Stuff I Saw

Some notes about stuff I saw recently.

Code 46

Some very brave moves by the screenwriter & director, plunking us right smack in the middle of their world, with only a few lines of text for an introduction, mainly about what is "Code 46". None of the gadgets are flashily displayed, unlike in movies like Minority Report ("This is the future, it's way cool!"), here it's more along the lines of: "Here's the future, deal with it."

I already love Samantha Morton from oh, everything else she does. And Tim Robbins is always dependable. Great character studies, and very very romantic, although I know it will leave many people cold. No walks in the park or candlelight dinners, this is the real deal. Curiosity, connection, lust, and then love. The bleak landscape tells volumes about the world they inhabit and their states of mind.

One cool thing is the fact that languages are mixed and matched, with Spanish, Chinese, and other fragments of languages thrown into everyday conversation. It's kinda nice, how everyone's one big happy family. Not.

Two especially strong scenes, and they all use the same shot. Handheld, closeup of Samantha Morton's face as she looks straight into camera - Tim Robbins' POV. First one is when she dances in a club. Mesmerizing, seductive, very, very sexy. And second when she's forcing him to make love to her in a motel room (she's taken a virus that makes her body reject his advances, so she has to ask him to tie her up and rape her). That shot of her face, torn between repulsion and desire, love and pain, is one of the most stunning performances, both shot and actor-wise, that I've seen.

Oh, and finally, a good use of a Coldplay song, unlike the atrocity that was Wicker Park.

Maria Full of Grace

Unbelievably sad and powerful. Low-budget indie with a great cast, especially the outstanding lead. Colombian girls become "mules", swallowing pellets of heroin and smuggling them into America, all for a better life. I love the way how the most important things don't have to be said, looks more than suffice. After all, what can you say when you say goodbye to a childhood friend, perhaps forever? What can you say when you find out that the girl who has come to be your friend on the trip has died from a pellet bursting in her stomach? And what can you say to that girl's sister, who is ignorant of how you turned up at her doorstep, and that her sister is already dead?

The Manchurian Candidate

Like #1 said to me so many months back (OK, it hasn't been that long), "I'm glad Demme didn't fuck it up." Really solid, and tense. Loved the cinematography, some pretty bold choices are made right at the very beginning. A conversation between Denzel Washington and his former corporal is shown mostly in huge close-ups, with the characters looking almost directly at the camera. Highly unsettling, especially with the sound design (which is great, by the way) hitting all the right notes; this scene sets the mood for the entire movie - which is that everything and everyone is fucked. Of course, solid performances all round, and even a hint of incest. Always lovely.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Gorgeous. Lovely tinted images look like pictures ripped straight from a 1930's-style painting. Fun, fun movie. Did I mention gorgeous? I was pleasantly surprised when one of my favorite actors-that-no-one-knows-about, Giovanni Ribisi appeared as Jude Law's sidekick. He's a great young actor, I think, and it's kinda sad he's not a bigger name than he is. The medic who gets shot in the liver and dies in Saving Private Ryan, the disturbed young man in The Gift, the husband in Lost In Translation. Good stuff. Oh, and Phoebe's brother Frank in Friends. Ah, now you know who he is. Philistines.

Old Boy

The Grand Prix winner at Cannes, from Korea. Tarantino loves this film, and it's not hard to see why. I haven't been this happy after seeing a movie since the Kill Bill's. It's stylish, it's melodramatic, it's darkly funny, it's also amazingly tragic and above all, well-crafted. I love moments where I go, "Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck." It means the film's just given me a kick in the balls in terms of plot development. It also means that it's a pretty amazing script to do that. So far movies that have made me do that have pretty much been The Sixth Sense and The Others (I'll amend this if I think of some more). And now Old Boy.

Favorite bits:

A tracking shot back and forth along a corridor while the lead character fights an entire gang of toughs, armed only with a hammer. One long take, great choreography (although it can't beat that amazing long take in the House of Blue Leaves from Kill Bill Vol. 1) and just plain cool.

A scene where the lead walks away from a high-rise building, and a man holding a dog plummets from the roof onto a car in the background. The dog bounces out of his hands and onto the ground. Pretty fucking hilarious.

A scene shot through a hole in a window - the lead character's POV - of a boy and a girl seducing each other, then gradually moving into sex. You can see the edges of the glass around the frame, moving back and forth. Highly voyeuristic, very erotic.

There's some nice use of classical music juxtaposed against violence, which I'm always a big fan of. I hope to someday use Bach's Air in G for a scene of extreme violence. Someday.

The violence wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be. Hammer pulling teeth out. Bloody teeth falling on a keyboard. Scissors cutting off a tongue. Everything takes place offscreen anyway, so it's all in the sound design and in your head. The most graphic scene would have to be the eating of the live octopus. I mean, the entire head is ripped clean off in one take, and the tentacles are still twisting and flailing weakly as he stuffs them in his mouth. Good thing octopi don't bleed. Well, I guess they must, but not red blood anyhow. I heard he ate four octopi for this scene. Tasty.

The Twilight of the Golds
This was a play by the NUS Theatre Faculty. I wasn't expecting anything much, so I was pleasantly surprised. And disappointed at the same time. I mean, three cast members ranged from fairly decent to really good. But the other two were just plain terrible. How can someone doing theatre be so terrible at their spoken English? And I don't just mean swallowing "t's" at the end of sentences and other typically Singaporean gaffes, I mean actually emphasizing the wrong words in a sentence so it's almost incomprehensible unless you're working really hard to understand it. I've never had to put in so much effort before just trying to listen to what actors were saying.

The biggest flaw though, was the choice of play. As I understood it, they didn't have a choice, and were told to do this by their professors. Well, that's fair enough, but it shows lack of research on their part. This is a very Jewish-American play, and while I don't claim to know much of Jewish families, I know enough from interactions with people and the media (oh, don't we all learn everything we know from the TV?) to know that something that's sorely lacking is the Jewish background. I mean, I know from the lines that they're Jewish, but I'd never know from their dressing, their mannerisms and other things like that. Perhaps I'm expecting cliches, I dunno. Maybe that's bad on my part. But still, the essence of the play is missing.

One interesting thing that happened was that there apparently was an auditorium or something next door to the little black box theatre, and they were playing Poltergeist that very night. Some very interesting cases of intertextuality happened, with the dialogue and music from next door juxtaposing almost perfectly with the scene that was playing out over here. For example, someone says something about her baby here, and next door, an ominous music cue plays: dum-dum-dum-DUM. Beautiful. Couldn't have planned it better.