’s commemoration of film in 2006, I wanted to contribute something a little different from the usual top-10-movies-of-the-year fare: a “5 for a Day” of five memorable movie moments. My definition of “moments” is fairly broad: they include either lengthy sequences or simply one particularly memorable image or scene. These are the sequences or images that stayed with me even after I saw them in a theater months earlier, and even if they occured in films I wasn’t too crazy about.
“A Time for Love” from While the whole of Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s three-part anthology about love relationships across time is fascinating and even profound in its own formally spare yet ambitious way, the first 40-minute segment, “A Time for Love” — set in Kaohsiung in 1966 (during the director’s own youth) — is the most vivid and touching of the three. Hou characteristically emphasizes medium shots, long takes and slow pans in depicting the stirrings of love between a soldier (Chang Chen) and a young woman who works at a pool parlor (Shu Qi) — a quiet, awkwardly blossoming romance that eventually hits a speedbump when the woman leaves town to work at another pool parlor elsewhere, leading the desperate soldier to scour town after town for her just before he is about to go off to army duty. But, emotionally, “A Time for Love,” in its own spare, Ozu-like manner, beautifully expresses the kind of exquisite romantic yearning that is almost Wong Kar-Wai-like in its power.
You have to see all three segments — including the silent movie-like second segment, set in 1911 — to get the full measure of what Hou is trying to get at, but “A Time for Love” is a small romantic masterpiece in miniature. The Conquistador gets to the Tree of Life in The whole of Darren Aronofsky’s attempt at a grand folly didn’t add up to the sum of its hugely ambitious parts (but then, is there a cinematic folly in which this isn’t the case?).
However, the climax of the 16th-century plot thread — when the Conquistador (Hugh Jackman) of Izzi Creo’s fictional story kills the soldier guarding the Tree of Life and finally makes his triumphant way to the “promised land,” so to speak — is the film’s lone glorious moment. There may have been no more spiritually transcendant a movie image this year than the image of the Conquistador partaking in the bark of the Tree of Life in a mad rush of childlike astonishment; there was no more darkly resonant a moment in itself than the moment when flowers start growing out of the Conquistador and overtake his body — the arrogance of humanity’s eternal attempt to find the fountain of youth punished with a quietly Biblical fury. (If the film had ended there, I might have forgiven its occasionally laughable, if consistently sincere, mythmaking pretensions.
) José Yero looking on from a distance at Crockett and Isabella dancing hot-and-heavy in a nightclub in Granted, the whole spacey look of Dion Beebe’s voluptuous HD videography of Michael Mann’s anguished post-9/11 updating of his hit ‘80s TV series was marvelous (arguably the best thing about the movie, which I admire in hindsight but don’t quite love as much as some of the other ’s commemoration of film in 2006, I wanted to contribute something a little different from the usual top-10-movies-of-the-year fare: a “5 for a Day” of five memorable movie moments.
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