You can almost tell when Wayne Wang makes films that he probably considers closer to his heart: they come in pairs. Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985), was accompanied by Dim Sum Take Out, a short film made up of outtakes from the previous film. Smoke (1995), written by the novelist Paul Auster, [...]
There’s a scene about halfway through Wayne Wang’s 2007 film The Princess of Nebraska that’s the complete stylistic opposite of the ending of his 1982 masterpiece, Chan Is Missing. You’ll be forgiven if it reminded you of those Christopher Doyle-filmed handheld scenes in Chungking Express, and maybe it’s even done on purpose: the scene is [...]
Just wanted to point you folks to an interview with Wayne Wang I conducted for my American Pop column over at AsianWeek. Reviews of his two latest movies coming shortly… href=”http://filmeyeballsbrain.com/2008/09/22/an-interview-with-wayne-wang/”>
A sampling of topics from my e-mail and IM conversations of the last seven days: – the Joker as the Übermensch – Gotham = Baghdad – “Is Batman a Jack Bauer-like Republican vigilante figure, who takes the hatred of the world upon himself to do the necessary work of getting rid of terrorism, or a [...]
Almost five hours of movies (Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy 2: The Golden Army and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight) and four hours of sleep later, I find that I can barely string together a coherent review. (This is also a break from my usual Two Movies That Have Nothing To Do With Each Other series, [...]
A link, instead, to an American Pop entry. href=”http://filmeyeballsbrain.com/2008/09/16/timur-bekmambetov-wanted-2008/”>
I have an entry on the director Wayne Wang on one of my other blogs, American Pop. It’s called The Saga of Wayne Wang and will probably inaugurate a whole series of reviews (if not a full-on retrospective) of his work to date. href=”http://filmeyeballsbrain.com/2008/09/15/entry-on-wayne-wang/”>
Horror movies, as any Comp Lit freshman would tell you, are often allegories of something or other. They can, on occasion, be a little more direct and literal in their targets, as seen in works like George Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005) or Joe Dante’s Homecoming (2005), The first is a thinly-veiled call to [...]
Jia Zhangke’s brilliant new film is no ghost story, but it’s nevertheless filled with figures of the walking dead. It’s titled Still Life (Sanxia haoren) perhaps an apt title for a movie filled with movement and travel, but towards an imminent entropy. The setting is Fengjie, the province with the most people affected by China’s Three [...]
It hardly seems fair to compare Yung Chang’s excellent debut documentary, Up the Yangtze, with work by a master filmmaker like Jia Zhangke, i.e., Still Life (2006), but the comparison is inevitable: Chang’s movie is set further downstream, in Fengdu province. His documentary focuses on the tourist trade, as it follows a girl who works [...]
Barry Jenkins’ Medicine for Melancholy is an uncommonly fine film, and easily one of the best I’ve seen this year so far. Indie romances don’t always sit well with me, probably even well before Natalie Portman gave Zach Braff her headphones, precisely because they follow such a well-worn formula. But Jenkins gets the formula — [...]
There’s a tiny whiff of the exotic about Lance Hammer’s powerful debut film Ballast — a drama set in the Mississippi Delta, with a non-professional cast — but that fact works in its favor. Otherwise, the story’s nothing we haven’t seen before, including the way it’s structured: the slow accumulation of details, then some (expected) [...]
Alexander Sokurov’s latest film, Alexandra (Aleksandra), derives its understated humor from its narrative premise: an elderly woman from St. Petersburg visits her grandson, an officer stationed in an army base in Chechnya. This, in and of itself, is already humorous in its faintly comic juxtapositions, as we see her barrelling stubbornly through the barracks, handling [...]
Speaking of immobility, Bela Tarr’s latest film, The Man from London, is also worth seeing, but good god, it’s slow — slow even for Bela Tarr. The movie has a classic noir setup: ordinary station guard witnesses a crime, comes into possession of a large sum of money, and ponders what to do with it [...]
I struck gold with my Movie #2 of the San Francisco International Film Fest yesterday with Roy Andersson’s queasily funny comedy You, the Living (Du Levande), a film I’m already anxious to see again. There is no narrative (although the movie does begin and end with two pieces of a story): just a barely-connected series [...]
The Wily Filipino