Reviews

I have no idea how to write a review for a superhero movie, but I thought that The Wolverine was a good enough film to warrant an attempt.

The Wolverine keeps you on the edge of your seat for nearly every second of the film. After an atomic set of dream sequences where Logan witnesses the bombing of Nagasaki in World War Two, we find Logan living in the forest, in what is wrongly identified as "present-day Alaska" by New York Times critic A.O Scott. It is clearly the Yukon Canada, as identified by The Yukon Sportsman's Paradise sign in an early scene. Having abandoned his life as a crime fighter, it doesn't take long before the action starts, and Logan gets drawn back into his old kick-ass ways.

Very early the film departs North America for Japan, and stays there for the rest of the time. The sets designs are spectacular, the photography obviously expensive and flawless. Shots of everything Japanese give the film an exotic flare, which then of course allows for every single character to be a martial arts expert. The fights scenes are visibly momentous, the special effects outstanding.

There are some gut-wrenching flaws though that are hard to stomach amidst the film's greatness: Logan and his side-kick Yukio are both highlighted riding motorcycles through the snow in the middle of Japanese winter; the sexy Viper villain has no discernible point as a character, neither do her costumes; the scene from the trailer where Logan is standing smoking his trademark cigar disappointingly does not appear in the film.

Yet the overarching theme dealing with Logan's angst causing immortality is interesting enough to easily redeem the film. Wolverine doesn't save the world here, but he fights to protect the life of one woman, and ends up fighting just to save his own.

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Women make the best suicide bombers. They receive more media attention and generate greater mass hysteria. If they can kill innocent children, this creates the best publicity possible. The Attack, a film by Ziad Doueiri deals with such suicide bombing connected to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The story is told in such a powerful and inventive way that I left the theatre feeling as if my emotional center had been extracted, run over by a train, and then transplanted back inside. One way I seem to judge how good a film is is by how bad it makes me feel.

After seeing The Attack I thought immediately of Paradise Now (2005). It has the same lead actor and both films involve Tel Aviv bombings, but while Paradise Now's suspense is generated by mystery involved in the story's unfolding climaxing in a mega-unsettller of an ending, The Attack gives away all its plot secrets in the first act. The major conflict of the film takes place early. Climax hit, mystery solved, we are out to examine why the events happened. The film opens with the protagonist's highest moment, so from here down is the only way to go.

Amin Jaafari, an ultra-successful Arab surgeon living in Tel Aviv receives a career achievement award. In his acceptance speech he praises a non-existent armistice of hostility between the Arab world and Israel. The irony of this speech is played out over and over again as he suffers blow after blow demonstrating the error of his judgment.

There is a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv and Jaafari's wife disappears. She has forgotten her cell phone. All things lighting, photography and mood point to "oh no, she's been killed." Shockingly, not only has she been killed, she was actually responsible; She was the bomber. Married for 15 years, Jaafari tries to persuade others that he knew his wife well, that she could never do anything so terrible; we spend very little time wondering or investigating the trivialities of whether or not she did the deed. He gets a letter that was mailed before the bombing. It admits to the bombing and pleads, "Don't hate me."

This secret disclosed, Jaafari goes to Palestine to track down the people who organized her suicide. What we find out in Palestine is a wrenching tale of Jaafari's own search for answers. He tries to come to terms with his wife as a mass murderer while at the same time still being madly in love with her. The more he mourns, the bigger the atrocity of his wife's deed becomes, and ever the more realistic.

Jaafari's fall from grace is a vivid representation that tragedy can strike at any time, to anyone. After seeing this film we are left with a striking awareness of our own vulnerability. Seeing an affluent, successful surgeon being betrayed by his wife, his family, his profession, and both of his home states leaves little hope for those of us that are less successful, non-surgeons.

Jaafari's was ignorant. He disregarded all the signs, saw only what he wanted to see, and this contributed to his ultimate demise, but he was not exceptionally oblivious, nor was he in any way malicious or evil. He was human. We leave theatres hopefully trying not to make the same mistakes.

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Danny Boyle. This is the guy that made Slumdog and directed the London Olympics opening ceremonies. I thought Slumdog was okay, and since I don't care for much for ceremonial BS, I think his best work came earlier in his career, specifically, in this order- Trainspotting, 28 days later, 127 hours. He's like almost a famous respected director, but I don't think he really gets true credit for being an "artist" from the critics in a way that say, Von Trier does. But I think he makes great, big budget, quasi- mainstream films. Trance is not one of these, but in a good way.

I am part of this type of film's built in audience. Just by the fact that it is psychologically manipulative means I like it. The way that the film distorts time is excellent. The first half is straight forward, but the second half starts shifting all over the place. It's almost completely non-linear. Because of the heavy emphasis on hypnosis we never know if what we are seeing is reality, dream, trance, past, present, future. It is a big, flashy, colorful film but it's only out in limited release and it's not very well advertised. After I saw it though I could perhaps see why it didn't garner too much mainstream attention.

I heard the late Roger Ebert say what makes a great film is when it does what it sets out to do, with excellence. It needs to be an example of greatness in the category of itself. What this to "do" is is very difficult to define. Is Trance a thriller? It has a heist, it has physiological manipulation, and it has an unorthodox love story, all elements that can make for great thriller, but as they occur on screen they seem too contrived, almost satirical. There are unrealistic, sometimes goofy flaws in the acting and in the characters, and it is not until after the film has laid all its cards on the table that all the little slips that have been happening are forgiven; they make sense in context, but this is a risky move. It requires the audience to recollect. It almost doesn't work.

Trance is like a mix of the Inception and Eternal Sunshine, but Trance does not succeed in achieving excellence in the same way these films do; however, it does do something else. I don't think that Inception or Eternal Sunshine take the chances that Trance does (I'm rethinking this- Inception takes some pretty huge chances), and so neither of these films make any of the same mistakes or flubs, but this also makes Trance really entertaining, and laugh-out-loud funny at times. The problem is that only in retrospect does the film really make any sense. Trance requires a certain level of forgiveness from its audience, and a truly great thriller, I think, would never require such forgiveness.

The coolest thing about seeing this film on opening night was that Boyle himself did a Q & A afterwards. He took technical questions: Do you prefer film or digital? He likes both, but sees digital as the future. Political questions: Do you think gun violence in film perpetuates real gun violence? He does, but relies on tragic paradox- the fact that we derive satisfaction from tragedy- to justify that we need these stories to be told, and sometimes, they happen to involve guns. Controversial questions: Does the UK (he's British) do music better than the US? Yes, but since the UK does very so few things well (his words), he has no problem admitting this as one of those few. I wanted to ask him what he looked for in a script and if he had any advice for scriptwriters looking to get their scripts made, but he only took questions from the first few rows of the audience, and as usual, I was sitting way at the back. More reviews drumgodchris.blogspot.com

Because it's so good, after watching Canadien/French Film Incendies for the second time, I thought that it must be based on a novel of play. I needed to find out. I now know that it is based on a play by Wajdi Mouawad. Mouawad is a Canadien writer, and to my delight, Incendies is part of a series of four plays. This means I have three more Incendies-like plays still to read. I won't go through a run-down of the plot, talk in abstractions about arch, characters symbiosis or lack-there-of…. there are tons of proper film reviews out there already dealing with these topics. I thought I'd just talk about two things, the two things that I thought make this an outstanding film: Photography, and the remarkable unfolding of a dramatic story; better film critics than me, which is to say any real film critic, have said that this film pulls off tragedy better than the Greeks.

The photography, the photography, the photography… was just as good the second time as it was the first time I saw it. The film opens in a village that could be mistaken for Greece of Israel. At thought maybe this was set and shot in Palestine, but I think most of the film as actually shot in Jordan. Theses shots are actually set to portray a fictional Lebanon, both past and modern day. The history intertwined with the movie seems to be loosely fictional; I can't find any information on any of the places that appear in film. My Lebanese civil war history is a little rusty. Anyone else?

There are two shots in particular that stand out. Both are shot at a distance to reveal the vastness of the landscape, unmistakably Mediterranean. Rocky, and the trees, not that I'm a tree expert, but they must be olive or fig trees, they are almost overused as prototypical symbols of the Med, but they work great. The first shot I like is actually two shots, meaning one type of shot that is used twice, almost identically. It's of a bus traveling on a skinny, mountainside road. At first, the camera is in close then pans way out to show the whole panoramic view, massive landscape, and tiny bus, a common technique in World films that are shot in exotic landscapes. The other shot is similar. It is later in the film. One of the characters is driving to a modern day Deressa Refugee camp and there is a shot taken from the sky of the winding roads leading up the side of a mountain. This shot is amazing, and whatever effects of filters the photographer added to make it fit the film's tone so well, I can't think of a better word to use to describe them, and the shot as 'cinematic.' I know that's a terrible term to use when describing Cinema, I really do, but a shot like this is so expressive and well-placed in the film, there is nothing going in the film here excepts visuals, the shot on it's own stands out as an artistic, filmmaking achievement.

The storyline, the storyline, the storyline…unfolds with the precision of a textbook tragedy. It sets up the conflict right off the top--- find missing brother and father. As the drama unfolds the story becomes more and more complex, adding twists and turns to the plot that we never even thought possible. In the end we are left with remains that challenge Oedipus the King in magnitude. (but without the fall from grace) The film still manage to exit the scene with a sparkle of hope. Forgiveness lets the audience breath a little easier as the film closes, a catharsis, but even then the story, the film, will haunt your subconscious for a good while after. More reviews at drumgodchris.blogspot.com