Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008, dir. Sacha Gervasi)
A documentary about the 80s band Anvil, who for whatever reasons never achieved commercial success. While the other metal bands that surrounded them went on to have long and lucrative careers, Anvil sank quickly into obscurity. This documentary opens with now middle-aged lead singer, 'Lips', working a shift at his day job as a delivery man for a catering service. We follow the now strictly part-time band as they embark on a badly-organised tour, following up with a self-funded album recording predictably ignored by every major record label, as the guys are continually struck down at each turn.
The actual filmmaking is nothing to write home about, and is quite naive in places; for example, toward the end of the film some good news is recieved - hopeful strings swell in the background and we get a shot of some flowers. Groan. However, what the director does manage to do is get plenty of candid footage of these bold, interesting, and funny real-life characters as they struggle in the face of adversity. The human interest is so strong that I could freely recommend this film to anyone.
Barrier (1966, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski)
This is one of my favourites from February; a highly tongue-in-cheek Polish film that draws strongly on its nouvelle vague contemporaries while at the same time incorporating some of the atmosphere and style of 1930 surrealism, most notably I think, Cocteau's Blood of a Poet.
The film begins with a group of medical students playing a kind of balancing game to win a pot of money. The winner decides not to share out his winnings and leaves the wander the streets, stumbling into an unconnected series of strange adventures, during which he meets a female tram driver whom he attempts to woo. The meandering narrative, wandering of the streets, and casual boy-girl dynamics are all typically new wave. The episodic and often comedic nature of some of the urban scenes even reminded me of Louis Malle's Zazie dans le metro. The cinematography however is exciting and varied. Some scenes are shot in stagey, contained spaces or shallow tableau (Cocteau), whereas at other times Skolimowski really innovates in terms of space and movement. There is no one style on offer, more a mixture of different ideas, all executed with great skill.
The final thing to mention is the soundtrack, which has a really nice set instrumental pop-jazz type tunes that bring things together. The overall experience is very charming.
Blind Shaft (2003, dir Li Yang)
Blind Shaft is a very straightforward realist drama about two Chinese men who make a living out of scamming mining companies: they take a drifting labourer under their wing and pretend that he's family, murder him, fake an accidental shaft collapse, and collect the compensation money. We are never told anything explicit about the characters and there is no forced exposition, we merely enter their world and follow a series of events. It's quite a neorealist film in this respect, minimal on performance and dialogue, although the focus on what there is of a plot remains tight throughout. I found it a really enjoyable, emotional, and worthy film. Recommended.
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970, dir. Jaromil Jirez)
A Czech fairytale movie with more folk story tropes than you can shake a stick at - grandmas, wizards, vampiricism, magic talismans, and the overarching and ever-present threat of incest (be it accidental or otherwise). Throw in some girls kissing on each other, great costuming, and some of the most picaresque village settings of all time, and you have an entertaining, if fairly loose and predictable, film - although to be fair it's all about the aesthetics, and if you like... this kind of thing, then you'll love... this.
Powaqqatsi (1988, dir. Godfrey Reggio)
Naqoyqatsi (2002, dir. Godfrey Reggio)
I love Koyaanisqatsi, the non-narrative non-verbal blockbuster of 1982. I recently got the second and third films in the 'qatsi' trilogy on DVD and was looking forward to them a great deal. Powaqqatsi I enjoyed very much at the time, although casting my mind back there's very little to differentiate it from the first film. The opening scene is fantastic and features the best music of the film, however from there on in it's arguably Koyaanisqatsi redux - the same cinematic techniques applied to different peoples and environments. Overall I don't think that Philip Glass's soundtrack for this or the third film come close to that of Koyaanisqatsi, now so iconic, but could it ever hope to?
Naqoyqatsi, visually, is a grand departure from the first two films. Unfortunately a great portion of it sucks. After watching it I was shocked to discover it was made in 2002. Two-thousand-and-two! It looks like it was made in 1992 with leftover footage from Lawnmower Man! Equations and Pi symbols fly toward the screen through a wireframe tunnel, just like you'd see in an educational programme timer-recorded off TV at 2 o' clock in the morning by an enterprising secondary school science teacher. There are some worthy attempts to innovate using split screen techniques but it's of limited effect. A few scenes achieve a sense of eerieness and alienation from hyperreality, which I think is partially what Reggio was aiming for, but do that for 86 minutes you run the risk of estranging your audience - do so unsucessfully and you run the risk of boring them. Although this review was mostly negative, I didn't hate Naqoyqatsi, I found it at least interesting as an experiment. I'm just mournful of an opportunity squandered.
"Guys, I just spilled coffee on my Amiga and accidentally made Naqoyqatsi."
The Wayward Cloud (2005, dir. Tsai Ming-liang)
In my limited experience (1998's The Hole, and now this film) the world of Tsai Ming-liang is a unique place, a discomforting but somewhat magical world of dark and cramped urban spaces, inhabited by a handful of lonely and/or misguided people, occaisionally brought to life by the injection of vivid colour and nostalgic 50s musical song and dance numbers. There is also a pervasive obsession with water. This film follows the adventures of a Taiwanese porn stud named Hsiao-Kang and what happens when he crosses paths with a girl named Shiang-chyi with whom he falls in love. It is important to say at this point that Hsiao-Kang and Shiang-chyi are both reoccuring characters in Tsai's universe. Both the character dynamics and the use of ensemble players in recurring roles is comparable to Wong Kar-wai; however, this is where comparisons to the familiar end.
Taipei is suffering a water shortage, which leads directly to the skyrocketing popularity of the relatively cheap watermeon. This iconic and colourful fruit replaces water as the basic element of life. This is the visual leit-motif and gimmick through which the less important scenes and story mechanics operate. The real theme that Tsai tackles is sex and it's role in human relationships, as either an obstacle or aid in making a romantic connection and overcoming loneliness. He specifically addresses the kind of sexuality seen in and inspired by pornography. He takes an open yet negative attitude towards sex in general - this is admitted by the man himself as he nervously giggles his way through the DVD bonus interview, explaining the influence of his own loneliness and the attitudes towards sexuality and pornography in the media in Taiwan.
Speaking for myself, I think the stand-out scene must be the opening one, which is a doctor-and-nurse themed cinematic porn sequence in which a piece of watermelon stands in for the woman's genitals. You might need to re-read that sentence but there's nothing more I can do to better describe it. It does however neatly describe the film's twisted sense of humour and approach to sex, which becomes increasingly darker and leads to quite a shocking (but still blackly comic) final scene in which the hero and heroine are romantically united through an unconscious Japanese porn starlet proxy.
As with Tsai's The Hole, a very similar film to this, I could appreciate the cinematic skill and wild originality in the movie yet I didn't immediately connect with the experience and came away unenthused and a little depressed. I'm impressed though how haunting his movies are and the images he creates really do leave a lasting impression, not because of shock value but because of robust artistic merit. The more I think about The Wayward Cloud the more I like it, and I know I'll go back to it again.
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009, dir. Lee Daniels)
Precious, or to give it its full original title, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire Based on the Life of Sapphire by Sapphire, is a film which through its promotional material intrigued me, both for its striking lead actress and the involvement of Oprah Winfrey. It is a fairly predictable and heavy-handed Inspirational Story (TM) about an illiterate inner-city teen who gets pregnant by her father and is regularly physically and mentally abused by her mother. Spoiler: She is strong and overcomes her circumstances. One notable thing about the film is the heavy use of tacky special effects and techniques: the fantasy sequences are just downright awful (for example, Precious imagines that she is a movie star and everyone loves her) but at one point she looks through a photo album and the pictures come to life and start talking to her! In her imagination! All of these layered tricks early on put me in mind of a really, really shit version of Citizen Kane.
Another thing to note is that the lead actress, Gabourey Sidibe, is actually given very little to do other than scowl and mumble her way through most of the film. By the time she gets two or three minutes of a real performance opportunity she has already been overshadowed by the truly brilliant Mo'Nique, who without a doubt deserved her 2010 Oscar win for her role here. Overall though the film is standard fare - its more atrocious moments balanced single-handedly by the strength of Mo'Nique's late game Oscar-bait revelation.
The Life of David Gale (2003, dir. Alan Parker)
I watch a lot of films for bad reasons. Occisionally I will get it in my head that I need to see something I know will be unexceptional at best. I watched The Life of David Gale because it appeared in a YouTube video of spoilers, addressing a list of films with unexpected or twist endings. My mind was later made up to see it when I discovered that Laura Linney was in it, an actress who has become part of an in-joke for me and a friend. Anyway - this movie is bad. The main problem is that the entire plot, including the supposed twist, is made totally obvious from the half-hour mark onwards. You then have to watch Kate Winslet run around for another whole hour misinterpreting obvious clues and generally being the most incompetent human being on the planet while you weep openly for Kevin Spacey's career.
Land of Plenty (2004, dir. Wim Wenders)
The pitch: Jen from Dawson's Creek has just returned to the US from Israel and checks into a homeless shelter run by Bunk from The Wire. Meanwhile, Dennis Quaid rolls around town in a van trying to prevent the next 9/11 by spying on people and being a bit racist. Don't see this.
Back to Normandy (2007, dir. Nicholas Philibert)
Thirty years ago, director Nicholas Philibert worked as an assistant to René Allio on the film I, Pierre Riviere. In Back to Normandy he returns to the rural French village where they scouted shooting locations and enlisted the local townspeople into playing all the main roles. He interviews some people who relate their experiences. We see some bales of hay. He shows some clips from the film. He ponders Allio's own experience. He shows a pig being killed on a farm. Then he tracks down the elusive lead actor from Pierre Rivière, who turns up to meet two of the other old actors. They say hello to each other and walk around a bit.
It was crushingly dull and massive disappointment for me when taking into consideration (a) how good the film this documentary is based on is, and (b) how lovely Philibert's observational doc Être et avoir was. This film has absolutely no focus, it meanders and rambles and comes up with nothing of substance to show for it all.
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