SKoS' World Cup of Cinema

[S.K.o.S.]

INDIA VS. GERMANY

 

 

 

 

In Fanaa, a blind woman named Zooni is on a trip with her friends, and falls in love with a tour guide named Rehan (played by the now very familiar Aamir Khan).  This is nearly a three-hour movie, and there's a lot more to it than that one sentence, but to tell you too much more about the story would be close to spoiling it.  Let's just say that the two are separated for seven years and then reunite.

 

Zooni's very attractive... except that she has a unibrow.  Unfortunate, but about an hour into the movie I had mostly gotten over it.  Pretty much all the other stuff in the movie looks really great, though.  The lighting on exterior shots, the vivid colors, it's all good.

 

There's some comic relief, which would be fine, except that from what I've seen of Indian movies this year, the comic relief has a habit of not being funny.  Here, we've got a police officer whose name is Jolly Good Singh and says "Jolly good" a lot.  That didn't really do it for me.

 

Some of the problems I had with this movie are the same as my issues with Rang De Basanti.  This is a light-hearted musical with lots of songs, and it's a love story, but near the end it gets deadly serious.  We have to sympathize with people that are very difficult to sympathize with, it's very morally complex, and it just doesn't fit the tone.  Outside of that, there are parts that feel like they were dropped in from another movie.  Beyond even that, there are some truly ludicrous moments that will strain your suspension of disbelief, approaching "so bad it's good" territory.  Some of it was weirdly kind of predictable, in the sense that I was thinking "No, they wouldn't do that, would they?" and then they did it.

 

Also, it turns out that Zooni and Rehan had a child, which we only discover once they reunite after seven years.  There's been a tendency not to show physical love in Indian movies - a kiss will typically be the most we get - but this is taking things to a new level, as they show nothing of the encounter that led to the child, making it completely unexpected when he showed up.  Anyway, he's named after his father, Rehan, and he refers to himself in the third person, and has a tendency to make statements about himself that could apply to his father.  This isn't as clever as the movie thinks it is.  And they also do that thing where they have voiceovers of dialogue from earlier in the movie in case you hadn't been paying attention.

 

I think this could still be enjoyable if you know in advance that there's going to be a few things that come totally out of left field.

 

Good Bye Lenin is another Berlin Wall-centric movie, which is still a nice break from World War II movies.  We've got a family living in East Germany, Christiane and Robert, with one son, Alex, and one daughter, Ariane.  We're told that Robert runs off with a woman in West Germany, when the children are just old enough to understand what's going on.  The mother, Christiane, who is (or becomes) fervently socialist, pretty much shuts down, going into a catatonic state for several years.

 

Later on, when the children are older, Alex is participating in a march protesting the Berlin Wall; Christiane sees him, has a heart attack, and goes into a coma for eight months.  When she comes to, the Berlin Wall has fallen, but her heart can't take any sudden shocks.  The collapse of her socialist country would qualify as a shock, so Alex tries to prevent her from finding out what's going on in the world.  She's confined to her bed, but she can see changes just by looking out her window (ads for Coca-Cola popping up on buildings, for example - and this is a great way of showing just what a huge effect the fall of the Wall had), so this is a lot more difficult than it might sound.  It's a very contrived scenario, but the idea that not absolutely everyone sees this huge historical event as a positive thing is interesting, and probably true.

 

That summary makes Christiane sound pretty useless, but that's not exactly the case; she can be effectual when it's called for, and comes off as a good person who just happens to be on the wrong side of history.  Alex isn't trying to trick his mother, just trying to keep her alive.  He has to take things pretty far, to the point of developing his own fake news broadcasts to explain some of the things Christiane sees (there's certainly a message in there about how media can influence people), and telling her that people are coming from West Germany to East Germany when the opposite is true.  That's not the right way to handle this, but he feels he has no choice.

 

This all goes along fairly well, but the movie doesn't get to above average until late in the proceedings, with some very heartwarming moments.  I thought it was a little sad how Christiane is being lied to, and if she's happy, it's something of a false happiness - but then they dealt with that in a simple but satisfying way, showing that regardless of what happens to her country, she can be happy about other things, like having children who care about her.  So I ended up feeling pretty good about this movie.

 

Fanaa is easily the more audacious and exciting of the two movies, but there were just so many problems with it that it really shouldn't get the win here.  India has kind of used up all my patience with flawed but beautiful movies.  Good Bye Lenin was good enough to send Germany to the finals.

 

WINNER: GERMANY

[S.K.o.S.]

LOOK OUT IT'S THE FINALS

 

 

GERMANY: Requiem [schmid, 2006] vs. SOUTH KOREA: Mother [bong, 2009]

[The Z]

I expected this to happen, but I actually think Germany has advanced too far in this tournament.

Or to put it differently, I think Germany has profited a lot by your choice of movies.

I think by now you've seen pretty much every good German movie of the last ten years or so.

 

I haven't see the German entry for the finals, but I have seen Mother and it's pretty damn good, so I think this will be it for Germany.

 

EDIT: Since it wasn't in the tournament, I assume you have already seen The Lives of Others before this tournament? Because that's pretty much the best German movie ever in my opinion.

[S.K.o.S.]

I still think Germany was lucky to get by Belgium.  (No question that I liked The Tunnel better than Pauline & Paulette, but if I'd drawn a different Belgian movie, who knows.)

 

Yep, I've seen The Lives of Others.  It's excellent, of course.

[S.K.o.S.]

GERMANY VS. SOUTH KOREA

 

 

 

 

In Mother, a female high school student is found dead on a rooftop.  Evidence points to a young man named Do-joon, who is somewhat mentally disabled, and he's arrested for murder.  But an early incident involving a hit-and-run shows that Do-joon's memory is unreliable and he'll admit to things he didn't actually do.  His mother (who is nameless - she's just listed as "Mother" in the credits) takes up his cause, trying to find the real killer on his behalf.

 

This was directed by the same guy who did The Host and Memories of Murder, and it's actually expanding on one part of Memories for Murder - while the actors are different, there's a scene in that movie where cops consider pinning a killing on a mentally disabled man but run into problems with his mother.  While I'm on the subject of police, by the way - after the whole deal with me finding the cops in The Chaser way too incompetent, I did notice that policemen in other Korean movies (like 4-Iron) aren't the greatest either.  The ones in this movie, while far from perfect, are actually pretty darn good in comparison.

 

There are very few characters, so there can't be too many possibilities for the culprit, yet there are still surprises.  The movie's good at fake-outs; there are subtle touches, not for the purposes of symbolism, but to advance the plot and characterization, and also to mislead.  And while I was misled, I also felt like I was picking up on everything I was supposed to, and being suckered in exactly like the movie wanted me to be.  Everything made sense to me; for instance, the first person the mother suspects is exactly who I would have first suspected.  There is actually one detail that I didn't understand, but I'm willing to believe that it was just something I missed and I'd catch it on a rewatch, because everything else was handled so well.

 

I didn't go back to fully confirm this, but I believe a certain group of shots is used twice in the movie, right at the beginning with the mother watching her son across the street, and then again near the end when she has an unexpected visitor.  They didn't exactly do anything revolutionary with it here, but the idea of using the same shots to represent two different moments in two different contexts in the same movie is just really appealing to me for some reason.  For that matter, there's a scene at the very beginning over the opening credits of the mother dancing, and when you realize where that actually fits into the story, it's pretty great too.

 

In Requiem, a girl named Michaela leaves her parents' home to go to college.  It's pretty much the typical college experience, pulling all-nighters to finish essays, finding new and unusual ways to dress, and hitting dark, dingy clubs.  But Michaela's also taking medication for some sort of condition, and there's talk of her missing a year of high school for health reasons.  We eventually find out that she's epileptic, but this may be more than epilepsy, since she seems to have an extreme aversion to religious items.  Or is this just her way of acting out against her strict religious parents?

 

So yeah, the suggestion here is that Michaela's been possessed, but this isn't a horror movie; though it had its intense moments, I didn't find it frightening at all, and there are no special effects.  It's sort of shot in documentary style, with the camera bobbing around enough to suggest it's handheld, and shots not always staying in focus.  Immediately before particularly violent seizures (or possessions) the camera seems to sort of gather itself and move at a weird angle, letting you know that something isn't right.

 

Obviously there's the question of whether Michaela is really possessed or not.  They do a good job of keeping things ambiguous.  Everything that Michaela does in the movie has a simple explanation, and a lot of what happens just seems like a teenager throwing a tantrum, so you'll probably lean towards her faking it... but her body contorts violently enough, and her unwillingness to touch religious symbols is just weird enough, that you wonder a little.  Everyone around her suggests that she see a doctor or a psychiatrist at first, which makes sense, and I'm glad no one went straight to the possession theory.

 

Part of Michaela's college experience is the beginning of a relationship with a young man named Stefan.  One of the best parts in the movie is when Michaela is showing signs of being in poor health, Stefan brings her to her parents' house, her parents call in the priests, and they start straight in on an exorcism.  The great part is that Stefan's sitting in the next room listening to Michaela shriek and howl, and you can tell he's thinking "I really need to do a better job of choosing my girlfriends."

 

The ending, however, leaves a lot to be desired.  After what feels like the setup to the ending, we just fade to black, and a written message tells us what happened.  I would've much preferred to actually see the end of the story rather than being told about it.  It has a very "we ran out of money, sorry" feel.  And this might be nothing, but the dvd case says the movie is 93 minutes long, and by the time the credits finish rolling we're at 88 minutes.  So, I don't know, maybe a closing scene got edited out.  That's certainly what it feels like.

 

South Korea's the easy winner here - Requiem wasn't bad, but not even close to being as good as Mother.  SK got a little lucky with the ordering by having their last three movies be their three best, but I'm just glad that at least one of the movies in the finals turned out to be good.

 

WINNER: SOUTH KOREA