Category: Film

I wish these video clips were longer, but the NMAI hosts a major selection of video art from the ’60s on up. The database is searchable, and contains not just a lot of Dutch artists I don’t know but also people like Bill Viola, William Wegman, Gary Hill, and many more. Fans of “Alive From Off Center” and the Channel 4 show “Ghosts in the Machine” will appreciate it all.
Netherlands Media Art Institute.
By way of Metafilter

Dir: John Woo
2004
Some have joked that “Paycheck” alludes to how John Woo saw this film. They’re probably right. The filmmakers take an interesting premise (from Philip K. Dick, who never gets any respect) and make it exquisitely dull by gussying everything up in cold blue techno sheen and throwing in a pointless car chase. When a solitary (CG?) dove flies out of a door for no reason at all I felt the screen should have read Copyright John Woo 1990.
Ben Affleck plays a reverse engineer who has his brain wiped at the end of every top-secret project he works on. Apparently, he’s very good at this and works at some sort of MicrosoftEvilCorp, who employs him to steal competitors ideas and make them their own (wow, just like in real life!).
Then he is approached by Aaron Eckhart to reverse engineer something so furshlugginerly top secret, Ben will have to have all of three years wiped. Benefit? Ninety million dollars. Sure, erase away.
So, three years later he finds himself with no money, the Feds accusing him of treason, and no memory of what he did except an envelope of random objects that he sent to his future self.
The film remains a run-n-chase, just instead of our hero using his brains to get out of a situation, he has a future self handing him objects. There aren’t too many philosophical conundrums here, just using keys to unlock doors…and the keys are clearly marked.
Uma Thurman turns up to play the girlfriend (Woo’s not very interested in her, or any females, as usual, or the idea of having your lover lose all knowledge of you. It’s interesting that this film came out the same year as Michel Gondry’s near-classic “Eternal Sunshine,” which takes on all these themes and ideas with 1/25 of the budget, but 10 times the intelligence and caring. When will Mr. Dick stop being dicked?

Dir: David Mamet
2004
The title is correct. David Mamet’s kidnapping thriller is pared down to its essence, with dialog and a plot that doesn’t wait for the stupid people in the audience to catch up. So many thrillers and action films tell you something three times just in case you get it. Mamet will have none of that.
Val Kilmer isn’t my favorite actor, but he’s well cast a Scott, and Special Ops Navy Seal (I think, I don’t pay particular attention to thing like that), a guy who just gets the (bloody) job done with maximum efficiency and never asks questions.
“Spartan” then sets up Scott in a situation where he must question his elders, as others are dying around him. I went into this film knowing nothing except for Mamet’s name and the fact that the film came and went. I can see why it did–most people couldn’t catch up with the film, despite being in a safe Hollywood genre. I also don’t want to discuss the plot too much as I found many of the twists unexpected. The trailer, however, is made for the mouthbreathers and tells you most of the film.
Mamet’s vision of modern politics is of a ruthless and efficient engine that chews up those far and near. And the gulf that separates the soldiers from those that give orders is wide when it comes to morals.

Boasting an impressive roster of hard-to-find films on DVD-R, 5 Minutes Online is another in a series of homegrown companies who are fed up waiting for their favorite cinematic obscurities to be released. The legality of any of this is questionable, but what company is gonna go there for a Mr. T PSA collection?
Myself, I’m thinking that Anna Karina music video film is looking good for $20…

Dir: Michael Mann
2004
Shot on 80% DV, Michael Mann’s latest captures the airless nighttime of Los Angeles, and is fairly truthful to the city’s geography (Thom Anderson would approve). When a hitman played by a grizzled-by-GQ hitman enters the cab of tktk (Jamie Foxx) for the first time, they have a small discussion about Los Angeles. Cruise finds it empty and cold; to Foxx it’s his city, and he knows it inside and out. L.A. is the kind of city where a man can die on the Metro line and nobody will notice him for six hours, says the hitman.
He may be right. Certainly there are times in Collateral where major things happen in the streets and nobody is around to witness them. A car hits a road block, flips upside down, and two survivors crawl out, one running off. Because this happens in the Bunker Hill area of downtown, Mann convincingly stages it right in the middle of the road. Nobody passes by. If you’ve ever driven around there at 3 a.m. you can bet Mann’s crew didn’t have to have much security for the shot.
As Foxx and Cruise make their afterhours journey (hitman has a list of five targets, the cabbie is forced to chauffer), Los Angeles unveils itself as a series of tribal encampments that only the in-the-know can visit. Two apartment complexes–one lower class, the other with a view of the city–three clubs, a jazz club, a Mexican dance club, and Korean nightclub out in the middle of nowhere. Mann gets the ethnic make-up and dispersement of L.A. correct here too, even though it’s used for a backdrop.
There’s also something to the fact that Collateral is about a black man unwillingly chauffering around a well-paid white guy as he knocks off people of color. After the first murder, Cruise throws Foxx’s moral panic back in his face: “tens of thousands killed in one day in Rwanda, and did you shed a tear? Did you join Amnesty International? So what’s one dead Angelino?” (I’m paraphrasing, but it’s close). The hitman is a bit of a moral relativist. The cabbie is not. Anyway, I don’t know if there’s much to be made of this or not, but we are made to feel empathy for the victim who is African-American (the club owner) whereas the rest are just cyphers. And of course, the last on the list is none other than the African-American prosecutor that Foxx has in his cab at the beginning of the film. In one way you could see Cruise’s hitman as the white elite coming down into a city of mixed race he has chosen not to understand, and the cabbie’s progression towards someone who will staunchly defend the city for all its problems. The film ends on a different mode of transport–the Metro line, method of transport for those who can’t afford cars.
Am I reading more into this film or not? Your comments welcome.

Dir: Yasujiro Ozu
1953
I can’t remember when I first watched Tokyo Story, but I know it was on crumb-bum video and I hadn’t lived enough.
So here comes Jon Crow shoving DVDs in my hand, shaming me for not watching Mizoguchi and Ozu enough. Fortunately, Criterion are finally getting around to releasing Ozu’s films on DVD. A good transfer of an old film is essential to its enjoyment, I think.
Anyway, “Tokyo Story” is a masterpiece, and not just because everybody says so. It has the emotional cruelty and sparse interior landscape of Chris Ware, but the sort of heart that Ware is only beginning to attain.
The story of an aging couple making a rare trip from their countryside home to the big city, only to be treated as mostly a nuisance by their grown children, doesn’t offer easy explanations to the conflicts on the screen, but suggests much more beneath the surface. That is, we could blame Shige’s bad treatment of her parents to being obsessed with making money, but there are hints that she has some sort of reason, some issues that she hasn’t worked out, something she hasn’t forgiven.
Not that “Tokyo Story” is a post-modern “everything’s opposite” twist-o-rama text, just that the film’s handling of character is so well-drawn that multiple viewings are bound to bring out the numerous levels on which these people think. The father, Shukichi, was apparently a bit of a drunk (as was the deceased son), and may explain the children’s differing responses to him.
The film asks a lot of questions about the parent-child bond, what motivates the breaking of that bond, reality vs. a parents’ expectations, and whether there’s anything to be done about it. When the youngest daughter vows at the end that she’ll never be as selfish as her older sister, there’s no way to say if she’ll be able to keep her word. “Tokyo Story” leaves the viewer wanting to know what will happen to so many of the characters. What will happen to daughter-in-law Noriko, (Setsuko Hara, an Ozu regular), now a struggling widow still young enough for remarriage? What will happen to Shukishi, especially after he is cheerfully damned in a way by the neighbor at the end of the film? (“You will be lonely” she says to him, which could be the film’s brutal message).

Giant wind-up robots, that is. “The Dream” is Trevor Cawood’s music video that mixes the mini with the huge, and uses seamless CG to do so. (Cawood did effects for the Matrix, so this is what he does on his days off.)

Dir: John Woo
1990
“Bullet in the Head” is often hailed as one of John Woo’s best, because it springs from his own memories of growing up rough on the streets. And after he sends his three heroes off to Saigon in 1967, determined to lay low from the police and make some money in the process, the film turns into his own version of “The Deer Hunter.”
The leads are Ben (Tony Leung), Frank (Jackie Cheung), and Paul (Waise Lee), and their character types are wistful/sensitive, well-meaning/unhinged, and realistic/selfish respectively.
All three, we see in an opening sequence that combines dancing with fighting (Woo’s tribute to West Side Story), are good at fighting. This comes in handy later when they go up against a crime boss and his minions with all sorts of firepower, from sub-machine guns to exploding cigars (!).
The three are poor, but Ben seems to be starting off well, getting married to a rather drippy girl in the neighborhood. But soon Frank’s problems with a local gangster cause all three to have to leave the country. Will they make a drop off of pharmaceuticals in Saigon while they lie low? Easy!
In the first of many well-executed set pieces, the three have just barely arrived in Saigon for five minutes when they wind up in the middle of an assassination attempt and have their important package blown up. Desperate, they decide to team up with a CIA op called Luke (Simon Yam) are wipe out the crime boss.
Another great set piece of ridiculous violence follows as the three take on the entire building.
So far we are safely in Woo territory. Then the three get captured by the Vietcong, who know nothing of gangland honor, and the movie gets very dangerous, refreshingly so.
At the center of the tale is a US army box full of gold. Paul insists on keeping it at all costs, destroying the friendship. There’s also a substitute for Ben’s drippy wife, a similarly drippy Canto-pop star turned captive druggie whore who Ben tries to rescue. Woo, who is never really that interested in women except when they are abstract plot elements, does away with her too.
I was with the film up until the final act, when Ben returns to Hong Kong to see vengeance on Paul for what happened to Frank. (What happens to Frank results in one of Jackie Cheung’s scenery-chewingest performances. He even got nominated for it.)
The ending, it turns out, was not the original, though that survives on the expanded, remastered DVD as an outtake. Like so many Hong Kong action films, any strides made by the drama are ditched for absurdity. The missus gave up on this film when the skull appeared.
Still, the transfer looks wonderful on this FortuneStar remaster, and is exciting for much of its length. But for those who want to build a case against Woo, there’s plenty fodder here too.

Dir.Mamoru Oshii
2004
As far as I know, this isn’t based on a manga by Masamune Shirow, but a film-only sequel to one of the best post-Akira sci-fi anime on the last decade.
With “The Major,” the female cyborg hero of the first film, living inside the ‘net/Matrix/computerverse, the sequel focuses on her partner, Bateau, a cyborg with a human brain, and his rookie partner, Togusa, a human with a synthetic brain.
The plot is police-procedural–investigate the homi- and suicidal impulses of pleasurebots (called gynorgs here), who have taken out their wealthy industrial johns. What is causing this breaking of one of the three robotic laws?
As GITS2 (great acronym!) progresses, it becomes apparent that the suicides, as well as Bateau’s outre responses to them (taking on an entire yakuza den with clever holography and a bloody great fun) are chess moves to draw protag and antag together. The solution to the mystery is a nice inverse on the idea that prostitution–in particular child prostitution–destroys the soul.
In between GITS2 delivers some of the most beautiful set pieces and animation so far in animation. Blending 2D and 3D animation, a painter’s eye for light, an otaku’s attention to techie detail, the film demands repeat viewing. Certain sequences deserve a mention: Bateau’s paranoid attack in a convenience store brings us fully into the subjective view of its cyborg brain; Kosuga’s brain-viral attack that leads into a Moebius loop of a nightmare narrative sends the film off into a Borgesian dimension.
It’s a very restrained film, and chilly in its diagnosis. Yes, the “soul” might be what separates the humans from the borgs (even when that line is blurry), but when soul becomes rare it turns into, in a capitalist system, a commodity

Apart from being the master of stick figure animation, Don Hertzfeldt has been posting poems on his blog made of nothing but spam text. Enjoy.

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and

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Really, you should check out the rest of the blog. Can’t wait to see the new film, four years in the making!