It’s exam season here at University of Toronto, so do please allow me a brief hiatus from movie reviewing. Will be back soon.

In the meantime, for your edification, some of my favourite YouTube videos:

SONNY CHIBA IN “THE BODYGUARD”

“Sonny Chiba, The Streetfighter, is back as the meanest, bloodiest, most violent ass-kicking lung ripping mother yet!”

JERRY LEWIS IN “HARDLY WORKING”

More fun than a day off?

BRUCE LEE FIGHTS BACK FROM THE GRAVE - TRAILER

Note that Mr. Narrator Voice is the same guy who did the trailer for “The Bodyguard.” The man’s name, unfortunately enough, was Adolph Caeser. He actually had a fairly successful acting career, received an Oscar nomination for A Soldier’s Story and acting in such films as The Color Purple and, of course, the immortal Fist of Fear, Touch of Death.

IT’S THE WILL SLOAN SHOW!!!

THE DARK KNIGHT

When I walked out of Batman Begins in 2005, the first thing I thought was, “I want a sequel, right now.”  If you’ve seen Batman Begins, you know what I mean.  If you haven’t…what’s wrong with you?

The Dark Knight - Theatrical Trailer

(The most amazing trailer I’ve seen in years).

MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS

Oddly enough, Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights was the movie I was most looking forward to…in 2007.  In Hong Kong, Wong directed a string of masterpieces (2046, In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express, Happy Together, Ashes of Time…) that have earned him a place among the most important film directors of all time.  My Blueberry Nights, his English-language debut and his first film with a cast recognizable to the average American – Norah Jones, Natalie Portman, Jude Law, David Strathairn, Rachel Weisz – was set to premiere as the prestigious opening night film at last year’s Cannes film festival, and was considered the odds-on favourite to take the Palme d’Or.

And then the movie was actually screened, and the reviews could be charitably described as mixed (“A berry bad movie” said the Toronto Star).

A full nine months after its Cannes premier, the Weinstein Company is scheduled to release My Blueberry Nights in February.  Considering the lackluster reviews, I’m not as excited about it as I was a year ago, but in the past, even lesser Wong Kar-wai has had merit.   When it comes right down to it, whatever Wong Kar-wai makes, I want to see it.

My Blueberry Nights - Trailer

THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM

In a team-up that brings to mind the legendary Charlie Chaplin/Buster Keaton pairing in Limelight, The Forbidden Kingdom will mark the first on-screen collaboration of Jackie Chan and Jet Li, who can be considered the Chaplin and Keaton of modern martial arts movies.

Now, I’m not expecting greatness from this film.  There is much to be concerned about.  It’s an American production (neither Chan nor Li have made any outstanding American films), it’s geared towards families, and, let’s face it, these guys aren’t as young as they once were (how awesome would a Chan-Li teaming have been in 1994, in the glory days of Drunken Master II and Once Upon a Time in China?).  But as far as I’m concerned, the very idea of Jackie Chan and Jet Li in the same frame together is a cause for celebration.

And this trailer looks kinda cool:

Forbidden Kingdom Promo

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

The 2008 release that interests me the most is actually over 30 years old.  Orson Welles filmed The Other Side of the Wind, a semi-autobiographical Hollywood satire about an aging director (John Huston) who has trouble finding work, over a period of six years in the 1970s on a shoestring budget.  He completed filming (it was, indeed, his last feature-length fiction to finish principle photography) and a large portion of the editing, but, as is too often the case with Welles’ body of work, legal difficulties arose that prevented its release.  Welles, in explaining the situation, would often point out that the chief financier was the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran.

In 2002, the cable network Showtime struck a deal with Peter Bogdanovich, Welles’ long-time supporter and a co-star in the film, to finish editing and release the movie to theatres.  But Welles’ daughter Beatrice threatened legal action, claiming the film was her property (despite the fact that, objectively speaking, it clearly was not).  But in 2007, Bogdanovich stated in a press release that a deal among all the parties involved had been worked out and that The Other Side of the Wind would be edited in time for theatrical release in late 2008.

For those who have been reading about The Other Side of the Wind for years, this comes as exciting news.  But considering that Welles apparently only edited about 40% of the film during his lifetime, would a version of The Other Side of the Wind edited by Peter Bogdanovich really be an Orson Welles film, no matter how closely Bogdanovich attempts to adhere to Welles’ original intentions (especially considering how fragmented and experimental the few scenes released to the public have been)?  Furthermore, is this news simply too good to be true?

If it is indeed released in a “finished” form, The Other Side of the Wind will not necessarily by Orson Welles’ vision, but rather as close an approximation to Welles’ vision as possible.  Still, considering how many films Welles completed in his lifetime (depressingly few) and how many were left unfinished (depressingly many), the prospect of new Welles material is intriguing.  And if the idea of a brand new Orson Welles movie doesn’t make you at least a little bit interested…well, I just don’t know what to say to you.

One of the few clips of the movie that has been released

1. 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS & 2 DAYS (Cristian Mungiu)
A teenaged girl in Soviet Romania seeks an illegal abortion (the title refers to how far she is in her pregnancy). Her roommate gets her a secret appointment in a hotel room with a sleazy, manipulative doctor, who puts both girls through humiliation. Writer-director Cristian Mungiu doesn’t editorialize (this movie isn’t explicitly “pro-life” or “pro-choice”), but just observes the situation in a way that, I’m forced to conclude, it probably would have happened. It’s a challenging film that is about as minimalist as you can get – no music, natural lighting, handheld camera - but it has a strong sense of immediacy, as if it were surveillance footage unfolding in the present tense. Winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and the most powerful movie I saw all year.

2. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen)
The Coen Brothers have always been unpredictable filmmakers willing to experiment with different styles – there’s not much that links Fargo, The Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and Intolerable Cruelty other than the Coen’s particular brand of quirky humour. But No Country for Old Men is the first of the Coen’s movies that might not pass a DNA test: a singularly tense, suspenseful, austere, and tight thriller. It’s also perhaps their best movie (even if I feel Fargo breathing down my neck). Very tense and entertaining, and virtually flawless writing, directing, and performances.

3. AWAY FROM HER (Sarah Polley)
In the actress Sarah Polley’s directorial debut, a long-married couple played (perfectly) by Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie are dealt a blow when Christie is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and she agrees to move into a nursing home. After only a month, Pinsent returns to visit Christie in the Alzheimer’s home to find that not only does she not remember who he is, but that she has fallen in love with another one of the patients. Considering his infidelities over the years, is this some kind of poetic justice? This movie is real heartbreaker, but also deeply warm and human. As mature a directorial debut as you’re likely to find.

4. PARIS, JE T’AIME (Various)
“Enchanting” isn’t a word I throw around very often, but that’s exactly what this very charming anthology film is. 18 short films by 20 of the world’s most interesting directors, all of them loosely about love in Paris. Of course, some are better than other, but at five minutes apiece, there are no real misfires, and they’re all unmistakably of a piece. Highlights include segments by the Coen Brothers, Vincenzo Natali, Tom Tykwer, and Sylvian Chomet, but far and away the pick of the litter is the conclusion by Alexander Payne, with Margo Martindale as a middle aged American tourist with an atrocious accent who has been saving up for her trip to Paris for years. I can’t quite put into words why this final scene is so good, but it combines humour and pathos in such a note-perfect way that it made Paris, je t’aime one of the few movies to actually make me really cry. And I’m man enough to admit it.
(Interesting news: this may go down as the unlikeliest 2007 film to inspire a sequel. Tentatively scheduled for 2008 is New York, I Love You, with contributions by Mira Nair, Park Chan-wook, Brett Ratner, and Jason Reitman, among others).

5. BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD (Sidney Lumet)
If Away from Her felt like the work of a veteran, 83-year-old Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead feels like it was directed by someone a quarter his age. A crime thriller about a heist gone wrong sounds like standard material, but Lumet’s timeline-shifting narrative structure and the performances by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, and Albert Finney make it completely engrossing. Watching this, I felt that same way I felt when I saw Fargo and Pulp Fiction for the first time: being absorbed by an unpredictable plot unfolding. One of Lumet’s very best…which puts it in the same company as 12 Angry Men and Dog Day Afternoon.

6. BATTLE FOR HADITHA (Nick Broomfield)
The great documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield (Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer; Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam) has been making a transition into fiction filmmaking, and with Battle for Haditha he made one of his most impressive achievements in any genre. It’s a torn-from-the-headlines story (so torn-from-the-headlines that the real events haven’t even been settled in court yet!) about four United States soldiers in Iraq who allegedly killed 24 Iraqis – men, women, children – after one of their fellow soldiers was killed by a bomb. Broomfield films the violent scenes with brutal intensity and a sense of blunt realism that only a documentary filmmaker could achieve (there are times when the film is virtually indistinguishable from news footage), but what really makes this great is Broomfield’s refusal to turn any of his characters into villains. This played at the Toronto Film Festival but has not yet received theatrical release; forgive me for jumping the gun.

7. THE KING OF KONG: A FISTFUL OF QUARTERS (Seth Gordon)
In the grand tradition of the Red Sox against the Yankees and Ali against Foreman comes Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell, two grown men who are competing for…the world record score in Donkey Kong. Sure, there are laughs to be had over the weight the people in this film bring to the competition – there are times when this is virtually indistinguishable from one of those Christopher Guest mockumentaries (wait’ll you see Mitchell’s geeky disciples). But The King of Kong is a wonderful movie not because of any cheap laughs it scores against its subjects but because of its depiction of two men – the decent family man Wiebe and the arrogant, Machiavellian Mitchell – whose only real distinction is their video game proficiency, and the lengths that they will go to in order to keep their names in the record books.

8. NO END IN SIGHT (Charles Ferguson)
Arguably the best of the many documentaries about the Iraq war, No End in Sight is also one of the most uncompromisingly bleak. Not a ‘liberal’ film, per se, but rather a calm, non-partisan tallying of the Bush’s administrations many tactical blunders in the handling of the Iraq reconstruction process, with particular emphasis placed on their stupefying decision to disband the Iraqi military. The cumulative effect of this film is devastating, and unlike other wake-up-call documentaries like Darfur Now and An Inconvenient Truth, the filmmakers offer no audience-congratulating silver lining.

9. RED ROAD (Andrea Arnold)
A surveillance monitor operator notices a man on one of the screens who looks familiar. Slowly she begins stalking him, showing up unannounced at his parties and following him to bars until he begins to notice and lust after her. She is apparently interested in revenge, but revenge for what? Details are revealed slowly, and the big picture doesn’t become clear until near the end in this dread-inducing, extremely tense Scottish film, the winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes. Compulsively fascinating viewing.

10. LUST, CAUTION (Ang Lee)
A somewhat arbitrary choice for number ten, I picked Lust, Caution ahead of the honourable mentions because it’s the one that has stuck with me the most. In Japanese-occupied China, an inexperienced girl (Tang Wei) finds herself in a resistance movement and is assigned the task of seducing and murdering a Chinese power-player (Tony Leung Chiu-wai, from 2046) who is in cahoots with the Japanese. After some false starts, she finally becomes Leung’s mistress, but once the relationship becomes sexual, a strange, sadomasochistic bond forms between them. I wasn’t raving about this when I came out of it, but over the last few months it has lingered in my memory because of its careful structure, slowly building up tension for almost two hours before the final, very powerful last forty minutes. Tony Leung gives a very disturbing performance that may be the best of his career, and Tang Wei matches him in her debut performance. And of course, there are the much talked-about, NC-17 rated sex scenes, which are shockingly explicit but form the film’s emotional (or, more truthfully, queasily un-emotional) centre. Another strong piece of work from Ang Lee, whose filmography has been varied enough to also include Brokeback Mountain, The Hulk, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

TIED FOR 11TH PLACE
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – A film that literally puts the viewer in the body of a paralyzed stroke victim. A challenging but surprisingly uplifting film, and an incredible achievement for director Julian Schnabel.
Gone Baby Gone – A powerful and thought-provoking directorial debut for Ben Affleck.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – The darkest and most thrilling of the Potter series, and the first one to justify its existence as a great work of entertainment in its own right, not a slavish cash-in on J.K. Rowling’s books.
In the Shadow of the Moon – A genuinely awe-inspiring documentary that breathes vivid new life into the old Apollo footage.
The Lives of Others – Oscar-winner for Best Foreign Film, with a great performance by the late Ulrich Muhe. I defy you not to tear up at the last scene.
Once – A really wonderful low-budget Irish romance/musical.
Paprika – A completely unique piece of anime from Satoshi Konn. Scene for scene, more amazing images than any other movie this year.
28 Weeks Later – The sequel to 28 Days Later is everything a serious horror film should be: smart, intense, bleak, and scary.
Ratatouille – Another hugely entertaining Pixar movie. The early kitchen scene, where the camera takes the point-of-view of the rat, is as good a scene as Pixar has ever made.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street – Tim Burton’s most virtuoso work in some time.

Movies have always been the art form to which I have been most attracted, simply because I believe that film is the most powerful art form we have, and the one that, through its sheer sensory power, is most able to move and inspire.  For example, to read about the Holocaust is one thing, but to see it depicted with Hollywood resources in Schindler’s List is another.  Film is also the art form that is perhaps the most accessible and universal.  Has any art form in the last 100 years produced cultural icons with as much widespread appeal as Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, Bugs Bunny, Marilyn Monroe, and King Kong?

Unfortunately, film is also the most corruptible art form.  Movies are expensive, and when studio executives are investing millions, who can blame them for hesitating at material that is edgy or unique?  When $50 million is at stake, the tendency is to stick to something safe that has a good chance of making back its money, which is why sequels, gross-out comedies, and cheesy horror films dominate the box office.

Unlike most other art forms, the success or failure of a film cannot be attributed to one creator.  While most film fans (myself included) like to think of the director as the ‘cauthor’ of a film, and the film being his or her own personal artistic statement, we all know that filmmaking is a collaborative art form.  Thus, filmmaking is by definition a far less personal vehicle for self-expression as, say, painting, or writing novels.  For example, Orson Welles is often used as the poster boy for the singular directorial vision, but how much of Citizen Kane’s greatness should rightfully be attributed to cinematographer Gregg Toland, co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz, editor Robert Wise, composer Bernard Herrmann, and the ensemble cast?

Yet with some films a unique personal voice does undeniably shine through, despite the hurdles of money and the group-effort nature of the medium.  A film by, say, Quentin Tarantino or a Martin Scorsese is unmistakable one by any other filmmaker.  It’s this personal voice, coupled with sensory power of the medium, that I believe makes film the valuable art form that it is.

There is a tendency to believe that the overall quality of movies is always going downhill; that the movies being made today cannot hold a candle to those made during the “Golden Age of Hollywood.”  This is a sentiment almost as old as the art form itself.  Similar doomsday prophecies were being tossed around with the invention of talkies.

It’s true that many of the best films ever made were made during the 1930s and 40s.  Still, I believe that some of the best films ever made are being made now, and would argue that the hit to miss ratio has been roughly the same as during the ‘Golden Age.’  While the worst films of today are worse than the worst films of the 1930s, how can one despair in a decade where the best include Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Incredibles, 2046, Borat, The Departed, Batman Begins, A History of Violence, Adaptation, Cache, Hero, The Pianist, Oldboy, Match Point, A Mighty Wind, Lost in La Mancha, United 93, and Sideways, among many others?

As a moviegoer, what I value most are films that engage both my head and my heart.  I have broad tastes – there is no genre of film that I am intrinsically opposed to.  With this blog, I plan to review popular box office successes as well as more obscure, arthouse fare.  There will also be reviews of select films that are new to DVD, and older films that I believe merit attention.