Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Our man in Rotterdam is back with another handful of reviews just for you. Can’t wait till Elaine weighs in again, too. Between them, they’ve got this thing covered...
Hey Harry/Mori,
I’m starting to get a little tired, but we’re almost halfway there... here’s my report from the fourth day of the festival.
DAY FOUR (31 january)
Beautiful boxer (Ekachai Uekrongtham) (3,5 out of 5)
Already one of the frontrunners for an audience award, Beautiful boxer is a well made but very standard melodrama about a Thai boy who wants to be a girl, and makes a living in the Muay Thai boxing ring. After many years of training and hardship, she finally makes enough money to get a sex change operation and quit her violent lifestyle. Beautiful boxer is a typical audience favourite: impossible to dislike, but also hard to fully recommend to a discerning viewer. The director ladles on the melodrama pretty thick, using bombastic music and manipulative images to drive the point home. The filmmaker’s sense of humour saves the film, though: the second act of the film has a lighthearted, upbeat flow that really works to move the narrative along.
The acting is excruciatingly bad at times, as is the dialogue; the inspirational last scene is so ill-conceived that’s it hard to keep from bursting out laughing; yet in spite of it all, the film works. Uekrongtham is a natural genre director and he knows exactly what buttons to press to generate goodwill in the audience. Beautiful boxer is masterful pulp.
La niña santa (Lucrecia Martel) (4+ out of 5)
This new film from the director of the utterly boring La ciénaga is quite a step up from her last feature. It’s a confidently told, extremely well observed character drama involving two young, catholic girls and their first encounters with their sexuality. Amalia lives in her mother’s hotel, where a medical congress has just begun. One of the doctors falls in love with Amalia’s mother, but when this dr. Jano touches Amalia improperly in a crowd, she starts to believe (under the influence of her religious classes) it is her holy mission to give herself to him.
The film is slow to get going, but once the relationships between these people are explained, there is much to be enjoyed here. The performances are uniformly excellent, the characters are well developed and almost without exception flawed but sympathetic, and the conflicts that arise from their interactions are handled in an interesting way.
La niña santa doesn’t really do anything that hasn’t been done before, yet it’s so well made that it doesn’t matter.
The green hat (Fendou Liu) (2,5 out of 5)
This Chinese crime/relationship drama starts out well, but loses its direction a third of the way in. The first story it tells is about three brothers who commit a bank robbery, but get separated when they try to leave the country. One of them wants to make a call to his girlfriend in the USA, but when she tells him she’s found someone else, he eventually kills himself in front of the police negotiator. Then, all of a sudden, the focus of the film shifts to the policeman, who is cheated on by his wife because he can no longer satisfy her sexually.
The first part of the film is interesting: great editing, a great character dynamic between the brothers, and a tragic ending. However, once the film changes tracks it devolves into an ambling character drama that never really goes anywhere. Long scenes that become extremely repetitive are the order of the day, and the few attempts at humour fall flat.
Suffice to say, I didn’t stay for the Q&A.
Foreland (Voorland) (Albert Elings & Eugenie Jansen) (? out of 5)
Foreland is thematically and stylistically similar to the Hungarian film Hukkle from 2002. The film is made up of narratively unconnected shots of an untouched natural area in The Netherlands, taken over the course of seven years, and paints a picture of the coexistence of man and nature in the area. It’s a compelling look at the immutability of nature and the ultimate meaninglessness of man in the grand scheme of things.
... Or that’s what my friend had to tell me afterwards, because I fell asleep after fifteen minutes of it. I’m probably just too dependent of a compelling story of some kind – and that’s not something that Voorland can offer.
We don’t live here anymore (John Curran) (4+ out of 5)
Damn! This film came so close to getting that quarter point extra and scoring a “brilliant” rating... but pacing issues and a certain sense of repetitiveness in the middle act keep it back.
We don’t live here anymore is an extremely well acted and fantastically scripted character drama, that examines the relationships between four friends (two couples). Jack and Terry are married, but Jack has an affair with his best friend Hank’s girlfriend, Edith (the ever-luminous Naomi Watts). Both couples have children, so that complicates matters between them, especially when Hank starts to make a pass at Terry, too.
The characters clash in spectacular and heartrending ways, in which the fantastic cast is helped tremendously by the razor sharp dialogue. It almost physically hurts when these characters lash out at each other and destroy themselves.
As mentioned, the film drags a little in the latter half of the second act, and sometimes it’s a little too easy to decide which character deserves your sympathy – still, We don’t live here anymore is a very raw and realistic film, that will surely leave an impression.
Tomorrow I’ll return with, among others, the new German film The edukators, Wong Kar-wai’s potential masterpiece 2046 (!) and Shinya Tsukamoto’s (A snake of June) latest film, Vital.
The Last Lizard, signing off.
Great stuff. Thanks.
"Moriarty" out.
