2005 Film List - Page 7

Edwin Pereyra · 01-24-2006, 12:58 AM

Quote:

Goodbye Dragon Inn - 0 (zero)

Worst movie I've ever seen...This isn't a film.

See, Jason? I'm not the only one who didn't like this movie!

~Edwin

Brook K · 01-24-2006, 12:11 PM

Yes it is Adam. I didn't care for it either but I could point you to a number of carefully thought out, positive reviews, J. Hoberman's Village Voice review being one of the best of these. Tsai made the film he wanted to make with specific aesthetic and thematic purposes for doing so. You or Edwin or I may not like this particular work, but he is no different from any other director with a clearly definable stylistic bent. He has the right to make whatever film he wants to make and we have the right to watch or not to watch.

I would also point out that Tsai probably made nothing beyond whatever his director's fee was for the film. The distributor/investors get the proceeds paid for foreign rights. Tsai has enough of a following that any film he made would be picked up in a similar manner. He didn't need to make a specific kind of film just so it would get released in other countries. I'm sure he could have made a martial arts or gangster film and had a far better shot at dough if such was his intention.

According to IMDB it grossed $33,000 in the US and only had 2 prints in circulation. Wellspring probably lost money on releasing this here. It won "The Golden Horse" for best Taiwanese film at the Taiwan film awards so I think it is safe to say that it had a far greater degree of acceptance in Taiwan than it ever did here.

Film can be anything within the imagination of human expression. Your attitude strikes me as terribly close-minded for a film fan passionate enough about the form to spend considerable amounts of money in studying it.

Not that it really matters, but for housekeeping purposes/thread rules, Goodbye Dragon Inn is a 2004 film.

Adam_S · 01-24-2006, 12:30 PM

well, yes you're right, it is a film I suppose, but I also know when I'm being exploited, and I know that there are asian filmmakers out there who guarantee making another film by producing crap right now but know that there feces will win enough praise in the west to get them more films made.

Although this is not true of him, it's sort of like Kim Ki-Duk, there are a lot of Koreans who don't consider his films to be representative of Korean cinema (Deepa Mehta of India is another example) rather, he's making films specifically for a western audience and what they expect to see from asian cinema. It's not orientalism per-se but its an extension of it, a self-orientalizing, if you will.

Hou Hsiao Hsien makes similar boring films but he usually has a point. I don't find anything worthwhile in this film at all, and I find it disingenous and ridiculous as an example of art-house filmmaking.

And I remember seeing this in LA art house theatres this last summer, so I thought it was 2005.

Adam

Brook K · 01-24-2006, 01:06 PM

Certainly, but you could find people who will say David Lynch or Woody Allen or Wes Anderson or whoever, isn't representative of American cinema and are making films for an insulated art house crowd.

I know what you are getting at as I've heard similar arguments about Ki-Duk and other filmmakers, and the Iranian Cinema is probably the worst offender of this, yet Goodbye Dragon Inn is not one of these films. Just as with Hou's films, GDI has specific Taiwanese contexts that may fly past the Western viewer. The film revolves around a screening of King Hu's Dragon Inn, the first film Hu made in Taiwan after leaving the Shaw Bros. Studio in HK. Hoberman's review goes into the historical reasons and theme that Tsai makes in specifically choosing this film to be the "film within a film" in his movie.

I've never seen Dragon Inn, these things were meaningless to me as I unsucessfully fought falling asleep during this movie, and yet, they wouldn't necessarily fly by a knowledgeable Taiwanese viewer. There are other cultural aspects, such as the real location of the film in an oldstyle dilapidated cinema that might resonate with Taiwanese viewers just as a film like Darabonts The Majestic or Grease or some other nostalgia-trip US movie might resonate with Americans.

I understand what you're saying, GDI just isn't one of "those" kinds of movies. I would put it more of a piece with Hou's Good Men, Good Women and Goodbye South, Goodbye where some understanding of the Taiwanese historical and cultural contexts existing within the film are almost essential to appreciating it. It's probably at the opposite end of the spectrum you are describing.

Edwin Pereyra · 01-28-2006, 04:49 PM

Flightplan - Producer Brian Grazer is up to his old tricks again. After passing off the revisionist and whitewashing that A Beautiful Mind was, he serves up another film, this time with a bullet-ridden plot.

(out of four)

~Edwin

Seth Paxton · 01-30-2006, 01:04 AM

Quote:

Certainly, but you could find people who will say David Lynch or Woody Allen or Wes Anderson or whoever, isn't representative of American cinema and are making films for an insulated art house crowd.

That's the first thing I thought of and was going to add. One of the things the middle stages of film theory study has opened up to me is that "production film" as a business or for a pop audience target or whatever is still a section of art. It is simply hyper-reflexive of the culture it appeals to.

We call this stuff hack work usually, such as a Fantastic Four or Dukes of Hazzard. Silly to speak of them in the same breath as Eiseinstein, and yet not. It is a style and genre, the Hollywood pop-spectacle and it has it's own identifiable traits, both in the production side of it (application of the budget, choice of stars vs actors, advertising, etc) and in the film content itself.

I'm not calling such films "good", but clearly we also can see that what makes those films "bad", the slavish manner in which they toe the genre line, also makes for bad arthouse, asian, queer, blaxploitation, or whatever type of cinema under discussion.

The fault isn't that these films are what they are, and in that regard this means that its not wrong for a filmmaker to appeal to an audience more than his own aethetics any more than it is wrong for Clint to win out in the final gun battle of a Leone film.

I haven't seen GDI to address the specifics here, just that I don't think it's intrinsically wrong to "give em what they want" vs "being true to yourself/culture." It's just a different genre.

It's fine that you don't like that genre, the Americanized Asian film by an Asian filmmaker. I'll leave it to you and Brook to decide if it fits that genre or not since you definitely aren't generating my interest in seeing it.

Seth Paxton · 01-30-2006, 01:48 AM

Now 3 adds to my list

The aforementioned
Fantastic Four
4.5 of 10
There are elements here, especially in the general plotline, that are very strong. And Chiklis is strong as Ben Grimm.

Where the film lacks most of all is in the detailed writing of scenes, usually filled with weak dialog, and then bad acting from some of the primary characters. I think Alba was pretty bad most of the time, only getting it right occassionally, as was Gruffudd as Reed. Chris Evans was a pretty good casting choice however.

I also think that another big weakness was Tim Story's direction. It has no life, no artfullness to it. Very plain presentation which fits with the very plain writing of scenes.

A film is only as good as the people who make it. This appears to be a film that is great only in treatment form and deserved to have better or more approriate talent applied to it in order to make a great film from it.

Capote
10 of 10
So much has been said of Hoffman that it has overshadowed how good this film is overall. The supporting cast is outstanding as well and meets the challenge of Hoffman's effort.

But the film is also so beautifully shot, so thoughtfully arranged to tell the story of this incident and what it tells us about who Capote was, that it has to be a major player for Best Pix.

It's also one of the best scripts I've seen this year. The few times it jumps forward and seems to leave gaps of important info behind, it then goes on to fill in those holes in the section it jumped too. Capote stays behind and is obsessed with the criminals seemingly out of nowhere, but it is the scenes with them after that which flesh out what it was that drew him to these characters and what his full motivation is.

The film takes a clear stand that this event made and broke Capote at the same time, and every aspect of the production focuses perfectly on making that point.

My favorite of the year so far.

Munich
9.5 of 10
The film is incredible most of the time. Where it lacks is a slow start (despite the compelling opening content) and then a stumbling, dragging finish as SS decides where he wants to end it up. At times in the middle he falls back into very Spielbergian things like a tracking shot at the wrong time or a plot point made a bit too obviously, but this is rare.

Mostly the 90% in the middle is finely honed and unflinching power in the hands of a master filmmaker paired with a great cast. Actions scenes retain the dynamic power of Raiders or SPRyan, and yet are more disturbing and than anything in SPR.

He is more willing to shock than ever before and does so many times over. Gore, nudity, and character behavior that becomes rather questionable. He condems violence by Jews as strongly as he condemned violence on Jews in Schindler's List.

He comes close to matching his best work (SL, Jaws, Raiders, CE3K, SPR, ET) but not quite.

Adam_S · 01-30-2006, 03:17 AM

I've not seen enough Lynch to comment, but I'd say Anderson's last film played more to the cult of Anderson than it stood on it's own merits.

Seth, this is what Goodbye Dragon Inn is, (bear in mind it's 80 minutes long)

About 20-25 minutes of a crippled girl walking around the depths of the theatre in long static takes. She finds out there is no projectionist to zero reaction (oooooooohhhhhhhhhh symbolic). This contains the one 'cool' shot of the movie when her face is illuminated by the light coming through the holes in the screen.

About fifty minutes of a kid moving from seat to seat and trying to pick up a guy, any guy in the theatre (or being annoyed by patrons). This is not as interesting as it sounds because mainly he stares at a person for a long time. Long static shot. This contains pretty much the only dialogue in the film

four minutes of three guys standing at urinals and apparently either masturbating or standing there for the fun of it (a four minute piss would have to be a record). Or they're so repressed they can't communicate their gayness to each other and so just stand next to each other in the john. This actually generates a few laughs at the ridiculousness of it.

Five minute static shot of the theatre at the end. Nothing happens in this shot.

About two minutes of the film Dragon Inn--this is the only interesting part of the movie.

----
On the Other hand, although Hou's Good Men Good Women was of a similar style it actually had substance, story, character and quality. I'd like to eventually see it again, though I was not crazy about the film it was richly textured and finely made and I felt I missed a great deal on the first viewing.

with Goodbye Dragon Inn I just felt abused.

Edwin Pereyra · 01-30-2006, 09:41 AM

Saraband - A worthy film, if not populated with very familiar themes about deep rooted hatred and lost love. Ingmar Bergman’s self-proclaimed last film, which looks more like a stage play, may not be his most memorable film but its strength comes from the complexity of emotions brought on by a very talented cast.

(out of four)

As a side note, Jonathan Rosenbaum needs some lucidity in his ratings system. While his 2 stars for Saraband was not that generous, it still made and placed higher in his Top 15 list (after ties) than the better reviewed 3-star Broken Flowers.

~Edwin