Movies I’m watching: JCVD

I’ve been waiting for this film for a long time. It’s a film where Van Damme plays himself, or rather, a version of himself. There are plenty of things taken from his real life–his career as an action star, his marital problems, drinking, drugs, etc. However, all of this is a backdrop for a fictional story about what happens when Van Damme, out of money and needing some cash to pay for lawyers’ fees, ends up going to a bank in Brussels…and to say more would spoil it. Suffice it to say that the movie’s plot is nothing unique, but the execution is quite good. Imagine, it asks, what would happen if a well-known action movie star ended up being a action movie type situation, where his life was endangered. How would his martial arts skills, or his fame and notoriety play into this whole thing?

The film has a desaturated look, with a lot of dark blues, greens, and grays. It goes with my image of Brussells, I suppose. Van Damme is showing his years, and that’s what makes the performance that much more poignant. As other reviews and previews have alluded to, there are some postmodern, speaking to the camera asides, and for the most part, this is done without being annoying. In fact, most people believe that the one to the camera monologue that JCVD has is, in fact, the highlight of the movie. I don’t completely agree with that, but it definitely shows off something more raw and real than you are used to from someone known as the Muscles of Brussels. And i think that’s a good thing, because in my mind, fact and fiction are blurred, and I want the best for both the JCVD and the real Jean Claude Van Damme*.

*In the movie, when asking for money to be wired to him, he tells us his “real name,” not his acting name.

Movies I’m Watching: Hell Ride

Hellride movie poster

Ugh. Roger Ebert thought this movie was shit and I am inclined to agree … it’s too bad, since in some way, the biker western genre is fascinating to me, if only because I have had so little exposure to this piece of Americana. The movie is written and directed by Larry Bishop, who was making biker movies since the 1960s. The reason that I bought the movie (other than the fact that it was, at 7 RMB, quite affordable) is that it had some big names attached to it: Quentin Tarantino executive produced it, and it has Dennis Hopper and David Carradine in it. The guy who plays Comanche — Eric Balfour – is perhaps more well-known to people as Milo from 24 (who got shot in the head trying to protect Nadia). Oh yeah, and there’s the great Vinnie Jones, who is extremely under-utilized in this movie.

The dialogue is meant to be hokey and everything is completely sexualized, but there was one good line from the movie. When David Carradine is being questioned about his role in a murder from 1976 as well as one that just happened, he says “I don’t remember that well, but then again I ain’t Marcel Proust.” Awesome. I don’t mind if Larry Bishop, no doubt in his 60s, wants to search for lost time … I just don’t know if he ought to do it at the expense of those, who like me, still have time to spare and want to make better use of it.

Movies I’ve watched: Lars and the Real Girl

Manohla Dargis of the New York Times thought that this film was a bit hokey because it takes the issue of mental health and makes something Capra-esque out of it. Lars was abandoned and abused when he was young and finds it difficult to connect with other human beings, to the extent that he ends up buying an anatomically correct blow-up doll named Bianca and then pretending that she is a real woman, with a real life, real history, and real love for Lars. The rest of the community, led by the town shrink, goes along with this play-acting, and soon Bianca become an integral part of their community. This is the part that gets Dargis’ goad, and I think I can partly agree with her on this. However, that’s the feel-good part of the movie, the source of the hokum if you will, and I think that’s what the movie is about: without this reaction from the community, the movie just wouldn’t have the same texture, and most likely would end up being something more “serious” or perhaps even bleak. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but I don’t that’s what the filmmakers were going for.

What was interesting to me was the notion that Lars could start fighting with Bianca, make her get ill, and then have her die on him. The message that we’re getting is that mental illness, like other types of illness, can take its course and be done. We all have the ability to self-heal and can return to some semblance of “normalcy” afterwards. By the time you reach the end of the movie, you’ll either be in Lars’ pocket, emotionally, or just find him completely annoying. I thought Gosling’s performance was good, which puts me in the pro-Lars camp. It made me feel good to believe that he could maybe move onto loving a real woman, with all the physical and emotional contact that implies–as terrifying as that is, to Lars. I don’t mind being suckered into liking a character even when your intellectual instincts bid you otherwise, that’s what the movies are about–but still, you wonder whether or not it’s all a bit rosy. Still Gosling is of course the center of this film and his performance, as well as that of as his brother, were excellent. The milieu–some small town in the midwest, in the middle of the winter, really came out as well. The snow, the houses, the churches and community organizations, the beat up cars, the non-descript countryside–again I don’t know if absolute sociological versimilitude was achieved, but I do know that the mood and ambience–a sense of place, and the people that inhabit that place–was achieved, quite nicely I think.

Movies that I’ve watched: La Pointe Courte

It’s amazing the kind of stiuff that you find at your local DVD shops in Shanghai especially if that shop.,
like the one that I go to, is run by a guy that is into art films and therefore stocks his fair share of
Criterion Collections. I’d watched Cleo from 5 to 7 before, and I thought it was pretty good,
so I was excited to find another Varda: La Pointe Courte–her first feature and what they
say was a progenitor of the nouvelle vague.

Here’s a little introduction to the film

Coming from a background as a still photographer, Agnés Varda made La Pointe Courte in 1954 on a shoestring, engaging two fine actors – Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort – to work for nothing. They played a married couple rethinking their relationship while on vacation in a small fishing village on the Mediterranean. Varda used the actual people in the village playing themselves for the parallel story of their lives, and filmed without sync sound, dubbing in other voices later in Paris. The story of the couple is stylized while that of the village people is like Italian neo-realism. The cinematography is lovely and the whole approach is fresh and completely different from the average film. Varda convinced Alain Resnais to edit her film. Her filmic debut is now considered the progenitor of the French New Wave movement which didn’t really begin for several years – with Breathless & 400 Blows.

This introduction does make clear that the two “sections” of the film are stylistically separate.
The section about the married couple is quite stylistic, with some interesting compositions
where you get half of a face facing the camera behind a full face in profile in the foreground.
There are long and languid tracking shots and poetic dialogues on the meaning of love and desire
which don’t sound like the kinds of conversations that real people, who live in this day and age
and have average IQs would have. It’s very French in that way, reminds me of Last Year at Marienbad.
You never really know what the hell they are really talking about and begin to wonder if they
engage in their affairs and romances in some kind of French dimension of the universe that the
rest of us are not privy to.

The other section, which involves the villages of Pointe-Courte, is quite interesting since it’s shot
in a documentary style and uses mostly non-professional real actors. I think it’s fascinating insofar
as it reveals a people and way of life that you don’t normally see…most of the France that I’ve seen
in the movies (as well as real life) is the north–Paris, maybe some things from the country. Here you
get to see the way of life and the problems faced by villagers as they try to deal with love, marriage,
illness, death, and the encroachment of state bureaucracy (the coast guard, government ministries
of health, the armed services, judicial system) into their way of life.

In particular there’s a great section where you see them jousting on these large boats that
are like gondolas, with lots of rowers trying to get their man on the top the momentum and speed
he needs to knock the other guy off his perch. The film is quite warm and humanistic in these parts
which provides a counterpart to the otherwise somewhat pretentious sections dealing with the
relation between the man and the woman. The man and the woman somehow seem to resolve
their problems, and though the woman was unsure at first of what would happen to them
and if she would be able to subjugate her own feelings and take the train from Paris to La Pointe-Courte
to talk with her husband (who is a native of there). There’s a bit of dialogue that revolves around
the cultural differences between north and south, which is quite interesting, since I know a lot about
regional differences in the US and China, but haven’t been able to really get my head around
how it works in France. Sure I know about it intellectually, but not from the inside, from actual
travel or interaction with people of varying regions.

In any case, an interesting film–and piece of film history–if you see it in China, you might want
to pick it up. If you are not in China and are otherwise law abiding, try getting it on Amazon, where you get 4 DVDs from Agens
Varda all together.

Movies I’ve watched: Youth Without Youth (2007, dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

This was certainly one of the more thought-provoking films that I’ve seen in awhile. Made in a sort of magical realist style, the film tells the story of an aging Romanian professor Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) who miraculously becomes rejuvenated after being struck by lightning.

The backdrop of the film is WWII, though tha tdoesn’t relaly play a huge part in the movie itself. Matei is a brilliant polylingual linguist (what a mouthful!) that, were he alive today, would be some kind of Steven Pinker-esque linguist in that he’s interested in the beginnings of human language and consciousness, and his life work is to go back all the way to the source on his way to finding a unified theory. But that’s actually just my inference, the movie doesn’t dwell too much on this. Suffice it to say that Matei is a Faustian figure who gives up the love of his life for the sake of his work. However, towards the end of life, he feels pessimistic–the movie starts with him claiming that he might never finish his life’s work.

So when he gets struck by lightning, something strange happens. His Faustian bargain, made with no one in particular, sees him reverse-aging, becoming younger.