Round One Resurrection Forecast, Films 76 - 80Hakuchi (Tezuka Macoto, 1999)
Lost to Nostalgia for the Countryside (verdict by edgar00)The second half of these first round resurrection forecasts begins with me finally starting to make decisions about films I didn't watch all the way to the end. I hate to do it, but if I ever want to catch up with this bracket, it's probably the only way. The good news, though, is that it wasn't quality that kept me from finishing
Hakuchi, only time. It's one of the most interesting of the first round losers to date, and edgar's general enthusiasm for it ("this movie was very much like the much-maligned
Southland Tales") makes me very comfortable resurrecting Tezuka's movie, despite having only watched the first half. I'm quoting edgar out of context, by the way. He wasn't very engaged by
Southland Tales (and I've never seen it), but the point still stands – namely, that
Hakuchi is weirdly good. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for darkly campy dystopias. I think, too, that
Hakuchi offers some great fodder for discussion (thematically, tonally), and I hope whoever watches it next for this bracket does a better job engaging with the film (along edgar's verdict) than I'm doing here.
No. 3 (Song Neung-han, 1997)
Lost to Talking Head (verdict by smirnoff)"I'm sorry you're going to have to watch this pixote." That's how smirnoff ended his verdict, though I didn't necessary remember that when I turned off
No. 3 at the thirty-eight minute mark and went to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I'd forgotten half of what I'd seen and figured it was just best to move on. From what I've viewed so far in this bracket, modern Korean cinema didn't really start to come of age until
Green Fish in 1997 (and that needed a resurrection to make it past the first round). The other twelve Korean films in the bracket from before 1998 haven't faired very well, with only four making it to the second round and just one (
A Petal) making it to the third. The movies from the early 90s that I've seen have generally been very safe and bland, written and filmed like mediocre television dramas. The mid-90s films have displayed an infusion of style seemingly borrowed from Japan and Hollywood, but also an infusion of emptiness. The boring earnestness of the earlier films gives way to a boring faux-coolness. Either way, these movies have been really underwhelming, and
No. 3 continues that trend. I mean, just look at the guy's hair in the screenshot. What was I supposed to do with that?
Green Snake (Tsui Hark, 1993)
Lost to The Tai-Chi Master (verdict by smirnoff)Umm... umm... umm... yeah. I guess maybe I shouldn't have tried to watch this one sober. It's just a wee bit crazy. I gave it half an hour, but Tsui never really gave me anything to latch on to or keep me watching. The mythic story was just ... crazy. The action was just ... crazy. The visuals were just ... crazy. To quote from smirnoff's review: "It's not so much unintelligible as it is hokey. Still... I'm willing to give this one credit for its fun and fantastic visuals. The giant snakes made of paper-mâché and monks shooting rainbows out of their foreheads may look absurd, but it's also quite amusing (at least for the first little while)." I wasn't quite so amused, I don't think, but the pressure of getting through all these films is maybe starting to get to me. Luckily,
Green Snake is on Instant Netflix now, so you can watch it yourself if you want, marvel at its insane brilliance, and then order me to give it a full look.
Keep Cool (Zhang Yimou, 1997)
Lost to Musuko (verdict by Melvil)I don't know what led the director of
Red Sorghum and
Raise the Red Lantern to try his hand at a hip, modern, goofy, romantic comedy, but I don't much care for it. I couldn't help but read this film through the lens of Zhang's earlier filmography, so
Keep Cool just feels like the work of a director trying overly hard to prove to the critics how modern and versatile he can be. (He'd have better luck a few years later with
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
edit: By which I probably mean
Hero.) The direction is
Keep Cool is very, very strained. Zhang employs a lot of jittery, hand-held, low-angled closeups and jump-cut editing, and it's largely just awkward. It's like he was watching the present-day sequence in
Good Men, Good Women and thought, ooh, I can do that. But
Keep Cool serves as a nice reminder that
Hou and
Zhang have different strengths as directors. Still, Melvil was quite kind to this film in his verdict, making me feel extra guilty giving up on
Keep Cool after just twenty minutes. If he wants me to give it a full look for resurrection, I definitely will.
Childhood Days (Shinoda Masahiro, 1990)
Lost to A Petal (verdict by Tequila)Childhood Days is the only movie of this round that I watched all the way through until the end. What really kept me engaged was the gap between how much I wanted to like the film (it's very well made, it's got the word childhood in the frickin' title, etc.) and how much I was actually liking the film (it's a little boring, a little too familiar). It worked pretty well for Tequila as a nostalgia piece, but for me the film was more
Lord of the Flies than
How Green Was My Valley or
Hope and Glory. I never teased out a full thesis, but I felt like the film was mediating darkly on the psyche of World War II-Japan through the children of the time, lamenting the cultural notions of might and right that fueled the country's military policy of the time. It's more interesting to me on paper than in how it plays out in the film. And the passing similarities to
Village of Dreams certainly don't help matters, not with that other film being more thematically elegant and dramatically engaging. There are, however, moments in
Childhood Days that make me question my whole understanding of the film (or lack thereof). At around the halfway point, for example, Shinji (our small, adorable protagonist) meekly says to Takeshi (the strong, alpha boy), "You're so kind to me, but... why...?" He can't even finish the question, but Takeshi knows he's asking why does he bully him when they seem to be friends at the same time. Takeshi responds by standing up, driving Shinji to the ground, and fighting back tears as he shouts, "Can't you see? Can't you see?" all the while driving Shinji's head into the floor. It's an odd moment to say the least. I was like, "Wait, is Takeshi in love with Shinji? When the f—k did that happen?" But little else in the film really supports any sort of homoerotic reading, so I don't know what's going on. Anyway, the point is, can I resurrect
Village of Dreams again?
Up next:
Dangan Runner,
Black Republic,
King of Chess,
Samurai Fiction, and
Sumo Do, Sumo Don't.
pixote