I hardly ever watch sports of any kind, so it isn’t surprising that I don’t generally watch sports films either, much less pretend to evaluate them. But I just saw a bouncy and personal debut effort about marathon running by a longtime pal of mine, Cheryl Ross, whom I mostly know and cherish as a colleague (initially as a fellow Chicago Reader writer and staffer), as a fellow movie buff, and as a sometime guest when she returns to Chicago for some of her marathons. I enjoyed watching her first film because I like Cheryl a lot, and also because she almost always accomplishes whatever she sets out to do, including in this case to become a filmmaker. If you’d like to check it out, here’s a link:
The raison d’être for this three-part 2004 anthology was finding a project for ailing Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni, in his early 90s, whose segment, The Dangerous Thread of Things, is drawn from three sketches in his book That Bowling Alley on the Tiber. It’s clumsily acted and closer to standard porn than anything else he’s done, though it’s also characteristic of his late work in its sensitivity to modernist architecture and its fascination with the silences and antagonisms of an unhappy couple. The one masterpiece here is Wong Kar-wai’s moving The Hand, a visually exquisite and highly erotic period piece about a prostitute (Gong Li) and her tailor (Chang Chen). The complete washout is Steven Soderbergh’s flashy Equilibrium, a heartless, unerotic, and ultimately pointless black comedy with a 1950s setting. I guess one out of three ain’t bad. In English and subtitled Mandarin and Italian. 108 min. (JR) Read more
Arguably, one of the more questionable and limited practices of film historians is the classifying of films and filmmakers according to a certain form of tribalism known as nationality. The problem with this admittedly convenient and obvious method of cataloging is that important elements–perhaps even essential ones–that elude or defy tribalism may get lost in the shuffle.
For starters, many of our greatest filmmakers – Chaplin, Dreyer, Hitchcock, Jancsó, Murnau, Renoir, Sirk, Stroheim, Welles — can’t be tied to a single country or tribe without being drastically oversimplified in the process. And even though most of what we call neorealism is Italian, this tends to overlook the fact that comparable examples can be found elsewhere in the world, not only in the 20th century but in the new millennium as well.
In the two short films that Nemes Jeles László made for the Inforg studio in 2007 and 2009, Try a Little Patience and The Counterpart, one can already find not only the same camera techniques, themes, and even emotions that will characterize his 2015 masterpiece Son of Saul — such as a mise en scène constructed in relation to close-ups, the experiences of a war prisoner, and a male adult’s feeling of tenderness towards a boy — but also, even more fundamentally, a sense of universality that goes beyond nationalism and tribalism. Read more
This 2006 feature by Tsai Ming-liang (Goodbye, Dragon Inn) is a departure in many respects — perhaps too many. His first film to be shot in his native Malaysia, it alludes to the homophobic persecution of deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim in the late 90s, to the large number of foreign workers stranded after the country’s economic crisis, and, according to Tsai, to Mozart’s The Magic Flute as well. Lee Kang-sheng, Tsai’s perpetual star, plays both a paralyzed hospital patient and a homeless worker who becomes the apex of a bisexual triangle involving another immigrant who takes care of him and a coffee-shop waitress. Despite the overload, Tsai remains resourceful. In Malay, Mandarin, and Bengali with subtitles. 118 min. (JR)
