list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around Summer Palace on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/Summer_Palace/279848/default.aspx Title: Summer Palace
Year: 2008
Director: Lou Ye
Plot: A romance takes place against some of the most turbulent events in recent Chinese history in this epic-scale story from filmmaker Lou Ye. Yu Hong (Hao Lei) is a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl who is soon to leave the small border town where she was born and raised to attend college at Beijing University. Shortly before Yu Hong leaves for school, she gives her virginity to her longtime boyfriend, Xiao, and pledges to remain faithful to him. At Beijing University, Yu Hong makes friends with Li Ti (Hu Ling), another girl dealing with a long distance relationship, and meets Zhou Wei (Guo Xiaodong), a handsome student who soon steals her heart. Yu Hong leaves her relationship with Xiao behind to commit herself to Zhao Wei, and she's swept up by her feelings for him as they embrace the new social and economic freedoms which are being felt on campus. The empowerment felt by the students in Beijing come to a head during a series of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square; the protests have tragic consequences, and the excitement of new possibilities gives way to a feeling of defeat. Yu Hong and Zhou Wei are separated and the heavy hand of the state is brought to bear on the rebellious students. The first Chinese film to feature full-frontal male and female nudity, Yiheyuan (aka Summer Palace) received its world premier as an official selection at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 18
Number of Lists: 10
Number of blog posts: 19
Number of discussion threads: 5
SpoutRating: 2
]]>Mon, 11 May 2009 01:04:51 GMTSummer Palace2008Lou YeA romance takes place against some of the most turbulent events in recent Chinese history in this epic-scale story from filmmaker Lou Ye. Yu Hong (Hao Lei) is a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl who is soon to leave the small border town where she was born and raised to attend college at Beijing University. Shortly before Yu Hong leaves for school, she gives her virginity to her longtime boyfriend, Xiao, and pledges to remain faithful to him. At Beijing University, Yu Hong makes friends with Li Ti (Hu Ling), another girl dealing with a long distance relationship, and meets Zhou Wei (Guo Xiaodong), a handsome student who soon steals her heart. Yu Hong leaves her relationship with Xiao behind to commit herself to Zhao Wei, and she's swept up by her feelings for him as they embrace the new social and economic freedoms which are being felt on campus. The empowerment felt by the students in Beijing come to a head during a series of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square; the protests have tragic consequences, and the excitement of new possibilities gives way to a feeling of defeat. Yu Hong and Zhou Wei are separated and the heavy hand of the state is brought to bear on the rebellious students. The first Chinese film to feature full-frontal male and female nudity, Yiheyuan (aka Summer Palace) received its world premier as an official selection at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide18Tag Target (>10)101952http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/s279848.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/Summer_Palace/279848/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/risselada/archive/2009/1/13/39458.aspx Post By: Risselada
Post To: Risselada Blog
Post Date: 1/13/2009 12:44:28 PM
Body: I'm told that Üç maymun (Three Monkeys) is Turkey's official submission for consideration of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. I really have no idea how many films with this level of production are made in Turkey each year. And now that I think about it, I can't think of a single movie I have ever seen that has come out of Turkey. The only movie I can think of that I've seen that is even set substantially in Turkey is Midnight Express, and I believe that was an American produced film that wasn't especially fair in portraying the full Turkish culture for Americans. However there's actually not too much about Three Monkeys that sets it in any particular location. At least there was nothing culturally unusual or alien to me. I'm not saying that there SHOULD be, just an observation from someone who doesn't know too much about Turkey and hasn't seen too much of their artistic exports. What we have here is a film that is well executed in many ways, nice pacing, framing, cinematography, sound, and superb acting. And the dialogue and story are realistic and easy to follow. The film does well with the "show don't tell" rule of story telling. We pick up a lot of things about the feelings of the characters and specific events and background elements without anyone speaking about them explicitly. YET, despite all of this I found the movie to be sorely lacking. Even if everything that a movie is trying to do is done well, if what it's trying to do has no originality or holds no interest then what is the point? This is a tragic drama. People in conflict, anguish, humorless. All of the characters make foolish decisions as people often do. But when we don't see much of the characters apart from their foolish decisions or the ill consequences on them due to the foolish decisions of others, no scenes of them really enjoying themselves or with any real hope or interesting personality traits, then the tragedy is not too affecting. The one key element that the movie is suggesting has played a key role in their backgrounds and how they got to where they are now is the apparent loss of another son in family many years ago. I did find quite a bit of skill and restraint in the way this is revealed. It's virtually never mentioned by any of the characters. The movie lets you as the viewer piece together the history of what happened and how much it has affected everyone through very simple images. But I do not feel as though this element adds enough to make this story particularly worth watching. The insight is too miniscule. One other interesting aspect of this film that I recall is that there is absolutely no non-diegetic music (from what I remember, if there was it must have been quite subtle). The only music in the film is the ringtone from the mother's cell phone which has some extremely sad lyrics about love turning into hate and destruction. The fact that this is the only music ever heard makes the song even more blunt. And it also makes the use of sound in the film even more apparent. Sound stands out in this movie. With your attention brought to the sounds around you more than you would normally notice it, normal things can sound quite strange and startling. There is a tense scene (well pretty much all of them are tense actually) where a man who is rather upset stands up and walks off screen. We hear a very strange noise, and then when the picture cuts back to him we see he is standing in front of an electric fan. The film also makes excessive use of sound bridges where the sounds of the next scene start to play quite long before the image cuts over as well. Sometimes the sound is that of the ringtone so that it sounds at first like non-diegetic music until we realize what is happening. These uses of sound and few realistic indications of the dead son still affecting the lives of the main characters are the moments where the film starts to extend into the surreal but never in a way that really seems unrealistic than our own perceptions of things. I would certainly be willing to watch something else by these same filmmakers in the future if someone were to tell me that their next project was going to feature a little more humor. As it is, as the first Turkish film production I have seen my impression of the country is that it's a place pretty much devoid of life and hope. Of course I know that isn't true. And I realize the filmmakers are also hinting that there was once some joy before the death of the son in this family, but I'd rather take my tragedy with a little more profundity. (At least this movie didn't have any horribly pretentious voice-overs like that other mavens movie I reviewed not too long ago, Summer Palace). Some better straight up tragic dramas that I prefer, that I think you may like if you like this movie: 21 Grams, House of Sand and Fog, In the Bedroom Rating: 5/10
]]>Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:44:28 GMTRisseladaRisselada Blog1/13/2009 12:44:28 PMI'm told that Üç maymun (Three Monkeys) is Turkey's official submission for consideration of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. I really have no idea how many films with this level of production are made in Turkey each year. And now that I think about it, I can't think of a single movie I have ever seen that has come out of Turkey. The only movie I can think of that I've seen that is even set substantially in Turkey is Midnight Express, and I believe that was an American produced film that wasn't especially fair in portraying the full Turkish culture for Americans. However there's actually not too much about Three Monkeys that sets it in any particular location. At least there was nothing culturally unusual or alien to me. I'm not saying that there SHOULD be, just an observation from someone who doesn't know too much about Turkey and hasn't seen too much of their artistic exports. What we have here is a film that is well executed in many ways, nice pacing, framing, cinematography, sound, and superb acting. And the dialogue and story are realistic and easy to follow. The film does well with the "show don't tell" rule of story telling. We pick up a lot of things about the feelings of the characters and specific events and background elements without anyone speaking about them explicitly. YET, despite all of this I found the movie to be sorely lacking. Even if everything that a movie is trying to do is done well, if what it's trying to do has no originality or holds no interest then what is the point? This is a tragic drama. People in conflict, anguish, humorless. All of the characters make foolish decisions as people often do. But when we don't see much of the characters apart from their foolish decisions or the ill consequences on them due to the foolish decisions of others, no scenes of them really enjoying themselves or with any real hope or interesting personality traits, then the tragedy is not too affecting. The one key element that the movie is suggesting has played a key role in their backgrounds and how they got to where they are now is the apparent loss of another son in family many years ago. I did find quite a bit of skill and restraint in the way this is revealed. It's virtually never mentioned by any of the characters. The movie lets you as the viewer piece together the history of what happened and how much it has affected everyone through very simple images. But I do not feel as though this element adds enough to make this story particularly worth watching. The insight is too miniscule. One other interesting aspect of this film that I recall is that there is absolutely no non-diegetic music (from what I remember, if there was it must have been quite subtle). The only music in the film is the ringtone from the mother's cell phone which has some extremely sad lyrics about love turning into hate and destruction. The fact that this is the only music ever heard makes the song even more blunt. And it also makes the use of sound in the film even more apparent. Sound stands out in this movie. With your attention brought to the sounds around you more than you would normally notice it, normal things can sound quite strange and startling. There is a tense scene (well pretty much all of them are tense actually) where a man who is rather upset stands up and walks off screen. We hear a very strange noise, and then when the picture cuts back to him we see he is standing in front of an electric fan. The film also makes excessive use of sound bridges where the sounds of the next scene start to play quite long before the image cuts over as well. Sometimes the sound is that of the ringtone so that it sounds at first like non-diegetic music until we realize what is happening. These uses of sound and few realistic indications of the dead son still affecting the lives of the main characters are the moments where the film starts to extend into the surreal but never in a way that really seems unrealistic than our own perceptions of things. I would certainly be willing to watch something else by these same filmmakers in the future if someone were to tell me that their next project was going to feature a little more humor. As it is, as the first Turkish film production I have seen my impression of the country is that it's a place pretty much devoid of life and hope. Of course I know that isn't true. And I realize the filmmakers are also hinting that there was once some joy before the death of the son in this family, but I'd rather take my tragedy with a little more profundity. (At least this movie didn't have any horribly pretentious voice-overs like that other mavens movie I reviewed not too long ago, Summer Palace). Some better straight up tragic dramas that I prefer, that I think you may like if you like this movie: 21 Grams, House of Sand and Fog, In the Bedroom Rating: 5/10 http://www.spout.com/blogs/minerwerks/archive/2008/10/5/35905.aspx Post By: minerwerks
Post To: minerwerks Blog
Post Date: 10/5/2008 4:47:00 PM
Body: Palm Pictures' DVD of 'Summer Palace' arrived adorned with a 'BANNED BY THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT' banner and reviews touting sex and politics "on full boil." In reality, this tells me about good old American hype than anything about the Chinese government. While interesting, the film wasn't quite as hot as the quotes imply.Yu Hong (Hao Lei) is a young girl from northern China near the border of North Korea. She travels to Beijing to attend University in the late 1980s. Upon meeting fellow student Li Ti (Hu Lingling), Yu Hong begins to open up to the new experiences the school and the city have to offer, as well as her awakening passions. These passions are further drawn out when she meets Zhou Wei (Guo Xiaodong), and the two become lovers.As a backdrop to the personal drama, there are hints of a growing political unease, which culminates in many of the students taking part in the famous demonstration in Tiananmen Square. The swift reaction of the Chinese government sends the various characters to places around the world, launching the film into a more sedate second half. Yu Hong heads back to her home temporarily, eventually heading south. Zhou Wei is initially mandated to join the Chinese military, but he and Li Ti eventually end up in Germany. Eventually, a tragedy sets up a chance for the former lovers to meet, but after a decade apart, how will they react to each other?Champions of art can make all the waves they want about how unfair it is that the Chinese government has sanctioned the makers of 'Summer Palace,' but to try and be coy about the film's meaning is just as silly as the Chinese claiming the film was rejected due to audio and visual problems. Though the film is subtle in the lyrical, meditative way that certain Asian films can be, it becomes clear by the end that the characters are emotionally damaged by government repression. Curiosity is replaced by shame, leading Yu Hong to rote sexual encounters and Zhou Wei to a dull, unspecific longing. After having a taste of great freedom cut short abruptly these students are more afraid to express their real needs and desires than to speak out against their country's leaders.I can't claim to be familiar with much Chinese cinema, though 'Summer Palace' is pretty much right in line with what I expect. It's interesting these films are skillfully assembled, but are not overtly stamped with the voice of a director, which is something I'm used to from American films. In this case, director Lou Ye assembles a great cast, sets about having them subtly convey longing and excitement and makes it all look and sound beautiful. If immaculate tone poems are more your speed, then by all means, don't miss this film. As an admirer of naturalistic film, I appreciated many parts of 'Summer Palace,' but I found that when the emotion drained out of the characters in the second half of the film, my interest went with it.RECOMMENDATION: Director Ang Lee is from Taiwan, but was born to Chinese parents and was encouraged to study Chinese culture. His films such as 'The Ice Storm' and 'Brokeback Mountain' evoke the tradition of subtle, lyrical character stories that 'Summer Palace' tries to be a part of. But Lee's command of film language feels much more natural and universal, which can be seen in his broad range of films. His breakout film, 'The Wedding Banquet,' was a great character piece but also part screwball comedy.The plot concerns a gay Taiwanese man, Wai-Tung, living with his partner in Manhattan. The young man's parents are eager for marriage and a grandchild, so they begin trying to set him up through a dating service. Wai-Tung decides on a marriage of convenience with a poor girl from China so she can get a green card and to keep his parents happy. The parents, however, are determined to stage a huge wedding.The result is a touching, entertaining concoction that was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe.
]]>Sun, 05 Oct 2008 20:47:00 GMTminerwerksminerwerks Blog10/5/2008 4:47:00 PMPalm Pictures' DVD of 'Summer Palace' arrived adorned with a 'BANNED BY THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT' banner and reviews touting sex and politics "on full boil." In reality, this tells me about good old American hype than anything about the Chinese government. While interesting, the film wasn't quite as hot as the quotes imply.Yu Hong (Hao Lei) is a young girl from northern China near the border of North Korea. She travels to Beijing to attend University in the late 1980s. Upon meeting fellow student Li Ti (Hu Lingling), Yu Hong begins to open up to the new experiences the school and the city have to offer, as well as her awakening passions. These passions are further drawn out when she meets Zhou Wei (Guo Xiaodong), and the two become lovers.As a backdrop to the personal drama, there are hints of a growing political unease, which culminates in many of the students taking part in the famous demonstration in Tiananmen Square. The swift reaction of the Chinese government sends the various characters to places around the world, launching the film into a more sedate second half. Yu Hong heads back to her home temporarily, eventually heading south. Zhou Wei is initially mandated to join the Chinese military, but he and Li Ti eventually end up in Germany. Eventually, a tragedy sets up a chance for the former lovers to meet, but after a decade apart, how will they react to each other?Champions of art can make all the waves they want about how unfair it is that the Chinese government has sanctioned the makers of 'Summer Palace,' but to try and be coy about the film's meaning is just as silly as the Chinese claiming the film was rejected due to audio and visual problems. Though the film is subtle in the lyrical, meditative way that certain Asian films can be, it becomes clear by the end that the characters are emotionally damaged by government repression. Curiosity is replaced by shame, leading Yu Hong to rote sexual encounters and Zhou Wei to a dull, unspecific longing. After having a taste of great freedom cut short abruptly these students are more afraid to express their real needs and desires than to speak out against their country's leaders.I can't claim to be familiar with much Chinese cinema, though 'Summer Palace' is pretty much right in line with what I expect. It's interesting these films are skillfully assembled, but are not overtly stamped with the voice of a director, which is something I'm used to from American films. In this case, director Lou Ye assembles a great cast, sets about having them subtly convey longing and excitement and makes it all look and sound beautiful. If immaculate tone poems are more your speed, then by all means, don't miss this film. As an admirer of naturalistic film, I appreciated many parts of 'Summer Palace,' but I found that when the emotion drained out of the characters in the second half of the film, my interest went with it.RECOMMENDATION: Director Ang Lee is from Taiwan, but was born to Chinese parents and was encouraged to study Chinese culture. His films such as 'The Ice Storm' and 'Brokeback Mountain' evoke the tradition of subtle, lyrical character stories that 'Summer Palace' tries to be a part of. But Lee's command of film language feels much more natural and universal, which can be seen in his broad range of films. His breakout film, 'The Wedding Banquet,' was a great character piece but also part screwball comedy.The plot concerns a gay Taiwanese man, Wai-Tung, living with his partner in Manhattan. The young man's parents are eager for marriage and a grandchild, so they begin trying to set him up through a dating service. Wai-Tung decides on a marriage of convenience with a poor girl from China so she can get a green card and to keep his parents happy. The parents, however, are determined to stage a huge wedding.The result is a touching, entertaining concoction that was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe. http://www.spout.com/blogs/joem18b/archive/2008/9/25/35552.aspx Post By: joem18b
Post To: joem18b Blog
Post Date: 9/25/2008 7:04:22 PM
Body: O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias (2006)***** SPOILERS *****The Year My Parents Went On Vaction tells the story of a pre-teen boy in São Paulo, Brazil, separated from his parents during a military coup in 1970. As the army takes over, the country is distracted in part by Brazil's successes in the World Cup of that year (sort of like following the pennant race or NFL football in the U.S. as the country's financial system implodes). The movie is pleasant, never dull, well shot, with a delicate score that adds to the feelings of sadness and loss inherent in the plot (the director threw out the first score written for the movie; Beto Villares then did it over and got it right).TYMPWOV begins with a mother and father taking their son to grandfather's house in São Paulo. The three are riding in a VW bug, '65 or earlier. A Brazilian friend suggests that for verisimilitude, they should have been in a Renault or Citroen, because the bug was the inexpensive car of youth and the lower middle-class; her family always drove French cars. Be that as it may, the movie's streets are rife with vintage bugs and VW buses, though I did spot a Renault or two. I mention this because the first car that I bought and paid for with my own money was a new '67 bug from Belmont Motors in Massachusetts, powder blue. It has been sitting since 1981 or so in a succession of company parking lots, progressively degenerating until, paint gone, wheels seized, flowering weeds growing from dirt caught in the chassis crevicles, it looks so bad that I was ordered to have it towed off the property because it had become an eyesore, at least to one sorehead in the company who remained anonymous - the bug's engine refusing to start, a hole in the floor threatening to release the battery under the back seat like a bomb dropped from its bay at the first speed bump, the windows opaque as my glasses in the Turkish bath down the street. Fortunately, my son stepped up and volunteered to restore the car as a hobby. He abstracted it on a flatbed towtruck via Raul's Towing Service to his driveway, where it sat, partially disassembled, for a week or two before the city, at the behest of neighbors or a cruising patrol car, ordered him to remove it. He rolled the poor thing into his garage, wheels now at least freed, out of sight behind closed doors, and since then he has ordered replacement parts from an unending list. He tells me that there are two sources from which to obtain these parts: (a) a quality manufacturer somewhere or other, or (b)Brazil. You want quality, you go to the quality manufacturer; you want cheap, you go to Brazil. I don't know if that's true or not but when I replaced a bumper a long time ago, it had a "Made in Brazil" sticker on the inside surface. One tap by another vehicle and the bumper folded up like an origami noodle. Also, curiously, '67 door handles are unavailable. But the point is, if you're a bug lover you might want to give TYMPWOV a little love for that reason if for no other.Director/writer Cao Hamburger and his co-writer, Claudio Galperin, were both born in São Paulo in 1962 and were eight years old when General Emilio Medici engineered his coup. Hamburger's parents "went on vacation" at that time, but only for a few weeks. In this movie, Hamburger and Galperin share some of their childhood experiences growing up in the cultural melting-pot of São Paulo. Hamburger's father came from a German/Jewish family that emigrated to Brazil before World War II. His mother was of Italian/Catholic stock, though both parents were non-religious scientists as he grew up. He says that he began thinking about São Paulo's mix of cultures and his roots while living and feeling like an outsider in London, another city where races and nationalities mingle. According to Hamburger (and my Brazilian friends), Brazil is deeply divided over socio-economic class issues (the rich, a small middle-class, and the poor) but is accepting of emigrants; he refers to Brazilian culture as Samba culture - "Samba" here meaning, roughly, "let's all dance together." In fact, Hamburger started out with all sorts of ideas for the movie, but while making it settled on the idea of enjoying the brief periods of sunshine in life on a cloudy day. The movie was made on a medium budget by Brazilian standards. Since the success of films like Central Station and City of God, Hamburger says, funding opportunities for cinema have gotten a lot better. He used professionals as well as non-actors from the community, which in the film is a conservative Jewish neighborhood. Today, Hamburger says, this neighborhood is Korean, but since he is exploring his own roots, for the purposes of the film it remains Jewish. Hamburger spent four months finding an empty apartment building to use for the shoot; the movie was filmed completely on location.So often in making a movie, the director starts out with an idea and massages it until a theme for the film is produced. This process can extend over years with input from editors, writers, friends, family, and assorted other sources while the director chases funding, as I describe in my review of Manda Bala. Hamburger's initial inspiration was to examine the mixture of cultures in Brazil, and from that grew the idea of examining a year in the life of a boy growing up in the same time and place that Hamburger and Galperin did. During the making of the movie, the military coup and contemperaneous world-cup excitement in the film emerged, according to the director, as metaphors for life. It seems to me that some of these metaphors crop up post-production but perhaps I'm just metaphor-blind or metaphor-averse. Does a movie metaphor count if it's discovered after the movie is finished? Does it count if a reviewer invokes it, rather than the director? I do like the way that Claudia Llosa, for example, disavows metaphors in her Maven-reviewed Madeinusa, a movie which could easily be weighed down with them. I'm guessing that Hamburger's military coup and World Cup would remain in the movie whether Hamburger deemed them metaphors or not. As it is, he has one more thing to talk about during interviews. Anyway, the coup represents a dark day and the World-Cup victory represents a shaft of sunlight breaking through the gloom of that day. The dark day is life under the military regime and the sunlight represents those moments in life that you must embrace in order to get through the bad patches - did I just nest a metaphor within a metaphor there? The life of goalies in general is also a metaphor in the movie, but if the victory is a bright shaft of sunlight, what is the goalie? A meteorite the size of Oshgosh? Who knows? The gray day/sunlight metaphor, applied to my own personal life, would be like at my work, where my boss would be dictator General Emilio Medici, and out of the grinding gray of morning I would emerge at lunchtime to sit down across from Izzy Vulvano and beat his pants off playing Magic and using my special red and black deck. Also the movie is about dealing with our loneliness and our connections to others, how we make them and break them and move on. Is the movie itself a metaphor for that, or just a movie about that? Also, the director does not agree that soccer is the opiate of the masses, exploited by the junta in this case to maintain calm. Hamburger is going for gray day/sunshine here, not gray day/opium. And having mentioned Manda Bala above, note that this whole movie unfurled without a kidnapping or fried frog in sight, but only because the whole country is under siege from an autocratic military dictatorship rather than a scourge of corrupt politicians and kidnapping-for-profit criminal thugs.Strangely, Hamburger's soccer metaphor gets turned on its head at the end of the movie. Irony? Another layer? Or just part of the movie that doesn't conform to a simple, stumbled-upon talking point? I thought about calling Hamburger and asking him, but nobody likes a wiseass.When the metaphorical army arrives in Michel's neighborhood and starts dragging young men out of their union offices in São Paulo, clubbing them and hurling them into vans while the boy's parents are in hiding, it occurred to me to wonder whether such scenes are automatically more powerful when filmed in the country where they are supposed to have happened, in the language in which they happened, by victims or the relatives of victims of the evils portrayed. Or, for a subtitle-hating country like America, could such a scene be made more visceral and moving if shot in Hollywood for U.S. consumption? For example, would Der Untergang or The Lives of Others have retained their energy or even gained some, if they had been made, shot for shot, in the U.S. with U.S. actors instead of Germans? Ennio De Concini tried it with xxAlec Guiness playing Hitler but I think we can agree that that didn't work as well as Bruno Ganz doing it. Being a cinema snob, I would say without cavil that it is intuitively obvious that the Brazilian version of the coup or the German version of Hitler's last days cannot fail to have an innate power, if well enough done, that a U.S. version could never match. But hold on. Summer Palace provides a dramatic take on Tiananmen Square and the events there in 1989, yet I've heard plenty of squawking (from round eyes) about its failure to do justice to that historic conflict. Would a movie about Tiananmen, made along the lines of The Last Emperor, fare better in the U.S? Could Gettysburg withstand a transfer to Japan; if Kurosawa made it, might it even improve in the eyes of the Japanese? Or in the eyes of American viewers as well? How to assign metrics to questions like these? It's easy to just say that the better the filmmaker, the better the film, for all informed viewers of taste. Do the French still love Jerry Lewis? Are Hollywood blockbusters still the biggest grossers all around the world? And children in movies - does the fact that the child is native to a country foreign to the viewer and speaks a foreign language have any effect one way or the other on that viewer? Rather than approaching these questions from first principles, maybe the thing to do is to evaluate a hundred movies or so, make a call on each, and examine the results for trends.And speaking of children, how do they learn to act so well? Or isn't learning involved? Teens act in high-school drama classes and plays - they're learning something there, I guess. They act in community theater, especially in locations where drama in the schools is being cut. Adults go to drama school, but often act badly in films anyway. And yet I see movie after movie in which children act just fine (Mother of Mine, Wondrous Oblivion, Birth, Kabluey (where the kids are caricatures, but good caricatures.) On the other hand, that kid in The Dick Van Dyke Show... ouch.). Is aging an antidote to natural inborn talent? As we grow up, do we lose our ability to act? Or are these children, who seem to be acting so well, actually not doing much at all? In TYMPWOV, is the boy mostly just running around, looking upset, and playing with his tabletop soccer set, or is he interacting with others and... well, acting. I called the Stella Adler School in Manhattan to ask these questions, but the woman I spoke to told me that the youngest students they enroll are 14-year-olds (eight Saturday classes from 10 to 6, $800. No waiting list.) I asked the woman if the under-14s I see in the movies have been trained, or if whatever they show is just natural ability. She could only surmise. I asked if the Stella Adler Saturday classes have produced some success stories; she said yes, but didn't name anybody I've heard of. She didn't have much else to say about younger children and their appearances in movies, so I called a school out in the Valley (Sherman Oaks) which takes kids as young as 8. Sherman Oaks is up the 405 from Santa Monica, just over the hills from Hollywood. The fellow I spoke to told me flatly that every young person onscreen today has taken classes. He listed graduates from his school now appearing in Desperate Housewives, Everyone Hates Chris, etc., etc. (Classes from 10 to noon on Saturdays.) Agents and casting directors visit frequently, nominally as "class assistants," but actually trolling for talent; or maybe just trying to make a living. For example:****For Young actors:Howard MeltzerHannah Montana Casting DirectorTV Intensive - Saturday, October 4thIn each class session, the children work on a scene. In addition, there is instruction in preparation, auditioning, so forth. Camps and career-placement services are available. I asked the fellow whether children start out with talent and then lose it, or whether talent is distributed among children in the same proportion as among adults, and if so, what the classes might add to that. According to him, we're all natural-born actors. As children, we play-act all the time, but as we age, we forget how much fun that acting can be. Acting classes, like organized sports, are just a modern way of letting children continue to have fun. And just as you won't be playing in the NFL or NBA unless you associate yourself with an organized program, just so you won't break into Hollywood without connections. Plus, I'm now getting casting calls for some reason.Hamburger claims to have auditioned more than a thousand children looking for his stars in TYMPWOV. When he found the boy and girl that he wanted for the leads, Michel Joelsas and Daniela Piepszyk, he changed the script to fit them. Joelsas had never acted in a movie before (like Magaly Solier in Madeinusa, who had never even been in a movie theater when Claudia Llosa made her the lead in her movie). Hamburger says that Joelsas had talent and other characteristics of his personality that helped him to compose the character, such as "his shyness, his introspection, his curiosity about life, and his strength." And his "intelligence and a sense of observation. And he had strong charisma. He's also got a certain shyness and an inner strength." Hamburger introduced all the children in his movie slowly to the characters that they were to play, perhaps Mike Leigh-like. There was improvisation. None of the kids saw a script during the shooting of the movie. So no acting class there, unless you count Hamburger's direction; TYMPWOV argues for inborn talent, but only in one in a thousand or so. “The way I work with them is the most important element. I treat them as intelligent people. They are not children. They are spiritual, intelligent human beings. What I look for in casting children is charisma and talent, but, more than that, I want smart people. There is a very natural sense - especially the kids with their reactions...We worked a lot to have this very natural feel, but there is a lot of work behind it.” So roll the film of Michel's audition. What the heck did this kid have to do when he came through the door, number 1013, with Hamburger languishing there in his director's chair, in order to get picked boss boy? Bark like a dog? I coulda been a contender? Put on blackface, fall to his knees, and sing Mammy? We'll never know. Now my niece - those auditions are brutal. She crawls on her belly like a reptile. They badger her about her tattoos. Surely there were tattoos in Shakespeare's time, weren't there, even if they weren't coupling ferrets over You Suck! in red and green on her shoulder blades?When I say that the kids were fine in the movie, I just mean that I watched the movie and never found myself thinking, "This kid is acting." What they were actually doing onscreen, I wasn't exactly paying attention to. Sometimes in a movie I do think about what the child is up to: when Cameron Bright gets into the bath with a naked Nicole Kidman in Birth, I found myself speculating about how that was accomplished without breaking any laws. When Dylan Baker has a talk with his son in Happiness, about Baker's pedophilia and his abuse of the boy's sleepover friend the night before, I knew in advance that Baker was actually talking to the air and his son's reaction shots were filmed later. But in general, I don't sit watching for signs that actors are acting, child or otherwise. Mary Badham and Phillip Alford in To Kill a Mockingbird? How much were they given to do? Can't remember. Scout narrates the movie, but as an adult. Are kids mostly asked to just look worried, or angry, or confused? How often does a kid have to laugh in a movie? What's the story on kid monologs? 726,000 Google hits for "kid monologs," including the following from Henry V:BOY: As young as I am, I have observed these three swashers. I am boy to all three; but all three, though they would serve me, could not be man to me; for indeed three such antics do not amount to a man. For Bardolph, he is white-livered and red-faced; by the means whereof 'a faces it out, but fights not. For Pistol, he hath a killing tongue and a quiet sword; by the means whereof 'a breaks word and keeps whole weapons. For Nym, he hath heard that men of few words are the best men, and therefore he scorns to say his prayers, lest 'a should be thought a coward; but his few bad words are matched with as few good deeds, for 'a never broke any man's head but his own, and that was against a post when he was drunk. They will steal anything, and call it purchase. Bardolph stole a lute-case, bore it twelve leagues, and sold it for three halfpence. Nym and Bardolph are sworn brothers in filching, and in Calais they stole a fire-shovel. I knew by that piece of service the men would carry coals. They would have me as familiar with men's pockets as their gloves or handkerchers; which makes much against my manhood, if I should take from another's pocket to put into mine; for it is plain pocketing up of wrongs. I must leave them and seek some better service. Their villainy goes against my weak stomach, and therefore I must cast it up.Wow. Maybe Michel laid that one on Hamburger.When I think of "bad acting," am I just reacting to bad line readings? In Son of Rambow, the boys have a lot to say and every once in a while I'd raise an eyebrow. In TYMPWOV, Joelsas and Peipszyk and the other kids are required to show their chops as follows:First twenty-five minutes: Michel (Joelsas) is the only child in the first quarter of the movie, except for a brief interaction with Hanna (Piepszyk). He plays by himself, asks his parents questions, looks out the car window at the big city and, by the way, narrates the film creditably. Sustains hugs from his parents. (As a child, I was hugged by a woman in a play once and I had to stand there and take it with a smile.) This is a good-looking young man. The camera loves him. So he walks, runs, waits, frowns at strange food, pisses in a flowerpot. It all looks real to me. I guess that's acting.Second twenty-five minutes: Michel gets slapped, runs away, cooks in the kitchen, kills time around the house. Now some face time with Hanna - mild dialog - but since I don't speak Portuguese, how can I evaluate their line readings? Rats. (And by the way, watching the movie, I mostly couldn't distinguish Portuguese from Yiddish; be nice if the subtitles would indicate which was being spoken - and ditto for Swedish and Finnish in Mother of Mine). At 39 minutes (out of 100), Michel meets Hanna's friends, three boys. They refer to Michel as the goy. Ten minutes of ensemble child acting; all five seem a little stiff, but they're just meeting each other for the first time, so maybe in real life they would be stiff. Will the stiffness persist? Now Michel settles in with his neighbor, the elderly Shlomo next door, and makes friends throughout the neighborhood. He's not asked to say much by Hamburger, but he does a lot of worrying about his parents, running around the neighborhood, so on. At the halfway point in the film, the World Cup begins. Third twenty-five minutes: First World-Cup match with everyone watching; Michel spending time alone again in the apartment; then with a whole crowd of kids - minimal dialog; back home at the one-hour mark. Second match. Polish Jew, Italian Jew, Greek, African, German Jew, Hamburger really pushing the melting-pot theme. Local soccer game. Narration by boy. He wants to be a goalie. Another World-Cup match (sees first with Shlomo, second at the union, third with the old women. Local kids game with Michel as goalie. Piepszyk gives him a gift in a one-on-one scene with dialog. Michel goes to synagogue.Final twenty-five minutes: The kids do an excellent acting job at a bar mitzvah celebration. And then some acting by Joelsas, as he helps a young union member hide from the army and secret police. Emoting, face to face with an adult! Some intense moments. Then more alone time for the boy, now coping with his worries in a more mature way than at the beginning. And the final soccer match, and more perfect-pitch behavior from Joelsas. And drama to wrap up. The boy has charisma, for sure. I believed him, from start to finish, and the other kids too.And lest I forget, every time a goal was scored, everybody whooped and waved their arms in the air and I wondered if all the women in Brazil were shaving under their arms in 1970. According to a Brazilian I asked, the answer is yes. Looks come first in Brazil, she told me, and that includes proper underarm maintenance.
]]>Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:04:22 GMTjoem18bjoem18b Blog9/25/2008 7:04:22 PMO Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias (2006)***** SPOILERS *****The Year My Parents Went On Vaction tells the story of a pre-teen boy in São Paulo, Brazil, separated from his parents during a military coup in 1970. As the army takes over, the country is distracted in part by Brazil's successes in the World Cup of that year (sort of like following the pennant race or NFL football in the U.S. as the country's financial system implodes). The movie is pleasant, never dull, well shot, with a delicate score that adds to the feelings of sadness and loss inherent in the plot (the director threw out the first score written for the movie; Beto Villares then did it over and got it right).TYMPWOV begins with a mother and father taking their son to grandfather's house in São Paulo. The three are riding in a VW bug, '65 or earlier. A Brazilian friend suggests that for verisimilitude, they should have been in a Renault or Citroen, because the bug was the inexpensive car of youth and the lower middle-class; her family always drove French cars. Be that as it may, the movie's streets are rife with vintage bugs and VW buses, though I did spot a Renault or two. I mention this because the first car that I bought and paid for with my own money was a new '67 bug from Belmont Motors in Massachusetts, powder blue. It has been sitting since 1981 or so in a succession of company parking lots, progressively degenerating until, paint gone, wheels seized, flowering weeds growing from dirt caught in the chassis crevicles, it looks so bad that I was ordered to have it towed off the property because it had become an eyesore, at least to one sorehead in the company who remained anonymous - the bug's engine refusing to start, a hole in the floor threatening to release the battery under the back seat like a bomb dropped from its bay at the first speed bump, the windows opaque as my glasses in the Turkish bath down the street. Fortunately, my son stepped up and volunteered to restore the car as a hobby. He abstracted it on a flatbed towtruck via Raul's Towing Service to his driveway, where it sat, partially disassembled, for a week or two before the city, at the behest of neighbors or a cruising patrol car, ordered him to remove it. He rolled the poor thing into his garage, wheels now at least freed, out of sight behind closed doors, and since then he has ordered replacement parts from an unending list. He tells me that there are two sources from which to obtain these parts: (a) a quality manufacturer somewhere or other, or (b)Brazil. You want quality, you go to the quality manufacturer; you want cheap, you go to Brazil. I don't know if that's true or not but when I replaced a bumper a long time ago, it had a "Made in Brazil" sticker on the inside surface. One tap by another vehicle and the bumper folded up like an origami noodle. Also, curiously, '67 door handles are unavailable. But the point is, if you're a bug lover you might want to give TYMPWOV a little love for that reason if for no other.Director/writer Cao Hamburger and his co-writer, Claudio Galperin, were both born in São Paulo in 1962 and were eight years old when General Emilio Medici engineered his coup. Hamburger's parents "went on vacation" at that time, but only for a few weeks. In this movie, Hamburger and Galperin share some of their childhood experiences growing up in the cultural melting-pot of São Paulo. Hamburger's father came from a German/Jewish family that emigrated to Brazil before World War II. His mother was of Italian/Catholic stock, though both parents were non-religious scientists as he grew up. He says that he began thinking about São Paulo's mix of cultures and his roots while living and feeling like an outsider in London, another city where races and nationalities mingle. According to Hamburger (and my Brazilian friends), Brazil is deeply divided over socio-economic class issues (the rich, a small middle-class, and the poor) but is accepting of emigrants; he refers to Brazilian culture as Samba culture - "Samba" here meaning, roughly, "let's all dance together." In fact, Hamburger started out with all sorts of ideas for the movie, but while making it settled on the idea of enjoying the brief periods of sunshine in life on a cloudy day. The movie was made on a medium budget by Brazilian standards. Since the success of films like Central Station and City of God, Hamburger says, funding opportunities for cinema have gotten a lot better. He used professionals as well as non-actors from the community, which in the film is a conservative Jewish neighborhood. Today, Hamburger says, this neighborhood is Korean, but since he is exploring his own roots, for the purposes of the film it remains Jewish. Hamburger spent four months finding an empty apartment building to use for the shoot; the movie was filmed completely on location.So often in making a movie, the director starts out with an idea and massages it until a theme for the film is produced. This process can extend over years with input from editors, writers, friends, family, and assorted other sources while the director chases funding, as I describe in my review of Manda Bala. Hamburger's initial inspiration was to examine the mixture of cultures in Brazil, and from that grew the idea of examining a year in the life of a boy growing up in the same time and place that Hamburger and Galperin did. During the making of the movie, the military coup and contemperaneous world-cup excitement in the film emerged, according to the director, as metaphors for life. It seems to me that some of these metaphors crop up post-production but perhaps I'm just metaphor-blind or metaphor-averse. Does a movie metaphor count if it's discovered after the movie is finished? Does it count if a reviewer invokes it, rather than the director? I do like the way that Claudia Llosa, for example, disavows metaphors in her Maven-reviewed Madeinusa, a movie which could easily be weighed down with them. I'm guessing that Hamburger's military coup and World Cup would remain in the movie whether Hamburger deemed them metaphors or not. As it is, he has one more thing to talk about during interviews. Anyway, the coup represents a dark day and the World-Cup victory represents a shaft of sunlight breaking through the gloom of that day. The dark day is life under the military regime and the sunlight represents those moments in life that you must embrace in order to get through the bad patches - did I just nest a metaphor within a metaphor there? The life of goalies in general is also a metaphor in the movie, but if the victory is a bright shaft of sunlight, what is the goalie? A meteorite the size of Oshgosh? Who knows? The gray day/sunlight metaphor, applied to my own personal life, would be like at my work, where my boss would be dictator General Emilio Medici, and out of the grinding gray of morning I would emerge at lunchtime to sit down across from Izzy Vulvano and beat his pants off playing Magic and using my special red and black deck. Also the movie is about dealing with our loneliness and our connections to others, how we make them and break them and move on. Is the movie itself a metaphor for that, or just a movie about that? Also, the director does not agree that soccer is the opiate of the masses, exploited by the junta in this case to maintain calm. Hamburger is going for gray day/sunshine here, not gray day/opium. And having mentioned Manda Bala above, note that this whole movie unfurled without a kidnapping or fried frog in sight, but only because the whole country is under siege from an autocratic military dictatorship rather than a scourge of corrupt politicians and kidnapping-for-profit criminal thugs.Strangely, Hamburger's soccer metaphor gets turned on its head at the end of the movie. Irony? Another layer? Or just part of the movie that doesn't conform to a simple, stumbled-upon talking point? I thought about calling Hamburger and asking him, but nobody likes a wiseass.When the metaphorical army arrives in Michel's neighborhood and starts dragging young men out of their union offices in São Paulo, clubbing them and hurling them into vans while the boy's parents are in hiding, it occurred to me to wonder whether such scenes are automatically more powerful when filmed in the country where they are supposed to have happened, in the language in which they happened, by victims or the relatives of victims of the evils portrayed. Or, for a subtitle-hating country like America, could such a scene be made more visceral and moving if shot in Hollywood for U.S. consumption? For example, would Der Untergang or The Lives of Others have retained their energy or even gained some, if they had been made, shot for shot, in the U.S. with U.S. actors instead of Germans? Ennio De Concini tried it with xxAlec Guiness playing Hitler but I think we can agree that that didn't work as well as Bruno Ganz doing it. Being a cinema snob, I would say without cavil that it is intuitively obvious that the Brazilian version of the coup or the German version of Hitler's last days cannot fail to have an innate power, if well enough done, that a U.S. version could never match. But hold on. Summer Palace provides a dramatic take on Tiananmen Square and the events there in 1989, yet I've heard plenty of squawking (from round eyes) about its failure to do justice to that historic conflict. Would a movie about Tiananmen, made along the lines of The Last Emperor, fare better in the U.S? Could Gettysburg withstand a transfer to Japan; if Kurosawa made it, might it even improve in the eyes of the Japanese? Or in the eyes of American viewers as well? How to assign metrics to questions like these? It's easy to just say that the better the filmmaker, the better the film, for all informed viewers of taste. Do the French still love Jerry Lewis? Are Hollywood blockbusters still the biggest grossers all around the world? And children in movies - does the fact that the child is native to a country foreign to the viewer and speaks a foreign language have any effect one way or the other on that viewer? Rather than approaching these questions from first principles, maybe the thing to do is to evaluate a hundred movies or so, make a call on each, and examine the results for trends.And speaking of children, how do they learn to act so well? Or isn't learning involved? Teens act in high-school drama classes and plays - they're learning something there, I guess. They act in community theater, especially in locations where drama in the schools is being cut. Adults go to drama school, but often act badly in films anyway. And yet I see movie after movie in which children act just fine (Mother of Mine, Wondrous Oblivion, Birth, Kabluey (where the kids are caricatures, but good caricatures.) On the other hand, that kid in The Dick Van Dyke Show... ouch.). Is aging an antidote to natural inborn talent? As we grow up, do we lose our ability to act? Or are these children, who seem to be acting so well, actually not doing much at all? In TYMPWOV, is the boy mostly just running around, looking upset, and playing with his tabletop soccer set, or is he interacting with others and... well, acting. I called the Stella Adler School in Manhattan to ask these questions, but the woman I spoke to told me that the youngest students they enroll are 14-year-olds (eight Saturday classes from 10 to 6, $800. No waiting list.) I asked the woman if the under-14s I see in the movies have been trained, or if whatever they show is just natural ability. She could only surmise. I asked if the Stella Adler Saturday classes have produced some success stories; she said yes, but didn't name anybody I've heard of. She didn't have much else to say about younger children and their appearances in movies, so I called a school out in the Valley (Sherman Oaks) which takes kids as young as 8. Sherman Oaks is up the 405 from Santa Monica, just over the hills from Hollywood. The fellow I spoke to told me flatly that every young person onscreen today has taken classes. He listed graduates from his school now appearing in Desperate Housewives, Everyone Hates Chris, etc., etc. (Classes from 10 to noon on Saturdays.) Agents and casting directors visit frequently, nominally as "class assistants," but actually trolling for talent; or maybe just trying to make a living. For example:****For Young actors:Howard MeltzerHannah Montana Casting DirectorTV Intensive - Saturday, October 4thIn each class session, the children work on a scene. In addition, there is instruction in preparation, auditioning, so forth. Camps and career-placement services are available. I asked the fellow whether children start out with talent and then lose it, or whether talent is distributed among children in the same proportion as among adults, and if so, what the classes might add to that. According to him, we're all natural-born actors. As children, we play-act all the time, but as we age, we forget how much fun that acting can be. Acting classes, like organized sports, are just a modern way of letting children continue to have fun. And just as you won't be playing in the NFL or NBA unless you associate yourself with an organized program, just so you won't break into Hollywood without connections. Plus, I'm now getting casting calls for some reason.Hamburger claims to have auditioned more than a thousand children looking for his stars in TYMPWOV. When he found the boy and girl that he wanted for the leads, Michel Joelsas and Daniela Piepszyk, he changed the script to fit them. Joelsas had never acted in a movie before (like Magaly Solier in Madeinusa, who had never even been in a movie theater when Claudia Llosa made her the lead in her movie). Hamburger says that Joelsas had talent and other characteristics of his personality that helped him to compose the character, such as "his shyness, his introspection, his curiosity about life, and his strength." And his "intelligence and a sense of observation. And he had strong charisma. He's also got a certain shyness and an inner strength." Hamburger introduced all the children in his movie slowly to the characters that they were to play, perhaps Mike Leigh-like. There was improvisation. None of the kids saw a script during the shooting of the movie. So no acting class there, unless you count Hamburger's direction; TYMPWOV argues for inborn talent, but only in one in a thousand or so. “The way I work with them is the most important element. I treat them as intelligent people. They are not children. They are spiritual, intelligent human beings. What I look for in casting children is charisma and talent, but, more than that, I want smart people. There is a very natural sense - especially the kids with their reactions...We worked a lot to have this very natural feel, but there is a lot of work behind it.” So roll the film of Michel's audition. What the heck did this kid have to do when he came through the door, number 1013, with Hamburger languishing there in his director's chair, in order to get picked boss boy? Bark like a dog? I coulda been a contender? Put on blackface, fall to his knees, and sing Mammy? We'll never know. Now my niece - those auditions are brutal. She crawls on her belly like a reptile. They badger her about her tattoos. Surely there were tattoos in Shakespeare's time, weren't there, even if they weren't coupling ferrets over You Suck! in red and green on her shoulder blades?When I say that the kids were fine in the movie, I just mean that I watched the movie and never found myself thinking, "This kid is acting." What they were actually doing onscreen, I wasn't exactly paying attention to. Sometimes in a movie I do think about what the child is up to: when Cameron Bright gets into the bath with a naked Nicole Kidman in Birth, I found myself speculating about how that was accomplished without breaking any laws. When Dylan Baker has a talk with his son in Happiness, about Baker's pedophilia and his abuse of the boy's sleepover friend the night before, I knew in advance that Baker was actually talking to the air and his son's reaction shots were filmed later. But in general, I don't sit watching for signs that actors are acting, child or otherwise. Mary Badham and Phillip Alford in To Kill a Mockingbird? How much were they given to do? Can't remember. Scout narrates the movie, but as an adult. Are kids mostly asked to just look worried, or angry, or confused? How often does a kid have to laugh in a movie? What's the story on kid monologs? 726,000 Google hits for "kid monologs," including the following from Henry V:BOY: As young as I am, I have observed these three swashers. I am boy to all three; but all three, though they would serve me, could not be man to me; for indeed three such antics do not amount to a man. For Bardolph, he is white-livered and red-faced; by the means whereof 'a faces it out, but fights not. For Pistol, he hath a killing tongue and a quiet sword; by the means whereof 'a breaks word and keeps whole weapons. For Nym, he hath heard that men of few words are the best men, and therefore he scorns to say his prayers, lest 'a should be thought a coward; but his few bad words are matched with as few good deeds, for 'a never broke any man's head but his own, and that was against a post when he was drunk. They will steal anything, and call it purchase. Bardolph stole a lute-case, bore it twelve leagues, and sold it for three halfpence. Nym and Bardolph are sworn brothers in filching, and in Calais they stole a fire-shovel. I knew by that piece of service the men would carry coals. They would have me as familiar with men's pockets as their gloves or handkerchers; which makes much against my manhood, if I should take from another's pocket to put into mine; for it is plain pocketing up of wrongs. I must leave them and seek some better service. Their villainy goes against my weak stomach, and therefore I must cast it up.Wow. Maybe Michel laid that one on Hamburger.When I think of "bad acting," am I just reacting to bad line readings? In Son of Rambow, the boys have a lot to say and every once in a while I'd raise an eyebrow. In TYMPWOV, Joelsas and Peipszyk and the other kids are required to show their chops as follows:First twenty-five minutes: Michel (Joelsas) is the only child in the first quarter of the movie, except for a brief interaction with Hanna (Piepszyk). He plays by himself, asks his parents questions, looks out the car window at the big city and, by the way, narrates the film creditably. Sustains hugs from his parents. (As a child, I was hugged by a woman in a play once and I had to stand there and take it with a smile.) This is a good-looking young man. The camera loves him. So he walks, runs, waits, frowns at strange food, pisses in a flowerpot. It all looks real to me. I guess that's acting.Second twenty-five minutes: Michel gets slapped, runs away, cooks in the kitchen, kills time around the house. Now some face time with Hanna - mild dialog - but since I don't speak Portuguese, how can I evaluate their line readings? Rats. (And by the way, watching the movie, I mostly couldn't distinguish Portuguese from Yiddish; be nice if the subtitles would indicate which was being spoken - and ditto for Swedish and Finnish in Mother of Mine). At 39 minutes (out of 100), Michel meets Hanna's friends, three boys. They refer to Michel as the goy. Ten minutes of ensemble child acting; all five seem a little stiff, but they're just meeting each other for the first time, so maybe in real life they would be stiff. Will the stiffness persist? Now Michel settles in with his neighbor, the elderly Shlomo next door, and makes friends throughout the neighborhood. He's not asked to say much by Hamburger, but he does a lot of worrying about his parents, running around the neighborhood, so on. At the halfway point in the film, the World Cup begins. Third twenty-five minutes: First World-Cup match with everyone watching; Michel spending time alone again in the apartment; then with a whole crowd of kids - minimal dialog; back home at the one-hour mark. Second match. Polish Jew, Italian Jew, Greek, African, German Jew, Hamburger really pushing the melting-pot theme. Local soccer game. Narration by boy. He wants to be a goalie. Another World-Cup match (sees first with Shlomo, second at the union, third with the old women. Local kids game with Michel as goalie. Piepszyk gives him a gift in a one-on-one scene with dialog. Michel goes to synagogue.Final twenty-five minutes: The kids do an excellent acting job at a bar mitzvah celebration. And then some acting by Joelsas, as he helps a young union member hide from the army and secret police. Emoting, face to face with an adult! Some intense moments. Then more alone time for the boy, now coping with his worries in a more mature way than at the beginning. And the final soccer match, and more perfect-pitch behavior from Joelsas. And drama to wrap up. The boy has charisma, for sure. I believed him, from start to finish, and the other kids too.And lest I forget, every time a goal was scored, everybody whooped and waved their arms in the air and I wondered if all the women in Brazil were shaving under their arms in 1970. According to a Brazilian I asked, the answer is yes. Looks come first in Brazil, she told me, and that includes proper underarm maintenance. http://www.spout.com/groups/Spout_Mavens/Re_Summer_Palace/366/35539/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: Risselada
Post To: Spout Mavens
Post Date: 9/25/2008 2:08:00 PM
Body: Finally my review of Summer Palace. http://www.spout.com/blogs/risselada/archive/2008/9/25/35538.aspx
]]>Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:08:00 GMTRisseladaSpout Mavens9/25/2008 2:08:00 PMFinally my review of Summer Palace. http://www.spout.com/blogs/risselada/archive/2008/9/25/35538.aspx http://www.spout.com/blogs/risselada/archive/2008/9/25/35538.aspx Post By: Risselada
Post To: Risselada Blog
Post Date: 9/25/2008 2:04:42 PM
Body: I've been pretty lax about making myself write these maven reviews in a timely manner. I notice that just about everyone else has already written a review on Summer Palace already, and anything I'm about to say has probably already been covered by someone. I'd recommend joem18b's review of the film as one of the most comprehensive collection of thoughts on various aspects of the film. Of course it may take you longer to finish reading his 4,778 word review than it does to watch this 140 minute movie. How much does enjoying and understanding this film rely on being already aware of certain aspects of a culture? It's a question I have to ask when considering a film made outside of the culture I am familiar with. In this case I am very unfamiliar with China's political history and the featured events in Tiananmen Square. This movie shows some of the physical events occurring, but the reason behind them is not explained. I thought perhaps the reason was that the filmmakers were merely trying to use these events as a backdrop for a more universal story of love and relationships. Well if that is true, then it's unfortunate because the main story and characters are frustrating and not very engaging. The characters themselves don't even seem to know what's going with themselves (the main story) or the events going on in the bigger world around them (the more interesting background). Which leads me to the other possibility. Maybe the characters aren't the only ones who don't really know what was happening around them. Maybe the filmmakers had no idea what all of these events going on at that time meant either. Information from some of the other maven viewers regarding this film seem to support the fact that most of the entire nation of China has less idea about what happened in some of their history than people do in the United States. Maybe I should be viewing the movie in that context then. A bunch of confused kids are forced to live together (college) with no apparent role models. At least there is hardly ever an adult on screen, and when there is the film gives them very little importance. It's hard to see what the goals and motivations of any of the characters are other than to experiment in sex and lounge about. In the context shown, I guess I could believe that maybe they wouldn't have any other goals, but the problem is that we know what is being shown isn't the whole context. We know that the kids are going to class, that they have parents, that there must be other kids around them who do have real goal and motivates because there is a revolution going on around them! So why are the main characters so apathetic, selfish, and aimless? The film gives no reason, and there must be some reason if you expect for me to empathize with Yu Hong's plight. All we get is narration of diary entries that spout unconnected emotions and metaphors without offering any tangible source for these feelings. How can I react, be affected, or learn anything then from this story? There are some good things about this movie. There are a few wonderful images, an example being a shot of a boat on the water that doesn't seem sped up but somehow the sunset seems incredibly expedited. I'm not sure how they did this shot but it's beautiful. It's also apparent that the actors are all quite talented. So it's a waste sometimes that the cameraman is so often asked to film nothing, while the actors are asked to do nothing. Nothing of interest at any rate. Rating: 5/10
]]>Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:04:42 GMTRisseladaRisselada Blog9/25/2008 2:04:42 PMI've been pretty lax about making myself write these maven reviews in a timely manner. I notice that just about everyone else has already written a review on Summer Palace already, and anything I'm about to say has probably already been covered by someone. I'd recommend joem18b's review of the film as one of the most comprehensive collection of thoughts on various aspects of the film. Of course it may take you longer to finish reading his 4,778 word review than it does to watch this 140 minute movie. How much does enjoying and understanding this film rely on being already aware of certain aspects of a culture? It's a question I have to ask when considering a film made outside of the culture I am familiar with. In this case I am very unfamiliar with China's political history and the featured events in Tiananmen Square. This movie shows some of the physical events occurring, but the reason behind them is not explained. I thought perhaps the reason was that the filmmakers were merely trying to use these events as a backdrop for a more universal story of love and relationships. Well if that is true, then it's unfortunate because the main story and characters are frustrating and not very engaging. The characters themselves don't even seem to know what's going with themselves (the main story) or the events going on in the bigger world around them (the more interesting background). Which leads me to the other possibility. Maybe the characters aren't the only ones who don't really know what was happening around them. Maybe the filmmakers had no idea what all of these events going on at that time meant either. Information from some of the other maven viewers regarding this film seem to support the fact that most of the entire nation of China has less idea about what happened in some of their history than people do in the United States. Maybe I should be viewing the movie in that context then. A bunch of confused kids are forced to live together (college) with no apparent role models. At least there is hardly ever an adult on screen, and when there is the film gives them very little importance. It's hard to see what the goals and motivations of any of the characters are other than to experiment in sex and lounge about. In the context shown, I guess I could believe that maybe they wouldn't have any other goals, but the problem is that we know what is being shown isn't the whole context. We know that the kids are going to class, that they have parents, that there must be other kids around them who do have real goal and motivates because there is a revolution going on around them! So why are the main characters so apathetic, selfish, and aimless? The film gives no reason, and there must be some reason if you expect for me to empathize with Yu Hong's plight. All we get is narration of diary entries that spout unconnected emotions and metaphors without offering any tangible source for these feelings. How can I react, be affected, or learn anything then from this story? There are some good things about this movie. There are a few wonderful images, an example being a shot of a boat on the water that doesn't seem sped up but somehow the sunset seems incredibly expedited. I'm not sure how they did this shot but it's beautiful. It's also apparent that the actors are all quite talented. So it's a waste sometimes that the cameraman is so often asked to film nothing, while the actors are asked to do nothing. Nothing of interest at any rate. Rating: 5/10 http://www.spout.com/blogs/bigjefflebowski/archive/2008/9/9/34922.aspx Post By: BigJeffLebowski
Post To: BigJeffLebowski Blog
Post Date: 9/9/2008 2:15:29 AM
Body: Whenever a film depicts the lives of fictitious individuals against a noteworthy historical backdrop, the question must be raised: do the filmmakers use their characters to humanize an otherwise emotionally unfathomable event, or do they cheaply exploit it to give their film greater social, political, intellectual, or philosophical weight? For the first half of its nearly two and a half hour running time, Lou Ye's Summer Palace manages to deftly filter the unrest of late 1980s China through the microcosm of a teen attending Beijing University. But following a dramatization of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations (and a where-are-they-now montage that swiftly glosses over the next decade), the film struggles for the next hour to rediscover the tone and pace that made its story thusfar so resonant. Yu Hong, a teenager from Tumen, serves as our protagonist and Metaphor with a capital M. Yu Hong is a thoughtful yet uncertain girl, more sure of what she doesn't want to be than what she does. She enters university with hopes of dashing her small town ennui, but finds instead that the uncertainties of adult life are greater than those of adolesence. At first lonely and introverted, Yu Hong is befriended by Li Ti, a fellow student, who introduces her to Zhou Wei. At first coy towards one another, the two begin the kind of courtship that seemingly only occurs in books and movies by or about disaffected poetic types; in between having sex and saying things like "I think we should break up, because I don't think I could stand to lose you," she grows restless, testing the waters of her relationship, pushing the boundaries of Zhou Wei's allegiance to see how far they will bend. And yet she is inconsolable when they finally break. Moving on from one loveless, impulsive, illicit romance to another, Yu Hong seems intent on alienating everything and everyone for whom she cares. Hers is the kind of self destructive behavior that seems aloof on the surface but stems from a deep current of doubt. Afraid to have anything taken from her against her will, she tests everyone who enters her life -- an endless string of Jobs of varying degrees of love-blind acceptance. If they can endure Yu Hong's games, the logic follows, they will be willing and able to maintain. If, however, they do not, she can rest knowing that it was by her own choice and actions that their relationship has severed. It is too late when Yu Hong realizes that there is more than empty consolation in the old trope that it's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. As the chasm between her ideal and her actual lives grows, her affairs become more reckless, until a tragic event reminds her of what is truly important to her -- and how irreparably she has sabotaged it. If this were all, the film would be an entertaining, if somewhat heavy handed, treatise on self realization and positive actualization; a pleasant and illuminating microcosm of the country and its times. But the last hour of the film constantly teases the audience with a resolution that it doesn't deliver. While the moral implications of the film's non-ending are significant, they are no different than those drawn from the film's midpoint, which would have made a more logical conclusion. There simply isn't enough going on over the next fifteen years of Yu Hong's life to warrant an additional hour of film. Nothing that any of the characters begin after college is explored, nor is it resolved. Perhaps this is the film's conceit, that there will always be a disparity between how we'd like things to occur and how they do, and that it's more often than not our own fault, due to blinders we don't know we're wearing. But that point was made succinctly halfway through the film; everything that comes after is beating a dead horse. This is not to say Summer Palace is a bad film. The first half is a moving evocation of those uncertain years between childhood and adulthood in which our illusions of life crumble around us and we are left, ill equiped with mediocre tools, to rebuild them stronger than before. The sex scenes -- of which there are many -- are surprisingly tender. They do not titilate, instead they give us insight into a side of the characters which they hide, sometimes even from themselves. Ultimately, it is tedious at its worst, but brilliant at its best.
]]>Tue, 09 Sep 2008 06:15:29 GMTBigJeffLebowskiBigJeffLebowski Blog9/9/2008 2:15:29 AMWhenever a film depicts the lives of fictitious individuals against a noteworthy historical backdrop, the question must be raised: do the filmmakers use their characters to humanize an otherwise emotionally unfathomable event, or do they cheaply exploit it to give their film greater social, political, intellectual, or philosophical weight? For the first half of its nearly two and a half hour running time, Lou Ye's Summer Palace manages to deftly filter the unrest of late 1980s China through the microcosm of a teen attending Beijing University. But following a dramatization of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations (and a where-are-they-now montage that swiftly glosses over the next decade), the film struggles for the next hour to rediscover the tone and pace that made its story thusfar so resonant. Yu Hong, a teenager from Tumen, serves as our protagonist and Metaphor with a capital M. Yu Hong is a thoughtful yet uncertain girl, more sure of what she doesn't want to be than what she does. She enters university with hopes of dashing her small town ennui, but finds instead that the uncertainties of adult life are greater than those of adolesence. At first lonely and introverted, Yu Hong is befriended by Li Ti, a fellow student, who introduces her to Zhou Wei. At first coy towards one another, the two begin the kind of courtship that seemingly only occurs in books and movies by or about disaffected poetic types; in between having sex and saying things like "I think we should break up, because I don't think I could stand to lose you," she grows restless, testing the waters of her relationship, pushing the boundaries of Zhou Wei's allegiance to see how far they will bend. And yet she is inconsolable when they finally break. Moving on from one loveless, impulsive, illicit romance to another, Yu Hong seems intent on alienating everything and everyone for whom she cares. Hers is the kind of self destructive behavior that seems aloof on the surface but stems from a deep current of doubt. Afraid to have anything taken from her against her will, she tests everyone who enters her life -- an endless string of Jobs of varying degrees of love-blind acceptance. If they can endure Yu Hong's games, the logic follows, they will be willing and able to maintain. If, however, they do not, she can rest knowing that it was by her own choice and actions that their relationship has severed. It is too late when Yu Hong realizes that there is more than empty consolation in the old trope that it's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. As the chasm between her ideal and her actual lives grows, her affairs become more reckless, until a tragic event reminds her of what is truly important to her -- and how irreparably she has sabotaged it. If this were all, the film would be an entertaining, if somewhat heavy handed, treatise on self realization and positive actualization; a pleasant and illuminating microcosm of the country and its times. But the last hour of the film constantly teases the audience with a resolution that it doesn't deliver. While the moral implications of the film's non-ending are significant, they are no different than those drawn from the film's midpoint, which would have made a more logical conclusion. There simply isn't enough going on over the next fifteen years of Yu Hong's life to warrant an additional hour of film. Nothing that any of the characters begin after college is explored, nor is it resolved. Perhaps this is the film's conceit, that there will always be a disparity between how we'd like things to occur and how they do, and that it's more often than not our own fault, due to blinders we don't know we're wearing. But that point was made succinctly halfway through the film; everything that comes after is beating a dead horse. This is not to say Summer Palace is a bad film. The first half is a moving evocation of those uncertain years between childhood and adulthood in which our illusions of life crumble around us and we are left, ill equiped with mediocre tools, to rebuild them stronger than before. The sex scenes -- of which there are many -- are surprisingly tender. They do not titilate, instead they give us insight into a side of the characters which they hide, sometimes even from themselves. Ultimately, it is tedious at its worst, but brilliant at its best. http://www.spout.com/blogs/the_american_dream/archive/2008/8/31/34594.aspx Post By: The_American_Dream
Post To: The_American_Dream Blog
Post Date: 8/31/2008 4:52:39 PM
Body: There is not a great deal to be said for this movie. And it is not because of the sex which is what I was afraid of. But I hoped that this one would, in its epic standing, that it would pull a large amount of material across time and people to make it interesting. Unfortunatly "Summer Palace" is really more than a let down to the point of almost being a waste. "Summer Palace" swings back and forth from what it gets made out to be. That being and political and sex charged drama spanning most of the dramatic periods in China's history. Well strictly speaking, it does that. This story of people does weave itself (or rather its characters) across distance and events rather completely. However, maybe only half way in or slightly more I was really wondering why I was supposed to care. Frankly, this is something that can be done very well and in a manner where I really do care. "A Beautiful Mind" is an example of a movie about people that really does span events and changes very well. "A Beautiful Mind" is perhaps not as politically charged as a modern Chinese drama is bound to be, but that is not the point here. "Summer Palace" really wants to tell a story about people and less about a time, this is what ramps it up to its 140 minute runtime, and it is really uninteresting. "Summer Palace" wants its audience to feel the trails and hardships, internal and external, faced by a small group over the corse of more than a decade. What is wrong with that? Nothing really, only that every time some little thing happens it takes several minutes of a character at sunset trying to work out why their friend stole a book from the library. Needless to say, you are in for far more of this kind of stuff when say someone throws them self off a building. There is also the pretense that this movie actually captures something about the time. Although it might, between dates, locations, stock footage, and an epilogue, there is not so much the emotion that one feels when there is actual empathy for the situation from the actors. "Across the Universe" encounters this, but makes up for it by being visually stunning beyond use of colors or focus (and also being very trippy). "Summer Palace" does in fact maintain genuinely good photography. However the constant recycling of formulaic shots does not make the movie any more interesting. With all this, what is there really to say is good? Well not allot. at the start, interesting camera moves and a heavy grit did grab my attention. But for its qualities, "Summer Palace" really falls short of expectations unless you came just for the sex (which is mostly buried under the afore mentioned lengths of sunset shots). "Summer Palace", perhaps grasping at the greats of historical fiction in film such as "Forret Gump", and the epic romance such as "The English Patient", does not impress. "Summer Palace" falls below the films of its county of origin as well, which often speak more volumes about China's history (as in "Hero") and create more connection between actor and audience (despite all the Kung-Fu hullabaloo). So I have to give this movie an overall negative review, not that I am the first it seems.
]]>Sun, 31 Aug 2008 20:52:39 GMTThe_American_DreamThe_American_Dream Blog8/31/2008 4:52:39 PMThere is not a great deal to be said for this movie. And it is not because of the sex which is what I was afraid of. But I hoped that this one would, in its epic standing, that it would pull a large amount of material across time and people to make it interesting. Unfortunatly "Summer Palace" is really more than a let down to the point of almost being a waste. "Summer Palace" swings back and forth from what it gets made out to be. That being and political and sex charged drama spanning most of the dramatic periods in China's history. Well strictly speaking, it does that. This story of people does weave itself (or rather its characters) across distance and events rather completely. However, maybe only half way in or slightly more I was really wondering why I was supposed to care. Frankly, this is something that can be done very well and in a manner where I really do care. "A Beautiful Mind" is an example of a movie about people that really does span events and changes very well. "A Beautiful Mind" is perhaps not as politically charged as a modern Chinese drama is bound to be, but that is not the point here. "Summer Palace" really wants to tell a story about people and less about a time, this is what ramps it up to its 140 minute runtime, and it is really uninteresting. "Summer Palace" wants its audience to feel the trails and hardships, internal and external, faced by a small group over the corse of more than a decade. What is wrong with that? Nothing really, only that every time some little thing happens it takes several minutes of a character at sunset trying to work out why their friend stole a book from the library. Needless to say, you are in for far more of this kind of stuff when say someone throws them self off a building. There is also the pretense that this movie actually captures something about the time. Although it might, between dates, locations, stock footage, and an epilogue, there is not so much the emotion that one feels when there is actual empathy for the situation from the actors. "Across the Universe" encounters this, but makes up for it by being visually stunning beyond use of colors or focus (and also being very trippy). "Summer Palace" does in fact maintain genuinely good photography. However the constant recycling of formulaic shots does not make the movie any more interesting. With all this, what is there really to say is good? Well not allot. at the start, interesting camera moves and a heavy grit did grab my attention. But for its qualities, "Summer Palace" really falls short of expectations unless you came just for the sex (which is mostly buried under the afore mentioned lengths of sunset shots). "Summer Palace", perhaps grasping at the greats of historical fiction in film such as "Forret Gump", and the epic romance such as "The English Patient", does not impress. "Summer Palace" falls below the films of its county of origin as well, which often speak more volumes about China's history (as in "Hero") and create more connection between actor and audience (despite all the Kung-Fu hullabaloo). So I have to give this movie an overall negative review, not that I am the first it seems. http://www.spout.com/blogs/smooth_j/archive/2008/8/30/34554.aspx Post By: Smooth_J
Post To: Smooth_J Blog
Post Date: 8/30/2008 1:14:44 PM
Body: "Sex and politics are on full boil!" NY Times "Its sex scenes are mini revolutions!" Guardian "I got a boner--from all the sex!" TVs Fred Savage, DGA nominee That is the first impression that the viewer of Summer Palace is supposed to receive. A hot-seat, glorified porno, and that's mostly what the film is. However, it's a bit more high-class than that: Lou Ye has a better eye for photography than your average porno auteur, and he manages to meld the debauchery with political events, whether or not his characters (that happen to be having sex at the time) know what the hell is going on. I actually liked the film. While the running time was a bit on the long-side, and certain scenes were way too brooding and self-important, there were frequent shines of brilliance in Lou Ye's direction. The story involves a girl named Yu Hong from a small Chinese town, who is introduced as being strange and strong-willed and in a passionate romance with her boyfriend. Just as soon as she sleeps with him in a "lyrical love scene" in the middle of a field, she says that she's leaving him and going to school in Beijing. Cut to: Beijing, where disaffected youth smoke like chimneys and have intellectual discussions in their dorm rooms, all the while having an interest in the opposite sex that can only be described as juvenile. There are long, LONG shots of the heroine's face as she stares down her love interest, Zhou Wei, and establishes an obviously otherworldly mind-connection with him, because those scenes and their wonderfully photographed sex-scenes are really the only connection that they seem to have. This is the one issue I had with the film--while everything looks beautiful, passionate, and melancholy, there doesn't seem to be much substance behind Yu's and Zhou's relationship. We're meant to think there is, and there quite possibly may be, but there is not much evidence of it. Eventually, the students become wise to this whole "communist government" thing and begin to stage huge protests, to which Yu and her female friends seem to know nothing about. The depiction of Tiananmen Square is incredibly effective: Yu seems to drift through the endless throngs of people, in a haze, an outsider trapped in something that she cannot escape from. While at many points the movie seems to be masquerading as something much more important than it really is, this scene is perfect. Soon after these protests, and in the format of any sweeping love story, Yu and Zhou are inevitably separated by the forces that brought them together and eventually reunited and need to decide whether their love has lasted. In general story arch, the film is undeniably conventional. It's Lou Ye's outstanding direction that makes the film good. His eye for gorgeous, continuous shots is unprecedented--I could have fallen for the film after the club scene very early in the film, in which corny pop music is playing and Ye deftly maneuvers his camera to view all parts of the club, while still focusing mostly on Yu's and Zhou's connection. There is a very French, new-wave feel to it, while still capturing the lyricism of truly Asian art. The ending is a perfect illustration of this: it is beautiful, it is ambiguous, and it is heartbreaking. (Minus the cheesy, indulgent mini-bios of the character's lives after the film's events--do yourself a favor and press STOP right after the film starts to fade out.) I stated earlier in my review that Summer Palace is a glorified porno, and that is an exaggeration. While there are about 10 sex scenes, including scenes in a field, in a hallway of a public establishment, and in three or four different bedrooms with all manner of partner pairings, it really is not as bad as you'd think from reading the DVD case. The film would most likely merit an NC-17 rating, but I'm not one to judge. (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is PG-13, and there are full nudity shots in it.) However, the sex scenes really do serve a purpose. Most of the dialogue between lovers consists of very generic, simple sentences, including "What now?", "What's wrong?", "Do you love me?", etc. The real passion is established through the imagery, through the feelings evoked by the director's style, and most noticeably through the outstanding music. The score really is a marvel, though I've heard it criticized as being "atrocious and cliched," two of the last words that came to my mind. The sex scenes only add to the poetic fervor of the character's and of the film itself. Unless the Chinese government is exceptionally stupid (which is more than possible), I would venture to guess that the banning was on account of the sexual liberty shown in the film. The subplot of political activism and unrest really felt forced, with no real connection to the character's other than their newfound "free-love" feelings, which are revolutionary at this time in China. I couldn't help but comparing the backdrop to Forrest Gump's backdrop of several generations of political and social turmoil--but while in Forrest Gump, the political commentary added to hilarity (I don't care what people say about that movie), in Summer Palace it only slows down the plot, especially in a God-awful transition montage around the film's halfway point. As I previously mentioned, the only scene of relevance is the Tiananmen Square sequence. Another film that is pretty connected in subject matter is Germany's The Lives of Others, a far superior film, demonstrating East Germany's secret police's invasion of privacy and censorship while trying to catch a pair of stage actors who infuse their plays with political satire. However, that is more of a morality tale than a romance, and Summer Palace is almost strictly romance with attempted undertones of political importance. Once again, I have found myself picking apart and bringing down a film that I actually enjoyed. I didn't love it, since it has its obvious flaws, but it is a good movie, and an excellently photographed one. If you're easily offended by full-frontal nudity and gratuitous sex, you might do best to steer away from this one. But it is a decent, lyrical love story from a very talented director. Its hot-seat political significance should really only be remembered for the reaction of the Chinese government.
]]>Sat, 30 Aug 2008 17:14:44 GMTSmooth_JSmooth_J Blog8/30/2008 1:14:44 PM"Sex and politics are on full boil!" NY Times "Its sex scenes are mini revolutions!" Guardian "I got a boner--from all the sex!" TVs Fred Savage, DGA nominee That is the first impression that the viewer of Summer Palace is supposed to receive. A hot-seat, glorified porno, and that's mostly what the film is. However, it's a bit more high-class than that: Lou Ye has a better eye for photography than your average porno auteur, and he manages to meld the debauchery with political events, whether or not his characters (that happen to be having sex at the time) know what the hell is going on. I actually liked the film. While the running time was a bit on the long-side, and certain scenes were way too brooding and self-important, there were frequent shines of brilliance in Lou Ye's direction. The story involves a girl named Yu Hong from a small Chinese town, who is introduced as being strange and strong-willed and in a passionate romance with her boyfriend. Just as soon as she sleeps with him in a "lyrical love scene" in the middle of a field, she says that she's leaving him and going to school in Beijing. Cut to: Beijing, where disaffected youth smoke like chimneys and have intellectual discussions in their dorm rooms, all the while having an interest in the opposite sex that can only be described as juvenile. There are long, LONG shots of the heroine's face as she stares down her love interest, Zhou Wei, and establishes an obviously otherworldly mind-connection with him, because those scenes and their wonderfully photographed sex-scenes are really the only connection that they seem to have. This is the one issue I had with the film--while everything looks beautiful, passionate, and melancholy, there doesn't seem to be much substance behind Yu's and Zhou's relationship. We're meant to think there is, and there quite possibly may be, but there is not much evidence of it. Eventually, the students become wise to this whole "communist government" thing and begin to stage huge protests, to which Yu and her female friends seem to know nothing about. The depiction of Tiananmen Square is incredibly effective: Yu seems to drift through the endless throngs of people, in a haze, an outsider trapped in something that she cannot escape from. While at many points the movie seems to be masquerading as something much more important than it really is, this scene is perfect. Soon after these protests, and in the format of any sweeping love story, Yu and Zhou are inevitably separated by the forces that brought them together and eventually reunited and need to decide whether their love has lasted. In general story arch, the film is undeniably conventional. It's Lou Ye's outstanding direction that makes the film good. His eye for gorgeous, continuous shots is unprecedented--I could have fallen for the film after the club scene very early in the film, in which corny pop music is playing and Ye deftly maneuvers his camera to view all parts of the club, while still focusing mostly on Yu's and Zhou's connection. There is a very French, new-wave feel to it, while still capturing the lyricism of truly Asian art. The ending is a perfect illustration of this: it is beautiful, it is ambiguous, and it is heartbreaking. (Minus the cheesy, indulgent mini-bios of the character's lives after the film's events--do yourself a favor and press STOP right after the film starts to fade out.) I stated earlier in my review that Summer Palace is a glorified porno, and that is an exaggeration. While there are about 10 sex scenes, including scenes in a field, in a hallway of a public establishment, and in three or four different bedrooms with all manner of partner pairings, it really is not as bad as you'd think from reading the DVD case. The film would most likely merit an NC-17 rating, but I'm not one to judge. (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is PG-13, and there are full nudity shots in it.) However, the sex scenes really do serve a purpose. Most of the dialogue between lovers consists of very generic, simple sentences, including "What now?", "What's wrong?", "Do you love me?", etc. The real passion is established through the imagery, through the feelings evoked by the director's style, and most noticeably through the outstanding music. The score really is a marvel, though I've heard it criticized as being "atrocious and cliched," two of the last words that came to my mind. The sex scenes only add to the poetic fervor of the character's and of the film itself. Unless the Chinese government is exceptionally stupid (which is more than possible), I would venture to guess that the banning was on account of the sexual liberty shown in the film. The subplot of political activism and unrest really felt forced, with no real connection to the character's other than their newfound "free-love" feelings, which are revolutionary at this time in China. I couldn't help but comparing the backdrop to Forrest Gump's backdrop of several generations of political and social turmoil--but while in Forrest Gump, the political commentary added to hilarity (I don't care what people say about that movie), in Summer Palace it only slows down the plot, especially in a God-awful transition montage around the film's halfway point. As I previously mentioned, the only scene of relevance is the Tiananmen Square sequence. Another film that is pretty connected in subject matter is Germany's The Lives of Others, a far superior film, demonstrating East Germany's secret police's invasion of privacy and censorship while trying to catch a pair of stage actors who infuse their plays with political satire. However, that is more of a morality tale than a romance, and Summer Palace is almost strictly romance with attempted undertones of political importance. Once again, I have found myself picking apart and bringing down a film that I actually enjoyed. I didn't love it, since it has its obvious flaws, but it is a good movie, and an excellently photographed one. If you're easily offended by full-frontal nudity and gratuitous sex, you might do best to steer away from this one. But it is a decent, lyrical love story from a very talented director. Its hot-seat political significance should really only be remembered for the reaction of the Chinese government. http://www.spout.com/blogs/leeroy711/archive/2008/8/17/34089.aspx Post By: leeroy711
Post To: leeroy711 Blog
Post Date: 8/17/2008 2:31:30 PM
Body: ***** Stars out of 5 Directed by: Cao Hamburger. Starring: Michel Joelsas, Germano Haiut and Daniela Piepszyk Running Time: 104 minutes Rated: PG Released: 2007 Language: Portuguese with English subtitles Synopsis: The year referred to in the title of this film is 1970. Brazil is being held by a totalitarian regime. The great soccer player, Pele has just scored his thousandth goal and the national team is preparing for the World Cup. Mauro (Joelsas) is like any 12 year old Brazilian boy at the time. He thinks only of soccer and girls. Unfortunately for him, his political parents have to leave him with his Grandfather while they go “on vacation”. Review: I can’t really say anything bad about this film. It seemed interesting from the box and I had pretty high hopes for it. I am very pleased to report: it did not disappoint. The only challenge I had to get past was the fact that I am not particularly familiar with the history of the backdrop of this film and it doesn’t do much to fill you in. I believe I made a similar comment about Summer Palace, but in the case of this film, you don’t really need to know the history behind the struggle. I actually think it may have worked out better knowing less in this movie. Keep in mind, you are trying to empathize with a 12 year old that knows and cares nothing about politics. I tend to make a comment about the cinematography of every film I review so why should this one be any different. It was actually shot beautifully. We never see the same camera angle twice throughout this movie. And, I really liked a lot of the angles that this was shot from. Many times we see what’s happening from behind an obstruction of some sorts, giving the viewer almost a mischievous “peeking in” feeling. The acting was very well done as well. The lead character, Mauro was played by Michel Joelsas. I wasn’t sure about him at first, but by the end of the movie, he had convinced me. This performance was by far the most critical to the film. On several occasions, he gets his heart broken and the audience really needs to feel that with him for the film to be even remotely successful. I also really enjoyed the performance of Hanna, as played by Daniela Piepszyk. She was the street wise, neighborhood girl that befriends Mauro. One of the themes that runs through the veins of this film is that of a community pulling together when someone is in need. This is another reason that it felt unnecessary to get into too much depth in regards to the politics of the conflict. Within that neighborhood, it just didn’t seem to matter which philosophy you subscribed to, everyone was in the same boat and the compassion they showed the new Mauro took precedent over everything. Well, everything except soccer of course. I think the country’s passion towards the sport was the one true common philosophy of Brazil. My favorite aspect of this film was that although the underlying plot was heartbreaking, there were plenty of subtle comedic moments designed to break the tension and keep audience light hearted. I laughed out loud at one particular scene in which Mauro is being served breakfast by one of the old women in the building. He has to constantly reposition his plate and cup because she is apparently blind as a bat and is spilling everything onto her kitchen table. This is the type of film that grows on you as you watch it. At first, I was only mildly interested but as I got deeper into it, I fell more and more in love with the characters. I would give this one my full recommendation.
]]>Sun, 17 Aug 2008 18:31:30 GMTleeroy711leeroy711 Blog8/17/2008 2:31:30 PM ***** Stars out of 5 Directed by: Cao Hamburger. Starring: Michel Joelsas, Germano Haiut and Daniela Piepszyk Running Time: 104 minutes Rated: PG Released: 2007 Language: Portuguese with English subtitles Synopsis: The year referred to in the title of this film is 1970. Brazil is being held by a totalitarian regime. The great soccer player, Pele has just scored his thousandth goal and the national team is preparing for the World Cup. Mauro (Joelsas) is like any 12 year old Brazilian boy at the time. He thinks only of soccer and girls. Unfortunately for him, his political parents have to leave him with his Grandfather while they go “on vacation”. Review: I can’t really say anything bad about this film. It seemed interesting from the box and I had pretty high hopes for it. I am very pleased to report: it did not disappoint. The only challenge I had to get past was the fact that I am not particularly familiar with the history of the backdrop of this film and it doesn’t do much to fill you in. I believe I made a similar comment about Summer Palace, but in the case of this film, you don’t really need to know the history behind the struggle. I actually think it may have worked out better knowing less in this movie. Keep in mind, you are trying to empathize with a 12 year old that knows and cares nothing about politics. I tend to make a comment about the cinematography of every film I review so why should this one be any different. It was actually shot beautifully. We never see the same camera angle twice throughout this movie. And, I really liked a lot of the angles that this was shot from. Many times we see what’s happening from behind an obstruction of some sorts, giving the viewer almost a mischievous “peeking in” feeling. The acting was very well done as well. The lead character, Mauro was played by Michel Joelsas. I wasn’t sure about him at first, but by the end of the movie, he had convinced me. This performance was by far the most critical to the film. On several occasions, he gets his heart broken and the audience really needs to feel that with him for the film to be even remotely successful. I also really enjoyed the performance of Hanna, as played by Daniela Piepszyk. She was the street wise, neighborhood girl that befriends Mauro. One of the themes that runs through the veins of this film is that of a community pulling together when someone is in need. This is another reason that it felt unnecessary to get into too much depth in regards to the politics of the conflict. Within that neighborhood, it just didn’t seem to matter which philosophy you subscribed to, everyone was in the same boat and the compassion they showed the new Mauro took precedent over everything. Well, everything except soccer of course. I think the country’s passion towards the sport was the one true common philosophy of Brazil. My favorite aspect of this film was that although the underlying plot was heartbreaking, there were plenty of subtle comedic moments designed to break the tension and keep audience light hearted. I laughed out loud at one particular scene in which Mauro is being served breakfast by one of the old women in the building. He has to constantly reposition his plate and cup because she is apparently blind as a bat and is spilling everything onto her kitchen table. This is the type of film that grows on you as you watch it. At first, I was only mildly interested but as I got deeper into it, I fell more and more in love with the characters. I would give this one my full recommendation. http://www.spout.com/groups/Weekly_Theme/Re_Weekly_Theme_for_August_4_Let_s_Talk_About_Sex/625/33704/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: indieabby88
Post To: Weekly Theme
Post Date: 8/7/2008 3:27:54 PM
Body: [quote user="leeroy711"] I also forgot to mention the last screener I reviewed, Summer Palace which uses the main characters personal sexual revolution to symbolise the social revolution going on at the time. Also, Seijun Suzuki's Story of a Prostitute should be mentioned. I really liked this one and I'm sure you could mention quite a few more Suzuki films. [/quote] Oh, lord. Don't get me started on how much I hated Summer Palace. Revolution might have been the intent, but there was nothing revolutionary about those relationships. The characters were either obnoxious, insane, depressed or a combination of the three, and if they actually did stand for anything, we never found out what it was. They just came off as a bunch of petty malcontent children who had sex all the time because they couldn't think of anything better to do. But that's just one person's opinion. You are right, it does symbolise the revolutionary atmosphere of the time, but it really didn't give enough context. If I see a movie about Tianenmen Square, I actually want to see Tianenmen Square for more than five minutes. And yes, I'm aware I totally botched the spelling. Sorry! End of rant, I promise.
]]>Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:27:54 GMTindieabby88Weekly Theme8/7/2008 3:27:54 PM[quote user="leeroy711"] I also forgot to mention the last screener I reviewed, Summer Palace which uses the main characters personal sexual revolution to symbolise the social revolution going on at the time. Also, Seijun Suzuki's Story of a Prostitute should be mentioned. I really liked this one and I'm sure you could mention quite a few more Suzuki films. [/quote] Oh, lord. Don't get me started on how much I hated Summer Palace. Revolution might have been the intent, but there was nothing revolutionary about those relationships. The characters were either obnoxious, insane, depressed or a combination of the three, and if they actually did stand for anything, we never found out what it was. They just came off as a bunch of petty malcontent children who had sex all the time because they couldn't think of anything better to do. But that's just one person's opinion. You are right, it does symbolise the revolutionary atmosphere of the time, but it really didn't give enough context. If I see a movie about Tianenmen Square, I actually want to see Tianenmen Square for more than five minutes. And yes, I'm aware I totally botched the spelling. Sorry! End of rant, I promise. http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/love/MemberTagFilms.aspxlove
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