Pikunikku (Picnic)

Manages to set a certain atmosphere with the nice photography, but otherwise pretty stupid.  Three young adults of varying degrees of craziness go venturing outside their loony bin.  Lots of not-very-successful attempts to be insightful, and brief flashes of Lynch/Cronenberg/Miike influence only make matters worse.  You’ve got to be real careful with insanity in movies, it’s too easy to strike the wrong note.  Here, Iwai rarely hits a good note, instead all we get is pretty noise.  Rating: 4

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6ixtynin9

A very good comic thriller.  Kind of a Thai version of A Simple Plan with a sense of humor.  I’m trying to resist mentioning Tarantino, but it does seem like an influence.  Rating: 8

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Hana and Alice

Well, I’m getting less interested in Shunji Iwai.  He’s too focused on adolescence.  This one again feels like it’s meant for an audience of young girls, like a Judy Blume novel or something.  It’s a fine film, very well shot with two nice lead characters… but there just isn’t a whole lot to it.  Fairly typical coming-of-age story, melded with a romantic comedy premise that’s rather silly.  Rating: 7

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Cinemania

What a great bunch of characters.  There’s Harvey, who’s kind of the idiot savant of the film.  He knows the running time to every movie, but has lousy taste… in fact, he doesn’t seem to have any taste at all.  Roberta is the cranky nutty old coot, but I hate to reduce her like that because she’s pretty smart.  Bill was my least favorite — a pretentious nobody who carries business cards identifying himself as “writer/philosopher”.  For a cinephile, it’s odd that his tastes don’t seem to go very far beyond the most basic film school curriculum (Godard, Antonioni, Fellini, etc).  Eric is perhaps the most together of the bunch, a pleasant guy who knows what he likes.  Getting the lion’s share of the screen time is Jack, the most outspoken and the wittiest, but with a slight sociopathic bent.  His rudeness is off-putting but hilarious, especially when he rips into Bill.

The movie is quite entertaining, never gets repetitive, and keeps it short (although the 45 minutes of deleted scenes on the DVD are well worth watching).  The low-budget look is the biggest flaw, but makes for a really amusing end credits sequence: a montage of the film’s subjects all commenting on the filmmakers’ bad decision to shoot on video.  Rating: 8

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Saraband

I beat myself up a little for passing on a chance to see this in the theater, but now I don’t feel so bad about it.  Oh, it’s a fine movie, completely worthy of Bergman, but lacks the gut-wrenching emotional impact of his stronger works.  And being a sequel (of sorts) to one of my favorites, Scenes from a Marriage, it was a bit disappointing.

Marianne decides to pay Johan a visit after several decades without contact.  Living nearby are his son, Henrik, and granddaughter, Karin.  The film is a chamber drama among the four, with the ghost of a fifth character lingering over the cast — Anna, Karin’s deceased mother.  All the relationships are (of course) strained, although I feel in some cases Bergman fails to explain them thoroughly enough.  Or perhaps I failed to pick up on the subtleties.

Fine performances all around, but as a Scenes fan I naturally wanted more stuff between Ullmann and Josephson.  Rating: 8

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Kamikaze Girls

I knew I’d seen this lead actress before… she’s the pop singer from Dolls (and there’s a guy from Survive Style in this, too).  Here she plays Momoko, an extremely girly-girl (kawaii as they say in Japanese), Rococo-obsessed, emotionally closed high school student.  Against her wishes, she ends up befriending Ichiko, a biker chick… and also discovering her talents.  This is another one that seems obviously designed for young girls, but the bold, flashy style and some genuinely touching scenes made it worthwhile.  I also liked the soundtrack, a mix of Momoko’s Strauss themes and catchy pop tunes.  Rating: 7

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Shigatsu Monogatari (April Story)

A pleasant little bit of fluff, it feels entirely like the beginning of a film.  It’s gentle and sweet and lovely, but also disappointingly insubstantial compared to the other Iwai movies I’ve seen.  One gets the feeling it was intended for an audience of pre-teen girls.  Rating: 6

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Kung Fu Hustle

The concept is intriguing — a slapstick gangster wuxia film.  The execution, unfortunately, is a letdown.  Chow tries way too hard, layering on heaps of not very good CG effects, overly cartoonish action, broad humor, and pop culture references (this is the second Asian movie I’ve seen this week with a Shining joke, after Survive Style).  Sometimes it’s quite entertaining, but a lot of the time it’s just stupid.  This is the kind of thing that critics would never tolerate from an American film, but when it’s from another country they hail it as comedy genius.  I think we should call this “the Gods Must Be Crazy syndrome” — the fear of admitting that a foreign culture’s humor isn’t that funny.  Rating: 6

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The Pornographers

I had a hard time getting into it.  It had a lot of clever and innovative stuff happening, but the story just wasn’t that interesting.  It didn’t pull me in at all.  I felt the same way about the other Imamura film I’ve seen, The Eel, although I’d have to say this one was considerably better.  Rating: 7

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Devils on the Doorstep

A simple premise — a meek and frightened Chinese villager is mysteriously entrusted with the keeping of a Japanese prisoner and his Chinese translator — is the framework for an impressive work about the Japanese occupation of China and the relations between the two nations.  Director Jiang Wen also delivers a memorable performance in the lead role, backed up by a dynamite cast of supporting actors.  The film moves at breakneck pace, as the situation constantly develops in new directions, and turns from comedic to horrifying in its unforgettable final act.  The black and white photography is stunning, and the kinetic camerawork and use of close-ups really puts you in the middle of the story.  This is superb filmmaking.  My appreciation is further enhanced by a book I’ve been reading, The Rape of Nanking.  Rating: 10

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