I’d been deliberately avoiding the trailer for this movie. Despite how often I ran across it posted on blogs and forums, despite how excited friends were getting about it, I refused to watch it. I hadn’t been to any movies at which the trailer was screened. I had not wanted to see this trailer, had not wanted to get a (very carefully shaped) preview of the film. But without warning, there it was on Sunday morning on the convention’s in-house channel, and despite my prior avoidance, I couldn’t help watching it.

As the first shadowed scenes played, one by one, with the hint of music from past films playing under them, I found a lump rising in my throat. As Indy’s hat landed on the ground, I found my eyes filling with tears. And by the time the entire thing had run its course, with music and motifs and characters that were intimately familiar to me and yet put in new settings, I was openly weeping.

I wiped the tears from my cheeks and said to my husband, half-angrily and half-wistfully, “Dammit, I am supposed to be too old for this kind of fangirl nonsense.”

Gently, and with great understanding, he replied, “But you’re not.”

My entry into the world of fandom—of unabashed nerdiness and obsessive preoccupation with a made-up universe—started with Star Wars. And Star Wars led to Raiders of the Lost Ark, because of course a fan of that first universe would be thrilled about a movie that put Harrison Ford and George Lucas together again and matched them with the boy genius of Stephen Spielberg. I was all fired up about it from the moment I found out about it (in those quaint, long-ago days, from a story in the entertainment section in our local newspaper), and I followed all the scraps of news I could get over the year or so until its release, an impossibly long time for an obsessed adolescent nerd.

I saw Raiders at a preview, before it even opened wide; I still have the full-page newspaper ad advertising it. To go to it, I had to wheedle my parents into dropping me off at a mall a fair distance from our house, and allowing me to be there quite late on a school night. The preview itself was free, but to see it I had to buy a ticket to The Legend of the Lone Ranger, a terrible and massively failed attempt at reviving the Lone Ranger franchise, and that is notable here only for the fact that stuntman Terry Leonard did the same “under a moving vehicle” stunt in this as in Raiders, except he got badly injured doing it in this film. Anyway, I sat through the terrible Lone Ranger movie (which even at that young and relatively uncritical age I could tell was a terrible movie), and afterwards was rewarded by being one of the first to see this new adventure that I’d been waiting for so long.

I came out of it transformed. I was still a fangirl, nerdy and obsessive about this made-up universe (and I’ve still got tons of tie-in merchandise and a scrapbook of press clippings and ephemera to prove it); but I was also a fan of the movie itself, as a work and an experience. I can trace my profound love of the form of motion pictures directly to this movie. I would see it another 20 times that summer, in line with the whole nerdy obsessive fangirl thing; but each time I saw it, I also learned something new about how to make a great movie, and about how to appreciate films. It taught me about not only the technical aspects (oh yes, I learned all about how they made the bad guys’ faces melt off), but about the importance of the harder-to-quantify elements such as pacing and tone and how to use light and how film editing can be a kind of alchemy. It’s not a perfect movie—there’s no such thing—but there’s so much about it that works perfectly that my love for it only deepened with exposure and time. Raiders remains one of my all-time favorites, and incredibly important in my experiences as a fan and a film critic.

And part of the reason it is so high in my estimation is that its sequels didn’t measure up, and believe me, the fangirl was profoundly disappointed by that. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom gave me a headache the first time I saw it, a loud, cluttered, juvenile, screaming theme-park ride that battered at my senses for two hours and left me vaguely offended for reasons I wouldn’t fully understand for several years. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade would be a pretty decent adventure movie if only it wasn’t a follow-up to Raiders of the Lost Ark, but since it is, its pale copy of the first one’s general plot and its over-reliance on bad comedy and Sean Connery’s charisma can’t help but be kind of disappointing (although I do still adore the opening sequence, which gave me a crush on River Phoenix that remains all too bittersweet). The sequels are excellent examples of how incredibly difficult it is to re-create the alchemy that makes truly great movies; whatever spirit had infused Raiders, it wasn’t something any of its makers could seem to capture again.

And so, all these many years later, I was skeptical, if not downright fearful, when I heard that they were, indeed, going to give it another shot, and that is why I avoided the trailers and kept the new movie out of my thoughts for as long as I could. It’s not just the impossibility of lightning in a bottle, either. It’s that I am not the same person who fell in love all those years ago. The new movie will be filtered through 27 years of experience, education, and cynicism, and the thought of it not only being disappointing but possibly being bad enough to taint the original is deeply upsetting. I’ve already lived through the crushing fannish nightmare of the Star Wars prequels, movies so bad and such betrayals of their progenitors that not even fangirl enthusiasm could overlook it, movies that have actually made me regret being a fan. I don’t want to go through anything like that with a new Indiana Jones film. With a new Indiana Jones film, the stakes are even higher, because it’s not just obsessive fangirlness, but also something that has become a core passion for me. I don’t want to have the foundation of one of the greatest loves of my life shaken. And thus I did my best to ignore the new film’s existence for as long as I could.

Yet when it was suddenly sprung on me after all that time studiously avoiding it, I reacted at a deep, near-primal level that I didn’t really even have control of. All of the right touchstones were there in that trailer, the familiar motifs and the music I know in my very bones and the images designed to whet my appetite and make me want more, and the knowledge—the cynical, decades-in-learning knowledge—that the entire trailer was very carefully crafted to evoke exactly that kind of response couldn’t stop me from reacting to it as if I were a breathless teenage fangirl all over again. And that’s why I wept: I wept in memory of all the joy the made-up world of Indiana Jones has brought me, and in gratitude for the great passion it introduced into my life. And I also wept for the intense fear I have that the new film might betray that joy and passion, and for the hope that it might, somehow, manage to reinforce them after all, and maybe even add to them. My husband was right: I’m not beyond being a fangirl, because being a fangirl has been the foundation of some very important things in my life. And it would just be foolish for me to deny that, as foolish as it was for me to deny for all those months that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull exists.

As I write this, it’s less than two hours until the movie opens. I am no longer the fangirl who had to be the first one there on opening day; opening days aren’t really my thing anymore, too much crowding and hassle and waiting in line, so I won’t be there tonight anyway, and I’ve honestly not entirely decided yet that I will be going to see it at all. Of course, I can say that with the almost-certain knowledge that my husband will manage to coax me into it, one way or another. If I don’t go, I’ll never know, for good or bad. But if I do go, I’ll definitely know, for good or bad. And I suppose, in the end, it’s better that I know.

I loved the first PotC movie. I loved it enough to see it multiple times, something that’s become increasingly rare for me with mainstrem Hollywood releases. I loved it in part because it was so unexpected; who would have thought that a movie based on a theme park ride, of all things, and with Jerry Bruckheimer’s name on it, would have been such fun, loaded with such richness of character and place and a genuine sense that the people who made it had a really good time, rather than it just being an empty exercise in noise and branding?

And so, while I definitely looked forward to Dead Man’s Chest, I also came at it with trepidation, because it’s a sequel.

Dead Man’s Chest is very, very much a sequel. It suffers from the sequel motto of “bigger, louder, MORE” that most sequels do, and thereby sums up for me what is precisely the problem with the sequel model. I think the core appeal of a sequel is that there’s something about the story or the characters that people are attracted to; they want to see what else happens to those characters or what more goes on in the world that the first movie created, and if the story is well-written, it shouldn’t need anything else. But Hollywood, with its perpetual combination of greed, arrogance, and insecurity, rarely seems to trust the characters and story on their own. It has to lard sequels up with more action, more comedy, more noise, more toys, out of fear that the audience won’t come back without greater flash. And over the past couple of decades, we, the audience, have become complicit with that, accepting empty sequels that all too often cheat the characters and stories we loved in the first place for the sake of all that extra flash, and the cycle perpetuates.

DMC doesn’t cheat the characters and story, not exactly. But it does load up with action and comedy and noise and toys that aren’t really necessary. We get an extended sequence on an island of cannibals that is little more than an excuse for Jack and Will to meet cute, and for cheap, shallow laughs. We get a big, flashy swordfight that is a great set piece, but exists solely to be a set piece (and seriously shorts the actual swordfighting; I’m deeply disappointed at the poor quality of the fight scenes in this film). We get lots of bang and flash on board ships that rarely feels like it adds up to much. We get glaring, beat-you-over-the-head references to the ride that was the film’s inspiration, just in case our attention spans are so ludicrously short that we forgot. We get a Jack Sparrow who is too often (especially at the beginning of the film) a parody of himself; there are times when the dialogue put in Johnny Depp’s mouth doesn’t feel like part of the character but like someone making fun of what they think the character is. And, most seriously, we get villainy that is gorgeous to look at but not nearly as shiver-inducing as it should be.

I’ve got a serious problem with Davy Jones. For all the wondrousness of technology applied towards the character (and for all of Bill Nighy’s astounding expressiveness underneath the CGI tentacles), he never feels believable. He’s neither as horror-yarn frightening as the story wants him to be (there’s no moment equivalent to Barbossa’s “You’d best be believing in ghost stories…You’re in one” from the first movie), nor given a convincing sense of the bereft, lovelorn human he was that the main plot point hinges on. He’s a joy to watch, to be sure, an unmitigated triumph of the blending of actor and technology; but I just don’t really buy him as a threat so horrible that Jack would go to any lengths to escape him. I’m also bothered by the way the film slows to a tortuga’s lumbering in most of the Flying Dutchman scenes. Perhaps the intent is to give us plenty of opportunity to marvel at the creativity of the character design (which I will readily admit is damned impressive) and the skill of the makeup and CGI artists; but those scenes do as much as the extraneous set pieces to drag the film out longer than it needs to be, and not as much as they should in moving the story along.

I’ve also got a problem with the film’s other villain, the East India Company bureaucrat Beckett. Some have complained that this is a pointless character, but I disagree. He’s the perfect foil for Jack Sparrow, a man to whom freedom matters more than anything and whose very appeal lies in that uncompromising, unfettered activity. Beckett doesn’t just want to shut Jack down; he wants to bind Jack’s actions, bury them under layers of rules and bureaucracy, and thus remove the essence of what Jack is. His earliest scenes are some of the most efficient in the film, elegantly laying out the specificity of this threat. Unfortunately, the fact that he’s stuck back in Port Royal (rather than being out on the water chasing our heroes, as Norrington was in the first film) somewhat limits the effectiveness of his villainy, and he becomes less and less compelling as the movie goes on. I think this is a terrible shame, as his potential scariness is definitely equal to that of Davy Jones, just in a different way.

And then there is the Orlando Problem. It’s much more clear in this film than it was in the first one that Will is meant to be the hero; the amount of time devoted to his interactions with his father and the number of opportunities he gets to show off make that clear. But Orlando Bloom isn’t up to the demands of being the hero, particularly when he lacks anything close to the charisma of his co-stars (never mind that he’s way prettier than even Keira Knightly, a fact that becomes distracting at times). In the first movie this didn’t matter so much, because he was always paired up with someone else. This time, he’s expected to carry large swaths of the story all by himself, and too often he drops them. This is particularly noticeable in his scenes with Stellan Skarsgard, who strives mightily to hand Bloom the sense of epic fate a hero ought to have; instead, Bloom doesn’t seem to be able to pick it up, and comes off more as a rebellious adolescent fighting with Dad about a curfew. It’s unfortunate.

Now, all of that said…I enjoyed the movie. No, really, I did, more than I expected to, in fact. For all the things that are wrong, there are still plenty of things that are distinctly right. Despite the parodic elements, Johnny Depp remains a wonder; we’re no longer surprised by Jack (which was one of the delights of the first film), but he’s still a compelling character, nicely balancing the complicated and sometimes problematic elements of the rogue, and earning our affections and concern. I’m not particularly a fan of Keira Knightly, but the ferocity of her performance here is worthy of serious respect (save for one pointless and idiotic sequence where she abruptly reverts to a shameful girliness that is completely out of character). Elizabeth spent much of the first film being a victim of circumstance, and finding her way out of it. Here, she’s the one in charge nearly all of the time, and it makes for some complex and fascinating developments. While Will might (technically) be the hero of this one, Elizabeth is its conscience, and that’s really more interesting.

There’s also an absolute wealth of secondary characters. Mr. Gibbs was a figure of low comedy as much as anything else in the first film; while he has such moments this time, he also has a great deal of gravity and dignity. We understand better his loyalty to Jack and the way the two of them work together, and why, to some extent, “Captain” Jack Sparrow is as much a creation of his first mate as of himself. I found the comedy-relief duo of Pintel and Ragetti to be more annoying than anything in the first film; they were given way too much screen time and way too many gags (particularly involving Ragetti’s glass eye). While I think DMC could have gotten by just fine without them, their presence here is more enjoyable–they’re not overused, there’s only one gag with the eye, and their patented ridiculous arguments over things they can’t possibly understand have a little more bite (particularly when taken as background notes to the issue of Elizabeth being the film’s conscience). Jonathan Pryce, who I often felt exasperation with in the first film (indeed, I maintained for a long time that the character should have been played instead by Robert Lindsay, who is much better at that kind of helpless neurotic wittering), absolutely owns his few scenes as Governor Swann; he’s far more believable here as a father trading for his daughter’s life than he ever was the first time around. We get the return of Norrington, no longer a commodore, and his character arc is in many ways the most natural-feeling of anyone in the film; he was always a character poised between honor and malignity, and Jack Davenport gets the chance to demonstrate both sides of that. Before the first film, Davenport was best known for light comedy, and it’s a treat to get a real taste of what he can do beyond that. I already mentioned Stellan Skarsgaard; what is most notable about him (aside from his attempts to make Orlando Bloom a better actor than he is) is the profound, bone-deep sense of melancholy he gives Bootstrap Bill, and doing it with barnacles and starfish plastered to his face in the bargain. His performance communicates more of Davy Jones’s evil than Jones himself does–it’s not the fate itself that’s so horrible, it’s the hopelessness that comes with it.

And then there is Tia Dalma. For a character with only two scenes, she casts a long shadow over this story, because there is clearly much, much more going on with her than we are allowed to see in this particular movie. Naomie Harris gives her everything she should have and then some; no stereotyped cackling witch (a characterization that would have been all too easy to engender), she is instead a figure of enormous, unspoken power, both mystical and sensual. She commands the screen when she’s on it, a presence who can reduce even Jack Sparrow to submissive respect, yet without doing anything but cocking her head or her hip, or modulating her voice. We don’t need to be told what she’s capable of; we can see it, in the way she moves and the way she speaks, and we understand her importance–she might not be the one who can solve the conflict between Jack and Davy Jones, but she’s an integral part of whatever will happen, even from the obscurity of her house hidden in the swamp.

She is also perhaps the starkest representation of something that I haven’t really seen addressed much, which is that these films are, at their core, dark fantasy, a genre Hollywood has often found problematic. (I’m reluctant to call them “horror,” as there’s too much good-naturedness for them to be truly, deeply scary, but there’s no question of the darkness at the core of the stories.) It wasn’t necessary to make them that; pirate stories offer ample opportunity for rip-roaring adventure and belly-laugh comedy, and it would have been just fine to go with that paradigm. Instead, the decision was made to thread darkness and fantasticness through them, to set the films in a universe where the undead and human-crustacean hybrids are entirely plausible, where magic and mysticism and the presence of powers bigger than ourselves are taken as fact. Certainly that choice ups the entertainment factor, especially for those of us who like some cthonic leavening in our adventures (even as we recognize that the forces of the upperworld are almost certainly going to prevail). But it’s also a choice that honors the mythology and superstition that surrounds the sea and that has long been woven into the lives of those who work upon it; and it brings in elements of the region in which the films are set in ways that manage to communicate the gravity of the belifs and traditions that have hold in the area. The first film’s Aztec curse (cheesy as it was on its face) was presented as the despairing horror it would be; Tia Dalma’s presence speaks of the fearsome allure that Afro-Caribbean religions carry for many, in their sense of mystery and direct power, and again, it’s not done just as cheap thrills. Hollywood is very prone to turning such things to overbearing cheese, meant to be mocked to relieve the sense of unease. Undead monkey notwithstanding, that’s not the case here. It’s a tough line to walk and a difficult thing to carry off, and one of the things that pleases me about both Pirates of the Caribbean films is that they manage it as often as they do.

Will I see the third film? Oh yeah. I gotta see how Jack gets out of his predicament, and how Elizabeth deals with her conscience. I need to see Tia Dalma again. And I definitely have to see Chow Yun-Fat. Most of all, I have to see how they carry through those threads of darkness and bring them together with the world of the everyday.

This is a lovely, tender, and melancholy film, with sympathetic characters carved with precision and performances to match. The main problem with it, from my viewpoint, is that it’s too much like its predecessor; I found myself continually comparing its plot to the same notes in The Twilight Samurai, and generally finding them less effective. The sense of change and loss was much stronger in that film, the melancholy of its central character more pronounced, the issues of love and class keener and more heartbreaking. This isn’t a bad film by any means; it just comes up lacking in comparison to its forebear. If someone hadn’t seen the previous film, I think this one would seem outstanding, and it is definitely worth seeing for its glimpse at a world-changing time drawn at the miniature level and the warm it shows to its characters.

The most interesting thing for me in seeing this was seeing Masatoshi Nagase as a figure of gravity. Ever since he became my Japanese-movie boyfriend over a decade ago, in The Most Terrible Time in My Life, a jumpy, jangly take on film noir gilded with the neon of modern Japan, he’s represented for me defiant, uncageable energy with the hint of a refusal to grow up. To see him in this role, grave and composed, straitened by the strictures of culture and decorum, and carrying it so beautifully, was a bit of a shock. What happened to that energetic, vaguely disreputable young man? And then I realized: he grew up after all, just as I did. And while growing up might mean a tradeoff in energy, the result is usually that sense of wisdom and authority that I saw in his performance. Thinking that I’ve gained that, just as he did, is a pretty cool thing.

There is no way I could call this a good film. It’s poky and meandering; not only does the central character never appear, but most of what’s said in the film has nothing whatsoever to do with him. Instead, a good portion of it is people in various cities and professions simply talking about their jobs (I learned how charcoal is made and that there are two types of pomeloes–we Westerners apparently prefer the sour ones), though there is a chunk dealing with some of the members of the CMP (most of whom now live in exile in manufactured “refuges” made especially for them just across the Thai border). Interspersed with this are weirdly cheery musical numbers describing the history of communism, the dangers of malaria, which machine guns are best in the jungle, Malaysian industry, and identity cards. Not just a strange mash of elements, but not assembled well, and this screening bled audience members steadily (and it’s not like the crowd was large to begin with).

But I have to say that I mostly enjoyed it. I like hearing people tell stories and talk about their work when it’s done with enthusiasm, and there were enough bits of history in this that my curiousity was engaged and I want to go learn more about the topic. I don’t think I could recommend this to anyone, but I don’t feel that I wasted my time seeing it.

First of all, this has nothing to do with Westerns, not one frickin’ thing. It is instead a weird kind of sexual-religious fantasy tale; it could possibly be folded in under “magical realism,” but it’s a little out there even for that. There are some great elements here, but most of them are just glanced at and never truly explored or folded effectively into the larger whole of the story; and while I’m hard to shock, there were numerous moments that hit the “was that really necessary?” marker for me. I felt like the film wasted some potentially gripping concepts in search of sensationalism and quirkiness. The Andes and the valley in which the story is set are pretty, though, and the religious imagery was fascinating in its own way.

Well, now I’m certain the people who wrote the blurbs haven’t seen the films. Here’s what actually happens: the “young dancer” (the dancing happens only in the opening sequence) tells her mother that she’s been raped, but won’t say more. Her mother tries to get her father to deal with the issue, and the father refuses. However, he does abruptly decide that it would be best, due to all the mysterious deaths, if the daughter were to be married off and gotten out of the village, for her own “safety.” After she’s gone, the village elders (all men) decide that the deaths mean the village must have been cursed by a witch–and as it happens, the ritual used to make the identification (in which the father participates) identifies the girl’s mother as the witch, and she’s driven out; no other community will take her in due to the stigma. When the girl learns of this, she leaves her new husband and vows to find her mother and get to the truth, a task that has many pitfalls of superstition and sexism along the way. (The film’s subtitle refers to the fact that the girl walks, powerfully and purposefully and long distances, in her quest.)

I make efforts to catch every African film that shows up at SIFF, particularly ones from sub-Saharan countries. SIFF is, in part, a cultural enrichment program for me, and American knowledge of the countries and issues of Africa is so woefully inadequate that every bit of exposure I can get is helpful to me. This does raise a problem for me, though, which is that the films taken purely as works of art and skill are often below the standards I expect, and yet I feel hideously imperialist and snobbish by saying so. I did think at one point that this film could have been a much more dramatically effective effort in the hands of more skilled filmmakers. However, I’m not sure that it would necessarily have been a better film. Telling this story, which ends up with an huge wallop of criticism against the traditions of its culture, from within the culture is what makes it so strong, and that outweighs the level of skill involved. The girl is almost a force of nature in her determination to not succumb to the horrible hidebound traditions, and yet she always feels like a genuine person, not a symbol, and all the moments that condemn the way tradition treats the women of the country add up to strong emotion without being embroidered or tricked out. Sure, the pacing and the dialogue and the overall performance level could be more sophisticated. But they didn’t need to be for this film to register strongly with me.

I don’t think the people writing the blurbs have actually seen the movies. This? This is X-Men in feudal Japan, and no I’m not really joking. Yeah, there’s a R+J vibe in there too, but it’s ultimately less of a presence than everybody’s freaky powers and all the fighting.

I actually enjoyed this quite a lot once I realized it wasn’t, as I’d expected (since all I’m reading is the blurbs), a serious swordfighting drama. The CGI is questionable and it’s sometimes silly, but I found some good solid entertainment in it. It’s very nice to look at (and not just the backgrounds; I much liked the pretty boy in black with the loooooooong sleeves); the fight sequences are fun, and the freaky powers are an interesting assortment that make for lots of entertainment. It moves briskly and is just the right length. A great way to spend some time on a Sunday afternoon.

Seven Swords
Hong Kong
From HK action king Tsui Hark (PEKING OPERA BLUES), this lush period piece sees a village beset by a cruel military official. Realizing they’ll need help if their community is to survive, two young men set off in search of Master Shadow-Glow atop the mystical Mount Heaven.

What happened to the Tsui Hark who made Peking Opera Blues and Time and Tide? The one who made the dreary, colorless The Blade is the same one who made this film, and I fear that’s the Tsui Hark we’re now stuck with it.

This isn’t a bad film, necessarily. But there are way too many plot threads, almost no humor and a rather grim, overly-somber tone, as well as a surfeit of artsy camerawork and lighting that serves mainly to obscure the fight sequences. Its pleasures come almost entirely from the cast; there is almost no circumstance where the presence of Donnie Yen or Lau Kar-Leung (who I didn’t even know was still alive!) doesn’t bring some enjoyment to a film, and the rest of the cast was nice to watch as well. I also liked the costuming (particularly the “ghost army” in their grim, spiky black armor and white-and-black makeup–who’d have expected an army of goths in ancient China?) and the locations. As for the fighting, well, it was good when it wasn’t heavily shadowed and quick-cut. The film is also quite a bit longer than it needs to be (something that might not have registered so strongly if I hadn’t seen it right after the economical Shinobi). I certainly don’t regret having seen this. However, a good wuxia film should leave me exhilarated and kinetic. This mostly left me drained and wishing it had been more exhilarating.

Initially, this was something of a “spinach” movie for me. The term comes from Salon‘s art-film columnist, and it means a movie that you know you ought to see, for various reasons, but enjoyment isn’t necessarily one of those reasons. The “spinach” aspect of this one was that it’s one of those things a well-rounded cinephile should have in his or her viewing repertoire due to its reputation, and because I was feeling kind of tired and cranky and not certain I wanted to make the effort of going to the theater (especially since I know I could drop by Scarecrow Video any time and rent it). But then again, I like spinach.

And I liked this, and I could not possibly have gotten the same effect if my first viewing had been on a little TV screen. The reputation is completely deserved. It is gorgeous (sometimes almost absurdly so, in the literally baroque costumes of the dance groups at the Carnival parade), passionate, emotional, full of vitality and energy–in the world of this film, dancing is the essence of life–and it makes the myth work beautifully in a totally contemporary setting. Even as I reveled in the beauty and emotion of it, my inner scholar was checking off the plot points of the myth, and nearly all of them were handled well and creatively, fitting into the contemporary setting without sacrificing the fundamental mythos. A movie that satisfies both emotion and intellect for me is a rare thing. I’m so glad I went for the spinach this time.

Blood Rain
South Korea
In this imaginative, period detective thriller, a series of gruesome murders takes place on medieval Dongwha Island, apparently fulfilling a shamanist prophecy. Lavish costumes and vivid production design grace this riveting story of what later centuries will call forensics.

So I like costumed things, and I like mysteries. This ought to have been a home run. And aside from the gratuitously gruesome violence (a constant in South Korean filmmmaking, I’ve found), I liked the first hour and a half of this. I appreciated the attempts to create some kind of forensic science in a feudal setting. I found the lead character very appealing. I did figure out who the murderer was well before it was revealed, but I didn’t get the reasons quite right, so props there. And yes, the costumes were great–I especially liked the ceremonial outfits that appeared to be made of paper (a paper mill figures prominently in the story). And it caused me to ponder the thought that traditional Korean dress seems to be built largely on circles, as opposed to the angular lines of Japanese costume. However, in the last half hour everything just started going completely over the top, with overwrought emotion and bizarre motivations; and the last ten minutes completely blew the philosophical underpinnings of the story out of the water, and for no good reason but spectacle and cheap emotion. Instead of enjoying the modest success of a decent mystery, I left the theater irked and disappointed at how it let itself down.

VishwaThulasi
India
A beautiful dance instructor returns to her childhood village and renews ties with her first sweetheart. Unfortunately for the couple a once-thwarted, insanely jealous suitor still lurks there. Almost indecently gorgeous to behold, poet Sumathy Ram’s knowingly old-fashioned directorial debut is bolstered by ultra-lush songs, costuming and scenery.

Very pretty, definitely. I greatly enjoyed the scenery and the dancing. Modest in ambition and execution and it was enjoyable to see a love story that didn’t revolve around dewy young’uns (not that the leads aren’t pretty enough, they’re just not spring chickens). A bit meandering. Dumb (though not really unexpected, since I know the conventions of the genre) ending. Aside from enjoying the visual aspects, I kind of wish I hadn’t gone to it.

The blurb isn’t terribly accurate. The setup is that there’s only one print of a film to share between two theaters, so he goes back and forth between theaters delivering the reels, trying to make sure that the next reel gets there before the previous one runs out. The pretty girl tells him that she’ll give him her name if he can make sure all the reels for the screening she’s at are there on time. Of course, chaos and absurdity ensue.

This is a really cute little movie, with very appealing characters, tangy dialogue, situations just silly enough to be funny without being completely unbelievable, and the right amount of sincere sweetness. Lots of movie-going jokes–the “10 Types of Audience Members” bit, featuring such specimens as the cell-phone user, the dimbulb who needs the whole film explained to her, and the snob who will only go on opening day, brought much knowing laughter. (The number of references to Hollywood films kind of bothered me, though; I hate being reminded of how much we’re taking over the world.) There were more passholders than ticket-buyers at this screening, which didn’t surprise me in the least–we’re a ridiculously self-referential bunch.

Sometimes you just have to take a movie on its own terms. Symbolic, opaque, and existentialist, this would likely drive most people crazy in short order. (And judging by the silly questions and irritated accusations thrown at the director after the screening, it apparently did.) I decided to just accept it for what it was–which is a largely plotless ramble through the landscape of eastern Turkey, near its borders with Armenia, Iraq, and Iran–and enjoy the scenery and draw my own conclusions. It’s nice to look at and calming and an interesting experiment in viewer interpretation. (It was also a pleasant little game to see how many Turkish words I remember. Not very many, it turns out.)

The Five Venoms
Hong Kong, 1978
An eager martial arts apprentice must fulfill his dying master’s final wish and track down his five most lethal students, each armed with a separate, animal-inspired fighting method. Kicking ensues. Responsible for defining a genre, director Chang’s 1978 classic is a lush, colorful chop-sockie masterwork. Toad Style!

All hail the Shaw Brothers. I’m still viewing and learning about the older Hong Kong martial-arts films, and it’s really interesting to see how dramatic a shift in production values there was in the mid to late 1980s. This one is very definitely a marker on the way to the lusher, better-produced films I fell in love with, but it also has the cheap, silly aspects that everyone associates with “classic” kung fu films: fakey sets, cheap and inauthentic costuming and makeup, grotesque overacting. None of that takes away from the fundamental pleasure of it, however, and the kung fu–while a little slower than would become true later–is definitely worthy of awe. And how nice to see Phillip Kwok (who I know best as “Mad Dog” in Hard Boiled, where he is awesome) in a starring role. I had a lot of fun at this, and so did The Husband, who fell into my evil trap in agreeing to see this and is now going to be subjected to a barrage of my favorite more recent martial arts and wuxia movies.

The Prince Contemplating His Soul
Tunisia
A tapestry of brilliant imagery and Sufi music unfolds as a blind old sage and his spirited granddaughter wind their way to a rumored gathering of dervishes. Are the travelers they meet along the way real or just manifestations of ancient legends and fables?

This is a really beautiful film, both visually and in story and emotion. The relationship between the old man and his granddaughter feels very true, and each tale folded into their journey has its own special feeling. It also uses music and images together wonderfully; a great deal of the emotion I took away from it came from that aspect.

Unfortunately, I don’t know how any of the stories in the film end. The print of the film was detained by Customs, so the distributor sent SIFF a DVD of it; sadly, the DVD is damaged, and started stuttering and freezing a little over halfway through. The staff stopped it and tried to get it fixed three times, and nothing worked, so they just ended the screening.