belladonna2054 Blog

Under discussion:

The Basketball Diaries  (1995)

The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things  (2006)

The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (2004) was a movie based on the bestseller "biography" that was written by J. T. Leroy.  The book was based on Leroy's traumatic childhood of living in and out of foster homes and with his unstable mother.  But prior to the film's release, it was discovered that the author himself never existed.  Though the book was entirely fiction, it was made into a great film.

Directed by and stars Asia Argento as Sarah, Jeremiah’s drug crazed mother.  We first see Jeremiah (at age 7 played by Jimmy Bennett), taken away from his foster parents who tried to adopt him, but were denied by his mother.  Before Jeremiah knows it, he is given back to Sarah.  It becomes clear that something is not quite right with her.  The apartment that she lives in is a wreck: very little furniture, no dishes and little food.  Jeremiah, not unexpected, is very upset and is in a state of denial of it all.  He does not want to be there, he does not believe that the woman he is with is his real mother and he wants to go back to his foster parents, much to the chagrin of Sarah.   She in turn, quickly fed up with Jeremiah’s refusal to accept her, becomes abusive, by telling him that it was his foster parents that did not want or love him, thus the reason why they gave him up.

One day Sarah quits her job as a waitress and takes her son on a car ride down a road where the lines of reality and insanity begin to blur.  She quickly hooks up with a guy from a bar, leaving Jeremiah in a car waiting.  When he does come into the man's apartment, he is told to sleep in the tub where he accidently urinates himself in.  Sarah finds out about this and punishes him via the guy from the bar, with a belt.  This string of men that Sarah becomes involved with continues until she meets and marries a man named Emerson (Jeremy Renner).  Both delinquents leave Jeremiah to fend for himself for two weeks, while both go on their honeymoon.  He withdraws into himself and seeks refuge in his imagination as he waits for their return.  But when someone does return, it is not who he expects.  Emerson, alone and upset, comes in.  Sarah apparently has left him, and left Jeremiah in his care.  But it is not the type of care that one would get at a would-be stepfather and Jeremiah is abandoned on the streets to be found and taken to a hospital. 

When Jeremiah wakes, he is told that his Grandmother (Ornella Muti) has custody of him.  She takes him back to their house and into their Evangelical teachings of his Grandfather (Peter Fonda).  He is forced to submit into their doctrine which is fanatical and leaves you wondering which family member is he better off with.  After three years in their custody, a now older Jeremiah (played by Dylan and Cole Sprouse) is reunited with Sarah.  He is taken, without the permission of his grandparents, by her and her new boyfriend where he once more goes down the path that nearly killed him. 

At times this was a hard film to watch because some of the scenes are graphic.  All of the children that played Jeremiah: Jimmy Bennett, Dylan and Cole Sprouse, did a fantastic job.  Asia Argento was excellent in her role as Sarah which was uncanny at times because you have to wonder if she really was going crazy.  Though he had only a cameo role, Peter Fonda did well as the Puritanical grandfather.  Fonda looked and sounded what one would and you definitely get a sense of what life was like for Sarah, as a child, and eventually Jeremiah. 

I recommend this film to those who also enjoy Clean (2006) and The Basketball Diaries (1995).

Under discussion:

Cool Runnings  (1993)

Sun Dogs  (2007)

Sun Dogs is a documentary about Jamaica's first dog sled team.  This film really is about the underdogs.  Like Jamaica's first bobsled team, which was featured in the movie, Cool Runnings, people didn’t think it would work.  However through perseverance and a lot of gull, one can succeed.  The difference between Jamaica’s dogsled team and other countries’ teams is that it consists of all stray dogs.  These were dogs that have been rescued from the streets of Kingston, which is considered one of the hardest towns to live in Jamaica.  Neglected and without homes, these dogs were taken to a school to be cared for and trained to be what would be Jamaica’s first dogsled team.  It was Danny Melville, who created Jamaica’s first bobsled team and the endorsement of Jimmy Buffet to put in all in motion.    

The challenge was difficult because these dogs were not raised like traditional sled dogs, but it was the dogs’ and their trainers’ determination was there to put it all together.  But the documentary is not just about the dogs and their trainers, Devon and Newton, it is about Jamaica itself.  Though the country is a popular tourist attraction, made famous by its sandy beaches and resorts, it is actually one of the poorest countries in the world.  Director Andrea Stewart made light of this in the film.  She doesn’t sugarcoat it; she brings up the fact that there are not many education or employment opportunities, there’s a lot of crime and economic desperation.  Through many of the experts that Stewart interviews, this team could shed some hope for the country economically as well as morally. 

The dogs and the mushers are trained in Jamaica before the mushers are sent to the United States to be trained further by more experts and to race.  This is due to the quarantine laws of Jamaica which state that you can take a dog out of the country, but the dog cannot go back.  So this was it.  Through some complicated hurdles, the team quickly makes headlines, not just because they are from Jamaica, but from their fortitude to succeed. 

Devon is the head trainer and caretaker of the dogs.  He is chosen to be the lead musher of the team because of his love of the animals.  Newton, who is one of Devon’s workers, is also chosen to be on the team because of the love of the dogs and has a lot of motivation for the team.  Both are trained by some of the best experts in bobsledding.  Due to a sticky situation Devon is the one that remains to hold on to the pressure to succeed, the most pressure as he is the only one that represents Jamaica.  Before long he is taken to Scotland for the international dogsled race.  It is there that he and the team really makes a name for themselves all around the world just by forming a team and racing.        

Stewart did a great job on this film.  The photography is great with shots on not only the beauty and the true life of Jamaica, but of the lives of the dogs and the people who lead these dogs to greatness.  Though the film is not about the dogs themselves it is about the lives of the trainers and those who interact with them as well.  You get a great aspect of what people deal with and grown up with in Jamaica which is not always pretty or glamorous as all the commercials on television depict it to be.  The documentary also shows how these people love these dogs greatly. 

Under discussion:

Love Story  (1970)

Summer Palace  (2008)

Summer Palace (2006) is based on a true story that centers on a young woman named Yu Hong (played by Hao Lei) as she goes on a 20-year journey from the late 1980s to present day China.  We first see her as a young girl falling in love with the boy next door named Xiao Jun (Lin Cui) only to move on after being accepted into Beijing University.  While attending university, we see her study, make friends, and become involved with the political activity that sweeps the campus.  All the while Yu Hong records every thought and feeling she experiences in her diary which becomes the narration of the film. 

We see the conditions that she and other college students had to endure and restrictions placed on them by the Chinese government.  Through it all she meets and falls in love with a man named Zhou Wei (Xiaodong Guo).  It is their tumultuous relationship becomes the main focal point of the film.  Yu Hong constantly says in the film that she wants to live and experience things more intensely.  Though she is admired by her friends as being very passionate with living there are drawbacks.  The intensity of her love for Zhou Wei is so great that they cannot be together.  From their breakup she goes through relationships with several different men over the course of the next several years to make up for her loss of Zhou Wei.  Her narration of the film, shows how is unable to handle all the conflict and pain that she experiences in these relationships and her inner self.

Time passes, but we can see the internal conflict building within her and Zhou Wei.  But both manage to go on.  Zhou Wei eventually moves to Germany with a couple of friends, while Yu Hong remains in China.  But their minds remain on each other.   There are several sequences that you see major events that have occurred over the last twenty years, i.e. Berlin Wall Falling, Britain turning over Hong Kong back to China, etc., intersect with Yu Hong and Zhou Wei’s lives.  In a way these events are an analogy with them.  One example is when the last British colony turns Hong Kong back over to China, Zhou Wei returns to China and eventually back to Yu Hong.   

Directed by Lou Ye, the film has won acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival upon its premiere in 2006.  Because of its political subject matter, the film was banned in China.  It is a film that is powerful not because of the political satire, but to see how a woman who lives under a suppressed government has liberated herself by her own internal conflict.  Hao Lei does an excellent job playing Yu Hong.  She embraces all the emotional aspects that make the character a strong, vulnerable character.  Xiaodong Guo does a great job playing Zhou Wei.  In the beginning you do not like him because of what he does, by the end you sympathize and realize how much he is like Yu Hong.   

Ye’s use of actual footage of the historical events depicted in the film makes the viewer a part of the film.  Though from time to time you see subtext of years and what happens to the characters you really don’t realize that this film is based on true events until the very end.  Summer Palace is a great historical romantic film that almost be compared to Love Story.   It can even be considered existential due to philosophical narration of the film’s main character.  I recommend this film to those who like historic romantic films.     

Under discussion:

Clean  (2004)

Paris, je t'aime  (2007)

Clean (2004) is a movie by Olivier Assayas, director of as Paris, je t’aime (2006), takes us on a journey into the hard world of the music business and drugs.  Clean stars Maggie Cheung in her award winning role as Emily Wang, girlfriend and heroin addict of a struggling rocker and fellow junkie, Lee Hauser (played by James Johnson).   After breaking off a potential gig in Canada, both travel back to their hotel.  They both argue about how she is blamed for Lee’s continuing failures and she ends up leaving for the night and gets high in an empty parking lot.  The next morning when Emily returns, the police are in the room where Lee was found dead of a drug overdose.  The police arrest her when she attempts to get into the room and discover a couple of bags of heroin in her purse.

Emily is sentenced to six months in prison and when she is released, she is briefly reunited with Lee’s father Albrecht (played by Nick Nolte).  Albrecht also takes care of Emily and Lee’s son Jay (played by James Dennis) whom they left behind in Vancouver.  He goes over what is left of their finances and tells her that the court has awarded custody of Jay to him and his wife, Rosemary (played by Martha Henry).  Knowing the predicament that she is in, Albrecht is sympathetic, but taking Jay’s best interests first, he tells Emily to stay away until she can straighten herself out.  Emily travels to Paris a few weeks later to build a new life for herself and we see her struggle through the abandonment by friends and family.  Upon hitting rock bottom, we finally see her turn around to achieve her ultimate goal: to see her son again and getting another opportunity for a career in music.

Maggie Cheung won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004 for this role.  This was an award well deserved.  In a movie that spans two continents (Canada and Europe) and three languages (English, French and Chinese), Ms. Cheung has outdone herself.  We see her as the narcissistic addict, going through a cold turkey recovery and finally as the vulnerable mother.               

Academy Award nominee Nick Nolte, who in real life is a drug addict, does well in his role.  The character he plays, Albrecht, is both sensitive and strong, but also caring grandfather and fatherly figure to Emily as he helps her rebuild her life.  One of the best scenes in which he displays his sensitive and strong side was after he finds out that Lee has died and his wife and grandson come home and startled, immediately jumps up and cannot speak, but has to tell Rosemary.  Overall Albrecht is much more forgiving of Emily than Rosemary, who blames her for the death of their son.    

Assayas’ film is one of the best independent films that I’ve seen.  He brought together a great team of actors, most notably of which was Nick Nolte.  He even went as far as going to the music business to include real-life musicians such as Tricky and the band Metric and music producer David Roback, who all have brief cameos in the film.  With their involvement, this makes the film more believable.  Even Maggie Cheung herself sings a couple of songs.  All are connected to the states of which her character she plays is in throughout the movie: chaotic, through the song by the Metric, “Dead Disco”, recovery through her own song “She Can’t Tell You”,  then finally at the end as she obtains the future for her and her son with “Wait For Me”.  The instrumental music is also notable, with contributors such as Brian Eno, who featured portions of the same score from 28 Days Later in this film, Tricky and David Roback. 

The cinematography, done by the award winning cinematographer Eric Gautier, was extraordinary and symbolic.  In the beginning titles with the factories blowing out smoke out of the smoke towers and then again, with the addition of the explosion, in the scene where Emily gets high is a connection of the environment to Emily, who was becoming more “unclean”.  At the end of the film, we see Emily run off the scene looking off a view of the wooded hills in San Francisco that can be seen as a “clean” view.

This was a wonderful film and the first I have seen of Olivier Assayas and would love to see more of his work.  What grabbed me was the cinematography, then the actors themselves.  How they put a lot of effort into their roles was very striking.  Not a lot of actors can pull off what they could do and you can tell that Assayas wanted and received the effort from them.  If you want to see a great independent film, and you’re new to this genre, I recommend Clean for you.

Under discussion:

The Thing  (1951)

The Thing From Another World premiered in 1951.  It became an instant classic.  So much so that the legendary John Carpentier created the remake of it 31 years later called The Thing. 

Watching it today, the original The Thing From Another World doesn't really appear scary, unless you're a little kid who doesn't know better.  The special effects compared to today's is a little so-so.  But as you watching the film, the little special effects there are are great because it not overly done.  It's just enough to give you a bit of a scare.  There's no blood or gore in the film (sorry my gore loving friends, but this was the 1950s) nor heavy violence.  This is a sharp contrast to Carpentier's 1982 version of the film which has plenty of blood and gore and a great classic in itself for its special effects.

 The movie is set on a research outpost in Antarctica.  One day one of the men stubble upon a UFO that has crashed some 10,000 years ago and its pilot only several hundred feet away, buried in the ice.  They take the body back to the station where it defrosts and the fun begins as the creature has come back to life and spreads its terror among the scientists. 

If you are not familiar with either this or John Carpenter's version, I highly recommend watching this version, followed by Carpenter's.  Not only will you be watching a couple of classic horror movies, but you get a real appreciation of how much love that Carpenter had for the original to make his own version. 

 As promised, here is the little known fact about both versions of the film:  

Both films are based off of a horror novel called Who Goes There?  However the 1951 version is a much scaled down version of the book than John Carpenter's.  In 1951, it would have been considered too graphic to be release had it been exactly like the book.  Additionally, John Carpenter had read the book and wanted his version to be just like the book.  So if you are going for more authenticity, go for Carpenter's version.

Under discussion:

Be Kind Rewind  (2008)

Michel Gondry's new film Be Kind Rewind, stars Mos Def as Mike, a young clerk working in an old videotape rental store, owned by Mr. Fletcher, played by Danny Glover and Jack Black stars as Jerry, Mos Def's character's clumsy best friend. 

 When an accident causes Jerry to become magnetized, he accidently erases all the videotapes in Mr. Fletcher's store.  To save the business, both Mike and Jerry decide to re-create all of the videos on their own.  With the help of a dry cleaning worker, played by Melonie Diaz, they instantly become a sinsation within their neighborhood. 

The movie is funny.  The scenes in which Mos Def and Jack Black recreate the films are hilarious.  I just believe that this film should have been filmed a few years ago when videotapes were still popular.  It just seemed out of place that there could be a store that only rents videotapes. 

The casting was altogther not that bad.  As mentioned previously, Danny Glover stars as the store's owner Mr. Fletcher.  Also starring in this film is Mia Farrow.  As great both actors are, they both seemed out of place.  Mia Farrow, I felt her talent was wasted in the film. 

But if you like Jack Black or Mos Def, you will like this film.   

Under discussion:

Cloverfield  (2008)

J.J Abrams and Matt Reeves have proven that they are great team in their premiere film Cloverfield.

Cloverfield is Matt Reeves' first film and with help from J.J. Abrams that they brought back the monster film in good form. 

The movie is set in modern-day New York City with a guy named Rob who has been promoted to a lucretive position of Vice President for a company in Japan.  His brother Jason and his friends Lily, Marlena and Hud have a going away party for him.  All of the suddenly all hell breaks loose with an earthquake and a mysterious roar; we quickly see the race for survival of not only Rob and his friends, but for the entire city from large creature.

It is clear that both Reeves' and Abrams' borrowed aspects from real events such as September 11th; and from other films such as Godzilla, for the monster; Alien, for the little creatures; Blair Witch Project, for the camera point-of-view filming.  But they put it together in such a way that all elements are balanced and have added both psychological and visual scares in the mix.  Many attempts at this type of balance in previous films have failed until now. 

An example of this from Cloverfield would be that not all the scenes involve all the characters.  The only constant character is the camera itself.  There are scenes in which you see part of the creature (a bit of tease added by the director) or scenes of military fighting the creatures.  Another example would be of a scene in total darkness and you hear the footsteps of the creature or of the fighting, which adds to the psychological build up for the end. 

However in the beginning you do have character build up to the point that you actually do have a feel to them and you actually begin to care of what happens to them.  In previous films this has been tried, but not to the degree that Cloverfield presents.

I will admit that I don't scare easily.  This film actually scared me.  It surprised me in ways that a film has not done so in some time.  If you have not gone to see it.  I do recommend it.