Lee Isaac Chung, “Munyurangabo” (2007).

The narrative parsimony of Munyurangabo is such that revealing the plot, even in a synopsis, would spoil the pleasures of the slow, patient unfolding of events. They’re not “spoilers” per se, but each tiny revelation of the backstory – people’s relationships to each other, or the purpose of their trip, for instance — forces the audience to recalibrate its understanding of previous events or lines of dialogue. I’ll at least say a little less than what one can read from your newspaper’s synopsis: after stealing a machete – perhaps the most recognizable symbol of the Rwandan genocide – two boys, Munyurangabo and Sangwa, set off on a journey.

Pete Docter, “Up” (2009).

If there’s anything a little disappointing — other than my friend Luna’s legitimate complaint about the lack of girls, which was perhaps the reason why my daughter wasn’t interested in seeing it again — it’s that Up doesn’t quite fulfill the promise of its title. (Is it still a preposition if the word stands alone? A direction, a state of mind?) I think it must have been Noel Vera who has pointed out (and I paraphrase here) that Hayao Miyazaki is the preeminent director of flight in animated films; for a movie entitled Up, surely the flight sequences should be exhilarating, especially with all the colored balloons, but not even the film’s characters seem particularly thrilled in seeing the landscape below them. (Compare this, for instance, with that first moment when the young witch-in-training manages to control her broom for the first time in Kiki’s Delivery Service — or even that incredible conclusion of Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon, with the boy floating over the rooftops of Paris — and you’ll see what I mean; Up’s sense of wonder is reserved for other parts.)

But it’s a minor complaint compared to the wonderful, whittled-down simplicity (like its one-word title) of Up. The animation, despite its computer origins, looks fluid and organic — it’s a Pixar production, after all — and the voice acting (Ed Asner and Jordan Nagai) is top-notch. Written by Bob Peterson and Pete Docter, Up’s similarities to Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino (as my friend Sue nicely pointed out) — Asian boy and cranky old widower sitting on his porch befriend each other — end in the first fifteen minutes once the house takes flight over Emeryville and off to parts unknown (actually, Venezuela), and Up turns into an homage to Harry O. Hoyt’s The Lost World.

Some Thoughts after Seeing Lee Isaac Chung’s “Munyurangabo”.

Lee Isaac Chung’s Munyurangabo has been one of the more critically-acclaimed releases of the year so far, and the rave reviews alone should have spurred viewers into theaters. But surely its “exotic” provenance – made by a Korean American director, filmed entirely in the language of Kinyarwanda, written by two Americans (Samuel Anderson, the co-writer, is white), with a cast entirely made up of nonprofessional actors – was also something of a draw.

This implicitly raises the question of why the film’s origins would be of interest at all. Perhaps the unspoken assumption is that the challenge of making a film in “unfamiliar” locales makes for a more interesting movie. Or is the director’s Korean ethnicity seen to impart a different directorial sensibility on the material? I can’t read the viewers’ minds, of course. I was there, however, for a slightly different reason.

Jean-Luc Godard, “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her” (1967).

In trying to slash my way through the thicket of signifiers that is 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle), it struck me that the film was probably Godard’s way of doing the same thing: trying to make sense of the untrammeled, vertiginous proliferation of words and images around him, like the mutating swirl of sugary galaxies in a coffee cup, just as I and the rest of the audience was doing in the theater. Or something like that: practice as cinema, cinema as practice, process as cinema, cinema as process. (If this is Godard’s “attempt at a film,” as he famously wrote, then this is my attempt at figuring it out — hopefully slightly more articulate than my initial response.)

This cinematic process begins initially as a dialectical engagement with the pure products going crazy, with the said process subtending the wisp of a plot: a day in the life of Juliette Janson, a Parisian mother of two (or three?) who works as a prostitute on the side to make ends meet afford to buy more clothes. On the surface, Godard’s movie is a critique of consumption; most of the film is set in sites of economic transaction (cafes, salons, stores, a hotel where prostitute and client meet), and takes place in a suburban Paris that has been carved up administratively. (Godard, who narrates all this in a whisper — to subvert the traditional role of narrator? — argues that this process of urbanization is “naturalizing capitalist tendencies”, and contributes to the ongoing capitalist oppression of the residents.)

The movie is about how images, and images as commodities, are consumed and sold, with the movie both interrogating and replicating this decoupling of words from images (and vice-versa), the deliberate way that meaning is forced (by advertising, by the government, by mass media, insert your favorite ideological state apparatus here) to slip between, and detach itself from, signifiers. “Words never say what I’m really saying,” one character says at some point. The cinematic process here, in other words, is a critique of this slippage, an attempt, perhaps, to fix meaning more precisely. The oddness of the subsequent scenes that show Juliette shopping for clothes makes more sense when seen in this light. She describes the colors of the sweaters matter-of-factly as she walks through the shop; the focus on her is intermittently interrupted by other women who address the camera: “I got up at eight o’clock. I have hazel eyes.” As in an earlier, seemingly random declaration by Juliette — “I can feel the tablecloth” — these objective, denotative statements serve to anchor meaning, to attach words to palpable, material reality.

Nagisa Oshima, “Night and Fog in Japan” (1960).

“This isn’t a wedding, this is a funeral!” spits an angry wedding crasher in Oshima’s Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no yoru to kiri). The wedding, not a particularly happy one at this point, is between two members of the left-wing student movement in Japan; the funeral is for the movement itself, its members retreating into bourgeois comfort, their dreams and ideals interred along with them. It’s the fallout after the bloody protests surrounding the signing of a treaty between Japan and the United States  — and the death of a former comrade — that haunts the film’s characters, but it remains politely repressed until the accusations fly across the room like bullets. Unlike the “spy” they captured earlier (and from whom they extract no information), the guests (and bride, and groom) end up reluctantly spilling their secrets and suspicions.

Thirty Random Things.

The most-read page on this blog, which I find kind of odd, is the About page. (Second is my entry on Slumdog Millionaire.) The About page is something that WordPress attaches automatically when you make a page for the first time. I never gave much thought to it, just pasting a post from my other blog into the placeholder.

But now I figure people clicked the link for a reason — if only to figure out who this fool writing about movies is — and there’s really nothing “about” me there. And so I thought I’d have some fun with it, like that horrible “25 Things” Facebook meme which I never did get to answer.

Nagisa Oshima, “Death by Hanging” (1968).

Death by Hanging (Koshikei) begins with a question – no, a demand: Are you for or against the abolition of the death penalty? It’s a demand specifically directed at the audience, and the film allows for no fence-sitting. This claustrophobic, angry, powerful black comedy demands to be seen as well. I can honestly say I’ve never seen a movie quite like this.*

Oshima’s answer should be obvious from the start. The narrator (Oshima himself) begins to describe, in clinical and banal fashion, the interior of the execution chamber and its procedure. (“The walls are painted salmon pink.” “The curtains are dark yellow.” “Then he is given cakes and fruit for his last meal.”) He continues to describe the events almost without affect, while all we hear on the soundtrack is the sound of metal handcuffs clinking incessantly due to the blindfolded prisoner’s trembling hands.

The condemned man – with the Kafkaesque name of “R” — is accused of raping and murdering two women. There’s a problem, though: R’s heart is still beating. The prison officials are thrown into a quandary: is it legal to hang him again? Can one execute an unconscious person? Is the doctor obliged to resuscitate him just so that he can be hanged again? The priest is convinced that R’s soul has departed, and therefore the condemned man is “not R” anymore. It’s a sacrilege, the priest cries, to return a soul when it has already left, but the Education Officer argues, “I’m doing this for humanitarian reasons!”

Ace Hannah, “Mega-Shark vs. Giant Octopus” (2009).

After seeing the viral trailer, a co-worker of mine said, “I’m just glad this movie even exists.” I understand his point. Conceptually, at least, the premise was promising in and of itself: an homage to monster B-movies of old, two lead actors who were footnotes of the ‘80s, and most important, a clear-eyed view of its own ridiculousness, beginning with the happily transparent denotative title. (Yes, it really does culminate in a dragged-out, mano-a-mano beatdown – or more appropriately, jaws vs. tentacle and tentacle and tentacle and tentacle and tentacle and tentacle and tentacle and tentacle.)

Unfortunately, only Lorenzo Lamas seems to have gotten the memo about the movie’s absurdity. Clad entirely in black, his hair swept up in a ponytail and his skin rather scarily tanned — a distant echo of his “Falcon Crest” days — Lamas swaggers and blusters his way throughout the movie as a smarmy government type, even if he’s confined in a control room the entire time. (He also gets the best line, which he addresses to Debbie Deborah Gibson: “And you, little lady, you got a mouth coming from someone whose career is all washed up.”) He looks like he’s the only one having fun. I certainly wasn’t.

Nagisa Oshima, “A Town of Love and Hope” (1959).

Nagisa Oshima’s debut feature film, A Town of Love and Hope, also known as Street of Love and Hope (Ai to kibo no machi) – a title apparently forced upon the movie by the studio, which freaked after seeing it the first time – is set in a Tokyo with not much of either. Certainly not the latter (hope), and the former (love) is tinged with an uneasy calculatedness. It’s this hint of duplicity which makes A Town of Love and Hope a little different, I think, from the standard neorealist drama, because there’s a palpable tension lingering in the words and motivations of the characters.

The film revolves around a boy who sold his pigeon (the original title Oshima preferred) – namely, Masao (Hiroshi Fujikawa), who we see sitting with two elderly shoeshine ladies in the Ginza district. The pigeons are sold to Kyoko (Yuko Tominaga), a high school sophomore of wealthy means who takes pity on Masao. But it’s all a fairly harmless scam that Masao has been running begrudgingly for quite some time with the encouragement of his mother: the homing pigeons, of course, end up flying back to the slum where Masao, his mother, and his mute younger sister live, practically in the shadow of the factories’ smokestacks.  Once they return, he sells them all over again to the next dupe.

Ron Howard, “Angels and Demons” (2009).

Me [after drinks and dinner]: What are you up to later? Wanna go see a movie?
She: Sure! What do you want to see?
Me: I’d like to see Star Trek.
She: I’ve already seen it, but I’d see it again. How about Angels and Demons?
Me: If you’ve seen it already, we should see Angels and Demons instead.
She: No, if you really want to see Star Trek, we should see that.
Me: No, I’m fine with Angels and Demons, really.
She: Don’t be passive-aggressive! If you want to see Star Trek, we should watch Star Trek.

[Later that evening, after Angels and Demons:]

She: What did you think?
Me: It wasn’t too bad, I guess.

I guess I can’t seem to shake this passive-aggressiveness, because Angels and Demons was surely the worst movie I’ve seen all year, even more than Saw IV.

John Schlesinger, “Billy Liar” (1963).

The peculiar thing about Billy Liar is how everyone looks so old. They don’t, not really; it’s just the way a 26-year old Tom Courtenay, in a fantastic performance, somehow looks old before his time — I think it’s the tie — playing Billy Fisher, who is probably in his early 20’s. (My double-take is homologous to how, when I was in high school in the Philippines, our first-year English textbook’s provenance was clearly some cast-off American donation from the ’50s. How alien, the girls in their bobs and long skirts, and men (boys? those were boys?) in ties and crew cuts and dark-rimmed glasses looking like young Robert McNamaras, all looking as if they were college graduates awkwardly shoehorned into acting as high schoolers. How old. And yet they were my same age.)

Olivier Assayas, “Summer Hours” (2008).

Olivier Assayas’ exquisite new film, Summer Hours (L’heure d’été) began, at least for myself, almost frighteningly like a generic Miramax French family drama: a sun-dappled lawn, a picture-perfect al fresco meal, children playing gaily on the grounds, and a cast, cardigans draped on shoulders, looking like they just finished a fashion shoot. (The most well-known actress here is the lone daughter Adrienne, who is played by Juliette Binoche — her hair still dyed blonde, I like to imagine, from The Flight of the Red Balloon.) The family has gathered together at their summer house for the 75th birthday of their mother Hélène, played by the elegant Edith Scob.* But such a happy milestone nonetheless provokes thoughts of mortality, and so she confides in her eldest son Frédéric (Charles Berling, something of an Assayas regular now) about the disposition of the summer house and its contents after her death.

Ursula Meier, “Home” (2008).

If you’ve ever picked up one of those organizing-clutter / home-improvement books, you may have noticed a shift in the way advice is dispensed: it’s all about self-help now. There’s nothing necessarily new about the idea that houses and their interiors are exteriorizations of the self, how rooms can be read as expressions of family dynamics. But to guilt you into clearing your coffee table or the landing strip by the door! That’s something new. (It still doesn’t fully explain why the bad guys in Los Angeles noir films always seem to live in Neutra houses though.)

The Swiss-French filmmaker Ursula Meier fashions her debut film, Home, from that central idea: it’s about a family who has lived for the last ten years alongside an unfinished freeway. There’s a lot of gently surreal comic potential in all this, certainly, and Meier doesn’t hesitate: the movie begins with the family playing an impromptu game of hockey on the freeway, and when the father takes out the trash — all the way on the other side of the blacktop, naturally — he walks by a chair and a reading lamp sitting outside. There’s no need to be afraid of thieves since they’re isolated from everyone else, and so — naturally — they sit on a couch and watch television on what passes for their lawn.

Michelangelo Antonioni, “Le Amiche” (1955).

Here’s Francois Truffaut, talking about Antonioni:

I don’t like the way he deals with women, because instead of talking about them as a man would, he talks about them as though he had been told their secrets, like General De Gaulle telling the Algerians, ‘I have understood you.’ He flatters women, but it doesn’t seem authentic to me.

Which says more about Truffaut than Antonioni, really, but Le Amiche, an early Antonioni film, perhaps demonstrates the first half of the quote right: it’s about women’s secrets, for sure, but there’s nothing particularly flattering about how Antonioni sees them here.

Darren Lynn Bousman, “Saw IV” (2007).

Prompted by a brief discussion on “crap” on Pivotal-film — Ashes of Time Redux and My Blueberry Nights were inexplicably mentioned, though the latter is certainly Wong’s weakest film to date — I hereby submit Saw IV for consideration, as it’s truly worthy of the word.

Oh, the curse of obsessive seriality, a fatal compulsion that I’ve brought upon myself. The first installment of the series at least had an intricate puzzle at its core, its tension attenuated in later films by the audience’s knowledge and by the fact that the main antagonist, played by Tobin Bell, was, well, already very dead. (The first Saw also benefited from the deliciously awful anticipation of a smarmy Cary Elwes about to do some major surgery on his limbs, as well as the presence of Michael Emerson, who totally nailed Creepy well before his current star turn as Benjamin Linus on “Lost”.) Saw IV, however, is an uninteresting mess, with inefficient directing, throwaway exposition, and limp acting all around. The dead Jigsaw is far more alive than the rest of the actors here.

At least one can argue that Saw IV drops any pretense about what the audience is there for. It’s all about the traps, whose David-Fincher-meets-Rube-Goldberg ingenuity have become less interesting in each iteration. The highlight: two men — one with eyes sewn shut, the other his mouth — dragged closer to each other by chains into a toothy meat-grinding machine, but that happens in the first few minutes. It’s perhaps interesting to note that the big revelation at the end isn’t a Scooby-Doo style unmasking, but all about temporal trickery — clever, but it requires too much exacting attention to the details of Saw III. Many viewers would have tuned out well before that.