Shimotsuma Monogatari (Kamikaze Girls)

Quick Info
Director: Nakashima Tetsuya
Starring: Fukada Kyoko, Tsuchiya Anna
Year of Release: 2004
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Awards: Best Film (Japanese Professional Movie Awards), Best Film (Yokohama Film Festival), +12 others
Genre: Comedy
MPAA Rating: not rated
My Rating: **** (meaning?)

Synopsis :
Momoko is a serious, introverted, and isolated girl.  She is obsessed with Rococo Europe and has one passion in life - expensive Lolita fashion.  After exhausting her father's funds in buying it, she places an ad to sell fake Versace clothes leftover from dad's days as a two-bit yakuza.  This brings Ichiko into her life.  Ichiko is loud, vulgar, and a member of an all-girl motorcycle gang - the opposite of Momoko.  Unwillingly, Momoko emerges from her shell as Ichiko insists on being her friend.

Review :
So much fun!  Shimotsuma Monogatari is at heart a film about female friendship, more comedic than others of this genre (Thelma and Louise, for example).  It breaks the fourth wall constantly, but this only adds to the charm of the film.  The bright colors, odd camera angles, and surreal fantasy sequences create a visual spectacle, but the film is rooted in solid acting, inventive storytelling, and a quirky narrative.  It's a film about independent thinking and the value of true friendship, and offers a scathing critique of consumerism thrown in to boot.  It is also one of the most fun movies I have watched in a very long time. 

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

Quick Info
Director: F. W. Murnau
Starring: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston
Year of Release: 1927
Country: USA
Language: silent (English cards)
Awards: Best Actress (Oscar), Best Cinematography (Oscar), Best Unique and Artistic Picture (Oscar), Best Foreign Language Film (Kinema Junpo)
Genre: Drama, Romance (melodrama)
MPAA Rating: not rated
My Rating: **** (meaning?)

Synopsis :
A married man is tempted to murder his loving wife and run away with the seductive woman from the city .  He finds himself unable to commit the deed, repents his betrayal, and the couple reconcile in remembering what they loved in one another.

Review :
A stellar silent film, Sunrise is a story of love, betrayal and redemption.  It's a film of great visual beauty, with inventive moving and panning in the camera work.  After watching Sunrise it's easy to see why it is often ranked as one of the best films of the silent era.  Murnau creates stark contrast between the elements of the film, using our common vocabulary of symbolism to create the atmosphere and story of Sunrise.  The wife, associated with light, day, the country, and purity is placed in opposition to the lover, who is night, dark, the city, and corruption.  The actors play their parts with a sincerity that isn't overacted like other silent films I have seen.  A beautiful, poignant film, Sunrise is worth watching for just about anyone. 

This evening's shift at BME provided another lesson about men:


If, while drunk, two of your buddies are talked into wrestling in jello, you will NEVER let them live it down.  

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Quick Info
Director: Tommy Lee Jones
Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cedillo, Dwight Yoakum, January Jones, Melissa Leo
Year of Release: 2006
Country: USA
Language: English & Spanish
Awards: Best Actor (Cannes), Best Screenplay (Cannes), Grand Prix (Flanders)
Genre: Western, Drama
MPAA Rating: R
My Rating: **** (meaning?)

Synopsis :
An aging cowboy decides to seek justice for the death of his best friend by forcing the killer to undertake the long journey with him to take his friend's body home.

Review :
A quirky, post-modern western told in a nonlinear fashion with a touch of magical realism that lacks a 'proper' ending.  If that tells you the limits of the audience, perhaps an expanded horizon is in order. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a story about retribution, loneliness, vengeance, and memory.  It's also a story about justice, friendship, redemption, and rememory.  It's about death, and it's about life.  It's about the past, about a code of friendship, loyalty, responsibility, and honor, the beauty of the wilderness contrasted with disaffection, boredom, empty lives and emotionally vacuous people trapped in lives they are unwilling to brave escape from.  They are also some of the most profoundly human characters I've seen in a Hollywood movie in a very long time.  Three Burials is complex, with depth and compassion for all involved (even the killer) - and well worth watching if you can handle it. 

I have been wondering - why is it in time-travel romances, the heroine is always from the future, the hero always from the past? Katrina offered up that it's likely because that way the reader can identify with the heroine more, but I'm not convinced that's the answer.

Know what I think? I think it's the same reason that the man is always a lord in a Regency, or the hero of a paranormal romance is always the vampire or werewolf. Romances are written for women to fall into a fantasy - generally a Cinderella fantasy, no matter how modern the heroine, the hero is always in a position to save/protect her. He always has to be in a position of power, because masculinity is definied by power and romance novels are all about fantasies of being swept up by a romance with a hypermasculine man. So the writer of these time-travel romances gets the spunky modern heroine (someone like the reader) AND the old-fashioned ultramasculine man, the man who hasn't changed with the times.

There's a sad, sick truth to a quote from the comic Wanted - "You ever meet a woman who fantasized about being tide up and raped by a liberal?"  

Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding)

Quick Info
Director: Carlos Saura
Starring: Antonio Gades, Cristina Hoyos, Juan Antonio Jiménez, Pilar Cárdenas, Carmen Villena
Year of Release: 1981
Country: Spain
Language: Spanish
Awards: Best Film (CEC), Best Film (Premios ACE)
Genre: Dance, Tragic Romance
MPAA Rating: not rated
My Rating: **** (meaning?)

Synopsis :
A dance troupe rehearses a flamenco ballet.  The story is of two lovers who cannot be together, as one is married and the other about to be.

Review :
A beautifully filmed, stylized and theatrical production - it begins with the performers getting ready for their rehearsal, with their makeup and costumes, followed by the actual dance.  The set is a minimalist bare space, forcing everything to be carried by the dancers and musicians.  They do not disappoint.  There is no dialogue to the story they perform, but the expression, body language, and music enable the viewer to easily understand and follow the story. 

This is not a film for someone who likes a fast pace, or movies where things blow up.  The beginning of the film, where the performers are getting ready, is very slow.  This is very much an art film.  If you're not interested in ballet or flamenco music, Bodas de Sangre would likely be very boring. 

The Third Man

Quick Info
Director: Carol Reed
Starring: Joseph Cotten, Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard
Year of Release: 1949
Country: UK
Language: English
Awards: Best Cinematography (Oscar), Best British Film (BAFTA), Grand Prix (Cannes)
Genre: Film Noir
MPAA Rating: not rated
My Rating: ****+ (meaning?)

Synopsis :
Holly Martins, a destitute American pulp novel author, arrives in post-war Vienna to see his friend Harry Lime, who has offered him a job.  However, Lime has recently been killed in a traffic accident and Martins arrives just in time for the funeral.  Inconsistencies in the stories he learns from Lime's friends, witnesses, and the authorities, however, spur Martins to find out what really happened to his old friend rather than return home.

Review :
The Third Man is a story of betrayal and corruption, a moody, intriguing piece that unfolds slowly.  The cinematography and lighting are spectacular (the eerie shadows, the back-lighting, the shine of the water on the streets), the black and white photography accenting the drama and tension of the film.  A true classic in every sense of the word.  Hollywood doesn't make a picture like this anymore - the ending is fitting, but not happy, the music is haunting (entirely played on the zither), and all of the violence is off-stage (which lends it a greater menace, for we are forced to fill in with our imagination).  Topping it all off is the excellent cast, with Welles at his finest as the villain of the piece, and Cotten as the innocent fool who comes out of the story not so innocent any longer. 

Both the British Film Institute and the American Film Institute include The Third Man in their lists of top films of all time and after viewing, it's easy to see why (although the only American connections are some of the actors, and David O. Selznik as producer). Excellent film. 

The Bucket List

Quick Info
Director: Rob Reiner
Starring: Morgan Freeman, Jack Nicholson
Year of Release: 2008
Country: USA
Language: English
Awards:none
Genre: Drama
MPAA Rating: PG-13
My Rating: *** (meaning?)

Synopsis :
Two very different men meet in a cancer ward and become friends.  Finding out their conditions are terminal, they decide to spend the time they have left experiencing life to the fullest.

Review :
Part buddy film, part travelogue, part tear jerker, The Bucket List was sentimental, predictable, and touching.  If it's unrealistic - one does have to have deep pockets indeed to do the things Edward and Carter do - it's only because those are things we ourselves would do if we could.  Who wouldn't go around the world and see the sights if we could?  Given that most of us don't have that kind of quid, we're left to vicariously, which is what we're provided with.  Ultimately, though, working on the list lets Edward and Carter understand that friends, family, love, those are the most important things, the things that give joy and make life worth living. 

The Bucket List reminds us, yet again, that Rent has the right of it - "no day but today."  Despite its leads both being male, I would consider this a chick flick, so it's not recommended if you can't stomach anything from Lifetime, or have a problem with emotional tug-your-heartstrings types of movies. It did inspire us to compose our own bucket lists, which I'll post another time.