The Great Passage (Japan: 2013): Love and Loss for Lex·i·cog·ra·phers

Posted on by

Rating:
image

Yûya Ishii’s the Great Passage was Japan’s submission for Best Foreign Language film last year. It received a very limited release in the US one weekend and has played a few film festivals. I couldn’t find the name of a US distributor for the film and ended up ordering a copy of the Hong Kong version from Yesasia.com so that I could finally see it. It’s a shame, really, that the film hasn’t been picked up. I could see people adding it to their list of beloved films. It is a very easy film to like. It sums up the hopes and dreams of all of us-that we will find a task that we can be devoted to and share that devotion with others. It is an optimistic film, not lofty enough to be awe inspiring, but the world it offers up is as much a fantasy dream world as the most magical love story or futurist utopia. It’s a world worth believing in.

Continue reading →

The Homesman (USA: 2014): Swank and Jones shine in a journey to th

Posted on by

Set in the Nebraska Territory of the 1850s, Tommy Lee Jones’ The Homesman is about hardship on the plains and the difficulty of maintaining civilized relationships on the frontier. There are many movies about the time period of the post Civil War west – with cowboys, farmers and railroads. Pre-civil war, we are in the transition from pioneers and frontiersmen to the farmer settlers who probably would have been better off staying at home. The movie captures the challenges of farming this particular area of the Great Plains. Treeless and unlike anything the Europeans were familiar with, the Nebraska Territory was the heart of what was called the Great American Desert, not the Breadbasket that it known as today. The difficulty of this life takes a mental toll on the wives of three farmers, who need to be taken back east in the hopes that returning them to their families will restore their health.

Continue reading →

Force Majeure (Sweden: 2014): Unexpectedly breaking the contract

Posted on by

Force Majeure is Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s take on a husband and wife reanalyzing their marriage after a breach of trust. Told over a five-day ski holiday to France, the story follows a low point in Ebba and Tomas’ marriage (played by  Lisa Loven Kongsli and Johannes Kuhnke) after he “accidentally” abandons the family when a controlled avalanche appears about to engulf a restaurant where they are having lunch with their two children. While he is filming the event on his iPhone, he panics and leaves his children and wife at the table, but remembers to pick up his ski gloves as he flees. Even though a marriage contract doesn’t spell out what is supposed to happen in these circumstances, we know that there has been a breach somewhere. The question is whether or not Tomas will realize that and whether Ebba will allow him a chance to fix it.

Continue reading →

The Way He Looks (Brazil: 2014); The sweetness of a stolen kiss

Posted on by

Rating:

3stars.PNG

The Way He Looks is Daniel Ribeiro’s first feature film. The movie started it’s life in 2010 as a well-received short, I Don’t Want to Go Back Alone, which told the story of a blind teenager who falls in love with a new student. That movie climaxed with one of the sweetest stolen kisses I’ve seen recently. I was glad to find out that Ribeiro was given the opportunity to expand the short into a full movie and that the movie is Brazil’s submission for Oscar consideration this year. That submission was probably one of the reasons it was picked up for distribution to US theaters for limited release.

I Don’t Want to Go Back Alone was a very simple budding romance story, and there was quite a bit that could have gone wrong in expanding it to 95 min. There needs to be complications at that length, and complications can ruin simple love stories beyond recognition. The movie actually highlights this issue in the opening scene. Leonardo (Ghilherme Lobo) and his best friend, Giovana (Tess Amorim) laze by her pool and discuss whether they will ever be kissed. They both want their first kisses to be special – romantic, but without drama. Romance without complicating drama is how I’d describe the short, and I wondered what obstacles Ribeiro was going to throw out there to make it more difficult for Leo and Gabriel (Fabio Audi) to get together.

Continue reading →

The Cold Lands (USA: 2013): A stray boy tries to find a home

Posted on by

Set in the region of Upstate New York and New England, Tom Gilroy’s The Cold Lands tells the story of a sheltered teen-aged boy making a transition to new adult role models after the death of his mother. When the movie opens, Atticus (Silas Yelich) and his mother, Nicole, (Lilly Taylor) are living off the grid. She is home schooling him, but he is entering a stage where socialization with his peers is important to him. They aren’t survivalists, but are getting by without electricity and supplementing the income she earns as an office cleaner by recycling and beekeeping. It is an existence without many conveniences, but hardly a simple life. Beyond financial pressures, Nicole has diabetes and feels hassled by  public health nurse who believes she as complications from the disease that may need additional treatment. She is managing to hide the pressure she faces from Atticus, while devoting her life to his education and cultivating his values.

Continue reading →

I am Happiness on Earth (Mexico: 2014): My Patience is Wearing Thin

Posted on by

If someone were to ask me what kind of movie I am Happiness on Earth is, I would respond that it is a Julian Hernandez film. I suppose that I could say that he makes “art house” or “festival” films, but he also belongs in that category of director where the style and subject become established patterns such that their films are classified off by themselves. No one makes films like them.

If you haven’t seen one of his movies, I don’t know if I would recommend this one, but Happiness does follow what I’ve come to expect from Hernandez. He is very good at creating stories of attractive men pursuing sex with each other – in fact he probably has no equal in that. There is a certain style to these pursuits in his films that evoke  a very raw sexuality that barely even rises to the level of Eros. It is more instinctual than Eros, which should involve some passion and pleasure. Men (and in this movie, women, too) in pursuit of sex are like animals in heat. They prowl. Stare. They crawl on all fours. Consume as if they aren’t certain whether what they hunt is prey or a rival beast.  Since there is hardly any dialogue in this film or any of his films, the actors must physically convey this animalism as well as any emotional states they might have. It makes sense then, that part of this movie involves an affair with a dancer since modern dancers are trained in the art of physical communication.

Continue reading →

Whiplash (USA: 2014)-Good Job, Teach. Good Job.

Posted on by

Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash (2014) tells the story of a driven young jazz drummer and a drill sergeant. O.K. That’s not quite true, but it could be. J.K. Simmons plays Terence Fletcher, a stern, demanding college jazz band director as if he came from Fort Bragg. Fletcher teaches at Schafer College, the fictional best conservatory in the country set somewhere in New York City near Juliard but not quite. The studio jazz band wins competitions. To be on the core team of that band is to be best of the best for college jazz band musicians. Fletcher could be a football coach or drill sergeant, but this movie is a pedagogic drama and set in a college.

Continue reading →

Gone Girl (USA: 2014): An Imperfect Crime

Posted on by

Gone Girl is a slick potboiler about the failure of a marriage and the unraveling of an attempt to commit the perfect crime. It does a good job staying away from many of the cliches of the crime thriller. It could easily have become a straightforward police procedural, but nonetheless the movie still made me feel like I was watching a TV drama from time to time and not a film.

The movie opens on the morning of Nick and Amy Dunne’s (played by Ben Affleck and stunning Rosamund Pike) wedding anniversary. Has stopped in a watering hole called “The Bar” which he owns with his sister, Margo (Carrie Coon), mainly to complain about his wife and marriage. He receives a phone call from a neighbor that his door is open and he returns home to find broken furniture but no wife. For the remainder of the movie, the characters attempt to solve the crime while flashbacks provide the history of the marital conflict between the two leads.

Continue reading →