http://filmeyeballsbrain.wordpress.com/2008/12/31/lee-chang-dong-oasis-2002/

or

http://tinyurl.com/9b9dw6

http://filmeyeballsbrain.wordpress.com/2008/12/30/prachya-pinkaew-the-protector-2005/

http://filmeyeballsbrain.wordpress.com/2008/12/29/john-woo-red-cliff-part-1-2008/

Too long to quote, so here it is:

http://filmeyeballsbrain.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/chuck-patton-dead-space-downfall-2008/

Too long to quote here, so:

http://filmeyeballsbrain.wordpress.com/2008/11/28/marc-forster-quantum-of-solace-2008/

http://filmeyeballsbrain.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/bryan-bertino-the-strangers-2008/#more-348

Too long to quote here, so:

http://filmeyeballsbrain.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/paul-ws-anderson-death-race-2008/

About 20 minutes into the annoying Boarding Gate, I was wishing Olivier Assayas had made something like Hal Hartley’s Fay Grim instead. The two films really aren’t all that dissimilar, working within the form and generally limited grammar of the crime / thriller genre. (Assayas did tell the audience, before the film started, that he wanted to make a B-movie with a “French independent movie budget”. I’m sure the French have different conceptions of what a B-movie is like, though.) All the right elements are intact in Assayas’ film - the gun in the handbag, international airports, the shadowy company that traffics in vague semi-legalities, the package of drugs hidden in the furniture, a chase that involves scurrying through the warrens of a restaurant’s kitchen - and, most important, “a woman in trouble”, as David Lynch would put it. (The said girl in peril comes in the form of a disappointingly greasy-looking Asia Argento, who looks sleep-deprived for most of the film.)

But while Hartley (and Assayas’ fellow countryman Godard) understood the inherent narrative silliness of the genre, Assayas overcooks Boarding Gate, immersing it in a queasy sordidness that fools the audience into thinking that there’s a grander, more serious undercurrent behind its vacuity, that there’s something larger at stake. There isn’t. And if the sleaze was indeed the point, it misses its mark; it’s not even enjoyable sleaze. (Some guy was talking angrily with another in the Pacific Film Archives bathroom after the movie, shouting, “Abel Ferrara makes ten of these films and nobody gives a shit!”)

I had high hopes for the second half of the film, when Argento’s character slips bloodily from the sweaty clutches of a fleshy Michael Madsen (in the sort of role that Mickey Rourke would have played twenty years ago) and ends up lost and disoriented in Hong Kong, but no such luck; Boarding Gate remains a cold and humorless genre exercise. (It’s even more disappointing considering the fact that the last time I saw Assayas in the flesh was for a Q&A session after his magnificent Irma Vep. Plus he had Maggie Cheung standing next to him. I remember very little about the Q&A, actually, except my thoughts at the time: OH MY GOD I’M BREATHING THE SAME AIR AS MAGGIE CHEUNG.)

Actually I take “humorless” back: the one funny moment in the film comes when Kim Gordon makes a cameo appearance, stomping angrily into the movie and barking orders in Cantonese. But if you didn’t recognize Kim Gordon, or didn’t know who she was—oh well.

It’s something of a paradox to state that Daniel Day-Lewis’ towering, fiery oil derrick of a performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is both the best and worst thing about this film. His acting, as oilman Daniel Plainview, is amazing, both subtly nuanced and overpowering—so much of the latter, really, that it tends to swallow the entire epic whole. Plainview is also impenetrably amoral, a man of few sympathies, and consequently the viewer has none in return for his character. It’s a tough hook to hang an entire movie on, but the film succeeds despite of it.

We see Daniel Plainview first as a gold and silver prospector (and not a very successful one) in a nearly wordless 20-minute opening sequence. Toting along his cherubic adopted son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), Plainview begins to buy up land, practically for pennies, from under unknowing farmers’ feet. It’s not a pleasant sight, and it is testimony to the power of Anderson’s movie that we find ourselves cheering, at least in the first half, for this robber baron. By 1911 Plainview has become one of the most successful oilmen in the region, though (in a crucial distinction) significantly small fry in relation to the big oil companies.

Plainview is approached by Paul Sunday (played by an excellent Paul Dano), who offers not oil, but information: his family’s farm in Little Boston, California, is floating on an “ocean of oil”, and would he be interested in scoping it out? Father and son, pretending to hunt for quail, arrive at the Sunday ranch and find not only oil seeping from the ground, but Paul’s twin brother Eli Sunday (also played by Dano), a young, charismatic preacher and faith healer, against whom Plainview wrestles for Little Boston’s soul. (Full confession: when my friend Eloise and I saw this the other night, we completely missed the point about the twin brother.)

It’s clear early on in the film that Plainview and Sunday’s different brands of hucksterism run on parallel railroad tracks. But Anderson seems to lack the confidence in his audience to appreciate what little subtleties there are in this presentation and chooses to bludgeon us with this obviousness. The abrupt tonal shift in the last twenty minutes, as Plainview descends into Charles Foster Kane madness, simply seems different from what came before; let’s just say that “There Will Be Blood” isn’t just the title, but a promise as well.

There’s little in Anderson’s previous work that suggests the heft of There Will Be Blood, unless you count the Old Testament metaphors made flesh in Magnolia, or the scams in Hard Eight, or Tom Cruise’s penis-evangelist in Magnolia. The movie is beautifully photographed, lingering over the fires of hell spurting uncontrollably from the earth, or the sere, rocky ground out of which such black bounty must be forced (and on which Jonny Greenwood’s Ligeti-like score falls like rain). It’s the visual antithesis, in more ways than one, to Days of Heaven.

This will be the film that Anderson will probably be most remembered for—for its epic breadth; the conflict between God and Mammon, or of fathers and sons; the invocation of Welles, Polanski, and Huston, or of West and Sinclair; the way it has Great American Movie written all over it. But if you ask me for a favorite Anderson film, I wouldn’t hesitate to name the brilliant but flawed Magnolia; despite its stylistic cleverness (and “clever” isn’t necessarily a compliment), glib spirituality, and full-on ripoff of / homage to Short Cuts, there was at least something questing, something more vitally human, about Magnolia and its ruined characters. It’s certainly more alive than the cold, dead heart in Daniel Plainview.

Richard Wong’s exhilarating movie Colma: The Musical (2006) is set in a town south of San Francisco most famous for its cemeteries and the fact that it has more dead residents than there are alive. Colma’s writer and actor, the ridiculously talented H.P. Mendoza, who plays Rodel, gets a lot of mileage from this central metaphor. The suburban deadness that infects the characters - fresh high school graduates with nary a clue about what to do with themselves - is only a little more vital than the graveyards all around them.

Colma revolves around the lives of three characters: an aspiring actor working “the highest-paying shit job” he can find at the mall, an aspiring writer thrown out of his house by his homophobic father, and a woman—well, it’s not really clear what she does, but as the emotional center of the film, the lovely Maribel (L.A. Renigen) does have the best monologue (and taste in interiors, for that matter).

What elevates this from your run-of-the-mill comedy is the fact that it’s a musical, perhaps the most cinematic of forms, the combination of its general grounding in reality - in the case of Colma: The Musical, the enervating flatness of suburbia - and the unreal compulsion to burst into song. This unaccustomed exteriorization of the characters’ emotions, erupting into the narrative, is part of the technique; the viewer is always aware that she or he is watching a movie. But Colma is also quite conscious, and not just in a mocking way, of the absurdity of the genre. (The digs at regional musical theater, for instance, are particularly funny.) The mawkish, sometimes unbearable honesty that accompanies teen angst is lovingly recontextualized here.

“We are so mature for our age,” Billy (Jake Moreno) sings to himself after kissing his brand new girlfriend-to-be for the first time. It’s something of a joke in the context of the movie: a kind of late-adolescent inflated sense of self, made funnier by the emotional immaturity constantly on display. One has the growing awareness that the way they torment each other, sometimes affectionately (or, in some cases, rail against the shallowness around them), is proof of a couple of things: 1) that there really isn’t much of anything else to do in the burbs anyway, and 2) that it reflects their chafing at the bit at the lot that the suburban deities have dealt them.

Colma: The Musical shows Mendoza to be a prodigious wit, both profanely funny and incisively smart, if a little too reliant on a synthesizer, probably recorded in a basement. (This may indeed have been the case.) Lyrically, the easiest comparison that comes to mind is Ben Folds. The writing, in any case, is sharp and all too real, from the stern immigrant father to the cluelessly hilarious way Renigen says the N-word with too much relish. It’s hard to pick a favorite scene: the eight-minute uninterrupted camera shot orchestrated by Wong at a drunken college party (ostensibly, a bunch of SF State hipsters), the cheerfully vicious sing-along in a bar, the unexpectedly poignant dance sequence in a cemetery, or even the goofy montage that introduces the movie.

Yes, it’s a first film, and it looks like one, and if my mention of that fact makes it sound like a disclaimer, it’s not. A weaker comedy would have cast “a lovable pack of misfits” - or if this were a drama, a group of Abercrombie & Fitch models - so it’s quite refreshing to see normal-looking people in this movie. Sometimes they’re not entirely lovable, sometimes they sing off-key, but I’d take this over any new Hollywood musical any day.

(If I do have one minor quibble, it’s the way the screenplay takes liberties with the geography. Sure, it’s fine to pass off The Bitter End or Java On Ocean as being in Colma - though that’s not necessarily implied in the film - but Serramonte Mall and Westmoor High and all those fogged-out little boxes are in Daly fuckin’ City! Plus the cast should have fought to have their real butts on the DVD cover.)