Tuesday, July 1, 2008

A few quick hits on movies

The Children of Huang Shi: As Andrew Kopkind wrote, "Like baseball for Americans and sexual initiation scenes for the French, public school days serve the English as a source of easy answers to hard questions about the meaning of their lives." Keeping this quote in the front of my mind was the only thing that kept me from fleeing the theater during two hours of Jonathan Rhys Meyers whipping a Chinese orphanage into shape using nothing but his pretty-boy face and British pluck. Sticking Children of Huang Shi in the British schoolboy genre also had the pleasant side effect of turning the cricket kept in a jar by one of the orphans into a hilarious pun rather than a heavy-handed symbol.

The Fall: "Tarsem, for two decades a leading director of music videos and TV commercials, spent millions of his own money to finance The Fall, filmed it for four years in 28 countries and has made a movie that you might want to see for no other reason than because it exists." Ah, Mister Ebert, you forget that so does The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. So, for that matter, does Spirit of the Beehive, which makes The Fall a little redundant. It's shiny, baroque, and ultimately very sweet. Still, I can't help but hope that The Fall is to Tarsem as Munchausen was to Gilliam: a little shot of humility.

LA Confidential: I had forgotten just how far this movie goes in differentiating between violence and violence against women. Perhaps I am a feminist after all?

I'm All Right Jack: British satire of trade unions. I'll write more on this one later, but, in the meantime, see it!

Still haven't seen Wall-E, but I weighed in on the trailer for it back in December.

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