For one, it comes a little too close to the voyeurism of “slum tours” to me. Of course, I myself am a bit torn about this since photojournalism and documentary photography, crudely put, often partake in this kind of dynamic. most photographers and filmmakers try to justify, at least to themselves, their actions with some principle of moral concern, whereas the slum tours are more experientially akin to the one night stand.
You could argue that this film isn’t like that, and is above that, and again, this is not meant to be a full condemnation—but I think it appropriate to discuss the relation of the film to the sociological backdrop of which it partakes.

People in the film industry are quite utilitarian: they are investing what for most people is an astronomical sum of money, and they hope to make as much as possible on it. Someone like Danny Boyle, an established filmmaker, operates within these parameters as much as anyone else. So they pick these exotic backgrounds and make these feelgood stories so that middle classes of the developed world will fork over their money. Of course, most movies are like that. That’s what they are—mass entertainment. A chance to forget the world for two hours.

So they go there and scout locations, and learn about their characters by staying there. Again, this is standard operating procedure, and its no doubt educational for someone.

But that’s at the microlevel, and what bothers me is that at the macro-level, nothing changes. They come in and shoot their movie and go out. The slums don’t change. Poverty is not eliminated. They couldn’t find a suitable boy in the slums for this role—because as we know, the main actor is everything and has to be vetted by the suits before the movie is a go. So they get an English Indian kid to play the lead. So they exploit the area and the social reality for the backdrop, but when push comes to shove and there’s money on the line, they go with something a bit more safe. Dev Patel isn’t a bad person, but honestly, he does, no matter what, look a lot more London than Mumbai.

And now, Danny Boyle, Dev Patel, et al. get their statues, and DVD sales go through the roof.
They make f*ckloads of money and get more gigs, sustaining or in Patel’s case, launching a career. He was just a somewhat well-known TV actor in England before all of this. And now, in some sense, he belongs in a rarefied elite of actors who played leads in Best Picture films. So his life, no doubt, has been changed, and drastically so.

And yet the slums remain. Of course, the slums aren’t all misery—there is real human community there, and, at least according to Dev Patel on the Jon Stewart show, there is a real joie de vivre there as well. Which is a nice and uplifting thing to say, and which no doubt assuages the conscience of the popcorn munchers around the world. All I know is that the amount of money that Dev Patel and Danny Boyle and them are worth is more than most of those slumdogs will make in their entire lives. I bet Danny Boyle himself is worth more than the aggregate wealth of at least 100 slumdogs.

Of course, I am not better: the whole reason why my conscience is troubled is because I belong to that same global middle class of popcorn munching voyeurs. But I stand by the point that the meta-discussion of the relation of the movie business to the social realities they depict—be it war-torn Iraq, Israeli vets, Japanese orphans, what have you—is something we ought to continue, or, in the case of many people, begin. Movies—what are they? No one is naive enough to dream that they could ever be vehicles of human liberation. How about make them mildly educational, give us isolated, navel-gazers a glimpse of a world we might not ever see. Saturated and vibrant images, great camera work is much appreciated, thanks. We can do that. Yes we can. But of course, I hope for more. I hope for art to somehow trump business, and I hope that egalitarian distributions of income, around the world, will become normative, will become something that human civilization aspires to, because of the basic dignity it could afford us.

So, then, what about the relation of global capitalism to the global South then? That’s a huge can of worms, and one that I, ill-educated in economics of any sort, am not able to answer. I can say that capitalism can create jobs and thus alleviate poverty. But I can also say that this should never be used as a means of justifying the status quo, that is, actually existing capitalism. There can be a better capitalism, I believe. A more humane one. Right now, capitalism seems to do more for the greedy CEOs and elites of the developing countries than it does for the bottom fifth dwelling in the slums of the South. Sometimes we middle-class people get some tax breaks. Sometimes Republicans and Democrats pretend to care about people in the US working minimum wage, even while their overriding goal is to keep the system runnign smoothly and not rock the boat.

The movie business is no different, and no number of George Clooneys or movie star UN ambassadors is going to change the fact that it is still a huge for-profit machine, one that generates huge sums of money for its stars and one that, for the most part, doesn’t mind its role as an opiate for the masses. Art brings liberation. Revolution can bring liberation. Is it naive to believe in these? Of course it is, and I know better—but in my heart of hearts, I will go on believing these, maybe just to spite those who are better adjusted to reality than I am. Or maybe because not only am I an idealist, but also because I believe there are too few of those out there, especially among that demographic that can afford a bit of extra idealism here and there. But they refuse, for the most part, and keep reading their business and financial news and keep caring about companies and people who do things that neither illuminate nor change something about the human condition, in the most fulsome sense of that phrase—but where’s the surprise there? These traits are rampant. But let’s not that call them traits. They are, ahem, the discreet charms of the global bourgeoisie.

Share This

Someone please tell me what the point of this movie is. If it’s meant to be satirical, which it is in spades, couldn’t it have been more LOL funny like SNL? If it’s meant to be some kind of historical political biopic, then all i can say is too soon, too soon. The gags, the famous Bushisms—they are still cringeworthy but somehow contrived to the point that they don’t make for much of a punch-line. Of course, much of this has to do with where this particular viewer is situated in time and history—no doubt that future generations won’t “get it” the same way that we do.

The placement of the famous lines are a bit awkward: consider the “rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?” Bushism–though I am not sure, it seems to have been placed at the wrong time: when Bush was running for governor, instead of president. The other one is “i read, i smoke, I admire”–which is supposedly what Laura said to her future mother in law, Barb Bush, but in the movie she says it to W. when they first meet.

I’m not a stickler for historical accuracy in these matters, but as mentioned before, it comes off, as someone who’s watched this history first-hand, as being contrived.

There were some other annoying and/or intriguing parts to this movie: Thandie Newton as Condi Rice. HEr first lines are terrible, mostly because she’s trying really hard to emulate an American accent, but her high-pitched voice just grates. And I honestly don’t know or care to remember what the real Condi sounds like, but Newton is just too affected. However, it gets better as the movie goes on. The other thing that is terrible is that they make her so homely, which is perhaps accurate, but which is painful for any devotee of Newton’s hotness to stomach. I just saw her in Rock N Rolla not too long ago, and the memories of her hotness remain fresh to this very day.

The other bit that is interesting is Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell. I love Wright but he just completely *lacks the gravitas* to be Colin Powell. He’s of a more slight build, not quite as stout and solid seeming as the General, and simply adding some fake white hairs doesn’t improve the situation a whole lot. Furthermore, he’s always talking in some kind of low, guttural voice which sounds every bit as painful and affected as Newton’s accent.

And how about that ongoing philosophical spat between Powell, the military man who knows the realities of fighting, versus Rummy and Cheney, the hawks that have never killed anything with two legs. The ongoing debates are a bit tedious, I have to say. I have no doubt that such debates went on in real life, but in the dialogue in the script is incredibly trite, with Powell going so far as to mention Cheney’s deferments from Vietnam, and the diabolical Cheney trying to use Powell’s military experience to his rhetorical advantage. They come across as two schoolboys in debate tournament. Then there’s a bit where they have a slideshow showing a map of Iraq and Iran with American flags covering the neighboring countries–illustrating the American-friendly sphere of influence in the mideast–and again, it just comes off as being too satirical, very much Wag the Dog or War, Inc. or Starship Troopers-esque.

Another strange portrayal was that of Tony Blair, whom we see on a visit to Crawford before the start of the Iraq invasion. He looks too young and acts a bit too naive to be the real Tony Blair, and just comes across as a total boob. I never liked the man but the portrayal here is just plain weird.

Then there was the whole thing with W. and his father, the whole you’ll never be good enough, Jeb is my favorite son dynamic which just, whatever its relation to the real life people, just comes across as a monumental cliche. James Cromwell—you can’t help but think of him in 24, so I guess he’s been type-cast as the creepy father. However, he comes across as a much more normal and smooth George Senior than the real life one, who always seemed to me, like, well, a wimp. In any case, this dynamic runs throughout the whole movie, and gets a bit tendentious after a short while. In a movie where there is little care for psychological realism, what is the point of showing this whole dynamic. Is it to offer some kind of theory for why W., the perennial underachiever, ended up as president? Is it to somehow humanize him? In any case, being a Bush-hater, i don’t think the film helped his case any, and I doubt that it was Stone’s intention to in the first place.

Mediocre.

Share This

I haven’t watched too many Oshima films but judging from Etsuraku (I really dig his style, especially the cinematography. There’s just something about the film stock that they used over there in the 1960s – plus Oshima loves nothing more than a dark and moody palette where faces and body parts are outlined in a distant light, as if they were fighting, struggling to emerge out of the darkness that envelops the rest of the frame.

There is also some fairly “radical” techniques, such as a method of framing certian shots such as they decenter the subject though those are actually a small minority of the shots. What I really loved were the montages: one of them was a girl smiling behind a glass (windshield…) you can see the skin on her hands. This one is not really a montage or double exposure type of thing, it’s more just a clever and poetic shot, photographic virtuosity if you will. The other one is more of a double/triple exposure type shot, where you have a close-ups of a woman’s face overlapping with each other, melding and shifting into and out of each other like a strange lipsticked hydra of desire.

It’s these kinds of sensibilities, plus the whole 1960s Japanese style of clothing (those suits with skinny ties are BOSS) that makes me love this film. The story is a bit meh … well, it’s not the tabla that counts, it’s how the story is rendered onto film. The acting is a bit garish in places, and I don’t if that’s a result of the style of the film or whether or not those were just the general acting conventions in the Japan of the time.

As for other films that Oshima has made: glancing through his IMDB the only one that I have seen for sure is the sensationally infamous In the Realm of the Senses, which is NC-17 up the wazoo, with real penetration, fellatio, etc. Another movie of his that I have not seen but which seems really intriguing is Mao Tse-Tung and the Cultural Revolution, which appears to be some 50 minute TV…documentary? Who knows. Would be awesome to get my hands on that…but I doubt it’s on DVD in China (my DVD dealer would have told me right quick if it was).

Share This

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.

Share This

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.

Share This

Is there any reason why Woody Allen should continue subjecting us to these morality tales? If you want to see the Abel and Cain-esque moral fallout that happens when two brothers once so close get in over their heads, you’d be better off watching “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” with Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Woody Allen can still weave a good yarn, but he’s still too talky, and not in a good way. Woody Allen is a natural comic talent, yet he has this more “serious” side that deals with the choices that you make. This is Allen attempting to be Dostoyevsky, attempting to tease out what happens when you murder someone. Do you, like the Ewan McGregor character, move on and get on with your life, or do you, like the Colin Farrell character, get beset by personal demons and fear of God’s censure?
Allen isn’t bad at what he does, it’s just that for those of us who are (very) familiar with his oeuvre will find this a bit more boring and repetitive than those who have not, though I think the latter, even without the benefit of having seen the rest of Allen’s film, will have little difficulty in reaching the same conclusion.

One last note: Colin Farrell’s “I’m in the midst of a terrible moral quandary” look in this movie is quite similar to the one he uses in In Bruges, with the latter being the more endearing of the two because he’s a bit more crass in the latter, or in other words the script and the dialogue of In Bruges gave Farrell a lot more to work with than did Woody Allen’s script for Cassandra’s Dream.

Share This

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. And as he becomes younger, not only does his hair come back and his stoop disappear–his neurons start firing like they used to, and he remembers everything that he’d ever studied. OK, but that still doesn’t bring him closer to his goal, but it does give him a second chance–a new life, in a way–to complete his goal. This, of course, is what everyone wants–a new life without becoming a new person. It’s you with all the benefits (your memories, your knowledge, your life experience) minus all the baggage that comes with being who you are being held responsible for it.

However, he does pay a price for his new lease on life: he finds out that he has a double, a Fight-Club type shadow that doesn’t seem too devious but does have a tendency to egg him into thinking and doing things he normally might not. The love of his life married someone else and died young, but one day in the midst of his new life he sees her again, or at least someone that is her spitting image. However, she gets struck by lightning as well, but instead of becoming younger she regresses in another way: by becoming the person she was in former lives. She begins with becoming some kind of ancient Indian contemplative and babbling in an ancient Indian language. Of course, they are skeptical because this would mean that there are past lives and the transmigration of souls is real, but yes, they confirm it’s true.

Matei communicates with her past selves, recording and studying what they say. Thus, the new incarnation of his lover is able to do what the old one could not–help him realize his ambition of discovering the origins of language. She does this by regressing farther back in time everytime, but it wears down her body, until one day she finds that the opposite of what happened to Matei is happening to her: she is getting far older–soon, despite being the physical age of 25 she looks a haggard 50. Matei is convinced it is his work, these regressions into past lives–that is wearing her out so he leaves her, thinking that her youth will return as soon as she’s freed of her burden.

There are some interesting ideas and tropes in the movie. For example, the contrast between his fate and hers. He gets to live his life twice, as it were, but needs a double in order to sustain this unnatural “second life.” In fact, the two are inseparable–the double, call it his shadow or id or whatever–is the source of his will and actions. The woman, on the other hand, also gets to live other lives, but instead of traveling in a loop within the same life, she travels linearly back in time to past lives. You could say that their lives are moving in “orthogonal” directions. On the other hand, they both connote a kind of immortality: he is, like a vampire, immortal in the sense of being locked in the same state, for eternity, whereas she is immortal because while the body perishes, the soul drifts uninterrupted through human history.

The idea of transmigration of an eternal soul is ancient, primordial idea from way back, from the collective unconscious. That is what the girl represents, and tries to regress to. Matei, on the other hand, is the embodiment of the modern scientific spirit. His unconscious is not the collective unconscious but rather the individual unconscious, the one discovered by Freud. His disinterested search for truth takes him to the limits of human knowledge–and, as one might expect, it is a border that he cannot broach.

When he destroys his double using the obvious symbolism of the smashed mirror, he ends up turning old again, because whatever it was that sustained him is in fact now gone. He becomes old and dies…but there’s a bit of a trick ending here (spoiler alert). When he goes one of his old haunts, he tells his old buddies about how much life has changed since the late 1930s, when he last saw them–but they say, in fact, it is still the late 1930s, and all the events that Matei has seen, from the end of the second world war to the landing of the first astronaut on the moon they have never heard of. Throughout the movie, Matei talks about the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi and the dream of the butterfly, a cliche that has been used to death in the movies, and this one is no exception: Matei always mentions it and it seems hokey until the end, when you realize that perhaps he never left the 1930s, and that he never got struck by lightning and became young. Of course, how he managed to dream up Neil Armstrong and the end of the War is another matter, but there is the chance that yes, he was just dreaming the whole thing.

This kind of film is not for everyone, but I do think that films like this are worth watching, they do make you think a bit more and the premise is, of course, quite interesting–none of the individual tropes and ideas are new, but the way they are woven together is intruguing. The story is based on the novel by the writer Mircea Eliades. And here’s a link to what Manohla Dargis wrote about the film in the NY Times.

Share This

So it looks more serious than I had thought…still you wonder what the fuck people are protesting about. Chinese people are really oversensitive, I mean Kungfu Panda is not much different than Mulan or anything of that sort…I don’t know why they are protesting all of the sudden. Of course, with the earthquake, everyone is especially sensitive about anything relating to Sichuan and probably feel, understandably, the need to protect what they perceive as the dignity of the place…

Technorati Tags: wenchuan, sichuan, chengdu, china, boycott, kungfu panda, jack black, dustin hoffman, film, wenchuan, film , catastrophe, disaster, relief,

Share This

So, as one might expect, there are some calls from people on the web to boycott the movie Kungfu Panda, an animated film about a panda that learns kung-fu and saves the day. First off, I’m not 100 percent sure whether this is purely an expression of popular sentiment or an official pronouncement, but according to one website it said that on June 20, which was the day that Kungfu Panda premieres in China, no Sichuan province movie theaters will show the movie.

Why would Chinese people not like this movie, to the point of calling for a boycott? I suppose that every person would give you a slightly different answer, but most of them are going to tell you something along the lines that it’s “insulting” to Chinese culture and Hollywood’s slickly produced orientalism really doesn’t come across well so soon after the deadly earthquake that ravaged Sichuan, where the pandas mostly live, and where it might seem kind of wrong for Hollywood hucksters to be making some money.

I am not going to bother reading through tons and tons of angry tirades, so the above is just my conjecture of a typical Chinese viewpoint�meaning typical “against” position. One writer, for example, says that although it’s insulting to Chinese wushu that they shouldn’t get too up in arms about it. He calls it an “artistic insult” and says that perhaps they ought to just change the name of the movie to “American Kungfu Panda” and “American Hero” or something…just to make sure there’s no false advertising and people know that there’s nothing real, authentic, traditional, etc. about this movie. The captions in the pictures on this essay are funny…and also capture, in a more succinct way, what the author feels about the movie.

Another writer asks what the point of boycotting Kungfu Panda would be. The essay mentions that on the 16th there were some people that went to SARFT with a few banners to protest the movie. Some guy named Zhao Bandi, compared Hollywood to Sharon Stone, which, in my mind, would imply first and foremost that Hollywood is eminently fuckable for its age, but I don’t think that’s what he meant. No, he probably meant something a bit more sinister … this Zhao fellow was evidently appalled by the fact that Hollywood intended to make money from this movie, a point which the writer calmly replies “uh…DUH” to and points out is the way the world works, no different from when the Chinese aim to sell a computer to the Americans.

The writer then takes on Zhao’s second point, which was that Kungfu Panda “steals” a Chinese national treasure (the panda) and kung-fu and spins into an American-style coming of age story. The writer replies that since Zhao, of his own admittance, has not even watched the movie, he might as well go around and offer his services as a psychic.

The writer concludes that says that the movie does put Chinese culture in a positive light and is about goodness, truth, and justice. So what’s the point of boycotting it, he asks�and I’m inclined to agree.

I know that some people out there probably hate Jack Black, but I think he’s pretty funny…Nacho Libre, School of Rock, Be Kind, Rewind…don’t know if I’ve seen any others but they appeal to a cheesy side of me. There might be something essentially American about this kind of comedian and his brand of humor. All I can say is that, on the whole, I think he’s good for the world.

Just noticed that there are already similar posts/articles about this, one from People’s Daily and another from Variety Asia Online.

Share This

I had high hopes or this movie because its directed by Erick Zonca, who made The Dreamlife of Angels, a poetic and gritty film that I watched around the time
that it came out. Back then, being in my early 20s and not having that many movies under my belt, the film made a deep impression on me. Europe was making a lot of neorealist,
documentary-esque type films. The Dardennes Brothers were making their films, it wasn’t quite a movement, but like Dogme 95 there was this sense that people wanted
fly-on-the-wall authenticity with a touch of tragedy. They wanted a glimpse of a lost, floundering, and marginalized generation of young Europeans in dead-end suburbs. I hardly remember what happened in Dreamlife now, but I remember thinking that if Zonca made that film, then Julia ought to be worth watching as well.

Julia proves that ZOnca is still an auteur of grit, but I can’t say that I liked the movie all that much. When you’ve got these character-driven movies, you necessarily have to let the audience spend some time with the character, in order to get to know them. Sometimes there is very relevant plot and character information imparted to us, and
other times we’re just given impressions, nuances and inflections, glances and passing expressions that tell us about what a character is like, what they would or not would not
do to change their situation, etc. And although it can seem all arty and pointless, it really isn’t � because the more the filmmakers can tell us about a character, the more credence there is to their outlandish actions in the rest of the movie.

Tilda Swinton is a great actress, but there was something about her performance in Julia that rubbed me the wrong way. The fallen woman as hero � well that’s nothing new � but how to play that role in an interesting way? That’s a challenge for any actor, even one as gifted as Swinton. There’s a requisite amount of trashiness and debauchery that has to be shown, you have to see her hungover, you have to see her strung out, you have to see her get taken advantage of by some men, you have to see her get fired. YOu can argue that all these scenes are necessary, but that doesn’t mean that I have to like them.

The problem is that Swinton over plays the character. She’s not American, and though she does the accent fairly well, there’s something rather forced about the way she cusses and sputters. Compare this to Amy Ryan’s performance in Gone Baby Gone, where she plays deadbeat mother Helene McCready. Not having seen Ryan before, we were convinced this woman might have been pulled off the mean streets of south Boston just for this role. It felt that real � the accent (Ryan is from Queens), the mannerisms, the way she cussed. I hate to be such a stickler about things like this, but knowing that the film takes place in LA and Mexico, you expect something real about it. The language somehow interfered with the rest of Swinton’s performance; we love methody performances, but someone � and ideally, it would have been Zonca � should have told her to tune it down or somehow achieved similar effect in the cutting room. Someone suggested to me that her character might not be from the US, a thought which had not occurred to me, but could very well be true. I suppose that when you see a white person with a plainly American accent living LA, you assume they are born and bred Americans, or something close to it.

As for the story of the film, which involves Julia kidnapping a boy, holding him hostage for ransom money, and then fleeing to Mexico when they find her out � well, if that happened in a TV show, we wouldn’t be surprised, so we were happy to suspend disbelief for this part of the movie. However, one of the main parts of this section is to show how a boy growing up without a mother somehow finds a surrogate mother in Julia, and how Julia, emotionally benumbed and hardened as she is, develops a soft spot for this kid, starts to care about him. I get the point of this, but again, it’s just not worked up to in the right way. There’s no sleight-of-hand to make you believe the illusion, it’s just put out there.

I read an interesting perspective on the character of Julia on Film Brain/Like Anna Karina’s Sweater:

Julia’s downward spiral from mere alcoholic to felony fugitive is all well and good, and like Cassavetes, Zonca doesn’t analyze her subjectivity � we’re constantly forced to re-examine our assessment of her. However, what’s missing is the undeniable humanism of Cassavetes, which found its way into all of his warts-and-all characters. More than Gloria, Julia is closer in spirit to Cosmo Vitelli � another down-on-his-luck character who resorts to a desperate act as means of survival. Yet Zonca doesn’t plunge deep enough to properly explore the insecurity, alienation, etc. � the things that make her all-too-human � and she comes off as too much of an absolute, a thing Cassavetes’ strove to avoid. The desperation is there, but she lacks the malleability of just about all his characters. Though much like The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Julia manages to succeed as a character-driven study contained within the framework of a genre film.”

I don’t know this blogger’s name, but I agree that, Killing of a Chinese Bookie was much more fleshed out. However, that movie was also a lot longer. My problem wasn’t with the fact that she was vitriolic and hateful, or that there is nothing redeeming about her. That sounds like hogwash that, as the blogger suggests, people overly concerned with the bottom line and with little appreciation for film artistry will say. My main problem was just that the acting, however bold, just didn’t sit well with me. Elena, the messed up Mexican woman that comes up with the original harebrained scheme to kidnap the kid (her son), is terrible as well. I know crazy people often, well, go crazy � but this whole alkie and batshit crazy milieu sometimes just gets so hackneyed.

Reading through the rest of that blogger’s post, it’s sad to hear what the other distributors at the Berlinale had to say. That’s why we jumped at the chance to see this movie in Paris. I am sure it’ll pop up on DVD in Shanghai, but fat chance most of my compatriots in the US are going to see it � at least not easily.

Share This