Change Your Image
ndk53
Reviews
Underwear (2015)
underwear-based melodrama
Good to see content from Japan. Great production values.
I found the musical score intrusive and too 'on the nose'. Signaling what you should be feeling now in case you can't figure it out from the script - determination, inspiration, sadness etc. Lush, redundant and mostly saccharine. Especially that damn piano! Coincidentally just having rewatched The Birds which has no musical score at all. Wish there was a separate mute for the music.
Subtitles in yellow often lost on a light background.
A weirdly depopulated Ginza and too-blue sky over Tokyo. The distraction of anime-looking characters thanks to cosmetic surgery especially among the young actresses.
The melodramatic line readings and swelling music when someone said something like, I will make...bras that I like! The simpering overacting and fumbling by the doe Kiritani in the early episodes.
Male characters mostly emasculated or evil. What was up with the coffee guy? Poor schmuck.
Not crazy about the stereotypical work-life imbalance, would like to have seen some of the characters' lives outside of work.
Other than Kiritani, a great cast. In particular could watch Mao Daichi sew and drink coffee all day. Without music and maybe without that Anna Wintour haircut. Her 'regal bearing' is an inspiration, as is her enunciation which is great for students of the language.
Livstid (2012)
Annika saves the day yet again
The endings of these episodes are predictable and outlandish. In this case of course Annika rushes in to do a rescue single-handedly, dodging bullets. Why not just wait for the police? But no, she must be the star of the show, no matter how implausible. This means she goes into obviously dangerous situations alone and unarmed. It really detracts from the series. It's one thing to be intrepid and ask the tough questions, but another to take foolish risks.
The husband's accusation is valid--she takes her job to an extreme, jeopardizing herself and even her family, when she could simply call the police.
Den röda vargen (2012)
anachronisms
I looked in here to get some clarification about the time line of the Red Wolf episode. In the office Annika was talking to Berit, one of the other reporters who was apparently an old-time lefty. Berit mentions she and a woman on the TV, perhaps the minister of culture, protested the Vietnam war together. But both the actress who plays Berit and the one who is the culture minister are too young to have been protesting the Vietnam war. The actress was ten years old in 1972, the last big year for protests.
In another episode Annika recalls being nearly raped as a young girl. This is an unfortunate cliché, as it seems so many female detectives are survivors of rape. Most male detectives (on US TV at least) on the other hand are not only war veterans but also combat veterans. Both are unimaginative attempts to layer world-weariness onto characters who more likely have led ordinary comfortable suburban lives. I noticed in particular in TV series the Vietnam-vet trope was really stretched, giving detectives war cred who were too young to have been there. There was a period where it finally became too implausible, with detectives in their 30s, in the 1990s, being Vietnam vets, so they started making them be veterans of Grenada (!), and even Panama. Then the first Gulf War came along, and they could be veterans of that at least, even though it was a very brief war. Now with Iraq and Afghanistan police depts will be well stocked with the necessary gravitas that only combat experience can provide, for many years to come.
The home life seems a cliché and predictable--the kids are tacked on. Would anyone notice if they were different from one episode to the next? You'd think the perennially put-upon spouse would have resigned himself to her schedule after all these years. And Annika's newsroom, with its "stop the presses"-type reporting seems an anachronism. No layoffs in this place! The gruff suspender-wearing editor is a pale copy of J. Jonah Jameson from the Spiderman comics of an earlier era.
Still, I enjoy the show because the cinematography is beautiful, and it's nice to see the ridiculously glamorous Malin Crepin poking around in various interesting locations in Sweden, which we in the US don't often get to see.
Chand rooz ba'd... (2006)
lots of existentialist getting in and out of cars and smoking
I saw this on Dec 3, the final night of the Boston MFA Iranian Film Festival. The auditorium was packed with a mostly Iranian audience. Niki Karimi was there and answered questions afterwards. She's charming and funny, and managed pretty well in English.
Karimi warned the audience before the start not to expect a "story", because she is not interested in telling stories. Fair enough. My initial reaction was that the film lacked not only a story but also a point. We see a cycle of scenes of a working woman under stress from a variety of sources. Her reactions remain entirely internal--she remains opaque, revealing nothing interesting about her emotions or her personality. The film is a set of repeated scenes of her abruptly leaving whomever she happens to be talking to, to get in her car, drive somewhere, get out, smoke a cigarette, and get back in her car again. All while looking miserable. Repeat for 90 minutes.
This is too harsh however as there is something to be said for the film, beyond the repetitive plainness. We get a glimpse of the ordinary life of a modern urban woman in Teheran. There are a few moments of humor.
Among the questions somebody asked was why the woman never smiled. Karimi said because she was depressed. Another noted that the camera didn't move much, and was there a reason for that. Karimi answered because she doesn't like camera movement. Karimi is a sympathetic figure and I think captivated the audience, more perhaps than her film itself did, with this kind of deadpan humor. In the absence of external clues you are left to infer that, even though she took pains to say that this was not a self-portrait, that she was the source of the same kind of deadpan neutral tone that is found in the film itself. A tone that succeeded in conveying a mood of unresolved desperation, buried deep underneath which might be found a lively, funny spirit. It is also a metaphor of life for modern people and for women in particular living in such a repressive society. You are forced to search for meaning in the small gestures, in the pauses, in what remains unsaid.
A contradictory review is a sign of either a careless review writer, or of a movie that's more complex than it seems.
Independent Lens: Stolen (2005)
distracting camera-work, little new info
Do these documentary filmmakers all go to the same film school? Every interview shot is guaranteed to be either too close to begin with, or to slowly and surely zoom in too close while the person is speaking. Instead of focusing on what the speakers are talking about, I'm counting nose hairs or contemplating various skin conditions. Sometimes for variety they start too-close and zoom out.
We see closeups of the back of Harold Smith's neck while he's taking the T or walking through South Station. Or endless closeups of his hands, his cheeks, his prosthetic nose. It's not just him--every speaker is treated the same way. What point are they trying to make with this investigation into everybody's skin pores? They're like frustrated dermatologists. The shots are so close you can't even see the speaker's entire face half the time. Why? Once you notice it you can't help but watch for it and sure enough, another steady zoom. Maybe it's fear of talking-head syndrome--they do it to inject a measure of (cheap) dynamics into an otherwise static shot of somebody talking. What a tedious technique!
As for the other aspects of the film, I don't know what Dreyfus would have done had she not found Smith to build her film around. Smith is a cool character but not much actually happens. We see him getting in and out of planes trains and taxicabs, and listening to various cranks and scam artists, and learn a little about Gardner herself. We see some scenes of Venice through the same off-balance zoom-in and zoom-out technique. None of this amounts to much. No time is spent describing the mechanics of the heist. Considering this was one of the great capers of the century, we learn very little about how it was actually pulled off. I guess because the documentary strives for something more than a mere exposition of the crime. Is this artistic license, or just laziness? Its her film, she gets to decide what to focus on. Seems to me though some of those pointless scenes of Smith getting out of taxis could have been replaced with a few minutes in the beginning, showing us how the thieves moved through the museum, dealt with the alarm system, and made their getaway.
This movie shares with The Giant Buddhas a lack of interest in the narrative, in favor of a tendency to meander and linger on irrelevancies.
To its credit the film does a good job of explaining, and showing Vermeer's appeal.
The Giant Buddhas (2005)
a disappointment
I agree with the comment that the film had insufficient structure and no identifiable point of view. Lack of structure isn't necessarily a bad thing, but this topic would have benefited from a more straightforward approach.
You don't know who is behind the camera half the time--that person seems to change. Who is in the UN airplane--is that Frei? Is that him in those meetings? In the segment in China when looking for the re-creation, who was speaking? Does Frei speak Chinese? Who was writing the letters to Nelofer Pazira and what was their point? I enjoyed the long lingering closeups of Pazira's beautiful face and especially those amazing green eyes, but they were completely gratuitous. If she were unattractive I'm sure she wouldn't have appeared in the film at all. Seemed like Frei was as interested in filming her as in filming his erstwhile topic. Don't blame him, but seems like that should be a different movie. Also as mentioned Frei did not succeed in connecting Buddhism in general to these statues. I saw this film with five others and none felt any particular historical or artistic loss at the destruction of the Buddhas. Did any modern Buddhists care about what was happening in Afghanistan? Seemed not. Maybe few even knew about the existence of these statues, or didn't care because they were only large and old, not beautiful. They were ugly in fact.
The walking-around scenes were confusing. There is a scene in which Pazira climbs up inside then seems to be looking down on the Buddha's face--but it had already been blown up by then. I lost my bearings.
This film needed a good disciplined editor I think, to give this raw material some shape and to clarify its point. Time spent lingering on Pazira's eyes could have been better spent on providing context. It should have been possible to present the Taliban's rationale directly from a Taliban. Maps showing where the Bamiyan Valley is exactly, where it stood on the trade route, and how Buddhism might have reached the area in the first place would also have helped. Also to identify what languages people were speaking and how the local Hazaris got to be there. Perhaps these details were missing in favor of a more subjective or "artistic" approach, but that seems to me more simply a lack of discipline than an expression of art.
Still, in its favor, the music was very good though maybe local music might have been more fitting, and I give credit for simply exposing viewers to footage of a part of the world westerners rarely get to see.