Some random short notes (sorry, I’m really dispensing with the synopsis this time, and yes, there are major spoilers below): 1. This marks the second time I’ve seen a Brocka film where I kind of wished the whole film was filmed like the credit sequence: Maynila begins with stark black-and-white cinematography by Mike de Leon [...]
In his lovely essay over at Lilok Pelikula, Richard Bolisay writes about the spectrality of the camera, or rather, the camera as the ghostly presence in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s haunted film, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee. It’s a film set in a village in Northeastern Thailand and the site of the torture and massacre of farmers [...]
Is it that time of the year yet? I thought I’d post my picks early, with two disclaimers: 1. My list isn’t limited to movies made or released in 2009, but to the ones I only saw this year. (The not-always reliable IMDB seems to date movies according to production and not release (in the [...]
¶
Posted 04 December 2009
† Benito Vergara
§
‡
°
Tagged: assayas, best of 2009, bigelow, chung, eimbcke, fleischer, gary, kore-eda, kurosawa, miyazaki, oshima, reyes, wakamatsu
I’ve seen just about every Michael Mann film (some more than once, unfortunately) and I’ve never been particularly impressed. I’m probably in the minority when I write that Heat (1995) was a bloated mess, and that all I remember from the turgid 1999 film The Insider are random bits: Russell Crowe’s glasses and Al Pacino [...]
I missed Geo’s presentation on The Resistance of Philippine Cinema when he swung through town last month (I didn’t know one had to RSVP!), but here, I guess, is the next best thing: a free screening each of Auraeus Solito’s The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros), from 2006, Ishmael Bernal’s Himala [...]
The peculiar thing about Billy Liar is how everyone looks so old. They don’t, not really; it’s just the way a 26-year old Tom Courtenay, in a fantastic performance, somehow looks old before his time — I think it’s the tie — playing Billy Fisher, who is probably in his early 20′s. (My double-take is [...]
Prompted by a brief discussion on “crap” on Pivotal-film — Ashes of Time Redux and My Blueberry Nights were inexplicably mentioned, though the latter is certainly Wong’s weakest film to date — I hereby submit Saw IV for consideration, as it’s truly worthy of the word. Oh, the curse of obsessive seriality, a fatal compulsion [...]
Someone asked me the other day why I hadn’t written up a 2008 Top Ten list for this blog. I’m not sure, actually. I think it’s because I was a little more wary of listing movies I’d only seen once — and believe me, I know how film-geeky that sounds. The other was that there [...]
This is more of a pointer to Barb’s great review of The Human Condition: I was going to write a mini-review of the movie(s) too, then realized that the act of writing was probably going to be just as exhausting, as she rightly put it, as the films themselves. So, some notes instead, originally written [...]
Leading the charge in the recent wave of French-language gore (from good to bad, in order: High Tension, Frontier(s), and the dreadful Them) was the Belgian film Calvaire, all the way back in 2004. It’s a particularly pungent and pointless piece of work (though there’s little onscreen gore, actually), borrowing liberally from Tobe Hooper and [...]
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, [...]
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 — [...]
The Wily Filipino