July 31: Summer Palace/Yihe yuan (2006 – Ye Lou)

★★★

I thoroughly enjoyed this film despite its flaws.  My experience in watching it was like that of reading a long, difficult but good book: there’s a reward at the end and I’m glad to have read it, though I’m not sure I’d read it again.

I liked many aspects of the film.  Summer Palace mostly follows the life of Yu Hong, a student from the country who goes to Beijing for university study. Her emotional complexity is the center of most of the action of the movie and, unfortunately, one of the aspects of the film that I found tedious as she whips repeatedly from love to anger to frustration to dissatisfaction and back. 

But as she becomes more intense and expressive emotionally, so does the political expression of students in the Chinese capital intensify, and the parts of the film that create this parallel are amazing achievements.  You see the parallel when several scenes of her tempestuous emotional life are followed by scenes of the liberty and excitement of the students’ burgeoning activism.  Ye Lou eventually intercuts between these areas of the story more and more frequently, orchestrating all of this tumult to the penultimate conflict in Tiananmen Square.  And as if that weren’t impressive enough, the Tiananmen conflict itself is a study of effective editing and staging that even Eisenstein would appreciate.  This is one of the great parts of the movie.

The conflict over, Ye Lou segues into yet another powerful set of edited sequences showing the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the surging of freedom in Europe, contrasting that with the Chinese assertion of authority in Hong Kong.  And these scenes parallel the emotion range of the characters in the movie, too: freedom and expressiveness in Berlin with curbed passion in China.  It is these combined elements that I like so much in Summer Palace – the parallels between political freedom and emotional life that are not causal in the least but still echo each other.  The fluidity of the editing throughout this film is marvelous, and the parallel freedoms are engaging.

My major qualm here is the character of Yu Hong and the way Ye Lou presents her.  We don’t see any side of her except her moodiness, anger and pouting, so we don’t know where that comes from or how these characteristics affect her outside her relationship with her boyfriends.  As we see her, in fact, she’s not very likeable.  And Ye Lou bears a lot of that responsibility since he did the screenplay as well as directed the movie.  Worse still, in his direction, we spend long periods as Yu Hong argues, has sex, and pouts, a repetition that slows the film while adding little content.  Perhaps this repetitive emotional tumult has something to do with Chinese culture or film context (melodrama?), but it was the weakest side of the film for me, and I wish we’d lost about a half hour of it.

Summer Palace follows Ye Lou’s other film, Suzhou River, and confirms him as an art movie director.  In this film, he casts a broad net.  There’s the great parallel between political and emotional freedom, the social history of a generation that came of age in Tiananmen and the economic opening that followed, the uniformly great editing and the story of several individuals.  If the film fails on the latter, its success in its other aspects make it a very worthwhile experience.

July 30: Cowboys and Aliens (2011 -- Jon Favreau)

★

This is easily the worst movie I’ve seen all summer.  The film has all the elements of the western – Indians, canyons, the loner, the landowner, the bad guys – and uses them to no effect.   You don’t really like or dislike anyone because they’re all just ciphers, nor are you surprised by their typical western actions.  Speed ahead to the aliens, and there are no surprises there either.  Think of the beasts in War of the Worlds.  This movie is more a show-and-tell than an engaging film.  It’s like everyone in the movie is modeling their characters instead of inhabiting them, but that’s because the characters are shallow clichés rather than characters.

The sci-fi/western mash-up is a fine idea, but Favreau misses here what J.J. Abrams gets right in Super 8.  Like Favreau, Abrams quotes extensively from a list of pre-existing elements (Spielberg’s cinema vocabulary), but Abrams does more than quote: he uses the elements to create a film with freshness, life and engagement.  Fabreau, instead, just marches out a type like the loner and marches him off as if to show him but not to use him to engage the audience.

I like the idea of mixing different period and genres, even mixing alternate versions of historical periods.  That can work in films like the recent Sherlock Holmes, and the upcoming Three Musketeers looks to have potential.  But a film like that has have more than show-and-tell going for it, or it will turn into a list of predictable characters doing predictable things, like Cowboys and Aliens. 

July 23: Super 8 (2011 – J.J. Abrams)

★★★

This movie is just a delight --  my second wonderful summer film bauble after Midnight in Paris.  It’s not aiming to give great insight or to move or to thrill.  Super 8 is just a fun, smart homage to Steven Spielberg’s film-making without cynicism or irony.

And that's its value and attraction.  I’ve tried on my own to sit down and make a list of the components of Spielberg’s film style, and I’ve pretty much always failed to find a uniqueness that would distinguish him from others.  I’ve always sensed it and felt I could recognize a Spielberg film, but I couldn’t tell someone what I was responding to.

 

Abrams, though, nails it.  His lens flairs, the long train wreck, his focus on children and (especially) their relationship to their fathers, the pure kid and the flawed adult, the strong foregrounding, the misunderstood alien, the mysterious government……yeah, ALL these are Spielberg.  This film is the best description of a Spielberg style that I’ve seen, and while I totally enjoyed the film, I also came away with a vision of Spielberg’s work that I hadn’t had before I saw it.

So Super 8 is a pretty good way to spend a couple of summer hours.  It foregrounds Spielberg's style while making it work on the viewer.  What a pleasure.....now back to Close Encounters.

July 22: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 2 (2011 -- David Yates)

★★★★

I read that Yates has done the last four Harry Potters, and I think he’s got the knack.  Though Deathly Hallows, Pt. 1 dragged a bit, this one did not disappoint.  At all.  I enjoyed the story a lot and, for once, I felt invested in Harry.  I went into the film with a vague foreboding, not having read the book and not having heard how it ended -- just all the usual chatter about “appropriate” and “mature.”  With that in mind, I wasn’t a half hour into the film before I felt the weight of doom on Harry, and I had an awful dread going all the way through.  It was the first time, in any of the films, that I was pulling for the boy and worried about what would happen to him.

Add that engagement to the impressive cinematography, and you have a worthwhile summer movie, and a kids movie to boot.  From the menace to Harry and his buds to the impressive action sequences like the attack on the shield over Hogwarts and the magicians’ battles, I felt altogether in the hands of a good story teller.  I was engaged; I felt threatened.  And I enjoyed the experience...in IMAX 3D.   I think the magician’s battles even break some new ground in fantasy film since they were so impressive despite the relatively restrained acting called for. 

The film isn’t perfect.  I got some answers to questions from Pt. 1 -- like who helped the kids escape from the department of magic – but I found some of the dramatic reversals to be  distracting.  I’m sure a lot of that had to happen because fans would want to know the ultimate fates of the characters, and this being the last in a series, I think Yates can be forgiven for packing in some info that might not be integral to what happens in this particular movie.  In any case, these digressions hardly take away from the pleasure of watching the culmination of the series and the vague bittersweet of the ending, which reminded me of how I always feel at the end of Peter Pan, with its continuing faith but also its sense of loss.


So I join the crowd in expressing my appreciation for this series-ending film.

July 18: In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger (2004 -- Jessica Yu)

★★★★

A worthwhile movie, both for the style of the documentary as well as for the subject matter.  Henry Darger was a fascinating guy – introvert, anti-social, hurt and inspired in the way a Howard Finster was.  I kept thinking of Finster as I watched this film.  Darger grew up achingly poor in the early 20^th century and experienced institutional life as well as military service in that era.  Probably due to his experience with Catholic charity, his Catholicism was important to him, too.


What makes Darger worth a documentary is the way he transformed his life into original, engaging art.  For his 15,000-page Realms of the Unreal, he created a universe in which the Vivian Girls are trying to free the enslaved children of the Glandeco empire.  The documentary suggests Darger draws in a lot of his personal experience as the Glandeco and Angelinian empires clash; characters have names of people he knew and experiences he had.  And he seems to identify with the girls (who had penises!) as much as with characters like General Darger.

Yu points out correspondences in Darger’s life and art by juxtaposing readings from his autobiography with excerpts from his epic.  This technique works to great effect because neither source is completely reliable, and we’re left to listen to the information and weigh it as we will.  We don’t get Darger presented to us; we understand him, each according to our individual resonances in his words.  This is a very effective way to present the man and his work.  The eyewitnesses who knew Darger contribute nothing determinate to our understanding of him because, to a person, they say they didn’t know him.  His identity emerges from our encounter with his work in this film.

Darger’s paintings seem to glow and shimmer with action with the Vivian Girls sometimes triumphant and sometimes not, often protected by chimeral  fantasy beasts.  Yu has chosen to give a stiff animation to some of Darger’s work, an animation that doesn’t go far beyond what the artist himself put on paper.  It’s an odd choice, not one that was especially necessary from my perspective.  But it doesn’t detract, and this documentary leaves you thinking about its unique subject and the way he created art for days afterwards.

July 16: Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011 -- Jennifer Yuh)

★★★

This is an entertaining  movie that manages to work out a very American theme using very Asian imagery.  Jennifer Yuh has a very deft touch here, satirizing kung fu film style while putting some heart into the characters, at least into Po.  Or maybe it’s that pandas, even animated ones, are just too cute.

I think the animation here helps you get sympathize with the characters.  Somebody has figured out that eyes are expressive, and you can watch the whole film just focusing on the characters’ eyes and how they reinforce what’s happening.  All the characters have active eyes.  And their body language is helpful, too, as the characters lean in when talking or take an upright, rigid stance for confrontation.  Or slump when they’re sad.  There’s a lot of attention to body language in the film.

There’s a nice message in the character arc of Po, too, one that might even be a little beyond some kids – you should know your past, but your life isn’t determined by it.  Your life is what you make of it. Po succeeds in going beyond his past and grows into maturity and success; it’s the tragedy of Shen that he can’t make this transition and broods endlessly into defeat.  This theme doesn’t strike me as very traditional, East Asian since the cultures from that area tend to value family background.  Instead, this idea has validity here in the US with our stress on individualism.  In fact, the theme strikes me as an essential American one. 

But you’d have to watch closely to see Kung Fu Panda 2 as so profoundly an American film because the movie is beautiful interpretation of Asian imagery and color.  I loved seeing the cityscapes, the streets, the clothes and the natural imagery.  And the style of the film goes from Asian kung fu movies in the funny-but-compelling chase scenes to Asian shadow puppet theater in the flashbacks.  It’s almost worth seeing the movie for the visuals alone.

July 15: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 1 (2010 -- David Yates)

★★★

With the last of the Harry Potter movies just coming out and all the summary appreciations of the series in the press, I realized I wanted to see the last one. Seeing Deathly Hallows 2 implied seeing Deathly Hallows 1, so I watched it.There is good to appreciate here. 

The mood is tremendous – dark, dangerous, foreboding. A lot of the atmosphere comes from dangerous creatures of J. K. Rowling’s imagination, creatures like the Death Eaters and Voldemort that we’ve come to know in the earlier movies, and a lot of the atmosphere comes from the direction of Peter Yates, with his dark pallet and growling sound engineering. The movie quickly sets up its tone by opening with the good guys out of power. It’s a dark world out there.

But the script doesn’t hold its own afterwards. Though evil is in overt control of the world, we’re left with scene after scene of Harry and Hermione sitting around a campsite angry at, wishing for, dealing with, or disappointed at Ron Weasley. Scene after scene. And the deus ex machinae of the movie are the house elves who, at least twice, have to drop in to get the plot moving. The elves have no other function in this film and only appear when Hallows 1 needs a way to finally move the story. The movie creaks though overly long dead zones and then suddenly zips through unmotivated action, so there is a certain lack at the center of the film.

My disappointed ambivalence here sums up my general response to the Harry Potter series. It’s not only that I’m turning into a crusty old man -- I liked the Lord of the Rings trilogy a lot, and it’s recent. Maybe it’s the franchise feeling I get in a Potter movie, like eating at Olive Garden instead of some local, authentic Italian place owned by an individual. Maybe the problem is that this series has so much to do with childhood and developmental psychology, a subject that has less appeal to me in film than other themes like myth and heroism.

But there’s no denying that a generation has grown up loving this series and that people around the world enjoy it.  And I certainly won’t miss seeing the last one in a theater  either.

July 10: Badlands (1973 -- Terrence Malick)

★★★★★

July 2: Beginners (2010 -- Mike Mills)

 ★★★