Rather than a sneaky, smirky post on this under my Halloween thread, Hubert Sauper’s documentary Darwin’s Nightmare deserves its own focus. Ostensibly the title comes from the ecological fuck-up extraordinaire in Lake Victoria, where the introduction of the Nile Perch–while economically a boon–has been an environmental disaster, decimating other fish species. But, as noted, these fish created a booming fish export industry in the surrounding cities and villages… (more…)

This is a classic martial arts movie from 1978, though I had never seen it. A remastered version with some good extras was just released by the Weinstein brothers’ Dragon Dynasty label and Netflix has it, though there was a long wait. Starring Gordon Liu in his prime, and opening with the ShawScope logo, you can see why Tarantino wanted to recreate some of its feel in Kill Bill.

In any case, it is very good. The plot line has a young rebel going to a Shaolin temple to learn kung fu in order to fight off the tartar hordes who have invaded China. 35 chambers teach elements of the art of kung fu, each more advanced than the one before (again, the scene in which the Bride is trained — by Godon Liu — in KB vol 2 explicitly harks back to this part of the movie). The 36th chamber involves a dispute over whether Buddhist monks should be training the masses to fight the invaders. Good, old-fashioned martial arts scenes with no wires and remarkably little cutting. Recommended.

A really fine film. Rolf de Heer (who did the very, very, very different Bad Boy Bubby) here works with Peter Djigirr and the people of Ramingining to shape a story that recounts a distant cultural past and evokes a distant storytelling tradition. The film has two frames: as the camera languorously pans over and through remote Arnhem land in northern Australia, a narrator talks to us of his ancestors and of stories told; we eventually come upon a group of men, making canoes to hunt geese, one of whom begins to tell his younger brother a tale of misplaced love in the distant past; the ‘central’ story is that tale told, in the tale told. (And even in that told, when characters imagine or hypothesize about what has happened or might happen, we get enactments–stories unfolding within the story, within a story.) The film moves back and forth, playing with our expectations (the narrator laughing at our impatience). (more…)

Some of my favorite video clips ever are now finally available on the net.
Carrell and Colbert’s back and forth killed me every time I caught it, even though the audience was sometimes less than amused by it. Comedy Central now has lots of archives up, including seven (only seven?) Even Stvphens.

For Halloween:

Or–maybe a better post title–The Return of the Excellent Issue Film. Saw in theaters the superb Michael Clayton, which has a first half begun with a voice-over monologue by Tom Wilkinson and follows up with a pitch-perfect succession of rants, debates, and asides that struck me as the richest dialogue I’d heard at the movies in some time. The second half softens the impact, becomes more conventionally a conspiracy-of-corporate-malfeasance thriller, and the dialogue fades more into the background… but hoo boy does it roar when it begins. A shout-out for the egoless and yet compassionate portrayal of a corporate-lawyer baddie by Tilda Swinton: she turns what could be a cartoon villain, and potentially a misogynist depiction of the icy castrator, into a detailed and generous portrait of a complex woman as torn by divisions as the protagonist. Everyone in this is good, and the writing whistles, and the film races along–and comes to a conclusion that offers us the kind of meat-and-potatoes closure we want while also keeping us hungry, uncertain, concerned. It’s a damn good film.

Swinton is equally strong in the small wonder Stephanie Daley, about a young girl who hid her pregnancy and then either killed or suffered the loss of her infant at birth. Swinton is the psychologist grappling with her own pregnancy, a prior stillbirth, and confusions over her self and her relationship with husband Timothy Hutton. Amber Tamblyn is excellent as the accused young girl. For the first half, it felt too often like the winner of a short-story competition, all these carefully-drawn parallels between the protagonists, a slew of complications which felt like sincere issue-picture problems to be resolved (gender, power, choice)… but by the second half I was glued to the set and the emotional repercussions, underplayed and entirely earned, ripple out with no clear sense of closure or completion. I really dug this film, too.