Route Irish (2010)

My friend talked about Route Irish (dir. Ken Loach) and I was eager to see it because of her enthusiastic description. Maybe I was in a bad mood while watching the film, but I was disappointed, having expected a film exploring the traumas of mercenaries. Of course, it did do that, to some extent, but for the most part, Route Irish treads the path of conventional thriller.  The main character, a tough guy, worked in Iraq as a private security contractor. What I wished for was a critical investigation of the business of these firms, providing 'services' to war-stricken countries. Even though that dimension existed, there were for example a few sour lines about firms providing both security and development projects, this was overshadowed by the main plot, which was about the frantic attempt of the main character to get clear about how his friend died. The official explanations turn out to be a cover-up of more gruesome circumstances. Ken Loch has directed many fine movies, but this was not one of them, despite of the fact that it dealt with a serious and important topic (and despite its raw depiction of Liverpool). What the film lacked was an original approach to the theme; the development of the story felt clunky and uninspired, the characters going through their characters rather one-dimensionally, fixating on one tone of voice. Cliches abounded (mostly about the state of mind of a troubled macho man), and from the get-go, I pretty much knew what to expect - which had the effect that I was alienated from the topic, I simply did not care much about it, and instead, started to observe all the clumsy attempts at showing one man's desire to attain justice and truth. In some scenes, the reality of war and the impact war has on people not directly involved in it, became apparent, but this was more an exception - because of the fairly stereotypical depiction of honest-but-tragic men and slimey villains. Route Irish has its heart in the right place, and it is justified in its critique of commercialized warfare - but as a film, it is, in my opinion, an artistic failure. Route Irish is not The Hurt Locker.

Wise blood (1979)

John Huston is an eccentric director and Wise blood, based on a novel by Flannery O'connor is a loony film. I watched the film before reading the book, which I am happy about now, taking account of Huston's very personal relation to a story. The main character, Hazel, is elusive, remains elusive. He is an angry man and it is his anger that drives him but I am never sure where he is going next. This makes everything in the movie unexpected. Things just happen and something new waits around the corner. It is a strange, strange world. Everybody thinks Hazel is a preacher, because of his hat, and he ends up becoming a sort of a preacher, building a church of his own, a church without Christ, a church where the blind remain blind and the dead stay that way. On his erratic journey Hazel bumps into a string of misfits: a sham preacher and his daughter, who lusts for Hazel. Then there is Emery, a loney guy who wants somebody to be his friend in the cold-hearted town. And there is the businessman who wants to make a dollar or two out of Hazel's evangelical performances on top of a scruffy car. Some reviewers have celebrated Wise blood as a deep film about religious redemption. For my own part, I had difficulties in relating to the 'spiritual' change in the main character. Personally, I enjoyed the film as a sad piece about loneliness and the weird ways in which we try to reach out to each other. The positively frantic acting of the main characters is brilliant, perfectly in synch with the offbeat, eerie atmosphere of the film. My impression of Wise blood can be summed up this way: I loved it for being weirdly comic, but I couldn't make much of the story. Do you like southern gothic? Watch this.   

Still Walking (2008)

It is a rare gift for a director to have the ability to render the rhythm of ordinary life on film. Hirokazu Kore-eda clearly has this gift, and for this reason it is tempting to compare Still Walking with the films of Ozu. I think this is a fair parallell, as Kore-eda takes a similar interest in the dynamics of family life. Characteristic for these both directors is a complete lack of sentimentality. This is not the kind of film that turns family into ideology and nor does it approach the story from the perspective of dystopia. In Still Walking, we see people, some of whom know each other extremely well, being irritated by one another's ideosyncracies, which doesn't take away love and respect. The story of the film is centered around a reunion that marks the 15th anniversary of the death of the eldest brother. The film follows the family in ordinary rituals: eating, taking a walk, preparing dinner. Nothing very drastic happens, but there is always tension in the air. Kore-eda wants us to scrutinize the small things, gestures, an exchang of intentive glances, silences. As with Ozu's films, the camera is kept on a low level, staying close to the family. I have rarely seen a film that exudes such intimacy as Still Walking. Where other contemporary directors (Haneke for example) choose to see intimacy as something that almost always verges on violence and dread, Kore-eda's approach is gentler, without this implying that he settles with cozy and rosy images of the close relations of a family. Intimacy, here, can mean as different things as the coy discussions while preparing food as the mother of the family putting on the record that she listened to while in love with her husband as a young girl. Small moments mean a lot: a father that welcomes the appearance of his son at the house with a neutralized grunt, 'so you're here'. There is a lot of discomfort in the way the family members interact with each other, but we never see explosions or ruptures - this is the kind of movie that makes hints about things that people rarely talk about, but boils under the surface, the kind of emotions that are rarely verbalized in a direct way.

To a large extent, the film focuses on the relation between the oldest son, Ryota and his parents. Ryota has married a widow with a son, and his parents make a fuss about this, at first not really treating his wife and son as members of the family. Ryota is unemployed, "between jobs", and this is clearly treated as a  shameful matter as he makes up stories for his parents to hide this fact. His father is a retired doctor, and has strict ideas about what constitutes 'a worthwhile occupation'. Kore-eda manages to bring up big ideas and emotions and still let the story drift, unwind through the twists and turns of ordinary discussions. Kore-eda has a superb understanding for the strange bond between parents and children. A mark of what makes this film so great is that the locations actually come to look like a home, or the surrroundings of a home. This is not an easy task, as 'locations' in films tend to be reduced to a neutral prop. Here, the home is partially constituted by a sensitive attention to how the characters move in and out of rooms, how they sit down or stand up.

Still Walking is the best film I've seen in a long time.

Zero de conduite (1933)

Jean Vigo made a brave movie when he directed Zero for Conduct. In a defiant, jolly manner, the film follows a bunch of boisterous kids in a boarding school. They won't let themselves become robots in a disciplinarian system. The film, along with the kids, bustles with irreverent life. Vigo treats the children's revolt as a justified act of rebellion against a school that leaves much to be desired. Bad food is served and some of the teachers seem quite sub-par. It's a beautiful and quite experimental little film, that often tells the story through eerie long shots. Sometimes the perspective of the camera is weird, so we approach the world of the school from a strange point of view, which only adds to this carnivalistic universe in which anything is possible and roles are not fixed.

Prometheus (2012)

At one point in the middle of Prometheus (dir. Ridley Scott), I actually thought it would take the following route: humans go to weird planet to look for anchestors. They come upon a few monsters and a bunch of corpses. They board the ship again, disappointed. So much for looking into the Grand Origin of Humanity. End of story. Of course, it did not turn out like this. Prometheus is not the Nietzschean culture critique it should have been... or something. Nor did it develop a critique of shady corporate interests going on behind the backs of everyone. Prometheus opts for the pompous, the quasi-religious. The thin storyline was augmented with just as cheap effects. Yes, some scenes look good, but there is no point to anything. We've seen plenty of the twists in the film in earlier Alien films, so there was really not much to write home about here; one may even speak about recycling, and not in a good way. My most positive judgment about the film concerns the design of the settings: great job there. Plus it was fun to see the familiar landscapes of Isle of Skye in a film. Another fun aspect of the film is the choice of role model for the sentient robot David - Lawrence of Arabia as the prototype of humanity! Do we sense cosmig significance? Not really, we sense tacky. By any means, this is not 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987)

oh God!
oh man!
oh God!
oh man!
oh God!
One can say one thing about Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance and it's that this is one hell of a weird movie. Is that a good or bad thing? Well, you decide. The script seems a mess, and the acting is sure ... a league of its own. So is the development of the story. And oh, the lines - the LINES! This film was made in that glorious period in which the genre of film noir was revitalized in a sleazy, moody way. There are a few great examples of this version of 80's noir, but this is hardly one of them, even though I would say that it has its indubitable value as a bad-good film where one never knows what will come next. The main character, in a classical way, suffers from amnesia. Of course, gruesome things have happened and in its own very peculiar way, the film sorts out what has been going on. If you can follow this film without having read the book, my congratulations. As Ebert writes in his review - many scenes play out like comedy but when you think about the film afterwards, there seems to be some kind of sadness in it that no element of the narrative seems to explain.

Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

Howard Hawkes' Only Angels Have Wings explores a familiar theme. A group of alpha-male pilots stationed in a South American port city have to deal with the harshness of their job. In order to attain a contract, they are forced to venture out in bad weather, risking their lives. Colleagues die; they have to deal with it - somehow. This situation is explored with the mediation of a woman. This is a slightly typical move; it is the emotional reactions of a woman that sheds light on the situation. And yes, in this film, the gender patterns are almost exclusively shady. But still, the film also looks into variations within the group of pilots, some of whom try to appear as stone-faced Stoics, others show emotions more immediately. By no means was this a film that Opened my Eyes to Great Existential Issues - but it wasn't the worst film in the history of Hollywood either. Check out an elegant use of settings and a bunch of tight scenes. If you want a film that challenges ideas about emotional self-restraint, this is not bad at all.

The Woman in the Window (1944)

The Woman in the Window has some shallow similarities with It's a Wonderful life. It's just that Fritz Lang's film is better, less sentimental than the X-masy morality tale you all know. In the ouevre of Mr Lang, this is a minor film, but as a paranoid crime story, it works pretty well - it kept this viewer interested, at least interested enough to sit through the entire thing. The story is a simple one. A middleaged professor sits with his buddies talking about the way they are not in the Game anymore, no, the way of Vice is not... their way. A small tiny step and you're in hell. The professor, of course, ends up in hell. Or that's what we think. What keeps the film going is the elegant cinematography paired with the very stripped-down nature of the storytelling. - - The ending, I must warn you, makes the film a far sloppier affair than it could've been.

The Captive (2000)

Chantal Akerman made a Proust movie? I had to watch it (Jeanne Dielman is one of those movies I have on my mind all the time). I guess you will get something out of The Captive if you have actually read Proust, as some of the plot quite subtly hints at certain tensions that are not explored in the movie. Proust wrote two fat volumes about the catastrophy that was the relationship between jealous Marcel and 'secretive' Albertine. In the film, Albertine is Ariane and Marcel is Simone, but the theme is still there: poisonous jealousy. From the first few scenes onwards, we are thrown into the world of a stalker. But what does that stalker want?  What does he want from Ariane? Why is he so fixated with 'telling the truth'? Proust lets us into the world of this outrageous character, but he provides no comfortable psychological answers, and nor does the film. The film has a simple structure: the camera follows Simone in his pursuit of ... whatever. We see him walking restlessly around his big apartment, spying on his girlfriend and her friendds, interviewing people about Ariane's possible Vice. Even though Akerman doesn't follow Proust all the way (who could in a film like this?) The Captive still occupies a place pretty close to the text. I have to confess that this film did not blow my mind. Still, it was a good film about obsession - and a certain form of corrupted love where love is based on fantasy so that the only relationship the lover has is with a fantasy, not a human being. What made me a bit hesitant about how the film developed was that it made the 'mystery' of Ariane into a slightly different issue than in Proust's book. Did Akerman want to conjur up the image that we 'can never know one another, no matter how much we try'? If so, the film would fall flat. The big question is exactly what meaning it has to say that Simone/Marcel can not 'have' Ariane/Albertine.

Still life (2006)

I am trying to get rid of my prejudice about Chinese movies as big-budget boosting about ancient emperors. Still life (dir. Jia Zhangke) has nothing to do with this genre: no action-fuelled fighting, no pompous praising of China, no glossy images. The story of the film is a simple one. A man and a woman are looking for their spouses in the area where the three gorges dam is built. We get as much involved in the personal stories of the two main characters as the landscape in which they move about: demolition, demolition, flooding. Millions of people have been evicted from their homes. This is a world of almost post-apocalyptic measures, just throw in one or two sites of capitalist luxury in the midst of destruction. The film doesn't preach, it shows. Some have pointed out the links to Italian neorealism and Antonioni - which makes complete sense. This is a realistic film in a world which has stopped making sense. One of the characters takes a job while he looks for his wife. The other character meets her business man husband only to tell him that she has fallen in love with another. Their stories are told through understated scenes and silences, rather than big gestures and confrontations. Well, there are a few moments of confrontations in the movie, but not of the kind you expect. In one scene, we see a group of workers attacking their boss for irresponsible behavior - scenes like this, were political material seep into the story about family member, keep the film alive. This separates Still life from almost every other family drama. The film does not approach the family as a closed unit, a little world in itself. Here, our characters are all the time a part of an evolving, open-ended world. Jia Zhangke pays attention to details and not only the big patterns. He makes drama out of mobile phone ring tone, the facial expressions of ferry passengers or a sweaty performance in front of happy workers. Odd elements - UFO:s! - swoosh by in some scenes, and to me, these elements made it all to clear that this is realism but not realism - what the hell is realism in a world like this one?

One of the things that impressed me about this movie was its attention to place. The demolition areas and the grandeour of new projects were put on a par with the space of the home. The way the director keeps alive these both dimension made the rootlessness of the main characters all the more terrible to watch. - Even though the cinematography is elegant and beautiful, I never got the impression that the film aesthetisizes the wasteland shown in these images. 

If you have the opportunity to get a hold of this movie - watch it!

The Caiman (2006)

I liked Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room quite a lot, so therefore I was excited about watching another Moretti movie. The Caiman turned out to be very different from the aforementioned film, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I remember The Son's room as a serious film about grief - serious, but not sentimental. This film might be serious as well, but it is a far more whimiscal affair. A producer of B-movies has not been making any movies for a long time. Now he should be making a film for the big audiences but that doesn't happen. In this precarious situation, he gets involved with a project the political dimension of which he has not realized. The problem with the film is that it is plenty of things at the same time and that everything seems to be done a bit half-heartedly (in this case, the film-within-the-film trick doesn't work so good, because there is no real tension between the two segments). Yes, the film's satire is sometimes funny, but somehow making successful satire based on Silvio Berlusconi is a challenging endeavour, as the man seems to be a parody of himself. The Caiman has the heart in its right place but as a film - it doesn't really happen.