wondercritic Reviews

American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally (2021)

Flawed but not terrible

[6/10 · 15 November 2021]

This movie is proof that certain directors can get the most out of their actors; others can't. Al Pacino can carry entire movies on his shoulders. He couldn't do that with this one, but "The Irishman," made only 2 years earlier, shows how at the hands of a master (Martin Scorsese), Pacino is utterly captivating.

In this one, Pacino's just good. His closing statement at the trial is the centerpiece of his performance, and it's fine. You can even forget that he's an octogenarian in real life. But the film ultimately feels strangely TV-movie-ish. The director might eventually develop beyond that, but for now it's Hallmark for him.

LBJ (2016)

Whitewash

[20 October 2021]

One day the REAL biopic of LBJ will be made. It would be comic if it weren't so sinister that Woody Harrelson's father, Charles, was a real-life hit man who was imprisoned for murder and told the world from his jail cell that he had fired the fatal shot that killed JFK. As it is, Woody plays one of his father's supposed accomplices. Who seriously doubts that Lyndon Johnson at least facilitated the assassination (if he didn't actually conceive of it) and was the prime mover in covering it up?

Details surrounding the Kennedy autopsy have come to light over the decades, and Johnson's actions in the immediate aftermath of the killing leave no doubt: LBJ executed a massive cover-up to prevent a proper autopsy. He used his authority as President over the military, Secret Service, FBI and any other institution of state he could get his hands around to crush any proper investigation, and he made sure the Warren Commission rubber-stamped s bogus report in time for the 1964 election.

All this hoopla about Johnson's amazing "civil rights" record is just hype. It was Kennedy's agenda. Johnson pushed it through as President because he knew it was both popular nationwide and also inevitable (the US lagged behind the rest of the developed world in voting rights). Johnson was a deeply evil person and a murderer. For Rob Reiner to make a paean to this evil man just shows how clueless he is. Waste of time.

Quantum Leap: Lee Harvey Oswald - October 5, 1957 - November 22, 1963: Part 2 (1992) Season 5, Episode 2

Sorry. Disappointing.

[3/10 · 25 September 2021]

Quantum Leap was always an innovative show in my mind. But the episode about time travel back to Dallas in November 1963 just ended up toeing the "Party line." The big question is: did Oswald do it? The episode concludes that he did, and as soon as that was clear, the whole thing became more dirt-cheap propagation of establishment hooey, as if the CIA itself strong-armed the producers so they wouldn't stray too far from the Warren Commission's nonsensical version of the assassination. It could have been so much more interesting had the show's producers decided to at least leave some ambiguity in the plot. For those of us who believe Oswald was a patsy, this was a big let-down.

The Parallax View (1974)

Masterpiece

[10/10 · 31 July 2021]

Unbelievably, I'd never seen this before 2021, but it belongs in the canon of conspiracy movies, right along with The Manchurian Candidate and Three Days of the Condor. Beautifully shot and directed, it has minimal dialogue and is this almost pure visual storytelling. Someone knew enough about the JFK assassination to create a "formula," to be reproduced as infinity, and depicted it cinematically. Amazing piece of work. Warren Beatty earns it. Well done.

New Money (2019)

Chinese Communist Party Propaganda

[25 February 2021]

Just watch the trailer. It's full of Western shills and scumbags raving about how much money they've made investing in China, where all the "smart money" is headed, etc. It's clearly a movie commissioned and approved by the Chinese Communist regime, and it wants to clear up the "misunderstanding" about the country (which is really an evil empire). If you like images of glitz and skyscrapers in Chinese cities like Shanghai and Beijing, you might get off on it, but you can be guaranteed there is nothing covering the sinister side of the People's Republic of China's economic growth, or the brutality of the Chinese Communist Party. There are other documentaries that are more informative, like "China's New Silk Road," also on Amazon Prime. You should also watch episode 5 of the documentary series "Evolution of Evil" (Mao: China's Chairman of Death) to get a sense of the historical foundations of today's Chinese glitter and glamor. It's sick. We can pray it all comes crashing down soon, for the sake of humanity.

Our Boys (2019)

Fabulous and deeply moving

[10/10 · 15 November 2019]

If there were only one foreign country I could visit in the remainder of my life, it would be Israel. I've always wanted to see Israel but have never found the right opportunity. I hope I get to soon. No country fires my imagination more.

"Our Boys" has only intensified my desire to visit. The series has already stirred massive controversy and resentment, so much so that the directors have received veiled threats from Jews for their supposed anti-Israeli bias in telling the story. Having never been intimately familiar with the events depicted, I can't comment authoritatively on the accuracy of the cinematic narrative. What I can say is, after watching the whole thing, I was left with a more - not less - positive image of the Israeli state than before.

As an attorney, I recognize a developed legal system when I see one. The courtroom, lawyers, procedure, questioning, testimony - all are recognizable to anyone trained and practiced in the legal culture of the Judeo-Christian world. And this culture is the backdrop against which all the emotion of this story, the sadness of the bereaved Arab family, and the passions of everyone concerned are set. The result is multi-dimensional - and absolutely brilliant. The acting is first-rate, even by youngsters. The actor occupying the lead role for most of the series until the legal proceedings get under way in the last few episodes has the uncanny ability to act with only his eyes. He is a stoic Shin Bet investigator, quiet and driven, and you can't take your eyes off him when he is on screen. It is a masterful performance. The performance by the actor playing the father of the murdered Palestinian Arab boy is likewise beautifully nuanced.

For those of us who have lived in Muslim-majority countries, the contrast of the Muslim sense of justice to its Jewish counterpart is very effectively portrayed. Most Westerners should identify with the Jewish sense over the Islamic one. For example, the demand by the parents of the murdered Arab boy (Mohammed Abu Khdeir) that the family homes of the three Jewish murderers be demolished does not comport with Western sensibilities. It is a disproportionate and unrelated punishment under Western law, especially when the three culprits are already serving life terms in prison. But it does feel familiar in a Muslim setting. After all, murderers in Muslim-majority countries are often given very lenient sentences, especially when they prove able to compensate the family of the deceased monetarily or materially with "blood money." In places like Turkey and Pakistan, those found guilty of honor killing - the murder of a relative for "dishonoring" the family - are often subject to what Westerners would consider light sentences, or the authorities turn a blind eye altogether. No such leniency for premeditated murder exists in Western countries-or Israel. "Our Boys" makes that clear.

When one looks for the cast list here on IMDB or elsewhere online, one finds that most members are not identified. This is a shame, and probably borne of the fact that both the producers and actors took a risk. The Jewish backlash against "Our Boys" is already visible in high profile, and perhaps the information publicized about the series reflects a sense that recrimination and retribution from angry Jews could ensue. Yet there is only one controversial aspect to the narrative, and that is in onscreen text at the end providing facts about the episode and describing the Israeli presence in the West Bank as "occupation" in the context of what anti-Israeli activists have used Mohammed Abu Khdeir as a mascot to protest against.

Read the wrong way, "Israeli occupation" could be interpreted as endorsement of the idea that Israel is "occupying" another "country." Yet the West Bank is not a country: the so-called "Palestinian Authority" has no vote in the United Nations, and not because of any pro-Israeli bias in the UN. In reality, the Arab-Israeli peace process remains unsettled internationally, with the "two-state solution" being only one scenario envisioned. Furthermore, although Jewish settlements in the West Bank inconvenience an international order of nation-states with clear, recognized borders, it is far from clear that "Palestinian" should refer to an Arab nationality that is "under occupation" by foreigners. It should not. The most accurate term for an Arab in the West Bank is probably "Palestinian Arab," because there are also "Palestinian Christians" and "Palestinian Jews," and thus no justification for allowing Muslims to monopolize the term "Palestinian." So it was a minor disappointment to see the term "Israeli occupation" on screen. Even if such a phrase was only intended to refer to something certain people imagine to be a legitimate target of protest, it could be misconstrued by viewers.

It is to be hoped that this series leads to more productions highlighting the multi-layered, sophisticated and ultimately fascinating society in the State of Israel. I for one would also like to see a dramatization of the stories of the three Jewish teens - Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Frankel - whom the terrorist organization Hamas abducted and murdered, and who are at the center of "Our Boys" when the series begins. Their stories, and those of their families, are surely every bit as moving and sad as the story of Mohammed Abu Khdeir.

Russian Doll (2019–2022)

Really irritating

[5/10 · 3 February 2019]

By now it's not a spoiler to liken this to Groundhog Day. Unfortunately, while it's supposed to be funny, it isn't. It's jarring and annoying. I wish I hadn't gone the distance.

Natasha Lyonne is a good actress, but the voice she adopts for this role is like Marge Simpson (she could fill in for Julie Kavner). She seems to want to emulate Lt. Colombo with her constant gesticulating and smoking (she should have used a cigar too), but she's too coiffed and clean to be Peter Falk. Her acting in this seems like an effort to create a really unappealing female character: tough, New York Jewish broad who's ready to transform into "sexy slag" at the first male proposition. Yet supposedly she has tons of friends. I wouldn't spend 10 minutes with this person.

In fact, the whole thing smacks of a kind of "It's a Jewish thing. You wouldn't understand." No, I wouldn't, and I wish I hadn't bothered trying. How irritating. Charlie Barnett turns in a great performance as Alan, but he can't save the whole thing from being irritating.

Why do people watch irritating series to the end sometimes? Because these shows are just engaging enough to keep you curious. You keep watching another episode, hoping you won't be disappointed. But I was left depressed and trying to forget it all day. It was a bit like watching "The Kominsky Method": full of angst and irritation, with a "meh" payoff at the end.

What did it for me maybe most was the Billy Joel-type song that repeats throughout. I don't like Billy Joel. He's a pompous git, as evidenced by his lyrics. In fact I'd rather have "I Got You Babe," and that's really saying something.

JFK: The Smoking Gun (2013 TV Movie)

Absolute rubbish

[2/10 · 29 November 2017]

These documentaries are CIA-approved and thus worth very little. They use paid actors for reenactments and "experts" on ballistics and so forth, but they always operate within predefined limits. One sacrosanct principle that can NEVER be questioned in any of these productions is that Lee Harvey Oswald was one of the gunmen and was on the 6th floor of the Book Depository at the time of the shooting. They refer to Warren Commission findings, as if by repeating them, the viewing public will never question them. But the Warren Commission is legally discredited, as any lawyer worth his or her salt will tell you. The Warren Commission was not a court or even a proper investigative body. It was a stitch-up.

There is no material evidence that Oswald was on the 6th floor - no fingerprints, no eyewitnesses, no forensics of any kind. So a documentary like this that hypothesizes that Oswald "could not have fired the fatal head shot" isn't really that useful. A shot from behind and to the left, as this film asserts, seems "new," but it doesn't really matter, does it? The kill shot probably didn't come from that direction, considering the massive EXIT WOUND at the back of JFK's head on his right side. It most likely came from the right side, or from inside the sewer drain on Elm Street. Who cares? Thinking, informed people already know Oswald didn't fire that shot. This whole film is meant to divert and distract. It posits a conspiracy at cover-up by the Secret Service, a small agency, not the CIA? Give us a break. What rubbish.

At the end of the day, thinking people know that the JFK assassination was a coup d'etat by the national security state. Nothing this documentary says makes a whit of difference to that. So this film is just another addition to the garbage heap of mainstream media commentary on this tragic event.

J. Edgar (2011)

Strangely misdirected

[5/10 · 28 November 2017]

Clint Eastwood is a talented filmmaker. His overall body of work stands up and speaks for itself. But he misses the mark, tragically, in this. He seems to be very interested in Hoover's homosexuality, and there are intensely dramatic scenes involving the protagonist and his lover, Clyde Tolson. But the implicit involvement in conspiracies and cover-ups in the assassination of JFK, RFK and MLK (to say nothing of Malcolm X) are not dealt with at all. Hoover practically had the Warren Commission as his captive audience in the presentation of evidence, resulting in one of the greatest travesties of justice in American history. The film does briefly deal with the blackmailing of MLK, but it is not developed.

Apart from this glaring inadequacy, the film under-utilizes the great Naomi Watts, cast as Hoover's lifelong personal secretary. Her scenes are very limited and pedestrian after an initial, awkward attempt by Hoover to court her. It's a strange film with lots of dramatic moments. But don't expect any illumination of Hoover's innumerable instances of suspect criminal behavior. It feels very strongly incomplete, and thus like a missed opportunity.

Vera (2011–2025)

Alluring

[9/10 · 13 January 2014]

"Vera" is a sort of cross between "Columbo" (with its slightly disheveled, idiosyncratic protagonist wearing a raincoat and driving a beat-up auto), "Kojak" (with the protagonist often ill-tempered and lacking patience with her subordinates and others) and "Wallander" (with desolate landscapes and grisly murder a-plenty). Brenda Blethyn is a superb actor and someone with a strong allure as the sharpest cop on the block by far. The plots are very intricate but the characters seem less wholesome than, say, in "Foyle's War" or other cop dramas, which is good because the overall theme is murder in contemporary England, which lacks the historic charm of period pieces. The Brits do this sort of thing very well, and one can only imagine that the reason these shows don't make prime time network TV in the US is because too many Americans would have trouble understanding the accents. It is also slow moving, which adds to the mood very nicely, and one can imagine Americans losing patience because there isn't enough poppy theme music a-la Jerry Bruckheimer. (I am an American, by the way, before you think I'm dissing the US.) Each episode is 90 minutes without commercials, so they are all like movies in themselves, just as with "Wallander," "DCI Banks," and others in the genre. Highly recommended.

Shadows (2007)

Bloody silly

[2/10 · 20 April 2008]

This film sounded so interesting in the description I read of it in the guidebook of the Istanbul International Film Festival 2008, and I had to admit I was pretty gripped from start to finish while watching it. But the ending was so disappointing, in fact so immature in its concept, I walked out feeling cheated.

Where the director succeeds is in the area of horror. With the desensitization of world cinema audiences to shock horror and gore, this movie actually comes up with some genuinely scary moments, and for that it scores points. There is also an impressive, quirky performance by the actress in the role of Menka, the mysterious young woman with short dark hair that keeps appearing unexpectedly to entice our hero, "Lucky" Lazar.

But it is ultimately silly, and I think most mature moviegoers could think up a better, more interesting premise for the experiences of the main character. Instead, we get a kind of "Sixth Sense Lite". The director throws in some softcore erotica to keep us entertained, but that does not make for a film worth seeing. Not impressive.

The Secret of the Grain (2007)

Hafsia Herzi steals the show

[5/10 · 20 April 2008]

This is the story of French-speaking Arabs somewhere in a port city on France's Mediterranean coast. The main character, Slimane, an Arab immigrant, works as a repairman on boats, and his immediate boss is always on his case about how slow he is. When Slimane confronts him, the boss simply says the work is no longer profitable and that his hours must be cut. Slimane is in despair. He has missed two alimony payments to his ex-wife, and as he brings large amounts of fresh fish around to her, he discovers that the freezer is full of frozen fish, the stuff he brought previously that hasn't been eaten. She tells him fish doesn't pay the bills, and now he has to think of something.

Slimane feels like a failure, but thanks to the aggressive nature of Rym, his daughter by his girlfriend, he succeeds in obtaining a loan from the bank to open a boat restaurant that specializes in the fish couscous that his ex-wife makes so wonderfully. No one in the local community believes he can pull it off, but he schedules an opening night and invites all the local grandees. There is live music and drink is flowing. His ex-wife cooks a huge quantity of couscous and everything is ready.

To say more would be to spoil the film. Suffice to say, the big night could not go off smoothly and still qualify as drama. But the star attraction is the young actress who plays Rym, Hafsia Herzi. She cannot be past her teens but shows tremendous depth and range—in addition to an extra talent that viewers will have to wait to see. She is easily the funniest character as well, since the rest are rather sad types that depict the dysfunction inherent in Muslim immigrant communities in the West.

The style of this movie is pure realism. The acting is superb all around, so much so that it almost feels like a documentary at times, a kind of "day in the life" where some documentary filmmaker follows these people around for a few days to see how they live. What augments this sense is that the camera is almost always hand-held, and the image is moving around all the time in a method pioneered by NYPD Blue. I found this slightly irritating, actually, since it does not give much room for spectacular cinematography. My ideal movie is a visually mesmerizing spectacle, and this film is not one — at least in terms of the photographic quality. There are some scenes where the movements of the actors—particularly Hafsia Herzi—compensate for this shortcoming. But on the whole it is unremarkable visually.

12 (2007)

A masterpiece based on fantasy

[9/10 · 20 April 2008]

This is a masterpiece. The beauty of the film is in its simplicity. Almost the whole thing takes place in a high school gymnasium, around a long table around which the twelve jurors sit. Every performance is superb, including that of the director, who plays the foreman, and Sergei Garmash as the cab driver juror. The screenplay follows the tortuous deliberations, in which every juror has at least one soliloquy. Excellent camera-work and lighting augment the heavy drama.

It is more likely in Russia today that twelve whites would end up forming a jury, although less so that no women would be serving. Director Nikita Mikhalkov evidently chose to remain faithful that much to the American movie on which his is based, Twelve Angry Men. One wonders whether it might have been more interesting with women jurors contributing their anguish to the picture, and since this version is simply titled 12, the possibility of including a woman or two (as would be realistic in this day and age) was presumably open. Also, the film is not realistic in the sense that Russia does not have a jury system, therefore this situation would not arise in real life. What Mikhalkov was probably trying to do was to create a morality play, and this he does magnificently. These criticisms are therefore minor. This is a wonderful piece of work.

As the film is starting, for those who know Russian, one sees the logo of "Patriotic Films." This may cause groans among those who know more about Russia. Patriotic Russians today seem reactionary and defensive to many Westerners. But Mikhalkov does not dance around the sensitive race issue at the core of the plot, a Chechen boy accused of murdering his stepfather, a Russian military officer, and facing life in prison. Mikhalkov's main interest really is in truth, justice and honesty. The idea of these qualities as components of "patriotism" actually lies at the core of this story, and it is brilliantly executed. By the end, if you can suppress cynicism and believe that this many men of conscience could assemble in one place in Russia today, you will be moved to tears. This is a major achievement.

Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File (2007)

Effective as anti-FSB propaganda

[5/10 · 20 April 2008]

This film was effective in showing the scary nature of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), successor to the KGB, but it did nothing to help solve the murder of former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko. It is a kind of "J'accuse" work that doesn't produce any evidence to back up its accusation besides presenting credible testimony about the corruption, brutality and even murderousness of FSB functionaries, and showing Litvinenko himself making a lot of these allegations on camera.

But this forms the entire basis of the film's case against Litvinenko's former FSB colleagues. There is no examination of how the polonium-210 wound up in Litvinenko's system. Andrei Lugovoy, who is now sought by the British police as a suspect, is interviewed, and talks about polonium-210. He and his monosyllabic sidekick do look rather creepy, but that is all, and when they offer the interviewer a cup of tea, there is a black comedy moment.

This is an indictment of Russia's "Chekists" (spooks), who supposedly run Russia as evidenced by the fact that one of their own, Vladimir Putin, is Russia's president. The logic runs as follows: there is a lot of murder and corruption in Russia, Putin is president, Putin is ex-KGB, therefore the ex-KGB are responsible for all the murder and corruption. This is not, incidentally, a fanciful notion. Russia is very corrupt and former Soviet security service officials are in places of high power in government and industry. But it does not necessarily follow that Putin ordered Litvinenko's murder, and this film fails to convince.

In fact, interesting theories arise when one poses the question: qui bono? Who stood to gain most by Litvinenko's murder? If Litvinenko fled Russia and continued his fierce accusations against Putin and the Russian regime, and then was assassinated, the finger would naturally point at the Kremlin. As it happened, condemnation was directed at the Russian government from around the world, which greatly benefited exiled Russian oligarch and fierce Kremlin opponent Boris Berezovsky, with whom Litvinenko had associated before he died. Could Berezovsky have killed Litvinenko? I was actually left with the impression that the director, Andrei Nekrasov, intended at least to hint at this possibility.

The film essentially points the finger at Putin and the FSB for the apartment bombings in Russia in 1999, which were blamed on the Chechens. These bombings served as the pretext for renewed war against Chechnya, and the blitz propelled Putin into the presidency. The theory—which is very believable—is that the apartment bombings were part of a Chekist plot to replace the ailing Boris Yeltsin with the authoritarian Vladimir Putin, thus securing the security services' hold over the Russian political system. Berezovsky has made these very allegations from the safety of his estate in England, yet a closer look at the history of these incidents reveals that Berezovsky himself was part of the cabal that helped Putin to power. It was only after Putin became president that Berezovsky fled to Britain, having been betrayed by the new regime.

If the pro-Putin clique and Berezovsky were jointly culpable in the 1999 apartment bombings, it would perhaps be more difficult for the Putin regime to publicly accuse Berezovsky than vice-versa. It would automatically invite the question: how do you know? How would the Russian regime present evidence of Berezovsky's complicity in a terrorist acts without at the same time implicating itself?

Hour of the Wolf (1968)

Fine but not earth-shattering

[8/10 · 20 April 2008]

I have never understood the genius of Bergman. Respected filmmakers such as Woody Allen have described Bergman as a genius, and while one can sense originality in Bergman's movies, I have never sensed great profundity. This is not for want of trying. I have tried to follow the camera and see where the amazing, revolutionary technique is. I have tried to scrutinize the directing and acting for signs of something revolutionary. But I have never come away from a Bergman film thinking anything more than: "Hmm." And I have never held any Bergman film in high enough esteem to even consider putting it in my top 100. Am I missing something? That said, this film was captivating for the time I sat watching it. Described in the 2008 Istanbul International Film Festival guidebook as "Bergman's only horror film," it is about an artist (Johan) who moves to the countryside with his young wife (played by Liv Ullmann) to paint. Before long the couple comes into contact with some members of the Swedish nobility who live in a castle nearby, and they are invited to dinner. There is a suggestion that these people are ghosts, but since both Johan and his wife see and interact with them, this idea doesn't seem entirely plausible. In short, Johan starts to show signs of insanity as his wife learns more about him, partly from reading his diary, partly from talking to him, and one can feel tension building toward the climax.

Because the movie was made in 1968, it is just old enough that some of the techniques displayed are original. There is a flashback scene where Johan is remembering a day fishing by the sea with his son. The scene is very disturbing but the image quality is unusual — high-contrast and very bright. It makes for a highly tense experience. Other than that, the usual desolation of Bergman is captured in scenes where Johan is walking in the rugged terrain around the cottage. There are a few scenes that qualify as traditional "horror" although they are not hugely scary in this day and age. The castle makes a good setting for scenes involving lots of shadows where people appear unexpectedly, again, not causing any jumps or starts in the audience. All in all, one has to conclude that Bergman was feeling his usual pretentious self when he made this one.

Help Me, Eros (2007)

Bang, bang... er... ?

[5/10 · 20 April 2008]

I watched this film in a packed auditorium at the 2008 Istanbul International Film Festival, and what amazed me was that there was not a single audible laugh throughout the entire thing. The reason this was amazing is that the movie is, in parts, truly hilarious. Perhaps because the feel and movement of the production is so realistic, and there are long sequences of no dialogue, the audience didn't know what it was watching. Also, because the movie has a lot of fairly explicit sex scenes and lots of marijuana smoking, some people were likely shocked. On one side of me sat a middle-aged woman who was evidently there with her daughter. The woman shook her head and put her hand to her mouth several times, and might have got up to leave if she hadn't had to climb over several laps to get out.

The story follows a pot-smoking protagonist who has apparently fallen on hard times recently. He lives in a multi-floor apartment in Taipei that must be rather grand by the standards of Taiwan, but he's lost a lot of money in the stock market and now has to start selling his household goods to finance his pot habit. He's a small man in his mid- to late-thirties', and his girlfriend has recently left him. A few of the scenes of him stoned at home by himself are very funny. In one scene he is talking to (presumably) his ex-girlfriend on the phone while a kettle is boiling. He keeps walking back into the kitchen to take the kettle off the range and make it stop whistling, then going back in and putting it back on the burner, clearly having just forgotten why he took it off in the first place. People who have never experienced the effects of marijuana will not understand the humor, probably. In another scene he's watching a program on TV in which a fish is being prepared for some kind of traditional dish. The fish is scaled and gutted but is somehow still alive when served on the plate (a 'delicacy'). You can see the fish's mouth opening and closing in an obscene gaping motion, as our hero clutches a pillow and stares horrified and motionless at the screen.

He has an instant messenger chat partner he has never met. His chat name is "Marihuana is God," hers is "Little Cookie." Little Cookie is one of the main characters but she is fat, largely because her husband—evidently a professional cook—cooks sumptuous dishes for her all the time at home. He long ago lost interest in her physically, and when a male guest comes to stay, she understands that the two of them are carrying on together. She develops an online attachment to Marihuana is God, but the protagonist is busy luring young, attractive hookers to his apartment, getting them stoned, and having gangbangs with them. One of the hookers actually starts to become attached to him, then is heartbroken when he only cares about getting stoned and having it off with any of the girls at the "hooker depot" where he originally picked her up.

The value of this film, which is not high, is that it gives a vision of Taipei street life: strange, brightly-lit little kiosk-type shops where escort girls in see-thru skirts and hooker outfits sell cigarettes and other conveniences all night; credit hotline agencies where row upon row of girls in cubicles answer calls from the hordes of debtors in Taiwanese society; vans with screens on three sides broadcasting lottery news and results. It is ultimately a highly depressing image but it nevertheless feels real in its nihilism, and its examination of how debts and gambling affect Oriental societies more severely than Western ones. For anyone who wants a look at Taipei, this is worth a look. Otherwise this movie is just another post-post-modern slice of super-depression, depression that is not negated by all the laughs.

Jellyfish (2007)

Pretentious and dull

[3/10 · 20 April 2008]

I went to see this because I'd never seen Tel-Aviv, where the story is set. I was disappointed, since it doesn't offer many views of Israel's largest metropolis. It's also pretentious—one of those movies that leaves you guessing at its meaning until you ultimately give up with a shrug of the shoulders.

The main protagonist is Batya, a woman in her twenties' who works as a waitress at catered weddings. Her parents evidently don't care about her very much, and when a little girl walks out of the sea with an inflatable ring around her, Batya feels compelled to take care of her. The little girl doesn't speak, and Batya can't give her to social services because it's the weekend and the agency is closed. So she takes her back to her apartment with the leaky roof, and when it comes time to work in the evening, she has to take the little girl with her. The boss is very unhappy about this and other shortcomings in Batya's work performance.

Another main character is Keren, who is getting married. At her wedding party (where Batya is of course working), she breaks her leg climbing out of a ladies' room cubicle whose door won't open, and so she and her new husband cannot take the Caribbean vacation they've planned. They end up in a dingy hotel on the seafront without a view. It smells bad, there is noise from the traffic, and Keren is complaining all the time. Her husband meets a strangely attractive older woman – a writer – who is also staying in the hotel, and Keren worries that he has slept with this stranger.

The third main character is a Filipino woman named Joy who looks after old people. The old woman she is hired to care for is very crabby and speaks no English, only German and Hebrew. Joy speaks English but no Hebrew or German. Joy is mostly concerned with how her son is doing back in the Philippines, and wants to buy him a toy boat, as he has asked. She finds the perfect boat in a store and plans to buy it. The daughter of the old woman, who hired Joy, is an actress appearing in some sort of post-modern "physical theater" adaptation of Hamlet, and does not get along with her mother.

The way in which these three stories—which intersect momentarily—resolve themselves is presumably supposed to mean something profound. I didn't get it. There is a fantasy element to Batya's relationship with the little girl, and maybe Batya's non-existent relationship with her parents is somehow inverted in this relationship. When Joy sees the toy boat in the shop window, there is a strange effect used where the little sails billow as if blown by the wind, and they do this as if they are on the scale of a real-life ship. Keren draws the outline of a bottle around a ship that is on a brochure cover in the hotel room, and a narration of the strange woman's poetry mentions a ship in a bottle. But what does all this mean? I thought about it for a while and realized I wasn't going to lose any sleep in the process. If anyone out there has a clear idea of what it's all about, maybe they can fill me in.

Secret Sunshine (2007)

A harrowing tale

[7/10 · 9 April 2008]

"Secret Sunshine" reminded me of "The Rapture" (1991), with Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny, but this Korean production is a better film. It portrays super-religious Korean Christians in a provincial Korean city, and the main character's experiences interacting with them in the wake of a horrible personal tragedy. Shin-ae is a widowed single mother who moves to the city of Milyang ('Secret Sunshine' in Chinese) from Seoul with her young son. She has chosen Milyang because her late husband (killed in an auto accident) was born there, and she feels she needs to make a new start in life in a new place. She does not react well to the overtures of the local Christian zealots, one of whose members tries to convince her to come to their church and prayer meetings. Shin-ae is essentially irreligious and brushes these people off as politely as she can. In fact, she brushes just about everyone in Milyang off to begin with, but some of them are persistent in trying to invade her world, and the consequences are often hilarious. To say more would be to give the film away, but it should be noted that the performance of the woman in the lead role (Jeon Do-yeon) is stupendous. Having read that she won the Best Actress award at Cannes in 2007, I expected her to a decent job. But Ms. Jeon is captivating and it is impossible to take your eyes off her when she is on screen. The movie is a sort of harrowing Evelyn Waugh-esquire piece of work, showing how Fate can feel insane as much as strangely inevitable.

Elite Squad (2007)

Ultra-violent but dramatically compelling

[7/10 · 9 April 2008]

Tropa de Elite does not feel like high art while one is looking at it, but artistically it does score some points. The protagonist is one of the commanders of the BOPE, a special operations battalion that is like a "death's head unit" of the police force in Rio de Janeiro, functioning outside the normal chain of command and used for special, super-dangerous missions. Our hero, Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura), who narrates the film, has served as a BOPE officer for many years, cracked a lot of heads, and is ready to retire. His wife is pregnant with their first child, while he is suffering from depression and fears he may be losing his mind. His eye sockets are permanently dark from worry and exhaustion. Still, the rules of the outfit are clear: if you want to leave, you have to find a replacement. He sets out to find one, and is surprised at the qualities displayed by his new picks. The movie is ultra-violent, showing BOPE's unorthodox interrogation methods, including "bagging" (putting a plastic bag over a suspect's head until he starts to suffocate), but what is most frighteningly effective about the movie is that—despite their unquestionably fascistic appearance and methods—the BOPE officers have the audience's sympathy by the end. The unit is made up of unprivileged men, and as BOPE officers they function in a world in which "enlightened" left-wing rich kids mix with drug-dealers in the slums. These spoiled brats form a socially-conscious NGO with the help of a local politician, and proceed to promote an image of the police as responsible for everything that is wrong in Rio's society. Predictably, their attitude results in tragedy, and the men from BOPE spring into action to set things right. The film is supposedly based on real events in 1997. The Pope, on his visit to Brazil in that year, announced that he wanted to stay with a bishop whose residence abutted one of the most dangerous slums in the city. BOPE was then called in to clean out the mafia elements and make it safe. Very much worth seeing.

Wonderful Town (2007)

A failure to communicate

[5/10 · 9 April 2008]

It probably does not give too much away to point out that the title is facetious. The "town" depicted in the film consists of a small seaside municipality in Thailand, presumably two or three years after the tsunami of 2004. The town is, for all intents and purposes, dead, but a young architect from Bangkok arrives to supervise construction of a new resort hotel. Evidently, investment in local tourism is just re-starting, but the place is still essentially a ghost town with only one functioning "rest-stop" type hotel inland. The architect starts to flirt with the young woman who works in this hotel, and whose family owns and runs it. A romance begins against the bleak backdrop, a world in which everyone left after the disaster of 2004 knows everyone else. Before long the out-of-towner architect has some unpleasant encounters with a gang of teenage petty hoodlums who ride around the area on little whining motorcycles. The building sense of unease is successfully conveyed, but the reason the film fails on several levels is that it relies too much on the audience's ability to perceive the "telepathy" between the characters, telepathy consistent with Oriental societies. It will not be immediately clear to many why the film ends the way it does, for example, or what the characters actually mean by their gazes and actions. There is a lot of "eye language", the meaning of which will only become clear to the viewer after walking out of the cinema and pondering the movie for a while. This dissipates the immediate effectiveness of the film and its screenplay, since movies — unlike books — cannot communicate thoughts easily. The performances are competent but not otherwise remarkable. Perhaps the film's only unqualified success is that the main character of the film, throughout, is undoubtedly the town itself.