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gattocinese
I stay up at night watching too many movies. I'm an amateur viewer. Never taken a film class.
I'm a male Asian, love animals, films, languages, and food.
Reviews
A Touch Away (2006)
No one left the theater to go to the bathroom. A 10 out of 10.
It's one of the best dramas/films/TV serials I have ever seen. I saw it in San Francisco at the Jewish Film Festival. Everyone I spoke to loved this. People were standing around talking about it afterwards. This broke my heart constantly, made me laugh, made me wonder, and kept me entranced.
A Touch Away is an Israeli Romeo and Juliet. Many of the scenes and elements were taken right out of Shakespeare - balconies, an innocent young Juliet, forbidden love, secret communications, a brother who hates Romeo and his family, a message of love intentionally turned negative, etc.
I also saw elements of Fiddler - Shmuel is a soft hearted but stand-firm father, a loving relationship between Shmuel and his wife while the child did her "modern" thing, the suitor was a Russian, Shmuel finds a way to justify his daughter's incident in the elevator.
There were some flaws. I'm not a professional critic, so forgive me if I'm off here. But the flaws do not downgrade my rating of a 10.
Wouldn't Zorik have known about the month of Chesvan? He had been in Israel for five years already. Zorik was a strong figure, but to me, he didn't seem like an officer in the IDF Air Force commando reserve. Is there such a thing? Wouldn't he have been able to beat off a few Yeshiva boys? I thought that the actor was a little wooden, especially when delivering the words of love. Was this bad directing? Zorik wants to void his lease partly because Golan didn't tell him he'd be surrounded by Orthodox Jews. Did he not know that by looking? His mother sure did. And why did he even go to Bnei Brak in the first place? I had a little trouble believing the role of Liat. Menachem seems to be absent from the household in most of the scenes there. ATA seemed to be anti-Haredi. They were human beings with real feelings, but I imagine a Haredi fuming that they were always the heavies.
However, the writing made for a story that captivated me. The characters were so conflicted, capable of great pain, overwhelming close-mindedness, and an inability to perceive tragedy.
Zorik's Russian family was so sympathetic, yet imperfect. The expressions of love in ATA were so tender that I had to cry. Gaya Traub is so beautiful yet this is not important to the story.
There are many funny moments, like Marina's comment about "The Dybbuk" or the scene at the hotel of how to tell the different types of Haredi. Yet you have the terrible foreboding that the humor is there to set you up for the tempest. ATA pulls off a difficult feat. We know the story of Romeo and Juliet. Yet a good storyteller can still entrance us and give new life to tale. That's what Shakespeare did. The subtitle of Romeo and Juliet should be "Everyone Likes To Watch A Car Wreck."
It would be extremely hard to see a viewing of this with the English subtitles since an Israeli TV series is unlikely to come out on DVD. What a shonda. The second season of ATA is supposedly in production and might make it to the 2008 Jewish Film Festival. Don't miss it.
Huang jia shi jie zhi III: Ci xiong da dao (1988)
Never enough Cynthia
There's never enough of Cynthia's fighting or her lovely face. I love watching her fight.
I think that she's so beautiful. She would be a great candidate for a long shot of her face. Notice the long shot on Shu Qi in Millennium Mambo, or the shorter long shots of her in So Close. Tarentino used that well with Pam Grier in Pulp Fiction. The 8 minute opening of Natalie Portman's face in Free Zone was pure bliss.
The scene at the beginning where she rips her skirt to fight the bad guy, wow.
What I couldn't tolerate was the horrible dubbing. I didn't know they spoke Cantonese in Japan.
The love scene was so HK. I'm from HK. It wasn't sensuous, it wasn't realistic, it wasn't believably passionate. The love scenes in Tampopo were shockingly erotic and passionate. The sex scenes in Korea's Bad Guy made me feel such genuine disgust, but it was real.
Logic, are at least a semi-smooth flow of credible story line, was missing.
That leaves nothing but more Cynthia. I don't know, maybe I'm just gushing. For me, never enough Cynthia.
Qian xi man bo (2001)
Pretty awful
I don't get Hou Hsiao-hsien. I saw Goodbye South and rated it a 1. Each film (this and Goodbye) features aimless idiots in a monotonous "slice of life." They're not just lowlifes. They're lowlifes that offer no insight. They are boring in their self-indulgent childishness.
The women seem to be these pretty (or breathlessly gorgeous in Qi Shu's case) innocents who stick by men who are bad for them.
It's really not entertaining to watch morons do nothing. Awful.
I gave this a 3 only because of Qi Shu and the background music.
I'm curious to watch Flowers of Shanghai. Or maybe I should only watch a film of Hou's from 1980-1989. The person who wrote his mini-bio on IMDb says he won seven awards out of his ten films during that period. Bribery?
Rumble Fish (1983)
I gave it a 3
I am a FFC fan, but I found the first scene so annoying. The repetitive thing with calling M. Dillon's character by his first and last name (Rusty James), the overstylized tough, but lost youth thing, and the ever annoying Tom Waits got me off on the wrong foot.
That stuff never stopped. Everyone kept calling Dillon, "Rusty James." Everyone had a thick NY accent while they were in the middle of the country. Everyone was dumb as s**t. Everything was overdone as far as the mood, camera techniques, caricatures.
Mickey Rourke gave a one dimensional performance in the Lee Strasberg tradition. I find that so many Method actors are so often unidimensional - Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, was James Dean method?
And I'm sorry to say, the film just got plain boring.
Tasogare Seibei (2002)
Two minor problems I have - starved people, swordsmanship
I gave this wonderful film a 9 of 10 for its rich sensitivity and the tremendous acting, particularly by Hiroyuki Sanada, and Yamada's direction.
But I have two questions.
1 - The famine was referred to a number of times. But when we saw peasants around the small village, they did not look like they were starving to death. They were not stick thin or have distended bellies.
2 - How would Seibei Iguchi, our hero, have been so adept a fighter if he was so many years out of practice? How would he have had the "bestiality" to win a swordfight? In all fine arts that require physical dexterity, one loses an edge (no pun intended) if one is not in practice and tuned up. Was it just the drunkenness of Iguchi's opponents?
Oh, and I had some trouble with how liberated a feminist Iguchi was. Maybe there were men like that in pre-Meiji Japan, but it's hard to imagine.
No matter what, this was a marvelous story of a thoughtful, eccentric man who defied the system at times (his refusal to his uncle), and bowed (no pun again) to it at other times (the swordfighting).
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
Loneliness, New York City, and a cute orange cat well captured
I suffer from bipolar disorder. I grew up in New York. I understand what it means to be lonely, unhappy, chasing after the rainbow's end, and finding solace in a discarded cat.
Sure, there are flaws. Almost everything in life is flawed. And the stuff with Mickey Rooney was grossly unacceptable. I'm Chinese, by the way. But as with many a work, I find that if there is profound resonance for me, and if those resonances can be expressed as elegantly as Audrey Hepburn, Blake Edwards, and Henry Mancini did, then it deserves a 9 out of 10.
I watched this film the night my little cocker spaniel, Cinnamon, died at the obscenely young age of six. It made me feel a little less lonely, a little less angry at life.
The ending was not to my liking either, but the film was so good already.
I thought that George Peppard was wonderful in his role also.
And wasn't that the cutest cat? How about that scene where Audrey throws him out of the cab and then we see him looking wet with his paws on the railing? Is that face to die for or what?
The party scene was ridiculously funny.
And the feel of New York was so well captured. People are too skinny in NY says Jed Clampett. True, too spiritually starved. New York can suck the life out of you. But New York is also a place of hope, a place for dreamers, a place to find inspiration for writing, a place to build a future out of nothing.
Finally, the scene where Peppard discovers Audrey Hepburn on the fire escape singing "Moon River" - has there ever been a more beautiful scene in film? Audrey graces us with her divinity here. A simple scene - a beautiful, comfortable, elegant, comely daughter of a Dutch baroness, singing a sad, smiling song. And that really was her singing.
The word "remake" should never be mentioned around this film. This truly was a beautiful piece of American art.
Chik yeung tin si (2002)
Hsu Qi is eye candy indeed
Hsu Qi is eye candy indeed. And that smile of hers, with her great body and her mane of hair...a 10.
Sorry, I preferred this film to Tarantino. The acting is stilted and the action is HK style (pretty unrealistic), but the film had great pacing and the women really carried the film. The use of light and suspense kept me dazzled.
Marie Baie des Anges (1997)
Almost as bad as Mee Pok Man
In terms of my personal bad movie test - I ended up pressing the fast forward button about 23 minutes into it and had to resist pressing the button throughout the film. Everyone looks stupid here. And the men all look ugly too.
I compare this film to Mee Pok Man (from Singapore) because this is part of what I call the genre of "young attractive woman in an artsy film that one would like to think that it's going to go somewhere, but one just ends up feeling angry, annoyed, and betrayed at the characters." Not worth the time despite the good looking young women. Skip this one.
Mussolini: The Untold Story (1985)
Raul Julia was marvelous
This miniseries has stayed with me long after I saw it. I was thinking about actors who never got rid of their local accents but were still great actors. Raul Julia was one of them. He could have played Count Ciano way over the top here, but he didn't. Yet he was so moving as Mussolini's conniving, but very human son-in-law. I hope you're doing well wherever you are, Raul.