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Posts by Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical

Posts by Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical
Andy Jones  |  by www2.cinematical.com. All rights reserved. 28.05 | 10:25




With only three feature films, has already roused supersize portions of both praise and disdain.

I am firmly planted in the former c Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003), is the best American movie I've seen since the year 2000. It's only too easy to explain the latter camp: Americans have never been too fond of women in powerful positions, and because of her obvious connections her detractors believe that she doesn't deserve her position. To many, she's just "daddy's little girl," and is only allowed to play on the big boys' field because of his guidance and protection.


There are even rumors that Sofia's brother (her second unit director) actually directed her movies, which is ludicrous given that Roman's own directorial debut, CQ (2002), is nowhere near as good as Sofia's three films (which also includes last year's misunderstood ). Historically, women directors have had difficult times sustaining long careers in Hollywood. If they lose any money, they suffer the consequences, whereas men can spend and lose ten times as much without fearing for their jobs.


Even more difficult to explain and defend is that Coppola is not really a natural born storyteller like her father. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. It's a mistake to consider cinema as merely an agent for storytelling; it has so many other possibilities.

And, indeed, filmmakers like Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bunuel, Federico Fellini, Mario Bava, Monte Hellman, Robert Bresson, David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, F.W. Murnau, Hou Hsiao-hsien and many others are likewise not necessarily praised or beloved for their ability to tell a clear, concise story.

That skill is not required for one to be considered a great cinema artist.


"Never judge a book by its movie," said someone called J. W.

Eagan, who appears to be famous only for saying that one thing. But he (she?) is absolutely right.

It's a war that has been waged since the beginning of movies. Do movies steal the souls of books? Are books forever doomed to live in the shadows of their movies?

Do we "stay true" to the source material or do we invent new, cinematic ideas? Or worse, what happens to all that stuff that gets lost in translation from page to screen? After all, we're talking two entirely different art forms with different approaches; the only thing they have in common is a narrative flow: a start, middle and ending.



In 1984, Christopher Guest and company refined and co-opted the "mockumentary" genre, and for over 20 years others have tried and failed to copy it. Some forgettable examples include (1999), (2000) and (2006). Last year Sacha Baron Cohen finally did it with , but that's another story; if Guest's troupe stamped their handprints on the mockumentary, then that goes triple for the "mock-rockumentary.

" No one, not even Cohen, can crawl out from under the shadow of . At this point, it's like re-doing Citizen Kane.
For his directorial debut, American-born Hong Kong movie star decided to make a documentary about a terrible boy band, but rather than tread upon sacred Spinal Tap territory, he and three friends actually formed a terrible boy band, recorded music and went on tour to conjure up material for this film.

Of the four members, Wu, , and , none could dance and only one, Yin, could sing (he had a short-lived career as a pop star in Taiwan).


Thanks to the rise of digital video and the increase in box office, documentaries have become far more plentiful in recent years. In some ways that's a good thing; it means more worldly, educated moviegoers walking around.

But it's also a bad thing for anyone who has to see more than a half dozen over a year's time. You start to notice the exact same techniques employed: talking heads, archival clips, filmed photographs, perhaps a narrator, and perhaps -- if we're lucky -- some actual new motion picture footage exposed just for the project.
Public television (not to mention Humphrey Jennings and his World War II-era industrials) years ago defined the format and rhythms for documentaries, and most filmmakers slavishly follow them, even if it flies in the face of their subject matter.

I've seen documentaries on groundbreaking, and even indefinable artists such as John Cage and Syd Barrett filmed in exactly this same format. You'd think that the filmmakers would get inspired by their subjects and break out of the routine. Even more frustrating was the recent doc , which told the story of Ralph Nader, and used Ralph Nader as one of a series of talking heads -- in his own movie.

If the filmmakers had access to Nader, why not actually utilize him?


For all its troubles, Iran seems to have produced a good number of female filmmakers. One of the biggest inspirations for many of the New Wave directors was poet , who turned filmmaker with her extraordinary 1962 short film The House Is Black.

New Wave director Mohsen Makhmalbaf helped both his wife (The Day I Became a Woman) and daughter (The Apple, Blackboards) break into the business with great success. And , who appeared as "the driver" in Abbas Kiarostami's Ten (2002) made her directorial debut with 20 Fingers (2004). On the other end, we have , whose overwrought melodramas (Two Women, The Hidden Half) and broad comedies (Cease Fire) received extra attention when she was arrested over the content of her films and threatened with execution.

Many Western filmmakers and writers came to her defense, and the right to free expression prevailed in the end, but none of this actually means her films are any good.

For the most part these few Iranian women filmmakers have been accepted into the filmmaking community with little question. This, however, does not appear to be the case with the latest female director to emerge from Iran.

Hers is a familiar face onscreen; appeared in both Two Women and The Hidden Half. Karimi has said in interviews that she has always been more interested in directing than in acting, and after a couple of documentaries and an early feature, her latest, A Few Days Later..

. appeared at the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival.

Fifty years ago, the very first San Francisco International Film Festival showed 's uniquely personal, practically homemade , which was by then two years old.

The festival had scheduled its brand-new follow-up, Aparajito, but had to make a last-minute switch. The film was shown again in 1992 when Ray won the festival's prestigious award (also won by the likes of Akira Kurosawa himself, Michael Powell, Robert Bresson, Joseph L. Mankiewicz and many other greats).

And it was shown yet again in 1997 when local director (The Right Stuff, Henry June) chose it for the "Indelible Images" series and introduced the screening. That's when I saw the film for the first time. Now, to mark the occasion of the festival's 50th anniversary, what better film is there to show?


Some films take a while to sink in, and others hit big immediately and then age badly, but Pather Panchali (or, roughly translated, "Song of the Road") was an "instant classic" that still plays well to this day. It dropped like a bomb on the huge, rigid Indian film industry, which preferred -- and still prefers -- romances and musicals with decidedly non-realistic settings. Like the Neo-Realist classics from postwar Italy (Open City, Bicycle Thieves) and the late 1960s, early 1970s Hollywood films (Easy Rider, M*A*S*H), it brought to cinema a new kind of realism that audiences were thirsty for.

Certainly escapism has its place, but there's only so often, and so far, one can escape. At some point, one must face one's self. And if you recognize a little of yourself in Apu, then the film has done its job.


In an era when most movie cameras seem to be moving more, jerking and jumping around, obscuring what they're supposed to be capturing, 's camera grows ever more still, gazing boldly and steadily at a scene for so long that we get to know its every corner. In his 2004 masterpiece Goodbye Dragon Inn, I detected one, maybe two, moving shots. But in his latest film, , it doesn't even budge that much.


Tsai has never been one for telling linear, easily explained stories, but at least some of his earlier films had recognizable elements. In The River (1994), Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng) takes a job in a movie playing a corpse floating in the polluted Tanshui River and develops a mysterious and apparently incurable pain in his neck. In The Hole (1998), a virus has turned most of the population into human cockroaches, and a remaining human couple bonds when a hole opens up between their apartments.

In What Time Is It There? (2001), a watch salesman dreams about a girl he has only barely met as she travels to Paris (he watches The 400 Blows on video and she meets the real life Jean-Pierre Leaud). And in Goodbye Dragon Inn, several lonely people pass a rainy night in a dilapidated movie theater on the last night of its existence.


Posted Apr 23rd 2007 9:01AM by
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Taking potshots at people can seem fun in the moment, but regrettable later.

Especially when someone shoots back. For example, in choosing this list of the most overrated actors, I might at one time have chosen someone like Tobey Maguire, Mark Wahlberg or Ryan Gosling. At various points in the past, I was convinced that none of them could act a lick and they all proved me wrong.

I could also shoot fish in a barrel, taking aim at people who are already down, like Freddie Prinze Jr., Ben Affleck, Chris Tucker, Paul Walker or Ryan Reynolds. Or Jennifer Hudson, whose flash-in-the-pan Oscar win will probably prove to be a hilarious mistake.

History tends to sort things out into their proper places, which is why I ended up not choosing anyone from cinema's glorious past (I wrestled with Gary Cooper and Gregory Peck, but decided against them). So in choosing this final seven, I went with people who, at this moment, feel "overrated." They're all currently working, and each could use a serious career adjustment.


1.
Is there a more arrogant, conceited, pretentious actor alive? And why does no one ever call him on it?

I wrote a nasty review of House of Sand and Fog in 2003 and got volumes of angry e-mail from his fans and supporters, but it remains that Kinglsey can barely disguise his own smugness even while acting. The last straw came during the opening credits for the small scale "B" picture Lucky Number Slevin: "Sir Ben Kingsley." If he can't even loosen up for something that silly, then what good is he?

He is also a screen hog, overshadowing all his co-stars with his scenery-chewing. His one great achievement came in Schindler's List, in which he generously allowed the leads to shine, while he did marvelous things in his small, meek role. He needs more jobs like that.






Two buses roll down the streets of Tehran, bound for Azadi Stadium.

Packs of wild soccer fans hang out the windows like colorful streamers, shouting victory chants at the occupants of other, similar buses. On one bus, a concerned man searches for his daughter. On another bus, a lone figure sits quietly at the front.

She is clearly a girl, with a soft face and a cute, turned-up nose. But she has done her best to disguise her gender, wearing a cap with flaps down the back, baggy clothes, and face painted in Iran's colors. Several of the boys on the bus immediately see through her disguise.


The girl ( ) is on her way to see the big Iran vs. Bahrain game, a real-life qualifying match for the 2006 World Cup. The boys warn her that she'll never make it into the stadium, but she persists.

She pays exorbitant fees for tickets, and is almost immediately nabbed by a security guard. Thus begins 's Offside, a movie outraged by the ridiculous rules that keep women from attending live soccer matches in Iran. It has been pleasing audiences all over the world -- except in its native Iran where it has been banned.

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Keywords: International Film, San Francisco, New Wave, the Hidden, Ralph Nader, the Hidden Half, Film Festival, San Francisco International, International Film Festival, Francisco International Film
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