The Angels' Share (2012)

Ken Loach has the heart in the right place but his films are a mixed bag: some are extremely good, while others follow the boring blueprints of film-making. The Angels' Share is small film, I suppose the budget was very modest. It's not a perfect film by any means, but it did entertain me - and I suspect that it would be difficult for a film about the working class and single malt whisky to disappoint me, given my political leanings and my appreciation for the water of life. The film is set in Glasgow: youth unemployment, crime, poverty - but it is also a film about people who come to care about one another. The story revolves around Robbie, who dodges doing time in jail as he agrees to community service under the supervision of one sympathetic man, Harry, who also happens to be a whisky connoisseur. The fact that the film constantly shifts gears - from social commentary to relationship drama to heist comedy - doesn't really irritate me; actually, I think Loach makes a pretty good job in keeping this rather loose thing together. It's not Hamlet, but I grew to like the characters, I cared for them and the strange scenes involving whisky expertise and glaswegian unemployed youth amused me a great deal. The humor in the film does not feel patronizing. Instead of sentimentalizing the working class, Loach takes a piss with images of Culture and Great Taste, wringing them in a direction that feels quite fresh.-  -  - As one reviewer put it: Angels' share and its gallery of characters is almost as far as one gets from the cool, elegant atmosphere in a George Clooney heist movie. A sympathetic movie.

Kikujiro (1999)

The first minutes of Kikujiro (dir. Takeishi Kitano) perfectly illustrate what kind of movie this is. Cute music. A kid is running through a very matter-of-fact landscape. Is this a hallmark production or a Kore-eda inspired movie? This tensions is kept throughout the film, and in my opinion, its a tension that works extremely well. A kid lives with his grandmother in a small town. The kid is bored, and he wants to visit his mother. Strangely, one of grandmother's friends - a thug - promises to take him there. The friend, played by the director himself, is one of the most memorable characters I've seen on film for a long time. A social catastrophy, he offends everyone he sees, but somehow he has taken to the boy and tries to go through with his mission. Kikujiro turns out to be a roadmovie, a strange one, involving a paedophile, a well-behaved motorcycle gang and a string of mishaps and adventures. I love the film for several reasons, the major being its style: things just happen, as things happen in real life - but this is life from the beckettian angle. Conventional action is kept to a minimum. The magic here is that the events have no particular narrative intelligibility - we never know what kind of story this is or what kind of story it will develop into. I think I have seen one or two of Kitano's hard-boiled gangster movies. Kikujiro is miles from that. It's a sensitive little film that treats social life with a certain open-endedness and wonder that makes it one of the rare examples of film succeding in taking a child's perspective seriously, without enforcing an adult rationality or moral logic. This is an adorable movie and I hope I will get to re-watch it sometimes. Very few movies mix the creepy and the cute and the naturalistic in this way. The humor often works through situations that are not really funny, but rather scary or repulsive. --- But it is a little bit strange that I liked this film, taking in account the vanity with which the director shows off himself and his cinematic quirks. Well - I let myself be gulled into liking this one, perhaps against my better judgment.

Life of Pi (2012)

Oh lord.
I accompanied my friends to the movies. Made sure to go to the loo before it started. Sat down in the familiar space where I used to watch movies while in high school and skeptically shoved the 3D glasses up my face. I tried to keep an open mind. I really tried. If somebody puts a gun to my hand and asks me to say something nice about Life of Pi I would confess that some of the images are quite beautiful and that, well, tigers are cute. Beyond that, well, I don't know. The message of the movie seems to be this: even if you have a pretty rough time in your life, just make sure you rely on STORYTELLING. This glorification of narrativity strikes me as deeply self-important and irritating: a movie that boasts of its own special power to seduct, thrill and, you know, deceive us a little to make us more comfortable. If you have a nice story, then you'll be fine. And heck, this comes from Ang Lee, a director whom I generally admire! (Of course one can still admire Lee's stylistic versatility but this is simply not a good movie.) I try to put my finger on what I found so unbearable about Life of Pi. Perhaps it was my first (!) experience of 3D movies - not impressed. Perhaps it was the glossy cinematography that to me appeared completely soulless despite all the 'spirituality' it so eagerly tried to evoke. Perhaps it was the schmaltzy acting. Perhaps it was the strange ideas about religion (more elevation of storytelling) along with the embarrassingly clumsy contrast between scientific rationalism and religious belief. Perhaps its the computerized, sterile feel of the animals that were supposed to be both scary and sublime. This film made its best to put me in a magical state of mind. It didn't succeed. I left the film in a grumpy mood and watched how a local media manager attempted to drive her car out of a heap of snow.