J. Harlan Reviews

Shiri (1999)

a slightly less paranoid Manchurian Candidate

[3/10 · 30 October 2002]

It's interesting that North Korea is one of the few spots in the world where the Cold War is still directly relevant. The common ground between Shiri and American Cold War movies is vast--particularly a film like Manchurian Candidate, that captured an unease with the myths of communist efficiency, so much so that we presumed people were literally losing their souls to this human factory. See also the Rocky with Dolph Ludgren.

Things are complicated in Korea, and you have to give Shiri credit for attempting to capture that. Many of the events that occur in Shiri have at least some connection to the everyday world. Reports of North Korean espionage seem almost mundane--remember that mini-sub full of spies that was discovered? And think how difficult it must be to find some peace in this conflict when both sides are Korean. During WWII, the army found it was difficult to get Americans to be properly aggressive towards the Germans--we thought they were good kids who were misled. Everybody on the peninsula feels manipulated. The Koreans have little love for the American soldiers in their country and even less with our allies the Japanese. China is loathed, too. And the North Koreans have suffered under drought for years now.

So while elements of Shiri seem propagandistic, in the way The Siege did in the US (the status quo is always explicitly encouraged and myths of the enemy are brought out for the sake of drama), the film was obviously effective for Koreans at bringing some sort of order to this confusion. Hee has that mixture of humanity, hatred and mystery. Most people in the world really have no idea what's going on in the North. No doubt, that's the root of the sentimentality (see Spring in My Hometown) of Korean films that another IMDB reviewer commented upon. I think for western viewers, this atmosphere, and the amazingly compassionate acting by the leads, is what will draw people in. Did we ever make a Cold War thriller so heart-wrenching and complicated?

But I get the idea, from reading IMDB reviews and watching the DVD production report, what REALLY mattered was the quality of the film. Korea has its prides, and some xenophobia like any country, I imagine, and making a film the way they did is important. It is a mixture of Hollywood drama, HK blood ballet and Korean cultural themes. But what's important is that it's a glossy, high-quality film with good, if unspectacular, action sequences. National cinema has a patriotic or nationalistic element, and that's probably its most important legacy.

All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001)

Rewarding and challenging coming of age film

[9/10 · 20 September 2002]

A harsh, almost 3 hour coming of age film, All About Lilly Chou Chou takes a number of real happenings in Japan-juvenile rape, violence, degradation, murder and pop idol fixation-and throws them together for effect. It centers on Ichihara, the persecuted protagonist who eventually finds himself atop a group of persecutors. He's in adult situations, but doesn't have adult faculties, and any grown-up that could help him escape the escalating sadomasochism of his friends is too clueless or apathetic to help. Ichihara fixates on Lilly Chou Chou, a Marilyn Manson/the Cure/Nirvana/Tori Amos figure whom he thinks embodies his disillusionment with his unfolding life. When he finds that his best friend/tormentor shares his love of Lilly Chou-Chou, it's too much for him to take.

All About Lilly Chou Chou is embedded in the traditional avant-garde belief that film need not being pleasurable to be beautiful or effective. It's a surprisingly graphic film, in fact, in some ways like Van Trier's the Idiots, Pasolini's Salo, or Wedekind's play Spring Awakenings. All About Lilly Chou Chou is beauty that's sought after. By foregrounding the filmmaking process and complicating the line between pain and pleasure, it forces the audience to be repulsed, enamored, whatever. Presenting the film in traditional cinematic language wouldn't do justice to the depth of the narrative. It's a film for catharsis.

If All About Lilly Chou Chou has a savior, it's art. Ichihara's passion for Lilly is endless, and his only connection with other people is through her. The director is critical of the cyber-community of Chou Chou followers, all disembodied voices, but acknowledges that this is the only way for these kids to understand themselves and communicate their feelings to others. The cinematography follows this love affair with the healing of art. Beautifully shot on DV, moving from the public to the intimate seamlessly, and capturing subtle moments of transcendence, it's a love-letter to filmmaking. And particularly the abilities of digital filmmaking, which is able to capture the processed, intimate, amateurish and technologically-filtered beauty that most First World children are used to.

The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949)

A B (+) movie

[7/10 · 9 April 2002]

A typical post-war psychological B noir, cheaply shot, a bit bloody and very much reliant upon a dark and complicated script. But that script is notably inventive, with the intelligent and egotistical Radek leading the satellite characters around in circles. Interestingly, it's his understanding of his victims' psychology (by and large male lust and fear of emasculation) that makes them do his work for him. It's of note that Radek is explained as a manic depressive, maybe one of the earlier filmic references to the disease, which is used to put the film's psychology and imagery into perspective.

On the poster, it lists the "city of Paris" as one of the stars. With the dizzying shots of the Tower, the crisscrossing roof tops, the tall bridges, the film comes across as true to it's European roots--in fact aesthetically closer to Berlin: Symphony of a City or Man with a Movie Camera in some parts as it is to Double Indemnity. There is no typical trapped, insular and indoor psychological landscape in The Man on the Eiffel Tower, but an expansive and modern one reminiscent of the formalists.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Rebuttal to littlesiddie

[9/10 · 16 March 2002]

First and foremost, I would say that the Royal Tenenbaums mocks hyper-successful urban hipsters more than it celebrates or attempts to appeal to them. I mean, look at these people; they're ultimately not successful, they haven't done much with their genius, and their money has kept them so emotionally sheltered that they are 30-year-old wounded and alienated children.

It's not a cruel indictment--there's little point in being nasty unless you're a Marxist. It's more of a modern half-parody like the Simpsons-we're morons, we've done some things wrong, but we're good people with ultimately typical problems (growing up, expectations, parents, sexuality, intellectual and emotional focus, loss). If the performances seemed strained, it was because these people were emotional midgets. And I also think that is why the music, scenery, location and wardrobe were all so ambiguous--the Tennenbaums were basically children living in a mess of experiences from the 70's, 80's, 90's, and 00's.

I don't think this is a postmodern attack on literature at all. I think the book metaphor was just to highlight the gap between their intellectual and emotional selves. That's why they all ultimately failed intellectually--their emotional selves had never been looked after. And I think Anderson is trying to say that that sort of hollow intellectualism, that a heart without a head, is useless. It is a documentation and reconciliation with a way that a lot of people live.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Just the best

[9/10 · 1 March 2002]

Indie, or quasi-indie, American cinema is just as concerned with underexplored places and feelings as French or Iranian cinema (don't listen to the critics, American cinema is fantastic and rough these days). The Royal Tenenbaums, sort of caught in time and place (what decade is it really? where are they really?) and between their "thought and expression," (lots of VU on the soundtrack) are prime examples of that American mystery.

Maybe the quest for auteurishness is self-conscious--it thematically and aesthetically fits together too well--and a bit distracting, but there are some fascinating, emotive things at work here. Some obvious symbolism, broken limbs, climbing up buildings, childish clothing, the book motif for people who don't know much about themselves, whatever, is still moving.

And the humor, well, who wants to take the pains of rich geniouses THAT seriously. They're not starving to death. They're intelligent, but very normal. Well, Wes Anderson's normal. Second city America normal. You know, like us, emotionally infantile and brilliant or the other way around. No inbetween.

And if you don't like it, I'll kick you in the gut.

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

post-war Germany's great romantic

[8/10 · 6 May 2001]

Like Fitzcarraldo, Herzog has a well-known passion for opera--he's been known to conduct on occasion and refers to music as the territory of "ecstatic truth." Film, too, has that potential, if it's released from the literal and the director concentrates on the importance of "great images." It's no surprise, then, that Herzog made Fitzcarraldo without a well-defined narrative goal. He just wanted to see if he could do it.

Filmmaking is a personal and social process for him, not a finished product. It's an extreme version of method acting. Like Fitzcarraldo's lifting of the boat, grand gestures go far for Herzog, if only to show the world that you're great and visionary enough to try. Most of his characters are done in by their obsessive drive (Fitzcarraldo's boat crashing into the rapids, Aguirre madly pacing about on his raft), but leave behind something beautiful. Like a boat being dragged up a mountain in Peru with ropes and pulleys or a gun depot going up like the 4th of July.

You can't give Herzog too much credit--he's been more careful not to be done in by his hubris than any of his characters were. In fact, he's capitalized on it, much the same way Cappola did after Apocalypse Now or Hopper did after Easy Rider. No doubt, the tales of his misadventures contribute as much to his films' popularity as the stories and images themselves, and he's been quick to market his persona with books, talks, and films about himself, the mad director.

But still, Herzog is a great romantic that was born of a time and place (Munich, 1942) with few romantics, which is its own great feat. See Fitzcarraldo for a little bit of that.

Jules and Jim (1962)

French machismo

[4/10 · 6 May 2001]

I don't understand why this film gains in popularity, and not infamy, as the years go by. Jules et Jim is all that is bad in French cinema. It's a deeply sentimental film, relying on the clichés of emotional and philosophical depth instead creating new pathways to them. Fuzzy lenses, grassy fields, dancing in the streets of Paris, love torn asunder by war. It's the stuff of The English Patient--all the tools of greatness and depth, but essentially lacking in insight. As Herzog would say, cinematic tourism.

Jules et Jim doesn't seem to comment in any real or important way upon monogamy, friendship, sexual difference, anything. Jules and Jim are indecisive, selfish protagonists in the great French existentialist tradition--when you don't know what to do with yourself, or find yourself somehow lacking, you have sex with the type of woman you want to be. Poor Jean Moreau is not a woman; she's a hurricane of potential existential and libidinal delights.

Jules and Jim are not passionate; they're sad and childish. Witness how they're so pacified by Moreau's rendition of the saccharine-sweet lullaby "Le Tourbillon."

Amy! (1979)

Avant-documentary

[7/10 · 11 April 2001]

Although credited exclusively here under feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, noted seiologist Peter Wollen was also instrumental in this strange anti-documentary.

Both Wollen and Mulvey had been involved in semiology and psychoanalytical film theory (two fields perhaps better at polemics than academic debate, although who am I to say that given their influence?) and incorporated a number of theories they had on upsetting the viewer, self-referential film-making, relativism and de-aestheticizing the female body into this film on aviatrix Amy Johnson. You're bombarded with seemingly incongruent methods of presentation. It's like a jigsaw puzzle that has been forced to fit together with the wrong pieces.

You won't learn much about Johnson-- Mulvey and Wollen's branch of academics was devoutly ahistorical--but you will see an interesting response to mainstream Hollywood film-making and voice of God documentary. And a great segment set to X-Ray Spex's "Identity."

It's interesting to see feminist psychoanalytic theory incorporated into film--painted mirrors, split selves, castration fears, stuff like that. Still, it's an activist film for academics. If you're really interested in feminist documentary, see Harlan County, USA or The Life and Times of Rosie the Rivetor.

Gun Crazy (1950)

Just about as good as it gets

[10/10 · 4 December 2000]

Manny Farber talked of termite art, films that were subtly, but distinctly unique and breathtaking. Gun Crazy is one of those films--all but ignored as a B movie, but idolized by those who see it (mainly the French, for some reason). Sure, it has the post-war women bashing that Noir often resorted to, but if you can look past all of the blame that Cummins' character receives, you can see one of the best doomed romances ever. A frenetic, crazed, strange and classic romance, where the characters had a real reciprocity and energy.

John Dall's (you're right, Levana, stiff) acting still is really charming for me, partly because of the silly, simple psyche his character is given. And Peggy Cummins, well, she's one of the most sexy women ever to play a circus performer on the big screen, and her raw, bad, gun-toting character really grabs onto you. It's hard not to look at Cummins and see this elemental force that John Dall really enjoys losing himself in. She's unstoppable in this film. The director once commented that he wanted Dall and Cummins to look like dogs in heat. Mission accomplished.

If you want some interesting commentary on the film, there's a documentary on Noir that talks a lot about the unconventional shooting of the film (most notably the first bank robbing scene) and a BFI classics book on it.

Cold Water (1994)

Right on, this one

[9/10 · 1 December 2000]

I really hadn't expected much of this movie when I saw it in Brooklyn last summer. But, as a coming of age story, it's one of the few ones that really hits home for me. Cold Water is just such a frustrated, restless film, neither condemning nor forgiving its self-involved children and inadequate parents. It's fair in that way, which is refreshing. I'm tired of hearing rich kids get a lot of breaks and tired of hearing the Richard Fords explain away their parenting mistakes.

Visually, it's not a terribly structured or naturalistic film, and maybe that's why it seems to be so right on. The frenetic energy and seeming meaninglessness of the individual shots really conveys the frustration that comes from having the faculties of an adult, but none of the powers. Those shots come together in these long, slow sequences . . . small town livin'. There's a seeming, but deceptive, plotlessness that drew a lot of recognition from me.

You shouldn't miss the party scene. Man, that brings back memories. Pure recklessness, and listening to CCR over and over and over.