狐娱乐 via kwout

Edward Yang is, by any measure, a master of the cinema. Like his other films from this era (late 1980s and early 1990s), Terrorizers is a merciless dissection of the lives of the Taiwanese urban middle-class. I’ve been reading a Chinese review/essay on the film, and I think it brings out some interesting concepts. For
one, it mentions that one of the major themes of the film is the middle-age crisis, especially as it revolves around the Li Lizhong and his wife Zhou Yufen. He’s a doctor obsessed with trying to get a promotion by hook or crook, and Zhou is a writer who seems to have lost her creative spark. What at first seem like minor speed bumps, over the course of the film,
get magnified into something else–a crisis of meaning. Their marriage is on the rocks, there is adultery, both real and imagined, and soon Zhou wins a literary award and moves out just to shack up with her old/new lover.

Of course, things go pear-shaped for Li and he goes on a murderous rampage–or at least we think he does. It turns out this is just a dream. It’s a strange thing: a dream sequence in the film that for the most part remains staunchly on the outside of the characters, observing them from afar. However, when we get back to reality, we find that
instead of killing others, Li has blown his own brains out. The Chinese reviewer’s point is that the emotional cruelty inflicted upon us by “modern society” , so that it is impossible to just take Li Lizhong’s self-destruction as individual tragedy–the lives of all the characters, not just Li’s, are comments on or representations of what Yang thinks of life
in the present society. The reviewer also claims that the two younger characters–Xiao Qiang, the scion of a rich family who slums it as a photographer, and Shu An, the girl involved in the criminal underworld–are rebelling against the strictures of society; they do what they do because they are, each in their own way, rebelling against their lot in life, running away from the clutches of middle-aged meaningless that would no doubt overtake them otherwise.

This whole theory seems a bit too pat for me, but I think that the overall gist is right, if only because the overall gist of Yang movies is really hard to miss. I don’t know if it really amounts to some broadside against modern society per se–I think that like anyone, Yang sees both the good and bad things about the times we live in–but I think, like a trust artist
Yang has made it his mission to take an unflinching look at the darker side of things: the anomie, the desperation, the specter of meaningless that lurks inside and around even the most normal of lives. Anyhow, I think this essay is also quite interesting for the way that it discusses not only the movie but Yang himself: Yang, he says, takes a surgical knife
to modern society, peeling away its layers, exposing what lies inside and beneath. He/she claims that the title of the film refers not only to Shu An, the most regularly “violent” of the characters, but to all those characters who stand in opposition –or perhaps find themselves, unwillingly perhaps, thrown into a situation where they must go against grain. They are the “terrorizers” because they terrorize us into seeing what is normally repressed. In some sense, the darkness that exists beneath the calm veneer of the middle-class ego and middle-age stability and position is even darker than naked violence between say rival gangs or mafia families. That kind of violence is open, and in some ways, transparent–people know the rules, there is a ample cause and effect, but the kind of violence that erupts from the relatively staid and normal people in Yang’s films is altogether something different. It’s inchoate, and unpredictable. The victims aren’t even aware of
the fact that they are targets.

One last digression. The author of the review says that the first ten minutes of The Terrorizers reminds him of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, but says that the contrast between the two directors lies in the fact that MA explores the philosophical nature of things and existence, whereas EY takes his surgical knife and exposes the core of Taiwanese society for what it is .

影片的前10分钟让我想起了安东尼奥尼的《放大》，同样行尸走肉一般的社会环境，同样带有悬念的故事，还有同样以照相机记录事件的人物。两部影片为了达到纪实的效果自始至终都没有配乐，但安东尼奥尼的主题是想探讨事物存在与真实的哲学命题，展示社会情境只是他加入其中的附属品；而杨德昌的镜头就像一把外科医生的手术刀，抽丝剥茧层层递进地揭示出台湾社会的内核。

Interesting food for thought.

Unfortunately, scrolling up and down, I can’t seem to find a name attached to it. You can see the original link here.

A picture of Wong Kar-wai at Tony Leung/Carina Lau wedding–WITHOUT SHADES

This is the first time that I have ever seen Wong Kar-wai without his trademark sunglasses. I never realized his face was so big;
evidently the shades he wears occupy a good part of his face. He was in Bhutan for the wedding of Tony Leung and Carina Lau
and lots of other Hong Kong celebs, such as Faye Wong, were there as well.

Anyway, he looks like such a regular postman dude in the picture that I was left scratching my head…so that’s WKW? How could this be?
I hope he dons his glasses again soon.

Photography books capture Wenchuan earthquake and aftermath

I saw this book when i was in the Xingguang Photographic Equipment Center on Luban Lu, in one of the bookstores on the third floor. The book is called 震动中国(百名摄影记者震区全记录 and cost 80 rmb, but I felt cheap at the moment, so didn’t end up buying it. I think it’s a good book, but it’s not the quality of the product that matters to me, or even the quality of the photography contained inside, but rather just the fact that it’s a pictorial record of what happened, and that’s just something that I feel I ought to have with me. Order it from Amazon China. Look at more images from the book on this blog. There are some other photography books on the earthquake, one of them was a big coffee table one that I saw in the same bookstore but I didn’t find it online. But it may be called 震殇5·12(崔益军汶川大地震摄影纪实) and be purchasable from Amazon as well.

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An interesting quote from Tristan Tzara

Ever since stumbling across his grave at the Montparnasse cemetery, I have been not quite obsessed — persistently inquisitive — about the life and times of the Romanian-French poet Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of the Dadaist movement. I was just looking over his single entry in Wikipedia, and found this quote plastered on the top right side, perhaps signifying it (to the author or whoever it is that has say over these things) as one of his more well-known or oft-quoted sayings:

“I consider America responsible for the shame of our age: the glorification of work, that stupid ideology which has engendered the idea of material progress and the disdain of every utopia or poetry tending toward the perfection of the human soul… I cannot help opposing those influences… with the most violent lunge forward, the idea, and the most creative of actions, idleness.”
—Tristan Tzara

Trust a poet to say something like that. And trust me, from somewhere inside my heart, to fully concur or less pretentiously (if that’s possible for me) — to second that emotion.

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