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Reviews
Zi hu die (2003)
Rather muddled history to add flesh to an interesting emotional quandary.
This starts in 1928 with a young Chinese female student and a perhaps slightly older Japanese male student in Manchuria. He is at least being groomed to promote reactionary Japanese interests prior to a war and she is just a tender thing sucked in by the more worldly man. They go to bed together before he announces he is being recalled to his own land.
Four years later the foreign conquest is underway and another love story is shown with less emphasis on sex.
Another 5 years and things are boiling. The Japanese are more or less in control and a well concealed "Purple Butterfly counter insurgent group is hard at work messing up the new regime.
The first girl is quite involved in the native movement when she sees her prewar lover returned for direct management action especially getting rid of the resistance. She now has quite mixed feelings remembering her schoolgirl love and wanting to further the protection of her country. Like a good girl she reports her finding of the Japanese boy and is taken aback when instructed to reaffirm a relationship with him to help the local cause. As this is very much a life-and death business, her quandary is interesting to watch. There is not right-or-wrong answers or even good-or-bad. Further the young Japanese man is confused whether she is a lover to be counted on or a detested spy to be destroyed. Watching this story unfold keeps the movie alive despite the desolation of the times and the destruction of war all acted out in constant downpour and dull and smoky lighting.
As much as I would also like to have seen more light and life, I am not sure the important love-hate story could have been maintained therein.
I had debated whether to pick this up at Blockbuster and am not sure I made the right choice. My heart aches for these people.
John Adams (2008)
average presentation of magnificent biography of a man, his family and his country.
David McCullough gave us a stupendous story of the life of this early American and of his times and his territory. Without being tedious he laid out the situation that produced John Adams, Abigail Quincy Adams, their children, John's colleagues and opponents and his unstinting efforts to found a new country for us while in serious danger from a mother country under the reign of a challenged king. He had to make a living for his family while spending years of his life first confronting his own desire to remain a loyal British subject, then helping the fledgling nation define itself, declare its freedom, establish laws and rules to ensure long survival with equity for all citizens, rule the country as president for one term, and define its role in world politics. Each task involved huge mental and moral strain and multitudinous stages.
Now come the movie makers with their rules of thumb to assure a significant audience while limiting costs to create profit for the studio. Then a director has to cut a long story into a few short ones and fit current actors into the personae of old legends. Usually a good book becomes a mediocre film. Sometimes a good film is possible.
Here the life episodes have become somewhat disjointed. Then the director sometimes seems to fall back on stereotypes and clichés to make sensitive tale clumsy enough for general consumption. The casting department must have been required to use untalented performers at times to get such a poor representation of George Washington. Seldom have I seen such a shoddy attempt to fill a major role. Many lesser roles seem to be poster caricatures of important historical figures.
Abigail was fairly well presented as far as things went, but her classic heritage and great personhood was still underdone. Nabby was darling. JQ was rather lacking and haphazard.
The depth of Charles Adam's efforts to cause mischief was not adequately drawn and his almost single-handedly pushing the colony into full revolt didn't get shown.
The film seems to take for granted the eventual outcome which was much more in doubt in real time.
Ed Wood (1994)
Delightful film about a fascinating subject
I have always avoided horror films and material about them until meeting this biography on IMDb. Suddenly I see what the genre is about. Depp is fantastic in the role of Ed. His angora'd girl friend is so soft and fuzzy. Bill Murray is naturally great. The direction and cinematography are excellent. The attempt to be horrible is outrageously comical.
This is about a small collection of real people doing what Hollywood does and doing it badly but very really. Only the Bela Luigi part seemed hammy. Maybe a serious addict could be like this in tinsel town. An Oscar was awarded for it but that often doesn't correlate with art. You can feel the desperation to get into production and through the final scene before the resources are spent.
Appealing to the Southern California Baptists for production costs is a scream. The story has only one possible ending and there it lands.
The art of life is never better presented. Ed Wood is Hollywood's Hamlet.
Following (1998)
Meat and potato mystery.
Done in BW, this modern tale is disconcerting in its erratic time sequences. It appears to start with a young, unemployed writer telling his plight to a counselor. Then maybe he really isn't a writer but just a bum justifying laziness. Then a male subject he is studying turns the tables on him. A female sex object appears from several entry points at once. Crimes start happening, but who is the criminal and who the victim? Is the club owner/gangster the chief villain? Is the finale really the end? If you want to tie it up neater than that you can, but the ends keep coming loose.
Fair entertainment for a rainy afternoon.
House of Sand and Fog (2003)
Buried tragedy
This a powerful story that is a little too clear how casual neglect of important occurrences can more than devastate one's life. It deserves a good movie which Hollywood is loathe to produce unless it fits their ethnic culture. I am not against that culture just because I don't like being swamped in it.
I can't stand Ben Kingsley. He is clearly of just one ethnic culture and should stick to portraying that. My stomach turns each time I attempt to watch him do something else in the belief "that no one will notice". This story is of a contrasting and conflicting ethnic group.
He totally fails the part of the displaced, aristocratic Iranian. He can only mope through scenes calling for tragic portrayals of the man trying to hide his need to slave for a bare living after being ousted from his native setting. Then finding a bargain in a new home for his family. Then developing that home to serve the family's need to establish the daughter in the new culture. And in the final tragedies that really could have been toned down by the author or the script-writer.
I wanted to see a good portrayal of this story and its several salient characters. The others were quite good and acceptably close to the book. I still want to see it properly casted.
Raye makhfi (2001)
A clear portrayal of how disjointed "civilized" life really is
Two Iranian soldiers "guard" some trivial outpost on an irrelevant, nearly deserted, desert island. One morning a ballot box and a young female collector of ballots materialize. One soldier has to take these across a desert scene by open jeep to collect "votes" from natives who are totally in the dark of what is happening. Scattered abandoned projects are encompassed along the way. Such as a stop light that never changes at a remote crossroads. A concrete bridge in the middle of nowhere.
The woman is concerned late in the day that they won't get back before the boat comes for her and she will be stranded. In a preposterous near-final scene, a full-sized jumbo jet arrives on an usable strip to pick her up.
The soldiers alternate in using a steel bed in the open desert.
There are many fascinating secondary stories. It is just short of pure comedy and of near tragedy.
Daughters of the Dust (1991)
What is going on?
I am taken with stories of the undeveloped and developing peoples and would have liked to learn of the Gullah culture. I did my best to follow this mishmash for 45 minutes. It seems to have several dialects that would be impossible to close caption and completely unintelligible as it is. Only a rare person would get anything from it.
It appears to start with a black preacher and his wife appearing on the scene where a black woman hidden behind a fluffy white object is approaching accompanied by an attractive light-skinned woman. As the lighting changes, some of the characters appear to shift from Caucasian to Negroid. I have no idea of what happened while I attempted to watch with my wife who has very good hearing and diction and could make no sense of it either.
I didn't attempt to watch the last half.
El silencio de Neto (1994)
A rich portrayal of life in Guatamala
A lovely story of the Guatamalan way of life from the past. An extended family copes with political upheaval. Three boys of the new generation are growing up while three brothers of the one before follow different paths. Several interesting women, especially the wife of one brother and mother of Neto, one of the boys. The unwanted intrusion of outside power and politics is depicted, but not oppressive.
Different class levels are shown. Neto accuses the servant girl of being "just an Indian". She replies gently they are all Indian. The father's job ends in one upheaval, but he quickly seems to find another. Small hot air balloons are a fad in the family and are interesting. Neto is troubled by asthma, which may be related to his "silence".
El imperio de la fortuna (1986)
Epic story of the struggle to appreciate good things of life.
A very poor, crippled man barely ekes out a living while his mother attempts to care for him. He is given a crippled cock to eat, but nurses it to health and some success in fighting. He rejects the offer of a professional gambler to win illegally. The gambler defeats him and then becomes his mentor in cock fighting and cards. A Mexican Ava Gardner sings in the settings where he is and lives with the gambler. Eventually she leaves the gambler, taking his luck to the poor man who then is vary successful materially, but never emotionally. One dramatic sexual scene and later a more degraded one. A daughter from infancy until early adulthood. A primitive life well portrayed. A story to see repeatedly.
The Weather Man (2005)
sorrier than life even
Even if you like difficult movies for what insights they can provide, this one is too dreary to finish. Even Nicholas Cage can't make it worthwhile. This unhappy poor little rich boy just has too much trouble to enjoy. In addition to all he makes for himself, the public is ever-ready to dump more on him.
His family longs for something substantial from him. A pretty ex-wife supports him when she can stand his sarcasm and condemnation. His father points him to immediate difficulties the children face. The children try to play their roles towards him in hopes that something good will reflect back. Anything that does return belongs in a trash can.
Bad ma ra khahad bord (1999)
still wondering
Have very much enjoyed Iranian films but was lost with this one. Starts out with a long ambling conversation from within a jeep but no faces. Some persons are traveling somewhere for a dark reason that was never revealed that I could tell. The setting was outstanding and the cinematography very good. The main protagonist was neither fish nor fowl but rather aggravating. One little boy was very cute. One woman was memorable. One dramatic event seemed unrelated to the story which seemed to end when the camera ran out of film. I may try it again sometime. At least it is not the dreary stuff from the movie factory with cardboard cutouts for characters. I came to IMDb tonight to see what it was all about, but still don't know.