[Crudblud]

Three Times (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)

Gettin' my HHH on with this anthology film of three stories. The film has a tripartite and almost symphonic structure, comprising two faster outer movements and a slow inner movement. The outer movements, A Time for Love and A Time for Youth, are the piece's strong points, they flow gracefully and with a certain relaxed comfy quality, but never feel like they are taking too long. The "adagio," A Time for Freedom, is problematic. It is a silent film with intertitles, but it goes against what I would think of as the "right" (for want of a better word) approach to silent cinema and rejects the primacy of motion in favour of stillness and slowness, and while this does set the tone of the piece well, I simply did not find it very interesting to watch. Both outer movements, by contrast, feature great sequences of motion revolving around vehicles; bicycles and boats in the former, motorcycles and cars in the latter — not to mention a wealth of beautiful shots and camera work throughout. For me, this led to the film having a sense of stylistic imbalance — that is to say the styles clash more than contrast, and do not complement each other very well — and while I understand the purpose of the classical, almost ascetic style of A Time for Freedom, it seems really out of place in the sequence.

It's two thirds of a good film, but the middle section is worth sitting through to get to the last, which is a great piece of filmmaking.

[Blanko]

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)

Unlike Syndromes, this film has a more distinct thematic core to it with its exploration of the theme of reincarnation. It mixes fantastical and mundane into a surreal and dream-like atmosphere, yet it's somehow never as captivating as Syndromes, despite that being arguably completely mundane. It's not quite as intricately paced and it's less interesting in terms of cinematography, with the soft and naturalistic lighting being replaced with over-saturated, bloomy lighting that looks too post-processed and shots lacking that painterly quality Syndromes had. 7/10

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003)

Whatever happened to Tsai that made him hate scripts so much? It seems that after his brilliant debut he's become gradually less interested in storytelling, as this film has a total of about ten lines of dialogue. It depicts, roughly in real time, the last screening of a cinema in Taipei, mostly in the form some central characters walking around while the film-within-a-film plays in the background. Frankly, Tsai isn't good enough a visualist to pull this off. He rarely provides a point of interest or attraction, his shot compositions aren't particularly appealing, and with the complete lack of narrative, I just find it difficult to find much of substance here. 5/10

[Crudblud]

Badlands (Terrence Malick)

Martin Sheen shoots the shit out of s(h)ome s(h)tupid s(h)quares but gets shunted by the Sheriff, while Sissy Spacek spits poetic verbiage about the whole thing. Malick is at his best when he's shooting man in conflict with nature (see: the locust swarm scene in Days of Heaven), and there are great shots throughout of landscape, flora, and fauna, but the action itself takes precedence as he had not yet developed a penchant for rambling aimlessly for two or more hours about some convoluted pantheistic nature thing, turning in a rather tight, but still with his signature visual style, 90 minute quasi-road movie replete with shoot-outs and car chases.

The hokey narration is a problem here as it is in Days of Heaven, Malick's follow-up feature, after which he would take a twenty year hiatus, but at least Spacek's voice is less annoying than that of Linda Manz. Script tends to be Malick's downfall, spending lots of time stuck in a given place for no apparent reason, then zipping along a hundred miles away without much ado, which is why I call it a quasi-road movie, the journey is nowhere near as important to Malick as the destination, and the characters seem to actively resent the road. Overall I'd say it's a decent film, and even if the characters and the story aren't all that great, it's still worth seeing for Malick's keen eye for pretty images.

[Crudblud]

Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)

Hou's masterful direction can only do so much for a film in which people I don't care about do things I don't find interesting. In a way, it feels like A Time for Youth drawn out too long and lacking in impact as a result. I don't think it's bad as a piece of filmmaking, but I just don't find Hou's subject here to be at all engaging. I enjoyed greatly the shots of the Yubari winter, which helped to off-set the neon and concrete texture of the action's main setting, but ultimately the film's highly limited variety of content holds it back in my view, and the sum of its parts is merely okay.

[Blanko]

Oh boy, it's time for a yet another wall of text.

Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997)

This one's about the turbulent relationship of a gay couple that become separated while on vacation in Argentina, and they're eventually left with no choice but to seek comfort from each other, albeit in an extremely dysfunctional way – all the jealousy and manipulation towards each other are portrayed in full fashion, but just when you think the film title is incredibly ironic, you do get to see hints of what exactly pulls these two characters together.

Stylistically, this film is very experimental, even for WKW, as it utilises everything in the book: it mixes black-and-white photography with extremely bright and vibrant colours, and it uses a variety of techniques from jump cuts, step printing, variable shutter speed, to things like Bay-esque super-fast panning shots (I don't know the technical term for that), and it all somehow comes together into an energetic piece bursting with emotion. 9/10

Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)

The first half of this film is a much more positive story about a gay couple than that last film. I don't really have that much to say about it. They do romantic things together, and it's pretty endearing I guess? The second half is something completely different. It's about a soldier that gets lost in the jungle and is hunted by the spirit of a tiger shaman. The pacing in this section is incredibly slow, as it's effectively just an hour of a soldier running through the jungle. Some great cinematography makes this an overall positive experience, but just barely. 6/10

And now, it's time for the...
Abbas Kiarostami Extravaganza!

Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)

A relatively straightforward docufiction detailing the trial and the events leading up to it of a man who impersonated the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The trial itself is, I believe, the real thing, and Kiarostami got everyone involved in the events to portray themselves for re-enacments. The film has some poignant things to say about human identity and ambition, but most of it is just told by the man on trial in defense for himself, and as such it's not very interesting from a cinematic standpoint. But, this is after all documentarian in nature, so it's set to portray reality as is and nothing more, and it does so competently. 8/10

The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999)

This film is all about the exploration of binary opposites, with themes of local and global, connection and disconnection, and life and death. It's about a group of journalists pretending to be engineers coming to a remote village to document a ceremony for a dead centenarian, only to find themselves stuck in this village when the centenarian doesn't end up dying as soon as they expected. In the process we witness one of the journalists, whom the story is focused on, slowly integrate into and accept the laid-back and communal style of living in this remote village. The village itself is fascinating and almost labyrinthian in nature, with houses stacked on top of each other and pathways hidden away, going across rooftops and who knows what else. Kiarostami utilises this disjointed geometry wonderfully in his direction, showing every little nook and alley, and tying it well into the theme of cultural disconnect. 9/10

Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami, 2012)

An Iranian director makes a Japanese film. That's something you don't see every day. This film is essentially a day and a half in the life of a student and a part-time escort who, despite being faced various troubles in her personal life, is persuaded into meeting a client, who turns out to be an elderly, academic man. He seems to mainly seek company in his lonely life, while the girl makes a great case for herself as the worst prostitute ever, as she tries to coerce the man into sleeping with her, only to fail at doing so and falling asleep. The next day the man drives the girl to her school, and the man encounters the girl's fiance, who mistakes the man as her grandfather. And that's about it, as soon after the film ends, in an extremely abrupt and jarring fashion. We never see the relationship of the elderly man and the escort develop, or why the girl and her asshole fiance are together (it's even directly asked in the film, and the girl tells us she doesn't know), and the themes presented seem woefully underdeveloped. Kiarostami spend a lot of time detailing the minutiae concerns this girl has in her personal life, only to have the main story begin about halfway through and end seemingly in the middle of it. I really don't understand the thought process behind this film.

In all of his films, Kiarostami seems to have a fascination with cars (another film of his I've seen previously, Taste of Cherry, is a particularly prominent example as it takes place almost entirely inside a car), and here he takes great advantage of it by shooting the reflections of the neon lights of Tokyo, as well as the bright blue skies contrasted with overpass roadways during daytime scenes. Other than that, the cinematography is a hit or miss, with some scenes being gorgeously lit, and others suffering from the flatness and shallow focus of digital cinematography. Kiarostami also does fall back on shot-reverse shot too much for my liking, as I never find that to be an interesting way to set up a scene. I would really like to like this film, as what is there is actually quite good, but it ends so abruptly that I can't shake the feeling that there should be at least half an hour to this film that I'm missing. 7/10

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)

I watched this film together with Crudblud, and I'm sure he has some things to say about it as well, as we both really enjoyed it. This time the film takes place in Italy, and is spoken in a combination of English, French and Italian. It portrays an afternoon in the lives of a British writer whose book discusses authenticity of art, and a French woman who has an antiques store in Italy. I was a little concerned going into this film that its philosophical set-up would lead to a factor of pretentiousness, as in other films Kiarostami has a habit of using his characters as ideological mouthpieces for his own train of thought, but luckily my concern was completely unfounded; if anything this film sets itself to satirise pretentious thinking, and the two main characters are the most genuine and humanistic that I've yet seen in Kiarostami's films. Their individual disillusionments and perceptions give these characters realistically flawed humanity, and as throughout their day they come to ostensibly increasingly dislike each other, they paradoxically also grow closer to each other, as following an encounter with a barista who mistakes the man for the husband of the woman, the two begin to play a game of pretend marriage that throughout the course of the film begins to blur the line between what is real and what is fake.

In a wonderfully meta fashion it ties into the thematic set-up of authenticity that the two both deal with in their professions, and Kiarostami constantly feeds us with visual imagery that ties into this thematic connection as well. The dialogue is poignant and funny, it flows extremely well and the performances from both of these main actors are great. The cinematography is quite varied as well: some of his typical car porn is included, but he prominently utilises long tracking shots and the occasional use of shot-reverse shot fits well in this much more personal, dialogue-centric film. Overall, it's just an extremely well executed narrative that is both satisfying and thought-provoking. 9/10

[Fortuna]

I watched Jules and Jim to see what all the hubbub was about. Basically it's about some French dude who lets his friend slip the baguette to his wife. He was in the war first, then he comes back and finds out his wife is cucking him and he just rolls with it like the Frenchman he is. Apparently it was highly influential for modern filmmaking. However, I see this in the same way as the horse drawn carriage being influential in the creation of the Corvette Z06.

I'd rate this hyper pretentious film frenchpeoplesmokingcigarettes/10.

[Crudblud]

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)

Centring on the idea of reproduction, simulacrum, copies of original works, and a particular theory of looking at these things and their relationships (i.e.: if one is not aware of the original, the copy has the value of the original) as delineated by a lecture glimpsed during the opening scene, the film centres on a man and a woman, bound by a book called Certified Copy, which the man has written. While getting coffee together, he slips out of the café to answer a phone call, during which time the elderly female proprietor mistakes them for a married couple. This sets in motion a kind of play, wherein an imaginary marriage, or a reproduction of a marriage (ceci n'est pas une mariage, as Magritte might say) is the arena for the airing of grievances, disappointments, hopes, fears, memories conjured as if from a genie's lamp, bringing out into the open the secret wishes of bitter divorcees and engendering the sense of hyperreality that the film gradually comes to embody. A church, bells ringing out, glimpsed through a window, dark border space of a bathroom framing the scene like a painting, a TV show, a film — a reproduction? an original? We do not know, it does not matter.

Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)

It's crazy how much better this film gets with each subsequent viewing. I've seen it three times now, and while I don't think I'll ever like it as much as I like the book it's based on, it has really grown on me over time, all the connections and references I didn't pick up on the first and second times, and who knows, maybe there's more to be found in a fourth viewing? Some day I'll find out. I'm still disappointed that so much content was cut from the book, but as I've said before, they only had so much money to work with, and Lemuria rising from the pacific ocean probably would be quite expensive to pull off.

P.S.: Pynchon has a cameo in the movie, but it is incredibly brief. During the scene where Doc and Coy talk at the Boards' house, he walks by the window twice, the first time he slows down and looks into the camera for about a second before moving on. I know this because I am a nerd. His face and hair match Salman Rushdie's description of him (after Rushdie was no longer under threat from the fatwa issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeini, against which Pynchon had written an open letter, the two met in New York), as well as the most recent picture of him that was snapped by a photojournalist who chanced upon him walking his son home from school — Pynchon promptly told the journalist to fuck off when he approached him for an interview.

[Crudblud]

Mad Max (George Miller)

Having watched Loony Lewis, I feel like I can now understand what it must be like to be on crack. I had a whole bunch of puns (Mental Mike, Crazy Chris, Enraged Eric, Angry Angus, Frenzied Frank, Loopy Larry, Batshit Brian, Demented Dylan, Bonkers Bill, Cheesed-off Charlie, Nutty Neil, Gaga Glen, Hysterical Harold, Potty Pete, Tetchy Thomas, Wacky Will und so weiter) lined up, but I don't really know what to write about this film so that I can use them all in any way other than listing them off.

I liked it.

[Crudblud]

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (George Miller)

Lots of explosions and violence and all that good stuff, but it lacks the manic intensity and bizarre editing of the original and is not so much Mad Max as it is Non-Threatening Nigel, Middle-of-the-road Michael, Generic Geoffrey. While the first half of the film goes pretty well, after the bad guys shoot the dog (at least they didn't butcher it and hang it from a tree, unlike last time) it seems to lose any sort of tension, and that's probably because the characters were all people I didn't really give a shit about. The plot is basically "I'm a dickhead and I want your fuel." "I'm a dickhead and you can't have my fuel." "I'm a dickhead and I can help you transport the fuel away from those dickheads, you dickhead." And so it culminates in a bunch of dickheads driving and screaming and exploding.

[Saddam Hussein]

And so it culminates in a bunch of dickheads driving and screaming and exploding.

In glorious and hilarious fashion.

[Blanko]

Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)

This film tries to have something to say about the horrors of war and romance, but the characters are such non-people, reduced to mouthpieces for reciting poetic dialogue, that it lacks the humanity to adequately make a statement about either. In the beginning of the film, the French female main character tries to understand the horrors Hiroshima went through in WW2, while the Japanese male character repeatedly tells her she knows nothing; ultimately, Resnais does not either. He is a pretty good director though, I'll give it that. 6/10

[Snupes]

Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2001)

Well, this was a movie. I'm not entirely sure what to think about it, to be honest. The first 20 or so minutes were very difficult, as—aside from the music—it was just really, really dull for me. I couldn't get into it at all or bring myself to care about what was happening. So, in a way, I relate very much to Crudblud's feelings about the movie.

After that point, it picks up. Mainly because of the portrayal of Vicky and Hao-Hao's aggravatingly abusive relationship, specifically the way he is towards her. It's nothing new (honestly, the movie just felt like a better-done version of movies I've seen a thousand times before, in terms of plot), but Qi Shu and Tuan Chun-hao are very good actors. The emotions were very real, the way it didn't try to play Hao-Hao up as a horrible, unfeeling monster like many stories about relationships like that do was great, the fact that Vicky wasn't defined solely as a victim...it was probably the best-done film about such a toxic relationship I can think of.

The main problem for me was, aside from those parts, the rest of it just didn't pull me in. Differently from Crudblud, the neon and concrete textures held my interest moreso than the winters (probably partly because I live in winter most of my life and it's become pretty ugly to me). One of the greatest things about this film is the visuals. One thing I've been getting noticeably sick of in American cinema (which I see more of than anyone I know, so it's had a lot of time to fester in my mind) is the horrible, horrible dried, empty colours in cinematography. The way the same colours are used over and over across films because that's what's standard, specifically the egregious filtering of things through orange and blue because hay complementary saturation blurbleh. Visuals are boring more often than not, especially in blockbuster films. This movie, on the other hand, has a wide spectrum of variety, and it's a very, very pleasant change. I've noticed this when I watch foreign things in general, so that combined with the fact that Hou is just a great director in general, and Ping Bin works wonders with his cinematography all around, made for a pleasant viewing experience. It's pretty incredible how the tiny sets never felt tiny or constrained at all.

The real highlight of the movie, though, is the soundtrack. I love it. I mean, the one motif that keeps popping up throughout the movie wore thin by the end, but in general it is very nice. The ending song in particular. Mmm.

So yeah, overall I'm not sure where to put this film. It did a great job of making me feel (I hate Hao-Hao with a burning passion), but aside from their relationship I can't honestly say I cared a ton about the rest of what happened. Everything near the end just kind of "happened", and I just watched, not really having any stake in any of it. If it weren't for the direction and the music, I think a lot of this film would've been a lot more difficult to sit through, but as it is I enjoyed a good chunk of it. The overall story, though, didn't leave anything with me. So that's the conclusion, I guess?

[Blanko]

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, 1972)

Buñuel strings together sequences in which a group of bourgeois repeatedly fail to dine together, as well as several dream sequences in which the dining does happen but end in disaster. Buñuel uses his surrealistic style for comedic effect, and the film is quite witty and funny as a result. Aside from the snappy and energetic camerawork, the film is visually quite unremarkable, but it is well edited and flows gracefully. 8/10

[Blanko]

La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)

This is a nifty little featurette composed almost entirely of static black-and-white photgraphs, with overlaid narration and audio recordings. It details the aftermath of WW3, and the nature of time travel experiments done on one particular subject, who comes to fall in love with a woman he meets in the past. Notably, its concepts have inspired 12 Monkeys. It's pretty great. 9/10

Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)

I don't know how to describe this. Is it a documentary? A travelogue? An art collage? I'd say, in general terms, it's a portrait of a culture. Or maybe even all of humanity. Marker's phenomenal compositional sense and amazingly written narration makes this a nearly perfect experience. I still cannot wrap my mind around it. 10/10

[beardo]

300: Rise of an Empire. Was good.
Interstellar. Was good.
Pacific Rim. Was good.

[The Ellimist]

Saw Watchmen. Still deeply disturbed.

[Ghost Spaghetti]

I'm almost through re-watching Stargate SG1 from the start. One thing which surprised me is how much I'm enjoying the later series. I remember from watching it for the first time that when O'Neill left the team, and they brought in a mostly-new cast that the quality dropped off a cliff. In actual fact, the new cast refreshed the series and the new enemy (The Ori) are an interesting and novel enemy after eight series fighting the Go'auld.

One problem is that, during its original run, SG1 and SG: Atlantis ran concurrently, with plot elements from one bleeding into the other. Re-watching it on Netflix, I'm watching all of SG1 before I start on SGA, and there are times when I've been left a little out-of-the-loop (Wait, when did they design this amazing new ship? When did they get this MacGuffin to work? Wait, who is this secondary character I'm supposed to care about?)

In conclusion, it's been worth the re-watch, and I'm glad that I stuck with it after the point at which my younger self walked away.

[Saddam Hussein]

I finally got around to watching Fury Road.  It was great.

[Blanko]

Finishing up my Hou Hsiao-Hsien anthology are six films from the 80s. All of them besides Daughter of the Nile are very sentimental, set at least partially in rural regions with plentiful shots of grassy fields and evoking a sense of nostalgia with their recurring theme of "simpler times". The clear distinction from what can be regarded as "modernist" Hou and antiquated production values (none of these films were filmed with live sync audio; A City of Sadness was the first Taiwanese film to do so) kept me from watching these films for a while (as well as the horrendous quality some of these films only exist in), but I'm glad I got around to doing it, as at least two of these films are actually very good.

The Green, Green Grass of Home (1982)

I have very little to say about this one. It's a petty small town drama where things happen and then are forgotten about with little sense of causality or narrative arc. Not that it's exactly unusual for Hou's films to be very loosely constructed, as even his modern films do that - but here Hou clearly hasn't matured enough as a director to have that pull and captivating quality to make something like this interesting. 6/10

The Boys from Fengkuei (1983)

A ragtag group of misfits move to the big city to learn independence and responsibility. It's very straightforward and simple, but well enough executed. Some highlights include some very good vertically panning shots of the building the kids live in, demonstrating that even in his early days Hou had some tricks up his sleeve. 7/10

A Summer at Grandpa's (1984)

I feel pretty much the same way about this as I do about The Green, Green Grass of Home. As the title suggests, it revolves around a couple of kids that spend their summer at their grandparents' place. They make friends and spend their hours away doing standard kid stuff. What makes this film slightly more interesting is the subversion of that traditional formula, as most of the actual storytelling revolves around the adult characters, and the kids have to come face to face with realities of adult life. Otherwise, it shares much of the same flaws with the aforementioned film. 6/10

A Time to Live, a Time to Die (1985)

This is the film where I feel Hou really hit his stride as a director. It's based on Hou's own memories of his childhood and depicts the growth and coming-of-age of a youth, and how the losses in his family shape him as a person. As both of his parents become ill and die, the main character has to seek a sense of belonging from other sources and becomes involved in gang activity as a result, while his family becomes more and more reliant on his support throughout the film. It's poignant, but a bit too elliptical and meandering to be as impactful as it could have been, and in a very Ozuan fashion he doesn't deem it fitting to dramatize the events beyond what is necessary. Lighting and cinematography in this film are absolutely stellar. 8/10

Dust in the Wind (1986)

This is the greatest of these six films. It depicts a young couple who leave their home town to move to Taipei to earn enough to get married. Despite what appears at outset, it's not a romantic film; both of these main characters are too busy in their work lives to spend much time with each other, and even when they do get the opportunity it becomes obvious that they're only together through circumstance and cultural expectations of getting married sooner rather than later. Eventually they drift apart completely and move on with their lives. In a way this film feels similar to Café Lumière with their thematic depictions of cultural disconnect, generational shift, urban independence, rejection of romanticism, and lots and lots of traaaaaaains. Once again, the film looks gorgeous, stepping it up even further from the previous feature. 9/10

Daughter of the Nile (1987)

This in turn is the worst Hou feature I've seen. It's the first Hou film to be set in present time (that I know of) and does very little of success with it. It's an exploration of a present-day family dynamic that does very little exploration at all, with a lot of gang violence that becomes a lot more tactful in his later films. Aesthetically it's probably his weakest film as well, as he incorporates a spectrum of neon lights, which really just detracts from the graceful and soft lighting that make the two previous films look gorgeous. History shows that Hou would later utilise this sort of style to much greater effect in Good Men, Good Women and perfect it in Millennium Mambo, but here it looks like an ineffective, cheap imitation. 5/10

With that all said and done, this concludes my HHH anthology. It unfortunately doesn't cover every one of his films, as the three that are missing are seemingly impossible to find. Without further ado, here is my personal ranking of the 15 films I did get to see:

1. Good Men, Good Women (1995)
2. Millennium Mambo (2001)
3. Café Lumière (2003)
4. Three Times (2005)
5. A City of Sadness (1989)
6. Dust in the Wind (1986)
7. A Time to Live, a Time to Die (1985)
8. Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996)
9. Flowers of Shanghai (1998)
10. The Flight of the Red Balloon (2008)
11. The Boys from Fengkuei (1983)
12. The Puppetmaster (1993)
13. A Summer at Grandpa's (1984)
14. The Green, Green Grass of Home (1982)
15. Daughter of the Nile (1987)

[Blanko]

Mad Max (George Miller, 1979)

Where's all the madness, Max? This film almost seems afraid to embrace the silliness, madness and campiness that it occasionally lets you in on. For most of the film Max is the fish out of the water, the lone American amidst all the crazy bogans yelling OI M8 WHATS ALL THIS THEN, and just to make sure that the personalities of ordinary Australian people don't get too crazy for you, the film leaves plenty of time for enjoying Happy Family Vacation Time before Max finally takes a step into the madness for the remaining ten minutes. It's almost a blessing that Max receives relatively little screentime, as he's the least mad part of this relatively un-mad world.

As for the assertion Saddam made that this is "artistic in the Blanko/Crudblud sense", I think that's just because this isn't the big dumb action movie it wants to be - hell, it's not really even the big campy silly car chase movie. I certainly didn't find Miller's direction remarkable at all, and ultimately what I got out of it is that it's a film struggling to find an identity for itself. 6/10