Entries tagged with “Foreign-Language Films”

Showing results 1-20 of 21:

The Orphanage has one indelible image, and that's plenty. It also has a sly current of grief and healing that hits home mostly on reflection, after cold recognitions and resonances sink in.

Directed by Spaniard J.A. Bayona and written by Sergio G. Sánchez, The Orphanage arrived in the United States under the banner of producer Guillermo del Toro, and it suffers from the expectations that name carries. Del Toro's Spanish-language films are compact, textured, and rich with meaning. Cronos (1993) is an alluring, lethal metaphor-dispensing machine, while Pan's Labyrinth (2006) has the ageless authenticity of a folk tale, among its many other merits. The Devil's Backbone (2001) most closely resembles The Orphanage in his oeuvre, but with so much attention paid to milieu — physical, social, historical — it transcends its obvious genre; its spectral elements become nearly secondary.

Bayona's movie is merely a good ghost story, which is no small thing, but it ain't Guillermo del Toro. While the acclaimed Mexican writer/director is fundamentally a symbolist, The Orphanage approaches its story through the emotional prism of its lead character.

Writer/director Michael Haneke's 1997 film Funny Games feels like a response to something that hadn't happened yet. Sure, we'd had Natural Born Killers and other ultra-violent movies, but the fetishism of agony hadn't yet become a crass trend.

The prospect of Haneke's English-language remake — due in theaters in late winter and starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth — is worrisome. (George Sluizer's American botch of his own The Vanishing comes to mind.) But it's also necessary; as unpleasant as it is, Funny Games deserves to be seen more widely because it forces introspection. I doubt you can watch it without seriously considering why you watch movies of this sort, and how you react to them.

And it's more timely now than it was upon its initial release a decade ago.

For me, the film is most striking in the scene in which Anna (Susanne Lothar) is forced by white-clad, white-gloved psychopathic visitors Peter and Paul to remove her clothes, while her helpless husband (The Lives of Others' Ulrich Mühe) casts his eyes down and her young son sits on a couch with a bag over his head.

The deaths last week of movie writers and directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni have incited all sorts of commentary about the "art" films of yesteryear and the people who made them.

Tied up in these discussions is one key assumption: that everyday people think these movies are boring, whether they've actually seen them or not. "Boring" is a reaction separate from claiming something is "good" or "bad," of course, but it's almost more important. If something bores a viewer, it becomes irredeemably irrelevant. So people arguing for the importance of Bergman and Antonioni must first make their movies sexy.

Sometimes the biggest gift a film can give us is to force us back into the real world rather than letting us escape.

Many people watch movies as a respite from the stresses of life, but that often has a trivializing effect. When film is used primarily as a medium for entertainment, it follows that we derive pleasure from crime, violence, human suffering, and the like.

The German movie Requiem is about demonic possession, yet in spite of its subject matter, it's a serious, wrenching piece. And because of its subject matter, it's all the more effective, as the audience isn't expecting to be challenged.

In a previous entry, I noted the disconnect between Guillermo del Toro's assertion that Pan's Labyrinth is "not about sexual identity" and the movie's marketing materials and design.

In this short audio commentary (part of Culture Snob's Five Minutes series), we look at the toad scene in the movie to undercut the writer-director's claim even more. Pan's Labyrinth is very much about sexual identity, particularly a woman's reproductive power over a man.

As much as I've wanted to write about Pan's Labyrinth, it hasn't happened, so you'll have to wait until its DVD release for a proper essay. (I have lots of ideas, but the movie's details have faded so much that anything I write would be either too vague or filled with errors. Even more than normal.)

For now, I'll note that I was struck by something writer-director Guillermo del Toro said in an interview:

Question: "So often in fairy-tale analysis, there's a tendency to read any story of a young girl as a psychosexual parable, but this film specifically doesn't go that way."

Answer: "Not at all. I consciously avoided it, not out of prudishness — though I probably am prudish — but out of the same reason why I tried to avoid the myth of vampirism in Cronos through using the most completely unerotic window I could; I tried to approach it like an addiction. In Pan's Labyrinth, I knew that the psychosexual angle was really tired; it felt very 1980s for me, and I felt this was a movie about a girl who was on the threshold of making a choice, where she could cease to be a girl, but it was not about sexual identity."

Perhaps he should have told that to the movie's designers and marketers. Take a look at these images and say with a straight face that they don't bear a striking resemblance to female genitalia.

As part of the Krzysztof Kieslowski Blog-a-thon at Quiet Bubble, Culture Snob recorded a commentary track for Three Colors: Blue, with some assistance from Bride of Culture Snob.

The commentary track deals with a handful of themes: the blunt use of color contrasted with the almost tangential way the movie deals with its ostensible theme of liberty; the use of visual and aural cues to indicate the subjective nature of the film; Julie's progression from isolation to active engagement with the world; and the relationship between the concept of "freedom" and Kieslowski's obvious interest in responsibility. Plus, I call Juliette Binoche a "two-faced bitch." How can you resist?

This entry also includes a short essay dealing only with Blue's first shot, inspired by Jim Emerson's Opening Shots Project.

I have no problem
choosing films of morbid love
from our Netflix queue.

Trouble Every Day
on the recommendation
of The House Next Door.

A film of few words,
buzzing with a quiet dread,
demands haiku squared.

The unfathomably fashionable torture film has spun off a welcome girl-power subgenre, in which determined, attractive young females facilitate the agonizing dispatches of men who have committed atrocities against youth.

In Hard Candy, a teenage girl meets a lecherous and possibly pedophilic photographer online and ends up at his house, where she aims to punish him for the sins she's certain he's committed. In Lady Vengeance, a young woman emerges from prison with a grudge against the man responsible for her incarceration: a serial murderer of children who forced her to confess to one of his crimes by threatening to kill her daughter.

It's a curious but promising phenomenon — invoking Virgin Spring-style outrage and justice — and if it develops into a trend, I imagine that in its mature state it will produce a gruesome but meaningful masterpiece or two. But the early entries — these two come from 2005 — are misguided.

What's unfortunate about Michael Haneke's Caché is that the writer-director has created a movie that requires such intensive decoding at its terminals that it's easy to overlook the rest of the movie — to, in fact, miss its entire point. By spending so much time and effort on the beginning and the ending, we neglect essential questions: What is the film trying to say? Is this an effective way to communicate that message?

Atom Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies is a work whose very title, with its cheesy double meaning, portends bad, blunt things. If it works at all, it's as an act of self-parody, in which the filmmaker's heady concerns are consumed by the tripe of his ostensible subject matter. Plus: the tedium of 2046.

That Chan-wook Park's Oldboy works at all is surprising. It's hilariously contrived, wildly improbable, and at times downright goofy in its broad comedy, most of it based in the main character's unleashed id. The movie's underlying self-seriousness runs so deep that it threatens to become its own form of silliness. And its pitch is constant extremity, from acute rage to blubbering desperation. Yet the effect is not tonal incongruity, but a messy mix of emotions that's true to its protagonist.

In A Very Long Engagement, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's fervid need to turn everything into fussy, over-processed whimsy is wholly incongruous with its primary subject: war.

The ever-divisive Lars von Trier is not known as a storyteller, and that's the main reason his miniseries The Kingdom — which was released on DVD in November — is so surprising.

Spider Forest is at once lovely and brutal, delicate and hard, sympathetic and unforgiving. It has a feel both foreign and familiar, like the image in the movie of a girl whose body rises into the air feet-first, as if God's hand gently plucked her by the ankle and took her into the heavens.

As flawed as it is and even though its freshness and shock value have been diminished by imitation and time, Eyes Without a Face still works amazingly well — primal, raw, troubling, and real. Its authenticity makes it superior to 95 percent of horror movies, and it illustrates how horror operates even when it's not terrifying.

Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum has so much to say that it can't survive as a narrative. Still, slogging through it might be worth the effort if the movie spoke meaningfully to the human condition, but the essence of the film is distilled misanthropy, and its flavor is so outrageously bitter that you immediately reject it.

The 2002 Chinese horror film The Eye is unfortunately familiar — "unfortunately" because the writing-directing Pang brothers are expert at creating scenes of skin-chilling creepiness but, in this film at least, don't give the audience anything more.

Takeshi Kitano's Fireworks is remarkable for many reasons, but its greatest achievement is taking a character capable of extreme violence and sweet tenderness and absolutely nothing in between and making him believable and rich. The feat looks all the more impressive considering the character's perpetual mask of blank impassivity.

Werner Herzog uses all the trappings of the story of Count Drac-oooo-lah in Nosferatu the Vampyre but doesn't approach it as a tale of terror. Instead, he turns Bram Stoker's basic plot (and F.W. Murnau's silent classic) into a contemplative study of sacrifice and tragedy.

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