YI YI

This extraordinary Taiwanese epic length family drama that spans the everyday struggles of three generations of a very colorful middle class family kicks off with a wedding and ends three hours later with a funeral.  The chaos of the wedding with the photo of the bride and groom hung upside down and the reception invaded by the screaming jilted ex girlfriend sets the perfect pace for this fascinating saga.

The Yang family’s matriarch has a stroke and goes into a coma and the family takes it in turns to talk to her to help her regain consciousness.  Son-in-law NJ is an electronics executive in a company which is looking for a financial angel (or mug) to rescue it from teetering into bankruptcy.  His wife Min Min has her own busy career and she realizes that when it comes to her turn she has nothing to say to her comatose mother and eventually seeks flees the apartment altogether to take refuge in the Temple to ‘find herself’.  Then there’s Ting Ting their teenage daughter too who almost strays and loses her virginity to her best friend’s boyfriend, a skinny kid called Fatty (!). But its little Yang Yang the 8 year old son who is left to his own devices most of the time who shows most indications that he will figure the bigger picture of life out possibly before the rest of his family.

At the wedding NJ runs into the first big love of his life who he has not seen for 20 years since he stood her up.  There is obviously still a great deal of attraction on both their parts, and that kind of throws NJ off course somewhat.

It takes all of this well-meaning thoroughly decent family some time to realize that not only what each of them had been thinking that they were missing out on wasn't really exactly as they imagined it to be.  And the life that they had ended up was really the one that they would choose if they did in fact start all over again.

Edward Yang’s remarkable movie that earned him the top Director’s Award at Cannes Film Festival in 2000 and countless other awards almost seems like a soap-opera at times yet it is far less melodramatic and hysterical than that, and the plot developments are  very real indeed. The movie engages your complete attention from the start and never lets you down at all.

If Mr Yang has a ‘message’ in the film, then it’s probably the one that he uses his 8-year-old namesake to  say to his father ‘ I cant see what you see, and you cant see what I see.  So how can we know more than half the truth?' Exactly.

When ‘Fatty’ takes Ting Ting out to the cinema on their first date, he tells her ‘movies don't resemble the world we live in, they expand it.’  When they are as good as this they do just that, and more.

It took me some time to get around to seeing this one , I would recommend that you put it on your Netflix right now. 


★★★★★★★★

CIRCUS ROSAIRE

Filmmaker Robyn Bailey’s documentary from 2007 plays witness to the sad tale of this ninth generation family of animal trainers as they struggle with the demise of traditional family circuses. British-born wheel-chair bound octogenarian Derek Rosaire Snr presides over his extended family as they scramble to practice their crafts playing any gigs that they can get for their acts.  Where once their sold-out audiences would have included royalty and US Presidents they are now hard pressed to find very small crowds in sporadic employment in state fairs and carnivals.

Each winter all the various branches of the family retire to their ‘ranch’ in Florida to hone up on their performances and lick their metaphorical wounds.  Some train bears, others tigers, one lot work with dogs and horses etc and the eldest daughter works the countries only surviving chimpanzee act.  The Rosaires come over as a charismatic and resilient bunch full of life and defiantly happy despite their financial struggles. Most importantly what Ms. Bailey has captured in the 4 years that she filmed them, is their undeniable love for the animals that they have reared or rescued and are equal, if not better, members of their own families, just like their children.

Bailey includes several of the protesters that picket every animal act these days, but she balances it with a spirited defense from the Rosaires in such a way that you fall wholeheartedly into their camp.

There can be no doubt that this is the end of an era but for such devoted caring professionals like this family, its extremely sad. I will fess to maybe being a tad over-sympathetic to their cause as the tradition of going to a really good circus (in my case 'Bertram Mills') was an annual Christmas treat that was extended even to us in the orphanage I grew up.  I have such happy memories of those shows, I just hope the animals did too.

P.S. I think that’s enough circuses for one weeK BUT if you do want more check out CIRCO an immensely  sad documentary about a charming wee family circus trying to keep itself on the road in Mexico that I blogged last summer : and still a favorite of mine.


★★★★★★★

CIRKUS COLUMBIA

As movie opens Divko, a cranky old man, is driving through some countryside whilst arguing with Azra a pretty young girl who is trying to deal with a cat who is in a basket on her lap and continually throwing up. Things are not what they initially seem as the girl is not his daughter but his pretty new trophy fiancé, and the real love of his life is the cat.

The year is 1991, the place is Bosnia-Herzegovina on the brink of war and Divko is returning home after a 20-year exile in Germany to re-claim his house and his son and get a divorce from the wife he had abruptly abandoned.  There is one obstacle in his plan but the fact that his wife still lives in the house is easily resolved by his cousin. whose ascent to Mayor he has funded, and who now uses his official power to have the wife evicted.

In this wonderful black comedy, which teeters on being a farce at times, Divko proves that throwing huge amounts of money around can buy you anything in a town that is in such disarray.  After kicking his wife out of her home, he buys up the hairdressing salon where she works, and has almost the entire population looking out for his cat when it goes missing in the hope of netting the substantial reward.

To be honest you have to know a tad more about the complexities of how the former Yugoslavia fell apart than most of us know to get the full drift of all the different factions of militia, and who is actually fighting whom and for what.  But that said the human element of wanting to avoid politics that people simply could not relate too and did not want to be a part of any more, made their wish to escape to a neighboring country to sit it out for the duration, seem like a really good idea. And there were some interesting side plots too, such as Martin losing his virginity to his new stepmom, which occasionally detracted one slightly from the impeding war.

The ending however is very sweet, and totally unexpected, and rounded off this very human take on a very difficult period before Serbia was born.

Written and directed by Danuis Tanovic who won the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar for ‘No Mans-Land’ in 2002. And starring Miki Manojloviic with his perfect hangdog face as Divko (you may recognize Mr Manojloviic from the wee but wonderful ‘Irena Palm’ where he played Marianne Faithful’s boss in the sex-shop)

P. S. I’m on a ‘circus’ movie theme right now, but the one in this is more of a carousel and is only featured in the very last shot.  Very misleading title!

★★★★★★★★

ALBERT NOBBS

There is an overwhelming sense of sadness that strikes from the very first moment we catch sight of Albert Nobbs going about his duties with such unsmiling exactitude in the posh Dublin Hotel where he works as a Butler cum Waiter.  It's sometime in the late 19^th Century and Albert has been working in the Hotel since he arrived as a 14 year old 40 years ago. In these depressed economic times Albert has lived with the secret that he is actually a woman in disguise because it is the only way that he/she can get any economic security.  As the story slowly unfolds we see that the pain that he lives with as a result of his subterfuge is a very high price to pay.

One day the Hotel is being repainted by Hector and so Mrs. Baker the owner insists that he bunks in with Albert overnight. It is inevitable that even with his cunning that Hector will spot Albert’s true gender, but as it turns out, he too is also a woman in disguise.  In Hector’s case the reasons are however emotional and sexual, as he has set up home with a wife that he clearly loves.

Hector’s supreme confidence is an eye-opener to Albert who starts to think of some possibilities he would never have ever even dared dreamed off before.  He has been hoarding away every single penny of his tips under his bedroom floorboards so that he can one day leave the Hotel and open a wee Tobacconist Store of his own. Now he feels emboldened to ask Helen, one of the hotel maids, to ‘step out’ with him and even consider marriage.  Helen however wants more than a business proposal but some romance too (that she is already getting with the hot maintenance man). Helen will however prove to be the undoing of him yet.

This was very much Glenn Close’s movie in every sense of the word.  She first played Albert in a stage play back in the 80’s and has been trying to bring it to the screen since then, and she even co-wrote the script. Both she and co-star Janet McTeer deservedly garnered Oscar nominations for their performances, and they also had a most impressive cast of supporting actors, Mia Wasikowska, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Aaron Johnson, Brendon Gleeson, Brenda Fricker & Pauline Collins

This extremely likable movie on a very touching topic is one that engages you from the first scene, and as you get connected to the characters, particularly Albert and Hector, you really will the story to succeed.  And it does, almost.  Despite the passion that Glen Close has invested in playing Albert with great sympathy and credulity, and the even more stunning turn that Janet McTeer does imbuing such depth into Hector, there is still this overriding feeling that this fascinating movie somehow failed to live up to its full potential.  It was still very good, but it had promised to be great.


★★★★★★★★

THE LAST CIRCUS

I am still reeling from the visual assault of what must easily rank as one of the most demented movies I have ever watched.  And also so excessively violent in such a way that I doubt I will get much sleep tonight, or even the rest of the week!

Writer/Director Alex de la Igesia’s parable starts in a Civil War-wracked Spain in 1937 at a local Circus when the performance is interrupted by the Militia who forcibly recruit every able-bodied man into the fight against Franco’s rebel forces who are hot on their heels.  They include the ‘Happy Clown’ who is still decked out in his costume and who takes out a whole battalion practically single handled with his machete. He is captured and killed and Javier his young son vows to avenge his death.

Fast forward to 1973 and Javier is now a depressed rather tubby adult who joins a moth-eaten ragbag of a Circus as The Sad Clown.  He plays the sidekick to Sergio a sadistic violent lunatic bully who out of the Ring gets into drunken rages every night and beats Natalia his girlfriend to a pulp.  Javier falls for her and vows to rescue her from Sergio her tormentor in the same way that the humanitarians fought the dictator Franco to save Spain.

From here the plot gets so surreal its hard to follow let alone describe: lets just say that it is totally bizarre and is essentially a mix of sex with bloody gore.

De la Igesia must posses one sick mind to have written this but the redeeming factor that makes it (so?) watchable is his fantastical imagination that led him to film this so stunningly with such vividness and all at such a manic and exciting pace that you end up feeling almost exhausted as poor Javier up on the screen.

Its over-the-top mayhem and despite my intrepidation I still sat transfixed until the very end. albeit I covered my eyes for the really bloody scenes as is my want.  The movie has been compared in some quarters to Guillermo del Toro’s’ brilliant Oscar Winning 'Pan’s Labyrinth', and whilst it is not in the same class, I could comfortable say they if you liked the former then you will probably like this one too.  You’ll probably never want to go to another Circus as long as you live though!


★★★★★★★★

THE LIE

Lonnie seems to continually feel sorry for himself.   He works editing inane TV commercials, a job he hates and in which he is barely tolerated by his colleagues, whilst his wife Clover finishes law school.  The couple in their late 20’s want to live a laid back stoner So Cal life but they have a got a 6-month-old daughter whom they are still adjusting their lives around, and this all leaves precious little time for ‘chillaxin'. Let alone for Lonnie to be making music with his old pot-smoking pal Tank who still lives in a trailer at the beach.

One day Lonnie simply can't bring himself to go into work at all, and using the baby as an excuse calls his irritated boss, and then skips off and and has a day all to himself. The next morning he does the same thing again but when pushed by the boss for a valid reason for his extended absence he blurts out a big whopper of a lie. This buys him a few more days' freedom, as well as outpourings of support from his hitherto distant co-workers, but it is obvious that this big lie is sure to explode in his face when discovered.

This very unfunny comedic drama is too irritating and implausible to be liked.  Lonnie is a self-indulgent whiner who wants it all without working for it.  His idea of balancing the emotional and economic demands of family life and staying true to one’s ordeals is just sitting around getting stoned and making really bad music. And then when he is forced to fess up to  his  inexcusable and despicable lie to his well-meaning and hard working wife, she full of middle class angst, just simply forgives him!

I will confess to a personal hang-up to such blatant dishonesty, which is a result of my strict Methodist upbringing and having a mother who was at best ‘economical with the truth’.  And this is compounded by the whole basis of the one in this story, which should never be the subject for any sort of fib!

Debut directing feature for actor Joshua Leonard (Blair Witch Project) who also co-wrote it (from what I read was originally a well-written short story). and he starred in it as well.  My advice to Mr Leonard would be to stick to acting in the future (he was also in Vera Farmiga's excellent 'Higher Ground'), and my advice to you if I have to be totally truthful (and I do!) is skip this one.  Maybe smoke a joint yourself, it will be much more fun than Lonnie and Tank doing it.


★★★★

FROM PRADA TO NADA

When the NY Times reviewed this movie when it hit the Big Screens back in Jan 2011, they hated the title.  Funny that, cos it's the only thing I actually liked about it!    Especially as it so neatly sums up my very worse nightmare scenario for my own future.  LOL

The plot of this trite comedy is (very very loosely) based on Jane Austin’s Sense & Sensibility, but when the father’s death forces Nora and Mary Dominguez to leave the family mansion, they don’t land up  in an English country cottage but into their Aunt’s house/illegal sewing workshop in East L.A. ‘the hood’.

Unlike nearly all the other movies I sit through, this one really had no redeeming features at all.  From the unfortunate casting with the two actresses playing the sisters having absolutely no connecting factor at all, to a plot full of ethnic stereotypes that were saddled with a grossly unfunny script etc.

It’s the film making debut of Angel Gracia who evidently usually makes music videos and commercials, and maybe he should have made this just 3 minutes long too. 

Lesson learnt?  Having a silly cute title is not enough reason to see a movie.   Stick to Emma Thompson’s Oscar winning original.  Or better still put the $10 admission money towards a new Prada Bag!

LOVELY MAN

In the opening scenes of this wee Indonesian drama we see Cahaya a 19-year-old devout Muslim young woman, nervously sitting by herself on a train.  It turns out that she is on her way from the suburbs where she lives alone with her mother, to go to Jakata the capital to find her father who she has not seen since she was four years old.  She is clutching just a few rupiah, and a scrap of paper that has an address the only clue as to where  she may find him in city.

She somehow manages to locate the right apartment building but all her enquires for Mr Saiful are met with blank stares, until one of the neighbors figures out that she means 'Ipuy', and they direct her to the area where they say he works.  Cahaya is baffled as this turns out to be just a bridge and has neither any offices nor shops even close by.  When she finally locates her father ‘Ipuy’ she finds a transvestite prostitute plying her trade on the streets with all the other ‘working girls’.

For both daughter and father discovering each other like this is a bitter shock. Initially it looks like that their worlds are so far apart that there is absolutely no way that they can even start to redeem any sort of paternal relationship, but that’s when this wee drama really comes in to its own.  As the pair are forced to spend some time together they very slowly start to have their deep rooted perceptions of each other’s lives shaken up. As the night draws on and the two strangers learn to open up and be honest with each other, against all odds they actually start bonding.

It turns out that Cahaya has her own dark secret that Ipuy persuades her to come clean with her mother as he has made it clear that this reunion of theirs is strictly a one time only event.  Its not that he doesn't care for his daughter but he is already in trouble with some gangsters who want him to return money he stole, the same money he gives to Cahaya to take back home to pay for College.  Its not said, but definitely implied, that when the mob later catch up with him, it will all end badly for him.

This essentially two handed piece is layered so beautifully and is a delightful fresh take on a father and daughter relationship. It primarily succeeds so well because of the fine nuanced performance by award winning Asian actor Donny Damara as Ipuy who pitches his convincing take of a transvestite hooker with such subtlety that so cleverly avoids all the stereotypical clichés .  

A wee gem that is slowly doing the Festival circuit and is definitely worth looking out for.


★★★★★★★★

DARK SHADOWS

Dark Shadows looks so wonderful on the screen as Director Tim Burton uses his regular Oscar winning alumni: Rick Heinrick's sets and Colleen Attwood‘s costumes its just a shame that he didn't give his starring actors a better movie to be in, and us a better one to watch.  As a Brit I have no idea if Mr Burton was trying too hard to be faithful to the cult hit daytime series that ran on US TV from 1966 to 1971, or just trying too hard period. The result is a somewhat disappointing shambles of a gothic horror comedy movie that instead of provoking fear in us or making us laugh out loud, just makes for the occasional titter, but more often than not, a very long yawn.

In case you don't know the plot: in 1760, Barnabas who’s a wealthy playboy in the small town in Maine that his family created, breaks the heart of Angelique a servant girl who happens to be a witch. After Barnabas rejects her, she kills his parents in revenge and curses his family. Angelique, in an act of jealousy, puts a spell on his lover Josette du Pres which forces her to leap to her death from a nearby cliff called Widow's Peak. Barnabas jumps after her over the cliff to kill himself, but Angelique has already turned him into a vampire before he reaches the bottom. Soon after she convinces the townspeople that as he is now a vampire they should capture him and bury him alive in a chained coffin in the woods.

Flash forward to 1972, and an assorted bunch of      Barnabas’s weird ancestors are still living in the family mansion along with an alcoholic psychiatrist who had been hired to help David the youngest deal with his demons, but she spends most of her time with own her demons in a bottle. Barnabas is accidently resurrected and comes to rescue the family and save their dwindling fortune as their business has been almost ran out of town by Angelique who is still doing her hocus pocus but this time from a very fancy sports car she spirits around in.

Oh yes, Josette re-appears too in the shape of the family nanny, but she, Barnabas, and the family have to go through hell and back if they are ever to have any chance to break the centuries old curse and live happily ever after.

A very young looking Johnny Depp in Michael Jackson make-up camps up the role of Barnabas evoking a few laughs but mainly bewilderment. His highly mannered performance is a tad too nuanced this time around.  Like his take on Captain Sparrow in the Pirate movie franchise : great fun at first but wearing thin by the second installment. Yet on the other hand Miss Bonham-Carter in her ridiculous drunken role wearing her fiery red drag queen wig was the best thing on the screen.  There are subtle shades of camp that do work.

By the time the tiresome extended ‘fight’ scene between the vampires happened towards the movie's end I had completely lost my patience in exactly the same way that Mr Burton had already lost the plot, and I just couldnt wait for the final credits to hit the screen 

I will admit that I started watching this trying to keep awake because I had been travelling the day before, but by the end it was a real battle not to fall into a deep sleep as I just hankered after my bed and sweet dreams.

★★★★★

THE SONG OF SPARROWS

Karim is the chief wrangler on an ostrich farm in the countryside outside of Tehran and one day one of his charges escapes which costs Karim his job.  He’s an impoverished but happy family man who lives with his wife and three children in their cluttered house in a small village.  A devoted husband and a good father, and like all their neighbors the family share when they have plenty and lend a helping hand where needed.

Now unemployed Karim travels to the city with the hope of replacing his daughters broken hearing aid, and even though is he distressed when he discovers the enormous cost, he  is still determined to find the money somehow.  As he sits thinking about his lot before starting the journey home a businessman shouting into his cell phone orders to take him to his next appointment as he mistakes him for a motorcycle taxi driver.  When the man pays him well for the short ride, Karim realizes that if he did this as a full time job, he could make much more money than his old job. And maybe enough to get the new hearing aid too.

As well as work the city provides Karem, an avid junk collector, with a whole host of building sites that he can salvage unwanted scrap that to re-cycle into useful items to furnish his home.  And the taxi-ing job starts off well but as he starts to get used to how easy his new income is he takes on a job to deliver a refrigerator, and when he loses his way, he keeps the fridge and starts losing his natural honesty.  The once happy man is now perpetually irritated and downright mean to his family and his neighbors.

It takes a bad accident at home that lays him up and means that his wife takes charge of the family, aided by the children, that restores some values back into their lives again.

Filmmaker Majid Majidi‘s simplistic and somewhat sentimental movie visually provides a stark contrast  from some dramatically imposing open landscapes with the ugly crowded cityscapes.  In this moral fable of his, it casts the latter as a place where greed is everywhere and is the sole reason why people (like Karim) are persuaded to forsake both their faith and their purpose.

The characters are totally engaging which does balance out the occasional weakness in the narrative. Karim is especially likeable, so much so that we can even overlook that this 40+ father is played by  Iranian actor Reza Naji who's 66.

This was Iran’s Official Entry for Best Foreign Picture Oscar in 2008 and as it is a beautifully crafted gentle and funny movie, I’m so glad that I finally got to see it.


★★★★★★★★

LIFE, ABOVE ALL

As the film opens 12-year-old Chandra is seen sitting quietly waiting in an office.  She is asked if she is expecting Jonah her stepfather to show, but he evidently is drunk and out with a whore.  Lillian her mother is at home immobilized by grief and illness, and as there is no other adult around, then Chandra has to go ahead and select the coffin for her baby sister who has just died. It is no task at all for a young girl, but it sets the scene for what this remarkable child has to face up and deal with.

Suspicion in the neighborhood of this Johannesburg suburb is that her family has been struck by AIDS even though everyone is in such morbid fear of the disease that it is taboo to even mention it, let alone acknowledge it's existence.   As Lillian gets sicker. Mrs. Tafa a bossy wealthy neighbor insists in getting a witchcraft seer to cast the demons out.  When she states that the only way is for Lillian to go back to her home village to be cured, it's a coded way of telling her to die away from the town so as not to bring disgrace to the family.

Jonah has been absent for some months but when he is dragged back home it is clear that he is not just drunk this time but very sick indeed.  No one will help him and they leave him just lying in the road, presumably to die.

Chandra’s best friend Esther is considered a bad influence on her, but it turns out that because both her parents had died (of AIDS) and she was left fending for herself, the 12 year old had started offering sexual favors at the truck stop just to survive. And this is how she eventually gets raped by an HIV+ man and is then thrown into a roadside ditch to die.  The Police who discovered her wont help, and nor will the Hospital Doctors.  But Chandra does, especially as now she has worked out that her own mother has been infected too.

She’s a very determined 12 year old who already has the responsibility of caring for her younger brother and sister, but she decides to leave them with Mrs. Tafa so that she can go to bring her mother back home to die.  Her grandmother and Aunt have already turned Lillian out of their house to avoid her bringing shame to them, and so the poor woman is now living rough in a field.

When the ambulance brings a very sick Lillian back home the neighbors start a near riot fearing that her presence will infect all of them.  Its Mrs. Tafa who had been so hard on Chandra all along as she has her own hidden demons, who comes to Chandra's aid, and by doing so gives this extremely harrowing story an improbable upbeat ending.

The poisoned climate of rumor and gossip is not surprising in a country where the former President did so much harm which resulted in many unnecessary deaths by his rigid denial of the causes and treatment of AIDS for years. What was surprising however was Chandra’s unflinching support and love for both her mother and best friend. She occasionally showed anger, but never shed a single tear.  It was the way that she took on life with such fierce determination that made this story remarkable to watch and so totally compelling.

I simply cannot imagine how the German filmmaker Oliver Schmitz came to be so lucky to find such extraordinary raw talent to play Chandra and Esther.  These untrained girls making their acting debuts were totally mesmerizing with their penetrating wide-open eyes.  And full credit to the adult actors who gave beautifully understated performances as Lillian and Mrs. Tafa.

When I used to help Program a Festival which always seemed to have never ending submissions of movies dealing with AIDS …. most of which were annoyingly bad …..my thought was always if you are going to upset a large part of your audience who may had some personal experience of the epidemic, then the movie should at least be good, and preferably have something new/relevant to say.  This movie would easily pass that criteria and is important enough to risk shedding the tears that Chandra never could on the screen.

This 12 year’s old straightforward approach to dealing with impending death is beautiful summed up by the (perfect) title of this movie.  Life, above all.   Unmissable.


★★★★★★★★★