August 30, 2012

Han Sanping and Huang Jianxin, The Beginning of the Great Revival (2011). 

What's Good: Every scene is shot beautifully. There is very good acting.


What Isn't Good: This film has the subtlety of a sledge-hammer or a wrecking-ball coming through your living room wall. It announced as much in the opening titles with the statement "In Commemeration of the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party of China."

The original title for this was The Founding of a Party: It got retitled for international release (IMDB). The film was financed through the state-run China Film Group, a mouthpiece of the propaganda department.

What's Bad: A film green-lighted from the Ministry of Propaganda encouraging Chinese citizens to act out against foreign "colonialism" (disputed Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean islands, for example) with the call of "Chinese Sovereignty!" It's hard not to read this movie through a probable anticipated outcome, like (just for an example) the tearing off of the Japanese ambassador's car's flag while the ambassador was in it. Boil the hate, stir the hate, hate will manifest.

A narrative arc where Mao doesn't go to France while his friends are boarding to a much talked about and previously agreed upon better education because a foreign influence can't fix China (no international interference necessary, China can and will fix all its problems by itself).

What's Really Bad: The Chinese Communist Government is trying desperately to relate what's happening now in China with Mao's understanding of Marx and the populist impulse that started the CCP.

January 11, 2012

New Jack City (1991), Mario Van Peebles.
Boyz n the Hood (1991), John Singleton.

While watching these films on my day off the other day, I thought that it might have been fun to have been a Critical Theory/Film Studies professor in the early-to-mid 90s. I was trying to imagine the syllabus for a course called "New Jack Theory" that was something of an intro to theory and the mechanics of critical discourse.

Take the opening scene of New Jack City: A white man in a suit is being held over the rail of the Brooklyn Bridge by the henchman of Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes). The (Wall Street?) suit takes a header into the East River. If you screened Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) beforehand, you could discuss power dynamics, race representation, audience expectation, cultural production (and financing thereof), etc . . . .

January 21, 2011

Michel Gondry, The Green Hornet (2011).

The fight between Britt Reid (Seth Rogen) and Kato (Jay Chou, 周杰伦) plays out like an op-ed for the New York Times this week discussing the balance of power between China and America, with China having all of the obvious advantages, but also with the colonialist fantasy that somehow America (ie, Reid) has the "real" unforeseen upper hand: here Kato, therefore China, can't swim, thus ending the struggle as Reid throws Kato an inflatable toy lobster to save him from drowning.

January 16, 2011

Banksy, Enter Through the Gift Shop (2010).

The "authenticity" of this Banksy documentary seems to be in doubt, but even if it's a hoax, it documents a few of the major players in the street art-to-gallery darling evolution that came about in the last decade. Whether or not Thierry Guetta (aka Mr. Brainwash) is "authentic" doesn't seem to matter much, as he is still putting on shows and selling on the market.

If Banksy, Shepard Fairey, et alia really felt MBW somehow hadn't "played by the rules", then making a full-length doco to give Guetta even more brand awareness and subversive outsider credibility would seem like the worst move possible. However, Banksy making a doco that asks just what "credible, authentic" art is, well that just seems right in keeping with his body of work.

January 11, 2011

"Is it that your dream is unattainable, or is it that you have the wrong dream?"

--Joaquin Phoenix, I'm Still Here (2010)

October 18, 2008

Wayne Wong's feature length adaption of a Yiyun Li's story The Princess of Nebraska is now up for view at youtube.

January 12, 2008

Bill Guttentag & Dan Sturman, Nanking (2007).

I caught this documentary at the Shattuck yesterday afternoon. Picking up & reinforcing Iris Chang's work, the film frames the work through foreign first hand accounts of Japanese atrocities in Nanjing, taking the written part of the dialogue (as opposed to interviews with massacre survivors) from the letters, journals, and other texts by Western foreigners who satyed in Nanjing to set up a "safety zone" prior to Japanese invasion. When some of the silent film footage shot by Rev. John Magee was shown, many of the older Chinese in the audience started crying. In the West, the Rape of Nanjing is a historical event, but for many Chinese this is still an open wound that the Japanese government continues to fester by not admitting what happened and by allowing text books into their schools that say the massacre never happened, whitewashing over a mountain of evidence carefully assembled by Iris Chang and by the Chinese Government. Hopefully, this film (by virtue of being a film) will reach a wider audience and help initiate another round of discussions around the Nanjing Massacre.

September 25, 2007

George King. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. 1936. 67 mins.

One of the earlier cenematic Sweeney Todd depictions. King's Todd is portrayed as a unsympathetic greedy, lecherous, murderous psychopath from the very opening scene. There is no revenge backdrop to humanize Todd, nor is there any real development as to why Ms. Lovett (the cannibal pieshop lady) pines for and acts as accomplice to Todd's senseless murders. There is however the magic barber's chair. Tod Slaughter (Sweeney Todd) has all the era subtlety of a bad vaudevillian making a slow transition to the talkies.

May 7, 2007

Zhang Yimou, 摇啊摇，　摇到外婆桥 (English title, Shanghai Triad) (1995). 103 minutes.
The Chinese title comes from a song line that is key to the overall narrative of the movie. It's a shame that the English title doesn't quite capture the tone or mood of this film.

It's 1930s Shanghai and a peasant boy of 14 from the countryside, Shuisheng, has come to the city to work with his uncle, who is an underling for a big triad boss. Shuisheng becomes the servant to the boss' mistress, Xiao Jingbao, played by Gong Li. The story is told mainly from the boy's perspective, which has the effect of over-weirding the scenes. Shuisheng's sense of how strange the set-up and these people are intensifies the audience's sense of strangeness and mirrors the audience's slow approach to understanding.

A fitful ending I won't spoil, but will say is bleak, bleak, bleak. Right after watching this, Sha said that Zhang Yimou should consider a sequel that catches up with Shuisheng 15-20 years later.

April 27, 2007

Bob Rafelson, Head (1968). 85 minutes.

The Monkees made this flick after their series got canned in an attempt to refashion/resurrect their image (the word plastic gets thrown around repeatedly). Acidy-trippy hi-jinks follow (co-writ by Jack Nicholson).

Notes:

anti-war
anti-product placement
anti-marketing created image
anti-Hollywood fakisms
anti-commercialism (blew that vending machine up good, twice)
awareness of career suicide as they all jumped from a bridge in the end

That is, biting the hand that fed them all the way.

Pop art with an agenda.

April 10, 2007

Um, I liked Rocky Balbao.

Read as a swansong from a (boxer, film-maker) veteran that recognizes his prime days have past, there may yet be something "in the basemant" worth paying attention to.

Rocky (in the film) just may be the rearguard doing mop up.

November 24, 2006

Yoko Ono, One: Fluxfilm 14 (1966). 5 minutes.
___, Cut Piece (1965). 8.58 minutes.

&

Taiwanese rapper Jay Chow, "Shi Mian Chu Ge." 4.05 minutes.

&

Sergei Eisenstein, October (1927). 5 minute clip.

&

Mak Shing-fung, Some interesting Hong Kong animation (2006).

November 22, 2006

Adam Small & Peter Stuart, Another State of Mind (1984). 78 minutes.

In August of 1982, punk band Youth Brigade bought a bus and asked their friends in Social Distortion to go on tour with them. It was pretty much the first tour for both, five weeks 35 cities including some stops in Canada, all very DIY. And which is almost always the case with DIY tours, the bus repeatedly breaks down, club owners rip them off left and right, and by the time they roll into Detroit, half of the crew are headed back to LA on the Greyhound. When the bus breaks down again in DC, Ian MacKaye and the Minor Threat folks open up the Dischord House for them. The kids in Social Distortion up and leave their frontman Mike Ness and Youth Brigade to return to LA without bothering to tell anyone. Shots of MacKaye working at a local HaagenDazs while off-camera narrating about the virutes of the straight-edge movement alone make this documentary worth watching.

Ah, the Reagan youth era. . . This movie reminds me of going to the Greystone (all ages club where the Misfits(1) & Black Flag played their last shows) and seeing all the hardcore bands that came from or to Detroit.

Hearing the Mike Ness commentary where he calls his younger self "an asshole" is kind of a nice moment as well. Strangely enough, musically Mike Ness and his Social Distortion vehicle have kept pretty true to their musical approach over the years, not so much continuous repetition but rather a core thread that seems to connect all of his work.

_____

(1) A reunited Misfits without Danzig just isn't the Misfits.

October 22, 2006

Woke up at four and watched a really bad flick in which the director wanted James Belushi to actually act, also featuring an aged Liza Minelli. I came in half-way, so channel 7 never bothered to inform me what the movie was. It'll always be that bad James Belushi flick with Liza Minelli, to differentiate it somehow from the others.

But did get to catch all the early Sunday morning political shows, including GW Bush with George Stephanopoulos. A total puppet show. Even though GS gave John Kerry double the time to respond to the president's interview, it all seemed so utterly staged that it was bad, worse than small Midwestern town dinner theater, theater (a runing theme for Sunday mornings apparently).

But whatever. My back bike tire has a slow leak, and that requires immediate action as I don't drive.

Thinking later of watching Bumming in Beijing, after we (Sha & I) clean the studio and do some laundry.

October 15, 2006

Hitting mid-semester snag, lack of enthusiasm, late-night paper grading enduced stupor... Thinking to myself, man, you could pass the civil servant exam and be a mailman. There's more money in it than the current gig, and you could go home after hours and have worker's play time like Billy Bragg used to sing about. Then Jorge, ever diligent, reminded me of the goodness of my gig and threw out Bukowski as a perfectly disgruntled example of the modern American postal worker (twice disgruntled).

By happen-chance got Bukowski at Bellevue, filmed 1970, in Netflix mail the day before and decided to watch. B&W on what must've been the first generation of video recorder: crappy but to interesting effects. Bukowski here is shot as a real poet and given that consideration rather than focusing on/buying into the tough/drunk etc. that later features...well...feature. Poet versus the (self-made?) myth. And the poems stand, the stronger at least, and the kids look somewhat bored (or is that what paying attention looks like?) and yes, Mr. Sakkis, they tried to shoot at least one of the women in the audience sexy.

September 29, 2006

Edward Dmytryk, Walk on the Wild Side (1962).

Schmidt: You said last time you wrote poetry.
Hallie: I only echo it.

Flag Day, 2006

Slate is running a photo gallery of Che Guevara, who would have turned 78 today.

Here's a short video of Che playing chess.

May 19, 2006

United News newsreel. 1945. 7:37 mins.

This FDR newsreel obit covers all the familiar ground, but what's striking is how after the polio all the world leaders agreed to be photographed/filmed seated, thus allowing FDR to maintain equal visual status. Would this happen today? Those in this reel include Churchill (repeatedly), Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek. What's interesting about this is the fact that because of his condition FDR is the only one to appear natural while sitting, often shot chatting and moving actively in his seat while the other leaders appear very stiff and uncomfortable. There is a shot of FDR on a boat where he is being assisted (held up) by a military figure. They have their arms locked as FDR leans against the rail. The reel mentions, but downplays, the "paralyzing condition" that nearly cost him his career.

The newsreel also includes clips from his last known public address, a report to Congress on the Yalta agreement.

May 13, 2006

Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver, Style Wars (1983). 69 minutes.

I saw this the first time when I was living in artist/curator Matthew Lusk's TV room in Greenpoint. I return to it out of the frustration of the elite=art conversation that's been continuing on the Buffalo list.

This documentary explores the world of graffitti writers in New York circa 1982. The main taggers are interviewed as well as the main officials agianst graffitti: Ed Koch, the cop in charge of the subway car yard, etc... It's a balanced approach, but I don't know of anyone who has watched that doesn't see what the writers are doing as art.

April 25, 2006

Donald Brittain and Dan Owen, Ladies and Gentlmen, Mr. Leonard Cohen (1965). 78 min.

I'm home ill, and my first Netflix arrived.

Beautifully over-serious:

"In my journey, I know I am somewhere beyond the traveling pack of poets. I will remain here until I am sure what I am leaving."

With hindsight, we see the arrogance backed up with talent. This was filmed before Cohen became Leonard Cohen, songster. The footage of his readings shows him doing basically what amounts to stand-up routines to get the audience in the mood to hear his poems (let us not forget he was a fairly good poet). Crowd working, more poets should try that, seriously. Cohen reading Cohen, although it happens less than I wanted, is reason enough to check this out. We can chalk up the fact that the audience camera pans are always on attractive 20ish females (sometime bespectacled) to the times. When was the last time poetry was shot sexy? The commentary at the end is all early post-moderny: Cohen shot viewing himself pretending to be sleeping acknowledges his uber-privileged status. Are we making similar movies now about younger poets? Why not? This was a great watch.