The Art Of The Kill

So far this Spring, I have mostly been too busy to keep up with too many new movies, though I made a point to get out and see some of my more anticipated films of this year, which I would say, held up to my expectations pretty well.  Within a few days of each other I saw both The Raid 2: Berandal, and Jia Zhangke's highly acclaimed A Touch Of Sin (天注定), and I would be remiss if I didn't find a common, though strikingly different, feature used within the two of them.  Both films, though incredibly violent, carry themselves very differently, and while I would say that I've had my fill of bloodletting for the foreseeable future, they also had me thinking about violence in general; what draws us to violence, in both entertainment/storytelling and in real life?  Why do people seek violence in entertainment, and what causes others to seek and cause violence in their own lives?  Rather than write a straight review of either film, I thought it would be more interesting to look at things within a larger scope, but also to examine violence with an eye trained towards Asian cinema, as it may pay to take a look at the climates of where these films originate or take inspiration from.

2011's The Raid (Serbuan Maut) was maybe one of the most inventive and entertaining martial arts/action movies in I don't even know how long.  The raw, intense, and over-the-top violence was a shot of adrenaline to the action film community, who for so long had been overtaken by either big budget, Michael Bay-sized emotionally empty blockbusters or poorly financed, aesthetically bankrupt brawlers; and while it's hard to say that The Raid changed the film community at large, it at least changed audience expectations and proved that it was possible to elevate what would have been a simple genre film with sharp camera work, spare, yet effective plotting, and crisp editing, for just under a million dollars.  A sequel was sure to follow, and wouldn't you know it, did, only three years later.

When evidence of said sequel started showing up online in trailers, audiences of the first film shook as they wondered whether filmmaker, Gareth Evans, would be able to top the first film, as it set a high benchmark not only for himself, but for the action genre as a whole.  What genre fanatics were torn on was whether they wanted more of what made the initial film so special, or something brand new that lived as it's own beast, propelled by the same kind of balletic violence they had now expected from Evans' production studio, Merantau Films.  As is always the case with action films, the goal is to always top the previous installment somehow, and with the success of The Raid, filmmakers all over the genre rushed to up the ante in an unspoken (or pretty spoken, if you ask Sylvester Stallone) competition.


The point to all of this, I suppose, is that maybe it's not necessarily the violence itself that Gareth Evans is promoting so much as he's promoting the genre itself.  Evans has stated in several interviews about the kind of film fan he is, and what films he grew up watching, and while corruption within the civil services is a real problem in Indonesia, The Raid 2's sly winks and deliberate homages to classic martial arts and gangster cinema almost alleviates it from any social responsibility.  There is a scene in The Raid 2 in which one of the lead characters, Uco, is having an altercation with a singer/escort in a karaoke bar, and while the scene is momentarily unsettling, I quickly reassured myself that Evans, as a filmmaker, seems uninterested in displaying sexual violence the same way as he would a carefully choreographed fight scene.  The point is to provide a moment in which the audience recognizes a character flaw and removes any doubt about Uco or his role in the film.  The violence in The Raid 2, I conclude, though serious, is more suitably taken as a choreographed martial arts epic rather than an acute social examination.

The violence in A Touch Of Sin, then, is perhaps far more impactful, due to the film's firm and unwavering look at a true, unforgiving, and rapidly modernizing mainland China.  Each of Sin's four separate vignettes on personal violence are based on real life events, and their short, sharp moments are felt even stronger than Evans' only slightly longer-running ballet of wince-inducing action.  In The Raid series, we involve ourselves in the exploits of rookie cum undercover cop, Rama, as he infiltrates an underground crime syndicate after toppling one of it's former under-bosses.  If all of that sounds a bit fantastical, it is; Rama is a fictional character in a fictional version of Jakarta, Indonesia's capital city.  His mission is one of pure exploit and escapism, though tinged with a darkening world that feels believable because the rules within it are so similar to our own.  Guns kill quickly and easily, and the impact from punches and kicks feel as if real.  As an audience, because of these rules, we believe that Rama's feats are possible.  It feels believable that he could clear a room of adversaries due to his superior skill and righteousness.  We see him hurt, we see him bleed, and because of that, we sit on the edge of our seats knowing in our gut that one more hit could kill him, much in the same way that Jackie Chan made us believe in real life superheroics (one of Evans' favorite action movies, afterall, is Chan's own balletic masterpiece, Police Story).

Jia Zhangke's protagonists, by contrast, are real people, not reasonable facsimiles thereof.  Rather than heroics, we face four real, unsettling, and often heartbreaking moments in which a person is drawn (or rather led?) to violence.  In contrast to The Raid's nonstop barrage, Sin gives us time to breathe between every moment, and it's in contemplation of every moment that it's impact is felt.  The death of a single factory worker, whose act is based on the Foxconn suicides of 2010, is more important than the swift demise of henchmen #s 14-32 in a single scene of The Raid.  The days and moments leading up to the dramatized account of the Deng Yujiao incident and the moments after frame the act of violence in a way that is both anticipatory and pensive; as an audience, we are forced to contemplate Xiao Yu's actions, and it's hard not to anticipate them as we watch the film.  Her segment comes at a place in the film where we already know what to expect, and if we are familiar at all with the actual event, it's a sick pit in our stomach as we wait for the pitch to finally turn feverish (or at the very least, where we find Xiao Yu's breaking point to be).  As news stories and accounts of incidents file up, Zhangke's film becomes sadly predictable, and I think it will sit with many viewers as a chronicle of a time in China when life seems very cheap; what is so fascinating with Sin, though, is it's ability to keep us engaged through it's predictability.

In their own ways, both A Touch Of Sin and The Raid 2 reminded me a bit of  the films of Takeshi Kitano, who is no stranger to violence (both in real life and on film), but has a sensibility about him that I have always really admired.  A nihilist at heart, Kitano has never had a problem showing us darkness, but the differences, specifically, between 1993's Sonatine and 1997's Hana-bi are staggering in tone; similar acts take place, though the way the audience views them is very different.  He is treating the audience much like children in the way at some moments he invites us in as if to say, "look at this, learn," in some instances, and "this is not for you to see" to others; but we trust his judgement, because he's usually right, and it's nice to see an artist guide his audience every once in a while through both extremes.  What Kitano lacks, though, is an eye for artistic violence, as to him it just exists.  I don't think it's too far of a stretch to think that maybe his aesthetics for filmed violence were shaped in some way by the work of Kinji Fukasaku, who was set to helm Takeshi's directorial debut, Violent Cop, before stepping down due to illness, or scheduling, or some other story I remember reading forever ago.

Fukasaku's own Battles Without Honor & Humanity (仁義なき戦い Jingi naki tatakai)series could be seen as a kind of precursor to some of the violent films we see today, even beyond Takeshi Kitano.  To Fukasaku, crime was unglamorous, and the yakuza, who up until then in film were often revered as folk heroes, were dirty, underhanded degenerates who killed, raped, and stole out of desperation and greed, and were not, generally, the heroic men of the people popularized in the the fiction of the time.  Fukasaku had enough true accounts to ever mistake the fictional yakuza for what they really were, and combined with his documentary-like style of filming, to audiences of the time (I can only imagine Takeshi was among that audience), it was a shot in the arm both cinematically and socially.  I again find it not such a stretch to imagine that Fukasaku's films were perhaps at least in some way influential to both Gareth Evans and Jia Zhangke, whose films celebrate both the cinematic and brutal humanity depicted as far back as the early 70s.



The difference between The Raid and A Touch Of Sin, I conclude, is in cinematic tradition.  In the case of Evans, perhaps, originally a westerner, his connection to many social aspects of the cultures he viewed were superficial.  That's not to say that Evans is a superficial director, and I actually would argue that he is a socially responsible filmmaker who in fact has great respect for the culture he represents in his film (allegedly, Sydney Pollack was said to have had very little respect for his Japanese cast while filming 1974's The Yakuza, and accusations of it's "promotion of 'yellowface' behavior" lasts to this day).  Again, Evans' films celebrate the balletic momentum of the wuxia film traditions (to make an interesting note, even the title of A Touch Of Sin is a reference to another wuxia film, King Hu's A Touch Of Zen), combined with modern sensibilities and classic "one-upmanship" within the genres his films represent, and are therefore not irresponsible when measured against the films of Zhangke, whose films have always carried a social overtone, and have yet to veer too far from being specifically Chinese.  One could argue that Evans could never make the films he makes outside of Indonesia, but I feel like his films have a little more of a global lens with which he views things.  To adopt a culture and grow in one are very different, and though one is not less admirable than the other, it feels rather inescapable in terms of pedigree.

It's hard to be able to sit back and say a film has zero social responsibility, but in having the choice of what cinema we choose to watch, the responsibility ultimately comes back to us as the audience; we are in a pretty wonderful position in 2014 for cinema to have such a global reach, and whether that influence be social or purely aesthetic, we can take from them what we choose.  It's interesting to note that Sin was censored in China (allegedly, though few notes have been found saying exactly that, despite the film's trouble finding domestic distribution) not for it's violence, but for it's social commentary.  The largest difference between the two films is that Zhangke asks us to reflect upon the consequences of that violence, whereas Evans is content to let his audience be namely that: an audience.  Though the protagonist in both films could be viewed as the angry antihero, pushed beyond the limits of rational humanity, of the two only Sin asks the audience to step into the shoes of his characters, while The Raid forces us to view Rama as we would through a shark tank: aware of danger yet safely beyond it's reach.  Neither film is wrong for it's decision, as ultimately the two films are incomparable (a little late for that, wouldn't you say?), and it is up to the audience to decide what the limits of their morality is, whether that be an explosive gangster yarn or the simple question of human decency.

Young, Beautiful, & Blue

Most readers who keep an eye towards international cinema will have, most likely, heard at least rumblings about two of the most sensational films from this past year's Cannes Film Festival, and since they're either finding or found their way to home video releases, now seems like the perfect time to talk about two of my favorite films of last year.

Despite it's controversy (more on that later, maybe), Blue Is The Warmest Color has become a critical success pretty much from go, and it managed to secure the Palme d'Or for the director, Abdellatif Kechiche, as well as both Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, making them the first (and only!) women since filmmaker, Jane Campion for The Piano in 1993, to win the award (not to mention Exarchopoulos being the youngest ever recipient).  While both actresses are excellent, I found Exarchopoulos to be the breakout performance as it's her character (also named Adèle) that the audience gets to see grow throughout the film as she meets Emma (Seydoux), the young woman with blue hair with whom Adèle begins a life-changing relationship with.

Though the film is based (kinda) on Julie Maroh's graphic novel of the same name (making Blue the first film based on a graphic novel to ever win it's esteemed award), the film differs slightly, as it was also the product of filmmaker, Abdellatif Kechiche's, original concept that he found mirrored Maroh's story that he came across as he was still developing it.  Aside from the changing the character's name from Clémentine to Adèle, it's the ending and preceding character changes that delineate the two versions; and as much as I love to side with source material, I found the film to be much more interesting, and the ending of the film drove home everything that I loved about it.  In fact, one of the reasons why Maroh wasn't mentioned in last month's article on female artists was that I wasn't too terribly impressed by her version of Blue Is The Warmest Color, as I didn't find her ending as satisfying.  It's also interesting to note the film's original French title, La Vie d'Adèle - Chapitres 1 & 2 (Adele: Chapters 1 & 2), which I find probably more appropriate, given it's structure, as well as the overall impression the film left with me.

As I mentioned above, the film garnered it's share of controversies and criticisms; some of it came from alleged working conditions during filming, but the film's reputation was criticized, even by Maroh herself, disapproving of the film's several lengthy sex scenes, comparing them to pornography.  I found that the rest of the film's visuals were not to be overshadowed though, and the lovely (if not so literal) use of blue in the film's rich color palate was very striking and reminded me of Glyn Dillon's The Nao Of Brown and it's brilliant use of red as it's own central palate; in both instances, neither color overwhelmed the senses nor felt overused, but in fact added to the overall design of both pieces, making them feel like complete, well-rounded artifacts.  Blue Is The Warmest Color is just that; both a color and a mood.

My second favorite film of last year, and also a nominee of the Palme d'Or, was François Ozon's Young & Beautiful (Jeune & Jolie).  I have been a tremendous fan of Ozon for a while now (as with the continuously promised Wong Kar Wai article,there is an Ozon omnibus post coming soon as well, I swear!), and I have yet to see him turn in anything I haven't enjoyed (though I will admit to not seeing absolutely everything he's done); Young & Beautiful was no exception.

The film focuses on the seventeenth year of Isabelle, played by Marine Vacth, who, after losing her virginity while on vacation with her family in south France, decides to explore her sexuality by becoming a prostitute.  Simple enough Cinemax style setup, I suppose, but Ozon's film shines in much the same manner as the rest of his films; almost like an alternate universe Yasujiro Ozu, François Ozon's films often deal with families and the relationships between generations, and it's that relationship and subsequent fallout of Isabelle's alter-ego Lea that feeds much of the film's conflict.  After a shocking event, Isabelle is quickly found by the police and her parents are notified, straining her relationship with her mother.

In true Ozon fashion, he deliberately and frankly sees his events through to their conclusion, and as the film encompasses an entire year, the audience is able to see real growth in the characters through the performances of actresses Marine Vacth and Géraldine Pailhas, who played Isabelle's mother, Sylvie.  Vacth is able to portray a young girl both experienced and unrefined, and it's her penetrating, weak, yet almost blank gaze throughout many of her sex scenes that belie a sense of innocence in her incongruous professionalism.  Pailhas reacts with all the stoicism of a lost parent, and it's through a series of tough love, treading water, and trust exercises that the two develop back into their former relationship, at once pretending that nothing happened while silently acknowledging their conjoined shadow, lurking just under the surface.

The film is interceded by four chansons (one for each season) by Françoise Hardy, whose recording of the German song, "Träume", was featured at the end of Ozon's Water Drops On Burning Rocks (an adaptation of an early Fassbinder play, so, you know, it's awesome that that's a French reinterpretation of both a song and a movie; just saying).  The effect is very French, and it gives the film a sort of timeless quality; much like his previous films, Young & Beautiful doesn't cater to social trends in either filmmaking or setting, and if it weren't for the inclusion of cell phones and computers, I feel like Ozon could have made the same film fifteen years ago.  In fact, the visual style of Blue Is The Warmest Color even reminded me quite a bit of Diva, a personal favorite of mine by director Jean-Jacques Beineix, so it's almost as if in 2013 France has reached a new neo-classicist period, though I'd still hesitate to rename an era every time a couple of dudes make a few really excellent films; for all we know, these are isolated incidents, but I'm still going to be excited when said dudes release their next films.

Funnily enough, despite filmmaker François Ozon's frequent use of deliberate sex and graphic violence, his films rarely if ever have any controversy surrounding them, and even in the face of some misplaced comments suggesting that many women fantasize about being prostitutes, Ozon stands by his films in a way that maybe Kechiche finds himself unable to do in the face of his critics, even at one point threatening legal action against actress Léa Seydoux for criticizing his shooting methods.  Despite both Ozon's comments and Kechiche even denouncing his own film in weekly French magazines and the like though, the films have been popular and critical successes, and it's nice to see that art can still sometimes speak for itself.

International Ladies

Okay.  I feel like I shouldn't have to do this, but lately I've been coming across more and more articles about women in media and thought that this would be a good moment to pause a bit and take a look at some of the wonderful female voices out there.  Now, when I say women in media, I am talking not about actors, TV personalities, or even singers; what I want to talk about is all the amazing ladies doing the cool work behind the scenes writing, drawing, or directing some of my favorite books or movies I've seen over the past couple years.

On a recent episode of The Point (if you have even a passing interest in videogames or the videogame industry/ecosystem, you should be watching The Point), host Danny O'Dwyer lent some focus to women in the videogame industry, and while lamenting the state that such a male-dominated community has devolved to recently (honestly, just check out some of the comments about any game that deals with women as either characters or creators to see what I mean), he offered a lot of insight as to something that unfortunately gets shoved aside when discussing games.  Another recent article featured on The Comics Journal has pointed to a similar problem in comics, and one that though seemingly a no-brainer, obviously needed addressed (honestly, the real crazy stuff comes in some of the comments), unfortunately.  Rather than toss my own arguments into the pile, I think it's more important to use this blog to let these talented individuals' work speak for itself, though it's important to understand that I still run the risk of sounding like just another male voice championing what I find appealing; this article is in no way meant to be a point of reference for every female artist out there, and this is by no means anywhere close to a comprehensive list.  As is the nature of this blog, I also want to focus on international talent that I find appealing and that maybe a more mainstream domestic audience might not know about yet.  Enough jabbering, though (clap): let's do it!

So last article I mentioned Pink, by writer and artist Kyoko Okazaki; it was a title and artist I was previously unfamiliar with, but after making my way through the absurdly-described, sexually-infused story set during Japan's bubble economy, I am ready to blindly try anything Kyoko Okazaki has written.  Pink's smart, yet breezy approach to storytelling reminded me in some ways of the work of Taiyo Matsumoto, though Pink is reasonably lighter fair than Sunny, or even Black & White.

I read an okay amount of erotica and have even reviewed some on this blog by way of some Dark Horse rereleases of erotic work by Milo Manara, and even some of the work by Vittorio Giardino.  What made Pink so refreshing to me was to finally see (for me, at least) frank eroticism told from the perspective of a woman.  I understand that romance novels exist, and female led erotica is a thing, but in comics, I had yet to encounter much in the department of a woman giving a true female perspective of the form.  Every so often one encounters a female writer or artist on a similar project, but mostly they are paired with a male counterpart who is either leading the story with their own take on the female mindset, or indulging in their own visual fantasies, rendering the piece often times more palatable to a male readership.  With Kyoko Okazaki's work though, it's her writing paired with her drawings (reminiscent of her work as a fashion illustrator) that give me the impression that I'm seeing her own views on beauty, sexuality, and even violence (again, reminding me of Taiyo Matsumoto's personal approach to all of his work).

It seems only fitting, then, that 2012's live action film version of Okazaki's Helter Skelter would be directed by film director and fashion photographer, Mika Ninagawa, who is known for her brilliant use of vibrant colors throughout her work.  Her previous film, Sakuran, was based on the manga of the same name written by fashion writer and mangaka, Moyoko Anno (can I pause for a minute to point out that Moyoko's husband, Hideaki Anno, is responsible for some of my favorite pieces of animation?).  The film even used Ringo Sheena's Heisei Fuzoku album as the film's soundtrack, as Sheena herself served as the film's music director.

It's hard to mention women in Japanese cinema and not talk about Naomi Kawase, whose films are decidedly more acclaimed than those of the aforementioned, Mika Ninagawa.  Though she also started her education with a focus on photography, Naomi Kawase used her interest in autobiography and documentary filmmaking to make a series of short films before completing Embracing, her longest film yet, and a personal journey to find her lost biological father who had abandoned her and her family at a young age.  Her films relate to a very personal, often rural slice of Japanese society, and while Ninagawa's films follow a more mainstream, pop culture formula, that while not bad, are definitely not as focused as Kawase's in terms of execution and polish.  Naomi Kawase also has a good fifteen years of filmmaking experience behind her, coupled with a more classic education in film, so it is no wonder that her films are, well, better.  There, I said it.

While we're on the subject of film, and to bring the focus away from Japan for a moment, let's talk for a second about Claire Denis and her recent film, Bastards, which has been kind of polarizing audiences lately.  A lot of people loved it, some people thought it was hollow, I thought it was pretty good; I don't think I would be chastised for calling it unforgiving and more than a little bleak.  Eeeeeeeither way, Claire Denis is a French film director who has been making films about as long as Naomi Kawase, and like Kawase, her films are very humanistic, and it can be argued that both directors extend their reach no further than the immediate issues relating to their own countries' distinct personalities.  While Naomi's Japan is populated with a rural plight and more singularly focused local outlook, Claire's France extends beyond her borders to Africa, and it can be argued as a product of France's long history of imperialism compared to Japan's resurgence into rural isolationism after World War II; despite a rapidly growing economy decades after the war and a growing Western influence, Japan remains incredibly divided in terms of development, and can be illustrated no better than in Naomi Kawase's own film, Moe No Suzaku (萌の朱雀).  Conversely, Denis' opening salvo, Chocolat, focuses on the much more colonial lifestyle of a French family living in Cameroon.  Both films manage to feel incredibly personal, and both films are able to speak to a larger societal issue in their respective countries.  Even the neo-noir feel of Bastards manages to feel in some way very specific to France, and to the French people.

Speaking of France, I wrote last year about one of my favorite comics I had read in a while.  I am speaking, of course, about Aya Of Yop City, whose writer, Maguerite Abouet, absolutely delighted me in her close-to-home telling of a thriving economic community in 1960s Côte d'Ivoire, but since I have failed to get around to writing about it in an article of it's own, I would instead like to talk about my other favorite read from that year, Miss Don't Touch Me, by French pair Hubert and Kerascoët.  Made up of illustrators Sébastien Cosset and Marie Pommepuy, Kerascoët gets their name from the village in Brittany where Marie grew up.  I honestly don't know a lot about Marie Pommepuy other than that she originally studied medical design at L’école Estienne, but the illustration work I've seen from Kerascoët is wonderful, and Miss Don't Touch Me stood out to me as a spectacular piece of graphic storytelling.  I've been looking forward to their next English translated work, Beautiful Darkness, for a while, but it got pushed back to February 2014 from October of this previous year, so hopefully I'll be able to talk about that pretty soon.


While it wasn't my intent to ramble quite so much in this article, the main thing I wanted to talk about was the silly question of female creatives working in a more male populated field.  While one could argue that I could have remained more focused in some areas, I had mentioned here before that I try to remain positive throughout this blog rather than talk about things I don't like, and I feel it to be a more positive idea to talk about some outstanding pieces of work rather than get too far down a hole of cynicism.  I encourage readers, if they haven't yet, to take the time to watch that episode of The Point, and explore the other articles mention here, as well as ones I may have missed.  The first step we can take is to keep an open dialogue between creators and fans, and for all of us to help these communities that we take part in by speaking up when we see this sort of thing happening; sometimes the biggest fault is complacency.

I want to also mention that this short list of creators and works is by no means definitive, nor is its opinions regarding sexuality to be taken as a measure for greatness.  The worth of any creator, female or otherwise, is not reliant on an openness towards sexuality or an aptitude for displaying that in their respective field.  I hope that this article helps to bring to some light both the talents of and issues being dealt with by many women in the arts.  I also understand that I have overlooked quite a few individuals in an attempt to keep the format of this blog at pace, but again, I encourage readers to follow any links on here and spend some time doing what they can to keep their eyes open in their own communities.

A One And A Two.

Even though the summer is over (and it is, despite the unseasonably warm weather), I was browsing through my movies recently, and I was struck with the urge to finally shove off the lingering season by watching Edward Yang's sumptuous, slice-of-life/coming-of-age/delinquent youth epic masterpiece, A Brighter Summer Day (牯嶺街少年殺人事件 Gǔ lǐng jiē shàonián shārén shìjiàn), whose title was derived from the Elvis Presley song, Are You Lonesome Tonight?

I was first introduced to Yang via his most widely available (thanks to the Criterion Collection), and final film, Yi Yi.  Watching either film is a slight undertaking due to their length (Yi Yi is 3 hours long, and A Brighter Summer Day closes out at around 4), but the way in which Yang portrays his linear events in his pictures have an almost episodic feel to them, allowing the viewer's attention to continually refocus as the momentum keeps at a steady rhythm.  It's not all jump-cuts or high-kinetic pacing though; Yang lets the seemingly stable and everyday moments in his films speak for themselves, allowing them the attention they deserve, and in the process, keeps us fascinated by such seemingly mundane activities.  There is a natural tension to real life, and Yang recognizes that an afternoon in the principal's office can be as tense as a run from the police, and the real life alienation that the two feel are often times very similar.

In fact, it was those themes of alienation explored by Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni that helped Yang find his place as a filmmaker himself.  Although he always had a fascination with film, Yang instead studied electronic engineering at National Chiao Tung University (sounding familiar to anyone else?) before giving it a try at UNC Film School after getting his Masters degree in electrical and computer engineering.  Yang found the curriculum and teaching at UNC too commercial-driven and limiting, and after leaving USC was accepted to the Harvard Graduate School Of Design, where he did not attend.  If all this is sounding a bit too convoluted, hang in there: While Yang was working on microcomputers in Seattle, Washington, he was struck by the film Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, by Werner Herzog, and later discovered the work of Antonioni before returning to Taiwan to pursue a career in film and TV.

I admittedly have not seen all of Yang's work (I'm certainly working on it, though), but the films of his I have seen are some of my absolute favorites.  Unfortunately, the director passed away from colon cancer in 2007, so we'll never get to see what heights his later films could have reached (2000's Yi Yi is considered his best film, by many).  He was reportedly working on a full length animated film with Jackie Chan (the fucking best) titled The Wind, and if you're like me, you can throw that film on the pile with Jodorowsky's Dune and anything else Satoshi Kon was going to do as the greatest sounding movies we'll never get to see (I know there is a Dune documentary coming out soon, and maybe The Dream Machine will get finished, but still...).  For all his hiccups towards his film career though, Edward Yang was able to create some of the most memorable moments I've had watching films, and in a way, with such a short career, much like Satoshi Kon, the audience was always on the upswing of his work; his films were only going to get better, and we can only imagine, in selfish elation, what would have come next.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Taiwanese New Wave, which Yang shared with fellow directors, Hou Hsiao-hsien (if you haven't watched Daughter Of The Nile, please do), Wu Nien-jen, and Tsai Ming-liang (among others).  It's interesting to note that not all directors in the Taiwanese New Wave were Taiwanese, and I think that says some interesting things not only about it's film industry, but about Taiwan itself.

A Lazy End To A Busy Summer

 Now that summer is coming to a close (I know we still have a little bit left, but late August has always felt like it's own season for me), I wanted to look back at all of the stuff I have consumed over the season.  Though the summer is usually (and still was!) populated with an overabundance of summer blockbusters and general fluff, I managed to keep up with what I wanted to see; both with new-ish releases and some older fare that I only recently got around to absorbing.

To be completely straightforward, I have been incredibly lazy this summer.  I mean, I have had some very busy moments and have been working all summer, but I really didn't do anything outdoorsy or get to travel anywhere.  On my off moments, I spent most of it indoors either working, reading, or watching movies; all of which I am a fan of, but it was still pretty lazy of me, and though I got some great experiences out of it, I can't endorse that kind of lifestyle for anyone generally interested in a great summer experience.

So (clap!), let's get down to it.  What wasted my summer, you ask?  Well, let's start with France, shall we?  Few things took up my time this year like France managed to do, and whether it was a slew of movies I parked myself in front of, or the great experiences I had with some really wonderful comics, it was this stuff that unintentionally dominated my palate for the past few months.  For the longest time I had always been more familiar with Japanese cinema than any other, and even in what I feel is a reasonable knowledge of some Hong Kong and European film, France, though my favorite of what I knew, still didn't occupy a very large room in the stupid warehouse in my brain that stores all the garbage I pick up on a regular basis.  That isn't to say I didn't love French film (I still know more about their comics than anything else that country ever produced), I just didn't know all that much about it.  Outside of a few directors I know particularly well, I still didn't explore their cinema as randomly as I do with Japanese film up until the past few years or so; this summer though, I got a little stuck and just wanted to see more.

I try my best, on this blog, to stay positive about the material I write about.  For every article I write on something I love, there are at least ten more in my head written about stuff I generally didn't enjoy or thought was straight-up awful.  Many of the films on this list, while not terrible, just didn't exactly warrant posts of their own; a few of them did, and there are some drafts of articles about them, and I really meant to finish them, but for some reason or another they fell out of focus, or the context of the original articles didn't apply anymore as time would go by and they sat in my drafts folder.  Some of it might still see some life beyond this post (some revisited works did!), but some of these works have been shoved to another room in my brain full of shit I love but don't have time or the proper context to talk about (I'll post a diagram of this thing sometime, I promise).

Criminal Lovers, In The House, A Curtain Raiser, A Summer Dress, Under The Sand, Water Drops On Burning Rocks; I pretty much really really enjoyed all of these.  I don't want to get into too much detail, as I plan on giving François Ozon his very own article, especially in anticipation of his newest film, Young & Beautiful (Jeune & Jolie), but suffice to say, he has become one of my favorite directors over this past season. 

 Lila Says, Ultimate Heist, and The Blonde With Bare Breasts, all starring actress, Vahina Giocante; I liked Lila Says a lot.  It wasn't incredible, but I enjoyed the intimate feel of the setting and the sensuality of the actors.  The film did a great job of portraying affected, perhaps abused youth, while still keeping the sexuality and building relationship beautiful and intimate.  Ultimate Heist was kinda dumb.  It was pretty much just a French blockbuster, and as such, was kind of mindless.  There was a plot, but even after watching it pretty recently, I can't for the life of me even remember what it was; none of which I would really say is any fault of the actors involved (Jean Reno, baby!), but rather just a very lukewarm plot; I don't know what would have made this film any better though, honestly.  The Blonde With The Bare Breasts was not at all interesting to me; I feel like it played more on the sensuality and appearance of actress Vahina Giocante, and less on any actual string of events.  Sure, things happen, and maybe they happen for a reason, but the dialogue, coupled with the insane sequence of events/character developement really made this one hard to get through, despite the aforementioned actress.

 
Read My Lips, by director, Jacques Audiard; I admit that I missed last year's Rust & Bone, but if Read My Lips is any indication of Audiard's work, I am pretty pleased with that and am willing to take my familiarity a step or two further and check out what else his modest-ish body of work has to offer.  It stars Vincent Cassel and Emmanuelle Devos (the latter I am not too familiar with, though the former is a personal favorite) in a sort-of crime, sort-of maybe romantic film.  It's all played out very well, with believable performances from both actors, and although the story was a little bit of a stretch, I still enjoyed it once I was in.  Some of the problems were of a scripting nature, as I said before, it all felt well acted, but I would call it a solid B.

Little White Lies, Park Benches, The Players, and The Lookout; this is the part where we start getting into large casts or well known actor territory.  Little White Lies, by Guillaume Canet, was pretty much both of those concepts; a summer movie in and of itself, Canet's third full-length directorial outing focused on a group all of friends, all played by currently famous French actors, still going on vacation after one of them gets in a very serious, drug and alcohol influenced auto accident that leaves him mostly paralyzed and disfigured in a hospital bed.  This wasn't a bad movie at all, and for all of it's star power, something that generally doesn't do anything for me, the cast worked very well together, and I bought was the story was trying to sell me.  Park Benches, on the other hand, bored the shit out of me.  It wasn't terrible, but it dragged like a bag carrying all of the actors in that movie.  There is a gag-laden, extended third (or fourth?  I couldn't keep track) act in a hardware store that I thought was never going to end, and the payoff wasn't as such that I cared too terribly what happened.  The Players, starring Jean Dujardin and Gilles Lellouche (reunited after Little White Lies) was an omnibus film from several of France's lofty directors pool, all focused on the concept of infidelity.  Quite a few of these were funny, a couple were not, but as a whole experience, I would have preferred these were all individual shorts (and maybe they were somewhere) that I could have seen on a weekly, serialized basis, rather than all in one go.  The Lookout was, meh, a movie.  It starred Mathiew Kassovitz, who I am still pissed at for never making anything as good as La Haine ever again.  It's a blockbuster, and it was okay as that, but it didn't stick with me; like Ultimate Heist, I really can't even remember what happened.

Elles, Sweet Evil, and Q; It took me quite a while to see Elles, but I think that I really liked it.  Juliette Binoche was fantastic, and Anaïs Demoustier, did a pretty believable job as a chic, twenty-something, student prostitute, and I liked her performance more in Elles than I did in Sweet Evil, which was a much sillier movie, despite it's serious intent and general lack of humor.  Q is something else, though.  If I had to make one of those stupid this-movie-is-a-cross-between descriptions, this movie feels like a cross between Lila Says and a Tinto Brass film.  Like Lila Says, the film explored troubled youth and sexuality, but it managed to be much more explicit, and even had unsimulated sex, which can usually go either way in a film.  For the most part, I actually liked it, despite it's Cinemax-in-the-90s style plot description.

Lastly (honestly there are some more I know I watched, but I can't even remember them), I finally got to see The Bride Wore Black, from François Truffaut, circa 1968.  I have been wanting to catch this gem for quite some time now, and I finally got around to it a couple weeks ago.  Without getting too into Truffaut's career, I love his Antoine Doinel series, and I loved this.  When it came out, Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill got more press as a take on martial arts and action films, but there are some sequences in this movie that were straight-up lifted and used in that film.  Watch twenty minutes of The Bride Wore Black and tell me that I'm reaching, please.  This was a wonderful cap to the season's long list of movies for me, and though there were plenty of great domestic and other-foreign films I saw in the past few months, this film, especially lumped in with everything listed here, was one of my favorites.  This summer felt very very long, but at the same time I feel like it blazed right by me.  Hopefully whoever is reading this had a great summer experience, and be happy I watched all these things so you didn't have to.

P.S.  Quit doing stupid shit outside and watch more movies.

Estival du Look

 Now that summer is in full swing, and seeking the solace of shade and a moderate amount of air conditioning, I have begun revisiting some of my favorite films from one of my favorite periods in French cinema.  I am really not entirely sure what attracts me to this era of, in all honesty, some pretty esoteric, albeit relatively surface-driven filmmaking; I wasn't even alive when some of these films were made, and I generally hate most other mainstream, style-heavy films from the 1980s centered around a youth counter-culture making the transition into adulthood, a la St Elmo's Fire, or some other such bullshit, but maybe it's a case of finding the right film at the right time of my life, though it's even more likely that many of these films were just much better made and/or adhere to a more reasonable aesthetic for me that falls in line with my interest with what was going on in film and comics in Hong Kong and Japan as well.  Eeeeiiiither way, some of these films were great, some people thought they were garbage, but I really like them, and I can't help but think about them when the weather gets unbearably hot.

So, I think it's a good idea to talk a little bit about what was called Cinéma du look before getting into any of the films, as the name itself came much later than the actual films; so it wasn't as much the case of directors trying to adhere to a film movement at the time as it was a specific critic's way of describing director Luc Besson's aesthetic and how his "surface-over-substance" style of filmmaking was similar to two other directors with whom his films shared "the look."  The critic was Raphaël Bassan, a French film journalist who encouraged and specialized in experimental cinema and film history, and who even experimented in making three short films, himself.  He coined the term, Cinéma du look, as a way to compare the films of Luc Besson to those of Jean-Jacques Beineix and Leos Carax, in, I believe, his 1988 article, Three Neo-Baroque Directors: Beineix, Besson, Carax, from Diva to Le Grand Bleu in which Bassan urged that the three directors be taken seriously by critics.

Bassan also recognized similar themes throughout their films, and it was their young, alienated characters that were said to have been representative of the young, marginalized populace of the time in France.  It's no wonder, then, that the films were successful in terms of reaching a younger audience searching for more substance to their pop culture, even as the films of these directors were very much influenced by pop culture itself, taking inspiration from fashion photography, TV commercials, and music videos.  It is, perhaps, more interesting to see some of these films getting critical praise from more established critics, such as Roger Ebert, who in his review for Beineix's Diva, wrote:

"It is one of the best thrillers of recent years but, more than that, it is a brilliant film, a visual extravaganza that announces the considerable gifts of its young director, Jean-Jacques Beineix. He has made a film that is about many things, but I think the real subject of "DIVA" is the director's joy in making it. The movie is filled with so many small character touches, so many perfectly observed intimacies, so many visual inventions from the sly to the grand that the thriller plot is just a bonus. In a way, it doesn't really matter what this movie is about; Pauline Kael has compared Beineix to Orson Welles and, as Welles so often did, he has made a movie that is a feast to look at, regardless of its subject.

Diva is just that, though.  As much as I enjoy the story, I find myself wanting to rewind the film several times just to relive specific visual moments over and over again, regardless of the rhythm of the film.  The story can almost become negligible if you want it to, and there is enough visual lyricism to keep the audience engaged even as one forgets the verbal narrative (the first time I watched the film, it actually took me a little bit to realize that I didn't have the English subtitles on, as I was watching the dialogue rather than listening to it).  Beyond any lengthy description of a thriller about a young man swooning over an Opera singer and some criminals looking for some tape with some conversation on it about something or something, the film is simply stunning looking, and is equally as stunning and fun to watch (I maintain that the latter often has nothing to do with the former).  I also want to mention that the screenplay for Diva was co-written by Franco-Belgian comics writer Jean Van Hamme, and for all the dumb film or TV adaptations of his work that are out there, I like his comics, so that's pretty cool.

Apparently, Ebert's enthusiasm lasts only as long as the characters stay dressed though, as I thought his review for Beineix's third film, Betty Blue (37°2 le matin), was focused too much on the nudity of the film rather than anything lying beneath it.  It was as if he was made so uncomfortable by certain situations regarding either nudity or the behavior of the titular character and just couldn't move on from his soured disposition.  Betty Blue is a film about a guy who lives near the beach and does odd jobs, a girl he meets, some other people they meet, some bad (and sometimes good) shit that happens, and some places they go.  It can more easily be described as a film about love.  And madness.  Or is it mad love?  I don't know, either way, it's something the French are not unfamiliar with in terms of their cinema, and it had a wonderful impression on me, and it came as no surprise to me to find that it had a similar effect on other artists I admire.

Despite sounding broad, Betty Blue feels very specific to me.  Although being part of a film movement that favored visual panache and spectacle over a more solidly-paced narrative structure, Betty Blue does something similar to what Wong Kar Wai was beginning to do in Hong Kong around the same time (there is a retrospective on his earlier work coming sometime in the near future, I swear).  Though Beineix appeared to have adhered more strictly to a script, his film, once watched, leaves the impression of seeing a real relationship take place, much in the same way Wong was able to build relationships out of a series of scenarios in which the actors were given room to breath improvisation into their characters rather than even having a script in some cases.  In some instances the film gives off an almost "you had to be there" vibe, making it an uneven product depending on the audience; on one hand, I believe film should almost always be universal, and what truly makes a great film is that anyone can find themselves relating to the characters within; but on the other hand, part of what makes Betty Blue so wonderfully appealing is that the relationship that the film paints is instantly recognizable to anyone who has experienced something similar.  The downside of this is that it is potentially alienating, and in the same way that some people will argue that stoner movies are made for people that smoke weed and if you don't smoke weed you just don't get it and you're wrong if you don't like it 'cause you don't smoke weed and maybe you should smoke weed and maybe you will see how good that movie really is, maybe Betty Blue is like that?  I like to think that it isn't, but you know, who knows?  Good or bad is an objective way to look at things, and though there are some hard facts when it comes to good film or bad film, it's hardly fair to label something as bad when you just don't like it, and unfortunately, much of "le look" was written off for just that reason.  Oh well.

Most sources I have found cite Subway as an early example in the movement, and although I would still maintain that Beineix's Diva was the first true "look", Besson's earlier film, Le Dernier Combat (The Last Battle), still exhibits signs of what was to come in his career.  Released two years after Diva and two years before Besson's own Subway, Le Dernier Combat was heralded mostly as a sci-fi film, generating a cult following because of it's nearly wordless presentation.  The style, however, exhibits some of the same trappings of other films within the Cinéma du look; having virtually no dialogue, the film is forced to tell it's story entirely through it's visual presentation, and though far from the neon signs and shiny-slick city streets, the effect was no-less striking than it's later counterparts.  In fact, the argument of style-over-substance takes on a new meaning when the style becomes the substance, something else that Wong Kar Wai would end up doing even so late as In The Mood For Love, from 2001 (again, a full post on Wong will be showing up soon, along with a complete essay on In The Mood For Love).

Besson's next films, Subway (which featured Jean-Hughes Anglade, who would the same year of release, star in Beineix's above mentioned film, Betty Blue, and who would also star in Besson's 1990 film, La Femme Nikita) and Le Grand Bleu, are essentially the beginning of what critics refer to as his true foray into the genre, though I still argue that Besson has basically been making the same kind of films his entire career.  His budgets or his subjects may have have changed, but even through to 1999's The Messenger, he was still making slightly subversive films that demonstrate his signature sense of style and interest in making art entertaining; that, no doubt, is due to his continued work with composer Eric Serra and cinematographers Carlo Varini and Thierry Arbogast.  Even the mainstream, audience-dividing, sci-fi blockbuster that was The Fifth Element couldn't escape some of Besson's signature style choices, and though it even goes so far as to grift elements from Moebius and Jodorowsky's The Incal, I still see it as a victory in tricking American audiences into being exposed to European science fiction, and it remains one of my favorite films ever (I was 14 when I first saw it, and it was still a few years before I would even discover film, Moebius, Métal Hurlant, or Luc Besson).  To make another comparison to Wong Kar Wai: both Besson and Wong would embark on the largest film projects of their careers (The Fifth Element and Ashes Of Time, respectively), only to take breaks during lengthy and difficult production times and embark on shorter, simpler films that would go on to great success (though Besson's Léon was no match for the revolution that Wong would create with his highly acclaimed and genre-shattering Chunking Express).

It's hard to actually look at some of these films as an actual movement, as, like I mentioned, the term, Cinéma du look, was a retroactive term to begin with; and being an after-the-fact observer, I can only tell from what I read whether or not any of it was made with an actual intent to conform to a certain "look", though it's hard to believe that even without a name for it, there wasn't a specific trend in their filmmaking.  It's particularly worthwhile to mention the early entries (Diva, Le Dernier Combat) as something truly inventive though, even as they were derivative of so many other forms of film.  Even as it was influenced heavily from current popular culture and the New Hollywood movement of the late 60s through the early 80s, it's even harder to believe that there wasn't also a credible influence from France's own New Wave movement, especially the influence of  Chabrol, Truffaut, and Godard (Luc Besson would even name his first true female character Hélène, which was a trait of quite a few women in Chabrol's films).  It even appears as though some of the films were influencing, or at least making references to one another; again it would be Besson who's villain in The Fifth Element would share a name with with the protagonist in Beineix's Betty Blue (an uncommon enough name, I presume, that it has to be a reference).

Though it's easy to see how Godard's visual pinache could be a viable influence on the "cinema-to-be-seen", I feel like Truffaut was an equally dominant influence, and in particular his Antoine Doinel character.  The blending of "high-culture" with pop culture was also a common theme of 'the look, and parallels can be seen between Antoine's love of classic French literature and Diva's protagonist, Jules, with his love of opera and "high class" friends he meets.  Perhaps I'm seeing signs that I want to see, as Besson's Joan would say, but I feel like they're worth mentioning at least, as it's something that came to my mind as I watched these films (it's also maybe worth mentioning that I was familiar with the New Wave movement before I was truly aware of the Cinéma du look, so my parallels may have been drawn from my limited knowledge of what I was seeing at the time).  It's also worth noticing that our aforementioned critic, Raphaël Bassan, was also a proponent of the New Wave and it's experiment in film, so perhaps the interest he found in the Cinéma du look movement was related in some way to what I also see as the natural progression of the avant-garde film evolution in France.  Just saying.

I want to admit, lastly, that I am not incredibly familiar with Leos Carax's work.  What I have seen I have found to be very much of the argument of style-over-substance, but a true watch of all of his films is more necessary for me to properly judge them, and I didn't want to just plow through them to make it in time for this post.  Once I get around to it I will give him a more honest shot, and that might end up being sooner rather than later given my film habits lately.  Also, I know there are quite a few films I glazed over or didn't mention at all; for instance, I didn't even mention The Moon In The Gutter (La lune dans le caniveau), and that is mostly because I wasn't particularly impressed with it.  It never grabbed me the same way many of these other films did, and it's (I'm prettttty sure) entirely studio-shot visuals failed to excite me in the way that Diva, Betty Blue, and Le Grand Bleu did with their beautiful, on-location photography.  Also, there are just some that I have never seen, and again, I would rather give them their proper chance rather than just watch them to watch them.  The rest I just didn't feel like mentioning because, well, I don't know; I don't know what else to say about some of these films that haven't been said, and they mostly just didn't fit into the dialogue I wanted to present in this post.

In one final post script; it is important, I believe, to mention that in every reference to Betty Blue I make on this blog, or any recommendation I make for it, I am always referring to the director's cut (version intégrale), which clocks in at a full hour longer than the film's theatrical release.  I think it's a better film, and that's the one I feel is complete.  It's also the version of the film I watched first, and the idea of watching the theatrical version at this point seems pointless to me.

Can I Kick It? or Being, Knowing, Doing

It seems only appropriate for me to get back to work on here by reviewing a film I have been looking forward to for quite some time.  I feel like this movie had been in production forever, and I remember being interested in this film long before I had even heard of the other Ip Man films.  In fact, the project had taken allegedly fourteen years to culminate, with six years in production and at least three years spent filming.

Now, my interest in this film was as such that I deliberately avoided any of the other Ip Man films, to which I believe there are at least four others; the last of which, also released in 2013, was directed by Herman Yau, who, if you don't remember, also directed such films as the 1992 martial arts masterpiece, Best Of The Best, starring Eric Roberts, and Phillip "god-bless-his-soul" Rhee

So, moving away from the cynicism for a moment, I really enjoyed this film.  It's hard to say objectively what I like sometimes when I am such a fan of someone's work, but I feel like putting Wong Kar-Wai's past aside, I can truly appreciate this film on it's own merits.  Admittedly though, it is more difficult to forget one's past mistakes than successes, and My Blueberry Nights (this is the last time I will mention that film here, I swear) was maybe the worst film someone could make in between two of the best, so one could easily say that while I was very excited about this film during it's production, it was with more than a little trepidation that I pressed play and began watching The Grandmaster (一代宗師).

To give a little more background on this film before I dig in with my thoughts, The Grandmaster is Wong Kar-Wai's telling of the story of Yip Kai-man, the martial artist/teacher who was said to have been the one to make Wing Chun famous, and who even more famously taught Bruce Lee.  Sort of.  Though the film is initially billed as the story of Ip Man from the early 1930s to around his death in the early 70s, The Grandmaster reflects on not only his life, but the lives of those around him, so much so that the film's title could have easily survived a pluralization.

In contrast to the more action oriented Ip Man films, The Grandmaster is a more reflective piece, and focuses on the more philosophical aspects of the martial arts and the times in which these martial artists lived.  The film spends equal time on Gong Er, the daughter of Gong Yutian, a martial arts master from northern China, visiting Foshan in the south.  Gong Er, played by Zhang Ziyi, commands probably at least half of the film's attention, and is in excellent contrast with Tony Leung Chiu-Wai's portrayal of Ip.  The only slight disappointment is that the character of "Razor" Yixiantian, played by Taiwanese actor Chang Chen, isn't given more time on-screen; though a peripheral character and not central to the story, The Razor was interesting enough in his brief moments to have many fans of the film claiming his character was underdeveloped.

This film reminded me very much of Wong's previous film, 2046 (which I consider to be Zhang Ziyi's standout role alongside her once-again exceptional co-stars Leung and Chang) in how it continues Wong's meditative examination of loss in a long-form narrative.  The Grandmaster is less a martial arts film and more a film, as Gong Er could be paraphrased as saying, about a certain time in which she chooses to stay.  It is almost as if one can only measure loss once it is lost, and sometimes the memory of love is as strong as love itself; and the film becomes two things, one horizontal, one vertical.

As a post-script, apparently both Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi spent three years training for their scenes in the film, and both have mentioned in interviews that the experience has more or less put a period at the end of their martial arts film sentence, so savor this film, as it will probably be the last time you see either one performing such elaborate fight choreography (Leung allegedly broke both of his arms and contracted a bronchial infection during the month-long shooting of the film's opening fight scene).