SKoS' World Cup of Cinema

[S.K.o.S.]

Which means the final 16 are set up like this:

 

 

I had sort of been expecting a France vs. South Korea final, but that won't be happening.

[S.K.o.S.]

And the movies for the round of 16 are:

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]

[jaedmc]

Poor Canada. They're about to get rolled.

[S.K.o.S.]

I do look forward to seeing what Hitler is actually saying in that one scene.  Instead of professing his distaste for lolcats or whatever.

[Death From Above]

Poor Canada. They're about to get rolled.

 

 

Only Canadians will truly grasp how high on the meme ladder this went when it was fresh.

[S.K.o.S.]

SOUTH KOREA VS. SWEDEN

 

 

Everlasting Moments is directed by Jan Troell, who has had three movies nominated for Oscars in the 1970s and 1980s.  It's about a Swedish family living in the early 1900s.  There is a subtle sepia tone to everything, to make things look older, I guess.  The parents of this family are Maria and Sigge Larsson.  At the start of the movie, they have four children; by the end, they have seven.  The story's being told by Maja, one of their daughters.  The family struggles to make ends meet; Sigge is the chief breadwinner, working at the local harbourfront.  It certainly doesn't help that Sigge drinks too much, sleeps with just about anyone he can find, and has moments of violence towards Maria.  He's always repentant for the bad things he does, until he goes and does something bad again.  And he seems to be the sort of person who hears about an ideology and gets committed to it pretty quickly, which is bad news for the family's money situation when the harbour workers go on strike.

 

Maria has a camera that she'd won in a lottery prior to the marriage, and since the family's in need of money, she tries to sell the camera to a shop owner, Sebastien Pedersen.  Pedersen encourages her to use the camera instead, and seeing that Maria has a natural talent for photography (which was a pretty rare thing in the early age of cameras), he comes up with an arrangement where he lets her continue taking photos while providing her with the necessary materials to develop her pictures.  Maria does take some pretty cool photos, and the scene where Pedersen wordlessly explains to her how a camera works is really well done.

 

This is based on a true story, and I was thinking that it almost had to be.  It does have a very realistic feel.  The down side to that is that in real life, things don't always work out the way you want.  There's a real lack of character development here.  You read that synopsis above, and maybe you get an idea of where you'd like things to go for Maria.  There are all these distractions (mostly involving the children's lives), and although those things do tie back to the main narrative pretty quickly, they keep teasing us with the idea of Maria's life getting better, and then pulling it away.  So, when the characters never improve, the narrative starts to feel like "here are some things that happened, the end."  They do try to put a bow on everything right at the end, and that works to some extent, but it could've been so much better.  Why emphasize personal life over photography if it ends up like that?

 

I'm A Cyborg, But That's OK is directed by Chan-wook Park, who also did Oldboy.  Young-goon is a girl who has a history of mental illness in her family and comes to believe she's a robot.  Her family checks her into a mental hospital, where the other patients make up quite a cast of characters.  The most important is a young man named Il-sun (played by singer/actor Rain, perhaps best known to North Americans from Ninja Assassin), who wears masks and believes... all kinds of things, including that he can make himself shrink and that people can transfer their personalities to one another by making physical contact.  The problem with Young-goon is that she believes food will clog up her system, and tries to "recharge" herself by licking a battery.

 

This was a very inventive and visually striking movie.  The hospital has a very clean feel, with lots of light blues, and everything is kind of fantastical, like a children's movie.  Young-goon has a pretty disturbing look, with no eyebrows (actually hers are dyed blonde - I wasn't sure if we were supposed to think they're gone) and wearing her grandmother's dentures for an unnatural smile.  Her toenails light up in the colors of the rainbow to show how close she is to being fully charged.

 

There are long sequences which, to put it simply, aren't really happening.  The most notable is Young-goon's fingers turning into guns and shooting up the hospital, which happens multiple times.

 

There is a lot of weirdness for weirdness' sake, and it was a little annoying initially.  I don't think it takes much acting talent to behave strangely.  At some point, though, this all goes from absurd to endearing, perhaps because the characters aren't one-dimensional.  I mentioned all the things about Il-sun above; Young-goon won't eat, but also believes she can communicate with machines, and has a set of rules she tries to live by that discourage emotion, because cyborgs aren't supposed to have feelings.  It makes it seem like actual effort was put into developing these characters, rather than just throwing out whatever seemed strangest.

 

The idea that something can come out of all this that will solve Young-goon's problem and make her want to eat again is oddly appealing.  Actually, I think the positivity has a lot to do with why I liked this.  There's been another movie with a distinctive visual style and lots of strangeness: Brand Upon The Brain.  But that one was all about negative feelings, with the central character carrying his resentment towards his parents through his whole life.  In this one, everyone's trying to help Young-goon; the only negativity comes from Young-goon herself, and it's an amusing, misguided negativity that doesn't carry any weight.

 

So South Korea gets the win here.

 

WINNER: SOUTH KOREA

[S.K.o.S.]

GERMANY VS. CANADA

 

 

Downfall is the story of the final month of World War II, mostly told through the eyes of Hitler's personal secretary, Traudl Junge.

 

The first time Hitler's name is mentioned, he's feeding his dog, which immediately humanizes him a little and tells us we're not going to be seeing some sort of personification of pure evil.  At times, he seems like a normal person.  At other times, it certainly seems like there's some kind of mental disorder at play.  He goes into these angry rants about people not following his orders and betraying him, interspersed with depressive episodes where he can barely even look up and speak.  The whole Hitler meme video takes away from the performance a little, in that you already sort of know what to expect going in because that one scene is already so familiar to everyone, but the acting job really is great.  The abrupt shifts in personality, which could easily have been done poorly, seem totally realistic.

 

The cast of characters, mostly high-ranking Nazis, is a large one.  There were so many that it became a little difficult to keep track of exactly who was who, so I can't really cite any specific examples, but like the portrayal of Hitler, they weren't all evil.  I don't know that we quite needed to humanize Nazis, and I don't exactly want to use the word "refreshing", but there are a range of personalities on display.  

 

Hitler ends up committing suicide, of course, but a lot of other Nazis do as well.  I don't see myself as being an especially empathic person, but some of those deaths really made my heart hurt.  Although everyone knows the history of the war, it becomes clear pretty quickly that we're missing out on a big chunk of the story.  Apart from one scene, we never see any of the Nazi atrocities.  We don't see the presumably charismatic side of Hitler as he gains the support of a nation that are literally willing to follow him to the grave.  So that lack of context makes the suicides all the more jarring.

 

You have to take a step back and think about why so many people kill themselves in this movie.  For Hitler and many high-ranking Nazi soldiers, it makes some degree of sense, as they would have more than likely been sentenced to death in post-war trials anyway.  There's also talk of not wanting the other side to control how they die or what happens to them after their death.  But for lower-level soldiers - and Traudl herself, who doesn't end up killing herself, but offers to - it's because they're just that loyal to the cause.

 

The Barbarian Invasions won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and I know that because I've seen the actual Oscar statuette.  It's on display in the lobby of a movie theatre in downtown Toronto.  This is actually a sequel to a movie from 1986, The Decline of the American Empire, which I haven't seen.  So this one is set seventeen years after the first movie.

 

A former university professor, Remy, living in Quebec, who kind of looks like a chubbier Ben Stein, is now a terminal cancer patient.  His ex-wife Louise gets his son, Sebastien, to come visit him, since this could be the last time they'll see each other.  Sebastien has some kind of financial job in London, England, so he's coming a long way.  We find out pretty quickly that the father-son relationship is rocky, and Remy distinguishes himself from Ben Stein by showing a lot more personality, as the two engage in some very heated arguments.  Eventually, things settle down.  Sebastien's job gives him pretty much an infinite amount of money, and he tries to put that to use, to help his father out as best he can.

 

Remy also has a bunch of friends and ex-lovers who visit and hang out with him - this was essentially the cast of the 1986 movie - and they mostly all get along.  A lot of their conversation sounds like it's supposed to be witty and intellectual, but I found it kind of annoying.  The parts that resonated with me the most were when Remy was focusing on his death, his fear of it, or just expressing regret that he hadn't gotten more meaning out of life.  Depressing, yes, and not something anyone wants to spend much time thinking about, but much more relatable than people taking their own lives without a second thought in Downfall.

 

Sebastien wants to do something about his father's physical pain.  Medicinal marijuana wouldn't quite cut it here, I guess, so Sebastien goes for medicinal heroin instead. He gets it from the daughter of one of his father's former flings, who is a user herself, and she administers it to Remy behind the hospital staff's back.  I was a little torn on this, because it seemed so far outside the realm of believability.  The way Sebastien went about finding someone who had heroin was just about the dumbest way possible.  And if his father really was in pain and needed some kind of medication, couldn't the hospital do something about it?  It didn't seem like they'd tried all other alternatives.  But the whole heroin angle did make the movie a lot more interesting, and I would've found it less enjoyable if they took it out.

 

Other highlights include some thinly veiled religion-bashing, and a cameo from Mitsou, who I can't believe I actually recognized.  She still looks good, I just haven't thought about her in like twenty years.

 

This isn't all that easy of a choice.  I had minor problems with Barbarian Invasions and no real problems with Downfall, but Invasions was more relatable.  Downfall was more impressive visually, with the war scenes, and had great acting (although the performance of the actor playing Remy in Invasions was really good too).  I think that's going to tip the scales towards Downfall.

 

WINNER: GERMANY

[S.K.o.S.]

POLAND VS. HONG KONG

 

 

These two movies were just about as different as possible.

 

There probably aren't many movies like Essential Killing at all.  Vincent Gallo plays a nameless Arabic man who has no spoken lines in the whole movie.  He gets captured by American soldiers and brought to some kind of detention camp.  When he's being transported to another location, his bus crashes someplace in Europe, and he escapes and is on the run for the rest of the movie.

 

Actually, he's on the run right from the first moment we see him, even before he gets captured.  We don't know what he's done.  He constantly looks scared, but has obvious survival skills, and is very willing to kill.  Some people might turn against him, perhaps assuming that he must have done something bad for Americans to be after him.  On top of that, his paranoia escalates to where he's committing some murders that didn't really need to happen.  But you need to sympathize with him for the movie to work.  I think most people would stay in his corner.

 

The military personnel that come after him lose the trail pretty quickly, which, honestly, is what I was hoping would happen.  To me, this wasn't really about the whole Americans vs. Middle Easterners thing.  It was more of a "fish out of water" story.  I mean, you have to make up a backstory for this guy, because we're not told anything about him, but it's not a stretch to think that he might have never seen snow in real life before.  And wherever he's been dropped, it's winter, and there's snow everywhere, and it's probably colder than he's ever felt.  It's a really absurd situation.

 

There are some really gorgeous shots here.  I've said that about other movies, but this time, I was actually wishing my tv was bigger, which doesn't happen too often.  Quite a few flyover shots, and the contrast between the Grand Canyon landscape that we start off in and the snowiness that we end up in means that there's no lack of variety.  What stood out to me most was an overhead shot, Gallo trudging out towards the horizon, with a pink sunset off in the distance.

 

The overall tone is... kind of an arthouse character study/action thriller?  It's much slower and more contemplative than an action movie, but there are all these situations he keeps running into that make it interesting.  There are some strangely incongruous moments, most obviously when they play Middle Eastern-sounding music over top of a snowy landscape, but there's also a scene where Gallo commandeers a vehicle that has metal playing, pulls over, and briefly stares at some sort of deerlike animal caught in the headlights.  That image alongside the music just felt really odd.

 

Anyway, if I listed all the means by which he kills people, I doubt anyone would think it was boring.  It was certainly unusual, but I was a bit surprised by how much I liked it.

 

Love In The Buff is a sequel to the 2010 movie Love In A Puff, where Cherie, a cosmetics salesgirl, and Jimmy, an advertising executive, met each other while on a smoke break and fell in love.  Now they're in a relationship and living together.  But wait!  Jimmy seems to value his job more highly than his relationship, and when he's offered a promotion that would send him to Beijing, Cherie encourages him to do it, and she moves back in with her parents, effectively ending the relationship.

 

As you might expect, Cherie's job soon leads her to move to Beijing too.  Both Cherie and Jimmy get into new relationships, but can't get over each other, and make everyone miserable by continuing to informally see each other while in those relationships.  Lots of arguments and problems ensue about people not spending enough time with other people.  Cherie and Jimmy both end up admitting there's no reason they should be together and they get nothing positive out of their relationship, but they just like each other.  Just because.  It sounds like it's based strictly on pheromones.

 

So this is a pretty typical romantic comedy - it's even got the cliché mad dash to the airport to stop someone from taking a flight. There's also lots of Cherie and Jimmy hanging out with their friends during the down time in their relationship.  Jimmy's friends all seem like jerks; he meets his new girlfriend right after a long conversation with one of his friends about how many times you can get away with molesting a flight attendant before she's allowed to report it.

 

In the interest of saying a few positive things: one of Cherie's friends has a history of boyfriends dying on her, and there's an awesome montage of the friend's relationship history at the start, including a Final Destination style death.  Cherie shows a fiery side of her personality during some of her arguments with Jimmy that I liked.  And I'm sure this wasn't intentional, but Cherie's mother's face is so lumpy that she reminded me of the "forever alone" guy.

 

Love In The Buff was two people creating their own problems for the duration of the movie and then deciding to solve them right at the end.  It was not good.  Essential Killing gets the win.

 

WINNER: POLAND

[S.K.o.S.]

ASIA 121°E VS. NORTHERN EUROPE

 

 

In The Seagull's Laughter, a woman named Freyja has been in America during the Second World War, where her husband was in the army.  Apparently he died of a heart attack, so Freyja returns to her native Iceland and moves in with her aunt and uncle.  It's a pretty full house, with about six or seven people living there, all women except for the uncle.  Freyja ends up sharing a room with the youngest member of the household, named Agga.  Agga doesn't like this, and claims Freda is evil.

 

Freyja's probably the best-looking woman in the town and has no shortage of suitors, but this was an ugly duckling case where she wasn't so attractive before she moved to America.  So she's got a lot of grudges against people.  Agga tries to get Freyja into a relationship and out of the house, and she's surprisingly good at manipulating Freyja and one particular guy into a relationship with one another - especially given that the guy had showed no interest whatsoever in Freyja's younger years.  But that just creates more problems, as Freyja's now in a relationship with a man she really doesn't like.

 

Clearly there's an effort to show that Agga has good reason to be wary of Freyja.  While Freyja's not evil, and is fully in command of her faculties, there are a whole bunch of suggestions that she's unstable or at least somewhat mentally ill.  To give one pretty innocuous example, there's a strong suggestion that Freyda might have improved her figure through bulimia.  But we only see that in one scene. 

 

There are a lot of other things that happen, pretty much a different one every time.  Some of those are really creepy, one provides a great visual, and the writers deserve points for creativity.  But because every strange thing Freyda does was very different from everything that came before it, I didn't feel like it had the impact it was supposed to.  Instead it was almost like we were starting over every time - yes, we already know she's got mental problems, thanks for pointing it out yet again.  It wasn't like they had one particular thing getting worse and worse.

 

That was how I felt about the entire movie.  Nothing made much of an impact, and I never felt like I had a sense of where things were going.  In a lot of ways, Freyja is like an unwelcome houseguest that walks in and tracks mud all over your carpet or something.  And the capper is the ending, which is
about as bad as I could imagine.  It really wiped out the significance of verything that came before it, and made the whole movie feel like a waste of time.

 

Yi Yi has multiple plotlines and a runtime of close to three hours.  We start off at a wedding; the central characters are a family, a couple with a son and daughter, who are guests at the wedding.  NJ, the father, who's the brother of the groom, has a business deal brewing with a company in Japan, and later in the movie he travels to Japan and gets along surprisingly well with the company's CEO, Ota.  He also runs into Sherry, a former girlfriend, at the wedding, and meets up with her during his Japan trip.  The mother, Min Min, is a less important character and is off at a retreat for most of the movie.  The daughter, Ting Ting, who's in her early teens, has a friend who's going through relationship problems.  The 8-year-old son, Yang Yang, who is impossibly cute, is teased by girls at school and has a bunch of run-ins with the principal.  Then there's the groom, A-Di, who also has a former girlfriend bothering him, and owes money to a bunch of people.  Finally, NJ and A-Di's aging mother, who's also at the wedding, complains of not feeling well and ends up at the hospital in a coma.

 

That's a lot to digest, but the tone of the movie is very slow, quiet, and contemplative.  There is very little in the way of music, and many shots where someone is just silently sitting and contemplating.  I felt there was also an attempt to create some emotional distance.  Scenes are shot from further away than you normally see.  One scene is viewed through a window, with the cityscape reflecting off the glass, superimposed over the characters; in another, a conversation between A-Di and NJ in the hospital, we don't even look at the characters, but instead look at their reflections in a window.  We absolutely do end up getting emotionally involved with these characters, though, so maybe all the distance and looking away is an effort to heighten the impact when we later look right at them.

 

All the characters have a habit of saying incredibly poignant things.  While sitting at his mother's bedside, speaking to her as she's in a coma, NJ compares it to praying, because you're talking without knowing whether you're being heard.  Ota talks about people fearing new things, but then asks how anyone can ever get out of bed if they're afraid of anything new, because no two days are alike.  Yang Yang asks his father "Can we ever know the whole truth?" out of nowhere.  And there's more.

 

It feels like I've only barely scratched the surface of talking about this.  There was a bit where NJ and Sherry are reuniting in Japan and talking about their past, at the same time Ting Ting is on a date in Taiwan, experiencing a lot of the same things her father is talking about.  That was great.  And the ending, with Yang Yang delivering a speech that he wrote himself, is just about guaranteed to make you cry.  I normally watch movies in 30-minute chunks, but I couldn't pull myself away from this.

 

No contest here, Asia 121°E is your winner.

 

WINNER: ASIA 121°E

[S.K.o.S.]

ARGENTINA VS. CZECH REPUBLIC

 

 

What can I possibly say about Liverpool?  I'm just going to run through the whole movie, because I really don't feel there's anything to spoil.  The first thing we see are the credits, perhaps done for the effect of being able to just cut off the movie at the end.  We've got a thin man in his late forties named Farrel, who is a sailor.  His boat docks, and he explains to fellow crew members that he's going to see his mother.

 

The next fifty minutes or so consists of Farrel making his way to his mother's house, stopping at several places to eat along the way.  There is no music and very little dialogue, and there are long takes with not much happening. It's winter, and there's snow on the ground.  He hitches a ride on a logging truck.  He drinks quite a bit - often hard liquor straight from the bottle - but shows few signs of drunkenness, so there's some degree of alcoholism going on.

 

He finally gets to his mother's, and it seems like she lives on a farm.  Farrel can't bring himself to go in at first, and stays outside, crouching at the side of the house, drinking and spying through the window.  He passes out, lies there overnight, and presumably almost dies from the cold.  In the morning, two men who seem to know him bring him into some kind of garage, and from there, he enters the house.  There is a young girl in the house, named Analia; she asks Farrel for money, and he gives her some.  It's not clear whether these other people are his relatives, or just farm workers doubling as his mother's caregivers.

 

Farrel seems to gather up his courage and strides into his mother's room.  She's bedridden; there are two beds in the room, and Farrel sits on the empty one and starts talking to her.  It's pretty clear that she doesn't know who he is.  He tries to explain that he's her son, but gets no reaction.  What I've read seems to indicate that this is because he's been away for so long, but it seemed just as likely that it could be because her mind is going.  She repeats herself at least once in their short conversation.  Eventually, Farrel just gives up and leaves, and we get quite a long scene of him walking off into the distance, all the way over the horizon until he's out of sight.  One of the men who brought Farrel in, named Trujillo, sits down with the mother, feeds her, and says something along the lines of "I'm glad he's gone." I suppose that brings up a third possibility, that the mother was just pretending not to know her son.

 

Now that Farrel's out of the picture, we spend the last ten minutes or so on farm life, feeding animals and other chores with Trujillo and Analia.  The movie closes with Analia turning a keychain over and over in her hand.  It says "Liverpool," as in the soccer team.  It looks new, so maybe she bought it with the money that Farrel gave her.  That's it.

 

Normally when a movie is slow, there's some kind of payoff in the late going, but there was very little emotion here, and I couldn't find anything to like.

 

I Served The King Of England is about a man named Jan Dite.  When we first see him, he's just getting out of jail after having served a fifteen-year prison sentence, and talks about his bad luck.  We get his life story, starting from when he was a teenager, at his first job as a bartender/server in an upscale pub with several rich patrons.  One day a local prostitute enters the pub; Jan immediately falls for her and pays for her services a whole bunch of times.  So he's a pretty innocent, unassuming person, but becomes obsessed with money and sex.  His dream is to become a millionaire.

 

Jan's next job is a valet at Hotel Tichota, a really nice hotel, and later, a waiter at Hotel Paris, which is the best hotel in the country.  The people who frequent these hotels are complete caricatures, impossible to take seriously, but it's all played with a pretty straight face.  Money apparently solves all these people's problems, and they do preposterous things like have a snowball fight in the summer, with a butler supplying the snow on a silver platter.  They're so rich!  Soooo rich!  Life is fantastic!  I found all of this absolutely hilarious, and it's the number one reason I would recommend the movie.

 

For his own part, Jan is accomplishing his life goals, but he's just fluking his way into everything, managing to be at the right place at the right time to pick up huge tips.  He's grown into a slight, polite man, with an ill-advised growth on his upper lip that can barely be called a mustache.  Yet he also sleeps with more than his share of beautiful women.  I should mention that this movie has, by far, more female nudity than anything else I've watched for this project.

 

The second half of the movie takes a different turn, with World War II and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia.  Jan falls in love with a German woman, Lisa, and they get married.  I won't spoil Jan's next job, but it's perhaps even more ridiculous than what we've already seen.  The idea is that even during a world war, he's got the easiest, cushiest job possible.  And I thought Caterpillar was going to take the cake for most disturbing sex scene, since it's got a quadruple amputee, but this movie boasts a Nazi-centric sex scene with Jan and Lisa that might actually top it.

 

Quick note on style: I thought this pulled a little from silent movies.  There's one really obvious scene early on, where they go full silent movie, black and white with the title cards for dialogue.  But there are later scenes that have that same sort of feel, using physical comedy and little dialogue, like when Jan takes Lisa to Hotel Paris.

 

It was sort of a foregone conclusion after I watched Liverpool that it wasn't going to win, and I was a little put off that Czech Republic was going to skate into the final eight without really having any movies that were all that great (although I did like Beauty In Trouble).  So I was happy to see that I Served The King Of England was a very good movie, the Czech Republic's best so far.

 

WINNER: CZECH REPUBLIC

[Neil Koch]

I haven't seen Love in the Buff, but Love in a Puff was a pretty straightforward romcom to me. They were popular in HK because they focus on stuff a lot of residents are going through and there's a lot of dirty Cantonese puns, to the point that they are rated Category III (NC17) for language. Those sorts of things are a big deal because so many HK movies are Mainland coproductions and are heavily censored.

Some better films by Edmond Pang are You Shoot I Shoot and Dream Home. IIRC Dream Home is on streaming Netflix.

[S.K.o.S.]

BELGIUM VS. SLAVIC EUROPE

 

 

In Amer, a mysterious figure, really just a black silhouette, has been stalking a woman named Ana for her entire life.  We begin with Ana as a child, living with her parents and her elderly grandmother in a Victorian mansion, and she returns to her childhood home later in life.  It's more or less a horror movie, since things get creepy right away; it owes something to giallo too, as it's very abstract, with heavy psychological and sexual elements.

 

Strangely, the most important thing about Amer is the sound.  My understanding is that most, if not all, of the sound was done through foley work - the movie was filmed and then the sound was added in post-production via effects.  Listening to the movie is a very unique and precise sort of experience.  There is both a musical score and dialogue, but they only make rare appearances.  More than anything else, there's silence, and every sound effect feels crisp and calculated.  There is some playfulness too: we hear a bird's wings flapping when Ana is shown kicking their legs, and in one moment where someone is supposed to be running, we hear quick footsteps, but the person's not actually moving.  The camera is just being shaken.

 

The way the sound works influences the visual style as well.  Since the sound is so precise, there are necessarily a lot of closeups.  Many times, you're only hearing one thing, so we have to be zoomed in on that one thing so that it's also the only thing you're seeing.  But there are some other touches too - specifically the lighting.  The last twenty minutes or so of the movie are in blue monochrome.  There is another long scene with Ana as a child where things are lit in varying colours.  The directors did the "O" section of ABCs of Death, and watching that little short would give you a pretty accurate idea of their overall style.

 

Although there's not much of a plot, I did get more out of this than just the audio-visual style.  Ana was damaged as a child by seeing her parents having sex (which is another instance of creative use of sound - Ana's shock at what she sees is represented by sudden dead silence where there should be sound), and now she has a love-hate relationship with her own sexuality, simultaneously drawn to it and threatened by it.  All those closeups I mentioned give the movie an alluring physical intimacy, but at the same time, once Ana is past her childhood, nearly every man in the movie seems to be leering at her.  Quite a few of those closeups are of guys' eyes.  There's a bathtub scene that's so perfect - Ana's own sexuality almost kills her.  I thought the shadowy pursuer was meant to represent that aspect of her, and the ending, while open to interpretation, mostly worked for me.

 

In Grbavica, a single mother, Esma, is raising a twelve-year-old daughter, Sara.  Esma is having difficulty making ends meet - the specific issue is a school trip that Sara wants to go on, but they need to make a payment to the school that Esma can't afford.  Esma takes a night job at a waitress at a club, which she's clearly a little too old for, but does decent enough work.  The club owner has a couple of security-type flunkies, and a romance develops between Esma and one of them - but these guys may be involved in some pretty sinister work.  Meanwhile, Sara has her own romance developing with a fellow student.

 

Overall, this was good.  Not a lot of really important stuff happens, but there are several things going on in addition to the shady activities at Esma's club, and it feels like they're setting up for something big.  Esma's relationship with Sara is pretty good, though they have their rocky moments, as any parent would with a pre-teen.  And even though they go back and forth between getting along and not getting along, it feels surprisingly natural.

 

It's too bad about Sara's haircut - kind of a bouffante mullet - but she's got a very strong, tomboyish personality, and it's easy to root for her despite her occasionally being a little too headstrong.  There's one great moment where her quasi-boyfriend is trying to help her with something and she brushes him off with a hand gesture that says "Step back, I can do this myself."

 

Now, there is a key moment about fifteen minutes from the end of the movie.  It rings true, the cast all does an excellent job of stepping up their acting to handle it, and it does make the movie better.  But it's a problem because, first, there are other plot threads going on and they just get dropped, sending the message that nothing was important except this one thing.  Second, there are several scenes earlier in the movie that don't entirely make sense until that moment (such as Esma breaking down in tears at the sight of a couple in the club making out on the dance floor).  I was watching those scenes and thinking I must have missed something.  Apparently I was supposed to be figuring out what the big moment at the end of the movie was going to be.

 

So that makes it feel like the entire movie was predicated upon that one scene.  Like they started with that as the central idea, and then worked backwards to write the rest of the movie.  You can write a script that way, of course, but you want to avoid making it seem like everything else in the movie is just filler.  I still thought it was a good movie, but that was a point against it.

 

Strong recommendation to watch Amer if you're looking for something unique and are at least familiar with arthouse films.  Grbavica, while good, was unexceptional.  If you're ever playing Hangman and want to stump someone with a movie title, though...

 

WINNER: BELGIUM

[S.K.o.S.]

JAPAN VS. INDIA

 

 

 

 

Rang De Basanti starts out with an English woman named Sue trying to make a movie based on her grandfather's diary, which was about the Indian Revolution in the 1920s.  The film studio she works for won't back the project, so she quits her job and travels to India to make the movie on her own, falling in with a group of goof-off university students and enlisting them to act in her movie.  The students may appear carefree, but they all have troubles of their own... and there's much more to come beyond just the making of this movie.

 

A couple of the main actors were also in 3 Idiots, which I hated, and even though this movie has a different director and different writers, it was tough to keep an open mind.  I don't know, the students all horse around enough in the beginning that I got locked into the idea that that's who these people are.  Eventually Sue manages to pull them into line and make her movie, which is fine.  That's pretty much what you'd expect would happen.  But then when things do get serious, with the tone shifting abruptly to these wrenching emotional moments, I'm thinking "No, it's too late, I already wrote off these people as incapable of this sort of seriousness."

 

There was the idea that these people were changed after they watched the final version of the movie they made.  But how much can you be changed by watching a movie that you yourself are performing in?  You already read the script, right?  Wouldn't that take away a lot of the impact?

 

I think it's possible that you could take the nearly three-hour runtime and edit it down to something closer to 90 minutes that I might find acceptable.  Maybe taking out half of it would give it a more consistent tone.  As it stands, it vacillated wildly between dizzying drunken highs and deep depressive spells.  There's a musical montage that literally couples scenes of dancing with scenes of torture.  One big turning point event is the most predictable thing ever, and then the next is completely unrealistic and out of left field.  In the end, it settles into what I can only call a cheerful amorality.  The good guys certainly didn't seem like good guys to me by the end.  I didn't hate it like I hated 3 Idiots, but I was left shaking my head in disbelief.

 

So Confessions just needed to be an average movie to get the win, but I didn't like it all that much, either.  It begins with a teacher, Moriguchi, giving a speech to her pre-teen class on her last day of teaching.  Showing very little emotion, she talks about not knowing whether or not she was a good teacher (it doesn't seem like she was, because the class is acting up the entire time) and trying to be a friend to the students (and it seems more like discipline is what they needed).  But as this very long talk continues, taking up the first half-hour of the movie, she reveals that her daughter's been killed, and two of the students in the class are responsible, and she's got a plan for revenge.

 

First off, that whole talk from Moriguchi just didn't feel believable to me.  I was actually expecting or hoping that it'd turn out that everything she said was just what the students thought was happening - some kind of visual representation of a rumor, given that Moriguchi has retired and one student stopped coming to class, because it really did sound like something a bunch of pre-teens would have come up with.

 

A big part of the plot is that minors won't be charged with any serious crime, so the students can't be prosecuted for killing Moriguchi's daughter.  Maybe this is another case of me not being able to wrap my head around another country's laws, but it's very difficult to believe that nothing would happen to a Japanese minor who's killed someone - not necessarily criminal prosecution, but something - especially if there was more than one such minor in the same place and they were interacting with one another.  Has no Japanese minor ever taken advantage of that in real life, if that's really how things work?

 

Normally, I'd be all over a movie full of sociopathic killers.  Maybe I was just in the mood for something more serious, I don't know.  But it seemed strange to me that everyone was so willing to kill.  The students try to explain their motivation in voiceovers, which is a huge eye-rolling waste of time.  "I was never taught that killing was wrong" - I'm already not buying it.

 

On a positive note, the movie does look really nice.  Lots of slow-motion scenes, with Radiohead on the soundtrack.  Blood splattering in slo-mo.  I may have problems with the writing, but I can't fault the acting.  Kids have some very difficult characters to portray, and they do just fine.  And there's a really cool backwards time sequence near the end - right before the WTF moment that closes out the movie, just to make sure I remembered I didn't actually like this thing.

 

And now I have to choose between two very flawed movies.  Rang De Basanti has a lot of bad points, particularly that unexpected twist that made little sense and turned the good guys into bad guys, but it felt salvageable.  Confessions is, like, fundamentally broken.  The plot barely works.  That's what I'm going to base my decision on.

 

WINNER: INDIA

[jaedmc]

JAPAN NOOOOOOO!

 

A fucking travesty.

[S.K.o.S.]

FRANCE VS. MEDITERRANEAN UNION

 

 

Honey is a Turkish movie that focuses on a young boy, Yusuf, who's about six or seven years old.  He lives at home with his parents, and definitely has a closer relationship with his father than his mother.  The mother's not especially strict or anything, but she's the disciplinarian in the family.  His father, Yakup, is a beekeeper (which is obviously where the title comes from), but this is actually pretty dangerous work.  Not from bee stings - bees seem to have their nests in very high trees around these parts, and Yakup's gotta climb them. 

 

Yakup has some sort of seizure early in the movie, which is never explained, but I'm going to assume is epilepsy.  That doesn't mix well with climbing tall trees.  So when Yakup goes off to do work for a couple of days, and doesn't come home, leaving Yusuf and his mother on their own, we can guess what may have happened.  But there's also a chance he might have disappeared for another reason, as Yusuf spotted Yakup giving a gift to another young boy shortly before he left.

 

There's also a subplot revolving around Yusuf's school life.  He has difficulty at reading out loud in class, due to a stutter.  The stutter only seems to come out in high-pressure situations, since he seems to do fine when we see him practising his reading at other times.  But he's self-conscious about it, to the point where it seems like he only speaks when he absolutely has to.  It also doesn't look like he really has any friends at school, and again, this seems to be by his own design, as he stays inside the school during recess and watches everyone else play.  So Yakup being gone is a pretty big deal, because he's really Yusuf's only friend.

 

It's a slow movie for sure, but it helps that Yusuf is pretty adorable most of the time, and it seems like something that comes naturally to him.  In an early scene, before we know he has the stutter, he's focusing intently on another girl reading in class, mouthing the words along with her to make sure he can do it too, and it's so impossibly cute.

 

There are a couple of scenes after the father is gone that seem to aim at showing total darkness except for one source of light.  In one, Yusuf keeps flipping the lights on and off in his house, and when he turns them off, all you can see is the light from the fire in their wood stove; later, he's leaning over a bucket of water outside, rippling the water, then he leaves, and everything's black except for the reflection of the bright white moon, slowly taking shape as the water settles.  The best explanation I could think of for this is that it suggests some kind of presence, maybe trying to convey that Yakup is still around in some sense, through the existence of his genes in his son?

 

Blame It On Fidel is also mostly about a young child, Anna, who's a little older than Yusuf, nine years old.  Her family lives in France, in the early 1970s; her father, Fernando, is of Spanish descent and has some relatives being persecuted in Spain, who flee the country and move in with Anna's family.  This leads Anna's parents to become political activists, going so far as to travel to Chile to march on behalf of Salvador Allende.  Anna's mother, Marie, a writer for Marie-Claire magazine, also starts work on a book about women who've had abortions.

 

While her parents are away, Anna and her little brother Francois are looked after by a revolving cast of nannies.  Anna doesn't fully understand what's going on; she just knows there are a lot of strange people in her house (first her father's family, then various bearded fellow activists, then women being interviewed by her mother for her book), and relies on whatever explanations she can get from adults to put things together.  This leads to her believing, for example, that Communists are "red, bearded, don't fear God, and move around a lot".

 

Anna is similar to Yusuf in that she chooses to separate herself from her peer group, but she has different reasons.  She seems to enjoy being around adults more than children, and probably sees herself as more mature than most girls her age, but as mentioned, she really has trouble figuring things out and thus is angry and sulking a lot of the time.  (The face she makes when she's angry really reminds me of Michael Cera in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.)  If we're comparing the two of them, though, Anna's behavior feels more forced than Yusuf - it's easier to tell that she's acting.  

 

The idea of filtering political stances through a child's eyes and having to boil them down to their essentials is pretty neat.  Anna is more of a capitalist than a communist and can't get behind the idea of sharing, and she confuses group solidarity with sheep-like behavior.  It would've been more interesting if there was more of a sense that having to answer a child's questions about everything was making people rethink what they believe.

 

I didn't think there was a whole lot to analyze about this movie.  It pretty much lays its cards on the table - there isn't a lot of subtext.  It might help if you're familiar with what was actually going on in the world at the time, and what the parents are protesting against, but for the most part it's clear what's happening even if Anna doesn't always understand.  Maybe my biggest problem was that, although Anna does become a better person by the end of the movie, I didn't really understand why.  She's just reacting to everything her parents decide to do, and that involves putting her through a lot of changes, but I didn't see any kind of big turning point.

 

Another tough choice here, since both movies were pretty good but not great.  I think the edge goes to Honey.  Blame It On Fidel is certainly busier, with all kinds of different people showing up at Anna's house, and there's much more dialogue.  But Honey feels more natural, and the eventual resolution, when we find out what happened to Yakup, made me think "Oh, that's neat."  Nothing in the French movie got as much of a reaction from me.

 

WINNER: MEDITERRANEAN UNION

[S.K.o.S.]

That brings us to the quarter-finals.

 

 

Matchups are:

 

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]

[jaedmc]

Can't wait to see your thoughts on 3-Iron.

[Death From Above]

I've actually seen Lagaan. It's the best musical about cricket and evil British people.

[S.K.o.S.]

Can't wait to see your thoughts on 3-Iron.

 

I have a couple of these written up but have been slacking on actually posting them.  One sec.

[S.K.o.S.]

MEDITERRANEAN UNION VS. SOUTH KOREA

 

 

3-Iron starts off with a young man, Tae-suk, going door-to-door leaving advertising flyers on people's doors.  It turns out that he's only doing this so that he can come back the next day, see which houses haven't touched their flyers (meaning there's no one home), and break in to those houses.  He doesn't do it to steal anything, though.  He seems to have no house of his own, and the break-ins are to take people's food, sleep in their beds, and use the facilities.  He does kind of repay them, though, as he fixes anything in the house that's broken, and cleans up after himself.

 

One of the places he breaks into is unexpectedly occupied by Sun-hwa, who has some bruises on her face.  An angry phone call from her husband makes it pretty clear that he's the cause.  Tae-suk leaves the house, but has a change of heart, goes back, and attacks the husband with a golf club (the titular 3-iron).  Sun-hwa leaves with him, and they break into their next few houses as a couple.

 

The big stylistic thing here is that neither Tae-suk nor Sun-hwa speak.  I believe that holds up through the entire movie.  Obviously they're not doing Harpo Marx acts - it's more like they're not talking because they don't want to, or don't need to, which creates the impression of a strong bond between them in the scenes where they're alone.  I didn't necessarily feel there was some master class acting going on (like "They say so much with just their eyes!"), but it says a lot that they don't speak when they're in the situations that the movie puts them in.

 

Tae-suk also takes the golf club with him, and practices his swing by tying a golf ball to a tree and hitting that.  Sun-hwa silently tries to stop him from doing that, by standing in his way.  What I got from that came from comparing it to the break-ins.  I had a bit of a problem with it, because even though he's not taking anything important, it's still an invasion of privacy.  But this whole thing with the golf ball shows that Sun-hwa would try to stop him if she felt he was doing something wrong, and also, later, that Tae-suk is deeply regretful when he does do something wrong.  It's just a bit of a reinforcement that these really are good people.

 

Later on, things get pretty strange and unrealistic, but the genius is in how they get to that point.  A particular scene plays out several times, each with a different thing taking place, and gradually gets less and less believable, but it's the "frog in the boiling water" effect.  If you accept that this can happen, the movie asks, then why not this?  And why not this?  By the end, we're almost into the realm of the supernatural, which is a big change since the movie had been firmly in the real world before that, but we're on board with it.

 

This ended up being the best South Korean movie I've seen this year.

 

Caramel is mostly about a group of women who work at a beauty salon.  It's a Lebanese movie, and I sort of thought "Caramel" was referring to skin color, but caramel is actually what they use for body waxing.  The salon's called "Si Belle"; the B on their sign out front has just about fallen off, though, making it "Si elle".  

 

You have to pay attention at the start since they jump around from person to person, and important things are fairly subtle.  First, there's Layale.  If there's a main character, it's her.  She has a guy that she's dating, but they meet in his car in out-of-the-way places, and we can assume that Layale isn't the only woman he's involved with.  There's a policeman who's attracted to Layale, too, though.  Then there's Nisrine, who's getting married to a guy named Bassam.  

 

Lastly, there's Rima, who is probably a lesbian.  They don't ever say or show that - I'm going to assume that it's taboo in Lebanese culture - but Rima kind of checks out women, there is one comment about how she's never interested in guys, and more than anything else, there's a new female customer at the salon and there's a lot of sexual tension between her and Rima.  The first time I watched it I was wondering if I was just imagining the lesbian thing, but I went back and rewatched the first half-hour and there's no question it's what they intended.  It's interesting how they can manage to make washing someone's hair seem like such a sensual experience.

 

On top of that, there's a couple of older women living together nearby, Rose and Lili.  Rose runs a tailoring business out of their apartment; Lili seems to be, essentially, a bag lady.  Her character is there for comic relief, but I'm not too sure why she's living with Rose.  I can only assume Rose took her in out of charity.  Anyway, the tailoring business has a new customer, Charles, and there's yet another possible romance between him and Rose.  Interesting that none of these romances get the chance to go anywhere (other than Nisrine's, but we already knew she was getting married).

 

There's one particular standout scene: Layale's in the salon, on the phone with her lover.  The police station is across the street, and the policeman who's got designs on her watches her having the phone conversation.  She's absent-mindedly staring out the window, focusing on her conversation, looking at him but not seeing him.  The policeman pretends she's talking to him, and fills in the gaps in the conversation; they cut back and forth between them, and he can't hear what she's saying, but the dialogue actually kind of works.  It's an impossible coincidence, of course, but fun, and clearly took quite a bit of thought to put together.

 

Caramel would've had to be extremely good to beat out 3-Iron.  It wasn't bad, but nowhere near what it needed to be.

 

WINNER: SOUTH KOREA

[S.K.o.S.]

POLAND VS. ASIA 121°E

 

 

Three Times is divided into three stories, at different points throughout history, but each centering on the relationship between a man and a woman, always played by the same actors.  So it's a bit like Cloud Atlas, except the stories are separate and self-contained rather than all interspersed throughout the movie.

 

In the first story, set in the 1960s, a man meets a woman who works at a pool hall.  He goes off to war and writes her letters; when he returns, she's gone, and he sets out on a journey to find her.

 

The second story is set in 1911.  There's a situation where a man has gotten a prostitute pregnant, and is trying to purchase her from her mistress, but there's a disagreement on the price.  None of these people are the man and woman from the other two stories; that woman works at the brothel but isn't a prostitute.  She seems to be just some sort of hostess.  That man seems to be a regular visitor to the brothel, and he offers to settle the matter by making up the difference in price from his own pocket.

 

The last story is in modern times, 2005.  This time around, the man and woman have some kind of strange relationship going on.  She sings in a band, he takes pictures of her, and one wall of his place is covered with his pictures of her.  They sleep together, but both have other relationships going on as well.  This is the most dead-eyed shell-like version of the female character, with an anarchy symbol tattooed on her hand and a yen symbol tattooed on her throat.  He has "Don't copy me" written on his motorcycle helmet, and there's some imagery with bar codes throughout this story, too.  I couldn't tell whether they were convinced of their own uniqueness, or despairing that they were so similar to those that came before them.

 

The biggest problem is that the movie's very slow.  It's not the slowest I've seen this year (that would probably be Le Quattro Volte, which coincidentally means Four Times), but it's probably in the top five.  Even something simple like opening a letter is done very slowly and takes way more time than it should.  The woman is played by Shu Qi (probably best known to Western audiences from her role in The Transporter), and she's really good-looking, but the movie's gaze often seems fixed on her, and it seems content to present her beauty in place of anything actually happening.

 

There are similarities between the three stories, but it was the differences that stood out to me.  In 1911 women could be bought and sold as property.  In 2005, sexual relationships mean so much less than they used to.  The 2005 story feels the "most different" to me, with everything being so much busier, but it's probably just because they can film more exterior shots, because they really are in that era.

 

In Darkness is another in the long line of World War II movies.  It was nominated for an Academy Award, and is based on a true story.  The denizens of Jewish neighborhoods in Poland are being sent to concentration camps by German soldiers.  A Christian sewer worker, Socha, agrees to hide several Jews in the sewers.  Socha's not particularly sympathetic to the Jews, though; they're essentially paying him rent to live in the sewers, and he's doing it for the money, but he is legitimately risking his life.  To put it simply, he's doing the right things for the wrong reasons.

 

The first thing I noticed was how the Nazi soldiers are portrayed a little differently here.  It's really just one scene, so I don't want to make too much of it, but a group of soldiers are shown essentially torturing a group of Jews on the streets, yanking out handfuls of one man's beard and laughing about it.  I've certainly seen my share of WWII movies this year, and Nazis were typically shown to be cold, unfeeling monsters - not sadistic, like they are here, taking pleasure in what they were doing.

 

What I was sort of expecting was to see a bunch of Jewish people huddled in a dark corner somewhere while Nazis roamed the sewers with flashlights.  But that's not what happens.  There were all sort of other problems I didn't foresee.  First of all, the movie emphasizes just how bad it is to live in a sewer.  It seemed obvious to me before watching this that a sewer is a better place than a concentration camp (I guess I think of a concentration camp as being the worst place in the world), but not everyone agrees, what with the smells, the rats, and the potentially deadly gases in the sewers, along with the psychological effects of not seeing the sun for months on end.  More than one character voluntarily enters the concentration camp.  Also, just because everyone living in the sewers is Jewish, it doesn't mean they all get along.  Being forced into close proximity with strangers, especially with everyone's nerves on edge, causes a bunch of problems.

 

The other problem with that "Nazis searching the sewers" image I had is that no one's going to be searching the sewers unless they have a specific reason.    Socha is old friends with a Ukranian Nazi soldier who keeps showing up, though, and there's a risk that he might let something slip.

 

This was long, at two and a half hours, but never dragged.  Even though so much of it happens in the sewers, it still felt like it kept putting up new and interesting situations.  Socha doesn't go through any really difficult ethical problems - he knows it wouldn't be right to force the Jews back onto the streets - but everyone in the sewers certainly faces tests of endurance.

 

Three Times = slow, In Darkness = interesting, and the win goes to Poland.  Poland's in the final four!

 

WINNER: POLAND

[S.K.o.S.]

CZECH REPUBLIC VS. INDIA

 

 

Autumn Spring is about Frantisek, a fellow in his mid-seventies.  Wrinkly and jowly, with a white mustache, his face sort of looks like a cross between Wilford Brimley and a walnut.  The title tells us that although Frantisek's in the autumn of his life, he acts like he's much younger.  Some of the writeups of this movie call him a "prankster", but that's not exactly true, since no one really ever ends up feeling like they've been pranked.  He does things like finding a mansion that's for sale, adopting the persona of a rich man and taking a tour of the place, and pretending to consider buying it even though there's no possible way he can afford it, only to turn it down in the end.  There's a lot of lying and pretending involved.

 

Why does Frantisek act this way?  The movie suggests that it's because of an underlying fear of death.  Frantisek's long-suffering wife Emilie is trying to save money for their funerals, but Frantisek doesn't want to discuss the details, and he even spends money straight out of the savings.  Eventually some of Frantisek's lying gets him into trouble, and things get a bit more serious.  The focus shifts to whether Frantisek and Emilie can stay together and both be happy.

 

The movie definitely wants to show us how much happier and relaxed Frantisek is than everyone else (such as his son, who has an insanely stressful life), but his refusal to acknowledge death is a flaw, so he's not perfect.  Later on, there's also what seems like a desperate attempt to get out of dying altogether.  So, the message isn't exactly that there's nothing wrong with living life the way that Frantisek does - he's not even necessarily closer to getting it right than those around him.   His wife and son would benefit from making changes, but so would he.  I liked that they didn't make him a teflon Ferris Bueller kind of character.  He does have to take things seriously and deal with the consequences of his actions.

 

It's tough for me to relate to someone in their seventies and the idea of death being so close, so the movie didn't quite resonate with me like it should have, but it's still interesting and relevant, because ideally I will be in that position someday and I'm going to have to deal with it.  I guess at one point in my life, I assumed that everyone eventually comes to accept the idea of their own death.  Today, I know that's not exactly true.

 

Lagaan is set in the year 1893, when India was ruled by the British empire.  The title refers to a tax that the British impose on Indian villages, taking a certain amount of their harvest each year.  This particular year, there has been a drought, and one village, led by a particular villager named Bhuvan, tries to plead their case, saying they can't pay the tax.  This evolves into a bet where, if the Indian villages can put together a cricket team that can beat a team of British soldiers, the entire Indian province won't have to pay the tax for three years.  If the British team wins, though, the village will have to pay triple the tax.

 

The British team is led by Captain Andrew Russell, master of the haughty sneer; he has a sister named Elizabeth who helps out the villagers, explaining the rules of cricket to them, and eventually she falls in love with Bhuvan.  That creates a love triangle situation, because there's also some attraction between Bhuvan and Gauri, another one of the villagers.

 

Bhuvan is played by one of the actors who was in 3 Idiots and Rang De Basanti - and I guess I might as well name him, since he must be pretty famous if he's starred in three highly-regarded movies.  His name's Aamir Khan.  I definitely liked this more than either of those other two movies, since the goofiness that was present in both of those doesn't show up here.

 

It would've been nice if they'd explained the rules of cricket, since I had no idea what they were, but there's no reason why they should do that.  They never explain the rules of the game in any other sports movie.  By the end of the movie, though, I felt like I pretty much understood the rules, if not the scoring.  So give them credit for dropping in enough rule-related asides along the way.  I also felt like it'd be an exhausting game, with the constant batting and running.

 

In any movie where there are a large group of good guys, like the eleven members of the Indian cricket team here, I tend to want all of their characters to be fleshed out; there's obviously going to be focus on each one of them during the game, and I want to know who they all are.  They did a pretty good job with that, giving nearly all of them a personality and a reason why they got on the team.  I think there were only two or three who weren't familiar to me by the time they got to the game.  We don't quite get the same level of detail for the British team, though - other than Captain Russell, the only standout player is Yardley, who has mutton-chop sideburns and will throw a cricket ball directly at your head.

 

There are a few missteps - apparently Elizabeth learns to speak Hindi in like two days, and it was a little silly that Bhuvan turned in an all-time great cricket performance - but I did enjoy this.

 

Both of these were decent movies; Lagaan was more absorbing and immersive.  Even though Autumn Spring dealt with slightly deeper issues, I'm giving this to India.

 

WINNER: INDIA

[S.K.o.S.]

BELGIUM VS. GERMANY

 

 

Pauline and Paulette are sisters.  Actually, there are four sisters in the family: the two of them, plus Martha and Cecile.  All of them are in about their 50s or 60s.  Martha and Pauline live together; Pauline is apparently mentally handicapped (I say "apparently" because I was never really sure if it was that or dementia brought on by aging), and Martha has to take care of her.  Pauline can do simple errands, like watering the garden or going to the butcher's to get meat, but relies on Martha for a lot of things.  It's a pretty decent arrangement, but then Martha dies.  Martha's will says that Paulette and Cecile won't get any money unless one of them takes care of Pauline; that's not what Paulette and Cecile want, though.

 

Pauline's favorite sister is clearly Paulette, and that may be because of Paulette's house.  Half of it is a fabric shop, and the other half, Paulette's living quarters, are decorated in the most girly fashion possible, with bright reds and pinks and little doll figurines everywhere.  Pauline's got a scrapbook full of little bits of fabric and wrapping paper that she keeps getting from Paulette.  When she lived with Martha, she'd always find some way to wind up at Paulette's house.

 

Paulette isn't unkind to Pauline, but clearly doesn't want the two of them living together.  In some ways, this actually kind of works in Pauline's favor, as Paulette's refusal to wait on her like Martha did leads Pauline to become more self-sufficient.  But, at least for me, any progress that Pauline made was

tempered by the knowledge that there's going to be a limit on just how self-sufficient she can be.

 

As far as style, this is set up like a 1950s movie - I don't really have the movie know-how to explain exactly where that comes from, but it's just something about the opening credits, which are shown over a wrapping paper pattern, and the music, and just the composition of shots.  There's a musical montage of Pauline watering flowers set to the Blue Danube Waltz that's a real standout.  It's a short movie, only 78 minutes; Lagaan was nearly three times as long as this.

 

The actress playing Pauline does a really solid job portraying her childlike character, probably making it look much easier than it actually is.  But there was something ultimately unsatisfying about the story.  The movie certainly doesn't rub your face in it, but the idea of an unwanted disabled relative is really sad and uncomfortable.  And although we do get a happy ending, Pauline isn't self-aware enough to appreciate what's happening.  She's happy, but she doesn't realize just how happy she should be.

 

The Tunnel is a German movie based on a true story, and, wonder of wonders, it has nothing to do with World War II.  We're in the early 1960s, during the construction of the Berlin Wall.  If I've got this right, East Germany was a communist state occupied by the Russians, and pretty much everyone wanted to be in West Germany.  This included Harry Melchior, a champion East German swimmer, and he wanted to get his married sister over the border too.  His plan was to get across the border with a fake ID, which wasn't too difficult, and then to dig a tunnel under the wall back to East Germany, which was extremely difficult, just in terms of the effort required.

 

If you've been watching a lot of World War II movies, like me, you need to forget about what the Nazis were doing a couple of decades earlier.  The German soldiers in charge of monitoring the border have considerably more respect for human life.  They'll give you all kinds of warnings if you look like you're trying to cross illegally, and eventually start shooting, but, as if in a children's game, as soon as you make it across that invisible borderline, you're out of their jurisdiction, and they give up.  

 

You can tell it's not going to be this way for long, though; it's not just that it's going to be different once the wall is fully built, it's also that the soldiers don't like to look ineffectual, so you'd better get across while you can.  Apparently several million Germans made it across this way while the Wall was being built, outrunning the soldiers' bullets by various means; digging a tunnel obviously takes a lot more work, but at least you're not getting shot at, and it's worth it to have a more permanent way of getting across.

 

One of the most bizarre parts of the story is how Harry and his collaborators raised money for the project, basically selling their story to Hollywood as it was happening.  They actually had a film crew with them as they were digging the tunnel and sneaking people across the border.  I was a bit worried that the story was going to become more about the financing and the film crew than the tunnel and the border crossing, but they dealt with that part and then the cameramen pretty much stayed out of the way, which was good.

 

There were quite a few characters, as Harry needs lots of help digging that tunnel, and everyone helping him has people that they want to get to West Germany.  I had trouble keeping track of everyone at first, but by about a quarter of the way through, I had everyone figured out.  The East German military actually manages to turn a couple of key collaborators and use them as informants, which creates a good deal of intrigue, and the final escape is very tense.

 

I was seeing Belgium as a potential dark horse to win the whole thing, but their run is ending here.  The Tunnel was the better movie, no question.

 

WINNER: GERMANY

[S.K.o.S.]

Into the semi-finals.

 

 

INDIA: Fanaa [Kohli, 2006] vs. GERMANY: Good Bye Lenin! [becker, 2002]

POLAND: Retrieval [Fabicki, 2006] vs. SOUTH KOREA: Poetry [Lee, 2010]

[S.K.o.S.]

POLAND VS. SOUTH KOREA

 

 

Poetry has quite the attention-grabbing opening.  It begins with a quiet scene of children playing by a river; one of them looks over at the water and sees a dead body floating by.

 

Mija is a cheerful woman in her mid-sixties.  She lives with, and raises, her grandson, Wook; she makes a living by working as a caregiver for an older, disabled man.  We're going to find out later how she's connected to that dead body, but for now, she visits a doctor's office, complaining of pain and numbness in her arm, and oh, she's been forgetting words too.  That last bit is going to lead to a diagnosis of Alzheimer's.  She's only in the early stages, though, so she's mostly okay.  It's just the occasional bout of disorientation.

 

Mija also signs up for a one-month poetry class, where everyone is expected to write one poem by the end of the class.  The instructor talks about having to look at things like you're seeing them for the first time.  That obviously ties in to the whole Alzheimer's thing, but the class has more to offer than just that.

 

Mija goes through some extremely difficult and sad things, beyond just the Alzheimer's diagnosis, and we as the audience certainly feel the emotional effect.  Other than a couple of scenes, though (and those scenes are right next to one another) there isn't a lot of strong emotion shown by her, or really any character.  It's more like she's suffering in silence.  She seems to avoid confrontation wherever possible, to the point where she backs out of a difficult conversation and we're not sure if she was intentionally doing it or if she just forgot she was supposed to.  She should be having those sorts of conversations with Wook, too (who is bizarrely emotionless himself), but never does, preferring to nag him about cleaning up instead.

 

Many great movies give us only part of the story and let us fill in the blanks.  For the most part, Poetry isn't like that, but late in the movie it starts playing with us a little.  We end up not getting a few details, but it feels like we're being told "Don't complain, because we could've taken out some really important stuff."  For instance, there's one particular shot where everyone important is up at the top of the screen, cut off at the waist so we only see legs.  We're straining to figure out what's happening - and then they go ahead and show us.

 

It's probably not spoiling anything to say that the movie ends with the poem that Mija writes.  By the end, considering all that Mija goes through, I really wanted to hear how that poem was going to go (and they tease not giving us the poem at all, which got an audible reaction out of me).  But it turns out that the images we're shown to accompany the poem are much more poignant than the poem itself.

 

There is no region 1 dvd of Retrieval, which meant it was tough to track down a copy, but it was worth the effort.  Wojtek is in his early twenties and lives with his grandfather; he has a girlfriend, Katia, who's a little older than him (but still looks to be in her twenties) and has a young son.  Wojtek has trouble finding a job that he likes.  His grandfather offers him work on his pig farm, which he takes, but that's not ideal for him.  When a man named Gazda sees Wojtek in a fight and offers him a job working security at a club, Wojtek jumps at the chance.  One of his friends, Andrij, gets himself hired as well.  But it becomes clear pretty quickly that this isn't just a security job.  Gazda's a loan shark, and both Wojtek and Andrij are going to have to work as the enforcement to collect Gazda's debts. 

 

There are some strong themes here: the importance of having a father, and what it means to be a man.  Neither Wojtek nor Katia's son were raised by their fathers.  Gazda's not a good person, but he does seem to be a good father; he's married with two young children, and that's the only biological father-child relationship that we see in the movie.  So, Wojtek is interested in this job for more than just the money.  He sees Gazda as a mentor, someone who could replace his own absentee father.  Gazda's also someone who could teach Wojtek how to be a father, because although Wojtek has the best of intentions, he's not doing a great job with parenting Katia's son, teaching him that fighting is what solves problems.  Gazda says Wojtek needs him, and that may be even more true than he realizes.

 

Casting Wojtek can't have been easy.  He has to be physically intimidating enough to beat people up, but still able to be threatened by other people.  They went with an actor who's tall, but not overly muscular, and has a baby face.  He can work the overwhelmed or frightened look well enough that we believe it.  Neither Wojtek nor Andrij are suited to this kind of work, and there are times when they both literally have trouble pulling the trigger.

 

The ending is really great - eight or nine minutes without dialogue that doesn't feel gimmicky despite the absence of talking.  It's not pretty, but it's still beautiful.  Andrij has his first difficult acting job of the movie here, and he hits it out of the park.  And with a callback to an earlier moment in the movie that seemed unimportant at the time, Wojtek shows that he's never going to give up on himself, come hell or high water.

 

These are two very good movies, both at about the same level, where I like them a lot but don't quite feel compelled to own a copy.  I think Poetry is operating at a slightly higher level, though.  The fact that we get to see a lot of schmucks get beaten to a pulp in Retrieval is certainly fun, but the violence makes it more inelegant.

 

WINNER: SOUTH KOREA