Blowup

Blowup (1966) - 8/10

First Viewed: 3/30/08
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
Cinematography by Carlo di Palma
Starring David Hemmings as Thomas

Blowup follows a day in the life of a photographer, Thomas, who spends most of his time strutting around his beautiful studio harassing his models and assistants. Thomas seems to be obsessed with the visual aspects of everything he sees around him. If he sees something interesting, say an antiques store or a night club, he goes off of his usual routine and explores them.

The movie, like the main character, is almost plotless and borders on rambling until Thomas blows-up one of his images and sees what he thinks may be a body. Even as he slowly sorts this mystery out throughout the course of the day, he lets other visual aspects and events distract him. Our protagonist, who could very well have ADHD, receives our empathy as we all get distracted in our lives, but he's also hard to get into considering he's pretty rude and abuses women. The film itself, much like Thomas, is off-putting and boring yet enthralling at the same time.

Antonioni, who my friend tells me was a photographer, provides beautiful compositions. He seems to focus on the importance of intra-frame lines, which are especially prominent in Thomas's studio. Our protagonist uses the various lines to create fascinating compositions with his models, yet he also has to avoid running into the studio's oddly placed beams. These lines also emphasize the nature of art and visuals as purely subjective entities that only have relevance in certain situations.

For example, a famous guitarist at a nightclub throws his broken guitar-head - a type of line - into the crowd, who almost kills Thomas when he's lucky enough to catch it. Once he escapes into the streets, he throws it on the sidewalk, where the shattered guitar-head loses all importance outside of the nightclub. Thus visuals, like the lines that Thomas interacts with in almost every frame, create meaning and restrict his actions on a daily basis.

Rant: Finishing the Semester and Boring Stuff

So, I think I had a very productive break. I took multiple measures to try to curtail my "buttitis," a condition that I got from Cross Country over a year and a half ago where my upper butt, along my piriformis muscle, has a constant burning pain that occasionally flares up. I had an MRI on my pelvis and then a fluoroscopy where I received four steroid injections into my piriformis muscle. Unfortunately, I'm still pretty sore and my physical therapy doctor thinks that I may have inflammation in the sacro-iliac joint, which may be triggering the piriformis muscle right next door. This ordeal will never end ...

I watched many movies over the break, as I'm sure you can tell with this sudden influx of write-ups on my blog. Some of them were watched on my brother's new PS3, which is actually a pretty nice machine. It runs quietly, keeps relatively cool, and responds quickly. Its catalogue of games is probably its weakest point: The XBox has most of the games on the PS3 in addition to its awesome exclusive games while some of the early PS3 games like Call of Duty only output at 720p instead of 1080i for some reason.

Still, the games were a blast and looked and sounded very nice. I like how the machine has a built-in blu-ray player and I have to say that blu-ray discs look very nice, though I wouldn't say it's an enormous step up over DVD. The blacks look deeper and more detailed, the colors more true, there's more detail, and there are hardly any annoying compression artifacts as seen on DVD. Unfortunately, our 42-inch plasma is kind of small to allow us to really appreciate the bump in quality; the display's resolution of 1024 x 768, which is arguably not truly HD and requires scaling, probably contributes to this lack of "awe." But it's definitely a nice addition to our home.

Speaking of home ... one thing that I never appreciated until I stayed in the dorms was how silent it is. We live in a suburb tract home that borders a canyon and it's literally dead silent at night. Except for the rats that were incessantly pattering underneath my room last night as I desperately tried to fall asleep. I had a 6:50 AM flight, as per frequent flier miles, and the incessant noises certainly didn't help. It wasn't until 2:00 before I finally said "fuck it" and moved into a sleeping bag in our living room. I think I got 3 hours of sleep - which is why I'm going to bed immediately after I finish typing this!

Berkeley is an eerie place without its students. The streets are empty, the once bustling businesses now largely vacant, the libraries and dining commons completely shut down, and the reliably noisy dorm courtyard as silent as my family's house. Unfortunately, I don't really have much to do here until monday when classes start. My few friends who are here are busy this week. The libraries aren't open so I can't start my research project. The mail room doesn't open until monday and, according to my roomate who stayed in the dorms over spring break, our building hasn't had any hot water since tuesday. Wonderful.

I have new goals, my "new years' resolution" so to speak, for the rest of the semester that I'll try to briefly outline before I fall asleep at the keyboard. One, I want to go to the gym three times a week. Two, I should really talk to professors and GSI's during their office hours. Three, I really want to start taking pictures every day and find a good method of organizing, processing, and distributing my pictures.

That about rounds it off. Off to bed I go!

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) - 7/10

First Viewed: 3/27/08
Directed by David Yates
Cinematography by Slawomir Idziak
Starring Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter, Emma Watson as Hermione, Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley, Michael Gambon as Dumbledore, Alan Rickman as Severus Snape, Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemort, Gary Oldman as Sirius Black, and Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange

Movie adaptations of books are often disappointing because they are hindered by obligatory ties to the source material. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix suffers from this problem, which makes some of the situations feel episodic and poorly fleshed out. Yet the film fares far better than most of the previous Harry Potter films.

I think this is because David Yates manages to simultaneously focus on the central narrative of Harry while conveying a sense of wonder with the magic world to the audience. Cinematographer Slawomir Idziak (Black Hawk Down), whose use of compositions and lighting is often striking, and the wonderful production design by Stuart Craig help to sell Yates' more focused, darker vision of the series. The films' special effects have gradually improved over the years and they look very impressive here, as only a few shots involving characters riding on brooms or creatures in mid-air seem fake. The acting is another aspect of the film that is strong.

I strongly disliked Michael Gambon's performance in the previous films, but I think that his more aggressive Dumbledore fits in well in this film. Imelda Staunton's gives an excellent performance as administrator Dolores Umbridge, creating a sinister character with more depth than J.K. Rowling, who used the description "toad-like" to tiresome effect, ever provided in the novel. All of the adult actors give excellent performances, but Daniel Radcliffe - who has been improving over the span of the series - and Emma Watson - who has not - are still weak actors and seem particularly bad in comparison to the other performances.

The various weaknesses that are associated with book adaptations will always hinder the Harry Potter series. But I still enjoyed this movie and appreciated the effortless pacing and entertainment that Yates provided, a welcome change from the plodding first two films by Chris Columbus.

Memoirs of a Geisha

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) - 4/10

First Viewed: 3/26/08
Directed by Rob Marshall
Cinematography by Dion Beebe
Starring Ziyi Zhang, Ken Watanabe, and Michelle Yeoh

Rob Marshall attempts to follow the rise of a beautiful geisha in Japanese society through the creation of achingly beautiful images that are admirably provided by cinematographer Dion Beebe. John Williams provides an excellent score and Pietro Scalia's editing creates a nice pace to the film.

Despite the technical accomplishments, Memoirs of a Geisha is surprisingly boring. I actually stopped watching this film about ninety minutes into its two and a half hour running time. It was hard for me to get into the movie and the characters, who speak heavily accented English rather than Japanese. As a result of this decision, the actors' dialogue delivery sounds frustratingly stilted.

Marshall also seems to lose focus by concentrating on the aesthetic aspects of his film. The lighting, sets, and costumes look gorgeous, but they draw too much attention away from the protagonist's narrative. In addition to these weaknesses, the story itself seems to be, at its roots, a typical rise and fall story of someone whose profession is both the blessing and the bane of her existence.

The Counterfeiters

The Counterfeiters (2007) - 4/10

First Viewed: 3/25/08
Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky
Cinematography by Benedict Neuenfels
Starring Karl Markovics as Sorowitsch and Devid Striesow as Friedrich Herzog

The Counterfeiters, the Austrian film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, has a fascinating premise. Sorowitsch, a former con artist who has managed to survive five years in the concentration camps, is enlisted by a German commander named Herzog to manufacture millions of fake bank notes in an effort to ruin the American and British economies.

Despite the intriguing story, the film does not work as well as it should. I am not a fan of the cinematography, which employs an odd conglomeration of de-saturated tones, handheld camera-work, jarring mid-scene zooms, high contrast, and repetition of compositions. It distracted from and ultimately hurt the film. Also, I never got to know who Sorowitsch truly was. The film simply presents him as a counterfeiter, a role that never changes or provides much in the way of character depth. The writing and Markovics' uninspired performance are also to blame for this lack of character development.

Simply put, I was bored. Instead of a fun, intriguing story with a fascinating lead, we get a poorly shot film with cliched dialogue, a boring protagonist, and standard secondary characters that we have already seen in other films that deal with concentration camps.

Seven Samurai

Seven Samurai (1954) - 10/10

Second Viewing: 3/24/08
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Cinematography by Asakazu Nakai

Kurosawa's film follows the plight of a village of helpless farmers who enlist the help of samurai - with no more than an offer of providing food - to fend off forty bandits. The movie presents an enjoyable story as well as social commentary on a period of change in Japan.

The samurai are presented as a dying breed. Too many are arrogant and drunk on power and their swordsmanship is starting to be rendered obsolete thanks to the advent of gunpowder. Yet it takes the sacrifices of seven of the best - or perhaps kindest - samurai, who rely mostly on tactics and their intelligence, to empower and transform the farmers into an assertive, self-reliant group.

Kurosawa traces this evolution subtly thanks to his perfect filmmaking. His camera perfectly composes every single frame, his editing is seamless, the use of sound is effective, and his direction of the mis-en-scene - the lighting, sets, and placement of actors - is impeccable. The film is filled with so many ideas, yet Kurosawa manages to extensively develop a number of fascinating characters ranging from the fledgling leadership in Rikichi, to Kambei Shimada's (Takashi Shimura) wise, head-rubbing samurai, to Katsushiro's (Isao Kimura) hilariously rambunctious samurai.

The only aspect I did not like was the love story between Kambei's apprentice and the village woman. This is not because Kurosawa does a terrible job depicting the progression of the love story, but rather because the love interest is a poorly developed character who flies into unnecessary, annoying episodes of histrionic outbursts. Nonetheless, the film is an incredible work of art and one of my top ten favorite films.