Reviews

Annoying situation comedy that tries to cross Goethe with Bertrand Blier and fails. Here's the story in brief: a young Berliner learns from a dying woman who rejected her GI suitor (read post-WWII Germany) that he must acknowledge his bastard son with his German girlfriend (read Germany post-Unification) while on a voyage of discovery to France (read Germany's experience with the EU). If this sounds didactic it is. I suppose it's part of a grand literary tradition: Goethe's Bildungsroman was just as dull.

To be avoided. I only watched it because I was stuck on a flight from China where every other option was in Mandarin.

SPOILER ALERT: INTERPRETATION FOLLOWS

This film is slow and subtle. Ostensibly a character study, the film is really an allegory for Quebec—it's inward, alienated present, its relations to the rest of Canada, its sad and difficult past, and most important, its painful recognition that its choices threaten to destroy any chance it might have at a future.

I particularly liked the lead actor. Taciturn and lumbering, Patrick Drolet embodies wasted potential. Sensitive in his work but farouche in company, Drolet conveys as much through omission as he does through action—the emotion he feels but refuses to express, the poetry he imagines but cannot write, the decisions he understands but fails to take. Émond's direction is everything he is not.

The film also alludes cleverly to literature. Balzac's "Lost Illusions" is the most obvious parallel as a story of squandered talent, but I also caught references to Racine's "Phèdre" (who won't dirty her hands) and Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister" (who slowly comes to acknowledge his responsibilities). In this line, Émond is the Turgenev of Quebec: critical in analysis but generous in sympathy.

I've seen quite a few decent Asian movies. This isn't one. The plot is obvious. The characters are flat and silly. There's pointless yelling substituting for emotion. The setting is unconvincing. There's little tension or fear. The score is generic. The shots are crude. And the simple karmic ghost story does little justice either to the genre of horror or war. If you want something creepy and interesting, try Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Cure" (1997), or if you prefer something Korean, "Spider Forest" (2004). "R-Point" was a tremendous disappointment, especially considering the raves other IMDb posters have been giving it. I can only surmise that these reviewers have suffered the same fate as the characters in "R-Point": creeping insanity or supernatural possession. I'd say that's a case of revenge of "Ringu."

I almost missed seeing this movie at a recent film festival because the organizers didn't classify it as Chinese. That is essentially what "Yang Yang" is about: the problem of Taiwanese identity. Other Taiwanese directors have wrestled with this theme, for example, Hou Hsiao-hsien in "Three Times" and "Millenium Mambo," or Tsai Ming-liang in "The Hole" and "What Time Is It There?" or Yee Chih-yen in "Blue Gate Crossing," or even Ang Lee in "Lust, Caution," and, if you squint at it, "The Hulk." Like these movies, "Yang Yang" portrays a set of trials that are so immediate and insoluble, and shot at such unpleasant proximity, that my first reaction was to try to distance myself from what I was seeing. But the acting is so good, and the symbolism is so intelligent, and the story is so universal, that "Yang Yang" made me realize that Taiwan's problems are everybody's problems, and instead of dragging through a typical Bildungsroman I left the theater exalted. 9/10. With haunting music by Lim Giong.

I thought "Crank" was silly enough to be fun, and for that I was willing to suspend my irritation at "Gamer"'s thefts from "Rollerball," "Running Man," "Strange Days," and other dystopian B movies with the rationalization that a film about simulated realities was obviously alluding to the other examples of the genre. But "Gamer" isn't even this self-aware. What starts as a meditation on Hegel's master/slave dialectic degenerates into Marcusian conspiracies of how capitalism is equivalent to pornography and from there into the even more primitive territory of the Puritan hatred of sin. It is as if the writers of the film felt that rolling the clock back through variants of American cultural critique all the way to the Colonial era was somehow the best way for their viewers to feel what it must be like for evil nanocells to take over their minds. It didn't work. "Gamer" is just dumb. Oh, and what happened to color? Does everything have to look like you're about to pass out?

I was expecting this to be a lightweight comedy but was pleasantly surprised by the subtext of this movie, which used the themes of maturation and family to address larger issues of Hong Kong's modernization and its relationship with Mainland China and the West.

In this respect, "Wait Till You're Older" resembles "Infernal Affairs," another film that uses a standard narrative to hint at larger issues. It is not quite at the same level of sophistication in either plot or metaphor, but it is a much deeper movie than one might be led to believe.

I don't think that I have to spell out the two sets of relationships here. They become quite obvious to the viewer with a little reflection.

I've been trying hard to appreciate this genre of French film. In all honesty, it's hard. It would be easy to write it off as humorless, pretentious nonsense—lines like "I felt with my heart, not with my hands" might have gotten Malle somewhere in at lame party, but they aren't the sort of thing one ever wants to hear in a theater.

The best I can do is interpret the film politically. The main character is intellectual France and his friends are the rich old guard. Intellectual France went on a bender and wasted its youth; in this it was condescended to by a corrupt and smug class of prigs and losers; now intellectual France has lost the will to live, despite its American-financed cure. This seems to suggest the Vichy past as the bender, America as the unwanted wife, and the perpetuation of corruption into the postwar period as the old guard under De Gaulle. It's not necessary to take the film's Existentialism at face value: French intellectuals should feel horrible after collaborating with Nazi occupiers. This isn't some metaphysical conundrum.

Read this way, the film foretells the death of French culture. There's something to this. The Citroën DS was a high point unless you are really into fast trains and breeder reactors and molecular biology, things that shouldn't be overlooked as great French postwar achievements. But with regard to what most people understand as culture, which means the humanities, France went into a hopeless and irreversible slump in the 60s, blow-hards like Goddard and BHL notwithstanding. Ronet is a charismatic actor, but he's got nothing on Depardieu, the half-educated gang-rapist most French found easier to live with than this postwar generation of spoiled and humorless weaklings.

I'm trying to find something of value here. The best I can muster is that Truffaut wanted to make a movie as tedious, painful, puerile, annoying, illogical, and brainless as the experience of being in love. If that was his goal, then he succeeded, but the solution to his exercise is really a drag to watch.

There is one scene that screams for a spoof: Belmondo compares the features of Deneuve's face to the features in a landscape . All I could think the whole time was "glacier," "ice floe," "two lonely fishermen wearing Army surplus on a frozen lake in Minnesota."

The only other point of interest was the resurrection of Buffon's theory of climatic determinism. The tropics are presented as paradise, and things get progressively worse as they get colder, hell being Calvinist French Switzerland. That was kind of funny.

This is the best Hong Kong cop thriller I have seen since "Infernal Affairs" and "Triad Election." All three films suggest critiques of Mainland China's relationship to Hong Kong chilling enough to raise them to a level of art. I expect a remake soon, although I don't think it will be as good as "The Departed."

For those with no interest or awareness in contemporary Chinese politics, "Beast Stalker" works perfectly well as a thriller. But with a little reflection many contemporary Chinese films like this can be decoded as profound commentaries on the current situation in China every bit as trenchant as Sixth Generation dramas. This is a golden age of Chinese cinema. Don't underestimate what you see.

Forget the obvious sources of annoyance: the fat and ugly girl, Binoche's toothless simpers and cigarillos, impossible characters, absurd pomposity passing for dialog, obsession with incest, plot holes, cookie-cutter stereotypes, annoying camera-work, poor direction, lame acting—the worst part of this film is the premise, which is that the older generation, in the form of a dynamic and responsible French-American duo, will teach the younger generation, in the form of a passive and irresponsible French-American duo, to get along. As if.

They want me to write some more. I will. Don't waste your time on this tripe. The whole movie I was just hoping for the characters to die.

Everyone else seems to be delighted with this "lightweight" comedy. I found it dull and depressing. It only made sense to me as an ironic commentary on the void of postwar Japanese suburban culture. There's nothing cute in the film at all, fart and poop jokes notwithstanding. The feeling of petty horror reminded me of Fassbinder and Ozon. I understand that some reviewers get nostalgic for past they see here, but let me suggest that much of what we see here is deliberately imagined, and that Ozu may well have meant this film as a cry of despair. Since everyone's dirty laundry is paraded for inspection, the final scene can only be a wry joke.

This movie starts well. The actors are all good, the camera-work beautiful, the setting Romantic, the plot plausible if unoriginal. As other reviewers have noted, things begin to unravel about halfway, and by the end the movie would be laughable if it weren't so unpleasant. What begins as a psychological thriller soon degenerates into blatant homophobia. This is either justified or not, depending on your perspective, but little is learned about the experience of being gay either way. Instead, the movie bombards the viewer with crude stereotypes: gay love as an English public school, gay love as corruption, gay love as a secret cult, gay love as narcissism, gay love as misogyny, gay love as Gothic perversion, gay love as a lie and a cheat. At one point I almost expected to Monty Python's Flying Circus to arrive and sing "I'm a Lumberjack." Now, I'm not gay, or even P.C., but the commonplaces in this film are not only unilluminating but downright bigoted. No audience would tolerate the nonsense of associating secret cults and conspiracies and special powers with Jews. Why should they tolerated it with Gays?

I wanted to watch this movie because, by a weird coincidence, I happened to walk by the Dakota the night John Lennon was shot. At the time I was a senior in high school visiting New York for a few days, feeling a lot like my imagination of Holden Caulfield. "John Lennon got shot," the police said. I went to Central Park for the public memorial. Some people were sad, but many others were excited, as if they were taking part in a giant happening. The atmosphere was hardly funereal, something you can see in the stock footage of the scene. I was disgusted and left. "Phonies," I thought.

The movie gets a lot of things right. The preppy clothes, the look of New York, the bad food, the awkward dialog all brought back memories of feeling young and alienated. It also succeeds in its allusions to "The Catcher in the Rye" and even "Lolita," where Chapman could just as easily have been Humbert Humbert at the end. The acting is quite good, and the direction, though flawed, is right more often than not.

Most interesting to me was the concept. Many reviewers feel disappointed that we don't understand the mind of the killer by the end. But that's the point. There's nothing to understand. The relation between fans and artists is much like the relation between youth and age. In the first instance, there is sensitivity that this powerless and derivative, and in the second, there is sensitivity that is assured and original. The former condition, as Salinger, Nabokov, and my own memory of adolescence contend, is basically Hell. The main character never escapes this condition-consider his book inscription. From this perspective the movie is less an exploration of his motivation, which is causal and developmental, than a description of his emotional state, which is static and permanent. This is suggested by the structure of the narrative, which follows the circularity of Salinger's novel.

Viewers will have to decide for themselves whether the movie pulls off the larger metaphor, namely, that America itself has never escaped the nightmare of adolescence. If you want to see the disintegration of a lonely loser, "The Assassignation of Richard Nixon" is a better movie. But "Chapter 27" is smarter than it appears.

I saw this movie in Chinese by mistake. I don't speak Chinese. I could follow the story almost perfectly. This gives some indication how infantile this movie is. So if it fails in America, Mr. America - Bashing - As - Universal - Apology - For - Horrible - French - Movie - Disaster, it's not because we can't follow it. It's because we can follow it all too well. This is especially sad, since the actors have been very good elsewhere. Here the best that can be said about their performances is that their costumes looked nice. Even that dude with the metal headplate looked stylish. Having seen this film, I'm considering having one bolted on to quell the agony. Besides, the French invented fashion, as everyone knows.

"The Knot" opens with a long, virtuoso shot reminiscent of Hitchcock, Antonioni, and De Palma. Don't get your hopes up. The rest of the movie is cheese, with comic characters, awkward dialog, sappy lighting, and an absurd story. Even the score is derivative in the silliest way, at one point—and I'm not making this up—reprising the theme from "Star Trek." Most disturbing, though, is the film's unrelieved nationalism, evidenced in the locations, the final image, and the symbolism of the story, none of which differentiate the film from propaganda.

On the plus side, the director did create a beautiful village with a really old tree and some very clean peasants.

This time of the relationship between Hong Kong and China. Andy Lau's "Internal Affairs" examined the roles with far greater interest. This time, though, Lau has sunk to the level of soap, which is sad to see, especially considering how sophisticated his previous work is. Shu Qi is criminally misused to boot. "Confession of Pain" in no way compares to "The Banquet," "Curse of the Golden Flower," "Mo Gong," "Three Times," all of which function on more than one level without sinking into the error of this film, which is not so much paranoia as mawkish self-absorption.

As for camera work, set design, sound, and editing, this movie feels more like a commercial than a feature film. The effect is to cheapen what otherwise might have been great and deep. The same goes for the acting, which seems to have been texted in.

If "L'Auberge espagnole" was" Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship," "Russian Dolls" is "Wilhelm Meister's Travels." As someone who has actually suffered through those novels, which have to be among the dullest ever written, I can appreciate these modern film renditions, both of which convey the same basic points and are far better to sit through.

A point worth considering, one that was hammered home with the architectural analogy, is that the ideal woman is not a woman, but art itself, something Goethe referred to as the "eternal feminine."

These movies are smarter than they're given credit for. They allude not only to a cosmopolitanism crudely expressed in the term globalization, but also to a cosmopolitanism at the heart of modern Europe, one that Goethe recognized first if not best.

I saw this movie in China in January. I was amazed it got past the censors, but judging from the comments posted here, I guess I should not have been surprised.

It's an allegory for Chinese history since 1949. Duh. All the characters stand for something. I don't want to spell it out, but the message really isn't that hard to get.

Art is a mirror of life, not fantasy. But you have to know a little history to understand the parallel. Reviewers here should not be disappointed in the director, but rather themselves.

Chen Kaige is brilliant.

I'm surprised no one noticed that "The Inheritance" is a remake of remake of "Les Destinées sentimentales" (2000) by Olivier Assayas, updated to the present and set in Denmark. It simplifies the story and the moral quite a bit. It's a good film, but if you enjoyed it you should see the French original. Unlike Fly, Assayas doesn't present the viewer with a choice between life and work so much as meditation on the possibilities of art in the modern world.

The difference in the films is symbolized by the family businesses: steel in Denmark versus porcelain in France, the one solid, simple, and cold, the other elegant, fragile, and complex.

It cannot be purely by accident that French is a second language in the film...

Ulrich Thomsen is as good an actor as Charles Berling, however, and looks a lot like Lawrence Olivier. Perhaps that's why there are allusions to Hamlet.