"Tokyo!" is made up of three unrelated shorts directed by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon-ho, all set, yes, in Tokyo.

Stop, you're shrieking, how much hipness can one little omnibus film contain?

It turns out, as is often the case with these things, a swoopingly uneven amount. I liked the Gondry portion, found Carax's a promising joke stretched too thin (though it attracted the most applause at the screening) and Bong's pretty damn disappointing. None of these filmmakers is actually from the city in which the film is set, and their methods of approach to encapsulating it in a short vary. Gondry's "Interior Design" kicks off as a plausible look at a young couple struggling with their move to the city that rapidly plunges into Gondrisms — aspiring auteur Akira (Ryo Kase) screens his low-budget sci-fi film in a porn theater and enthusiastically pumps a smoke machine until the audience spills out, coughing; Hiroko (Ayako Fujitani), not knowing what she wants from life, discovers a surreal ability to transform herself into something she considers truly useful. Gondry's shown something of a fetish for tiny, cramped living spaces, and so he takes to Tokyo with ease, and the length limitation means "Interior Design" doesn't exhaust its charm by spilling all over the place in the manner of the features he's written.

Carax's film, "Merde," casts the director's beloved Denis Lavant as a cock-eyed, red-bearded troll who emerges from the sewers to terrorize the Tokyo population by eating their flowers and cash, stealing their cigarettes and crutches and licking their armpits, all of which he does during an uproarious single-take stroll down the street — the world's monster-magnet metropolis attacked by a combed-over, corporeal id. After that opening segment, there's nowhere left to go but down — a trial, a fellow troll who's a French lawyer, a scant appearance from Julie Dreyfus, and a line of Merde action figures.

Bong, whose closing segment "Shaking Tokyo" was probably the most anticipated, at least by anyone who's seen "The Host," zooms in on the life of a hikikomori, one suffering from the media-adored Japanese disorder in which people retreat to their rooms or homes for what can be years. His nameless recluse (Teruyuki Kagawa) has been bunkered down in his apartment for over a decade, until a perfectly timed earthquake drops a pizza delivery girl (Yu Aoi) in her tracks in his entryway, and he finally finds something worth going outside for. But the hikikomori phenomenon is just too ripe a metaphor — from the beginning, the film lacks traction, with its central character reflecting on his condition in a manner almost anthropological until events drift into magical realism. From a director who delicately explored his own country's insecurities and ills by way of a river-born mutant, "Shaking Tokyo" rings sadly false.

[Denis Lavant in "Tokyo!," Comme des Cinémas, 2008]

+ "Tokyo!" (Festival-Cannes.fr)

By Alison Willmore in Festivals, Reviews | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Bong Joon-ho, Cannes 08, Leos Carax, Michel Gondry, Tokyo!

Following up Fernando Meirelles' dystopic "Blindness" with the animated Israeli documentary "Waltz with Bashir" made for an exceedingly dour day here at Cannes. "Bashir," the better film, orbits a black hole in director Ari Folman's memory that's consumed his time in the army in the early '80s, the point of singularity being the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which Israeli soldiers allowed Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen to go into two Palestinian refugee camps, where they then slaughtered hundreds of men, women and children. Folman was there, but all he remembers is looking at the flare-illuminated ruined city while floating in the shallows off the beach, something the friend he's sure was also there insists never happened.

The reliability of memory is one of the dominant themes of Folman's doc, which, unlike the obvious comparison, "Chicago Ten," is almost entirely animated — both its recreations and sit-down interviews. This doesn't serve the present so well, as Folman talks to friends and others who served during the massacre, trying to fill in the gaps — people and gestures are off, and seem to lack substance; animating a talking head interview doesn't bring any added dimensions to it, no matter how carefully it's done. But the past comes in hectic blasts of heightened and sometimes surreal segments, the personal mixing with the historic and the invented — thoughts of an newly ex-girlfriend corporealize in the form of a ghost on a nighttime stakeout, a wander through the Beirut airport allows a fantasy of lively shops and flights aimed at all the capitals of the world to give way to a bombed-out reality. The sporadic weakness of the animation is easily overcome by its cinematic adventurousness, with the camera making wild tracking shots and impossible zooms through its sketched-in world. More than the monstrous events that are witnessed and that close the film in all-too-real detail, the moments of levity and jolting, out-of-place beauty are spookily resonant of the way things are perma-seared into your recollection, bright and vivid as the passing present. It's a quiveringly good depiction of sense memory, and both a lovely and disquieting film as a whole, one that takes few of the directions you'd expect in that overcrowded field of atrocity docs.

[Photo: "Waltz with Bashir," Bridgit Folman Film Gang, 2008]

+ "Waltz with Bashir" (Festival-Cannes.fr)
+ "Waltz with Bashir" (Official site)

By Alison Willmore in Festivals, Reviews | Link | Recommended (4)

Tags: Ari Folman, Cannes 08, Waltz with Bashir

The third annual IFC Cannes Cam, streaming live, 24/7, for the duration of the festival, is going live in a minute or two. You can find it here; at 6:40pm local, Matt Singer and I will be on to discuss tonight's opening film, "Blindness," during the red carpet.

+ Cannes Cam (IFC)

By Alison Willmore in Festivals | Link | Recommended (1)

Tags: Cannes 08, Cannes Cam

In a piece on the premiere of "The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian," MTV News offers this tidbit:

[M]uch of the prerelease chatter about "Prince Caspian" has been about a new element that the filmmakers contributed: a romance between Caspian and Susan. [Ben] Barnes said he initially shared the concerns of many die-hard Narnia fans: "I was deeply concerned about [the romance]."

Director Andrew Adamson carefully defended the plot addition. "I think it's very sensitively handled," he said. "The kids are growing up. If you look at Ben and you look at Anna, it seems really implausible that they wouldn't have some feelings for each other."

Plus, when you're trying to foist your unknown, valiantly cleft-chinned British lead on the public, giving his character a romantic angle is just another way to appeal to the girls in the audience. Still, if you've read through the Narnia books, you may remember that Susan is the character who in the final volume is punished, punished, punished for growing up and turning her attention to boys and become "interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations" by being, essentially, left out of heaven. So one would guess the fans' issues are less with the fact that the puppy love in question wasn't in the original book, and more that its addition treads on what was famously harsh (and emotionally scarring) treatment of one of the series' initial main characters from author C.S. Lewis.

[Photo: Ben Barnes and Anna Popplewell in "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian," Walt Disney Studios, 2008]

+ 'Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian' Stars Get Royal Red-Carpet Treatment As They Defend Movie's Romantic Twist (MTV)
+ Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel sign on for "500 Days" (Hollywood Reporter)

By Alison Willmore | Link | Recommended (1)

Tags: Ben Barnes, The Chronicles Of Narnia Prince Caspian

A labor of love from Tarsem Singh (who often prefers to go by just "Tarsem"), the musical video director who made his feature debut with 2000's "The Cell," "The Fall" was paid for out of pocket by the filmmaker and shot over the course of four years. The film, about a movie stuntman (played by "Pushing Daisies"' Lee Pace) who narrates a fantastical story to the five-year-old girl with whom he's in the hospital, is certainly visually striking, but reviews are mixed as to how well it all actually comes together. "[L]acking the ability to fashion cohesive tales driven by engaging characters, Singh overcompensates with his trademark visual palette and loses a hold on both in the process," sighs Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. "If the human details are often problematic, the IMAX-grade bombast, ceremonial camera, and Jodorowsky-esque eclecticism still combine for a singular spectacle," counters Nick Pinkerton at the Village Voice.

At the New York Times, Nathan Lee describes "The Fall" as "a real bore" and wonders at the way the girl is "cognizant, it would seem, of the full repertory of high-gloss, empty-headed pictorialism deployed by corporate advertising." Tasha Robinson at the Onion AV Club admits the film "is pretentious to the point of laughability," but finds "the structure is so delicate, the ideas are so ambitious, and the imagery is so hellishly flamboyant that it's easy to fall into Tarsem's over-the-top vision... It's the most glorious, wonderful mess put onscreen since Terry Gilliam's Brazil." Slant's Ed Gonzalez believes the film to be insufferably self-indulgent: "Shunning logic and compassion, The Fall is a bedtime story impeccably designed to flatter its own maker." Armond White at the New York Press writes that "Tarsem has that David Fincher problem of creating TV-flimsy imagery that lacks the spatial and emotional weight of true cinema. In the final sequence, Tarsem connects Alexandria and Roy's wishfulness to silent film heritage and the mass audience experience. Yet The Fall remains remote and unengaging." But Glenn Kenny at Premiere disagrees, finding that it "works like crazy as a multi-leveled, smart, jaw-droppingly beautiful, big-hearted piece of entertainment... I can't quite bring myself to call it visionary. But it'll more than do until the genuinely visionary comes along, as that doesn't happen too often, especially these days."

[Photo: "The Fall," Roadside Attractions, 2006]

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Lee Pace, Tarsem Singh, The Fall

Documentarian provocateur Nick Broomfield, of "Biggie and Tupac" and "Kurt & Courtney," goes semi-scripted in "Battle for Haditha," which portrays a real and ugly incident involving 24 Iraqi men, women and children, all civilians, who were killed by a group of United States Marines, possibly in retaliation for the earlier death of one of their own. Broomfield uses non-professional actors, many former military, in his film, which begs comparison to Brian De Palma's "Redacted" but is certainly getting a better reception from the critics. Certainly most see it as more balanced — New York's David Edelstein compares it to the multi-POV "The Wire," concluding that "even when the dialogue is stilted, the acting and directing take the starch out of it. Battle for Haditha has some of the raw energy of Sam Fuller's war pictures, which weren't subtle but left you energized by their ambivalence (there was no good or evil). It's a hell of a picture." "'Battle for Haditha' is a relentlessly exciting war film, unafflicted by moralism or finger-pointing, that leaves all the judgment to us, adds Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Which only makes it harder to bear."

For Armond White at the New York Press, the film's "greatest breakthrough comes from Broomfield unabashedly portraying al-Qaeda characters while the rest of Hollywood fears facing this reality--as if following the Muslim prohibition against portraying Mohammad... This taboo-busting is an act of humane imagination; that's what's missing from one-way Iraq War films that condescend or propagandize." Leo Goldsmith at indieWIRE finds that "it is the event itself -- and not how it is reported or misrepresented -- that fascinates Broomfield, and this is what distinguishes his film." Though he thinks that it "sometimes feels like an amateur remake of Jarhead," Nathan Rabin at the Onion AV Club declares that the film "ultimately derives much of its primal power from its bluntness and simplicity."

Others have quibbles: Anthony Kaufman at the Village Voice acknowledges that "[w]hen the shit finally hits the fan, though, the results are more emotionally bruising than many of Haditha's predecessors... Then again, the film's affective power occasionally bubbles over into the manipulative." And Manohla Dargis at the New York Times writes that the film, "though technically exemplary, falters dramatically on occasion, becoming dangerously close to overheated whenever the characters speak for any length."

{Photo: "Battle for Haditha," Hanway Films, 2007]

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (1)

Tags: Battle for Haditha, Iraq, Nick Broomfield

Kevin Maher at the London Times tries to interview John Hurt, who's been forbidden by the studios to discuss his role in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." Maher attempts to come up with a workaround:

I suggest a game. I'll run plot points (gleaned from the internet and beyond) by him, and will judge their validity, or not, by his reactions. There's more than one Crystal Skull? "Hmmm, interesting," he says. Your character comes back from the dead? "He'd be called Lazarus, wouldn't he?!" There's a cameo from the Elephant Man? "Depends on how you look at it." And, finally, with [Quentin] Crisp in mind, you have a homosexual relationship with Indiana Jones. "I wish!" he says, before sneering: "Oh yes, Lucas would really dare to put something like that in!"

Samantha Geimer, the girl behind Roman Polanski's 1977 Waterloo, showed up for Tuesday's premiere of now-HBO doc "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired." From New York: "Coming to the premiere, likewise, was a way to try to get the press off her back. 'I figure if I keep talking to people, maybe they'll get tired of me,' she says. 'That's one of my theories, that no one will want to talk to me anymore! Hasn't worked yet.' "

Sean O'Neal talks with Troma's Lloyd Kaufman at the Onion AV Club. On "Poultrygeist":

[W]e're living in an age of remakes, so we decided we'd do a shot-by-shot remake of that hilarious, slapstick-gore movie Schindler's List. But instead of the Jews, we put in several hundred chicken Indian zombies, and instead of the concentration camps, we've got concentration coops. Liam Neeson wasn't quite up to the task, so we hired the very famous Shakespearean actor Ron Jeremy. I predict Poultrygeist is going to be very favorably looked upon by the Schindler's List crowd.

There's a Bollywood remake of "Spider-Man" in the works, according to io9. Shah Rukh Khan will star.

Michael J. Jordan at the Christian Science Monitor looks at the Kazakhstan film industry, sans "Borat."

[Photo: "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," Paramount Pictures, 2008]

+ Me and Mr Jones: is John Hurt the latest Indiana Jones villain? (London Times)
+ The Surprise Guest at the Roman Polanski Documentary Premiere: The Woman in Question (New York)
+ Lloyd Kaufman (Onion AV Club)
+ The Bollywood Version Of Spider-Man Is Better, Because He Can Fly (io9)
+ Kazakhstan seeks identity on the big screen (CS Monitor)

By Alison Willmore in Odds | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: John Hurt, Kazakhstan, Lloyd Kaufman, Roman Polanski, Samantha Geimer, Shah Rukh Khan, Troma

New Line for the win (I guess). From the Hollywood Reporter:

In a surprising move, Warner Bros. has decided to shutter both Picturehouse and Warner Independent Pictures.

"With New Line now a key part of Warner Bros., we're able to handle films across the entire spectrum of genres and budgets without overlapping production, marketing and distribution infrastructures," announced Warner Bros. president and COO Alan Horn. "After much painstaking analysis, this was a difficult decision to make, but it reflects the reality of a changing marketplace and our need to prudently run our businesses with increased efficiencies. We're confident that the spirit of independent filmmaking and the opportunity to find and give a voice to new talent will continue to have a presence at Warner Bros."

Speculation before had been that the two indie distribution arms would merge, not vanish.

+ Warners axes Picturehouse, WIP (Hollywood Reporter)

By Alison Willmore in Biz | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: New Line, Picturehouse, Warner Independent

"Imagine someone pouring hot, melted Starburst candies into your corneas, and you just begin to approximate the experience of 'Speed Racer.'"
       —Alonso Duralde at MSNBC

"Watching Speed Racer... is comparable to dousing one's eyeballs in a sugary hyper-digitized Skittles soup. It's like being immersed in a kaleidoscopic pop-art LSD nightmare in which one's bounced around a pinball machine and assailed by an onslaught of electric smoke tendrils."
       —Nick Schager at Slant

"But what about the rest of us? True, our eyeballs will slowly, though never completely, recover, but what of our souls?"
       —Anthony Lane at the New Yorker

"The Wachowski brothers...deliver enough cotton-candy-colored cinematic pyrotechnics to send you into sugar shock or strobe-induced seizures."
       —Matt Stevens at E! Online

"Speed Racer spins some people's heads right near off their axis."
       —David Poland at The Hot Blog

"[T]he Wachowski Brothers' follow-up to The Matrix trilogy is, if viewed from one angle, the most headache inducing kid's movie of them all; if viewed from another, it's the most expensive avant-garde film ever made."
       —Glenn Kenny at Premiere

"[The] Speed Racer experience - I just can't bring myself to call this garish tantrum a "movie" - is akin to nothing so much as diving face first into a rainbow-hued bowl of methamphetamine-laced cinematic Jell-O. It's a giddy rush for a moment or two, but the comedown is long and harsh."
       —Marc Savlov at Austin Chronicle

[Photo: "Speed Racer," Warner Bros., 2008]

By Alison Willmore in Critic wrangle | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Speed Racer

The good and the very bad news this morning:

On the plus side, Criterion has announced that it's going Blu-ray, with "Chungking Express," "The 400 Blows" and "Contempt" amongst its first releases in the format. /film has the announcement.

On the minus, and this is an incredible downer, Glenn Kenny at Premiere writes that

I've just been informed that my position at Premiere.com is being terminated. What this means for this blog is still up in the air; I've got meetings this afternoon in which such things are to be negotiated. In any case, I now join the ever-growing ranks of film critics without staff positions.

These days, it seems you only need a fistful of fingers to count the staff critic positions still around. Sorry to hear it, Glenn.

[Photo: "Chungking Express," Miramax Films, 1996]

+ Criterion Collection Goes Blu-Ray (/film)
+ The end of an era (Premiere)

By Alison Willmore in Critic watch | Link | Recommended (1)

Tags: Blu-ray, Criterion, Glenn Kenny