muvies

三峡好人

三峡好人, Sān Xiá hǎorén, "Three Gorges Good People", English title: Still Life.

Really liked this. Very slow, beautiful, fascinating, funny, touching. Some say boring and depressing, but I don't. When I watched it I was very sleep-deprived but I didn't fall asleep, though I noticed others around me dozing off. Nice music. Good subtitling job.

Linguistic note: it took me a long time to decipher the characters for the Chinese title. I'm an idiot, because three of them even I knew since they're among the 50 first characters you learn when studying Chinese. The one that had me stumped, 峡, has a mountain 山 in it, also an extremely common character. Let's see... "Three Mountain-something Good People"? The Chinese title of a movie about two people looking for loved ones in the setting of the Three Gorges Dam area? Nope, no idea what that mountain-character could mean. I guess I could try blaming simplified characters. The traditional form 峽 combines 山 and 夾, which a represents a person squeezed between two other people, and not coincidentally means "be wedged or inserted between." So this was a seriously guessable character, for once, but no, I had to go find the characters in non-image form on Wikipedia, then look the title up on the wonderful mdbg.net and zhongwen.com.

Anyway, this is a fine movie.

Idiocracy

I really want to see Idiocracy.

Release date in France: April 25. In the US, essentially never (e.g. Boston).

Das Leben der Anderen

It's nice to see movies in German. Even if they kind of suck. OK, that's too strong. This is an interesting movie. A huge critical and popular success. But it's sentimental and stereotypical. In some ways it's even worse than Goodbye Lenin, though it's a more polished, serious film.

One of the flaws is that it's set in the world of theater. What's good about theater is that people are attractive and passionate. The bad part is, well, theater. What a tedious, preening, narcissistic, irrelevant art form.

East Germany is a fascinating topic. It deserves even better film treatment.

Another recent (in France) German movie, Ping Pong, was also interesting, a first film, and well-reviewed. Unfortunately it was a bit long, and a bit exaggerated.

Also Sehnsucht was supposed to be good, but didn't make it to France.

Disclaimer: I love German, Germany, also Austria and Switzerland! I've been too chicken to see Haneke's movies because they sound too violent. I'd like to see some Herzog movies. My most satisfying recent experiences watching German productions (besides Zwartboek) have been with the TV series Ein Fall für Zwei, dubbed in French...

Even Dwarves Start Small

What I got out of Herzog's "Even Dwarfs Start Small":

- I learned that cockfighting is beautiful.
- For the first time in my life, I conceptualized a few of the realities of dwarf subcultures (and was often proven that I was actually pretty far off the mark).
- It made me realize that there are a few really wild places left in Europe.
- It taught me that chickens can become cannibalistic.
- It made me think intensely about Samuel Beckett, which I hadn't done in a while.
- It made me think about neurology.
- It made me think about acting, in new ways (acting is, ultimately, making choices about how you represent yourself to others).
- I learned something I didn't know: "The plural of the word dwarf was historically spelled dwarfs, but fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien used the plural dwarves, which has entered general usage. However, the older spelling is still actively used."

Apocalypto

Haven't seen it yet. But this funny review makes me want to:

The sentence following this is going to take me quite some time to write, because between every keystroke, there will be a three-minute pause while I clench my fists up to my temples and emit a long growl of resentment and rage.

It almost puts Mel Gibson into a kind of insane-genius league, not too far from the adventures of Werner Herzog. But it wasn't for hours after I had staggered dumbly out of the cinema that I realised which German director Gibson really was channelling - and again, this is hardly going to recommend his film to anyone. Apocalypto is like something by Leni Riefenstahl, both from her Nazi period (the prehistoric Mayan Nuremberg, the mad, declamatory leader) and from her later, primitivist-anthropological period of photographing Sudanese tribesmen.

By the way, I liked Braveheart, OK? It made me go to Scotland. Though I didn't see the Passion, because I was afraid I'd be grossed out by the blood.

Black Book

Yay! Verhoeven's back. In Dutch!

Reviews:

aVoir-aLire - Romain Le Vern

Paul Verhoeven signe un grand film lumineux et ténébreux qui sonde l'ambiguïté des bonnes intentions.

Première - Gaël Gohen

On est bien chez Verhoeven: une main dans le slip (...) l'autre dans les poubelles de l'histoire, le cinéaste triture les clichés du film de guerre et le politiquement correct avec une même furie.

Won't be in the US until March 2007