1. No time to write a real write-up, but Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse is up there with Bong Joon-ho's The Host (and Philip Gröning's Into Great Silence) as one of my favorites this year so far.
(And in case anyone wanted to know: QT's was better than RR's. In fact, I'll go out on a limb here and say that Eli Roth's "preview" for Thanksgiving was better than Planet Terror. And indeed I'll go out on another limb and say that Death Proof is probably Tarantino's best work since Pulp Fiction. It's a structural marvel, plus Tarantino lets his characters simply luxuriate in the pleasures of the rhythm of simple conversation. Words, speed and metal -- yeah.)
2. Great roundtable in the L.A. Weekly -- though it's mostly Tarantino yapping -- between various grindhouse auteurs.
I love the shout-out at the end to The Siege of Firebase Gloria, on which a cousin of mine was a producer; that was also when I found myself sitting at my kitchen table with R. Lee Ermey!
3. Reading the latest issue of Cinema Scope. The Rotterdam film fest has all the Filipino films I want to see! (We in SF have only one, and it's not the ones at Rotterdam. It's the latest Auraeus Solito film though.)
4. Plus two missed cinema-related opportunities just about a month ago:
I was out of town (in Austin for the weekend), so I totally missed the Apichatpong Weerasethakul fest in Berkeley, which comprised a showing of his latest film and a shot-by-shot director commentary accompanying Tropical Malady. If that wasn't bad enough, an email arrives on Thursday, inviting me to a small reception for the director. Drat. At least I can console myself with my last moment of director-fanboy interaction a couple of months ago, i.e., holding the bathroom door open for Bong Joon-Ho and stammering about how much I enjoyed Memories of Murder, and he smiled and said "thanks" and ran in, clearly needing to use the facilities.
So back to Austin: I step off the plane and to the Advantage car rental counter and the clerks there (all women) are all excited about something.
Me: What's going on?
Clerk: Oh -- you should have been here ten minutes ago!
Me: What do you mean?
Clerk: Just ten minutes ago, Rosario Dawson was standing right where you are.
Me: Are you serious?
Clerk: Yes, she just left! She was soooo nice.
Other clerk [in a whisper]: And she was stacked.
I figure I would have stammered about how much I enjoyed watching her in Clerks 2, and she would have smiled and said "thanks" and ran off to get her car anyway.
5. Saw Samuel Fuller's White Dog on the big screen. (For those of you who don't know it, it's Fuller's unreleased movie about a German shepherd specifically trained to attack black people.) I still don't know what to make of it -- a somewhat ham-fisted if certainly original attempt to address racism (though movies like Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon were much worse), terrible acting from Kristy McNichol, dialogue (co-written by Curtis Hanson) that's really unable to transcend its pulpy origins -- but there's something about the movie that gets under your skin. (This mainly has to do with the anti-racist dog de-trainer played by Paul Winfield, whose nobility of intentions places him on the continuum of Noble African American Men of Hollywood, but it's a compelling role nonetheless.)
6. Takeshi Furusawa's Ghost Train: sorry -- just dull all around.
7. Hirokazu Kore-eda's superb Hana is that rarest of things: a samurai comedy. Junichi Okada from V6 has sworn to avenge the death of his father -- except that he's something of an incompetent samurai, and prefers teaching the local kids how to write. Romance, drama, legacies passed on from father to son, the theater, the meaning of revenge -- they're all here in this excellent film (although it's not Afterlife, for sure).
8. Ray Lawrence's Jindabyne boasts an excellent ensemble cast -- it's hard to beat Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne -- and this adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story (also borrowed for Robert Altman's Short Cuts, i.e., the unnecessarily misogynist Huey-Lewis-pissing-into-a-river segment) does a fine job of illustrating the domestic frustrations that erupt to the surface when basic human decency is tested. But god almighty, is it ruined by a red herring of a subplot that thankfully goes nowhere and one of the most appallingly mawkish endings I've seen in a while.
9. Unfortunately I popped a Benadryl (my allergies are really awful these days) just before seeing Pedro Costa's exquisite Colossal Youth, which was the movie I was most excited to see during the SF Film Festival. Not good, because Costa stretches his long takes to the absolute breaking point (though I probably only drifted off for only a few seconds each time). Hey, at least I happily stayed through the whole thing; people were leaving in droves!
(I didn't "get it," though I stopped having that reaction to a film a long time ago.) What was certainly most memorable was the rigorously composed frame, mostly with the tall, dazed lead character -- Costa gets a lot of mileage from dressing him in all black -- cutting obliquely across the screen. What a movie though: ghosts refusing to quit haunting burnt-out shells of buildings, shuffling in stained and chipped hallways, reciting letters never sent, standing in ruined pools of light.
Posted by the wily filipino at April 29, 2007 03:15 AM