undollaroatestablog

30 Kasım 2009

Carmen Jones review

Kategori: Kategorilenmemiş — undollaroatestablog @ 16:25
“Electric performance by Dorothy
Dandridge as the sultry whorish Carmen Jones.”

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Tantalizing re-upholstered Hollywood updating of Bizet’s 1875 opera
of “Carmen,” with an all-black cast. Director Otto Preminger (”Porgy and
Bess”/”The Moon is Blue”/”River of No Return”) turns in his usual heavy-handed
approach to the project, that’s an adaptation of the 1943 Broadway triumph
but is saddled with the risible lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and a bunch
of unsympathetic stereotyped and two-dimensional characters. But the energetic
cast gives it its all to save it from the doldrums and for the most part
succeeds, especially through the electric performance by Dorothy Dandridge
as the sultry whorish Carmen Jones who ruins the life of a promising soldier.
Though both costars Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge were pretty good
singers, their opera voices were dubbed in by opera singers LeVern Hutcherson
and Marilyn Horne.

It’s based on the novel by Prosper Merimee and is written by Harry
Kleiner.

It features only African-Americans on an Army base in the segregated
deep South during World War II, where Carmen Jones is a sexy parachute
factory worker on the base and Joe (Harry Belafonte) is a stalwart and
honored 

corporal about to be the only one in his group to go to flying school.
He’s also set to marry his visiting country bumpkin nice girl sweetheart
Cindy Lou (Olga James) on his 24-hour pass. But when Carmen causes a factory
brawl among her fellow girl workers, Sgt. Brown (Brock Peters) orders Joe,
his rival for the affections of Carmen, to take her to the civil authorities
in town. Carmen lures Joe into a night of romance in her old neighborhood
and in the morning she skips out. This lands Joe some stockade time for
neglience of duty. Carmen sends Joe a rose, and he now forgets his love
for Cindy Lou and waits only for the day he can meet the vamp again. She’s
found doing a singing gig in a Louisiana night spot. One night braggart
champion boxer Husky Miller (Joe Adams) and his entourage arrive, and he
falls for the “heatwave.” But she rebuffs him. Husky bullies his manager
Rum to persuade Carmen to accompany him to Chicago, but instead the manager
falls for the other roadhouse singer and fortune teller Frankie (Pearl
Bailey) and Husky settles for the singer Myrt (Diahann Carroll). The two
roadhouse workers go with the boxer to the Windy City and live off his
gravy train. When Sgt. Brown makes a play for Carmen after running into
her accidently, Joe gets into brawl with him and fatally pummels him. To
avoid arrest by the military Joe goes AWOL with Carmen to Chicago, where
she soon hooks up with Husky and dumps pretty boy when he becomes a penniless
bore. That leads to a crazed and jealous Joe realizing he’s in love with
a slut but is so crazed he can’t get her off his mind, which results in
doom for the star-crossed lovers.

This bouncy musical, living off its fancy nature, has a few Otto
moments that sparkle (though I think another director could have served
this whimsical material better) and it gets an A for effort. It’s noted
for Dandridge becoming the first African-American woman to earn an Academy
Award Best Actress nomination.

28 Kasım 2009

Goodbye Dragon Inn (2004)

Kategori: Kategorilenmemiş — undollaroatestablog @ 15:55

Following the suicide of their mother, two exceptionally close sisters
(played by Im Soo-jung and Moon Geun-young) have to contend with a moody
stepmom (Yeom Jeong-a) and an ineffectual father. It’s deliberately left
unclear if the strange things that turn up in the family’s dark labyrinth of a
house, such as intestines in the bed and fridge, are real or imagined by the
girls, who are just back from a hospital stay presumably for mental problems.

The siblings pull you over to their side largely because Im and Moon are
likable young actresses who don’t overemote or make their characters seem
crazy. By contrast, Yeom’s stepmother dearest is a loose cannon from the get-
go.

Kim, an up-and-coming filmmaker in his native Korea, freely cuts from the
past to the present and back again, confident in the audience’s ability to
sort things out. He creates stunning images ripe with meaning — for
instance a doctor in a white coat washing his hands in a white basin intimates
layers of guilt beyond scrubbing up. Splashes of red appear throughout, often
turning into a trail of blood. In one inspired moment, the red morphs into a
symbol for a first-aid kit, something that every member of the family could
use. This tale of two sisters is so bloody good that an American remake
already is in the works.

– Advisory: This film contains violent scenes and lots of blood. – Ruthe Stein


‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’

POLITE APPLAUSE

Drama-comedy. Directed by Tsai Ming-Liang. (In Mandarin with English
subtitles. Not rated. 81 minutes. At the Roxie.).

Tsai Ming-Liang’s films move glacially in a global-warming world —
seems as if everything has to be hot, edgy and fast-cutting, while Tsai’s
works invite us to take the time to contemplate the issues of the day, which
most often involve loneliness and disconnection in an increasingly complex and
impersonal world.

In “Goodbye, Dragon Inn,” opening today at the Roxie, he has created
another idiosyncratic, oddball movie that is both funny and moody. On a lonely,
rainy night, an old, run-down theater in Taipei is about to close for good.
The movie shown on that last day is King Hu’s 1960s martial arts masterpiece
“Dragon Gate Inn.”

Tsai’s film mourns the passing of an era of not only movies and movie
stars but also moviegoing. With gargantuan and characterless multiplex
theaters swallowing up the business of single-screen neighborhood theaters all
over the world, including San Francisco, and the success of the DVD format, we
just don’t experience movies in the same way.

I quote from James Naremore’s film-noir book “More Than Night,” in which
the film professor and author recalls first becoming enamored of the movies
during the 1950s, when “most neighborhoods had second-run or rerelease
theaters where the films changed every few days. At such places, moviegoing
involved a feeling of circularity and flow; one often entered in the middle of
a feature and then stayed to see the short subjects, previews, and the opening
one had missed. … It was not unusual to watch the show in a nonlinear or
flashback style.” “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” shows what happens when that flow
stops. As it begins, a nearly full house is enjoying the early evening show;
soon, the film focuses on the late-night showing, the last in the theater’s
history. There are only a few people there. Most of them are alone. They
change seats, leave the theater for various reasons, and return.

What follows is a series of set pieces, most of them both humorous and
also a little bit sad. The decrepit theater has leaks; the ticket taker is a
shy woman with a clubfoot; a young man can’t seem to sit down without another
patron sitting right next to him in this almost-empty theater.

The young man takes frequent breaks — perhaps this is a film he has
seen many times before — and explores the cavernous theater, the storage
areas filled with boxes and old posters. He encounters a man smoking a
cigarette, who says he is Japanese and that the theater is haunted, then
leaves. Strange.

One shot early on hints at what Tsai is getting at — an old man,
sitting next to his young grandchild. You get the feeling the old man has been
watching movies all his life, and is passing on his love of movies to the boy,
who presumably will go on watching movies the rest of his life (and perhaps
“Dragon Gate Inn” will always have a special meaning to him even decades later.
May the circle be unbroken).

Tsai is considered a groundbreaking genius in some critical circles and
an overrated bore in others (grist for the latter’s mill: a five-minute shot
of an empty theater). Certainly he is one this generation’s most original
voices, who raises interesting questions about why lonely people often lead
the same kind of lives independent of one another in a technologically
advanced but increasingly disconnected world. Now he seems to be expanding
these themes to include movies — an art form that can certainly bind
disparate groups or individuals together to “create” a common culture.

In Tsai’s previous film, “What Time Is It There?,” about a man in Taipei
and a woman in Paris who barely know each other but seem to have the same
experiences at the same time, the man watches one of his favorite movies,
Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows.” At the same time, the woman meets a man
at a cemetery; it is Jean-Pierre Leaud, now in his 50s, who played the boy in
the movie.

In “Goodbye, Dragon Inn,” the two old men in the theater turn out to be
two of the stars of “Dragon Gate Inn,” Shih Chun and Miao Tien (who has been
in several of Tsai’s films). When they speak at the end of the movie, there is
a resigned acceptance that life, and the movies, will go on without them.

Tsai’s films are quirky and strange, but ultimately they are universal
and touching.

Note: The sound designer is rarely a person you read about in a movie
review, but “Goodbye Dragon Inn” benefits enormously from the work of Tang
Hsiang-Chu. “Dragon Gate Inn” is shown only in a few scenes, but the movie’s
wall-to-wall background soundtrack is superbly integrated into the “real-life”
scenes, effectively operating as the film’s musical score. In a way, it
underlines how “cinematic” a movie can sound.- G. Allen Johnson

26 Kasım 2009

The Element of Crime (1985)

Kategori: Kategorilenmemiş — undollaroatestablog @ 07:50

You authority you’re looking for something different, bizarre, macabre, creepy, and perhaps a little obnoxious? Consider “The Element of Wrong,” the leading part blur (1984) from Danish correspondent and chairman of the go to extremes-out, Lars von Trier (”Breaking the Waves,” “The Kingdom,” “Zentropa,” “Dancer in the Dark”). It’s an extremely dismal felony drama with a twist, an exaggerated attempt at film noir, often slow moving but sometimes fruitful, too, especially in the expressionistic conjuring of its images. It’s undoubtedly not your unexceptional thriller and leaves a lot of thread questions unanswered, but it is rightful as decidedly quality a look on DVD, if just as a rental.

Under hypnosis a police detective named Fisher (Michael Elphick) recounts his experiences of the above year investigating a series of particularly grisly murders. It’s never profoundly clear why he’s seeing a shrink (Ahmed El Shenawi), except that possibly he’s baffled his honour or his mind, but the hypnosis angle gives filmmaker von Trier an opportunity to present his story borderline as a impression, a dream, and, thus, to purvey a hallucinational visual style that time after time borders on the surreal.

Fisher explains that he had left police work in Europe some thirteen years earlier and was in virtual exile in Egypt when he was called back to duty by a pair of old friends on the oblige, Kramer (Herold Wells), from time to time a chief of police, and Osborne (Esmond Knight), a retired criminologist and teacher. Because of his expertise, Fisher is asked to investigate the murders and mutilations of several babies girls, superficially the work of a serial Jack the ripper curved on destroying girls selling lottery tickets.

At first the view is grim and unpleasant, shown in foggy, muted colors, mostly shades of sepia with the occasional bright color thrown in. Dying, drowning horses are a recurring subject-matter, and the location suggests a eyesight of nightmare, or a very polluted nightmare. The intimation is that the time is somewhere in the come close future, and Europe appears to be in the throes of some kind of post-atomic eradication. The ecology of the continent seems to have been disrupted, it’s sporadically perpetual evensong, and this barren visual tone is suggestive of films like “Blade Runner” and parts of the premier “Terminator.”

Police headquarters lies in ruins, a good part of it submerged in water. Looking through the police files, Fisher finds that his mentor, old Osborne, had been on the railroad of an comparable serial killer some years in the forefront, a fellow named Harry Ashen, suspected of committing four anterior to lotto murders. Osborne had also written a reserve, “The Element of Crime,” in which he full how to find a villainous by getting basically the criminal’s mind and discovering his motives by constructing a psychological profile of the person.

Obtaining a “trailing report” that shows where the police had followed Grey years before, Fisher decides to retrace the old suspect’s footsteps. But Osborne tells Fisher that Dismal no longer exists, that he died in a excited car bang. If that’s so, who’s the guy worrisome almost in the shadows following Fisher? Fisher isn’t so accurate Grey died in the crash and becomes obsessed trying to feel him. He goes to Grey’s old haunts, meets Grey’s proficient girlfriend, Kim (Meme Lai), and brings her along on his search after, tries to get into Grey’s wisdom, and tries, in the end, to become Grey. As he does so, his headaches increase and beforehand prolonged he appears to be losing his mind.

The film raises more questions than it answers with its peculiar, ambiguous visions. What is the meaning of the overcast weather, the perpetual night? Is it really a advise-devastation nightmare or just the nightmare of Fisher’s imagination? Is it symbolic of a decaying Europe? Why did Osborne retire from the supervise drive, and why does he turn up to be afraid to romp more about Harry Cloudy? And who is this mysterious Harry Grey, anyhow, whose presence is so reminiscent of the Harry Lime character in “The Third Confine,” another criminal who was reputed to have planned died but didn’t? What do all the dying horses represent, and how are they connected with a knight’s chess piece, a horse, left at the landscape of each crime? Who are the strange, shaven-headed issue men being rounded up by the protect, some of them jumping to their deaths? And what here the ending, so surprising, so seemingly straightforward, yet so uncertain, too? Just what was Fisher doing with the child just previous to the story’s crisis?

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