All About My Mother

I fired up ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER solely to check the Almodovar box. I didn't know anything about the picture going in, and that may be the best way to approach the piece.

ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER is a gorgeous picture, the kind of movie that had me watching with one finger on the "pause" button, just so I could admire the composition of certain shots. The care in the film's design reflects the care that went into crafting its characters on both the page and the screen. Cecilia Roth, playing the film's protagonist, anchors its interweaving stories and tragedies with a grounded, present authority and conducts us on a journey that's well worth the price of admission.

What a pleasant surprise.

Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas

I am not the target audience for SINBAD: LEGEND OF THE SEVEN SEAS. I've read _1001 Arabian Nights_. I've been to Syracuse. I'm familiar with Greek mythology. And I like Harryhausen movies.

I couldn't get on board with this movie, primarily because its Sinbad has so little in common with every other version of the character with which I'm familiar. There were more hangups, of course: its maguffin wasn't compelling, its geography was sketchy, and its creation of a fantasy world didn't jibe with the names it gave elements of that world. Why even call your protagonist Sinbad when he bears no resemblance to the Sinbad of legend? Why call your city Syracuse if it isn't going to look anything remotely like Syracuse? Why establish a round world in the film's very first scene, only to make a flat world a major plot point near the end? The list of nits I picked is practically endless, and they conspired to keep me from getting involved in the picture. The only bright spot in the whole production, in fact, is Michelle Pfeiffer's voice work as Eris, goddess of chaos: it's dangerous, seductive, and loads of fun. She isn't enough to keep the production afloat, however. Someone should've scuttled SINBAD back in the story development phase.

PS My wife enjoyed the artwork and our boy absolutely loved it, so your mileage may vary.

Eros

Wong Kar Wai. Steven Soderbergh. Michelangelo Antonioni. Three short films on Eros. How could it possibly go wrong?

Wrong it goes.

Here's the problem: the first film, Wong Kar Wai's "The Hand," is so much better than the other two that most of the movie is a letdown. In "The Hand," Gong Li plays an aging courtesan who enthralls and possesses the young tailor (Chang Chen, from THREE TIMES) sent to design and create her gowns. Li is so intriguing, so commanding, so sad, so pathetic, that she overshadows every other woman in the tryptich. When we should be thinking about the Dream Girl of Soderbergh's "Equilibrium" or the dancing nudes of Antonioni's "The Dangerous Thread of Things," we're thinking about Li and Chen and Christopher Doyle's beautiful cinematography.

Unfortunately, this means that EROS is a mixed bag. TiVo it for the first chapter, but feel free to skip the following two.

Jet Li's Fearless

Fearless is a towering masterpiece and a brilliantly fitting end to Jet Li's wuxia-film career. It's thoughtful, beautiful, exciting, and heartbreaking. It makes me want to be a better man.

By now, most of us are familiar with the Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey and they way that journey informs the Western storytelling tradition. Jet Li's Fearless takes on a different kind of journey, the Buddha's Journey, and it breaks and re-forms our hearts along the way.

In the Buddha's Journey, the privileged young man comes to see the emptiness of that privilege. He either wills himself or is shocked out of his mental and emotional space, and he embarks on a spiritual quest for enlightenment. For most men, that enlightenment never comes and the quest becomes its own spiritual vehicle. The Buddha, however, gets it in the most profound way imaginable. If he returns, he may try to share part of what he's seen with his fellows. He may even succeed.

Fearless begins with Huo Yan Jia (Li) at a tournament in the waning days of the Qing Empire. Li, the embodiment of Buddhist self-possession and peace, easily bests three Champions of the Western World. As the last challenger, a Japanese fighter, enters the ring, we flash back to Huo as an impetuous and Wu Shu - obsessed child. From there, the film takes on the journey that leads to this ring and beyond. It's beautiful work, beautifully done, and it does more to illustrate my limited knowledge of Buddhist thought than any other film I've ever seen.

The film itself looks beautiful. Fearless chooses a heightened aesthetic. Its world looks like our world, only cleaner and fresher and somehow more wonderful. In other words, it's the world of story. It's a world in which wire-fu lives alongside the drudgery of planting rice in paddy day after day after day. It's a world that's infused with beauty, and one in which unspeakable things happen to people who deserve only wonder and joy. Even if the whole "Buddha's Journey" thing doesn't appeal to you, even if you could care less about wuxia films, this picture is worth seeing for the joy of looking at it alone.

The action, well, it's wonderful. Choreographer Yuen Wo Ping pulls out all the stops here, letting us see and feel the variations in the fighting styles onscreen and seamlessly blending wire work with practical stunts. The film's fights (or later, competitions) breathe with an organic life of their own, and they're filled with surprises both delightful and heartbreaking. Some of the action beats in Fearless made me laugh - others brought tears to my eyes. From a choreography and dance perspective alone, this thing is phenomenal.

Finally, Fearless is a heartbreaking movie. Having grown up in rural America, I'm not much for bucolic reawakenings. Nevertheless, Fearless made me cry just by showing me a bunch of farmers pausing to stretch their backs in the middle of a hard day of planting. This is a movie that explores a life badly lived, then turns and gives us one lived well. We see this life lived well, and we see the effect it has on the people it touches. It makes me want to live my life better, to touch those around me in a more positive way.

What a wonderful, brilliant movie. In a year filled with outstanding films, Fearless is one of the very best.

Gojira

Takashi Shimura had a wonderful 1954. First, he starred as Kambei Shimada in The Seven Samurai, one of the greatest films ever made. Then he starred in another Toho production, the original Gojira. The latter film would later be recut and renamed Godzilla for an American audience, and that version (the one with Raymond Burr) would be the only Godzilla the American audience would know for quite some time.

What a shame, and what a blesssing that Sony chose to release the original version in a new U.S. DVD. Gojira is my favorite Godzilla movie, more than making up for its clunky effects and sometimes hamfisted acting with a genuinely scary and thought-provoking tale that recalls and reflects the Japanese sensibility in the wake of WWII.

Two events overshadow Gojira: the nuclear bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fire bombing of Tokyo. While Godzilla is, obviously, a radioactive monster awakened by nuclear testing in the Pacific Islands, his destructive rampage invokes the horror of the fire-bombing, an event that (if I remember my 1993 reading of Kurosawa's _Something Like an Autobiography_ correctly) gutted Toho Studios and personally affected the lives of those who worked there. Consequently, Gojira pulls no punches. The monster's rampage isn't cute, or played for action beats. It's horrific, people die, and those who survive the onslaught must deal with the effects of radiation poisoning afterward.

Takashi Shimura anchors this film. Surrounded by overacting young stars and giant latex monsters, Shimura brings a level of maturity and gravity to the situation that makes us believe in both it and him. The actor plays things straight, and paleontologist / wise man character keeps the proceedings anchored in reality when they could very easily descend into camp.

Gojiira. It's the first. It's the best. It's not to be missed. What were the odds that one man could star in two classics in the same year?

Goodbye, Mr. Chips

I read Robert Hilton's _Good-Bye, Mr. Chips_ about two years ago. I loved it so much that I didn't bother to seek out the film, feeling that I'd already experienced the story. I did myself a disservice by waiting so long.

Sam Wood's 1939 version of the story, starring Robert Donat and Greer Garson, is wonderful. Donat plays Mr. Chips over roughly a 60-year span, taking the character from fresh-faced young teacher to wise old dean without putting a single foot wrong. It's a masterful performance, the kind of thing that makes us realize just how powerful and wonderful an art form drama is. Greer Garson, in her first film role, plays a supporting character that breathes life into both Chips and the movie. Though she doesn't get much screen time, her presence energizes the whole proceedings - she's wonderful to watch.

Goodbye, Mr. Chips follows its titular character through the chapters of his life as a professor at a English Boy's School, the kind of institution that has become part of the British cultural landscape. On his first day, he lets the boys roll right over him, but it isn't long before those selfsame boys come to respect him and send their best wishes, along with their own boys, back to him. This isn't the saccharine stuff of a Dead Poets' Society, however. Chips is a real guy, a product of his time and place, as are his charges. He never really breaks out until he meets Garson on - well, I'll let you discover that element for yourself. The film is told in episodes, lifting moments from the Professor's life, and closes in the way we would all hope a life well lived would close. With grace, joy, and hope.

I just plain loved this movie. Had I seen it as a younger man, it may have inspired me to go into teaching. Who knows? Perhaps it still might.