In the first shot of this film, the camera moves slowly down a cross. The hand nailed to it is not connected to a body but ends abruptly in a severed arm, dangling and swaying in the wind. A grotesque wartime atrocity? No – it’s the remains of a bombed chapel which is now in the no-man’s-land between trenches. The woman weeping at the bottom of the cross only exists from the waist down. It’s a powerful opening, and although you don’t know it at the time, it prefigures much of what will happen in the film. The disfigurement of a hand. The suggestion of violent death, but the absence of a corpse. The hope for a resurrection.
Read More “A Very Long Engagement”

I thoroughly enjoyed this. It had much hotness – Gael Garcia Bernal smouldering in drag, Fele Martinez’s auteur-with-eyeliner aura, and all the priests in their fitting black surplices! – and it spun a great yarn. Any attempt to summarise the hows and whys of this by anyone who isn’t Almodovar will probably make the movie out to be little better than Wild Things with foreign film cred, so I won’t try. Although I suppose it may annoy people who prefer their disbelief unsuspended, I think its surprises are artful and well-orchestrated, and don’t cross that “Oh, COME ON!” line in the sands of credibility.

I seem to have enjoyed this film less than many other people have. Set-pieces depicting the dogmatic preacher father, sex-researcher garden parties where they all talked about sex, and the closeminded colleague determined to hinder Kinsey felt very contrived. I also found the graphic montages of maps and faces they used to evoke the researchers’ interviews conducted across America rather pedestrian, though if they were (for some reason I am unaware of) trying to recreate the feel of a 70s documentary then I guess they succeeded.

Nevertheless, it was a good film in other respects – I thought Laura Linney was great, there was one seriously laugh-out-loud moment (I won’t spoil it for you, you’ll know it when it comes), and while it gave due recognition to the importance of Kinsey’s work, it also didn’t shy away from acknowledging that untrammelled sexual liberation can sometimes really fuck things up.

Apart from Javier Bardem’s impressive performance, I found parts of this film a little heavy-handed.
Read More “The Sea Inside”

(An entry I half-wrote a while back and have now completed.)

I like to think that I possess enough maturity, intellect and aesthetic sensibilities to appreciate films that other people find challenging. I’m able to sit through films with slow-moving or even barely-existent plots, I’m not put off by films with content that may offend or anger, and I’m usually ready to let good acting from just one member of the cast save an otherwise unredeemable film experience.

But even by these standards, Shall We Dance was a real struggle.

I’m not actually going to talk about Shall We Dance, though; unlike other movies which have failed to impress me, it’s too forgettable even to bother excoriating. It’s just that Pei Ee and I had a long tradition of watching dance movies together to maintain, and we wanted to ogle Richard Gere. I just hope Alec will some day find it in himself to forgive Pei Ee’s husband for suggesting that we make it into a couples outing.

But anyway, the following entries will be scattered notes (not reviews per se, those require actual focus and knowledge) on some slightly better films I’ve watched in the last month or so, mostly just so I can remember I’ve watched them.