Giulia non esce la sera

I’m not entirely certain how this ended up in my queue. I have a lot of films like that. But I did my best to get into it, and partially succeeded. This is rather a film that keeps the viewer at arm’s length: Guido’s motivation and character are rather opaque, in spite of the glimpses of his psyche we get through his story-writing. On account of his somewhat inscrutable character, it’s hard to get much of a read on his wife either: it’s clear there’s no chemistry any more, but I never got a feel for the cause and effect between Guido’s infidelity and the cooling of his marriage (or, indeed, whether I was supposed to view his infidelity as particularly a character flaw). Some of this may be cultural: Eurpoeans have historically, and to a certain extent still do, take a different attitude towards the nature of a household which makes something like, say, Guido refusing to move at the same time as the rest of his family, seem a bit less bizarre.

There are definitely some tender moments in the story, particularly involving Guido’s attitudes towards his daughter and her boyfriend, which I found appealing. I liked the interplay between Guido’s creative endeavors and his real-world interactions, and the satirical look at the literary world as a whole was a nice sidelight. Unfortunately in the end almost all these interesting elements are dwarfed by Giulia’s drama, and the last half of the story, in spite of its dramatic tension, never quite felt as engaging as the earlier section where Guido felt more human and more involved with his world as a whole (on the other hand, maybe his withdrawal from his former interests was the whole point, and I missed it completely.

Technically the film was competent, making use of cinematically motivated shot framing and lighting; it’s a bit too fond of blue-tones but is clearly trying to keep the camerawork and lighting fundamentally aesthetic. I always have trouble assessing the expressiveness of actors not speaking English, so I’m not too clear on the acting potential.

See also: IMDB.

פעם הייתי/The Matchmaker

I saw this film this evening as part of the Louisville Jewish Film Festival. It’s a largely sweet and nostalgic comedy with some surprising teeth. Like so many films that I find interesting, it’s also a picture of a time, a place, and a culture: there is a specific intergenerational and intercultural dynamic which is perhaps uniquely 60s-Israel, which suffuses the film: even among the young people, there are clear distinctions on a piety/nationalism/radicalism spectrum, with different young people subscribing to different views of what being Israeli really means. Of course that pales in comparison to the distinction between and among the older generation: the Holocaust survivors are a breed apart, and soberingly presented as not pitied but rather shunned. It’s easy to see how people get Survivor’s Guilt, when they’re in a culture full of Survivor Blame, and this film is merciless in presenting the basic rift in communication and understanding between those who survived and those who wonder just how they survived. This is quite possibly the coyest Holocaust film I’ve ever seen: the Holocaust itself is barely mentioned, but the spectre of its legacy hangs pretty heavy, and in unconventional ways.

While this intercultural drama is part of the experience delivery, and a very intriguing part, the film is, on the whole, a comedy, with likable characters bouncing off of each other in clever ways. There are recurring gags, such at Yankele’s overreliance on the exact same lines for every customer, and a tremendous amount of situational absurdity, and it is, for the most part, quite funny enough to keep the film moving in between the dramatic bits. The acting is generally solid: the entire cast is competent, and Adir Miller puts on an inspired performance which is believably sentimental. The only element of the story that really fell flat for me was the Arik-Benny-Tamara love triangle: Benny was fleshed out so sparsely, and even Tamara was fairly one-note, and that particular aspect of the plot felt flat and in large part irrelevant.

On technical notes it was mostly satisfactory, although some of the editing decisions seemed questionable: on more than one occasion a scene cut out without fanfare after a rather non-final-seeming line of dialogue. It didn’t seem that this technique was used with any deliberate purpose in mind; I assume that either the script or the editing was unintentionally abrupt, which doesn’t speak well to the technical aspects.

A word of warning, which may be an issue only of pre-releases and not of the actual stateside DVD: the subtitles are rendered in white (without the usual black border on subtitle script), which makes them very difficult to see when anything white is on the bottom of the shot. On the subject of the subtitles, they are sometimes haltingly ungrammatical or unidiomatic, but only when one of the Holocaust survivors is speaking, so I’d tend to put this one in the “faithful reproduction of aslightly mangled Hebrew” box (unless someone who speaks Hebrew tells me otherwise).

See also: IMDB.

The Lightkeepers

This one tries so hard to be sweet and romantic and never really seems to get there; the underlying drama and reconciliation feels limp, and the characters feel largely unconvincing in their various roles. The sense of peiod never seems to come alive, either: it felt like this film wanted to very strongly be defined in both time and place, and while the place was excellently brought to life (Cape Cod, with on-site well-chosen scenes and competent cinematography), the time could’ve been pretty much anything before, oh, 1940.

Basically, it left me with very little actual impression, which is a bad thing. Excellent films I can usually come up with something to say about, even if better critics than me have seen it before. Bad films I usually have fun tearing apart. This one didn’t really give me anything in particular to say. It marches through a number of requisite plot elements to the end and never once really engages the mind.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.

Rindu kami padamu

I may have missed something about this one that made me unable to appreciate it, or something. There are vignette storylines that center around a market and the claustrophobic, low-rent housing nearby, but it’s very difficult to make sense of the characters’ motivations or the extern to which their actions serve to progress the plot. I think some slipshod design on the subtitles may have also created problems: the lines were sometimes oddly flat, and when multiple actors were speaking at once, the mapping between subtitle lines and voices wasn’t very clear. All in all, I’m afraid it fell completely flat for me, in spite of my usual enthusiasm for settings and characters outside my range of experience. Not all of these experiments can be winners!

See also: IMDB.

Cyrano de Bergerac

I rather like the text of Cyrano de Bergerac, although I’ve never seen a stage performance of it, so this will have to do. It even uses the same translation I read (Brian Hooker’s). There are bits, particularly wordplay-intensive bits, whose omission I missed, but that’s ever the curse of an adaptation. Mostly this worked; there’s significant hamminess in a lot of the scenes, but, hey, it’s a hammy play, and Jose Ferrer is particularly well-placed, full of swagger and bravado and just the right amount of tragedy. Mala Powers’s Roxanne is a bit indifferent and unconvincing, but they can’t all be winners.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia, Internet Archive (free download).

Cú và chim se sẻ

This was a first for me: I found a technical decision in a film to be irksome enough to drag me out of my usual tepid indifference to technical matters. It’s an issue a lot of indie and quasi-indie stuff has these days, but it really only became intolerably distracting in this one. I refer to the modern “shaky-cam”, not in the action-movie Michael-Bay/Star-Trek sense, but the bobs and weaves of a handheld camera, as if the action is being recorded by an invisible videographer. I don’t want to imagine my Saigon residents being followed by a documentary crew; I want to see their story delivered with competence, which is usually best served by a steady camera. I’m sure there’s some dodgy verisimillitude-related justification for this poor (and not unique) decision, but I call bullshit.

Maybe one of the reasons I felt the technical aspects so keenly was the thinness of the story. The basic plot is of a plucky little girl’s machinations to get a man and a woman she likes together. It’s a sweet little romance but rather cliched. The only places where I felt much at all was when Hai was philosophizing (he had good lines and good delivery), or when we were seeing life among the flower-selling girls and noodle-selling boys, which was presented convincingly and with a realistic restraint of tone (cold insecurity, but not, say, Dickensanian nightmare)

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.

Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery

“What kind of crap are you reading these days?” my father asked incredulously, as I set down Anne of Green Gables on top of Pirates of Venus, having brought both along on my trip. Anne is not bad the way Pirates of Venus is bad, but evidently it is not thought meet that a 29-year-old male reads them (nonsense: if I can watch shoujo anime and hold my head high, I think my masculine pride will survive a novel targeted at 19th-century Canadian schoolgirls).

Anyways, on to Anne. I’m afraid the story never engaged me too much. As a child I might’ve loved the first three-quarters, with Anne charming the socks off everyone around her with her whimsical, innocent garrulity, but being an old, joyless fart these days, her imaginative-chatterbox routine mostly made me want to lie in a dark room with cold compresses on my eyes. There seemed to be generous timeskips near the end to get everyone where they needed to be, and Anne grew a lot less interesting (as you might have determined from above, I found young Anne wearying. But older responsible Anne just felt kinda dull. There may be some verisimillitude there, and/or an aanalogy to my own life. I’m going to stop talking now). Even the death of a major character couldn’t really rescue my interest much.

Evidently there are sequels. Lots and lots of sequels. I don’t think I’ll read them, since I find it hard to imagine this story proceeding in a direction I find terribly interesting.

See also: Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia.

Állítsátok meg Terézanyut!

This is a romantic comedy featuring Sándor Csányi (best known in America, to the extent he’s known at all, as Bulcsú from Kontroll), but in most other respects it doesn’t much resemble Csak szex és más semmi. It’s not actually as entertaining, for one. It seems to be cultivating a consciously imitative “Sex and the City” vibe, and that particular vein of humor may be tapped out. Also, it’s attempting to develop a theme which doesn’t seem to actually be present in the story: there’s a presumption running trough the story that Kata is self-sacrificing to her own detriment, and that she has to move past her compulsive altruism to be happy. And yet, with the exception of her hawklike hovering over her ex-junkie brother, we see no evidence of the story’s eponymous terézanyutszerűseg [*], which makes me wonder why it gets such prominent mention in the dialogue.

Short take: watch Csak szex… instead. It has more Csányi, better humor, and more consistent characterization and themes.

[*] Literally, ‘resemblance to Mother Theresa’. This may be a highly unidiomatic use of suffixes.

See also: IMDB.

彼氏彼女の事情/His and Her Circumstances

Oh, Kare Kano. I love you, and you break my heart. When I saw the first five episodes of this, I was charmed by the delightfully eccentric take on shoujo style, bouncing around with a manic energy reminiscent of the best things about FLCL. This impression continued unabated for several more episodes, and I came to become fond of the characters as well. And then came the 19th episode. The one where the money ran out. The one consisting entirely of flashback footage and paper puppets. And it became immediately clear that the Gainax project this most resembled was not FLCL, but Neon Genesis Evangelion. Once again, we would see a vision derailed by financial-privation-induced poor design choices, chiefly over-reliance on stills and flashback footage, but occasionally bursting into the offensively amateurish.

And the sad thing is, for the most part, I continued to like it. The “14 days” arc, as much as it dragged on, still had style and entertainment value, even through the dubious design choices. I was eagerly awaiting the conclusion. And then, in episode 24: more fucking recap. Episode 25: a completely unrelated story involving an extremely minor character. Episode 26 — the last one, the one I had pinned my hopes of a resolution on — was told in stills and narrator voiceovers and maddeningly abstract, and celebrated the eventual blossoming of love between two characters whose relationship had been telegraphed (and which totally disappointed my assumptions about both of their sexual orientations). And that was the end. No actual conclusion to the main story of the 6-episode arc. That felt like a sucker punch, and it was damn disappointing.

But I like the series, on balance, so what I’m going to do is pretend it was an excellent 18-episode series about a boy and a girl, with incidental light on their circle of friends, which reached a conclusion when they ironed out some confusion about their physical relationship. No culture fest. No Kano-stalker subplot. Tsubaki and Tonami are both gay, and there is no evidence to the contrary. No voiceover telling me at the beginning of each episode how bad the Japanese economy is. NoFewer flashback episodes. And some damn closure.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia, Anime News Network.

孤男寡女/Needing You

I probably should’ve been warned off by the romantic-comedy aspects. Continental European romantic comedies are frequently better than their American counterparts; east Asian ones can be a bit more of a crapshoot. Needing You is not actually all that bad, but it does not, for the most part, distinguish itself. There’s a certain color-by-numbers feel to the setup, with a womanizing office manager, his scatterbrained assistant, and a lot of conversations in which people insult others while they’re covertly listening. Seriously, that’s one speakerphone incident away from an American sitcom. It does it all with good enough grace to be watchable, though. Plus it’s shot through with occasional elements which lift it away from its mundane office setting. There are recurring scenes of dining, and while it’s easy for an outsider to be horrified by what a culture eats, there are at least two scenes of people in-scene being horrified by the food, so I think it’s permissible to find the culinary experiences presented here a bit regrettable. Of the two major characters, only Andy actually appears to develop: Kinki is more or less the same character at the end as at the beginning, just presented in a more charming light. I’m not sure if that says something alarming about gender, but I used up all my indignation of Decameron ’69, so I’ll let this one slide.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.