Another in the post-Crouching Dragon line of Chinese historical epics, House of Flying Daggers is worthy follow-on by writer/director Yimou Zhang to his Jet Li blast Hero. This fantasy focuses on a surprising love triangle among Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro), Leo (Andy Lau) and Mei (Ziyi Zhang).

The story is fairly flyweight: In the distant past China is ruled by a corrupt dynasty and so the titular rebel group, along the lines of Robin Hood and his merry men, has risen up to oppose them. Mei is a target of opportunity for local police captains Jin and Leo, rumored to be the blind daughter of the recently assassinated leader of the Flying Daggers. Complications ensue. The weakest aspect of the whole film is the ending which, despite being lovely, exhilerating, and tragic, makes for a completely meaningless end to the story. But I guess this being a sort of fable rather than a historical recreation makes that not too important.

This film is all about the interplay between the leads, the visuals, the colors, the physical movements of dancing, horseback riding and even making love. Zhang shot the film as autumn crossed into winter and uses the color of changing leaves, the snow, even the crisp sharp air. The plot has just enough to keep the audience involved. So not quite the masterpiece that Hero was, but eminently watchable.

recommended

I watched two movies tonight which had a surprising commonality in emotional tone, Elephant and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which had neither raised voices or excited shouting. However in the former it was a conscious strategy by writer/director Gus Van Zant and in the latter it was just Bill Murray getting a paycheck with the absolute minimum energy expended; Van Zant had me on edge through this device and Life Aquatic had me and TS1 asleep inside of an hour.

Elephant is a small film without plot. Essentially a meditation on a morning like what happened in Columbine, the cameras follow a few of the students at a sprawling suburban high school. The cameras simply stand at eye level, sometimes in front and sometimes behind, with long continuous shots as one or another of the kids walk the halls; the scenes aren’t even shown in any obvious sequence until the focal character walks into a shot we’ve already seen from a different angle. At times the long walks with only the back of a student’s head in frame made little sense.

Van Zant finally clues us in as two of the boys hang out: one picks up the other’s laptop and starts playing a game called Body Count. Unlike real video games this features no outrageous graphics, big blasts and fountains of blood, just potential victims walking away from the shooter’s perspective on an empty, colorless desert landscape. When shot they fall over and the player turns to find another target.

Elephant makes no attempt to explain or justify the boys’ actions, other than a brief classroom bully attack on one, and I was especially puzzled having the two take sex shower before calmly packing several duffelbags with explosives, guns and ammunition. A wordless drive gets them to school mid-morning and they stroll (okay, at times jog) through the same long halls and shoot anyone they see. In the next to last scene they meet up and after casually inquiring as to the number of kills, one shoots the other.

recommended

I watched two movies tonight which had a surprising commonality in emotional tone, Elephant and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which had neither raised voices or excited shouting. However in the former it was a conscious strategy by writer/director Gus Van Zant and in the latter it was just Bill Murray getting a paycheck with the absolute minimum energy expended; Van Zant had me on edge through this device and Life Aquatic had me and TS1 asleep inside of an hour.

Murray plays an American Jacques Cousteau, a marine biologist world famous for the films he makes of his expeditions. At a premiere showing of his latest movie, Ned (Owen Wilson) shows up as the son he never knew but sort of heard about a few years earlier; Ned’s mom died a month earlier, spurring him to seek out Zissou. I have little doubt that Steve and Ned are father and son because they share such a lack of energy one wonders if either ever consulted a physician. In other words, Wilson has no trouble aping Murray in what must have been a competition to move the fewest facial muscles.

Anjelica Huston plays Mrs. Zissou, a woman of no small beauty but crucially bought a big checkbook to the marriage. Jeff Goldblum is her ex and Zissou’s main competition for grants and audiences, Cate Blanchett a British journalist grinding her axe against a story on Zissou, and Willem Dafoe is his offbeat, jealous chief aide.

This mess was directed by Wes Anderson and co-written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach but I think Anderson missed whatever Wilson brought to their previous collaborations, The Royal Tenenbaums and the much funnier Rushmore. Maybe it was just an unwillingness to challenge Murray or an inability to move him off his rock.

not recommended

Seeing a movie on Thanksgiving afternoon is turning into a tradition for TS1 and me, and this year we picked a real good one. Maybe it’s new director Mike Newell or that screenwriter Steve Kloves (who wrote all four of the scripts) or the three teenage leads are really hitting their stride. I think all three are actually true, plus Kloves, Newell and (presumably) JK Rowling figured out how to put the meat of the very long novel on celluloid.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is centered around the Tri-Wizards Tournament, an infrequently held international competition. Troops of students from two foreign schools–dark hard boys from Eastern Europe and agile, pretty girls from France–turn up to spend the school year at Hogwarts. And even though the Ministry of Magic has imposed a new rule allowing only students at least 17 years old to enter, somehow a slip of paper with Harry Potter’s name is regurgitated from the goblet making for four contestants instead of the customary three.

The tournament is no game like quidditch, though that sport does feature in a colorful opening sequence, but rather life and death tasks which are intended to test the school champions’ limits. All four do come close to death and one does in fact die during, but not really in it. The tasks also give Newell and the producers opportunities to bring in some decent special effects (dinosaurs, mermaids).

Of course this is the point in Harry’s saga when Voldemort regains human form. Ralph Fiennes has only one scene, at the climax, where he squares off against Potter but his performance, along with the scene itself, show that Goblet of Fire is fantasy but no kids’ movie. No more than, say, Lord of the Rings or Star Wars.

definitely recommended

James L. Brooks has made some classic films over the years including As Good As It Gets, Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News plus he’s a co-creator of TV standouts The Simpsons, Taxi and The Mary Tyler Moore Show! Adam Sandler, on the other hand, has not. Okay, some of his movies have been funny (The Waterboy, Happy Madison) and even a couple that are a step above the pre-teen level (The Wedding Singer and especially Punch-Drunk Love) but nothing of the mature, life-affirming nature of Brooks’ oevre.

So we didn’t run out to the cinema to fork over $10 each to see Spanglish when the reviews were, well, half-hearted at best and no friends gave positive (or any) reports. Watching it, though, made me wonder why it didn’t get a better response. This is more the story of a young, unwed Mexican mother trying to make a life for her daughter in a strange land than anything to do with Sandler, and Paz Vega does a superb job as the woman who doesn’t even speak English until nearly the end.

Vega gets tangled up in the lives of Type A mom Tea Leoni, the nearly Zen monk-like Sandler and their two kids. Leoni doesn’t work but needs help taking care of her smart but slightly chubby daughter Berniece, (barely visible, so hard to characterize) younger son George and alcoholic, faded, drunk but able to care and give the occasional bit of sage wisdom singing star mom (Cloris Leachman). Her own daughter, the same age as Leoni’s, cannot resist the lure of wealth so easily but is still the most well-behaved teenager I’ve ever seen.

Anyway, the plot is not so much the point here as the performances Brooks is able to bring out from the cast. Leoni and Leachman are no surprise, and Vega is experienced if unknown in the US (and gorgeous, like Penelope Cruz without the zero percent body fat), but Sandler and the kids are an unexpected pleasure. Particularly Sarah Steele as Berniece but also Shelbie Bruce as her Latina counterpart.

recommended