Oldboy

Dir. Chan-wook Park, 2003



Has everyone seen this movie yet? Am I the last person to finally see what the big deal is? If you haven't seen it yet, then don't read on any further, because I am going to talk about this frankly. I wouldn't want to ruin the ending for anyone, like multiple people have done for me.

All right. I wonder what this movie is like to watch without having any idea what it's about, the bumps along the way, or how it turns out. When this film came out a few years ago, it was such a sensation among such a cross-denominational body that on a regular basis, I would encounter people talking about it and, inevitably, revealing something. I can tell that there is something appealing for almost anyone, so long as they have a tolerance for the other aspects of it. For instance, a hopeless romantic might even like Oldboy, so long as he or she doesn't mind gore. The buzz about this film was so fevered that, unfortunately, it's almost impossible to look at this in a vacuum, and to judge it on its standalone merit.

Oh Dae-su is just some asshole who happens to stumble upon the worst luck possible: he is suddenly imprisoned by an unknown captor for 15 years for a crime he cannot immediately recall. While locked up, he pontificates on his past life and learns to fight. He goes from soggy loser to hardened badass. The minute he is let out of his prison, he embarks on a journey to understand what led to his incarceration, starting by answering anonymous cell phone calls and eating something alive. [Spoiler number one: I tell anyone that my favorite animal is the octopus, and they say, "Oh! Have you seen Oldboy? He eats a live one!" I knew it was going to happen, that some poor octopus would die for the sake of art, but that doesn't make it any less disturbing. Octopi are some of the smartest creatures on the planet. I'll bet he didn't even enjoy it.]

Ahem. So that happens, and in the process of choking down Earth's most intelligent cephalopod, he catches the flu and wins the sympathy and sanctuary of the cute little sushi chef, Mi-Do. You all know this. While avenging his own misery and tracking down the guy who made it all happen, he also develops a kind of relationship with Mi-Do based on mutual desperation and fear of losing the other. Eventually, he makes the 5-day deadline and figures out what all happened, and it all spirals out of control into the mutual revenge-fest that is befitting of one of the installments of the Revenge Trilogy. (The other two of which are Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance.)

Okay, so if you're still reading along with me, you know, blah blah, Oh Dae-su caught the jerk who orchestrated this whole thing having inappropriate relations with his sister and blabbed it all over the school, leading to the sister's suicide. This, I actually didn't know. I did not know that this was the driving force of Captorman's (forgot his name) evil plan, and so that reveal was actually a surprise, though I found it very thematic with the whole incest undertone of the film. Because we also all know that Captorman's evil plan involved hypnotizing Dae-su and Mi-Do into meeting and falling in love. But she's his daughter! Man, that must have been such an amazing twist for the people who don't have annoying friends!

But I do have annoying friends. And live in an annoying city full of annoying people who don't understand that some people like to see movies with a blank slate. So I can only tell you what this movie is like for someone who knows what's going to happen. And, you know, it's a little anticlimactic, when all is said and done. After the major reveal, the film really does not need to go on for another 15 minutes. We were all there for the twist, now we don't need to see a guy cut out his own tongue, another guy shoot himself in the head, and a ridiculous return to hypnosis. It's kind of like watching The Usual Suspects after you know that SPOILERSPOILER Verbal Kint is Keyser Soze. I mean, it's an interesting movie with interesting details, but it really exists for the ending.

I do know that there are people who bought this movie and watched it multiple times, and perhaps there is a reason for it. It was definitely entertaining, and the moment when Dae-su first resurfaces in the world and encounters the first human being in 15 years; that is a really touching moment that was very well done. It's a thrilling ride, and the gritty fight scenes with the flying blood and body parts are undeniably fascinating. But it doesn't really stand up as an entirely satisfying film without the twist or the anticipation of the moments that make the film so infamous.

Tokyo Sonata

Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008



In my years as a film-viewer, which is the only kind of credential I really have to present, I have seen quite an assortment of unbelievably strange films, and other incredibly slow films. Being categorically slow or strange doesn't automatically turn a film from my good opinion, and sometimes it actually makes it better, or more interesting, or that it just suits the topic so well that there is no other way to present the idea. However strangeness or slowness is a kind of subtlety that requires great skill to handle correctly. Just like a film on any kind of controversial topic, there will certainly be an audience that will be uninterested, so it's best to cater to those who will accept the strangeness or slowness, and tell the story that needs to be told.

I'm not sure that Tokyo Sonata succeeds in this regard. It's both slow and strange, which, right now, to me, seems like a rare combination. I am also a fan of Japanese cinema, new and old, and I appreciate the fresh look at metropolitan culture through a different lens. This film is just odd. Something just doesn't work. Halfway through the film, I shot my filmgoing companion a quizzical look, and he confided, "I don't quite get the...thesis here." Whether or not this is the film that Kiyoshi Kurosawa had envisioned, it's misdirected and has too many disparate parts.

The Sasaki family, a fairly nuclear family living in Tokyo, falls prey to the laws of chaos theory once Ryuhei, the father, loses his job due to downsizing. Too ashamed and prideful to tell his family or to immediately take a new, lesser job, he goes around pretending to still be a high-ranking administrator, while taking advantage of the soup line and haunting the unemployment office. His dutiful wife, maybe bored, maybe disenchanted, sees him one day eating his free meal, and she suddenly understands everything. Ryuhei, meanwhile, tries to control the only thing left in his life, the activities of his children. He forbids his younger prodigious son from taking piano lessons, and his older son from joining the American army. We all know what happens, though, with this kind of desperation, and the appropriate rebellion ensues.

All of the events leading up to the Moment when the film comes together (you know there's going to be one) take about an hour and a half. It's slow, but the anticipation keeps you around, keeps you alert. (Except for one man in the audience who had only come, clearly, to kick off his shoes and snore his way through the second act.) All of a sudden, the film takes a drastic turn for the dramatic, but because it is so unexpected and unprecedented, it is difficult to look at the action with a serious eye. It all just seems so comical when the three main characters - mother, father and younger son - supposedly hit rock bottom with the kind of gasping, bumbling imperfection of a minor Shakespeare character. It reminded me a bit of The Host, which was decidedly a black comedy interspersed with dramatic and tragic moments. The emotional push-pull in that film was disconcerting, but it remained consistent throughout.

In case you already bought advanced, non-refundable tickets and you are cursing yourself for the lack of foresight, it isn't all bad. If I had seen the two parts separately, I'd have possibly enjoyed them for different reasons, and could say positive things about them as two different films. The characters of Ryuhei and his wife are a bit sad, but also familiar. The secretive husband and the quiet, sacrificing wife are common enough to engage an emotional response, though they don't entirely avoid being a cliche. There are some sweet and interesting scenes that are relevant to the film as a whole, and others that are maybe just vignettes to set the place and time. In the moment, there is enough to enjoy that I didn't feel uncomfortable or bored. Unfortunately, I never managed to shake the feeling that there was something slightly off.

The director, Kurosawa, perhaps intended for Tokyo Sonata to be a statement about the social pressures of Japanese society and the need for a patriarch to save face in front of his peers and family. I am not Japanese, nor have I visited the country, so I can't make any blanket statement about the importance of honor, but I know what I've heard from other sources. It is a popular theme in modern Japanese cinema, and I've seen it executed more successfully. Even with strangeness and slowness thrown in. Perhaps I'm incorrect in pinpointing that as the failure for this film, and after I finish this, I'll probably think of another slow, strange film that worked for me. (Yep. The Taste of Tea and Last Life in the Universe.) But I can say that the disconnect between the tone of the first three-quarters of the movie and the last quarter caused me, and at least one other person that I know of, to furrow our brows in confusion.

Sorry guys. (To my two readers.) I obviously dropped the ball on this, and now it's sort of late to be doing this. I'm taking a break from this project (clearly) until a time that I can look myself in the face and really believe that I am not saying the same thing every single time. Thanks for sticking around. I enjoyed doing this, for a time.

Everything I Saw In Theaters In 2008 And Up To This Week

Atonement- 1/6/08
The Golden Compass- 1/12/08
Cloverfield- 1/19/08
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly- 1/20/08
The Savages- 1/25/08
Persepolis- 2/8/08
Be Kind Rewind- 2/22/08
In Bruges- 3/19/08
Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day- 3/29/08
Young @ Heart- 4/19/08
Smart People- 4/20/08
The Band's Visit- 4/27/08
Iron Man- 5/10/08
Topsy-Turvy- 4/30/08
The Visitor- 6/6/06
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull- 6/8/08
The Fall- 6/22/08
Get Smart- 6/25/08
Wall-E- 6/27/08
Wanted- 6/29/08
The Incredible Hulk- 7/4/08
Hellboy II: The Golden Army- 7/12/08
Hancock- 7/13/08
The Dark Knight- 7/18/08
Wall-E- 7/19/08
Pineapple Express- 8/10/8
The Dark Knight: Imax Experience- 8/10/08
Vicky Cristina Barcelona- 8/23/08
The Little Mermaid Sing Along- 8/24/08
Hamlet 2- 8/31/08
Tropic Thunder- 9/7/08
Girl Cut In Two- 9/12/08
Burn After Reading- 9/13/08
Miracle at St. Anna- 10/3/2008
Choke- 10/5/2008
Cool Hand Luke- 10/7/2008
W.- 10/17/08
Rachel Getting Married- 10/18/08
Ashes of Time: Redux- 10/24/08
Happy Go Lucky- 11/01/08
Rock n Rolla- 11/06/08
Synecdoche, NY- 11/13/08
Quantum of Solace- 11/14/08
Passion of Joan of Arc- 11/23/08
Milk- 11/27/08
Slumdog Millionaire- 11/23/08
Ciao- 12/14/08
The Wrestler- 12/22/08
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button- 12/25/08
Revolutionary Road- 12/26/08
Let The Right One In- 1/9/2009
Taken- 2/01/09
Gran Torino- 2/16/09
Frozen River- 2/17/09

Frozen River

Dir. Courtney Hunt, 2008



In a time when the most prominent female figures in cinema are the leads in such films as Confessions of a Shopaholic or He's Just Not That Into You, here is a film driven by the kind of woman you might one day actually meet, and might actually like. It takes independent cinema to portray people with struggles and difficulties more complex than just managing an unrealistic credit limit or trying to figure out whether or not you're correctly interpreting a guy's mixed messages. In Frozen River, the characters are stark and yet rich with emotion and nuance, with responsibilities and scars more profound than could possibly be written into a script.

Melissa Leo, an extremely underused and underrated actress, plays Ray Eddy, a mother of two boys living in a trailer in the far north of upstate New York. When we first see her, she is sitting in the passenger seat of a car with the door open, glove compartment hanging open, thinking through some emotions before putting on a brave face for her kids. She stays cheerful for her giddy five-year-old son, who is excited about the new double-wide that they are getting. As the new trailer drives up, Ray runs to meet them and tries to bargain with the salesman to set up installation payments, or to pay at a later date. They turn her down, give her an ultimatum, she turns to face her 15-year-old son, TJ, who already knows what happened. Apparently, her husband had run off to Atlantic City with the four thousand dollars they were going to put toward the double-wide.

Rather than this film turn into the story of a woman coping with having no man, getting her man back, or meeting and falling in love with a new man, this is about a woman who can do it, and does it. She tracks down her husband's car, picked up by Lila, a young woman from the Mohawk tribe, with problems of her own. The two women are at odds at first, and what starts off as indignant coercion turns into a common convenience over which they form a willing partnership. They begin to smuggle illegal immigrants from Canada to the United States by driving over the expanse of frozen river that normally separates the two countries. It started off with Lila and Ray holding each other at gunpoint, but the steady incline in trust and understanding leads to solid teamwork.

The great thing about most performances in independent films is the refreshing subtlety. I last saw Melissa Leo in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and she was good, but I admit to not having thought too much about her as an actress. It is clear to me that whatever fame and notoriety she is missing is because nobody must know who she is. Because she's pushing 40 and has visible lines on her face, she will never be a Hollywood household name, but her style is forceful and confident. She's hard as nails, but her tenderness is visible, never cloying. She interacts well with Missy Upton, who plays Lila. Upton, too, has a quiet kind of strength, and never once plays into cliches. Even the actor who played TJ, the 15-year old son, is effective in the way he incorporates teenaged sarcasm without turning into a caricature.

It's also refreshing to see a successful female filmmaker, especially one who addresses issues of racial tension and poverty. I can sense the woman's touch in a film's production, and it seems to be in the details: the genuine maternal intuition, the expression of emotions, the relative scale of the drama. As a woman, I can identify with this perception of the world and this understanding of humanity and certain experiences. Courtney Hunt chooses to show us the oft-seen story of the "unlikely friendship" (a phrase a strongly dislike) against a backdrop of muted social consciousness and the importance of family and self-sacrifice.

I had watched a lot of studio films in a row before seeing Frozen River, and it was like eating an apple after days of processed food. It feels real, natural, fresh, good for you. Almost a relief. I was allowed to think for myself, to process the nuances and secrets hidden in a glance or a flourish in the background. Even the reduced quality of film was a nice change from the overly polished glamor of big-budget flicks. Best of all, it didn't immediately vanish from my mind as I walked out of the theater. I could ponder and dwell on things that bothered me or that I needed to process. Thinking just feels so good.

The Mango Awards

I know I only have between zero and three regular readers of this blog, but I would like to celebrate my favorite movies of the year, with my first ever Mango Awards Ceremony. I am going to evaluate all of the movies I have seen in the last year, or to the best of my ability. There will be two classes of categories: the awards for films released in 2008 and films that I saw on DVD that are most likely released in any of the years preceding 2008.

This should be interesting and pretty easy, since it's only me voting. I'll list everything I've seen, for my own reference, then later decide the winners. In the unlikely event that anyone would like to weigh in, the polls are open, and maybe I'll have a reader's choice award or something. I might as well call it the "Bryan Award" or whatever, since I doubt more than one person will say anything, if at all.

So stay tuned!

Ciao

Dir. Yen Tan, 2008



Loyalty is a strong bond. It is probably the one noble incentive for doing something fairly unpleasant, scary, or uncertain. Loyalty to a friend can lead you to take care of his posthumous affairs, even when it is emotionally taxing, and to face the unknown. While loyalty is one theme in Ciao, it is also what kept me watching the entire film rather than leave during the first 10 minutes. I am glad I stayed to watch it because once it found its stride, it was a moving and thought-provoking film. It is very flawed, at times uncomfortably so, but it contains the seeds of a promising career for all of the parties involved.

While I do not personally know, nor have I met the filmmaker, director, writer, anything, I know someone who knows the editor. This is two degrees of separation, but they are good friends, and I am always willing to support friends of friends, especially in the face of the harsh Hollywood machine. I know that it is difficult to translate a good idea to film, and that there are so many variables that are so difficult to control, plus budgetary limitations, time constraints, etc. I needed to open my mind and look at the intent of this film, to understand it as an entity rather than just the small details of its component parts. It was uncomfortable at times, but in the end, I gave in completely.

The film leaps immediately into the drama: a man, named Mark, somehow dies rather suddenly, leaving his best friend, Jeff, as the only one able to sort out his personal business. This involves answering emails and notifying friends and acquaintances that he is deceased. Thus, Jeff meets Andrea, an Italian man who met Mark online and had arranged to fly out to meet him for the first time. They would be lovers, hopefully, and Mark's death was a sudden shock, as Andrea was already in the country. Jeff, intrigued by this mystery man whom Mark had kept a secret, invites Andrea to come out to Dallas anyway. It's a little crazy, sure, but the love that both Andrea and Jeff felt for Mark clearly told them that someone so meaningful probably can't be all bad. It is a rather reckless leap of faith, but one that I cannot admit to finding unrealistic.

When Andrea arrives, there is awkward uncertainty as the two men gauge each other and slowly let down their guard. Jeff is still boggled that Mark never mentioned Andrea, with whom he apparently communicated frequently for some time. Andrea is still boggled that Mark died so suddenly, and seeks to learn about him from and through his best friend. After a while, their conversations grow more intimate and they allow their emotions and secrets to come out. Each man is nursing wounds from unrequited loves, and dreams of the possibilities afforded from things beyond their reach. It is only a matter of time before they feel love for each other, which we know will happen from the film's poster, and because of the nature of a story like this. It is an old story, but set in the repressed banality of the life of a homosexual man in a conservative, post-industrial city.

The events in the film are very sympathetic, and the emotion is very human. As the characters learn more about each other, we learn more about them, and about the events that bring people together. This might sound cheesy, but whatever skepticism or antagonism one may feel about someone, the immediate reaction to a loss is sympathy and compassion. Jeff hadn't known about Andrea because Mark was afraid he would judge him for his previously impulsive love life. While he may have dismissed Andrea as just another "fuckoff," his heart was softened by his friend's death, and as a tribute, or to honor one last wish, Jeff chose to understand this man from across the world and to embrace Mark's personality. Mark did not have a dying wish, but if he had, it would probably have been understanding and acceptance of his nature. That kind of friendship and loyalty is touching, and yet understated.

The amateurism of the film is evident in some of the typical film-school techniques employed: stationary camera repeating exact shots multiple times, somewhat stilted, theatrical dialogue with awkward timing and lack of facial expression, and somewhat beginning-level actors. By far the most pleasing person to watch was Andrea, played by Alessandro Calza (who also wrote the script). He was not necessarily the most natural, but his awkwardness was more forgivable as a foreigner. Jeff's stepsister, a somewhat unnecessary character who clearly was mostly a tool for allowing Jeff's inner monologue to be spoken out loud without the use of voiceover, was the weakest character. The film equipment was good quality, and the images were lovely, but perhaps the crew needed a bit more practice and experimentation to fully understand the possibilities afforded by high definition work.

That being said, the nuances of the emotional range were hidden between the unnatural-sounding words and odd actions. My tendency is to use realism as the measure of quality, but even though this played out very much like a "film," there is a real, developed maturity in the content. There is an understanding of human nature and the strength of friendship and love affairs. Curiosity and grief drives Jeff to a potentially dangerous situation, especially when he knows that Mark was previously in an abusive relationship. While actor Adam Neal Smith does not necessarily physically evoke the stages of grieving, Jeff's character is full enough that if he existed, we'd know that he was seeking answers and looking to complete his view of Mark by reading more emails than necessary and eventually asking Andrea bold questions about their international relationship.

I'm not sure I would be so forgiving and patient with this film if I were not tangentially and indirectly connected to it, but I sought to understand it and take it in. I was patient with the annoying parts, and cringed at the less effective writing at times, but I wanted to get to know it. Often there is more than what meets the eye, and a little patience can reveal a lot more than what appears at face value. I am quick to dismiss something as "terrible," but perhaps this was a good exercise in opening my mind and reserving judgment until I get more information. It was ultimately worth my time, and I was impressed by what I could take away from it. If the measure of a good film is what kind of mark it made or how it influenced me, then I can say that this is a good film.