Ludwig (1973, Luchino Visconti)

Quest Status: 753 / 1000

TSPDT Rank #975

I haven't seen most of Luchino Visconti's movies for close to ten years, when I was still in the midst of my initial obsession with film. In those days, I devoured movies morning, noon and night - often using a portable DVD player to fill every waking minute of time with movies. Regrettably, legendary Visconti masterpieces like The Leopard and Death By Venice are among the ones that I remember watching on that device for the first and only time. So when I come to a movie like Ludwig, it feels like I'm coming to Visconti with a blank slate to fill with new impressions (even though there are a few of his movies that I've digested properly).

 

 

Ludwig starts out as a sane movie about an eccentric and somewhat childlike king, and over the course of four hours, slides slowly into increasingly colorful and sprawling excess. This mirrors the journey of its subject: the "Mad King" Ludwig II of Bavaria. At first, his exploits consist mainly of spending huge sums on his patronage of Richard Wagner, who staged Tristan and Isolde for the first time on Ludwig's dime. As the film progresses, however, Ludwig starts building castles with underground ponds and swan boats, while also opting for illicit homosexual affairs with male aids rather than marrying and continuing the royal lineage. 

An Italian-German co-production with an international cast (who spoke in English and had their lines dubbed in Italian after the fact), Ludwig was initially cut down to a less decadent length and sanitized for mass consumption, but it really needed to be four hours long in order to properly convey the king's slow descent into madness. What it didn't need were the occasional faux-documentary asides where ministers from Ludwig's government talk candidly about their disapproval (or, occasionally, approval) of the monarch's ruling style. It may have seemed like a fashionable idea at the time, but the rest of the film is more than able to convey these ideas on its own.

--- 247 films remaining ---

 

NOTE

This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.

Memories of Murder (2003, Bong Joon-ho)

Quest Status: 752 / 1000

TSPDT Rank #692

Memories of Murder is not your typical true crime serial-killer thriller. It follows the police investigation of a real-life serial killer in a rural Korean farming town, but it lacks suspense, or any clues to lead the characters on their "inevitable" path to find the killer. In fact, it's practically impossible to categorize. However, it does succeed as an enigmatic mystery that gets in your head and stays there much longer than the 132 minute running time.

 

A lot of this has to do with Bong Joon-ho's unconventional approach to tone and character development. The first half of the movie is often more of a goofy cop buddy comedy than a thriller, with inept sidekicks Song Kang-ho (the father in Bong's recent Oscar-winner Parasite) and Kim Roi-ha trading wisecracks and beating suspects into confessions, when they're not butting horns with the seasoned new recruit from Seoul (the brooding Kim Sang-kyung).

 

 

But as the film unfolds, layer upon layer of uncertainty is added to the investigation, and the dynamics between the characters begin to subtly shift. There are moments of dark humor, frustration, creeping dead, and inertia - while the truth seems to drift farther and farther out of reach. It's a classic case of "the more you think you know, the less you actually do." One of the thing that makes the film so unsettling is that while the characters' unpredictable behavioral shifts make them seem human and relatable, these shifts also make it impossible to know who they really are. Everyone seems vulnerable and transparent, both the police and the suspects, but are they really? Can we ever really know for sure who's guilty and innocent? These are the types of questions that Bong Joon-ho asks in this film, even though even he knows that the answers are just blowin' in the wind. Or, in this case, in the rain.

--- 248 films remaining ---

 

NOTE

This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.

Kagemusha (1980, Akira Kurosawa)

Quest Status: 751 / 1000

TSPDT Rank #544

It's been awhile since I've seen an Akira Kurosawa film for the first time. I guess the last one was Sanjuro a couple years back. Kagemusha has a few shades of that film in it, with a plot involving a lowly drifter becoming involved in the upper echelons of feudal society. There are also hints of Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, and other Kurosawa classics. But the consensus on Kagemusha seems to be that it pales in comparison to Kurosawa's earlier work.

Those who say this are forgetting one important thing though: this is Akira Kurosawa we're talking about here. It's impossible to compare Kagemusha to his earlier films. The use of vivid color cinematography - relatively new to Kurosawa's work at the time - gives the film a painterly style, foreshadowing the impressionistic qualities of later films like Akira Kurosawa's Dreams. Gone are the visceral, tactile battle scenes of Seven Samurai. Instead, we have a three-hour historical epic which is largely about resisting the urge to fight in an attempt to hold territory. When the film's climactic battle scene finally comes, the character's fates are already decided. There is the build-up to a fight, and then the aftermath. The viewer is never caught in the crossfire, which might have something to do with why the film doesn't get as much praise as some of Kurosawa's classics from the 1950s and '60s.

There's a resigned pessimism to Kagemusha that sets it apart from those earlier movies. Being Kurosawa's reintroduction to the world after a painful period of depression which left him mostly inactive for most of the 1970s, this film about a double living in the shadow of the man he is charged with impersonating feels deeply personal. Kurosawa almost certainly felt the pressure of living up to the Japanese public's memory of his past self, as well as the new audience which the names of executive producers George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola brought to the film. Kagemusha might not impress Star Wars fans, but it is a work of elegiac grandeur, signaling the return of a master throwing himself into his art as if it were the last film of his life.

 

--- 249 films remaining ---

 

NOTE

This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.

A Brighter Summer Day (1991, Edward Yang)

Quest Status: 750 / 1000

TSPDT Rank #124

I've been watching a lot of long films recently, so I was a little wary of A Brighter Summer Day's four-hour length. I'm sure that distributors were afraid of the same thing when they neglected to give this film appropriate distribution back in 1991. But make no mistake, if you're still on the fence about watching this film, don't be. It's the rare instance of a film that I instantly know on first viewing is a MASTERPIECE.

It's hard to put the beauty of A Brighter Summer Day into words. Yes, the cinematography is staggering. Every shot in this film, even the simple ones, are exquisite works of art. They convey a poignant sense of time and place, not to mention humanity. And what's it about? Well, the Chinese title alludes to a real-life murder that occurred in 1961 Taipei. It's a teen drama that deals with romance in the awkward and overly serious way that teenagers do. It's a family story that covers the relationships between husband and wife, father and son, brother and sister, and even neighbors and friends without a moment of heavy-handedness. It's a warm, breezy epic with occasional bursts of violence that could rival any Martin Scorsese gangster film. In other words, it's pretty hard to categorize. Which is why A Brighter Summer Day, even after Criterion's shimmering HD restoration, will forever remain in the domain of cinephiles who don't need their movies neatly packaged and labeled.

P.S. I'm 75% finished with the quest now!

 

--- 250 films remaining ---

 

NOTE

This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.

Opening Night (1977, John Cassavetes)

Quest Status: 749 / 1000

TSPDT Rank #463

Many of John Cassavetes' films focus on relationships coming to a head, often with explosive improvised fights between couples or friends. Opening Night is one of his first films to focus in specifically on a single character, Gena Rowland's frighteningly unhinged theater star Myrtle Gordon. Cassavetes himself plays a smaller (but pivotal) role as one of Gordon's fellow actors, with whom Myrtle shares a scene that she feels is particularly humiliating, giving the two actors' past romantic relationship. Ben Gazzara and Joan Blondell both also have meaty roles which entail butting heads with Rowlands in almost every scene they're in.

These relationships are not the main focus though. Myrtle has far worse problems, mainly provoked by the death of an obsessive fan after a show, but also because she has to grapple with aging and failed romance in the play - two issues that she doesn't know how to express on stage. But to say that Opening Night is about the pressures of being an aging actress is like describing A Woman Under the Influence as a film about mental illness. Cassavetes doesn't so much probe his subjects as he does slit them open with a jagged hunting knife and let them bleed out for the audience to see. Myrtle's alcoholic meltdowns verge on the schizophrenic, but the people around her hope against hope that these inner demons will eventually produce a great performance - resulting in a baffling grand finale that holds a mirror up to reality in a way that's pure Cassavetes.

--- 251 films remaining ---

 

NOTE

This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.

Amores Perros (2000, Alejandro G. Iñárritu)

Quest Status: 748 / 1000

TSPDT Rank #835

I avoided watching this movie for a long time, mainly because I knew it involved dogfighting. This was definitely a valid concern. It may be true that no animals were harmed during the making of the film, but the simulation is convincing as hell. This was a more harrowing watch than Salo for me. Even putting the animal cruelty aside, there's just as much human cruelty, and scenes of a dog trapped in a dark hole with rats, making for one of the most stressful viewing experiences I've had in a long time. So view with caution...

That being said, this movie initially seems like it's going to be a Mexican Pulp Fiction with graphic scenes of simulated dogfighting thrown in for added grittiness, but this impression starts to fade after the first hour. The film has a complicated structure, with three main stories that bleed into each other at various points and one major point of intersection between them. Despite the fact that these stories intersect, the characters don't really end up interacting with each other like the ones in Pulp Fiction. It's more about comparing people from different social classes and exposing the undercurrent of violence running through Mexican culture as a whole. It's an explosive film, not to mention that it was Alejandro González Iñárritu's debut, creating enough of a splash to catapult him out of Mexico and into Hollywood.

--- 252 films remaining ---

 

NOTE

This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.

La Ciénaga (2001, Lucrecia Martel)

Quest Status: 747 / 1000

TSPDT Rank #615

Director Lucrecia Martel said in an interview about this film, her debut feature, that she wanted the viewer to feel uncomfortable from the start, and to always be unsure what was going to happen next. Well, mission accomplished. La Ciénaga starts with a highly stylized and unsettling opening sequence, with a group of middle-aged drunks lounging around a pool and drinking heavily, dragging their chairs loudly over concrete tiles while gunshots sound in the nearby mountains. This surreal opening provides the set-up for an accident that introduces us to an extended family with more than its fair share of issues - mostly hinted at - but child neglect, alcoholism, incest, mental illness, and racism are all fair game in this free-floating tale of festering familial decay.

The title is the name of the town where the film takes place, a thinly-veiled take on Martel's hometown of Salta. This name, which translates as "The Swamp," is a fitting metaphor for both the family seen in the film and Martel's narrative style. Everything we see in the film is only the scummy surface of a larger swamp. It could be a metaphor for degenerate upper-class families like this one, or for Argentine society as a whole. No matter how you look at it, everything in this film is putrid and rotting. There's not a likeable character in sight, but it is a beautiful film in its own unflinching way.

--- 253 films remaining ---

 

NOTE

This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.

Taipei Story (1985, Edward Yang)

Quest Status: 746 / 1000

TSPDT Rank #861

The only other Edward Yang film I'd seen before was Yi Yi, and that was years ago, so today I felt like I was making a fresh start with Edward Yang - one of the legendary masters of the New Taiwanese Cinema movement that started in the '80s. After decades of martial law, Taiwan was moving into a new era, and that included film as well. Watching Taipei Story, it seems like Edward Yang (and star/writer Hou Hsiao-Hsien) were trying to create the polar opposite of Hong Kong's loud, violent and commercial cinema.

 

 

Taipei Story is quiet and understated to the extreme. Even when characters are angry, it's conveyed as briefly as possible - a slap to the face, a few sharp words, a slamming door. Then they go their separate ways, arguing in tense whispers when they finally reconvene. Many directors in many different countries have portrayed the difficulties of being caught in the middle of a generation gap, but Yang captures the unique emotional dilemmas and social changes of this particular moment with a deep sadness that creeps up behind and sinks its teeth in until you find yourself sinking down with the characters.

--- 254 films remaining ---

 

NOTE

This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.