Category: Watch Movies!

Review: Miyazaki’s Tales from Earthsea

By Joe Bendel. Forget the Syfy (Sci-Fi) Channel’s Earthsea miniseries.  Ursula K. Le Guin, the author of the Earthsea novels and stories, would certainly prefer you did.  Her reaction to Gorō Miyazaki’s anime adaptation of her fantasy world has also been decidedly mixed, but arguably not as vehement.  In fact, Miyazaki’s film is not without merit, especially for those not intimately grounded in the Earthsea mythology.  Three years after its Japanese premiere, Miyazaki’s Tales from Earthsea, finally has its American theatrical release, now screening in select theaters courtesy of Walt Disney.

While the legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki long sought to adapt Le Guin’s Earthsea stories, it was his son Gorō, a relative new comer to animated filmmaking, who was assigned the project by Studio Ghibli, the anime house co-founded by Miyazaki the elder.  The result is a visually striking, if thematically familiar, fantasy.

Like the epics of Tolkien and Robert Jordan, Tales follows a young protagonist of destiny, Arren, a confused prince who has apparently just murdered his father, the king.  Fleeing in shame, he encounters the wizard Sparrowhawk on the road.  Like his late father, Sparrowhawk is concerned about the chaos sweeping over Earthsea.  The weather is unseasonable, crops are failing, livestock are dying, and two dragons were recently spotted off the coast fighting to the death – an unprecedented event in the Earthsea fantasy world.

From Miyazaki's "Tales from Earthsea."

Naturally, there is a Sauron-like evil overlord to contend with.  In this case, it is the androgynous sorcerer Cob, whose slave-trading minions are out to get Arren.  Indeed, Tales follows the standard epic fantasy template, but does so reasonably well.  There is also a pseudo-environmental motif of a world out of balance that should have appealed to Le Guin, but it is subtler and more nuanced than most “green” movie messages.

Miyazaki the younger is most successful creating an epic look in the film, employing watercolor backgrounds and hand-drawn animation for dramatic effect.  Indeed, his fantasy landscapes and cityscapes have an exotic beauty that elevates Tales well above standard issue anime.

Redubbed for an American audience (not an uncommon practice with anime distribution), the English language cast mostly ranges from adequate to fairly good.  Timothy Dalton (the under-appreciated James Bond) is the class of the field, lending his commanding voice to Sparrowhawk.  In contrast, Willem Dafoe’s work as Cob often sounds campy, in the wrong way.

The first Disney animated release to carry a PG-13 rating, Tales is similar in intensity (and subject matter) to Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated Lord of the Rings.  Richly crafted but predictable (as is the case with most contemporary fantasy fiction), Tales is better than genre diehards might have heard at their conventions.  It is currently screening in New York at the Angelika Film Center, and in Los Angeles at The Landmark.

Posted on August 20th, 2010 at 8:11am.

Rex Reed Calls Mao’s Last Dancer a “Masterpiece” + New Clip from Film

By Jason Apuzzo. We want to keep people pumped here at Libertas about seeing Bruce Beresford’s extraordinary and courageous new film, Mao’s Last Dancer.  We’ll be showing you a variety of clips from the film, including this excerpt above for today.  It features the lovely Joan Chen as dancer Li’s mother.  This clip really gives you a sense of what you’re in for with this film, in terms of how bold it is.  [Make sure to read Joe Bendel’s LFM Review of Mao’s Last Dancer.]

Mao’s Last Dancer opens this Friday (8/20) in select theaters nationwide.  Predictably, the film has already been banned in China due to its highly unflattering look at the Mao years.

Word also comes today that Rex Reed, one of our favorite critics here at Libertas, has written a rave review of Dancer, calling it a “masterpiece.” I’ve excerpted at length from Reed’s review below:

“As I depart for my annual August vacation, I leave you with a highly recommended magical experience you must not miss. A giant hit at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival, Mao’s Last Dancer, by the great Australian director Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy), is a feel-good film bursting with courage, energy and overwhelming inspiration … In the cherished tradition of heartbreaking movies about personal triumph against impossible odds, it is a combination of Billy Elliot and Rocky …

“At 19, granted unheard-of permission from Mao’s regime as one of the first exchange students to travel abroad, on a three-month student visa, in 1980, Li [the dancer and protagonist of the film] faces new hurdles. His parents expect him to bring honor to their humble station, his country expects him to represent China like a good, loyal and cynical comrade, drawing attention to Communism while trusting no one. Terrified and confused, he is the first boy from his province to travel to Beijing, much less the world beyond. Landing in the U.S. in a stiff, outdated, Chinese government-issued suit, he is like Dorothy arriving in Oz. Housed and guided by the kind but flamboyant Stevenson (wonderfully acted by the charismatic Bruce Greenwood), he takes little time overcoming culture shock, adjusting to alien Chinese restaurants and realizing that the Communist propaganda drummed into his head about America as a place of deprivation and darkness is a lot of hokum. The more he experiences of Texas cooking, kung fu movies, miraculous kitchen appliances, American hospitality and tennis shoes, the more distanced he grows from the ideals of Communism and the rigid dogma of Chairman Mao. (Against the rules of the Cultural Revolution, he also discovers the thrill of admiring political defectors like Nureyev and Baryshnikov without fear of arrest while watching forbidden tapes.) Capitalism, he confesses, is groovy …

“Distilling so much drama and turmoil into two hours is not easy, but by the time the film completes Li’s long and arduous journey, in 1986, when his parents are finally allowed to fly to the U.S. to see him dance for the first time, you will marvel at how much is accomplished. I predict the highly charged emotional finale will leave you cheering … Mao’s Last Dancer is a masterpiece.”

Click here for the entirety of Reed’s review.

Posted on August 19th, 2010 at 12:32pm.

Nikita Ads Called Too Sexy; Attacking the CIA? No Problem!

Too racy?

By Jason Apuzzo. We reported recently here at Libertas about how the CW’s reboot of the Nikita franchise will be making the CIA the villains of the piece.  So far as we’re aware, we’re the only site currently making a fuss over this.

Variety (registration required) is now reporting today that the show is currently turning heads for a different reason – namely, the raciness of it’s advertising.

At Libertas, of course, we dive right in to such controversies.

As I mentioned in my earlier post about this show, what alerted me to this show to begin with was a gigantic, eye-popping billboard of star Maggie Q slapped up against a building here in LA.  The poster was the already quite racy one of her in a red dress (see here).  Now, apparently, the people at CW are trying to get huge billboards of Maggie Q in leather and tattoos (see left) into major markets like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles – and even here in LA not everybody’s going along with it.

Let me begin by stating the obvious: it would be spectacularly hypocritical of me to complain about the sexiness of this show’s advertising, given our regular featuring of pin-ups here at Libertas.  On the contrary: we love this sort of thing, as it speaks to the sort of freedoms we enjoy here in the West that are routinely frowned upon in totalitarian societies (both of the Islamo-fascist and communist variety) elsewhere in the world.

Plus, the girls look cute – which should be reason enough.

Cheerleaders.

With that said, even I think that putting up 50ft. billboards of Ms. Q in leather and tattoos in public places like malls, where families and children may gather, is probably a bit much.  And for safety reasons, I don’t think it’s too good of an idea to put these billboards near freeways.  The one of her in the red dress (see here) is more than enough to get the point across.

What bothers me more is that this new show apparently goes The Full Stallone in taking a nasty swipe at the CIA.  Why aren’t people more bothered by this?  Let me put it this way: why are we so prudish about the sex component to this series, yet so completely untroubled by what the show is depicting in terms of our own government?

Attacking our intelligence services is such a terrible idea at this point in time, as those services struggle under the combined weight of low morale, rampant anti-Americanism overseas and budget cutbacks.  And here’s another problem: shows like this do, eventually, get syndicated in foreign markets … and what kind of effect do you think they have, particularly among those already inclined toward hating America?  [Foreign distribution rights to Nikita have already been sold to the UK and Australia.]

Much as with The Expendables, I really wanted to like this show.  It had the potential of being a kind of sexed-up version of 24 – or a weekly Salt, if you will – and in fact that’s what the show should have been.  Instead, they had to make America’s intelligence services into the enemy, into ruthless murderers bent on assassination.  What a shame.

The only silver lining here, I suppose, is that the CW is giving us a better-looking show this fall called Hellcats.  The show is apparently based on the book, Cheer: Inside the Secret World of College Cheerleaders.  I’ve put the trailer for the show below.  This cheeky comedy-drama’s premise is described this way:

Hellcats revolves around Marti, a pre-law college student from the wrong side of the tracks. When budget cutbacks and her mother’s constant carelessness cause her to lose her scholarship, she joins the Hellcats, the college’s competitive cheerleading team.

Perfect!  A series about a young gal forced into a life of cheerleading due to tragic circumstances.  [Is Roger Corman running this network?]  Between the new terrorist-fighting Hawaii Five-O and this, I think we’re set now.

Posted on August 19th, 2010 at 11:33am.

Review: Mao’s Last Dancer & Artistic Freedom

By Joe Bendel. For fifty-plus years, Mainland China’s Communist government has experienced bitter factional rivalries and instituted enormously destructive campaigns for ideological purity.  While the pendulum has swung back and forth from relative stability to institutionalized insanity, it has remained an authoritarian state where artistic freedom is simply impossible.  That is why twenty year-old ballet dancer Li Cunxin defected to America in the early 1980’s.  It was a bold decision that would define Li’s bestselling memoir and Oscar-nominated director Bruce Beresford’s subsequent big-screen adaptation, Mao’s Last Dancer, which opens this Friday (8/20) in select theaters nationwide.

As a young boy, Li was slight but flexible as enough to be accepted at Madame Mao’s ballet academy.  Diligently training to build his strength, his natural talent blossomed -even in the didactic productions foisted on the academy by their ideologue patron.

Eventually Li was entrusted to study with the Houston Ballet as part of a cultural exchange program.  Primed to expect unspeakable misery, Li slowly discovers America is not as he was led to believe.  Acclimating to the new environment, he actually finds he dances better in the land of class enemies because he “feels freer.”  He also falls in love with Elizabeth Mackey, an aspiring dancer.  Then his life really starts to change.

Li indeed decides to defect, news the Chinese government does not happily receive when he ill-advisedly delivers it in-person.  In fact, they forcibly detain him in the Consulate, with the intention of whisking him out of the country against his will.  However, Li’s friends refuse to leave quietly (fortunately Texans can be an unruly lot), precipitating an international incident.

Dancer is a truly inspiring crowd-pleaser of a film, but it is not an overly-sanitized or conveniently simplistic reduction of a complex, real life story.  In fact, the guilt-wracked Li, fearing dreadful repercussions for his family, frequently quarrels with Mackey, eventually even divorcing her.  Yet, as a result, Li emerges as a flesh-and-blood human being.  We can also forgive the film for indulging in its manipulative coda, having more or less earned its triumphant freeze frame.

As wildly improbable as it might sound, much of Dancer was shot on-location in China.  Reportedly, once shooting was underway, the authorities began demanding changes to the script, but to his credit, Beresford rebuffed them.  As a result, there are indeed scenes of Madame Mao (who remains an official non-person in China), played by a truly eerie dead-ringer for the Gang of Four leader.  We also watch as Li’s mentor at the academy is purged for perceived ideological offenses, such as teaching the techniques of counter-revolutionary defectors like Nureyev and Baryshnikov.  (Granted, the film also seems to imply contemporary China may be loosening up, at least to an extent.)

Amanda Schull & Chi Cao.

Perhaps Dancer’s greatest challenge was casting credible dancers for its key leads roles.  Again, fortune smiled with the discovery of the considerable acting chops of Chi Cao (currently Principal Dancer with the Birmingham Royal Ballet) and Chengwu Guo (a member of the Australian Ballet) as the adult and teen-aged Li, respectively.  Both prove to be charismatic performers, with Chengwu making a surprisingly strong impression, even with his limited screen time.  (Hopefully, they will both be allowed to return home, despite their participation in the film.)

Dancer also boasts two Twin Peaks alumns – including Kyle MacLachlan, making the most of a small supporting role as crafty immigration attorney Charles Foster.  It is Joan Chen who really delivers the film’s emotional punch though, as Li’s spirited mother Niang.  Even thoroughly glammed down for the role, she still remains a radiant beauty.

Dancer is a well-rounded, fully satisfying bio-picture.  The product of Australian filmmakers, it refreshingly refrains from kneejerk political cheap shots, even implying then Vice President Bush played an important role securing Li’s freedom.  It also vividly captures Li’s passion for dance, which is the fundamental cause of nearly every event that unfolds in the film.  Emotionally engaging and politically astute, Dancer opens this Friday (8/20) in select theaters nationwide.

Posted on August 18th, 2010 at 11:58am.

Review: Cairo Time

By Patricia Ducey. Time in Cairo is slow. Very slow. Glances are exchanged. Background concertos are heard. Sparks, however, are not ignited, ever, between Juliette (Patricia Clarkson), an American magazine editor and Tareq (Alexander Siddig of Syriana), her supposed Romeo in Cairo Time.

This is not Shakespeare, or even English Patient (a great weepy if ever there was one). This is one nuanced love affair.

Juliette and Tareq represent archetypes of the East and West, yet they are actually more alike than different: both inhabit internationalist circles – Tareq just recently retired from the U.N., where he came to know Juliet’s husband (a UN operative in Gaza), and Juliet herself a feminist women’s magazine editor. Not much of a culture clash here. At a few points in the film Tareq lightly (and rightly) scolds Juliet for her easy outrage over a few social problems in Egypt. This hints at further story is to come, perhaps a real discussion of custom and culture, but nothing develops. (The Last King of Scotland, by contrast, brilliantly portrayed the deadly consequences of feckless liberalism in its main character.)

Juliette arrives in Cairo to await her husband’s arrival from Gaza so they can enjoy a long dreamed of vacation together. He is delayed, though, by trouble in the refugee camp he manages – so he asks his old friend Tareq to see after his wife until he can join her. Juliette seems anxious, tentative and tongue-tied from the start – odd behavior for a successful magazine editor. We wonder why – middle age crisis, bad marriage, illness? – but we never find out. She loves her husband, children, and her job. Tareq tries to draw her out but she rebuffs him. Later, though, she mystifyingly shows up at his men-only coffeehouse to visit him – not once but twice.

This fog of ambiguity never clears, and slows the movie down to a crawl. Juliette wanders the streets alone, inexplicably tossing aside her husband’s warnings about women traveling alone. Naïve, self-destructive? One can only ponder. This behavior does reveal the only people who seem to know who they are, sadly: the bands of leering men on the Cairo streets who consider her, a Western woman alone on the street, as something south of “available.”

Juliette finally takes action after her husband is delayed again and again. She hops a bus to the border and to Gaza to find him, but the Egyptian police stop the bus and send her back to the hotel; they realize the situation in Gaza is dangerous.  As Juliette follows the police, her seatmate – a young Egyptian woman – stuffs an envelope into Juliette’s hands and implores her to deliver it to her lover back in Cairo. Again, hints at a story: tension, mixed up in politics, danger – but this too goes nowhere. She gives the letter to the young woman’s lover.

Non-doomed lovers.

The narrative of any melodrama demands some rupture of the moral code. English Patient’s doomed love story was played out on the canvas of a World War, when the old world order was collapsing in England and the Middle East. The lovers in English Patient violated every norm of class, race, gender and sexual orientation and died in agony for their transgressions. Patricia Clarkson’s protagonist, on the other hand, is a modern Western woman and thus is left with no moral code to rupture whatsoever. What will she lose if she betrays her husband, what would happen if she did betray him with Tareq? Not much. Tareq is an Egyptian Muslim who is kind of secular, kind of not. We are not quite sure what his moral code is either, or if he has one. Perhaps this is why the greatest doomed love stories take place at least pre-1950.

Canadian writer/director Ruba Nadda has underwritten both the characters and the story. The characters’ physicality – walking, talking, eye gazing, walking, talking – as well as their sparse dialogue reveal little. Clarkson and Siddig do their best but have little to work with.

My inner writer asks, what do these characters want? Apparently not each other. Or at least not very much. Perhaps Juliette will remain faithful to her husband, perhaps not, but it is of no real import to a woman in the grips of such anomie. Tareq was content pre-Juliette and is content post-Juliette.  I am not asking for these characters to outrun a fireball or gun down CIA assassins – I just want to know why their lives and loves matter.

Posted on August 10th, 2010 at 9:36am.

DocuWeeks LA: LFM Reviews My Perestroika & Summer Pasture

By Joe Bendel. Probably no division of the Academy Awards has more byzantine rules than the documentary wing.  Their mandated seven day theatrical runs in both New York and Los Angeles can be difficult hurdles for nonfiction filmmakers to clear.  However, every selection of the 2010 DocuWeeks will be officially Oscar eligible once they finish their week long runs at the ArcLight and IFC Film Centers.  As is seemingly the case with every documentary series, this year’s DocuWeeks is a mixed bag, but two films in particular offer intriguingly intimate glimpses into lives of ordinary individuals living a world away from the arthouse cinema scene.

Even though he was badly hung-over, he knew there was a national crisis.  Though the bleary-eyed Russian did not know at the time the hard-line Communist coup had deposed Mikhail Gorbachev, he saw that Swan Lake was the only program on television.  For some reason, the Soviets always broadcasted the Tchaikovsky ballet during periods of internal turmoil.  It is telling details like this that connect the personal to the grandly historical in Robin Hessman’s My Perestroika, which screened earlier this year at New Directors/New Films.

A Russophile in high school, Hessman was working for LENFILM, the Soviet film agency based in what was then Leningrad, at the time of the infamous coup.  Through her time working and studying in Russia, Hessman developed a keen appreciation for the stoic nobility of average Russian citizens, which is clearly reflected in Perestroika.  Using five former classmates as representative everymen, Hessman subjectively presents the last forty-some years of Russian and Soviet history through their reminiscences and home movies.

Yes, there is a certain nostalgia for their childhood years lived under the yoke of Soviet tyranny.  However, they are really wistful for their lost innocence rather than the supposed virtues of the Brezhnev era.  As becomes clear in their interviews, as the Perestroika generation came of age, it also became quickly disillusioned.

Still, not all of the film’s lead voices are doing badly.  An entrepreneur with a small chain of high-end men’s clothing stores, Andrei has done quite well for himself.  He is also the most vocal critic of the current Putin regime.  While none of the five have led exceptional lives, Hessman had the good fortune to find participants who had been somewhat in the vicinity of great events.  Indeed, the experiences of Perestroika’s subjects defy easy classification, at various times lending credence to wide array of political interpretations (though it is hard to find much in the film to justify any faith in Putin’s puppet government).

—

Tibet is also changing drastically, which is exactly what China wants.  For instance, it has become increasingly difficult for Tibetans not fluent in Chinese to conduct business transactions.  Such are the challenges facing a young nomadic family in Tibet’s eastern Kham region as presented in Summer Pastures, an intimate new documentary from Lynn True and Nelson Walker (with co-director Tsering Perlo), also currently screening as part of DocuWeeks LA.

In many ways, Locho and Yama are much like any other parents you would find anywhere else on Earth.  Their greatest hope is for their daughter to have greater opportunities in her life than have been available for them.  However, their daily chores are far removed from those western audiences will be familiar with, including the daily spreading and drying of manure for fuel that starts Yama’s daily routine.  It is a hardscrabble life, but it is what they have always known.

Unfortunately, it is not clear whether the nomads’ way of life will be sustainable much longer.  Inflation constantly drives up the price of their supplies, while they seem to have less to show for their labors.  Adding further uncertainty, Yama suffers from a persistent heart ailment, yet she keeps working like an ox – in contrast to Locho, who often seems like an overgrown kid herding their livestock.

Even in their remote corner of Tibet, Locho and Yama feel the impact of great macro forces.  However, True and Walker focus their sites on their deeply personal family drama, (somewhat timidly avoiding the occupying Chinese elephant in the room).  Yet by conveying such a strong sense of the nomadic couple’s personalities and relationship dynamics, Pasture will have most viewers rooting for this family as the film unfolds.

Pasture forgoes filmmaker commentary, instead capturing the nomads’ lives unfiltered, in a style not incompatible with that of Digital Generation Chinese independent filmmakers.  Though it requires some patience, it is certainly rewarding to meet Yama and Locho, whose spirit and resiliency the filmmakers capture quite vividly.  Both Pasture and Perestroika are difficult films to pigeon hole, but they have more merit than most docs released this year.  They are currently screening in Los Angeles, as DocuWeeks continues at the ArcLight.

Posted on August 9th, 2010 at 9:32am.