Wish fulfilled, I suppose.

PRO:

Tange Sazen and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo (Sadao Yamanaka, 1934)
Yamanaka’s genius is in presenting the comedy and pathos of this story in the same contemplative vein. Without seeing it, I can easily imagine a remake stripping Tange’s struggle to tell Yasu his father has died of dark humor, for example, or overplaying the hilarity of Genzaburo’s deal made with Tange during a raucous swordfight. In fact, sans its few sops to convention—e.g. Tange refusing to walk an archer home, followed by—screen wipe—Tange walking him home—this would be every bit the masterpiece that Humanity and Paper Balloons is.

The Last 15 (Antonio Campos, 2007)
In a crappy mood prior to viewing, which never bodes well for filmmakers whose work I’m unfamiliar with; claustrophobic compositions cloying; sound design overemphatic. Somehow I loved it anyway: tonally and conceptually, Campos is a stunner, deriving a great deal of restraint from subtly varying acting styles, and totally willing to let material trickle in that undermines big ideas. Now I’m excited to see Afterschool.

The Wedding Night (King Vidor, 1935)
I don’t know if the device of characters using fiction to talk about real life can ever work for me. I suspect it’s because I was weaned on sit-coms, which use the “subtext” of the device as free reign for blunt exaggeration. Nevertheless, Helen Vinson, the actress assigned to do it, is amazing as a woman forced to talk about her own impending devastation from the distance of an outsider. And the ending of the film is amazing, suggesting that Vidor’s intelligence is visual above all else.

pro:

Reckless (Victor Fleming, 1935)
Good—never jaw-droppingly distinctive but Fleming certainly grasps the better material here. (Which feels a bit weird, like a screwball comedy that’s been hijacked by a self-loathing philosopher. And indeed, a character stops telling a joke to say, “I’m just philosophizing…”) William Powell’s confession scene is memorable, as is his restrained portrait of heartbreak.

Okuni to Gohei (Mikio Naruse, 1952)
Somewhere between very good and exceptional in the Naruse canon, with two appealingly subdued lead performances. (It’s hard to imagine any other sort, given the material, which requires that Okuni and Gohei be indebted and opposed to each other in a bevy of ways.) I was sort of put off by Tomonojo’s creepy persistence at first, but it makes sense considering Okuni is never quite on the level with the men in her life.

Better Things (Duane Hopkins, 2008)
Lots of people dislike this film, and I guess I can see why. Its visuals—mostly up-close, with a barrage of angles—are both elegant and kind of indefensible. Hopkins aestheticizes its dead and dying subjects, but he isn’t abrasive about it. I was tempted to call his sensibility Bresson meets Seidl before realizing those directors’ devout might scowl at a style so lacking in rigor. But Hopkins’s actors feel Bressonian to me, and the range of human interest smacks of Seidl. I’m almost certain Hopkins would have garnered more attention from the auteurist crowd if he had trimmed his shot list by about two-thirds, which is a shame, because it’s a pretty good film anyway. Whether looking at beautiful people with ugly parts or ugly people doing beautiful things, at least Hopkins is consistent.

Il Divo (Paolo Sorrentino, 2008)
I thought of Hunger a bit, here: not only because, as abrasive stylists, Sorrentino and Steve McQueen are anomalies in the art-film world, but also because they both take care to settle the hell down, mid-film, for an extended pro-Bazin moment. I didn’t care for McQueen’s movie at all, including that moment: the loud material begs for a quiet eye, and the Bobby-priest scene reveals a director to whom actors are little more than monotonously impassioned mouthpieces. But frenetic as Sorrentino is, he’s also sensitive to personality. I don’t know whether to attribute the success of Il Divo to Sorrentino or Toni Servillo, whose performance—pathetic yet dignified, mannered in the most effective way—deflates Hunger-esque problems because it renders Andreotti’s convictions inextricable from his weirdness.

Gross Misconduct (Atom Egoyan, 1993)
One of the ultimate examples of direction-over-writing, Egoyan’s biopic succeeds almost fully neither on performances, which are wooden, nor on dialogue, which is often hopelessly bad, but by emphases created by editing and camera movements. Egoyan’s camera is like the more consumer-friendly version of Zhang’s (see below), punctuating a dramatic moment by lingering on vast planes of empty space or a violent outburst with a quizzical pause.

mixed:

Desert Dream (Zhang Lu, 2007)
“Tough sit” characterized much of my first Zhang experience, even though individual shots were very striking. My fave: the one in which a mother heads coolly into a tent to remove her child, exits with the reluctant child, who begs the environmentalist tent-owner to let him stay, which causes the mother to sullenly head back into the tent. I also liked when the slave-owner asked the environmentalist to buy the mother and child, after which the environmentalist’s response actually appears harsh. If only this kind of marvelously complex power play were present into the majority of other takes, many of which are stunted in their alignment with the action for no apparent reason.

Nô (Robert Lepage, 1998)
Lepage is the sort of director one treasures for emphasizing things nobody else would bother with: the way the Patricia forces a smile and lowers her voice at the same time, for example, when she tries to convince Sophie she liked her play. And then there’s the lovely final take, in which Lepage is momentarily possessed by the spirit of Rohmer. But the visuals are generally too haphazard and the throughline too vague to make much of an impact.

Iri (Zhang Lu, 2008)
Based on the gorgeously nuanced opening, in which the significance of the Iri explosion is denied and confirmed in the same breath, I thought I’d have an easier time with this than Desert Dream. Alas, aside from several post-Dumont outbursts of sexual violence waiting in the wings, there’s little to imbue Zhang’s compositions—which often feel like a subdued version of Tsai—with substance. One commonality, I suppose, between this and the earlier film, is that Zhang wants us to carefully regard not only the connections between shots A and B but between, say, shots A and R. It’s easy to notice the camera sitting in the same corner of the same restaurant during different scenes placed an hour apart, and perhaps harder to divine why its placement is so important… to which I can merely shrug and admit I’d rather not watch films as if I’m preparing for a research paper.

Literature:

PRO:

No More Parades (Ford Madox Ford, 1925)
While Some Do Not… is written in a precisely observational mode reminiscent of the stoic way the series’ hero Tietjens presents himself—thus making Tietjens’s inner life, as well as the effects of his perverse discipline, tantalizingly enigmatic—the second novel in the series gets progressively manic, mirroring Tietjens’s war-time anxieties. But Ford has perfected the art of turning neurotic meandering into a game, deriving the most possible pleasure from thoughts bordering on indistinct. It also offers more supporting material than the first novel—thank god, if you happen to be saddled with a Vietnam-vet professor who identifies with the character and clings to his sentiments—to refute readings of Tietjens as the last honorable man in a corrupt world, e.g., during the long conversation with the general in which Tietjens’s practicality is directly and articulately challenged.

A Man Could Stand Up – (Ford Madox Ford, 1926)
Weird stuff going on: deadpan wit used to lionize a serious man; Valentine becoming, via the delirious loneliness of war, Tietjens’s great love, a sentimental refuge more than a person; Tietjens writing a sonnet in the midst of battle, and the soldier who loses an eye for him appreciating it. These novels elude shape, or perhaps I can’t grasp it.

pro:

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (Haruki Murakami, 2006)
I actually find Murakami more troublesome in short story form than in novels, because one of the great pleasures of the latter is the way incidents pile inexorably on one another, perplexing reader and characters alike. His tone is much more impressive than his worldview—often deliberately reductive—but the right tone goes a long way.