TSPDT #999 - Oasis (Lee, 2002)

Stars: Kyung-gu Sol, So-Ri Moon, Nae-sang Ahn
Director: Chang-dong Lee
Writer: Chang-dong Lee
Release Date: 9 August 2002

IMDB Synopsis: An irresponsible and childish ex-con befriends a girl with cerebral palsy and develops a progressively stronger bond with her.

TSPDT #999
My progress: 2/1000

First Time
This time.

Format
DVD

What I Think
I've spent most of my adult life working alongside persons with developmental and intellectual disabilities. I've got a pretty good "bullshit detector" when it comes to cinematic representations of such persons. Oasis smells right for most of its runtime. It falters quite severely near the end. Despite the flaw at the end, Oasis stands as a success. Both actors are convincingly real. The writing is significantly real. It's also lovely the way that the camera explores the two real characters at the center. There are also a handful of moments of cinematic magic, including the introduction of one of the characters. I find aspects of Oasis frustrating, but I especially found the end a mixed success. By the end of the film, the lovely relationship that has emerged in surprising but believable ways is put through a cruel enforced suffering. Everything about it feels strained and forced. It continues to work as narrative, especially one symbolic act, but it's clearly the story following an imposed structure.

Additional Notes/Stats

• Ebert: "There are fantasy scenes when Gong-Ju seems miraculously restored, and can move with grace and speak with eloquence. I am not sure if these moments are poetic, or somehow cruel." This.
• Still, Moon So-ri deserves all of the awards for her performance.
• This is a good review (w/spoilers): http://alexsheremet.com/lee-chang-dongs-oasis-2002-undoing-narrative/
• 
  
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My Meaningless Star Rating
3.5 out of 5 stars.

TSPDT #1000 - Sorcerer (Friedkin, 1977)

Stars: Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal
Director: William Friedkin
Writers: Walon Green (screenplay), Georges Arnaud (novel)
Release Date: 24 June 1977

IMDB Synopsis: Four unfortunate men from different parts of the globe agree to risk their lives transporting gallons of nitroglycerin across dangerous South American jungle.

TSPDT #1000
My progress: 1/1000

First Time
This time.

What I Think
Sorcerer is grubby and dirty and dangerous. Its pleasures are the vicarious pleasures of watching men act confidently as men, sure of their actions and ready to do whatever it takes regardless of risk. None of the main characters are moral men. Each one that we are introduced to has been involved in violent crime and deserves what is coming to them. Yet each one of them wants to survive and so Friedkin effectively creates in the viewer a desire for each to live. Even as we may frown on their criminal activity, we admire their nobility of spirit, a sort of regal disposition that allows them to live their lives as free men even as they are forced to hide in the jungle.

I'm often too hard on the 70s American scene, and there is plenty to hate in the rampant exploitation and overall lowering of moral standards that accompanied the film brats rise to power in Hollywood. But I've come to forgive them more than a little when I consider that they were operating in a world of bankrupt morality, hypocrisy, exploitation, etc, and were expressing themselves accordingly. Friedkin is no exception. Of all of his films that I've seen, this one is actually the most joyful, the one most brimming with life as it skirts death many times. Friedkin's film somehow gives me the same feeling that the Indiana Jones films gave me as a kid. There's a sense of high adventure to the film, but it's more adult. It's grimier. It's more dangerous, it's brutal and savage. Each set piece in the film is a high wire act. It's difficult for me to truly feel suspense/thrills at most Hollywood products. Sorcerer gave me the feels. Even when I knew that something would play out a certain way, the way it played out pleased me. Some of the action (trucks across bridges) seemed like Herzog-level of manly commitment to getting great shots.

Since watching the stupid horror movie Revenge a couple of weeks ago, I've been thinking about the "male gaze" (which I prefer to refer to as the "sleazoid gaze" in most ways in which it is used). One of my favorite moments in Sorcerer is a playful series of shots of a Coca-Cola advertisement poster and Scheider's character's response to that ad. It's obvious that the ad works perfectly, creating a desire for sex and soda, but there is also an undercurrent of sadness in being so far away from these sources of pleasure. It's a very earthy moment, which perfectly conveyed the feeling of exile and loneliness. Regardless of what else I am, I am a culturally conditioned American, and the sight of a well-proportioned woman in a bathing suit pointing at a bottle of coca-cola on the beach is ridiculously comforting. It is very easy for me to imagine how wonderful that image would be in a wasteland of testosterone and terror.

There's more to say, but, ya know, life and family over film chatting.

Finally, the Tangerine Dream score is so good.

Additional Notes/Stats

• I have not seen The Wages of Fear so can't compare the two.
• I'd love to just do a Roy Scheider marathon
• Andrew Sarris: "What Friedkin, with all his enormous resources, has managed to fabricate in "Sorcerer" is a visual and aural textbook on everything that is wrong with current movies."
• https://criticsroundup.com/film/sorcerer/
• Wow, critics were not impressed with this in '77. Things have changed now.

My Meaningless Star Rating
4 out of 5 stars.

I've watched a lot of movies in the last month.

I've logged them all on Letterboxd, but here's a quick rundown with a few fresh comments.

2018 films
A Quiet Place
Avengers: Infinity Franchise
Solo: A Star Wars Story
Zoe
Hannah Gadsby: Nanette
Chris Rock: Tamborine

2018 has been a bummer so far, but I was pleasantly surprised by A Quiet Place and Solo. I liked how blatantly stupid the whiteboards were in AQP. I liked the stupid humor in Solo. Once I started thinking of Solo as a kid's movie, I realized how much I would have enjoyed it as a 10-year-old, and I just let myself enjoy it as a little kid.

I hated Avengers and its meaningless goofer-hero plodding. I couldn't watch all of Zoe. I jumped around in it and gave up on it. Nanette is overrated. It's preachy and not so funny. Some of Gadsby's narration of her own story is pretty powerful, but also misguided. Tamborine held up to a second watch. Rock is obviously in pain because of terrible decisions that he has made. Yet he's still funny. That said, he's the one who should probably quit comedy. It's obviously too late to save his marriage, but maybe it's not too late to save himself from continued celebrated celebrity depravity.

Films w/ DeNiro
Taxi Driver
The King of Comedy
Heat
Casino
Jackie Brown

Taxi Driver would make it into my Top 100 if I put together a new list. I'm convinced that this is the best work of Scorsese, Schrader, and DeNiro. There are aspects of it that I still find problematic, but these are also aspects of America that I still find problematic.

The rest of these films are fine. The King of Comedy is funny, but slight. The rest of these were re-watches. The King of Comedy was new to me. Heat is as bloated as ever, but remains interesting to watch. Casino struck me as an experiment in voiceover narration and propulsive skim-narrative. It's pretty shallow, like Las Vegas.

I'm still not in the "Jackie Brown is Tarantino's greatest film" camp, but this re-watch almost convinced me. Everyone in this seems like they're having fun. Besides Taxi Driver, I think that this is the best of the De Niro performances that I've watched recently. It's fun to think of him coming off of the bravado of Heat and Casino and signing on for this understated role.

Ozon films
Sitcom
Criminal Lovers

I'm listing these here out of respect. Ozon is talented. Sitcom is silly trash, but Criminal Lovers is a complex fable that would be worth wrestling with if it weren't so depraved. I'm pretty sure that that's probably how I'll feel about even the best of the rest of Ozon, so I'm done exploring his work. (The only reason that I watched these is because MUBI is having an Ozon series; my MUBI subscription is up for renewal at the end of August. I'm probably going to cancel since I don't watch enough and they are significantly raising the cost this year. If Filmstruck added offline viewing, I wouldn't even be considering MUBI any longer).

Watched on Filmstruck since the last post.

Shorts
Begone Dull Care
Captain Kidd's Kids
Just Neighbors
Bumpin' Into Broadway
Billy Blazes, Esq. (this is a new favorite)
Hairat
A Gentle Night
Call of Cuteness

Features
Taxi Driver
Singin' in the Rain
Withnail & I (one of my friend Mike's favorite films)

There are at least half a dozen other films that I logged on Letterboxd, but I'm not going to reproduce them here. I don't even have it in me to rant about Cronenberg's Shivers or Altman's Images or Mann's Thief. These all have their defenders. Meh. I guess I don't have anything to say. Blech.

Spring into Cinema

Something about the change in weather has me watching more films. While everyone else has crawled out from their Winter holes to enjoy the warm sun, I've felt the pull to escape from the sun into cold, dark, digital pictures.

Every few months I've tried Filmstruck again. In the past, I just couldn't get a good stream from them. Part of it was/is surely my slow country DSL connection, but mostly Filmstruck was just not ready for release. Any time I'd try to watch something, I'd get buffering a couple times a minute. It was impossible to watch anything that way. Anyhow, this time the streaming is working well with hardly any issues. I'm going to trust that the connection problems have been solved. I'm signing up for the full year plan, boys. A year of Filmstruck. If I only watch an average of one film a week, that comes out to about $2 a movie, which is about what I was paying for a VHS rental in the 90s, so I think that I can live with that.

What have I watched so far?

Shorts
The Acquaintances of a Lonely John (Safdie, 2008)
The Burden (von Bahr, 2017)
The Marathon (Goulding, 1919)
Old Man (Shore, 2012)
We're Going to the Zoo (Safdie, 2006)

Features
Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969)
The In-Laws (Hiller, 1979)
The Man on the Eiffel Tower (Meredith, 1949)
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Donen, 1954)
Thirst (Bergman, 1949)

That's 5 shorts and 5 features in less than two weeks. There's no way that I'll keep up this pace, but I am really enjoying watching movies right now. Easy Rider was a re-watch. The rest were new to me. The Man on the Eiffel Tower was the best of the lot and the only one that I think would make any sort of Top list (that's why we watch movies right, to put them on lists?). I'm thinking of doing a Brandon-style march through 1949, then writing about it. I can't access Brandon's old blog, but I think he wrote about 1949 at one point.

Here's my old '49 list from a few years back:

1949

1. Colorado Territory (Raoul Walsh)
2. Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius)
3. The Set-Up (Robert Wise)
4. The Inspector General (Henry Koster)
5. Hellfire (R.G. Springsteen)
6. I Shot Jesse James (Samuel Fuller)
7.
8.
9. Border Incident (Anthony Mann)
10. Reign of Terror (Anthony Mann)

Mentions: A Run for Your Money (Charles Frend)

I don't remember anything about A Run for Your Money. I remember not liking the two Mann films. The Fuller Jesse James picture wasn't all that memorable either. Hellfire was a weird low budget c-western that I think was on NWI a while back. I remember liking it, but it hasn't stuck with me. I confess that I don't remember anything about The Inspector General. But the Top 3 for the year are still solid. All three of them made it on my Top 30 of the 40s list and even bigger, all three of them made it on my Top 100 list. Remember that great Top 100 project that we all finished? Yeah, me too.

So, back to The Man on the Eiffel Tower. It's pretty great, though I'm sure that what I love about it frustrates others. Laughton plays a wonderful version of Maigret, as the plot has him doing pretty much nothing to solve the crime beyond letting the criminal unravel and give himself up. The most climactic moment of conflict in the film involves a decision to back away and not confront the criminal. I found it all satisfying. This film is based on the first Maigret novel that I ever read, the novel that made me really love Simenon's Maigret books. Contrary to noir connoisseurs, I've hated every one of Simenon's non-Maigret crime novels that I've read, but the Maigret books are cozy fun. Lots of pipe smoking and beer drinking and a detective that loves his enemies in order to understand them. What's not to love?

GeMAYni Blahs.

How is TV Club going for everyone?

Cobra Kai actually had me excited for a couple of days. It fell into predictable patterns, but that's kinda what we want from 80s sports movies, right? A week ago, I felt like I was going to write a long, dumb post about Cobra Kai, what I really liked about it. I didn't write it. Now I won't write it because the moment is past and it turns out that I think Cobra Kai is pretty stupid. But it was stupid, highly binge-able fun for a couple of days. I was glad to watch it. My biggest gripe with the show is actually how "conservative" it is in its portrayal of high school life. The artificiality of American public school settings should not be normative for anyone. The entire system is an anomaly in the history of education. The Karate Kid tropes depend upon this social structure. True wisdom would be opting out of this system altogether rather than survival tactics of lunch room brawling.

Movies? Not so much.

Two days ago, I got out of work early and decided to see the first movie that was playing at Regal. I went to the 3:15pm showing of Deadpool 2. I could have waited another 15 minutes to see Solo, but I was impatient. I got there at 3:20 and seeing a movie that just started meant that I got to skip some of the 30 minutes of crappy previews.

I mostly hated the first Deadpool. Guess what? I mostly hated the second Deadpool. I almost walked out a few times in the first 30 minutes or so. Once the film hit its central X-Force section, though, I was entertained. I enjoyed the "lucky" Domino sequence in the middle of the film. All of the self-aware and crude humor? It fell flat for me. I rarely laughed. That said, I was amused by the live-electric-wires-up-the-butt gag. Finally, despite all of Deadpool's obvious pandering to the naughty crowd, the film ends up stealing heavily from the Christian tradition and insisting on self-sacrificial love over all. I don't think that the film overall is worth watching, there are too many fatal flaws to recommend it, but if someone is going to watch this stupid movie anyhow (and the box office suggests they are), well, I guess I'm okay with the final themes that hit hard at the end.

My only other theater experience was Gemini. I confess that my picks for the month weren't so good. No theaters were showing them for more than a week. Nobody cared. The truth is that I don't even care. Gemini has a slow build in which character relationships are built up, then a pretty decent "Wrong Man" middle, followed by a disappointing (and retrospectively obvious and stupid) resolution. It looks great. I think that where it failed for me is that I just don't care about L.A. or celebrity culture. The mystery wasn't so great and the cultural commentary was pretty weak.

At home....

The Blue Dahlia. It's got a few great lines. The fistfight at the safe house is better than any action staging/editing of any contemporary Hollywood film.

Thirst Street. The new Nathan Silver film. This is Silver's most ambitious film to date. I think that it's also where he loses me. There is a lot to like in the camerawork and in the acting, in the awkwardness of the story beats, but I think that in the end, it all feels too staged, too much of a performance piece to impress Silver's friends.

The Truman Show. This one has only grown in my estimation. It's better now than it was in '98. I don't even say that because I think that it is "profound" or "relevant," but only because it's still so effortless to watch, a joyous entertainment.

Isle of Never Here

I'm not feeling it, boys.

April didn't have me watching all that much. I'm grateful for Chris picking two films that got me out to the theater. I'll watch movies on my pocket device with the rest of the zombies, but my heart is in a dark room with expensive popcorn and flickering light.

I enjoyed both films, but I don't know that I have anything terribly insightful to say about either one.

Isle of Dogs is charming and good fun. The past couple of decades have given us a large number of family/children's movies. This one is right up there with the best of them. I find myself wanting to make a list...... maybe later.

You Were Never Really There is not a masterpiece. The flashbacks tarnished it for me. This might just be my pet peeve, but these flashbacks seemed like a cheap way to establish meaning in what was otherwise an expert exercise in playing with action tropes. The little girl at the center of it all also seemed more Macguffin than real person. But. But. The score more often than not won me over. The staging and editing are truly terrific. Throughout most of the film, the violence is seen indirectly, implied, or doesn't happen as expected. This is opposite of Refn's violence-as-orgasmic-release. It is violence as steady disruption of terrible reality, moments of focus that exist as blur. What worked for me, and the reason that I left the film feeling overall positive about it despite my complaints mentioned above, was the bold gamble at the end of the film, a moment of direct, fully revealed violence. That this moment comes with success is a lovely statement, maybe one of the truest revelations of mental illness that I've seen on the screen. All gestures are meaningless. It is a beautiful day. This moment is also a continued subtle commentary on the action hero saved through action, in which all is reconciled and restored. All is not reconciled and restored here. It is broken and fragile and it is riding despair..... and yet Ramsay does not end on the violent moment, but on a quiet moment of hope after. I respect that a lot.

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It's been another slow watching month.

I saw The Apartment on TCM. Eh, it's okay.

I re-watched Dead Poets Society. Eh, it's okay.

I watched some stupid late night shows. I fell asleep to the beginning of a couple of movies.

I watched the first episode of the new Lost in Space and thought it was stupid.

That's it. Lame.

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It's my turn to pick for May.

Here are my two picks:

Gemini
Lu Over the Wall

Probably neither one will make it to Regal, but they're both coming to Cinemapolis. I'm hoping to see them both on the same day as a double feature. These two films are by two of the most exciting directors working today. I don't want to miss them.

Crap Car

I watched Cop Car on March 24th.

Then, I forgot to write about it.

I don't have much to say.

Overall, I think that the movie is stupid, but maybe also close to great.

One single sequence from the movie can demonstrate why I think it is stupid.

The sheriff is burying a body in the middle of nowhere.

The kids start up his car.

But the sheriff does not hear the car start. Maybe I'm too used to driving cars with loud exhausts to understand how quiet vehicles are now. It just seemed weird to me that he wouldn't hear a car start and drive off when he was just over the next hill.

I also disliked the kids cursing.

With a few adjustments, including cleaning up the language, slightly taming the violence (and there isn't much of it; the threat of violence and implied violence is more present than actual violence/gore), and tightening up the logic a bit, I could see this being a noir masterpiece. I kept imagining it shot in b&w by John Alton, starring Robert Mitchum. Bacon is no Mitchum, but he does give me a Mitchum vibe in this.

The kids being kids in a world gone bad is the reason this movie sometimes approaches greatness. I just think that it indulges its vices and falls short.