Nian ni ru xi (Before We Fall In Love Again)

James Lee needs to find his audience.  This is the third thing I’ve seen by him, and I think they’re all great.  This one (the start of his “love trilogy”) is the most straightforward of the ones I’ve seen: after a woman has vanished, her husband and her lover try to track her down.  It packs a lot of charming little Truffaut-esque moments in their reminiscences, and has a slow but agreeable pace with just enough ambiguity to enhance the story without overshadowing it.  I dunno, maybe I’m latching on to an obscure director just for the hell of it, but I really feel like there’s an undiscovered talent here whose iMDB ratings are a travesty.  Somehow I’m gonna have to track down his other work.  Rating: 8

IMDb

Dat Kho (Land of Sorrows)

Notable for being a Vietnamese movie actually filmed during the war.  It contains actual shots of the evacuation of Hue during the Tet Offensive, and it claims to be only existing Cinemascope footage of Vietnam at the time.  The star is popular Vietnamese singer/poet Trinh Cong Son, whose sweet & sensitive songs are peppered throughout the narrative.  The story centers around a family split (emotionally, ideologically and physically) during the war and contains several interesting subplots about the different family members.  The editing is not that great, and there’s nothing hugely original about its tales of wartime tragedies, but it’s a solid piece of work that easily makes you care about its characters, and is of special interest considering the circumstances under which it was made.  Rating: 7

IMDb

Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters)

I’ve seen more than my share of Holocaust movies.  Most of them are pretty good, and people generally tend to be mindful about treating the subject matter carefully.  This one, winner of the foreign language Oscar last year, was about as good as most of them.  It’s based on a true story (although some of the DVD extras I skimmed through indicated that many of the details were fictionalized) of a team of Jews hand-picked from the concentration camps to forge currency for the Nazis.  It examines the moral complexities one would expect from such a situation with a decent amount of subtlety and realism.  Well-done with good performances.  Rating: 8

IMDb

15 Park Avenue

Another Aparna Sen-directed film with an address for a title, but it’s nothing at all like 36 Chowringhee Lane (except one of the primary actors has a role in it).  As in Mr. & Mrs. Iyer, Sen casts her daughter in the lead (with Iyer co-lead Rahul Bose also in a significant part) as Mihti, an Oscar-bait type character of a schizophrenic and tortured young woman.  But the real star here is Shabana Azmi as the long-suffering older sister, trying to cope with Mihti’s delusions while still maintaining her own life.  The writing isn’t quite as heavy-handed as in Iyer, and the ambiguous ending is a nice touch, but this still isn’t much deeper than your average television drama.  I’d like to see more of Sen’s earlier directorial efforts, but this one wasn’t that bad.  Rating: 7

IMDb

The Sun Also Rises (rewatch)

I bought this from the same seller as Love Letter, and the disc has the same problem of freezing up and skipping in the middle.  Must be something about these Korean discs, but just beware of a seller called “dvdasian” on Amazon.  Fortunately, it only affected about 12-15 minutes in the middle and my memory of the film was good enough to mostly fill in the blanks.  It’s a shame there isn’t a non-import version of this DVD available… Wen Jiang deserves a lot more attention, all his films (this one being his third and most recent) are superb.  The story is a lot more comprehensible the second time around, especially the first section.  Although the film doesn’t have quite the same impact as Devils on the Doorstep, it’s told in such a breathtaking manner that it makes for a truly compelling experience.  Rating: 9

IMDb

Chichi to kuraseba (The Face of Jizo)

A film that wallows and wallows in self-pity about Hiroshima.  Now, I’m not for atomic bombs and I certainly think that what happened was awful, but when I see/read/hear the Japanese whining about it, I keep thinking “Pearl Harbor… Nanking… Pearl Harbor… Nanking”.  It takes a really good movie for me to overcome that.  This isn’t a really good movie.  It’s quite obviously based on a play, which rarely works for me (even when Bergman does it).  And the theme just doesn’t strike me as that original (young woman deals with her survivor guilt by conversing with the ghost of her father).  Can’t think of any particular reason to recommend this movie, it’s mildly touching but that’s about it.  Rating: 5

IMDb

36 Chowringhee Lane (rewatch)

Well, at least one of these new discs is a keeper.  Aparna Sen’s directorial debut is still masterfully touching and layered and confident.  I’m pleased to own this and have it in my library, even if it is a pretty crappy print on a low-budget DVD.  Rating: 9

IMDb

Love Letter (rewatch)

Well, this DEFINITELY turned out to be a bad purchase… because the disc (a Korean import) freezes and skips halfway through.  But based on what I saw (and what I remember from seeing it about 3 years ago), I probably wouldn’t have kept it in my collection anyway.  Well, maybe, it’s a tough call.  In my previous comments I called it “part Moonlight Mile, part Only Yesterday and part Double Life of Veronique.”  That still sounds right.  It’s not a brilliant film, but it strikes the right tone most of the time and the way it plays out is pretty interesting.  I guess I’ll leave it up to fate.  If the seller offers me a refund, I’ll dump the disc.  If he only offers a replacement disc, I’ll take it and keep it, at least until the next time I purge my collection.  Rating: 8

IMDb

La Femme Nikita (rewatch)

Another of my questionable recent purchases, and another one that won’t be sticking around.  This is my 3rd time watching it, and it’s still pretty entertaining.  But I’ve had my fill of it.  And there are a number of things that bug me about it now… the laughable hooligan gang that Nikita hangs out with at the beginning, the sometimes embarrassing attempts to establish Nikita as a kooky/unhinged character, wasting Jeanne Moreau in a nothing role.  It’s a slick and stylish film, but in that late 80′s/early 90′s way that’s heavy on the blue filter and doesn’t look that cool any longer.  Rating: 7

IMDb

Raging Bull (rewatch)

So I went on this buying mini-spree lately… picking up legit versions of a few movies that I had, let’s say, “not quite legal” copies of.  But the weird thing is that most of them are movies I’m not really sure I need to own.  I think this is the 4th or 5th time I’ve seen Raging Bull.  The only real criticism I can level at it is that Cathy Moriarty is supposed to age from 15 to 30 throughout the film, but there’s no way in hell she looks anywhere near 15.  Even this minor complaint is offset by De Niro’s incredible physical transformation from the start to the end.  As with so many other Scorsese films, it’s quite violent, but it’s such a wonderfully rendered study of a man who cannot escape his own rage.  I love GoodFellas, I love Taxi Driver, I pretty much love Mean Streets.  But this one just doesn’t do that something special for me.  It’s missing some kind of certain zing to it.  I don’t know if this is the right word, but I want to say it’s too self-contained.  A movie that I respect deeply, but it doesn’t have a place in my heart, or my collection.  Rating: 9

IMDb