Change Your Image
chaizzilla
Reviews
Aleksandr Nevskiy (1938)
the accessibility of great art by lowbrow appreciation
Of so many excellent and so on in Nevskiy, one particularly compact *zing* out of them all tickled me so thoroughly that it ends up being the definingly terrific moment of the movie for me.
Or at least the one that tends to drive hassling people to see the film, brandishing the disc in hand for emphasis.
The existing vague abstract acknowledgement of the fairly simple and concrete guilt involved in the guilty pleasure of this may truly gel and prod me into paying the intellectual bill eventually.
Till then..
The demise of the organist was so right on.
2046 (2004)
sneak attack
halfway through 2046 i was having the very rare experience of thinking, OK... i'd seen that much of it, i'd hate wasting that time *and* ending up wondering about the rest of it just enough to have to go through it again. i'm wondering if that itself set me up for the rest of the movie to feel like a slow punch in the gut. after reading dozens of reviews i was soothed somewhat to find at least two that seemed to have got some of the same. once i figured i had the movie made already, those low expectations might have left me open to what the director was trying to do. hard to say, that whole blurred stumbling through time thing had an interesting parallel in the dulling/blurring caused by the initial tedium. does that make sense? it seems a bit of a stretch to attribute this to artistic intention, but it made something more than just the eye/ear candy work really really well. nothing as satisfying as heartbreak, just heartache, like another reviewer here already said. i like another person's expression -- "calm craziness" -- for it as well. i'm pretty sure a lot of the film was over the top, but so was Gattaca. the dull uneasy ache the movie left behind almost makes me want to give it a rotten score, ya know?
Gyeoul yeonga (2002)
swoony, teary, pretty, sweet
what a tear-jerker! the series is very nice to look at as well; the contrast between its warm tones and the glassy blue and yellow tones & high contrast a lot of directors seem to be into now kept standing out. return to the gooey lighting and fireside ambiance of each episode of winter sonata was a treat. the theme song got to be little hard to endure after a while, possibly because it was impossible to not associate it with a lionel richie song from like twenty years ago whose video happened to call up a theme common to this series. imagine that. jun sang is of course dreamy, tho after reading about all the plastic surgery in the series, that's not so fun. by far the most likable characters are the "sidekicks" of the main dramatic couple, especially Mr. Kim.
Bez konca (1985)
mute howling
the movie seems to state it's "thing" directly at least twice: when urszula reads antek's notes to labrador, and in the poem read aloud by labrador near the end. for the longest time i couldn't find subtitles for it but my reason for wanting to see it so much i watched the first time without them was no, not b/c i liked "Blue", but b/c jerzy radziwilowicz is foxy. this was a good thing though, seeing it once without much grasp of the dialogue and once with nearly all of it available in translation made the way the dialogue turned so many of the scenes on their head stand out a lot, so i don't know how much the effect would have stood out seeing it all at once. the second time seeing it being much easier also, and made so many small things that happen in the movie turn up, including a couple of details i'm sure i would have understood if i simply had a regular amount of the context i think the movie's audience would be assumed to have. as a whole it felt a little like i'd been walking neck-deep in an immense but somewhat deceptively smooth river. when the movie was over it felt like it had been physically heavy, leaving one a little wobbly. but this is how it can feel when you become stretched between things going on and relationships. popular wisdom (over here anyway) tries to say one is more Real, and the other steals from this, but as much as this is true in some sense it is also from a perspective of either luxury or detachment. when labrador is hoping to coach darek's wife in getting her husband to break the hunger strike, he asks her, do you want him free? her answer seems to convey that stretch, "he'd kill me" (figuratively) isn't just about how he'd respond to her betraying this thing he's fighting for, it's not as simple as he's neglecting his family for this thing. everyone lives in that thing, labrador's assistant conveys another facet of it, which you can immediately see is selfish when he talks to darek, but so what? the hypnotherapist seems to point to other dimensions of the emotional toll of this paradox, and at the same time the sessions almost seem to concentrate a feeling spread throughout the movie. something about the vulnerability of the living characters in the setting of the movie, there's almost a feeling like everyone's sleepwalking but the dead. i'm guessing that is how someone like myself, who can only guess, picks up the movie's expression of the feeling of the systematic oppression in the setting of the movie. no end?
Russkiy kovcheg (2002)
dreaming rooms
i haven't heard the commentary track yet, but on a hunch thought i might want to later, and after reading the reviews here i look forward to it. there are some very sweet moments in the film, such as the BLUE! glaze of the bowls, if you're inclined to enjoy someone's enthusiasm the scene almost makes you feel like someone seeing and falling in love with the bowls as well. it almost seems like the place is full of ghosts at times, other times more like interaction of a handful of ghosts -- those who for whatever reason are drawn to spend some time at the hermitage -- with ghost memories of the whole of a living moment of the various rooms in the hermitage's past, even a room that seems to be occupied with the memory of modern museum visitors. the metaphysics of course are entirely, secondary to the movie, which is about the Russian Ark, this vessel. the movie would work fairly well even if the hermitage hadn't made it and the set had to be built, but it's wonderful having such a great documentary element to this. i don't feel much love for the time and part of society that the stranger loved, but there's a moment of stillness, and the unseen narrator says, "farewell, europe" in that sing-song voice... it sweeps the whole movie up to swirl up and around that moment, like a wave that then sweeps away slowly and softly, to the sea on which the ark lives and dreams forever. this ending has some of the wonderful way the whole journey of the movie _Andrei Rublyev_ fades like a dream back to to the same place the journey began. i know every time i see this movie i'll see and understand new things in it in new ways.
Das Boot (1981)
listening, waiting
i couldn't believe how awesome this movie was, not a lot of movies live up to the hype for me, but there's enough of them that do that i try and get around to them eventually. the first time i watched it i was probably thinking about this way too much, but i ended up watching it a few more times in the same week and was sucked right into it each time. no sense of when the movie was made, the English dubbing is the only time i've been able to stand a dubbed movie, though never having seen it w/subtitles i have to wonder how much that affected the translation used in the dub. there's a moment in the movie that i just can't get enough of, the succession of small changes in expression on the captain's face as he listens, i probably don't have to add any spoiler details for folks to know the moment i'm talking about. for some reason the famous sense of dirt & claustrophobia was lost on me, maybe b/c my apartment's tiny & crowded, but regardless; incredible, incredible movie.