A list for Anna

Like an army of films rushing at you all at once. Frustrating to follow sometimes (best to just let it fall all over you), but the sheer strength of Kseniya Rappoport's performance pulls you through the film and her character's life. It's a stunning portrayal of love, fear, and determination.

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sitenoise at the movies: The Unknown Woman (La Sconosciuta) (2006)

Beautifully written, beautifully shot, beautifully acted, and bewildering

sitenoise at the movies: Spider Forest Review

Perfectly executed. One of the most well-crafted films I've ever seen. Dizzying animal terror. Swirling, whirling cameras and a soundtrack designed to induce nausea make watching this film a physical experience. Super punk. Not for everybody. I'm glad it went backward. Ends sweetly. Super sweet. Bravo.

The problem with this movie is it could have been written better. The hyper-expository monologues Claudia dishes out were so unrealistic I laughed. It's a sign of a director in trouble when he has to give lines to a character that can't be delivered organically for the sake of the audience. Those plot-getting-in-the-way-of-the-story lines polluted an otherwise poetic, dream like, and metaphorical film. I would never call this film "Lynchy" ... which is just shorthand for "I don't get it but I liked it anyway ... I think. Didn't I? Did you?"

Hence, the sudden remake. El Habitante incierto was a brilliantly conceived film that could have been executed better so the director takes a mulligan. That's cool. I look forward to it and hope he does a better job explaining Vera's sudden muteness upon being shot in the plot hole we all saw coming like an eighteen wheeler.

OK. She was shot in the mouth/vocal chords and it just took a couple days without food or water to get her voice back at film's end.

I give the first half a 9, the second half a 5. Let's call it a 7 and anxiously await the do-over.

It's a buddy cop comedy mystery thriller melodrama. Typically over-the-top Korean style done very very well. World of Silence peels off layer upon layer, uncovering about five film's worth of internal demons and other dramatic tragedies, but it ends, and it seems to end a few times, like a sportscaster screaming "No! No! I don't believe it! Don't ..." and then "Great shot!" when it goes in.

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sitenoise at the movies: World of Silence

Thoughtful K-comedy, slightly risqué, wins with wit, good acting, and a good (award winning) screenplay filled with surprises. There is adult humor in the presence of a child so delicacy is warranted. Props to young actress Woo Seo for taking it all in stride, reminding us that kids are usually hip to the things adults think they should be protected from. Hyo-jin Kong, as the frumpy high school teacher is surprisingly accomplished in her comic timing. The director seems aware of all the cheap ways to make us laugh but instead of utilizing them he steps back and winks at them. This is smart and funny ... not a goof-ball comedy even though it plays like one on the surface. NY Asian FilmFest 2009.

A thoroughly engaging film on the surface. The creative camera angles, the mostly gray/green color palette accentuating a sense of disease or decay, the original music and sound design, and the beauty of the actors add up to a sensuous ninety minute delight.

Charlene Choi is magnificent as the schizophrenic, sad and lonely Winnie.

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sitenoise at the movies: Diary (Mon seung)

It must be chauvinistic to suggest that a film about a young man accused of touching a young girl's hip and right buttock under her skirt on a crowded train doesn't sound like a compelling two and a half hour legal drama, but this film is compelling and impeccably done. Japan's 99.9% conviction rate is the star of this show and it's scary stuff.

A supernatural romance where the dead come back before their 49 days in limbo are up and bring appropriate living beings into their dreams. Lucky guy (Kyeong-ho Jeong) is torn between Min-sun Kim and Su-yeon Cha not knowing who is alive and who is dead, including himself. The soundtrack is a little too bold at times, but the cinematography an set locations are wonderful.

No surprise to learn director Xiaoshuai Wang studied painting before becoming a director. This is a marvelously composed film. The screenplay is brutal sharp with one large unnecessary gimmick toward the end. I'm glad this theme was done art-house and not commercial melodrama, which it could easily be. The four main performers are solid and compelling, with lots of shots of faces on bodies doing nothing but carrying burden within. And they all pull it off.

This is the highest grossing film of all time in China. Hard to believe, as it's not really a remarkable film, except for Shu Qi, she's remarkable. When she asks her date if he believes in love at first sight he responds "I loved the first sight of you!" It's a very pleasant film. Funny, slightly quirky, it's an intimate study of two people's vulnerability, and thoroughly Chinese. I'm sure some of the humor was lost on me due to the fact I don't speak Mandarin! And Ge You's Mandarin accent is as thick as syrup. He does a great job playing a forty-something guy who's made his lot in life selling zany inventions and now has a very specific set of criteria he's looking for in a mate to settle down with. This is a great 'date' movie.

Wow. Just wow. This is the most adorable cartoon I've ever seen. It's beautifully animated (by the master Hayao Miyazaki) and the two kids portrayed seem uncannily accurate. I highly recommend NOT watching the English dubbed version. Dubbing might seem like less of an issue with animation than with real people, but I saw a dual audio version and flipped back and forth and for some reason the English voices made it seem less magical. It's a simple story about a father and his two young daughters who move, and must adapt, to the country, but it's executed perfectly. You will feel happy after watching this movie. It's soothing, and as a friend says, it seems almost healing. I agree.

Only from Japan. This has a sensibility and sense of humor similar to ADRIFT IN TOKYO and FUNUKE, SHOW SOME LOVE, YOU LOSERS! Bizarro-land family dynamics. Things are said where the delivery and body language don't play at the same level of intensity as the words. Kyôko Koizumi plays this kind of role perfectly, similar to her character in ADRIFT. Hiromi Nagasaku also has a wonderful small role. The soundtrack is a little trite and annoying in parts as are the 360 degree camera swings but it's funny and intense with a spectacular ending.

A couple clean cut kids who don't have much bad happen to them struggle for identity anyway. They are extremely cute and the film is put together artfully; beautiful scenery, split screens, and lots of fades give the film a poetic rhythm. And there's tinkling piano too.

A surprising, illuminating, entertaining, enlightening, educational program. Michael Palin is perfect for this. He's an everyman with a sense of humor in some very foreign places.

Do-yeon Jeon is excellent in this film as the cheating wife. She reels you into her life to the point where you stop judging her. That's good actin'. There were a few inexplicable plot wonders, but who cares? The ending is abrupt and ambiguous, seems to happen a lot in Korean films, but not too frustrating. I was pleased to discover that this actress, Do-yeon Jeon, went on to receive best actress honors at the 2007 Cannes for her performance in SECRET SUNSHINE. She's very engaging.

I don't think I have a Natalie Portman obsession because I usually think of her as someone I don't like, but she is adorable in this movie as a . That guy from MTV or something is also quite charming.

This is just what a guy wants from a Japanese movie: bizarre humor, twisted family relationships, a little sexual deviance, beautiful women. Most guys will probably go for robo-babe Eriko Sato, who does a great job playing mean and self-centered, but it's Hiromi Nagasaku who shines in this film--a multiple award winning performance. Nagasaku plays the innocent, an outsider who has married into a crazy family and she is the only character any one should relate to (or pity). Check out her filmography, she always elevates a film. This one is stylized decadence with a sweet filling. Not for mainstream lovers.

Sadness is seldom more unrelenting than on ONE FINE SPRING DAY, a film with no plot and very little dialog. I was riveted by the intelligence and realism depicted on screen, knowing that the film plays differently depending on the viewers own experience. Masterfully done!

Forget the polemics, and forget the Valerie Plame inspiration. The problem with 'message' movies is that you can get sidetracked by the message and miss out on everything that's good about a film. This is a great ensemble thriller with questionable gender politics. KB, MD, and Vera Farmiga are fantastic. Brilliantly provocative ending.

sitenoise at the movies: Nothing But the Truth

Do-yeon Jeon fans, add this one to your queue. She plays both mother and daughter in this touching film about a woman who goes back in time and befriends her mother and witnesses the courtship between her mother and father. Great location, cinematography and acting.

This film belongs to Jung-woo Ha. He is engaging and funny, one of those guys who knows how to spin even the worst of interactions into something that makes him seem likeable. Do-yeon Jeon, in heavy eye make-up, pretty much pouts her way through this Yoon-ki Lee film--which means it's low-key, slice of life, simple story stuff.

This is one of those very slow and dreamy ones but the story is interesting enough to stay engaged and Lunmei Kwai is wonderful. She receives cassette tapes of nature and community sounds from a guy who thinks he is sending them to the girl who broke his heart. He is capturing sounds from all the places he had hoped to visit with her before she broke up with him. Lunmei Kwai sets out to visit all the places the sounds come from with the outside hope of maybe meeting the guy who is sending them. Very bittersweet ending that's neither happy nor sad but wide open to possibility.

Ricardo Darín's peculiarly charactered performance is executed with such subtlety and nuance that it's hard to believe he's acting. The sound design and original score are beautiful, and so perfect for the film they seem to be growing out of it rather than being imposed upon it. This is one of those rare films where the ride is so engaging that its hard to imagine anything but disappointment merely because it does end (the ambiguity of the ending notwithstanding).

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sitenoise at the movies: The Aura

We can talk all day long about the genius or pretension of director Hsiao-hsien Hou, and the magnificent cinematography of Pin Bing Lee, the soothing chill-room techno soundtrack, but in the end this is a Shu Qi vehicle and the film rests on her shoulders. If you like her, you'll like the film. If you don't, you probably won't. There's no plot. We just follow her around for a couple hours. I think she does a great job.

Very well acted by attractive actors. The tentativeness of the sexual reawakening has as much to do with the personalities involved as it does with gender ... and it's not padded by making the guy an asshole like is done in many western films about lesbian love. The direction and cinematography are more ambitious than they need to be for this simple love story. It's got politics too, as the younger pair exist amidst the Tiananmen square riots and massacre. Well done.

If you like a good mind-fuck ... and who doesn't? ... a little kinky sex and a lot of tension, go here. Trying to figure out the layout of this apartment was mind boggling. It was supposed to be.

sitenoise at the movies: Next Door (Naboer)

Interesting direction to this semi-arty French film. Loved the frustrating ending and all the scenes in the rehearsal studio. Keep your eyes out for tough, natural beauty Catherine de Léan. Wears Boots.

sitenoise at the movies: La Capture

This would be five stars off the charts awesome if all it was about was Tilda Swinton's acting, but it's not. The story starts off pretty well and sets the agenda for making you accept that things won't always make sense or go according to plan but then the second half veers off into a new film of its own. It tries to stay connected to the first half but just unravels to the point that it's hard to stay on board. The film could have been edited by a third to make a tight thriller but then we'd miss out on much of Swinton's great performance. I loved every minute of her but the plot comes up short (by being too long!) and the ending fails miserably.

Post modern disgust at its finest and most endearing. Hal Hartley at his best. Nobody acts in this film, they just deliver lines. Lead character carries around a hand grenade at all times ... "just in case."

As far as hand-held camera things go, I really enjoyed this one. The supernatural aspects of the film are on a different level than the gritty realism of the rest of the movie, and there are a couple ridiculous scenes thrown in for plot, but all in all a fun, fast ride. It's waaay better than the remake "Quaratine", which throws in a few extra scenes for plot that are waaay more ridiculous.

A gripping thriller with a bewildered sense of humor made possible by the kick-ass performance of Yun-seok Kim. Highly recommended. There are a handful of groan out loud plot moves in The Chaser, but so what. There are also more than a handful of plot moves this film doesn't do, moves that most people will be guessing it will do, that it more than makes up for it. This is a film I know I'll watch again just for the performance of it. The plot won't matter. It's that good.

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sitenoise at the movies: The Chaser

Fans of ERASERHEAD should like this. It's gross and disturbing beyond the call of duty, yet ultimately very amusing. The funniest scene in the film involves necrophilia gone bad. Not for the lactose intolerant!

The dialog in this film is so quick-witted I could barely keep up with the subtitles. It's very funny, and very punk. It's dark and violent and nihilistic and truly bizarre. Each member of the band must have a handicap. One has a really bad lisp and lives on the ceiling (see poster)-(only in his own home, tho), another has a debilitating mother complex and a stiff right arm, another is deaf and addicted to crack, and the drummer's handicap is that he can't play drums ... but he's writing the story. The soundtrack is magnificent and the acting is all spot on. If you like punk, you gotta see this.

sitenoise at the movies: Ex Drummer

Suffering Surrealism. It's Art-Horror. Not the gory kind, this is one of those "You-might-as-well-already-be-dead" nightmares with spooky feral children. The story's not remarkable but it's photographed extremely well. It's dirty beautiful creepy. Du Welz makes the screen drip atmosphere. Great performances build to magnificent climax. One of the best in recent memory. Yep, Great Ending.

Emmanuel Schotté as Pharaon is mesmerizing. He lets you see inside his head. His walk is modern dance. I can't imagine him being anything else but this character. All three of the male actors were masters of the facial expression. So subtle. The sound design is spectacular. I noticed it as much as anything else.

Many of the scenes which seemed to have nothing to do with anything more than revealing character were captivating. There is one scene of Pharaon riding his bicycle several miles that takes a few minutes of real time. He gets to a random place, stops, looks back and breathes heavily for a few moments. Then he rides back the other way. Fade to black, next scene.

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sitenoise at the movies: Humanité

See this before the one with Naomi Watts.

White short shorts, no socks and deck shoes, white gloves and an ivy-league education. That's creepy. Him and his friend Bif are fucking with your life. This is one of the creepiest films I've seen.

All the pretentious talk about "making a film that sends a clear message about violence, and the audience's view and involvement with violence on film" is BULLSHIT.

A masterpiece picture captures what the music scene was like in 1981. This is when (some) punks started wearing white shirts and skinny black ties and the art crowd got dirty and they all mixed together creating mutual influence. You can tell a musical scene is healthy when you film 34 bands from all over the map and every performance kicks total ass. Even the Go-Go's are good here. If you think Devo was just some weirdo quirk band, they rock harder than almost any one in this film. The 2 minute Gang of Four performance will leave you speechless. And so, probably, will The Cramps, although it might be Klaus Nomi who steals the show.

Mark Wahlberg should have won an oscar for his performance in this film. And the writer of the screenplay for giving him the part. And the cinematographer for the unique look of the film.

A magnificent character study of a woman who has retreated.

"Because it is only when we make love that you understand that I'm gentle."

That's all the character development I need. This is an ambitious film about the stalled maturation of an idealistic but troubled young woman flanked by the Tiananmen Square protests, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the handover of Hong Kong to mainland China. The direction is a little chaotic but it reflects the nature of the film. The soundtrack is impeccably chosen and the film is ultimately very sad. I was glued to this 140 minute masterpiece.

More: sitenoise at the movies: Summer Palace

This is one of the funniest albeit confounding movies I have seen in a long long time. This is a happy film with a happy ending. A connection is finally made between young and old, the pop group's work is done and the most suicidal of the teenagers, the one whose boyfriend surprises her by landing on her when he jumps off a building in a suicide attempt, but doesn't die until he's had time to discuss the irony of the event with her, (tell me that isn't pure comic genius).

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sitenoise at the movies: Suicide Club

Interesting to see this story of the Chinese immigrant experience and a marriage of convenience (sister comes for medical care and needs a marriage in order to stay) played out in ... not USA. All the characters are wonderfully executed and the film is full of respect for the culture. The plot points unfold a little thinly as they convey the passage of time, but it didn't devalue the overall. Nice film.

Zhou Xun is one of the most compelling actresses working today and she grabs you right from the start in this film. She plays a young woman whose parents, intellectuals from the previous generation, have abandoned her for the most part, shuffling her off to live in near poverty with her granny and aunt. Then she's accepted into university, raising her class status momentarily, but falls in love with a truck driver, gets pregnant and her life unravels. There's subtle and deep social commentary embracing this extremely sad tale of family, love, and one woman's struggle to survive in modern China. I was very surprised by the script.

A perfectly cast film by David Mamet.

The Red Shoes uses every Asian Horror motif we've seen many times before. Most notably the young, attractive, professional female lead who's got a cheating husband and a daughter that goes freaky. Its plot is constructed around some 'thing' that connects the natural and supernatural worlds via the kid. There's a hip, interested, and understanding 'other man' hanging around, helping when he can. The infamous J-Horror Goth Chick even makes appearances. If all this is a deal breaker with regards to your viewing pleasure, skip this one. If it's not, then add it your queue immediately.

The red shoes, usually referred to in the singular in this film, are really more of a fuchsia pink set of come find me pumps. The "Red" is surely meant to symbolize blood, as in "blood on your hands", but I digress.

It's the production values of The Red Shoes that make it worthwhile. This is a good looking film whose creators clearly cared about doing it well. The cinematography is creepy and creative, accentuating the sense of dread with distortions, colors and inspired scene locations. The soundtrack is understated and almost peaceful--it's not used to create tension where none exists. And the script, typical of Asian Horror, is loose enough for the viewer to choose from a number of interpretive styles: is it a dream, a figment of some dreadful imagination, or is everybody a different aspect of a multiple personalty?

The Red Shoes doesn't break any new ground but if you are a fan of the genre this is a professionally put together package.

One of the reasons the Pang Brothers' films are so engaging is they have an excellent grasp of sound design and good taste in music. Both this film and Diary (an Oxide solo effort) reached operatic proportions at times. They are not content to hire up a few jingles and play them over and over throughout the film in some sort of branding effort. Each scene has its own soundtrack. Often times the soundtrack seems to lead the scene. I hesitate to call it music video-like because that smacks of demotion, but it is like a music video in the sense that the music is as important as the video.

Re-cycle reminded me of Terry Gilliam's work, but not as desolate or oppressive. It's a beautiful film made edgy by the Pang Brothers tendency to genre hop, mixing in horror as well as melodrama. I think most would agree the Pangs are quite skilled and creative in the visual department but seem to lack a command of the story telling part. I say, "so what". I'm happy to be fully engaged while the film is playing and my only after thoughts be fond memories. I don't always need to have a deep philosophical discussion of what a film was trying to say.

There may be better ruminations on the basic idea of this film, and it's a good one--exploring a place where all that's forgotten or abandoned congregates--(Spider Forest comes to mind), but few will be as engaging as this multimedia masterpiece. I had no idea this film was going to take off into fantasy land. And stay there for the duration of the film. It came as quite the surprise, and kept surprising me.

I really liked Angelica Lee's man-shoes, and ... is there anything more adorable on this planet than an eight year old Chinese girl? Big round of applause for Yaqi Zeng!

This is an uncomfortably good film but wraps up too nicely in the end. Vera Farmiga is fantastic, hard to tell what she might do from one second to the next she's so edgy weird. And the world of paraplegic wannabes is a bizarre eye-opener. For the Cronenberg's Crash-challenged.

Loved the pace, acting, direction, but the story seemed inadequate to justify all the tension leading up to its revelation. I'll watch it again just for Kate Dickie's tough performance and ignore the story.

In many ways this is a natural, and equal, followup to "Memories of Murder". It's every bit the 'caper' film that one was, and, although slightly more somber in tone, the film keeps unraveling in directions you don't expect making it much more a plot driven movie than a character study. Kim Hye-ja is magnificent as the mother. There is a scene in this film where she tells the family of the victim her son didn't do it and her eyes are so electrically charged it made me jump back from the screen. This film fires on all cylinders. The direction, cinematography, script, and acting are all grade A. It's one of those films where each of the secondary characters steals the show for a brief period. Bong Joon-ho does a remarkable job of populating the world of the film with real people and manages to give them depth and development in a very short period of time. It's too bad that because this film is ostensibly about an old lady it must be considered a 'smaller' film in his oeuvre. It's not. It is every bit as brilliant, and as large, as "Memories of Murder".

sitenoise at the movies: Mother (Madeo)