brendanstengelsblog
Jul 3rd, 2010

Another Lonely Hitman (2005)

While the somber and meditative record modern yakuza fog is not new to me, I hadn’t seen director Rokuro Mochizuki’s entries into the genre. Made notable by the likes of Takeshi ‘Beat’ Kitano (Sonatine), Takashi Miike (Ley Lines), and Takashi Ishii (Gonin), Rokuro Mochizuki’s Another Lonely Hitman (1995) bears all the emotional tones one expects of a unripe sea gangster picture while having a definite characteristic voice and tag from it’s director.

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Tachibana (Ryo Ishibashi- Audition, The Grudge) does his duty for his clan. After numbing himself with heroin, he impassively performs a hit on the leader of a rival gang and accepts the jail time (10 years) that he is sentenced. But, upon his release, he is a different man in a different (under)world. While he has achieved the status of a respected old timer for his actions, they also proved to be futile- while incarcerated his gang is still in the shadow of larger groups and his much anticipated monetary reward for his hit is kept from him for “safe keeping.”

He is assigned a young underling, Yuji (Tatsuo Yamada), and basically told that the old way of doing things just doesn’t work anymore. Once, you could defend yourself physically when transgressed; now, every action against a rival gang must be evaluated first and the preferred means of settling a score is a payoff instead of bloodshed.

Tachibana shacks up with an escort, Yuki (Mami Sawaki), who is young and energetic, but also addicted to heroin. Tachibana doesn’t sleep with her, though, and he makes it his cause to force her into kicking her habit by chaining her up in her bedroom and enduring her tantrums as her body weans itself from the drugs.

Tachibana’s tattoo is still uncompleted and serves as a fitting symbol for how he feels inside. He is no longer fully in step with the gang world, yet he knows no other life and it is his actions as a gangster that define him. If he were to abandon the gangster life, the tattoo is a haunting brand that will not let him forget what he was and what he did.

I’ve always drawn the comparison between Japanese yakuza films of the late 60’s and 70’s to the classic gangster films the US produced in the late 30’s and 40’s in that both drew upon the unsteady economic times (like Japan’s post-war reconstruction) and social movements (like prohibition) to create anti-hero portraits out of underworld figures, who’s efforts to prosper in downtrodden decades no doubt seemed appealing. As times change, so do the films, and by the time the 90’s hit, the Japanese yakuza film took a different form, one that explored more internal issues of the criminal mentality and group structure. The genre, in effect, took a turn inward and wasn’t so much about the eternal pressures of keeping your gang or reputation alive, as it was the internal, keeping your self sane and somehow both moral and criminal at the same time.

Predictably, Another Lonely Hitman slogs to final act denouncement, which isn’t a negative thing really, just a product of the story and the tone set by Rokuro Mochizuki. This methodical structure is perfect, and no scene feels out of place or wasted.
Ryo Ishibashi is delivers a great performance which bears weight and stands out as more than just another yakuza role. Another Lonely Hitman is an engaging, somber struggle of a man out of his element but refusing to give up or give in, sticking to his own personal code, though in the end he will be damned for it.

brendanstengelsblog
Jul 1st, 2010

Landlock (1995)

While getting ready to type of my assess of the upcoming Manga release "Landlock," I decided to watch the membrane with the English Dub and English Subtitles. I quickly discovered some rather large inconsistencies between the two. Two that kept popping up was the vital unfitting was Luda in the dubbed hang out, and Ruda in the Japanese mix. Another was name of the village of Zaar in the Japanese mix and Zul in the American addle. Of course, the packaging has the land of Zer´lue and a boy named Lue´der. You have to love the confusion. More and more, I am appreciating watching a film with its ethnic Japanese soundtrack and moving more distant away from watching a coating with an English dubbed mix.

"Landlock" is a two-hint at story that focuses on a boy named Lue´der (Ruda or Luda is also acceptable) who has an kinky feature of having a red percipience and a blue eye. Limerick day, his homeland of Zer´lue is invaded and his father is killed by a friend Agahari (Eran, Elan), who also has a red eyeball and a blue vision. She was sent by her father Zanark to kill the boy, because he has the power to destroy the wind. Lue´der´s sister Ansa also has a similar birthmark to Agahari, and is apparently Ansa´s ringer sister. The whole pinch becomes quite confusing before it is discovered that Zanark purely wants to harness the power of the blue eye and the red watch and be proper ruler of the superb. Soon, Agahari takes the side of Ansa and Lue-der to survive a remove the stand against Zanark.

The picture quickly becomes a quest film, where the two young people with the red and indecent eyes are looking as a remedy for a direction to harness their powers and amalgamate against the evil Zanark and his jumbo floating airbase. The pair eventually comes across an island where an ancient effigy offers clues to the question they are taxing to resolve. After they descry this eyot, they pirate off to defeat Zanark. In addition to their battle against the evil forces, the three youthful characters obligated to come to grips with each other and the recognition that they are all siblings. The geste roughly works to unite the three, but the moments on screen to detail this story arc stumbles. One stand-in, they hate each other. The next second, they do not.

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The two episodes of "Landlock" were fun to note and I enjoyed my ninety minutes with the film. However, after watching the story unfold, I felt somewhat unsatisfied and Nautical port with many questions. In my opinion, tons details were leftist glossed finished. Some of Zanark´s motives were completely left undescribed. Lue´der was the main trait of the picture, but most of the time took the backseat to Agahari. The basic premise of the story was very good, but the gaping holes in the plot that were left to the viewer to ruined together did ripen into fairly frustrating. "Landlock" hardly did not feel as complete and epic as what I accept come to count on from Japanese liveliness. The story was worthy, but the anecdote of the "blue flow" and the "red flow" perhaps fell short of my expectations.

My overall conception of "Landlock" is that it is a perilous way to pass some time and a decorous adding up to any anime library. I have certainly seen much better offerings of Japanese animation than this. I have also seen much worse. The packaging goes as far as pointing out that the expected designs are by Masamune Shirow, from "Ghost in the Blitz." It appears that Shirow handled the character designs of that flick as stream. Conducive to those that have a huge technical caress of the leading "Ghost in the Shell," then you may be acutely interested to see the person designs. Otherwise, this sounds like a really thin attempt at linking an generally-at-unsurpassed vent one’s spleen of anime with a timeless archetypal like "Ghost in the Shell."

brendanstengelsblog
Jun 28th, 2010

A misguided drifter with a pe…

A misdirected drifter with a proclivity for the benefit of inhaling aerosol fumes to get high finds herself in the middle of a heated chauvinistic weigh after she’s arrested (again) and discovers she’s pregnant (again). The judge offers to expose her off lightly if she has her pregnancy ‘taken tend of,’ but when she’s put in a cell with a society of pro-spark of life protestors, her novel roomies ‘adopt’ her and try to force her to have the babe. A double-edged parody from foremost-moment put into the limelight director Alexander Payne.

brendanstengelsblog
Jun 26th, 2010

The Big Clock (1948)

Excellent noir thriller in which crime-journalist Milland, innocently involved with a filly subsequently murdered by his megalomaniac boss Laughton, is then commissioned by Laughton to manage the offender. When he himself becomes the framed fancy, the trap seems closed… With marked performances (especially Laughton as the outrageous, sexually insecure tycoon, confident in his ability to control the law through his wealth and status), the sheet also delights auspices of Farrow’s evocative direction: the newspaper conglomerate’s enormous clock indicating not only the rip against constantly but also the inhumanly unbending world in which the combat takes place; the phallic ornament with which the impotent murderer kills his mocking mistress; and John Seitz’s marvellous high dissimilarity photography, portraying a smashing of isolation in which nothing is as it seems. The source novel by Kenneth Fearing was remade, much altered, as No Motion Out (1986).

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brendanstengelsblog
Jun 23rd, 2010

Two for the Money review

“Ends up as a push.”

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

D.J. Caruso’s  (”Taking Lives”) downbeat primer for betters
is as annoying to watch as one of those infomercials for sports betters.
It once again has Al Pacino in the same type of mentor role he played in
The Devil’s Advocate. The derivative film is one part “Boiler Room” another
part “Jerry Maguire,” as it bets its wad on it getting over as a serious
morality driven melodrama about the dangers of the sports betting craze
sweeping across America. Turgidly scripted by Dan Gilroy, it ends up as
a push (which is as good as kissing your sister, since no one wins). We’re
told there’s $200 billion a year bet illegally on sports, and many people
have destroyed their lives because of their gambling addiction. Caruso
weighs in on the subject with this hysterical presentation of the up and
down sides of being a hustler, while giving Pacino enough room to go into
his long hammy philosophical monologues about what it all means. Actually
it means nothing, which becomes a problem for the pic. 

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Handsome stringy blond Matthew McConaughey stars as Brandon Lang,
a former star college quarterback in Division 1A whose goals changed when
he suffered a career ending knee injury. While earning ten dollars an hour
making picks in Las Vegas for a 1-900 number, the telemarketer is recruited
by big-time sports betting consultant from the Big Apple Walter Abrams
(Al Pacino) and begins work picking college football games. Walter fixes
the kid up with a sports junkie’s dream crib in his brownstone on Old Fulton
Street, in Brooklyn. Soon Brandon picks the pro games and becomes the No.
1 handicapper in the betting consultant’s cable-TV business (legal because
they don’t take bets, only offer tips and get a percentage of their client’s
winnings) and is Walter’s protégé. We meet Walter’s nice-girl
manicurist wife, an ex-junkie, of the last 12 years and his daughter, and
learn that neither Walter (a recovering gambling addict who hasn’t gambled
for many years) or Brandon gambles; they just encourage their clients through
a hard-sell in their phone talks to trust their picks and throw them a
percentage of their winnings. It’s all a hustle, smoke and mirrors, and
as a year passes all is well and good as Brandon, whose name was changed
to John Anthony to give him a more important image, has a phenomenal eighty-percent
winning average and his surrogate sugar daddy sets him up with the spoils
of war. But when things turn sour, we get a second half of the film that
delivers an unconvincing lesson that illegal betting is not good for the
heart or soul as the trio has to deal with adversity. 

It clearly tries to cash in on the growing popularity for sports
and gambling, but seems unsure of what it wants to say. Pacino is not Mephistopheles
but is made into a complicated figure, who can ruthlessly use his clients
to gain wealth but can also be loving to his family and paternal to his
best handicapper. What all this means is not much, which is why the long-winded
pic never had much of an offense as it stagnates into a confusing morality
fable about characters who do not deserve our sympathy or for that matter
our time. 

brendanstengelsblog
Jun 21st, 2010

An early attempt at the theme …

An antiquated shot at the composition of an encounter with benign but awe-inspiring aliens. The write (nominally from Ray Bradbury’s representation The Meteor) rattles to all the formulary clichés: an tyro astronomer who ‘understands’, a antagonistic sheriff, a woman employed as a dupe. But seen in its original 3-D, it’s clear that Arnold’s direction gives it more than a animation liberate. He isn’t much good with his second-fee cast, but his compositions in perception are consistently engrossing, and his frugal use of celebratory effects keeps the level of visual note high. The 3-D method leaves the image somewhat murky, but you can discern sparks of authentic squash poetry everywhere in.

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brendanstengelsblog
Jun 19th, 2010

The Addiction (1995)

You certainly can’t misconduct Redesigned York filmmaker Abel Ferrara for not blazing his own game plan. In movies such as “Bad Lieutenant,” “Dangerous Game” and “King of Rejuvenated York,” Ferrara has proved that he is harmonious of the most individualistic and least compromising figures working in film. And with “The Addiction,” he delivers the despite the fact iniquitous, unflinching idea of contemporary modern autobiography that he presented in his over and done with work. Unfortunately, it’s so dark—and impenetrable— that it shuts us excuse.

Set in downtown Manhattan, the movie is yet another variation on ancient vampire legends. However, unlike in “Nadja” and “Vampire in Brooklyn,” these myths aren’t employed for their pop resonances. Instead, Ferrara uses vampirism as a metaphor for AIDS, drug addiction and all sorts of worldly evils.

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His heroine here is Kathleen (Lili Taylor), an NYU student in the process of completing her doctoral dissertation in philosophy. Every day, Kathleen is in the library, plumbing the depths of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre. Then one night Kathleen meets Casanova (Annabella Sciorra), a slinky creature who gives her a little bite on the neck, and suddenly she is describing the library as a slaughterhouse, reeking with the putrid odor of rotting ideas.

Clearly something has changed. Fascinated by evil, Kathleen pursues a more direct exploration of the subject, leading her to conclude that all mankind is baptized in sin. After she begins behaving like a vampire, Kathleen concludes that she is merely acting according to her true nature. “We are not evil because we do evil,” she says. “We do evil because we are evil.” She uses this as a rationalization for her heroin use too. Addiction, it seems, builds character.

For Ferrara, these aren’t casual observations. His critique is serious and passionate; his conviction, too, is unquestionable. However, when he flashes images of historic atrocities of both the distant and recent past—Nazi death camps, the war dead in Bosnia—his ideas come across as shallow and banal. Also, inserting scenes of real-life horror into what is essentially a glorified genre exercise may strike some as the essence of bad taste.

Regardless of the material, Ferrara is usually able to entice uninhibited performances from his actors. Taylor, however, seems less distinctive here than she has been in past roles. (Perhaps it’s that she’s playing a junkie.) On the other hand, Christopher Walken supplies all the acting eccentricity an audience can absorb in his brief cameo as Peina, a truly disturbing figure who can only be described as a kind of Super-Dracula. When he’s on screen, the movie’s theoretical pretensions fade into the background and, for a moment, it becomes truly frightening.

The Addiction is rated R.

brendanstengelsblog
Jun 16th, 2010

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2008)

First, this movie should be enjoyed. Later, marveled at. And then, once the excitement has faded, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” really should be studied, because director Cristian Mungiu creates scenes unlike any ever filmed. Moreover, he builds and reinforces a mood with unexpected techniques that are simple, personal and resoundingly effective. They are effective from the movie’s opening moments.

This Romanian film, set in the communist era, re-creates the crushing sense of living under totalitarianism, but it doesn’t accomplish this in the usual way. There are no suffocating close-ups and no ominous music on the soundtrack. Instead, individual shots are long and leisurely. The camera movement flows, following the characters as they move about their world. Gradually, this lived-in feeling allows us to inhabit their world, too, and with that comes, not just an understanding but an actual feel for what it must have been like. Here, tyranny is not something new, but something old and endless. And so we come to understand the daily, soul-killing monotony of living under oppression.

“Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days” is a masterpiece. Curiously, this begins to become apparent within minutes, even though nothing earthshaking is happening. We see two young women planning to go away for a few days. They don’t seem happy about it. Then one of the women - Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) - walks out into a hallway, and we realize this is a college dormitory. She knocks on a door and bargains with a fellow student for black market goods - cigarettes, personal items, candy. This is Romania in the 1980s, and we’re right there.

What becomes apparent, even before we intellectually register it, is something specific and special about the director. And though the notion is hard to explain and as mysterious as talent itself, it’s worth the clumsy effort to put it into words: Mungiu is that rare director who feels in pictures. That is, he’s someone whose emotions have an immediate visual analogue. I don’t get the impression he pounds his head against the floor trying to find the right way to render a tone or mood. My guess is that he feels it and sees it simultaneously - and then he shows it, and we get it.

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Because what he sees is different from other directors, he is able to show things in new ways that are right and illuminating. Here’s one quietly astounding moment: Otilia is at a party at her boyfriend’s parent’s house, sitting at a dinner table with people his parents’ age. Her mind is elsewhere. She is worried. If things go wrong in the next few hours, her life could be ruined. But in the meantime, she can only sit, as people around her carry on a vigorous but, for her purposes, irrelevant conversation. Mungiu places her at the center of the frame and shows her in a long, long take, as the conversation happens around her.

This is an aspect of consciousness, a moment in life, that we’ve all experienced. We’ve all been scared and feeling outside the general mirth. At different times, we’ve all been young, surrounded by older people whose lives have seemed to exist on a different planet, one safe and complacent. Yet I’ve never seen this reality conveyed in a movie. The scene is unbearably tense, not because Mungiu shows us that Otilia is tense, but rather because he puts us at the table with her, and he does so long enough that we soon feel what she is feeling.

That’s just one scene. Several paragraphs could be written about every scene in this film. Virtually every shot has something novel about it, either in its technique, emotional weight, psychological perception or combinations of all three. The title refers to the length of time that Otilia’s roommate has been pregnant, and the movie follows Otilia’s efforts to secure an abortion for her, at a time when abortion was illegal and severely punished in Romania. So the movie is the story of a dangerous enterprise.

Otilia is just trying to live her life, trying to be a good friend, but everything, not only the government but even the friend she’s trying to help, makes things difficult for her. Marinca, at the center of the action, her face the movie’s locus of meaning, is remarkable, humble in aspect but brave and focused. As the friend Gabita, Laura Vasiliu is quite different, vacuous and self-pitying. Vasiliu’s achievement is that she neither asks audience sympathy nor paints Gabita in negative terms. Vlad Ivanov completes a trio of notable performances, playing the abortionist with a reasonable-seeming wickedness reminiscent of the late J.T. Walsh.

Somehow “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” wasn’t nominated for a foreign language film Academy Award. Having not seen the five nominated films, I can’t comment on them, but if they’re all better than this one, then 2007 was the greatest year for foreign cinema in recent decades. As it stands, “4 Months” is the strongest foreign language film to play this area since the one-two punch of “The Lives of Others” and “After the Wedding” early last year. I just hope I did justice to it.

— Advisory: Nudity, some blood and other scenes that sensitive viewers will find difficult to watch.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com and read his blog, Maximum Strength Mick, at sfgate.com/ZZB.

brendanstengelsblog
Jun 12th, 2010

Annapolis review

The Film

Justin Lin’s astonishingly patchwork Annapolis starts off like a lazy retread of Top Gun or An Officer and a Gentleman before absent-mindedly morphing into an exceedingly tiresome Xerox of Rocky. Along the way we get huge and familiar chunks lifted from flicks like Good Will Hunting, Dead Poets Society, and literally every single miltary movie ever made. Like, ever.

Oh, and apparently Annapolis exists as part of an alternate universe in which noody over the age of thirty is allowed to join the U.S. Navy. Frankly I wouldn’t have been too shocked if, instead of turning into a stupid boxing flick, Annapolis became a really weird Logan’s Run-style sci-fi flick. That would certainly explain all the robotic faces.

Stop me when this ceases to sound familiar: Jake Huard (a gaunt, inert James Franco) is a low-end shipbuilder who dreams of being a Naval Cadet in the gleaming edifice across the river: Annapolis! (Cue majestic music.) Although he’s a poor student (and kind of a petulant dolt), Major General Donnie Wahlberg stops by the shipyard to give Jake an envelope full of Naval acceptance. Only Jake’s going to work extra hard, what with his being four weeks behind all the other recruits, not to mention his lame attitude and lack of intelligence.

The night before his arrival at Annapolis, Jake clumsily woos a lovely young girl, even going so far as to imply that she’s a hooker. Imagine Jake’s (and your) surprise when said girly ends up being his Naval Academy superior. (Yikes.) And then we’re introduced to the supporting cast: cadets Hispanic Sass, Asian Snoot, and Chunky Black. Oh, and the lieutenant is a real ballbuster, too, a plot revelation that really threw me for a loop. (Did I mention that Jake has an emotionally distant and perpetually disapproving daddy? Yeah, he does.)

So Jake sucks at everything, gets yelled at, starts boxing, learns to be a non-sniveling little weiner, earns the respect of his fellzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…

Seriously, if there’s not an age-old cliché, concept, trope, or stereotype that director Justin Lin and screenwriter David Collard did not employ in the creation of Annapolis, please drop me an email and let me know what it might be. I’m building a list of the most played-out movie material and I’m only up to number 421.

The characters are paper-thin and cardboard-deep; the innumerable “saw it coming” plot contrivances begin to stack up like so much cinematic cord wood; and there’s not even a half-decent surprise or memorable performance to act as an asterisk in this outrageously generic mass. The thing’s directed with all the color and energy of a battery commercial; the “morality lessons” are as shallow as they are archaic; and, basically, the whole thing feels like a toothless, formless, shameless piece of pro-Navy propaganda.

And please don’t mistake this as a knock on the U.S. Navy, because I admire all our servicemen and I really love boats. But if I were a veteran Navy man — I think this mush-headed, shallow, facile little flick might really piss me off. The lead character cluelessly fails, fumbles, and stumbles his way through the “very demanding” Naval Academy, but earns a happy ending because he knows how to punch people. Weird.

brendanstengelsblog
Jun 9th, 2010

Lockdown review

Avery (Jones) is a ingenious and flourishing swimmer who is enjoying the upright aspects of life. He has a loving girlfriend (DeSousa) as closely as a young son named Jordan. Avery’s elan vital is headed in the right instruction after dropping over of college in an toil to support his family. When a recruiter comes to Avery’s latest swim tourney, Avery learns he is on his way to the A- with his pick of any shape he wishes to escort. Then, his autobiography suddenly changes in an instant.

His friends Cashmere (Casseus) and Dre (Bonds) take Avery out to broadcast, only to be arrested when the car they are driving fits the species of a vehicle Byzantine in a brutal rub out earlier in the day. To filch matters worse, the murder weapon is mysteriously in the abandon seat, all but sealing their destination. As expected, the three are sent to a maximal surveillance prison against life. Once lining, each goes a different tow-path with only Avery’s leading to a better place. Cashmere falls in with Clean Up (Master P) and his powerful gang. Dre is stuck with an Aryan inmate who repetitiously abuses Dre both mentally and physically. Avery, admitting that, finds help in Malachi (Powell), an older inmate who will slowly help Avery find redemption.

Directed by John Luessenhop Lockdown is admirable in the way it portrays life inside calaboose, choosing instead to indistinct on the harshness rather than the camaraderie that numerous other cellblock films make every effort also in behalf of and come by. Luessenhop and writer Preston Whitmore (who based the calligraphy on a real life story of a falsely imprisoned friend) offer up compelling characters and truthful moments that make the viewer look past some glaring faults. The largest of these is the unnecessary grouping of a subplot involving the DeSousa character attempting to free her boyfriend. These scenes disavow away from the grittiness of the central scenario and feel isolated when unchanging against the remainder of the mistiness.

At its best, Lockdown works as a dog-tired look at the penal combination with an unbiased eye. The scenes featuring abuse and rapine of inmates, strikingly Dre, are gritty and very tough to supervise, but a certain has to esteem the filmmakers instead of respecting the truthfulness of the employment.

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The company is uniformly superb, with the trio of restraint actors turning in stunning performances. Casseus and Bonds stand at large, showing true heartfelt backbone, accepted their sundry environments in the poky. Jones is charismatic sufficiency to make the viewer have a funny feeling for him, while Jaws Nunn and Clifton Powell offer strong mentor-like support.

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