S.K.o.S. Posted July 13, 2013 Share Posted July 13, 2013 I'm going to pick this back up from the start of the third round of group play. Standings at end of group play: GROUP A Argentina 2-1, +18 Poland 2-1, +9 United Kingdom 1-2, -13 Israel 1-2, -14 GROUP B Hong Kong 2-1, +5 Czech Republic 2-1, -4 Norway 1-2, +12 Italy 1-2, -13 GROUP C Japan 2-1, +36 Asia 121°E 2-1, +8 China 2-1, +2 Eastern Europe 0-3, -46 GROUP D Northern Europe 3-0, +18 India 2-1, +3 Mexico 1-2, -8 Central Europe 0-3, -13 GROUP E Belgium 3-0, +42 France 2-1, -7 Denmark 1-2, -24 Spain 0-3, -11 GROUP F Mediterranean Union 2-1, +28 Slavic Europe 2-1, +5 Africa 1-2, +8 Brazil 1-2, -41 GROUP G Germany 3-0, +10 South Korea 2-1, +34 Southern Cone 1-2, -9 Russia 0-3, -35 GROUP H Sweden 3-0, +21 Canada 2-1, +9 Southeast Asia 1-2, +2 Iran 0-3, -32 First round of group play (winners in bold): Group A UNITED KINGDOM: Millions [boyle, 2004] vs. POLAND: Big Animal [stuhr, 2000] ARGENTINA: Bolivia [Caetano, 2001] vs. ISRAEL: Lemon Tree [Riklis, 2008] Group B ITALY: Le Quattro Volte [Frammartino, 2010] vs. HONG KONG: A Simple Life [Hui, 2011] CZECH REPUBLIC: Beauty In Trouble [Hrebejk, 2006] vs. NORWAY: King Of Devil's Island [Holst, 2011] Group C CHINA: Devils on the Doorstep [Jiang, 2000] vs. JAPAN: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time [Hosoda, 2006] EASTERN EUROPE: The World Is Big & Salvation Lurks Around The Corner [Komandarev, 2008] vs. ASIA 121°E: Service [Mendoza, 2008] Group D CENTRAL EUROPE: Kontroll [Antal, 2003] vs. NORTHERN EUROPE: Omagh [Travis, 2004] MEXICO: Abel [Luna, 2010] vs. INDIA: Eklavya: The Royal Guard [Chopra, 2007] Group E DENMARK: We Shall Overcome [Oplev, 2005] vs. BELGIUM: Gilles' Wife [Fonteyne, 2004] FRANCE: Read My Lips [Audiard, 2001] vs. SPAIN: Take My Eyes [bollaín, 2003] Group F AFRICA: Abouna [Haroun, 2002] vs. SLAVIC EUROPE: Mirage [Ristovski, 2004] BRAZIL: 2 Filhos De Francisco [silveira, 2005] vs. MEDITERRANEAN UNION: Scheherazade, Tell Me A Story [Nasrallah, 2009] Group G GERMANY: Nowhere In Africa [Link, 2001] vs. SOUTHERN CONE: Bonsai [Jiménez, 2011] RUSSIA: The Italian [Kravchuk, 2005] vs. SOUTH KOREA: Woman On The Beach [Hong, 2006] Group H SWEDEN: The Ape [Ganslandt, 2009] vs. SOUTHEAST ASIA: Beautiful Boxer [uekrongtham, 2004] CANADA: Water [Mehta, 2005] vs. IRAN: Ten [Kiarostami, 2002] Second round of group play: Group A UNITED KINGDOM: Last Resort [Pawlikowski, 2000] vs. ARGENTINA: Son of the Bride [Campanella, 2001] POLAND: Tricks [Jakimowski, 2007] vs. ISRAEL: Broken Wings [bergman, 2003] Group B ITALY: The Best Of Youth [Giordana, 2005] vs. CZECH REPUBLIC: Empties [sverak, 2007] HONG KONG: Election [To, 2005] vs. NORWAY: Elling [Naess, 2001] Group C CHINA: Still Life [Jia, 2006] vs. EASTERN EUROPE: Zift [Gardev, 2008] JAPAN: Still Walking [Koreeda, 2008] vs. ASIA 121°E: Crying Ladies [Meily, 2003] Group D CENTRAL EUROPE: Hukkle [Pálfi, 2002] vs. MEXICO: Miss Bala [Naranjo, 2011] NORTHERN EUROPE: Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale [Helander, 2010] vs. INDIA: Three Idiots [Hirani, 2009] Group E DENMARK: Italian For Beginners [scherfig, 2001] vs. FRANCE: La Moustache [Carrere, 2005] BELGIUM: L'Enfant [Dardenne Brothers, 2006] vs. SPAIN: El Bola [Mañas, 2000] Group F AFRICA: Teza [Gerima, 2008] vs. BRAZIL: The Year My Parents Went On Vacation [Hamburger, 2006] SLAVIC EUROPE: The Border Post [Grlic, 2006] vs. MEDITERRANEAN UNION: Times And Winds [Erdem, 2006] Group G GERMANY: North Face [stolzl, 2008] vs. RUSSIA: Russian Ark [sokurov, 2002] SOUTHERN CONE: Machuca [Wood, 2004] vs. SOUTH KOREA: Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood Of War [Kang, 2004] Group H SWEDEN: Faithless [ullmann, 2000] vs. CANADA: Brand Upon The Brain! [Maddin, 2006] SOUTHEAST ASIA: Ong-Bak [Pinkaew, 2003] vs. IRAN: Iron Island [Rasoulof, 2005] Third round of group play: Group A UNITED KINGDOM: Red Road [Arnold, 2006] vs. ISRAEL: Footnote [Cedar, 2011] POLAND: Katyn [Wajda, 2007] vs. ARGENTINA: Intimate Stories [sorin, 2002] Group B ITALY: I'm Not Scared [salvatores, 2003] vs. NORWAY: Happy, Happy [sewitsky, 2011] HONG KONG: 2046 [Wong, 2004] vs. CZECH REPUBLIC: Zelary [Trojan, 2003] Group C CHINA: Blind Shaft [Li, 2003] vs. ASIA 121E: The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros [solito, 2005] JAPAN: Caterpillar [Wakamatsu, 2011] vs. EASTERN EUROPE: 12:08 East of Bucharest [Porumboiu, 2006] Group D CENTRAL EUROPE: Werckmeister Harmonies [Tarr/Hranitzky, 2000] vs. INDIA: Devdas [bhansali, 2002] NORTHERN EUROPE: Bloody Sunday [Greengrass, 2002] vs. MEXICO: Nora's Will [Chenillo, 2009] Group E DENMARK: Applause [Zandvliet, 2009] vs. SPAIN: The Perfect Crime [de la Iglesia, 2004] BELGIUM: Moscow, Belgium [Van Rompaey, 2008] vs. FRANCE: Fear And Trembling [Corneau, 2003] Group F AFRICA: Days Of Glory [bouracheb, 2006] vs. MEDITERRANEAN UNION: 678 [Diab, 2010] SLAVIC EUROPE: Witnesses [bresan, 2003] vs. BRAZIL: Elite Squad: The Enemy Within [Padilha, 2010] Group G GERMANY: Sophie Scholl: The Final Days [Rothemund, 2005] vs. SOUTH KOREA: The Chaser [Na, 2008] SOUTHERN CONE: Gigante [biniez, 2009] vs. RUSSIA: Silent Souls [Fedorchenko, 2011] Group H SWEDEN: As It Is In Heaven [Pollak, 2004] vs. IRAN: Baran [Majidi, 2001] SOUTHEAST ASIA: Buffalo Boy [Nguyen-Vo, 2004] vs. CANADA: The Snow Walker [smith, 2003] Final 2: Round of 16: ARGENTINA: Liverpool [Alonso, 2008] vs. CZECH REPUBLIC: I Served The King of England [Menzel, 2008] JAPAN: Confessions [Nakashima, 2010] vs. INDIA: Rang De Basanti [Mehra, 2005] BELGIUM: Amer [Cattet/Forzani, 2009] vs. SLAVIC EUROPE: Grbavica [Zbanic, 2006] GERMANY: Downfall [Hirschbiegel, 2004] vs. CANADA: The Barbarian Invasions [Arcand, 2003] POLAND: Essential Killing [skolimowski, 2010] vs. HONG KONG: Love In The Buff [Ho-Cheung, 2012] ASIA 121E: Yi Yi: A One And A Two [Yang, 2000] vs. NORTHERN EUROPE: The Seagull's Laughter [Guðmundsson, 2001] FRANCE: Blame It On Fidel [Gavras, 2006] vs. MEDITERRANEAN UNION: Honey [Kaplanoglu, 2010] SOUTH KOREA: I'm A Cyborg, But That's OK [Park, 2008] vs. SWEDEN: Everlasting Moments [Troell, 2008] Round of 8: CZECH REPUBLIC: Autumn Spring [Michalek, 2002] vs. INDIA: Lagaan: Once Upon A Time In India [Gowariker, 2001] BELGIUM: Pauline & Paulette [Debrauwer, 2001] vs. GERMANY: The Tunnel [Richter, 2001] POLAND: In Darkness [Holland, 2011] vs. ASIA 121E: Three Times [Hou, 2005] MEDITERRANEAN UNION: Caramel [Labaki, 2007] vs. SOUTH KOREA: 3-Iron [Kim, 2004] Semi-finals: INDIA: Fanaa [Kohli, 2006] vs. GERMANY: Good Bye Lenin! [becker, 2002] POLAND: Retrieval [Fabicki, 2006] vs. SOUTH KOREA: Poetry [Lee, 2010] Finals: GERMANY: Requiem [schmid, 2006] vs. SOUTH KOREA: Mother [bong, 2009] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted July 13, 2013 Author Share Posted July 13, 2013 SOUTHERN CONE VS. RUSSIA This was interesting. A battle of movies focusing on loners. The central character of Silent Souls, Aist, tells us that he's just over 40 and has no family. He doesn't seem to have many friends, either, and spends most of his time alone, writing. His boss' wife, Tanya, has just died, and the boss, Miron, tells Aist that he wants to cremate Tanya in a traditional fashion rather than sending her to a morgue. He wants to do this where they had their honeymoon, so, road trip! With a corpse in the back seat! There's quite a bit of voice-over narration from Aist at the beginning, and if it had kept up it would have been a very wordy movie, but he's pretty quiet from that point on. Most of the dialogue is from Miron talking about his deceased wife. Aist owns two birds, which he and his boss bring along on their trip (in a cage) since they'll be away for several days, and it's a good thing they were there to chirp away, otherwise there would have been a decent amount of dead silence. The mood is dreary, but not really depressing. No one seems unhappy, exactly. There's a kind of acceptance. Late in the movie, Aist describes it better than I can: "I felt sad and pure. But the sadness didn't press on me. It enveloped me like a mother." There's a lot of mundane nothingness, as things run just about according to plan, but once in a while there'll be something that makes you sit up and take notice. The cremation itself is one of those moments. Up to that point, the color palette has been mostly either very pale colors or very dark colors. But they wrap Tanya in a blanket, douse it with alcohol, and set her ablaze, and of course the fire is brighter than anything we've seen to that point. And the music up until that point has been this quiet New Age chanting, but as the fire burns it too becomes like nothing we've ever heard, these crazy spiralling violins, and Miron walks away from the fire looking like he doesn't understand why any of this had to happen and it's almost too much to handle and then it's OVER. They're cleaning up the ashes. And then there's the women that Aist and Miron run into afterwards. The Wiki article says they're prostitutes, which wasn't exactly spelled out in the movie but it would make a lot of sense. It's a pretty quick scene but it's just presented in such a bizarre, unearthly manner, which might be because pleasure has become so foreign to Aist. There are a couple more notable moments that I won't spoil. Given that the whole movie is just 75 minutes, there were enough of those moments to push me into liking it. The central character of Gigante, Jara, is a gentle giant type who lives alone. His weekday job is a security guard at a supermarket, one of those deals where you sit in a room and watch the security cameras on a monitor. His shift starts at 11 pm, when the supermarket is closed, so the only people he's watching are the employees as they clean up and restock the shelves. Jara develops a fixation (I couldn't bring myself to write "falls in love") with one of the cleaning staff, Julia, but is too shy to actually talk to her. And why bother talking to her when you can just watch her on the monitors? I'd like a woman's perspective on this one, actually. It's difficult to talk about what happens without making Jara sound awful. He happens to see Julia on a weekend, figures out where she lives, and pretty soon he's spending whole weekends just following her around. It's stalking in the most literal sense. But, at least in my opinion, they managed to avoid making him seem creepy. It's a bit of a tightrope to walk, and if it doesn't work for you then the movie's probably not going to work for you, but it worked for me. It probably helps that Jara's portrayed as someone who's helpful and generally does the right thing. Don't get me wrong, though, I definitely wanted him to stop following her and start talking to her. There's no audio on the security camera footage, and Jara has no reason to be talking when he's alone, which he is most of the time. So the story frequently has to be told without words. This is very well done, as we hear Jara's breath quickening at points when he's watching the monitor. There's also a great scene where Jara follows Julia into a movie theatre and clearly (but wordlessly) spends a lot of time debating between the movie he thinks Julia would've gone into and the movie he really wants to see. In spite of the lack of meaningful human interaction, I didn't think it was boring. Although he probably doesn't feel all that powerful, Jara's in a kind of all-seeing, godlike position with all those cameras, and that makes for some interesting goings-on. And he's a metal fan, so a lot of scenes are either accompanied by full-volume metal or muted metal when he's listening through headphones, which is pretty funny. On top of that, there's this western sort of theme they play a couple of times whenever Jara decides to actually man up and do something. The cinematography is worth noting. In the supermarket, there's an electric, fluorescent, humming glow to everything, not so prevalent as to be annoying, but not the kind of thing you'd want going on all the time. But then when Jara's at home, everything feels drab and washed out from the lack of that lighting. It probably symbolizes Jara's dissatisfaction with his life - and notice, when he gets outside, even though it's for stalking purposes, the lighting problem goes away. The cremation scene in Silent Souls is better than anything in Gigante, but if you take out that scene, what remains of Silent Souls is either nothing special or very strange, and Gigante is way ahead. It's telling that, outside of that one scene, I felt less sympathy for Miron, who had lost his spouse, than I did for Jara, whose problem was just that he couldn't get past his own shyness (although it could just be a case of what I find more relatable). I'd be recommending Gigante to other people over Silent Souls, too, so I guess my choice is made. WINNER: SOUTHERN CONE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted July 13, 2013 Author Share Posted July 13, 2013 BELGIUM VS. FRANCE Fear and Trembling is based on the autobiography of writer Amélie Nothomb, who spent the first five years of her life in Japan and then moved to Belgium. She feels an attachment to Japan, moves back there when "almost an adult" (I'm assuming somewhere in her twenties?), and gets an office job at some global corporation. The movie's about her job - in fact, nearly the entire runtime is spent in the office. Most of the few times we leave are in Amélie's imagination. If she has a life in Japan outside of her job, it's not shown here. Amélie speaks fluent Japanese, but seems to be the only white person working in the building, and also seems to be at the very bottom of the totem pole. It's not easy to get ahead in a job in an unfamiliar culture, and some of Amélie's co-workers are sympathetic to her plight, but the ones that matter are generally not. So there are a lot of angry Japanese people in this movie. Mr. Omochi, the company's vice-president, is like a mountain in human form, and that mountain frequently erupts. Mr. Saito, one level down from Omochi, is a balding office drone, but he certainly knows how to yell. And then there's Miss Mori, Amélie's immediate superior, who Amélie adores, and gets along with her pretty well until things go sour. The easy comparison here is Office Space plus a cultural barrier. You're going to be thinking "How has this person not been fired yet?" in both movies, but it's not a dead-on comparison because Amélie is trying extremely hard at her job, with loyalty to her corporation that's on par with a puppy that's just been rescued from a shelter or something. Also I think Office Space worked for most people because it was so familiar to them, and Fear and Trembling is all about unfamiliarity. Japanese management figures seem to react in very random ways. There were office problems that I've seen in real life, but they were handled in ways I've never seen. How do you occupy an underling who has nothing important to do? Apparently you give them a simple task and keep telling them they're doing it wrong until they've spent an entire day doing it over and over. I guess real life doesn't always arrange itself into a neat little story, but the character arc was pretty lacking here. It seemed like things only got worse and worse for Amélie. The bottom of the totem pole somehow keeps getting lower. If there's a lesson, I suppose it's not to get so focused on one goal that you lose sight of everything else. Or maybe it's just that you shouldn't let your job take over your life. Moscow, Belgium is currently selling on Amazon for the bargain price of five thousand dollars. It's about a mother of three, Matty, separated from her husband, Werner. On her way out of a grocery store parking lot, Matty backs into a truck, which is being driven by a man named Johnny. They get into a fight. Johnny has a receding hairline with a beard, and he's wearing a tank top, and Matty is starting to show her age a bit and has wavy blonde hair... I guess what I'm trying to say is that this looked like half of an ABBA reunion. Eventually Johnny changes his tune and starts trying to talk his way into a date. But there are a few reasons why this wouldn't work out - he's 29 and Matty is 41, and Matty's got the family, and her estranged husband is far from out of the picture, and there's some other stuff too. Of course, if Matty didn't give him a chance, there'd be no movie. Surprisingly, I liked this quite a bit. The plot is nothing special, and the actors aren't especially attractive, so I wouldn't have guessed that I'd enjoy it. But there were enough good scenes. There are three good fight scenes (verbal fights - the first one is in the grocery store parking lot), and there's a karaoke scene that I really liked. And the moment where the movie really started to win me over was the moment where Johnny started to win Matty over, when they're walking around after their first date. I was almost starting to think there was no way anyone couldn't like this movie. Things eventually get a little iffy, though. Matty has to choose between Johnny and getting back together with Werner, and both guys have their bad points. It was starting to get to the point where she just goes back and forth too many times. I had been sympathizing with Matty for quite a while, which says something, because when a girl rejects a guy, I would tend to take the guy's side. It's probably because the movie spends quite a bit of time letting us see inside Matty's head, with scenes where she's checking herself out in a mirror, and reminiscing about how perfect things used to be with her husband. But I think, eventually, any viewer is going to lose a bit of respect for her. This could be another instance where I'd like to get a female viewpoint, just to see if a woman can relate to what Matty is going through and what she does. Oddly, death is something of a minor theme here. It keeps popping up. None of the characters actually die, but there's a minor character whose job is apparently to notify the next-of-kin when someone dies, and another who wants to go into palliative care because people are more "real" when they're dying. Maybe it's meant to show that, even though Matty's only in her early forties, she's becoming aware that she doesn't have forever to find someone, and a man's bad points become a little more tolerable. Fear and Trembling was just okay, and Moscow, Belgium was very good. It may not be worth five thousand dollars, but it's good enough for the win here. And Belgium comes out on top in the Group of Death! WINNER: BELGIUM Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted July 13, 2013 Author Share Posted July 13, 2013 GERMANY VS. SOUTH KOREA The Oscar-nominated Sophie Scholl: The Final Days continues the streak of Nazis showing up in the German movies. Here, they are front and center. In 1943, with the Nazis just having lost the Battle of Stalingrad, Sophie Scholl is part of the German White Rose student organization, who are printing and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. Sophie and her brother Hans go to the University of Munich campus early in the morning to distribute the leaflets, but are caught and charged with treason. A huge chunk of time, nearly an hour, is devoted to Sophie's interrogation by Gestapo investigator Robert Mohr. Hans is presumably being interrogated elsewhere, but we never see that. I like both those things in theory. Sophie starts off by denying that she was distributing the leaflets at all, and piles lies on top of lies as Mohr tries to take apart her story. Eventually that peters out, and we end up with sort of a philosophical discussion as Mohr tries to get at Sophie's motivations. All of that, while not bad, isn't especially great either. I'm guessing very few people would really want to see Sophie lie her way out of the situation, and showing a debate with a Nazi sympathizer seems a little pointless since it's so obvious who's right and who's wrong. No one's going to reconsider their opinions on the Holocaust. It doesn't help that Mohr is dressed in a grey suit and red bow tie, reminiscent of Pee-Wee Herman, and goes through a raft of very dour and snide facial expressions. There's value in seeing how Sophie sticks to her beliefs, even when faced with death. It seemed to me that a lot of that courage was coming from faith in God and an afterlife, and that's going to mean more to some people than others. Then in the next scene, a sham trial attended entirely by German soldiers, with the judge basically just lecturing Sophie, Hans, and one other man, we see that it wouldn't even have made a difference whether or not she stood up to anyone. The third man on trial recants all his statements and pleads with the judge to spare him, and he still gets put to death. So it's not like Sophie refused to take the easy way out. There was no easy way out. The title pretty much advertises that Sophie's going to be put to death, and the only suspense lies in the method of execution. The whole thing is just a slow march to the end. Holocaust movies can be more than that (The Counterfeiters is one example); this wasn't. This wasn't as bad as I may be making it sound, but for whatever reason, I'm mostly coming up with negative things to say about it. In The Chaser, Joong-ho is a former cop and current pimp. Business is bad, with several of his girls having gone missing. He starts to notice a pattern, that all the missing girls have been seeing the same guy, and he's just sent one more girl to that same person. It turns out that the women are being murdered. I knew that much going in. From the title, I was expecting the pimp would spend most of the movie pursuing the killer. The chase ends up being pretty brief, though, and the police quickly get involved. So it was different than what I expected, but that's fine. Unpredictable can be good. I was always wondering where they were going next, and that kept me on my toes. The acting and cinematography were good too. You may be thinking there's a "...but" coming here, and here it is. After the first scene where the police show up, I was thinking they handled things pretty poorly, but I could come up with a different scene where the police didn't do such a bad job and still ended up at the same point. So I kind of let that slide, but it just kept getting worse. If you're interrogating a suspected serial killer and trying to antagonize him with questions, wouldn't it be a good idea to have him handcuffed to a solid object? Why should one guy wielding the first thing he was able to pick up even be able to come anywhere near escaping a group of like fifty policemen? How is it possible to waste all kinds of time being idiots when you've got a killer in custody, you're correctly assuming you'll find dead bodies at his house, and you have a rough idea what neighborhood he lives in? I had to check if the South Korean police are really that bad, and apparently they are, as difficult as it is to believe that well-meaning people can perform that poorly. (Not that this makes them bad in and of itself, but apparently they very, very rarely fire their guns when on duty, which somewhat helps explain how one guy could have a chance at escaping many.) That doesn't make it a good movie, though. I'd find it more believable if it was just one bad cop, like in Memories of Murder, but it's everyone. And no one on the police force is really developed all that well as a character, so it just feels like some faceless force that's constantly screwing things up. By the time they got to the pivotal convenience store scene, which requires a pretty big coincidence (the second in the movie) plus multiple people having jello where their brains should be, I wasn't feeling sorry for anyone when things turned out poorly. I was just thinking "It's too bad all these people are so stupid." They had things set up well, I wanted to like it, and then the police showed up and ruined everything. So clearly I had big problems with both movies. The Chaser feels like it was more of a waste, though, in terms of squandered potential. You can at least look at the German movie as being worthwhile for historical purposes. WINNER: GERMANY Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted July 16, 2013 Author Share Posted July 16, 2013 SWEDEN VS. IRAN One of the first things we see in As It Is In Heaven is a conductor, Daniel (played by Michael Nyqvist, who went on to star as Mikael Blomkvist in the Swedish Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy) in the middle of directing an orchestra, drenched in sweat and with blood running down his face, since he's gotten a nosebleed in the middle of the piece. It's a really powerful image, but it's bad news for Daniel. He's been taking his work - music - way too seriously, and it's made him pretty famous, but in the interest of his health, he's got to take a break from everything. Daniel decides to move back to the small town he lived in as a boy. It's not all positive memories, since the reason he and his mother moved out in the first place was because he was being bullied, but it'll hopefully get him out of the public eye for a while. Once he's gotten settled in, a few people recognize him, and somewhat against his will, he's coaxed into becoming the director of the church choir. There's a scene where he's listening to them perform for the first time, says they're pretty good, and you're not sure if he really thinks they're good or if he's just saying that because he knows he's not supposed to be stressing out over music. Anyway, it's a given that the choir's going to get better with a world-class conductor in charge, but a lot of the choir members have big problems in their lives. Also, Daniel starts falling in love with Lena, one of the choir members, which a few people strongly disapprove of. There was a lot to like here. I mentioned that it captivated me right from the start. It's never, ever even remotely boring. The characters all have vibrant personalities, and it's very good at making us like and dislike the appropriate people. I found myself wanting things to work out with Daniel and Lena. As it was in Son of the Bride, the idea of being consumed by your work was very relatable to me. And no individual story is handled unrealistically. The bad parts generally have to do with the movie drifting over the line and becoming melodramatic and hokey. A few of the choir members' problems are dropped on us out of nowhere, and it starts to reach a point of diminishing returns. In back-to-back scenes, Daniel has a murder-suicide threat delivered by one character who's waving a shotgun around, and then gets beaten bloody by another over a completely separate issue. That's a pretty bad day by any definition. And it just seems sometimes that characters are having the most dramatic reaction possible (and the script seems more at fault than the actors). The ending, as well, might work for some people more than others. It was a little too over the top for me to be fully on board with it. Baran starts off with a (very helpful!) message explaining that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in the late 1970s, and many Afghan refugees fled to Iran and are still there today. So, we're on a construction site, with a lot of illegally hired Afghan workers, who have to actually run and hide whenever a building inspector shows up. One of those workers, Najaf, falls out of a second-story window of the building they're working on, and breaks his leg. He's not going to be able to work, but his family still needs money, so he sends one of his children, Rahmat, to fill in for him. It becomes clear pretty quickly that Rahmat isn't cut out for construction work. They end up allowing him to swap jobs with Lateef, a teenage Turkish boy who does lighter work, mostly making tea for everyone. Lateef is bitter that the son of an Afghan refugee took his job, so that's where the conflict arises. But there's a lot more to this story. The movie is fairly low-budget. Like, I have no doubt that they're shooting it on an actual construction site rather than having built a set. They do drop in some unexpected aerial shots, though, and they make the most of what little special effects they've got (like slow motion). Also, I got the impression that a lot of scenes must have been done in, if not one take, then very few takes. Stuff like holes getting punched in walls, or things being dropped on people. If time and money are considerations, then you realistically couldn't do those scenes very many times. Yet, nothing even looks like it needed to be done more than once. The actor playing Lateef isn't the greatest, as the way he delivers dialogue is pretty wooden. There's a scene where he's crying, and there's no way those aren't fake tears. But he throws himself into any physical scene with a huge amount of enthusiasm. There are some brief fight scenes, and he just hurls himself into them. That's fun to watch. Ultimately, I liked this more than the other two Iranian movies I've seen this year. I was on board with the story, and it seemed like I was just going to have to wait around a little and it would eventually get really good. But somewhere around the halfway point, it meandered into a direction that I didn't really enjoy. It seemed to espouse this philosophy that as long as you're a good person, you can feel good about that, regardless of whether you achieve anything else that you want in life. It just felt kind of spineless and unsatisfying to me. It's not where I wanted things to go. This isn't the easiest choice, because there were things I liked and disliked about both. As It Is In Heaven has both the better high points and the worse low points, and that makes it more memorable. There was a temptation to throw Baran a bone here for being the best Iranian movie, but I can't do it. WINNER: SWEDEN Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted July 19, 2013 Author Share Posted July 19, 2013 SLAVIC EUROPE VS. BRAZIL Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is the sequel to 2007's Elite Squad. Both these movies were huge deals in Brazil, setting records for the highest-grossing domestic movies. The first movie, which I saw a few years back, won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. It tells the story of two friends in training to become officers in a military police unit. Only one of them makes it: André Matias. Captain Roberto Nascimento trains Matias and provides voice-over narration. If you didn't like the first Elite Squad, it was probably because of its politics. The first half of that movie was devoted in large part to showing how lazy and corrupt regular Brazilian police are. In the second half, we learn that the military police unit might be even worse, as they're pretty much killing machines. Liberals are portrayed as useless intellectual bleeding hearts, giving criminals sympathy they don't deserve. It's a little strange watching such a blatantly right-wing movie, because you don't get that perspective much from Hollywood. You may have felt like Nascimento turned out to be a fascist robot and Matias was molded into one. At the outset of this sequel, there's a prison riot. The military police are called in, and as you would expect, they solve the problem by killing people. Matias, who is now a Captain himself, pulls the trigger at a key moment. But this time, a good portion of the media turns on them. In the ensuing political fallout, Matias is taken off the unit and demoted to a regular policeman, and Nascimento, who was directing the operation, is promoted into a desk job where he can't do any more damage. From that vantage point, Nascimento is able to go after the police corruption that he always knew about, but he's got to develop a whole different set of skills, because you can't just stamp out that kind of thing by killing people. (Or can you?) Is the sequel just a cash grab after the success of the first movie? Well, maybe, since it did make a ton of money for something coming out of Brazil, but that doesn't mean it's not good. All the important actors are back, as well as the writing team, and the end of the first movie was a good jumping-off point for a new story, as it felt like all the pieces were in place but the game hadn't really begun. The biggest difference is that everyone's a little more relaxed. The first movie was brutal as far as treatment of criminals. This time, Nascimento's become a father, which might have mellowed him out somewhat, and, out of necessity, there's some teamwork between people on opposite ends of the political spectrum. That makes things more palatable, without giving the impression that the writers sold out. Ultimately, this is just a really good combination of intelligent dialogue and action. There's something for everyone. And by the way, I think you could still enjoy this without having seen the first movie. Witnesses is set in the Serbian-Croatian war during the early 1990s. Three Croatian soldiers try to blow up a Serbian man's house. They believe the house is empty, but it's not; the Serbian man unexpectedly comes out to see what's going on, and they gun him down. That's not how they wanted things to happen. Even though this is wartime, the village they're in is not a battleground, and they can still be prosecuted by police. There is one witness to the killing. As police investigate the murder, we learn that the soldiers are staying at the home of one of their mothers, and they're there because they've brought back the body of her husband. It looks like blowing up the house was the soldiers' own idea; they weren't on an assigned mission or anything. The draw here is that scenes are shown over and over, and each time we get a little more of the story. It's kind of like Hero or Rashomon, except that no character is telling the story, and so there can be no lying or embellishment, strictly speaking. It's the movie that's presenting the story to us. Once, on the second time through a scene, I wondered how I could've missed a specific detail on the first time through, and then I realized that it was probably never shown. We see only what the camera sees, which is limited to what the moviemakers want us to see. I would probably get quite a bit out of a rewatch, just to tie off some loose ends. I'm specifically thinking of a scene where a character is being interrogated and seems to leave out certain very important details. The timeline loops back on itself with little warning. That's a plus in that the repetition doesn't get boring (as with something like Run Lola Run, where I fast forwarded the entire last third of the movie), but a minus in that I was often a little fuzzy on certain things. Sometimes we're not supposed to know what's going on just yet, and the questions are answered later; late in the movie, they turn things around, taking our knowledge of what's going to happen next and using it against us. This is another entry in the list of movies where I got so caught up in the plot, or at least in concentrating on which part of the story was being retold and seeing what the next new revelation would be, that I forgot to notice anything about the acting or cinematography. I do remember at the very start, when the three soldiers are driving to the house, there's a neat lighting effect where everything outside the car is green and everything inside is blue. And there were also a couple of standout shots where the mother's face is the only thing visible against a background of pure blackness. These are two very good movies. Elite Squad 2 felt like it had more to say, though. Witnesses is all about its gimmick of how the story is told, and the new revelations that we get throughout the movie often felt like window dressing, while the Brazilian movie is just telling a good story. WINNER: BRAZIL Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted July 29, 2013 Author Share Posted July 29, 2013 DENMARK VS. SPAIN Applause is a character study of Thea Barfoed, an actress whose career is past its peak. She has two sons, is divorced, has lost custody of her children due to her alcoholism, and is trying to get them back and turn her life around. She's still working, acting in a play, and seems to be doing a pretty decent job with it, although it looks like she needs to drink to even be able to get on the stage. Bits from the play are interspersed throughout the movie. What I noticed most about the way this was shot was - I'm not sure of the technical term, but I guess it's that the contrast is turned way up. The whites are very bright, the blacks are very dark, and all the other colors are muted. There are lots of close-ups too, which means we see every line and wrinkle on Thea's face. The actress playing her, Paprika Steen, would've been in her mid-forties when this was made, but looks older here. They don't belabour this point, but Thea is famous enough to be recognized a couple of times, which she can't stand (and made me think about how a lot of celebrities probably reach a point where the good points of fame disappear and the bad points are still there). After dealing with a few people trying to take pictures of her while she's at a café with her husband, she hisses to him, "I hate regular people." That's an insane level of egotism and self-centeredness, but she also seems perpetually about to snap, erratic and babbling, all over the place. You have to admire Steen's performance. It's not easy to make that kind of crazy seem believable, but since she does, she garners sympathy in spite of being very unlikeable, because she's so messed up and legitimately trying to get better. There's a character named Tom that I found very intriguing. He tries to approach Thea in a bar while she's drinking mineral water. She predictably wants nothing to do with him, and gets kind of nasty telling him to leave - and then he's nasty right back, but with a smile on his face the whole time, BUT that smile occasionally wavers and cracks. I was just wondering what he was thinking, if he really meant everything he was saying, or if he was using some plan B reverse psychology deal to get her into bed. There's some more stuff with him later on that really makes you think "Who is this guy?" I also liked the last scene with Thea and her children. She wants it to be a pleasant moment, and has to act normally in front of them, so whatever's going on in her head can't be shown through anything she does. To compensate, the piano score hits a slightly jarring false note every so often, and the camera occasionally moves away as if glancing at one particular thing over and over, making you wonder what she's really going to do. So, good stuff here. In The Perfect Crime, Rafael works in a department store, in the clothing department. He was actually born in the store, considers it his home, and seems to spend entire nights there quite a bit. He's an amazing salesman, an alpha male type, kind of an Antonio Banderas-Dennis Miller hybrid. He also sleeps with a ton of his co-workers, hilariously making dates with them to take place inside the store - although there's a lot you can do in a department store after hours. Unfortunately, there's another guy, Don Antonio, who beats out Rafael for a promotion and becomes his manager. The two of them come to blows, and Don Antonio is accidentally killed. One of the least attractive women in the store, Lourdes, witnesses this and helps Rafael dispose of the body. Rafael has no interest in Lourdes, but now that she can blackmail him, things are going to change. This felt more like an American movie than almost any other I've watched here. Kontroll is the only other one I've felt that way about. Apparently the director, Alex de la Iglesia, has collaborated with Pedro Almodovar in the past. This did actually have some Almodovar-esque touches, with Rafael's department full of ridiculously hot women, and Don Antonio coming back in ghost form to give Rafael advice on how to deal with Lourdes. Whether intentional or not, it also had a bit of foreshadowing to the only other de la Iglesia movie I've seen, The Last Circus. I get the impression that The Perfect Crime is one of his most "normal" movies. No one is likeable here. Rafael is so full of himself, and has such a low opinion of other people. You can point out that it's a black comedy, and no one is supposed to be likeable. Actually, all you need to say is "it's a comedy" and the movie gets itself out of a lot of responsibility. Rafael's plan at the end of the movie doesn't entirely make sense, since he would almost have to be psychic to know that things would work out the way they did, but hey, it's just supposed to be funny. And there is some cleverness to it. I think a good comparison here is Very Bad Things. I liked that one, and it probably has something to do with Jon Favreau, Jeremy Piven and Leland Orser. Everyone else was pretty awful, but you wanted those guys to get through it okay, so you at least had someone to root for. In this, you're spending a big part of the movie with unlikeable people in miserable situations. It's fun when Rafael is loving his life at the start, talking directly into the camera about what a fantastic person he is. Once things go wrong, it's not quite as enjoyable. These were both good movies, but I think it's pretty clear from what I wrote that I liked Applause better. WINNER: DENMARK Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted August 17, 2013 Author Share Posted August 17, 2013 HONG KONG VS. CZECH REPUBLIC 2046 was a bit difficult for me to wrap my head around. The movie begins and ends in the year 2046, shown as a digital blur of colors, with lots of LG product placement. There's talk of time travel - a train that goes to 2046 - and a man, Tak, who wants to leave that time, even though most people are happy there. I guess the official line is that none of what we see in the future is actually happening, that it's all a story being written by a man in the 1960s, which is where most of the movie is spent. And that probably makes the most sense, since women who are there in the 1960s also show up in the future, meaning the writer is using real-life acquaintances in his story. But as I was watching, it was never completely clear to me if the 2046 stuff was fictional, or if the guy in 2046 had left the future and travelled back in time to the 1960s, or if he had travelled forward in time via that train and was remembering his past life. The whole idea of time is pretty elastic here, with characters seemingly able to freeze themselves in one position for days. The guy from the 1960s I've been mentioning is Chow Mo-wan, played by Tony Leung, who has a Clark Gable look going on. We check in on him every year around Christmas time from 1966 to 1969. He's with a different woman each time, and is really only serious about the first one, Su Li-zhen, played byGong Li. But she rejects him, and after that, he seems to become less serious about his relationships. The craftsmanship here is second to none. Everything screams high quality. I noticed there are quite a few scenes where there'll be some large object right in the foreground, or the camera will be looking around a corner, and half of the screen will be black. What that means, I'm not sure, but it was definitely a recurring theme in the shot composition. There were a lot of points where I was left wondering what all this was supposed to mean. It doesn't help that a woman shows up late in the movie with the same name as Su Li-zhen, doing the same things as her namesake, but played by a different actress (Maggie Cheung). Mo-wan sees them as two different people, but the second one seems inexplicably attached to him. So on top of single actresses playing multiple characters, we may have had single characters played by multiple actresses. Zelary, which was nominated for an Oscar, is another movie set during World War II. We begin in 1943, midway through the war, and go straight through until its end in 1945. A couple, Richard and Eliska, a surgeon and a nurse, are involved in some sort of resistance of which the Nazis wouldn't approve. When it starts looking like they've been found out, they have to go into hiding, and that means splitting up. A recent patient, Joza, agrees to hide Eliska, and they go all the way with it, changing her name, moving her into Joza's mountain village, and even going through with a sham marriage. The movie isn't really about Eliska hiding from the Nazis, because she's never really in danger of being found out, other than one scene reminiscent of Inglourious Basterds where German soldiers drop by Joza's cabin. It's more about whether Eliska and Joza can coexist. And later, as time passes and the war intensifies, the focus shifts more to just what's going on in the village. There's another family in the village where the father suspects there's something going on with the Eliska-Joza union. And it'd be a stretch to call the village a war zone, but both German and Russian soldiers are regularly passing through, causing a lot of bloodshed.This is a 150-minute movie, so they've got time for all these shifts in focus. There are a couple of instances of pretty explicit violence, surprising considering it's a period piece, but not unwelcome. There are also a couple of quick but interesting fight scenes, one of which ends with a karate chop. Zelary was more engaging and had more "wow" moments. 2046 looked much prettier, but that's about the only area where I can honestly say it was better. WINNER: CZECH REPUBLIC Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Elsalvajeloco Posted August 17, 2013 Share Posted August 17, 2013 WINNER: GERMANY Yo Germany, I'm really happy for you. Imma let you finish but I just got to say The Chaser is one of the best Han Cinema movies of all time. *drops mic* 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Z Posted August 17, 2013 Share Posted August 17, 2013 WINNER: GERMANY Yo Germany, I'm really happy for you. Imma let you finish but I just got to say The Chaser is one of the best Han Cinema movies of all time. *drops mic* I am German and I agree with that statement. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted August 17, 2013 Author Share Posted August 17, 2013 To boil my above review down to one sentence: The cops in The Chaser were so terrible at their jobs that it ruined things for me. You guys were ok with that? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaedmc Posted August 17, 2013 Share Posted August 17, 2013 Cops being terrible at their job sounds like art imitating life to me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Elsalvajeloco Posted August 17, 2013 Share Posted August 17, 2013 To boil my above review down to one sentence: The cops in The Chaser were so terrible at their jobs that it ruined things for me. You guys were ok with that? One of the things about Korean thriller movies is it requires you to suspend disbelief in their entire justice system. The whole premise of Confession of Murder was Korea having a fifteen year statute of limitations on what basically amounts to first degree murder. Not only do you have to believe that, you have to believe the insane swerve in the end where the said calculated, cold blooded serial killer doesn't know the exact time the statute of limitations would go into effect. If I can believe the twists and turns of that film, I can believe there is a inept police station in The Chaser. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted August 21, 2013 Author Share Posted August 21, 2013 UNITED KINGDOM VS. ISRAEL The Oscar-nominated movie Footnote is about a relationship between an aging father and his adult son, Eliezer and Uriel Shkolnik. In one of the early scenes, Uriel is receiving some sort of award, and his family, including Eliezer, are in the audience. As Uriel goes up to give his acceptance speech, the camera stays on Eliezer through the whole thing. He's clearly not happy, and seems to be bitter about something, but we don't know what. From the direction that the blurry figures seated behind him are facing, we can see he's not exactly looking at Uriel during the speech, either. Maybe he's jealous of his son's success? We learn shortly afterwards that both father and son are Talmudic scholars. Eliezer has been working very hard for many years with very little to show for it. He's gotten so wrapped up in his work that he doesn't do much else, and is convinced that his way of doing things is the only right way. He doesn't show much outward emotion other than exasperation and annoyance. When he finds out he'll finally be receiving an award, the Israel Prize, he shows very little reaction. If we can tell he's pleased, it's only because of the absence of annoyance. Eliezer is a bit conflicted about this, since he'd been decrying the last few award recipients as being unworthy of the prize, in a bit of a sour grapes situation, and thus saying that the prize didn't mean as much as it used to. Also, he's not the sort of person who thrives in the spotlight, so he'd rather avoid all the publicity and interviews that come with the prize. Lastly, he's got a few enemies on the nomination committee, and a bit of a persecution complex, and you can tell he's wondering if the prize is being sincerely awarded. But, deep down, he does crave the recognition. In the climactic scene, with no spoken words, facing what his son has said will kill him, Eliezer still only shows controlled agitation. However, the music tells the story of what he's feeling inside, and that's very well done, making it as exciting as it could possibly be. I also thought the ending came at exactly the right time. The movie has a whimsical style to it when it's introducing the characters, which is always welcome. Also, there are these great profile shots of one particular person on the nomination committee, one of Eliezer's enemies, when he's arguing with Uriel. This guy has a face full of character, a bit on the chubby side, with a forehead that looks like a road map. When you see him in profile, it reminded me of an "Old Man Winter" picture, with his cheeks puffed out, blowing cold air. I saw a trailer for Red Road in a theater a few years back, and at the end, a guy in the audience yelled out "Red Road!" trying to sound like the kid from The Shining, and everyone laughed. Soooo that's my little Red Road story. This was written and directed by Andrea Arnold, who I'm familiar with for one of her later movies, Fish Tank. I thought that one was excellent, and had been wanting to check out some of her others. What I didn't realize was that this movie is supposed to be part of a trilogy, designed through a concept called Advance Party, where the three films were to be written and directed by three different directors, with the outlines and back-stories for the characters being specified in advance by the executive producers. So these same characters, played by the same actors, would be involved in totally different stories in the other two movies. It seems like things didn't quite work out, though, since this movie was released in 2006, the second one (called "Donkeys") was released four years later to very little fanfare, and the third one is still in developmental limbo. Certain major cities have those security surveillance cameras set up outside in public areas. North Glasgow, in Scotland, apparently has a bunch of those cameras, and Jackie is one of the people whose job is to monitor them. One day, a man shows up on one of her monitors, and the music tells us she knows that person, even though we have no idea who he is just yet. The setup is quite a bit like Gigante, and early on, I was trying to make the characters fit into the plot of that movie - that is, I was thinking Jackie's lonely and stalking the guy because she's in love with him. But, even though she does spend most of her time alone, that's not what's happening. The atmosphere in the early stages is extremely foreboding. It's mostly the score, with an electronic squealing that sends shivers up your spine, but the image of Jackie alone in a dark room in front of dozens of television sets has a creepy science fiction feel to it. I was loving that. And it's cool how they drop little clues for you along the way. For instance, it gradually becomes clear that even though Jackie knows who the guy is, he doesn't know who she is. Now, by the halfway point I had an educated guess about what was going on, and that turned out to be pretty much correct, but I still didn't fully understand Jackie's motivations or what she was going to do next. So I was still interested. Unfortunately, the payoff isn't quite as amazing as I would've liked it to be. It mostly makes sense, although you really have to avoid thinking too hard about it, and the acting is great, but that creepiness and nail-biting suspense very much fades away. These are both good movies. I feel like I've had to make this choice a few times already: the one that's solid all the way through, or the one that's really, really good for the first half and then falls off for the second half? I'm picking Red Road this time, because it's not like it becomes actively bad partway through. Also, one of the questions I ask myself is "If you were going to show one of these movies to a friend, which one would it be?" and that's definitely Red Road. The average person is going to enjoy the security camera story more than one about Talmudic scholars, I think. WINNER: UNITED KINGDOM Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted August 23, 2013 Author Share Posted August 23, 2013 CHINA VS. ASIA 121°E The Maximo Oliveros in The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros is a 12-year-old boy who basically dresses as a woman - he doesn't wear skirts, but does wear bright colors, makeup, and accessories like flowers or barrettes in his hair. He lives with his father, who looks like a smaller Kensuke Sasaki, and his two older brothers. These three are small-time criminals who deal in gambling, stolen cellphones and pirated DVDs, but they're not altogether bad guys, since they're solidly in support of however Maximo wants to live his life. In the early going, it's just a character study of Maximo. I was seeing this as a combination of two movies from earlier rounds: Beautiful Boxer, since we have a cross-dressing Asian male as the central character, and Service, since he and his friends like to get together at a makeshift neighborhood theatre to watch movies. The griminess that we saw in Service is on display here too. This movie and Beautiful Boxer both make me wonder just how things like transvestitism and homosexuality are actually viewed in Asian societies. In Beautiful Boxer, the central character took some flak, but I don't think it was portrayed as anything serious. Here, there is a lot more teasing, and the suggestion that a small minority of people could do some really damaging things. Then, about a third of the way into the movie, we have a plot! We don't know the circumstances, but one of the older brothers kills someone. Maximo sees him burning some evidence, and since it's public knowledge that there's been a murder in the area, he puts two and two together. This is a problem because Maximo has befriended a policeman, who has a pretty good idea that the killer is in Maximo's family, but doesn't know exactly who it was. So Maximo is torn between doing what's right and being loyal to his family. It's maybe even more complicated than that, though, because Maximo seems to be attracted to the policeman. The relationship between those two is... open to interpretation. Remember, Maximo is 12 years old. Nothing untoward ever actually happens, and the scenes with the two of them don't get creepy, but I got the sense that there might be something more there that the policeman didn't want to act on. It certainly gets brought up by other characters. The acting is a little suspect in some scenes. I'm thinking mainly of one instance where Maximo is crying and he sniffles like twenty times in a minute. But this movie thrives because of the plot - it goes in directions you wouldn't necessarily expect, and just about all the characters are nuanced and interesting, not at all one-dimensional. Occasionally the dialogue shines too, as there are a couple of really good lines. This was, unexpectedly, a darn good movie that was a great reminder of why I'm going through this project. Near the beginning of Blind Shaft, two mine workers kill a third, without us really knowing why. We're told that the victim was the brother of one of the killers. When he receives monetary compensation from the guy who runs the mine, to make up for the loss of a family member, and then splits it with the other killer, the motive becomes clear - they did it for money. It's revealed around that time that the victim wasn't even really the killer's brother. It's a pretty good racket, to be honest. They find a place where a bunch of people are looking for work, befriend one of them, and convince him to lie and say he's related to one of them, ostensibly so that the two of them can get hired together. The victim shouldn't be trying to fight back because he'll be totally taken by surprise, but even if he does, it's a two-on-one situation. It's dark enough in a mine that they can get away with killing someone without anyone else noticing, and then set off an explosion to make it look like there was a cave-in. Many of the workers are inexperienced enough and the work is dangerous enough that people die pretty often. The mine doesn't want anyone to know that a worker was killed there, and pretty much handles the cover-up for them. And hardly anyone will suspect that the killing was deliberate, since everyone believes that the victim was one of the killers' relatives. Then they go to another mine in a different city and do it all over again. Some problems start to crop up on their next run-through, though. In what amounts to their job interview, after they say they have experience working in a mine, the mine boss wants to know why they left their last job. The best they can come up with is to tell him that a worker was killed and they left because it was unsafe. That's the kind of thing that could leave a trail for other people to find. Most importantly, their next victim is a 16-year-old boy, who's agreed to pose as a nephew, and he's young enough that the thought of killing him makes one of them uneasy. This is a particularly wide-eyed, innocent and obedient boy, too, and he's very studious, he reads textbooks in his spare time, and there's just all sorts of reasons not to kill this kid, especially since they're just doing it for money. They spend a good bit of time showing the boy squinting at the sun every time he comes out of the mine - he looks a little confused that it's so bright - and I think it's meant to show that he's essentially escaping death every time he leaves the mine, even though he doesn't realize it at all. We soon realize that whatever's going to happen with this kid, it'll be at the very end of the movie, and we're basically just waiting out the runtime to find out how things go down. I give the edge to Blind Shaft on its acting, and it seems to have loftier aspirations, but Blossoming was more fun, and I think it would hold up better on a rewatch. WINNER: ASIA 121°E Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted September 5, 2013 Author Share Posted September 5, 2013 NORTHERN EUROPE VS. MEXICO There are a whole bunch of events referred to as Bloody Sunday, somewhere between ten and twenty of them. This movie deals with the most recent one, in 1972, which is also probably the most relevant and well-known. Protestors in Northern Ireland holding a civil rights march were shot at by British Army soldiers, resulting in roughly thirteen deaths and thirteen more injuries. Although it's based on real-life events and looks quite a bit like a documentary, everyone in the movie is acting. It starts with two press conferences, one with the British government saying that marches and assemblies are banned in Derry, the other with Ivan Cooper, a Member of Parliament from Northern Ireland, saying that their planned march will go ahead. It's a great way of bringing people up to speed who aren't familiar with the history, and more involving than just showing text on a screen. The early part of the movie mostly focuses on Cooper trying to drum up support and get people to show up at the march. There are also a couple of other minor stories - a relationship between a Protestant and a Catholic where the Protestant will be attending the march and the Catholic won't, and another guy who's been arrested once for rioting and doesn't want to get arrested again. But really, I was just waiting for the march to start. They get hundreds of people showing up, many more than I was expecting. The British soldiers obviously don't just open fire for no reason, and the movie does a very good job of showing how things escalated, with both sides mostly making reasonable decisions. As a bonus, we get liberal use of the wonderful word "yobbos". I do have to mention that the documentary style works against the movie a bit here, since a handheld camera is being used and things get pretty shaky once the bullets start to fly. We only see one marcher actually firing a gun. According to Wikipedia, that's all there was. After the fact, the soldiers indicate that there were many more gunmen, and we're seemingly meant to believe that the vast majority of them are lying. We know for sure that some of them are, but with others, it's not so clear. As I watched the movie, I got the impression that there were so many people that there could have been all kinds of other stuff going on without me knowing. So maybe there were more gunmen than just that one. The camera can only see one thing at a time. There's no question that the soldiers had a huge firepower advantage and killed innocent people, though. The aftermath, with Cooper in a hospital along with a ton of other marchers, is pretty devastating. I was actually expecting some kind of violence to break out again, since there were a few soldiers standing guard at the hospital and they were massively outnumbered. Nora's Will starts off with someone trying to deliver food to Nora's apartment. She's not answering, and the delivery guy assumes she's out, but we can guess from the title of the movie that she's probably passed away. There are some unexpected things to come, though, as the delivery guy goes across the street to drop the food off with her ex-husband. Yes, a divorced couple were living across the street from one another. When the ex-husband, José, the movie's central character, goes to Nora's apartment to investigate, he finds her body, along with an empty bottle of pills - evidence that she's committed suicide. This comes as no surprise to him, since she'd apparently tried this many times throughout her life. Nora was Jewish (which I found unusual, since very few Mexicans are Jewish) and her death has come right in the middle of Passover, meaning that she can't be buried for the next three days. A couple of rabbis show up to arrange the funeral and pray over the body. If I understood this correctly, the praying has to go on constantly. Meanwhile, other members of Nora's family are arriving for the funeral: her sister, her son, and the son's wife and two young daughters. José is not at all receptive to this. He's kind of the grumpy old man archetype, but more passive-aggressive than sullen. He's not outwardly saddened by Nora's death, but she clearly still matters to him on some level. There's the fact that he was living so close to her, plus he spends much of his time in her apartment trying to snoop through her things, seeing if she had any secrets she kept from him. He torments the rabbis by doing things like arranging a Catholic funeral, telling them that God doesn't exist, and offering them a bacon, sausage and ham pizza. The original title of this movie translates as "Five Days Without Nora". The word "will" in the English title turns out to mean something other than what I thought. There is no physical will and testament, but José repeatedly mentions that Nora did this to bring the family together (which he hates). So it's her will in the sense that it's what she wanted. I found it difficult to develop strong feelings one way or the other for this. I guess, in theory, I like the idea of people battling for custody of a dead body, but my problem was that it was just so flat. Maybe it's because you have to be respectful at what is essentially a three-day-long wake, but the characters weren't expressive enough, and moments that seemed like they should've been emotional peaks rang hollow. Obviously there's meant to be more to José than his passive exterior, but the actor wasn't able to totally sell me on that idea. So, for that reason, I'm going with the Irish movie. It didn't seem like a sure-fire winner when I watched it, but the opposition was weak. WINNER: NORTHERN EUROPE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted September 30, 2013 Author Share Posted September 30, 2013 ITALY VS. NORWAY In Happy, Happy, we've got two couples who are next-door neighbours: Kaja and Eirik, and Elisabeth and Sigve. The latter two have just moved to Norway from Denmark. Both couples have a child of about the same age, six or seven years old: the Norwegian couple have Theodor, and the Danish couple have Noa. Noa is adopted, though, from some African country whose name I didn't catch. This is a rural community that they're in, and there doesn't seem to be much to do other than to go to church and to walk around in the snow. So I wasn't too sure exactly what this movie was going to be about. But then, on an evening when the couples have gotten together to play board games, Sigve reveals to Kaja that his marriage hasn't been going well, and Kaja, who has probably been drinking more than she should, um, gives him a blow job. At that point, they had my full attention. Eirik leaves shortly after that for a ten-day hunting trip, so Sigve and Kaja are going to be able to keep things going for a while. I was thinking that the title, with "Happy" repeated twice, was referring to how happy Kaja and Sigve made one another. I'm sure there are lots of movies about adultery, and there's probably a good chunk of those that make it seem like the spouses being cheated on deserved it. In this one, though, it seems so beneficial and healthy for Kaja and Sigve to be sleeping together, and although they're obviously not coming right out and admitting what they're doing, they have a complete lack of guilt when they're around each others' spouses. It turns out that a literal translation of the title is "insanely happy". Well, Kaja does seem like a very happy person right from the start, but it's kind of an artificial, fake happiness. It only becomes real when things start up with Sigve. Of course there's more to come later on in the movie, not all of it happy. There's also a side plot with the boys, Theodor and Noa. Noa is pretty quiet (I don't think he has any spoken lines at all) and very obedient. Theodor's only exposure to black people up to this point in his life seems to be a book about slavery. The two boys are left on their own a lot to play with each other. "If this were the old days, you would be my slave," Theodor says to Noa early in the movie, and my jaw hit the floor. It continues on in that vein throughout the movie. Granted, these are children who don't know any better, but if that's not over the line, then it's very close to it. I'm not sure what the point of all that was other than to shock, but it certainly succeeded in that regard. In I'm Not Scared, a pretty typical nine-year-old boy, Michele, lives with his parents and has some friends his age. He's out by himself one afternoon when he discovers a grate that covers up a hole in the ground. The hole's about ten feet deep, is quite large, and contains a dirty, shackled boy, who turns out to be named Filippo. This did have some frightening moments early on, when Michele is finding the child for the first time. I think it may be the first movie I've run into in this thing that's at all scary. And, the plot seemed to me like something of a fairy tale setup, but it takes a turn that I didn't expect. Other than that, though, it's a very middle-of-the-road movie. There are so many aspects of it where it feels like there's nothing for me to praise or criticize. Outside of that one swerve, the plot is just okay. The acting is serviceable. The cinematography is alright. Maybe the problem I had is that we're not supposed to fully understand what's going on, because we're seeing things through Michele's eyes, and he doesn't fully understand. But there has to be something to compensate for that lack of understanding. You could maybe explore one of the characters very deeply, and that'd probably have to be Michele or Filippo - really get me inside their head, have some scenes shot through first-person view or some kind of scene where they get really emotional. I didn't see that happening, though, and in somewhat the same way a child is removed from fully understanding what adults are doing, I felt removed from fully sympathizing with any of the characters. The movie kept me at arm's length. If I can't feel bad for a kid living in a hole, something's wrong. I really liked Happy, Happy, and didn't think I'm Not Scared was anything special, so Norway is your winner. WINNER: NORWAY Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted October 4, 2013 Author Share Posted October 4, 2013 SOUTHEAST ASIA VS. CANADA The Snow Walker doesn't have subtitles, but a decent amount of it is spoken in a foreign language, an Inuit language. It takes place in Yellowknife, which is up north in the Northwest Territories, in 1953. It's based on a Farley Mowat story, and has James Cromwell in a small role and Michael Bublé in a smaller one, which makes it pretty darn Canadian already, but it also has that Canadian low-budget look to it where you'd think it was a movie from the 1980s. An ex-World War II pilot named Charlie now works for a shipping company. He's making a shipment by seaplane and runs into a couple of Inuit men. They don't speak the same language, but they bring him to a tent and show him an Inuit woman who's very sick. Charlie guesses she's got tuberculosis. He eventually agrees to take her to a hospital back in the city, but ends up crashing his plane (and it's a little strange that they keep playing adventure-type music as the plane is crashing rather than something a little more dangerous, though I guess if they died in the crash there'd be no movie). Charlie has deviated a bit from his planned flight path, and the Northwest Territories are pretty huge. So although people are more than willing to look for him, he'll be very difficult to find. He and the Inuit woman, who turns out to be named Kanaalaq, have some decent survival skills, but they're not going to be able to last forever on their own. The biggest draw here might be the scenery. The vast majority of the movie is shot outside, and there's not much other than land and sky, but it's so unspoiled and gorgeous. There are some time-lapse shots that are pretty amazing, with the highlight being one of the northern lights. There are also a few spots where they really went for it in terms of showing what you need to do to survive, and one more where they showcase an unexpected danger of the north. Those got my eyebrows up. On the down side, the acting is nothing to write home about. There's a bit of a blandness to all the characters. Even when Charlie is throwing tantrums about his situation, which happens quite a few times, he still strangely feels like a nice guy. The only exception is one particularly cynical guy on the search team, who is like a breath of fresh air. The plot, on the whole, isn't anything you haven't seen before, but at least they don't do anything wrong with it. The part which really made me scratch my head was that Kanaalaq doesn't speak for the first few hours she's with Charlie, and the assumption is that she doesn't speak English. But then it turns out that she does know a few words, enough to communicate. So why wouldn't she speak for so long? I have no idea, other than to fool the viewer. So, some good points and some bad points, and it adds up to a movie that was alright. Maybe on the upper side of average. Buffalo Boy got me to learn a little about buffaloes, since the buffaloes here are Asian water buffaloes, and when I think of a buffalo I think of the American version, the bison. The movie's about a young man, Kim, who lives with his elderly parents. The family owns two water buffaloes. In Vietnam, buffaloes are used kind of like oxen, for plowing fields and such. They're in the middle of flood season, and the land around the family's house is covered with waist-deep water. This means the buffalo can't graze and are on the verge of starving to death. Kim has to join up with a group of buffalo herders to take his animals someplace where they can eat. After this trip, he'll start up his own herding group. What struck me here, given that the movie looks like it's set out in the middle of nowhere with very little around, is how out of place a movie camera would look there. I've certainly seen movies this year that were filmed in some pretty remote locations, but this has to take the cake. I'm not sure someone who lives in this sort of area would have ever even seen the equipment needed to make a movie. There's a rainstorm in the movie, and - assuming they didn't just trick me and film that part on a soundstage somewhere - I was wondering if they had to wait for it to rain to shoot that scene, or if it just happened to be raining one day and they decided to put it in the movie, or what. And keeping all those buffalo in line can't have been easy either. Although it can't measure up to what I saw in The Snow Walker, the scenery is pretty decent here too. It's another case of there being very little around - here it's just water and sky - but it's beautiful nonetheless, with the pinks and oranges that show up in the sky. Even though it looks good, I got the sense that the water was supposed to represent death. It's indirectly killing the buffalo, Kim talks about the water being full of dead things, and in the same way that the water is everywhere, Kim's father is very conscious that he doesn't have much longer to live. My problem with the movie was that it's just not that interesting. The acting's not great either, which might have something to do with it not being able to capture my interest. Things do happen, but it all feels very flat. There's a bit of characters jumping around from place to place without really showing us how they got there, too. Kim is with his buffalo herd one moment, then back visiting his parents again in the next. These were two good movies to be comparing - both have nice scenery, not-so-nice acting, and are not particularly exciting. The Snow Walker pretty clearly made more of its advantages and was the more enjoyable movie. WINNER: CANADA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted October 6, 2013 Author Share Posted October 6, 2013 POLAND VS. ARGENTINA The English name of the first movie is Intimate Stories, but a more literal translation of its Spanish title would be "Minimal Stories". Knowing nothing else about it, I was expecting something like Hukkle or Slacker, a whole bunch of very short, unconnected scenes. When the first thing in the movie was an elderly man getting an eye test, and the second thing was a woman finding out she'd won an appearance on a game show, it seemed like that's where this was headed. Actually, there are only three stories in the movie, and they all revolve around people travelling from Fitz Roy to San Julian, which is about a three-hour drive. The old man, Don Justo, had his dog run away several years ago, and he's been told the dog has been seen in San Julian. Because of his failing vision, he can no longer drive, and his plan is to hitchhike. The woman, Maria, as mentioned, is travelling to San Julian to appear on a game show. And a third person, Roberto, is travelling to be there for the birthday of the child of a woman he's fallen in love with. He's trying to bring along a cake. The movie doesn't exactly lay out the three stories right from the start. They kind of sneak up on you. For the first while, you might think it's just about the old guy travelling to find his dog. Then Roberto is one of the people who picks him up, so the birthday cake story gets woven in there. And then, well over halfway into the movie, it cuts back to - who is this again? - oh, right, Maria and her game show appearance. So the stories don't all get equal time by any stretch of the imagination. Things just putter along for the first hour without anything especially impressive happening, but then the movie really hits its stride in the last half hour. First, after hinting a few times that there's something more to his past, Don Justo finally tells the story of how he lost his dog. It's the first time that something actually seems important here, and a big part of the reason why is the acting job as Don finishes the story, staring straight into the camera, his eyes glistening without actually shedding tears. Then, even though Maria's life is nothing special, and the game show she's on is just a low-budget local production, there is a long moment when she stares into the tv camera - flipped around so we see it through her eyes rather than what the camera's seeing - and we feel just how much this matters to her. I didn't get that transcendent moment from anything that happened in Roberto's story. However, all three stories end up much the same way - not exactly perfect, but still pretty good. That's kind of how I ended up feeling about the movie as a whole, too. Katyn, which was nominated for an Oscar, is the name of a forest in Poland where over 20,000 Polish soldiers were executed during World War II. I have to admit that I'm getting pretty sick of World War II movies, and this likely won't be the last one I watch this year. However, this turned out to have some interesting wrinkles. Poland, of course, was on the side of the Allies, but is geographically right between Germany and the Soviet Union, which is just about the worst possible place to be. I always sort of saw the Axis countries as moving in lockstep, so in the early stages of the war, when Poland is being occupied by both the Soviet Union and Germany, it was strange to me to see the Russians trying to portray themselves as saving Poland from the Nazis. From a dispassionate point of view, the idea of Russians ripping Polish flags in half, discarding the white half, and hanging up red banners everywhere is actually kind of neat. Here's what I got as far as the plot: two Polish soldiers, who each have a wife and child, are captured by the Russians, along with a great many other Polish soldiers. Groups of the captive soldiers are periodically being shipped off somewhere, and it's probably not giving too much away to say that it's the Katyn Forest. The soldiers' wives and children are in danger from the Russians as well. On top of that, one of the soldiers has a father who teaches at a local university, which is taken over by the German forces. The second half of the movie brings quite a few things I wasn't expecting. First, we hit 1945 at the midway point, so the whole second half of the movie is about what happens after the end of the war. Second, even though an absurdly huge number of Polish army officers were killed, apparently not every single one of them was - which is kind of what you'd expect, if you think about it. The third thing goes back to the idea of Russians and Germans operating independently. Each of them is trying to blame the Katyn massacre on the other country. For whatever reason, I found the idea of a country trying to pass off responsibility for their wartime actions a little surprising, even though I've obviously heard of things like Holocaust deniers. Admittedly, I was getting confused about who exactly we were seeing in each scene, especially later on in the movie. The soldiers and their families are almost interchangeable, and since we go through many years in a short period of time, people's appearances change. I don't want to give away the details, but the last ten to fifteen minutes of the movie are completely devastating. I had found it a little lacking in the emotional punch department up to that point, but it ends up going straight for the throat. Granted, it was right at the end, but it took things up a notch. So, I didn't find either of these especially impressive for most of their runtime, but then they both hit a higher gear near the end. Katyn is clearly the more important movie, and its last ten minutes are better than anything in Intimate Stories. The problem is that it's a feel-bad movie and Intimate Stories is a feel-good movie - and I'm comparing ten minutes of excellence to thirty minutes of really good material. Because of that, if I had to watch one of these again, I'd be choosing the Argentinian one. And for that reason, Argentina gets the win. WINNER: ARGENTINA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted October 8, 2013 Author Share Posted October 8, 2013 JAPAN VS. EASTERN EUROPE 12:08 East of Bucharest, which won an award at Cannes in 2006, is a comedy centering around one episode of a talk show in Vaslui, which is a city a few hours northeast of Bucharest. The title refers to Nicolai Ceausescu's speech that started the Romanian Revolution in 1989, which led to the end of Communism in that country. The speech began at noon in Bucharest, and the crowd started to turn on Ceausescu at roughly 12:08. The question being asked on the talk show is whether demonstrations in their town began before or after 12:08 - that is, whether Vaslui was partially responsible for starting the revolution, or whether they were just reacting to the events in Bucharest. The guests on the talk show are two Vaslui citizens who were around at the time of the revolution: Piscoci, an old, retired man who used to play Santa Claus around Christmas, and Manescu, a history teacher who's heavily in debt, mostly because of his drinking habits. The first half presents the guests' lives, which sets up a lot of the jokes in the second half; the second half is the talk show episode in its entirety. The humor mostly comes from how useless both these guys are. Manescu's story of demonstrations on the day the revolution began seems to be completely made up, leading to him borderline sulking by the end of the show. Piscoci, in what I found to be the funniest part of the movie, is more concerned with origami than with any of the actual conversation. The camerawork is kind of cool too - the camera operator is meant to be enough of an amateur that the shot sometimes drops, blurs or wavers. There's also a running joke with kids setting off fireworks. It wasn't that funny overall, but I did laugh out loud a few times. And it was never boring. As usual, I'm pretty ignorant on world history and didn't know anything about the Romanian Revolution, though Ceausescu's name was at least familiar to me. I felt like I was able to pick up enough of the details as the movie went on, though. In a movie like Machuca, which is about the life of Chileans at the time of the 1973 coup, I feel like I need to know more what happened to appreciate how much danger everyone's actually in. In this movie, it's more about laughing at the present-day characters, so I didn't feel too left out. Although, I do wonder how much of the appeal is meant to come from the idea of making a comedic movie about a very serious event. Caterpillar is, strictly speaking, another World War II movie, but this one is unlike any other I've seen. A Japanese soldier, Lieutenant Tadashi Kurokawa, is delivered home from fighting in the Second Sino-Japanese War, a war between Japan and China that evolved into WWII. He's alive, and has a few war medals, but also has no arms, no legs, a good chunk of his head is Kreugered up from burning, he's deaf, and is nearly unable to speak. This kind of story has been told before, like in Johnny Got His Gun (a book from 1939 that was made into a movie in 1971, about a WWI soldier who ended up much the same way, and was the inspiration for Metallica's song One), but this movie focuses more on the soldier's wife, Shigeko, who is stuck taking care of him. Johnny Got His Gun is all about what Johnny is feeling. Here, we're very rarely allowed inside Tadashi's mind, and even when we are, it's only with images, not words. I really loved this, enough that it'll probably end up being the best movie I see this round. First, most obviously, there's the shock value of seeing a man with no limbs. The special effects are pretty amazing in this regard. On top of that, there are preconceived notions about what physically disabled people can and can't do, and how they should be treated, and those sorts of ideas are challenged here, both in good and bad ways. A movie that mostly features two people in their home, with only one of them being able to speak, could've gotten boring pretty quickly, but I was never even close to bored. A big reason for that was the strong emotion, most of it coming from Shigeko. She goes from horror when she first sees her husband's condition, to sadness, to happiness when she realizes she can communicate with him, and later at times to anger and frustration at her situation. Every one of her feelings is very intense and very well portrayed. Then you start to notice the subtext. Even though just about everyone treats Tadashi with the utmost respect, they want nothing more to do with him. Even his family just shows up for his return and then take off pretty quickly, with Tadashi's father calling him a "lump of flesh". One of Tadashi's brothers does visit a few times, but he mostly talks to Shigeko, never entering the room where Tadashi lies. This story raises a whole bunch of questions. Is it worth it to end up in Tadashi's condition for your country? If not, how much of a sacrifice can one person be expected to make? Does Shigeko's obligation to her country and her duty to her husband mean she has to give up her own life, especially when no one else seems inclined to help her? Is her suffering insignificant when compared to Tadashi's? Why do bad things happen to good people, and am I supposed to feel good when bad things happen to bad people? What would it feel like to be in Tadashi's position? It really gives you a lot to think about. No question that the win goes to Japan. WINNER: JAPAN Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaedmc Posted October 8, 2013 Share Posted October 8, 2013 Then you start to notice the subtext. Even though just about everyone treats Tadashi with the utmost respect, they want nothing more to do with him. Even his family just shows up for his return and then take off pretty quickly, with Tadashi's father calling him a "lump of flesh". One of Tadashi's brothers does visit a few times, but he mostly talks to Shigeko, never entering the room where Tadashi lies. This is interesting. There's a documentary called White Light/Black Rain about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and part of it covers how victims of the atomic bomb are treated - and it's not so good. I can't tell if it's just the reminder of war, or if it's some kind of spiritual/psychological deal where people afflicted with a tragedy are shunned by society. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted October 10, 2013 Author Share Posted October 10, 2013 AFRICA VS. MEDITERRANEAN UNION 678, also known as Cairo 678, is about sexual harassment in Egypt. This is sort of similar to the other Egyptian movie I've seen this year, Scheherazade Tell Me A Story, but not quite the same, as that dealt more with men being awful to women rather than the specific issue of harassment. Like Scheherazade, there are three separate stories here. They revolve around three women, all of them in committed relationships. Nelly has a telemarketing job, and when she's groped by a man driving by in a truck, she chases him down and becomes the first Egyptian woman to file a lawsuit for sexual harassment. However, her fiancé's family encourages her to drop the suit. Seba's story is mostly in the past. Near the beginning of her relationship with the man who's now her husband, the two of them went to a soccer game. When the Egyptian team won, the two of them were separated in the celebration, and Seba was gang-raped, ended up pregnant, and had an abortion (I think; this is all kind of implied) without ever telling him. Now they're married, but their relationship isn't going so well. Fayza has a husband and two children. Because her family has money trouble, she has to take the bus to get to her job; however, when she's repeatedly groped on crowded buses, she starts attending a self-defense class. That encourages her to fight back, and she does this by righteously stabbing men in the penis. No, really. Pretty soon a couple of police detectives are trying to track down the person responsible for these stabbings. The movie's title, by the way, comes from the number of the bus route she takes. For the most part, this was pretty good. In spite of that whole stabbing thing, it's a lot less outrageous than Scheherazade. That makes it more realistic, since it at least doesn't paint every male character in the movie with the same brush, but also less fun. Fayza needed to undergo more of a transformation to really sell me on this. She seemed weak even when she was fighting back. The stand-up comedy stuff with Nelly and her fiancé was great, and I liked how all three stories came together in the last act of the movie. But the disagreement about Fayza wearing a head scarf and dressing as modestly as possible was a little strange. It felt like something designed to fill out the runtime. The shaky camera during action scenes (like when Nelly's chasing down the truck) is a big problem. You hear the phrase "shaky camera" quite a bit in relation to action movies, but this is more than just the shakiness you would get from someone running with a handheld camera. It's like someone made a conscious effort to literally shake the camera in the hopes that it would make things seem more exciting. Days Of Glory is yet another movie about World War II. It was nominated for an Oscar, and won an award at Cannes - the entire cast shared the Best Actor award. Apparently African countries such as Morocco and Algeria produced a lot of Arabic soldiers fighting on behalf of France. So we've got an entirely Muslim, Arabic squadron of soldiers - except for their commanding officer, Sergeant Martinez - doing a tour of duty through Europe, with the goal of liberating France. Think Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, except less good than either of those, and swap mentions of "Allah" in for "God". The central character is Said, a low-ranking soldier who, although he sees plenty of combat, has an unofficial role as the Sergeant's errand boy. He seems very short, I'd guess about 5'4", about a head shorter than any other soldier. His motivations aren't entirely clear, other than feeling like he has a duty to protect France. He goes to war voluntarily, in spite of his mother trying to get him to stay home, and he doesn't care about being promoted to higher ranks (actively turning down promotions, in fact), but he definitely cares about being respected on a personal level. There are three or four battle scenes, depending on what exactly you count as a battle scene. The best of these is the last one, in a small village in Vosges, France. The soldiers are perfectly competent throughout the movie, but in the last battle, they suddenly develop into these deadeye sniping killing machines - though I guess that's because they found themselves in an advantageous position. In between the fighting, things are pretty unfocused. It's like they had a whole laundry list of scenes they wanted to do and just ran through them all. Racism and French soldiers being favoured over Arabic ones is an issue, but they spend about as much time on that as they do on one soldier writing letters to a woman he met in Marseilles. Apparently the Nazis saw the Muslim soldiers as being less strongly aligned with France, and issued propaganda trying to win them over to the German army. That's a pretty interesting idea, but it gets brought up only to be dealt with in a few minutes and never mentioned again. Interesting that the only time the soldiers really get mad is at each other. When they're actually fighting enemy soldiers, the prevailing emotion is fear more than anything else. That's probably not all that different than any other war movie, though, and is probably a pretty good reflection of what war is really like. What is less realistic is the lack of blood. Mortar shell explosions or land mine explosions just make people completely disappear. Picking a winner here isn't easy. These were both alright, but not amazing. I think I'd be more likely to watch 678 again if I had to pick one. If I wanted to watch a war movie, I've got options that are clearly better than Days Of Glory. If I want to watch a movie about women fighting back against sexual harassment, my choices are a little more limited. WINNER: MEDITERRANEAN UNION Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted October 12, 2013 Author Share Posted October 12, 2013 CENTRAL EUROPE VS. INDIA I saved the longest for last! These two movies were nearly five and a half hours combined. In the black and white movie Werckmeister Harmonies, the young man Janos lives in a small Hungarian town, seemingly working as a caregiver for an older man. Some sort of travelling exhibition comes to town, advertising the body of a giant whale, and an appearance by a prince. Janos goes to see the whale, and is pretty impressed, as one might expect. But the rest of the townspeople seem to feel that the whale is awful and disgusting and will ruin their town. Of course there's no reason why the presence of a whale should have any effect on anything. Everyone other than Janos seems to feel that things are getting worse and worse, but through most of the movie, all we hear is talk. It's not clear whether anything bad is actually happening. Finally, and very gradually, we see that some crazy stuff really is going down. There was a point where I was losing interest in this movie. It's pretty long, about two and a half hours, and some shots just linger unnecessarily. There's a good amount of footage of people walking, for instance. No question it could've been cut down to under two hours without losing anything. Clearly it's a very strange story, and I haven't even mentioned the strangest parts. Your guess is as good as mine as to what was meant by the end of the first hospital scene. Characters say odd things from time to time, and there are a lot of unanswered questions, mostly about why people are doing what they're doing. But, it really had a way of making me feel for the town. It doesn't seem to come from anyone's performance - most lines are delivered very crisply and precisely. I think it has a lot to do with the score. The opening scene, which is strange all on its own, with Janos directing a bunch of bar patrons to spin around to mimic the planets, has an accompanying piano and string theme that's really comforting. And the music in the final scene pretty much forced me to sit through the entire closing credits because it was so epic that I didn't want to just cut it off. Rotten Tomatoes has this listed as a horror movie, which is a stretch, but the late stages of the movie do approach something like that. The shot of Janos running down the railroad tracks and staring directly into the camera is pretty unsettling. In the end, it won me back. You come away feeling that you've witnessed something amazing, even though you're not sure what that something was, and the weirdness ends up making the movie feel like a fairy tale rather than being offputting. Devdas is the name of the movie's central character, who, at the beginning, is returning to his parents and siblings in India after ten years in London becoming and working as a lawyer. He reconnects with his childhood friend Parvati (Paro for short), and all indications are that the two of them are going to get married. Things seem to be going so smoothly that I was wondering if there'd be any conflict at all in this movie, but then, out of nowhere, Devdas' parents step in and prevent the marriage, because Paro is of a lower social class or something. Her parents quickly marry her off to another man, and Dev hits the bottle hard to cope. He finds himself in the company of another woman, Chandramukhi, who is... they use the words "courtesan" and "paramour" a lot. She falls in love with him; Devdas doesn't want to lower himself to a relationship with a prostitute, but it doesn't look like he can get Paro back. The buildings and sets here are amazing, just incredibly ornate, with every possible color on display. The costumes, especially what the women are wearing, are pretty crazy too. Jewelry on every inch of the body, that sort of thing. The sexual conservatism that was on display in Water is present here too. I was thinking that due to India's morals, Devdas actually ends up seeming like a jerk; he calls Chandramukhi a whore (although that's filtered through subtitles), and hits Paro in the face at one point, drawing blood, and says something like "I have scarred you with the mark of my love." But as Devdas sinks into alcoholism, I got the message that he's intentionally supposed to be a very flawed person, and is going to have to make some changes if he wants a happy ending. This fits the stereotype about Bollywood movies in that it has probably five or six songs over the course of its three-hour runtime, and I only thought one of the songs was at all worthwhile. But I actually didn't mind them too much. It gave me the chance to turn my brain off for a bit and tune out. (This is in contrast to the long shots in Werckmeister Harmonies - at least I could see that they were making an effort with these songs.) I liked this a lot. When a movie is as long as this, you become more attached to the characters, and it helped that things could plausibly go in any one of several directions. Devdas could end up with Paro, or Chandramukhi, or maybe neither of them. It certainly wasn't predictable. The eventual ending could be seen as cheesy, I guess, but I loved it. I actually got goosebumps. Werckmeister Harmonies is pretty highly regarded, but I can't get past the fact that there's seemingly so little point to so much of the movie. I have to give this to Devdas, which I liked pretty much all the way through. It's crazy that Central Europe could put up the three movies that it did (Kontroll, Hukkle, Werckmeister) and go 0-3, because I liked all three. WINNER: INDIA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted October 12, 2013 Author Share Posted October 12, 2013 All movies from the third round ranked:1. JAPAN: Caterpillar [Wakamatsu, 2011]2. SOUTHERN CONE: Gigante [biniez, 2009]3. INDIA: Devdas [bhansali, 2002]4. BELGIUM: Moscow, Belgium [Van Rompaey, 2008]5. NORWAY: Happy, Happy [sewitsky, 2011]6. BRAZIL: Elite Squad: The Enemy Within [Padilha, 2010]7. ASIA 121E: The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros [solito, 2005]8. ARGENTINA: Intimate Stories [sorin, 2002]9. SLAVIC EUROPE: Witnesses [bresan, 2003]10. UNITED KINGDOM: Red Road [Arnold, 2006]11. SWEDEN: As It Is In Heaven [Pollak, 2004]12. CENTRAL EUROPE: Werckmeister Harmonies [Tarr/Hranitzky, 2000]13. DENMARK: Applause [Zandvliet, 2009]14. RUSSIA: Silent Souls [Fedorchenko, 2011]15. MEDITERRANEAN UNION: 678 [Diab, 2010]16. SPAIN: The Perfect Crime [de la Iglesia, 2004]17. CHINA: Blind Shaft [Li, 2003]18. ISRAEL: Footnote [Cedar, 2011]19. IRAN: Baran [Majidi, 2001]20. AFRICA: Days Of Glory [bouracheb, 2006]21. NORTHERN EUROPE: Bloody Sunday [Greengrass, 2002]22. POLAND: Katyn [Wajda, 2007]23. CZECH REPUBLIC: Zelary [Trojan, 2003]24. FRANCE: Fear And Trembling [Corneau, 2003]25. MEXICO: Nora's Will [Chenillo, 2009]26. CANADA: The Snow Walker [smith, 2003]27. GERMANY: Sophie Scholl: The Final Days [Rothemund, 2005]28. EASTERN EUROPE: 12:08 East of Bucharest [Porumboiu, 2006]29. SOUTH KOREA: The Chaser [Na, 2008]30. ITALY: I'm Not Scared [salvatores, 2003]31. SOUTHEAST ASIA: Buffalo Boy [Nguyen-Vo, 2004]32. HONG KONG: 2046 [Wong, 2004] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.K.o.S. Posted October 12, 2013 Author Share Posted October 12, 2013 So the final group standings are: GROUP A Argentina 2-1, +18 Poland 2-1, +9 United Kingdom 1-2, -13 Israel 1-2, -14 GROUP B Hong Kong 2-1, +5 Czech Republic 2-1, -4 Norway 1-2, +12 Italy 1-2, -13 GROUP C Japan 2-1, +36 Asia 121°E 2-1, +8 China 2-1, +2 Eastern Europe 0-3, -46 GROUP D Northern Europe 3-0, +18 India 2-1, +3 Mexico 1-2, -8 Central Europe 0-3, -13 GROUP E Belgium 3-0, +42 France 2-1, -7 Denmark 1-2, -24 Spain 0-3, -11 GROUP F Mediterranean Union 2-1, +28 Slavic Europe 2-1, +5 Africa 1-2, +8 Brazil 1-2, -41 GROUP G Germany 3-0, +10 South Korea 2-1, +34 Southern Cone 1-2, -9 Russia 0-3, -35 GROUP H Sweden 3-0, +21 Canada 2-1, +9 Southeast Asia 1-2, +2 Iran 0-3, -32 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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