Saturday Matinee: Amores Perros

By James Berardinelli

Source: ReelViews

Without a doubt, the majority of the reviews of Amores Perros, the acclaimed debut feature from Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, will, at one time or another, invoke Pulp Fiction. There are undeniable similarities, although most of them are at the surface level. Amores Perros, like Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-nominated opus, deals with men and women who live on the seedy side of life. The plot unravels episodically and in a non-linear fashion, with characters from one segment occasionally appearing in, or passing through, another. However, one of Pulp Fiction‘s trademarks was to glamorize the gangster – to make the traditional “bad guy” seem hip and interesting. This was done through clever dialogue and stylish filmmaking techniques. In Amores Perros, criminals are not romanticized. They are exposed for what they are – human beings whose moral compasses have become twisted. So, although the territory may be familiar to viewers of Pulp Fiction, the vantage point is radically different.

Amores Perros introduces us to a veritable Rogues Gallery of individuals. Of the seven or eight significant characters traversing Iñárritu’s terrain, only one could be considered sympathetic. The others comprise a web of corruption and deceit. There are hit men, murderers, philanderers, thieves, betrayers, and other assorted riff-raff. Tarantino’s anti-heroes are cool and suave, with always the right one-liner to offer. Iñárritu’s are brutal and lacking even a modicum of charisma.

The first two we meet are Octavio (Gael García Bernal) and Susana (Vanessa Bauche). She’s his sister-in-law, but that doesn’t stem his ardor for her, and, because he treats her with a degree of kindness that her brutish husband, Ramiro (Marco Pérez), never shows, she can’t help but be attracted to him. Octavio is determined to make enough money so that he and Susana can run away together (along with her infant son), but, in Mexico City, where poverty abounds, clean money is hard to find. Ramiro’s meager income as a grocery store clerk is supplemented by convenience store hold ups, but that’s not a path Octavio is interested in taking. Instead, he decides to get involved in dog fighting, and he’s fortunate to own a real winner. But, once Ramiro finds out about his little brother’s windfall, he wants a piece of the action, and all of Octavio’s carefully laid plans are put in jeopardy.

Meanwhile, a couple of rungs higher on the social ladder are Daniel (Álvaro Guerrero) and Valeria (Goya Toledo). She’s a world-class model who has hit the big time. Her face and body are plastered all over billboards throughout Mexico City. He’s a magazine publisher who has left his wife and two children to be with her. Together, they make the perfect couple – young, good-looking, and in love – until tragedy strikes. Valeria is seriously injured in a car accident and Daniel must cope with living with a mentally and physically crippled woman whose modeling career is at an end. Suddenly, the rosy life he envisioned reeks of decay.

Finally, there’s Chivo (Emilio Echevarría), a mysterious, wild-looking figure who hovers around the periphery of the other stories until his tale is finally told. Chivo is an ex-guerilla who abandoned his wife and daughter for The Cause. Now, many years later, he lives with regrets. He spies on his adult child from afar, never having the courage to approach her, while he takes odd jobs as a hit man to feed himself and his small menagerie of mangy dogs. But, when Chivo is hired by one brother to kill another over money, he arrives at a few realizations about the importance of family.

The dogs in this film are almost as important as the humans. Canines feature prominently in all three stories. Octavio makes his fortune by fighting dogs. Valerie loves her pooch more than a child (and, one might argue, more than Daniel). And Chivo treats his animals with greater respect than he accords to any human. By elevating dogs to this level of importance, Iñárritu is making a statement about the level to which society has descended. It’s a sad commentary about a culture where individuals care more about dogs than other human beings.

Amores Perros‘ timeline is not linear. It curves back on itself, but not in a manner that is intended to confound the audience. The film begins with an pivotal occurrence that happens half-way through the movie, then proceeds to show events that lead up to that moment, and, later, what happens afterwards. Chivo’s story plays out in the background for most of the film, until, during the final forty-five minutes, it is brought to the fore while the other tales are wrapped up on the periphery. Iñárritu’s approach isn’t unique, but it is unusual, and it’s one of the elements that will keep viewers involved in Amores Perros from beginning to end.

Iñárritu has surrounded himself with a strong cast. Veteran Emilio Echevarría is magnetic as Chivo, with blazing eyes staring out from beneath bushy eyebrows. They are the eyes of a fanatic, but there’s also a sense of almost unspeakable loss in them as they gaze in the direction of his daughter. Álvaro Guerrero brings a youthful energy to the part of Octavio, and Goya Toledo is suitably fragile and spoiled as the model who is used to having the world bow down in front of her. In fact, there isn’t a weak performance to be found throughout the movie; even the trained dogs do solid jobs.

Amores Perros has won an impressive number of awards in film festivals across the globe. Watching the film, it’s not hard to understand why. Iñárritu’s style contains elements of Tarantino, Peckinpah, and others, but, ultimately, the synthesis is all his own. Even though there’s really no one in this film we can like, root for, or sympathize with, the intricacies of the narrative and the its themes are strong enough to ensure that we will not lose interest. Amores Perros is more than just a strong debut; it’s good, gritty filmmaking.

Watch Amores Perros on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/12158942?utm_source=MARC&Lid=hhh985

Saturday Matinee: Peking Opera Blues

Running Out of Karma: Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues

By Sean Gilman

Source: The End of Cinema

I first saw this eight months ago, on my first night home after the birth of my second kid (I had rented it from Scarecrow Video and needed to watch it before returning it the next day). Needless to say, exhausted and occasionally interrupted, I remembered very little of the experience, other than that I liked the film quite a bit. Happily, a more clear-headed rewatch confirms that initial vague impression: this is a great movie, perhaps the best melding of director Tsui Hark’s twin impulses toward subversion and entertainment I’ve seen yet.

The setup follows two plotlines that will come together and intertwine with a third, each focused on a female protagonist. Brigitte Lin plays the daughter of a local warlord. She dresses like a man (having spent time studying in the West, and also because she’s Brigitte Lin) and is secretly a revolutionary. She and fellow revolutionary Mark Cheng (memorable as Louis Koo’s able assistant in Johnnie To’s Election 2) have to steal some MacGuffins from the general’s safe. Cherie Chung (from The Enigmatic Case) plays a musician who stole a box of jewelry from a soldier (Tung Man, played by Cheung Kwok Keung) in the chaos after the previous general was run out of town. Through a series of complications, the box ends up at a local theatre troupe, where Sally Yeh, daughter of the director (played by film director, actor, clock Wu Ma), wants very much to go on-stage but can’t because women aren’t allowed to perform. Lin and Cheng also find themselves at the troupe, as it’s the favored entertainment for the most powerful people in town, including the local police commander/gangster Liu, who becomes infatuated with the star actor, Fa.

That covers the first 20 minutes or so of the film, what follows is an elegantly structured twisting and deepening of the characters and their relations as the film progresses through a variety of suspense and comic set pieces. Ching Siu-tung choreographs some exceptional action scenes, usually featuring Mark Cheng jumping into or shooting a bunch of bad guys (the sequences at the theatre make ingenious use of the space’s multi-leveled design, with Cheng diving under and jumping over tables and benches, then on the main stage and up to the stage above it before swinging across the rafters and finally onto the rooftops), but there are also cunningly designed short sequences like the one David Bordwell describes early in Planet Hong Kong, where Mark and Cheung and Cherie hide in Sally’s bed from her father. The two father-daughter relationships are especially poignant, with Lin’s eyes exploring every aspect of her self-hatred for destroying the father she loves while opposing everything he stands for politically. It’s most remarkable to see her usually implacable image break down in anguish near the end of the film and even in happiness in a brief middle section where she gets drunk with the other girls. As well Wu Ma brings a note of knowing sadness to the theatre director father, a man who we took as a stock type gains nuance when we realize exactly why he so strictly keeps his daughter away from the stage: because if she catches the eye of the powerful, she’ll be forced to prostitute herself for the sake of the company (as Liu attempts with Fa). Complex as well are the film’s romantic relationships. Not so much the main one between Mark and Brigitte (if that even is a romance given Lin’s ambiguous orientation), but the all but unspoken one between Cheung (whose soldier I don’t think is even named in the screenplay) and Cherie, which exists almost entirely in the subtle looks he gives her of longing and disappointment at her more venal moments. That soldier, in fact, is one of the more fascinating characters in the film: a hapless guy, bullied by his fellows, who joins the revolutionaries by chance, falls in love with a girl and ends up saving the life of the heroine in a spectacular last minute rescue. There are few martial arts films I know of that have so many richly developed characters and relationships. The only one that even comes to mind in Tsui’s own epic Once Upon a Time in China.

The Peking Opera setting provides Tsui a world full of potential meaning, and he plays it up beautifully. The gender reversals required of the all-male stage echo the real-life reversals of Lin’s character, as she not only dresses like a man but takes on the traditional hero role (note that it’s the women who rescue the men time and again). When the other two women make it on stage, they become women impersonating men impersonating women, just as they more or less unwillingly take on the roles of revolutionaries. Eventually, the politics that undergirds the plot comes to be seen as a form of performance, with one general shuffling on stage as the other exits, the rebels scheme amounting to a lifting of a curtain (exposing certain warlords as conspiring with foreigners) all while the real power lurks behind the scenes, in the form of the black clad local police force. That the local commander is both bluntly evil and homosexual (as well as the ultra-effeminate depictions of the male actors) might be a cause for concern were it not for the sincere warmth with which Tsui depicts the homoerotic relations between the three women (Sally in particular seems infatuated with Brigitte). Instead, what we see is sexuality, with politics, as another kind of performance that serves to either mask our baser urges (the violence of the commander, the greed of Cherie) and/or complicate our nobler ones (the father-daughter relations, the multiple instances of self-sacrifice throughout the film, as each hero in turn faces death to save the others).

The result is a film not too far in spirit from the anarchic nihilism of Tsui’s earliest films, the burn-it-all youth drama Dangerous Encounters – First Kind or the cannibal comedy We’re Going to Eat You. But instead of merely exposing the world, politics, and human relations as a sham, Tsui instead finds a humane warmth at our core, while simultaneously celebrating the artistry of that disguising performance itself: Mark’s ultra-cool secret agent and Lin’s resolute stoicism, as well as the athleticism of the opera performers. The film opens with a series of close up shots of Peking Opera costumes and props and actors, scored to a traditional sounding song with a modern synthesizer beat. And it ends with a close-up from that same series of a performer in full make-up, laughing maniacally at us, or maybe with us.

Saturday Matinee: Donnie Darko

By Caleb Quass

Source: Medium

Enigma as a thematic device in itself is something I’ve applied to the films of David Lynch and his surrealist ilk, but until my third viewing of Donnie Darko, it’s not something I had considered for Richard Kelly’s debut film. Viewing once again the theatrical cut of the film, I started wondering whether or not the significantly-extended director’s cut could actually offer anything significant in its additional footage, or if it would merely obfuscate such an atmospherically uneasy movie through its clarity.

Like the characters’ immature dialogue and the mostly non-nostalgic depiction of a recently bygone era, the mysterious and almost unknowable nature (at least from casual viewings) of Donnie Darko’s happenings come across as a manifestation of the turbulence and teenage angst that define the titular character (Jake Gyllenhaal). That the film features such subtly brilliant performances and an alluringly spooky atmosphere are just the icing on the cake but just as important in rendering this a truly brilliant film.

Plot summaries have always been weirdly difficult for me, and that’s especially the case with the disorienting stream of events that Donnie Darko offers. The psychologically-unstable social outcast is awakened by a giant bunny rabbit and lead from his bedroom, where shortly after a jet engine mysteriously crashes through the roof in what would have almost certainly been his demise. This “imaginary friend” Frank continually appears and speaks to Donnie, compelling him to commit destructive acts with far-reaching consequences.

All the while, he regularly sees his therapist, forms a relationship with a new student (Jena Malone), experiences “daylight” hallucinations related to time travel, researches time travel via a book written by the town’s unspeaking hermit “Grandma Death” (Patience Cleveland), and generally copes with the frustrations of being a precocious, cynical teenager in a conformist society — all as Frank forebodingly counts down the “28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds” until the world ends.

There’s a lot going on, but even as Donnie Darko climaxes without the sort of resolution that audiences may expect, it’s never unwatchable or less than compelling. From the opening minutes of the film where Donnie rides his bike around a darkly-photographed suburbia to the post-punk stylings of Echo and the Bunnymen, a mood is established and never broken. It’s typical Midwest American iconography through the lens of a disillusioned adolescent, and though the slow-motion, pop music-infused high school sequences, as well as the dialogue of aimless friendships and budding romances, are reminiscent of coming-of-age dramadies, Donnie Darko never embraces these things as genuine or even necessarily normal. Scenes have a tendency to bleed into one another with the slightly-hurried pace of the “paranoid schizophrenia” which Donnie’s therapist (Katherine Ross) offers as an explanation for the hallucinations, and the already somewhat downbeat pop music is complimented by a jittery, melancholy score by Michael Andrews.

Perhaps most peculiar of all, though, is the look of the film in general. The interiors of Donnie Darko are just a little too dark, and its daylight scenes just don’t feel sunny, as though constantly threatened by an impending storm. Something is extra dismal and extra drab about every classroom, street, and upper-middle-class household, and though this is an extraordinarily subjective designation, it just looks depressed. Donnie never forms an especially healthy relationship with anyone in the film, and his extrasensory premonitions are apt counterparts to his frustrations with society, labeling as an outsider, and all the implicit complexities of puberty.

Though admirable for its thematic strengths, Donnie Darko ultimately makes its impact through its sneaky emotional core, which continually grows in the background until exploding in the film’s fatalistic conclusion. Here again the movie embraces a pubescent concept, the notion that one’s own life is a direct burden on others, but with a sobering shift in perspective. After his mind-bending odyssey results in the literal death and figurative destruction of multiple people, Donnie’s ultimate fate is to sacrifice himself to undo his supposed harm upon the world, harm which, paradoxically, only occurred through his quest to stop it. On the level of pure logic, this might not make sense, but on a dramatic level, it’s pure poetic tragedy. The film’s “Mad World” montage could have been a miserable failure in its sudden spike in melodrama, but instead it is the culmination of the sorrow and emotional terror that was just beneath the surface all along.

The entirety of human emotion cannot, as the delusional teacher played by Beth Grant suggests, be divided into “fear and love” or any other two extremes. Donnie understood that, but what neither he nor anyone else understands is exactly how it does function. Donnie Darko is a masterpiece not because its convoluted story offers any answers, but because unlike the majority of shallow coming-of-age narratives, it knows that it can’t.

Saturday Matinee: Dark Star

By Roger Ebert

Source: RogerEbert.com

“Dark Star” is one of the damnedest science fiction movies I’ve ever seen, a berserk combination of space opera, intelligent bombs, and beach balls from other worlds. It has a checkered history. It began as a student project by John Carpenter (later to direct “Halloween“) and Dan O’Bannon (later to write “Alien“), and grew over a period of time and expanding budgets into a full-length film.

It was finished some four years ago, before “Star Wars,” and might have had a big success as a cult film if its original distributor hadn’t been so chicken-hearted that he dumped it in a string of Southern California drive-ins and then pulled it out of commercial release. As it is, “Dark Star” has found audiences on the campus and revival circuits, has been a hit here at Facets Multimedia, and, at last, is having its first commercial run at the Three Penny Cinema.

It was finished some four years ago, before “Star Wars,” and might have had a big success as a cult film if its original distributor hadn’t been so chicken-hearted that he dumped it in a string of Southern California drive-ins and then pulled it out of commercial release. As it is, “Dark Star” has found audiences on the campus and revival circuits, has been a hit here at Facets Multimedia, and, at last, is having its first commercial run at the Three Penny Cinema.

The movie’s best sequence centers around the care and feeding of the pet alien they’ve taken on board (a sequence that O’Bannon may have drawn on for the original screenplay of “Alien”). The “Dark Star’s” onboard alien looks like a plastic beach ball with claws, and has a nasty way of sneaking out of sight; a crew member chases it into an elevator shaft and gets himself into a very tight spot. (The elevator sequence looks suspiciously as if it were filmed on the floor of a horizontal hallway photographed to look like a vertical shaft.)

Otherwise, life just sorta drifts past, until a chain of accidents leads to a situation where a bomb does not detach from the ship as planned, and will explode in 24 minutes, blowing the “Dark Star” to smithereens. The bomb cannot be disarmed because, intelligent little devil that it is, it’s convinced that it has a mission to self-destruct.

The movie’s best sequence centers around the care and feeding of the pet alien they’ve taken on board (a sequence that O’Bannon may have drawn on for the original screenplay of “Alien”). The “Dark Star’s” onboard alien looks like a plastic beach ball with claws, and has a nasty way of sneaking out of sight; a crew member chases it into an elevator shaft and gets himself into a very tight spot. (The elevator sequence looks suspiciously as if it were filmed on the floor of a horizontal hallway photographed to look like a vertical shaft.)

Otherwise, life just sorta drifts past, until a chain of accidents leads to a situation where a bomb does not detach from the ship as planned, and will explode in 24 minutes, blowing the “Dark Star” to smithereens. The bomb cannot be disarmed because, intelligent little devil that it is, it’s convinced that it has a mission to self-destruct.

And so, in an incredible and hilarious scene, a crew member floats out into space, confronts the stubborn thinking bomb, and uses pure logic in an attempt to reason it out of exploding. The strategy: If the bomb can be convinced it has no evidence that the universe really exists, then how can its instructions be valid?

This is a fun movie, and a bright and intelligent one. It bears few signs of having been made on a low budget, and the special effects are reasonably slick. And it has a mercifully low-key comic approach; many satiric comedies by young filmmakers are frantic and overwrought, but this one is wry, laid back and fond of its situations. And on the same program is “Hardware Wars,” a short subject starring steam irons, pop-up toasters and other kitchen appliances in outer space.

Saturday Matinee: Buck and the Preacher

Buck and the Preacher review – Poitier and Belafonte are glorious in overlooked western

Sidney Poitier’s first directorial effort makes for a wild ride, packed with memorable turns and smart filmmaking

By Fedor Tot

Source: We Love Cinema

Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, two icons of the Civil Rights movement, sit at the centre of Buck and the Preacher. The two occupy a totemic space in the cultural imagination that has to some extent calcified their images. Part of the brilliance of this much-overlooked western is how it plays against this calcification – Belafonte, as the Preacher of the title, is introduced bathing stark naked, a rambunctious character with the gift of the gab, grimy teeth and scratchy beard. It’s a far cry from Belafonte’s more clean-cut roles, and a glorious against-type performance devoid of ego.

Poitier for his part, ostensibly plays another stoic good man, the type he built his career around. But here, too, there are wrinkles, perhaps unsurprisingly given that this was Poitier’s first directorial effort, taking over the shoot having had the initial director Joseph Sargent fired over creative differences regarding the depiction of race. Poitier’s Buck may be a lawful man, but he’s taciturn and cautious, pushed to lawlessness mostly by the threat of white violence.

The two titular characters meet out west. Buck is a professional wagon master aiding Black folk looking for safe passage away from the post-slavery South, with former masters hiring “labour recruiters” (as they call themselves) to force them back to the cotton field. The Preacher is more chaotic, a lifelong con-man primarily motivated by money. The clash of these two characters against a wider environment of white hostility provides the film with much of its dramatic tension.

As with many actors-turned-directors, Poitier’s direction could be accused of being a little staid at times: this is certainly a handsome western, but parts do lack a bit of flair, such as an opening raid that’s simply dull. And yet on occassion Poitier-as-director hits upon a rich seam of inspiration.

Two scenes late on in the film are a case in point, a brilliant marriage of action and theme. The first is the quietest bank robbery ever committed to film, told almost entirely in whispers, our protagonists pushed fully outside of the law as a means of survival. The second, their final stand, stranded on a rocky, claustrophobic outcrop, surrounded on all sides, having to remain hidden under cover. Poitier is using both aural and geographical textures to comment on Blackness – survival in a racist society requiring both silence and invisibility – expressed purely in filmic terms.

It’s remarkably smart and astute directing in these sections, yet the central charm of this film remains Belafonte. His Preacher is a delicious, smart-talking and charismatic creation, a shifty anti-hero that plays nicely against Poitier’s righteousness. Buck and the Preacher might not have the rawness or nihilism of the predominantly revisionist westerns produced concurrently, such as those by Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) and Robert Altman (McCabe and Mrs. Miller), but it remains a smart and entertaining film.

Saturday Matinee: Diamantino

By Peter Sobczynski

Source: RogerEbert.com

The new Portuguese/French/Brazilian co-production “Diamantino” could technically be described as a political satire but anyone going into it expecting the hard-edged humor of a “Dr. Strangelove” or “Wag the Dog” will soon realize that it’s not quite like those earlier works—probably around the time that the gigantic fluffy puppy dogs first make an appearance. Instead, it takes a far more whimsical approach that suggests a weird hybrid of “Being There” and “All the World’s a Stooge,” the 1941 Three Stooges short in which Moe, Larry and Curly are taken in by a rich woman who is inexplicably convinced that they are child war refugees, as presented by Michel Gondry at his absolute Gondriest. The results are uneven—how could they not be?—but the sheer weirdness of the whole enterprise has a charm to it and it certainly is never boring. Bewildering, maybe, but never boring.


Let us go back to those fluffy dogs for a minute. They are manifestations in the mind of Diamantino (Carloto Cotta), the star striker for Portugal’s soccer team, that allow him to filter out all distractions and hit the shots that have made him an idol on the level of real-life Portuguese soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo. Alas, one day, the power of the fluffy dogs fails Diamantino and he misses a crucial shot that prevents his team from advancing to the World Cup final and he becomes a pariah in his home country and a laughing stock around the world. This would be hard enough for most people to bear but we soon realize that Diamantino is basically a big kid himself who is innocent in most of the ways of the world—not only do the sheets on his bed have his face and logo emblazoned on them, it is evident that he has never had anyone into his room to share them with him.

In an attempt to do some good and honor his recently deceased father, Diamantino decides to take in a refugee to live at his palatial estate, much to the consternation of his cruel and abusive twin sisters (Anabella and Margarida Moreira), who mistreat him even as they are robbing him blind. The “refugee” turns out to be Aisha (Cleo Tavares), a lesbian Secret Service agent working undercover as a teenage boy from Mozambique to investigate suspicions that Diamantino is involved with a money-laundering scheme. That, not surprisingly, is the work of his sisters and if that were not enough, the two have embroiled their uncomprehending brother into a plot by Portuguese nationalists to leave the EU. Such a scheme includes an elaborate ad campaign focused on Diamantino as the epitome of Portuguese manhood, as well as machinations from a mad scientist determined to harvest the source of his greatness that winds up calling certain aspects of his manhood into question.

So yeah, “Diamantino” is strange as can be and then some, but the problem that it’s not as outrageous as it clearly wants to be in terms of the details. The material involving the shifting nature of the relationship between Diamantino and Aisha, whose true identity as an adult woman he remains blissfully unaware of for much of the narrative, would seem to be tailor-made for the kind of cheerfully transgressive humor that the writing/directing duo of Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt are clearly aiming for but never quite achieve. Likewise, the more overtly political material involving the nationalists duping Diamantino into participating in their anti-EU campaign leans a little more towards the innocuous than the incisive. The stuff involving the mad scientist and the unexpected results of her experiments on Diamantino are absurd enough but enter the proceedings in such an arbitrary manner that it fails to land the impact that it might have had with a more focused screenplay.

And yet, even though “Diamantino” never quite digs beneath its aggressively goofy, candy-colored surfaces to deliver truly penetrating satire, it still manages to hold one’s interest for the most part. As a comedic collision between the not entirely dissimilar worlds of political and popular culture and the mayhem that can ensue when the two intertwine, the film has a likable oddball energy that is further boosted by an outlandish visual style that’s reminiscent of what the legendarily over-the-top 1967 version of “Casino Royale” is like at its best moments. “Diamantino” is also blessed with a number of random bits of strange humor that wind up hitting more than they miss, ranging from the aforementioned bed linen to several hilarious needle drops on the soundtrack. Best of all, it has a performance by Cotta as Diamantino that is perfectly calibrated so that he comes across less as a moron, which is what might have resulted in the hands of lesser actors, than as a genuine innocent—a Candide of the soccer pitch—who we find ourselves laughing with instead of at. Admittedly, a film like this may not be to all tastes, but those with a taste for the silly and the strange should get a kick out of it.


Watch Diamantino on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/movie/diamantino-carloto-cotta/17616054