Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
First time spy here, doing quadruple duty for us with this report from London:
Aiki
A kind of higher brow Japanese version of the Karate Kid, only really great, it tells the story of Taichi, an up and coming boxer of talent who is paralysed when hit by a car, riding home after a successful fight. He sinks into depression and becomes suicidal, pushing his girlfriend, family and friends away from him, drowning his sorrows in drink. He becomes arrogant, angry and deeply unpleasant to everyone around him, but gradually finds new friends and starts to pull himself up and back into society. It is when he discovers the martial art of Aiki-Jujutsu, and the ability of its practitioners to flip a person over with a simple flick of their wrist that is the turning point. He meets his Mr Miagi in Ryo Ishibaishi (looking a lot better than he did at the end of Audition) who figures Taichi’s disability doesn’t have to matter, Aiki can be practised sat in a wheelchair.
What’s so great about the movie is the feeling of triumph, of Taichi dragging himself up from being on the edge of suicide to feeling like he’s ‘standing tall’ at the end of the movie. His character does not travel on so much an arc as a cardiogram as everytime he seems to be pulling himself together, he takes a knock backwards, and it is testament to director Daisuke Tengan’s control of the tone of the film, which switches from depressive and bleak to downright hilarious, that it is thoroughly engaging throughout.
Haruhiko Kato as Taichi turns in a sterling performance and pulls at the heartstrings in all the right places, without ever becoming overly sentimental.
Ryo Ishibaishi once again proves himself one of Japan’s finest working actors and special mention needs to go to whoever (amazing how much we rely on the IMDB nowadays) played the karate master who is unconvinced by the deceptively simple Aiki and challenges the wheelchair bound Taichi to a bit of a fight at the end. He comes off as Kazuya Mishima on Red Bull and Haribo and is absolutely marvelous. It’s Yoda and Count Dooku all over again and one hell of an uplifting ending, not out of cloying sentimentality but because we are allowed to realise just how far Taichi has come.
I want the DVD, and I can’t give more praise than that.
(And can I just say: “New seats at the NFT!!!!” Good to see my membership is being spent well. Not too sure about the pink carpet though.)
Bowling For Columbine
You probably don’t need another review to sing this powerful, moving and downright hilarious documentary on American gun control’s praises, but here’s one from the English perspective. See, we think you’re all a bit looney when it comes to guns. We’re a culture that doesn’t like guns. We don’t want to see Police officers armed on the street because we know that if the guns are there, they’ll bloody well use them, and when guns get fired, people get hurt. Often times not the ones you want hurt. It’s not that our culture isn’t violent, you only have to look at football hooliganism to see that it is, or that major cities like London and Liverpool don’t have or need armed response teams of specially trained police officers in flak jackets and carrying MP5s doing the rounds, it’s that we don’t want to accept it. We don’t have a culture of hunting which brings kids up with guns (not unless you’re a toff anyway) and we certainly don’t have a constitutional right to own a gun. In fact we don’t have a constitution whatsoever, but that’s another story. When we look at the gun culture in America, we worry it is what Britain will turn into. Going into the film that’s the main thing on our minds. Standing shoulder to shoulder with America is all well and good, but we’d rather be in a suit from Saville Row than a leather flight jacket, if you get my drift. We’re worried we’re copying all the bad things from America, and none of the good. That’s not just my baggage, it was the whole audience’s. When Michael Moore answered questions afterwards he nearly got a standing ovation for promising his next movie would be going all out at President Rumsf...sorry, Bush and ensure he doesn’t get re-elected (although he didn’t actually get elected in the first place). We’re scared about where we’re going as a nation and this documentary makes America look like hell and we think we’re on the road to it. It boils the nation down to the one thing we don’t like about it. It’s so insular. Individuals batten down the hatches and lock themselves in their homes with their arsenal to protect themselves from the outside attackers. Be it that they are scared of Native Americans fighting them for land, or Blacks demanding the same rights as Whites or Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorists or just the guy from the bad side of town who wants to steal your TV set, it’s America’s foreign policy in a nutshell and is extremely telling.
Moore shows us a nation run by the media and its warping of truth, of corporate greed replacing common sense and decency. But there is hope. The media can do good. If they show up at K Mart head quarters with a pair of kids from Columbine High School with inoperable bullets lodged in their bodies bought from a supermarket, they can get the company to stop selling them. Is it because K Mart had a change of conscience, or is it because they didn’t want the media to portray them in a bad light? Either way you can’t buy bullets in K Mart anymore, and that can only be a good thing.
Thankfully there are people like Michael Moore showing us the other side of the story. God (or should it be Satan?) love him for letting Marilyn Manson say the most intelligent thing in the entire film. When asked what he would say to the people of Columbine after being blamed for what happened there he simply replies, “I wouldn’t say anything. I’d listen, which is something no one did.” It made me want to go buy his DVD.
Then there’s Charlton Heston. Jesus Christ, there’s Charlton Heston. OK so he’s not well, he’s clearly frail, but oh my God he’s the John Huston in Chinatown of this film, hanging over it like the devil himself, displaying no compassion whatsoever by going to two (count em) towns where shootings have occurred and holding an NRA rally. He wholeheartedly exercises his right to own a gun because he can and he wants to, which is fair enough, but there was a collective jaw drop, a joint ‘did he just say that’ in the cinema as he said the excessive gun violence in America could be attributed to having an ‘ethnic problem.’ No one’s going to watch Planet of the Apes in the same way again.
But of all the crazy things you can learn about America in this film, like you can go to a bank and get a free gun when you open an account, or buy a twelve-guage with your pint of milk and pop tarts, it’s quite amazing to think you can actually go bowling at six o’clock in the morning.
Looking For Leonard
Actually, no. They don’t find him. No, really they don’t. The Leonard in question being Leonard Cohen. Now, being a literary philistine, I know Kurt Cobain yearned for a ‘Leonard Cohen afterworld’ and he did that ‘Everybody Knows’ song in Exotica and the seminal Pump Up the Volume, and that he wrote some books and stuff. Maybe if I’d read him, I’d realise they did find him, but hey you get out what you take in...So anyway, Looking for Leonard is a kind of quirky litte Hal Hartley-esque Canadian movie, with a really rather lovely colour palette, and a rather obvious narrative.
Jo (Jim Huffman) is unhappy in her marriage to Ted (Ben Ratner), a small-time theif with delusions of grandeur. When she’s not ‘helping’ with the petrol station and convenience store robberies, she loses herself in Cohen’s novels. I put ‘helping’ in inverted commas because she performs them in a state of complete and utter apathy, sleepwalking through them while Ted and his brother, Johnny (Darcy Belsher) run about like blue arsed tits, leading to the funniest and least professional robberies since Bottle Rocket. She eventually meets up with a Czechoslovakian computer programmer, Luka (Joel Bissonette) who is in the country, intending to meet an employer who disappears as soon as he gets there, leaving him somewhat in the lurch. They wander about a bit and develop ‘feelings’ for one another. An accidental killing occurs and Luka is accidentally pegged as the killer. He goes on the walk and meets a drug dealer, who’s actually rather nice and he thinks about Jo a lot. She thinks about leaving for Australia, but thinks about him a lot too. They meet up again and an ‘exciting’ and ‘tense’ final reel ensues.
Thinking back on it, I liked the movie a lot more when I was watching it where I guess the characters had a bit more going for them. The performances were all fine and dandy, but the whole thing lacked a feeling of cohesion and depth. The directors’ (Matt Bissonnette and Steven Clark) way of getting around shooting stunts was creative and it looks lovely. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it doesn’t have that ‘thing’ that sets it apart from all the other character based indie pics out there. Hopefully the film makers will only get better and more confident in their work. Hopefully we’ll get to see.
Love Liza
Phillip Seymour Hoffman gives the best performance of his life. Do you need anything else? OK, so everyone reading this site knows and loves Phillip Seymour Hoffman. He’s one of those great character actors, like Luis Guzman, Elias Koteas, Phillip Baker Hall, who you go to see in a movie, often playing second fiddle to some big movie star and wonder why they don’t have top billing. Am I the only one who saw Ocean’s Eleven because Don Cheadle was in it? I think I first noticed Hoffman in Todd Solondz’s Happiness, then he was in Boogie Nights, and Magnolia. Then you start realising he was in other movies, like Twister, always giving great performances no matter how small the role. In Love Liza, written by his brother Gordy and directed by Todd Luiso, (who played Dick, the cool geeky one from High Fidelity), he plays Wilson, a web designer finding the suicide of his wife hard to deal with. He finds her suicide note but can’t bring himself to open it, fearful that he is to blame. He becomes addicted to sniffing petrol, presumably because his wife killed herself with a hosepipe in a car, though it is never disclosed and he drifts further and further away from the world. His mother in law (Kathy Bates) tries to get him to open his letter but he pushes her away. A work colleague introduces her brother Denny (Jack Kehler), a remote contol nut who gets Wilson interested in flying radio controlled aeroplanes, although Wilson’s primary interest is in using it as an excuse to buy more petrol.
Funnily enough, Love Liza is a very sad film, at times almost unbearably so. Wilson wanders around with the weight of Liza’s death on him, and his only escape is in petrol fumes. The music, courtesy of Jim O’Rourke is melancholy, and the scenes sombre, but light seems to crawl in at the edges. The music sounds beautiful. The landscape looks stunning. Sunlight glistens off water, and the colours are often vibrant. Humour comes into the film, as Wilson seems to go nuttier and nuttier. At one point he strips off and goes for a swim in the river, even though a gathering of radio control fans are trying to race their speedboats, and we seem to be invited to laugh at this, not in a mean spirited way, but because simply because it is funny. They’re trying to have a race, he wants to go for a swim and so he does. It’s as if we’re in Liza’s position, watching down from above at a former love behaving silly, but knowing he’ll pull himself together eventually and smiling about it. It’s a wonderful little film and it ended too soon.
Hopefully you’re still awake.
Shadwell.
I am indeed, Shadwell. CANNONBALL, starring David Carridine and Sylvester Stallone and a world of Roger Corman all-stars, just came on, and I’m having trouble looking at the computer instead of the TV. There’s a lot more updating to do, though. Thanks for your mail, Shadwell, and enjoy anything else you see at the fest...
"Moriarty" out.
