Monday, December 6, 2010

Children Of Heaven



(Summery)
Ali fetches his little sister Zahra's pink shoes after the shoemaker has repaired them. Ali puts down the shoes to get some potatoes at the grocer's. While he is preoccupied, a blind garbage man accidentally picks up the shoes, hidden in a bag, and takes them away. Frantic to find them, the young boy knocks over crates of vegetables and is chased away by the grocer.
Ali's father, anxious to earn more money, borrows some gardening equipment and heads off with Ali to the rich suburbs of Tehran to find some gardening work. They try many places without success, though Ali proves to be a great help to his tongue-tied father. Finally they come upon a mansion in which a six-year-old boy named Alireza lives under the care of his grandfather. While Ali plays with Alireza, his father works. When he is finished, Ali's father is surprised and elated by how generous the grandfather is. On the way home, their bicycle's brakes fail and the father is slightly injured in the resulting crash.
Finally, Ali learns of a high-profile children's footrace involving many schools; the third prize is one week at a vacation camp and a pair of sneakers. To his bitter disappointment, in a hard-fought dash to the finish, he accidentally places first instead. However, there is a quick shot of the children's father's bicycle, showing two new pairs of shoes among his purchases. In the final shot, Ali is shown dipping his blistered feet in a pool. Some versions include an epilogue revealing that Ali eventually achieves success in a racing career.

(Reaction)
Children of Heaven does provide a kindly, enveloping sense of Iranian life and customs, from the way the family prepares sugar cubes to be served at a mosque to the way Zahra helps care for elderly neighbors. These moments come more easily to Mr. Majidi than his studiously bittersweet ending for what is, despite its surface bleakness, an essentially sunny story.
What struck me in this movie was the devotion of brother and sister, their willingness to work together through a problem, and how they face the realities of their poor life in the south of Tehran. The family is poor by American standards, with a father who's barely getting by and who needs his third-grade son to help him find extra work in the richer sections of the city. But he Â’s a proud man, who Â’s willing to work hard and who has helped to imbue, along with a sick mother, in his children a dedication to working hard and making sacrifices for each other. This is a man who's a success not on the basis of what he makes in salary or owns, but in what he Â’ s helped to create in his children .In this movie you get to see Iran, the rich, the poor, and the regimentation that comes with the regime in power for children in school, where they line up and pay tribute to the great leader. Mostly you get to see a wonderful story that touches on fundamental values in our lives, and shows that there Â’s always hope if we make the effort and we give to our children the right things.

Walk On The Water

Walk on Water Poster

(Summery)
Eyal is an agent in Mossad, the Israeli security service. He is a hitman who targets enemies of Israel. His wife has recently committed suicide, and the agency decides that he needs to take on a less challenging assignment: to find an aging Nazi war criminal and get him "before God does".In order to track down the old man, Eyal poses as a tour guide and befriends the Nazi's adult grandchildren, Axel and Pia. Pia lives on a kibbutz, an Israeli commune. Her brother Axel visits her in order to convince Pia to return to Germany for their father's seventieth birthday. It is later revealed that Pia's estrangement with her parents began when she discovered that they were hiding her grandfather. She shares this information with Axel.
Although he has a job to perform, Eyal truly befriends Axel and Pia. Axel and Pia are decent people who demonstrate that most Germans have gotten beyond the hatred that led to the Holocaust. They spend time together and Eyal enjoys himself, even if he would not openly admit so. His friendship with Axel allows him to display some humanity, letting down his tough-guy machismo. Eyal is initially disgusted and disappointed to discover that Axel is gay. He asks to be removed from the assignment, not attempting to hide his homophobia as the reason. His boss, Menachem, insists that Eyal finish the mission. Eyal visits Germany and comes to realize that Axel's orientation is unimportant. During the visit, Eyal defends a group of Axel's transsexual friends from attackers and, in doing so, reveals that he is fluent in German.
Axel invites Eyal to his father's birthday party. The guests are uncomfortable about Eyal's nationality and religion, but, still polite. After the cake is brought out, Axel's parents surprise the guests by bringing out Axel's aged grandfather. Axel angrily confronts his mother and goes to Eyal's room, only to find a folder full of information on Axel's family. Meanwhile, Eyal meets with Menachem and tells him that they can easily take the grandfather and bring him to Israel to be tried for his war crimes. Menachem reveals that they are the only two on this mission, and the aim is to kill the grandfather. Eyal is clearly conflicted, but takes the case of poisons that Menachem gives him.Eyal arrives at Axel's house and enters the grandfather's room, unbeknownst to all but Axel. Axel sneaks up behind Eyal and watches as he fills a syringe with poison, doing nothing to intervene. Ultimately, though, Eyal is unable to fulfill the task. He leaves, and Axel tenderly caresses his grandfather's face before turning off his oxygen tank, killing him. He goes to Eyal's room, where Eyal tells him that the suicide note his wife wrote told him that he kills everything that comes near him. Eyal says that doesn't want to kill anymore and breaks down in Axel's arms.

(Reaction)
It’s hard not to be impressed with the subjects it examines, which range from homophobia to the Middle Eastern social climate. Watching the movie is another story. What keeps Walk on Water from sinking are the performances of Berger and Ashkenazi, who don't act to the film's shifts in tone, but consistently act like two men at an impasse. They want to be friends, but can all of their ideological baggage and prejudices be set aside? When Fox focuses on this uncomfortable human conflict, the movie achieves the relevance he's aches to attain.

Central Station

Central Station Poster

Walter Salles' Central Station is a touching, well-made motion picture whose only real flaw lies in the over familiar storyline. This kind of film explores the bond between a motherless child and a lonely older woman, has been attempted so frequently that good acting and direction are no longer enough. The script must offer a new and compelling quality, something to draw us into the narrative and make us really care about what happens to the characters. Another interesting aspect of this picture is that it presents a rare look at non-tourist locales in Brazil.
The film opens inside a large train station in Rio de Janeiro, where Dora (Fernanda Montenegro) is going about her daily job. At a dollar's price, she will write a letter for one of the many illiterate passers-by in the station, and then seal it in an addressed envelope. When it comes to mailing the letters, however, Dora is not trustworthy. Based on arbitrary criteria, she posts some letters, tears up others, and stashes a few in a drawer. Dora doesn't care when she betrays a trust; she has made the determination of what's best, and decides whether or not to send a letter based on that judgment. She stands aloof and uninvolved, making her assessments dispassionately. Until she meets Josue (Vinicius de Oliveira), that is.
Josue is the 9 year-old son of a woman who dictates a letter to Dora. In it, she asks the boy's father if they can be reunited. When leaving the station afterwards, the woman is struck by a bus and killed. Josue, with nowhere to go, begins to loiter around the station, acting pugnacious and withdrawn. His plight stirs something in Dora (she has seen the fate of shoplifters, who are shot, and she reasons that, without her intervention, a similar fate awaits Josue), who brings him home, then sells him to an adoption agency. However, when her best friend notes that Josue is too old to be adopted and that the organization may be a front for organ thieves, Dora kidnaps the boy from the agency, then goes on a journey with him, searching for his father.

The two leads both do superlative work. Fernanda Montenegro believably conveys the changes in Dora as her relationship with Josue transforms her inner self. It's a finely-tuned portrayal that doesn't ask the audience to accept any sudden or hard-to-swallow shifts in behavior. Dora's rebirth is gradual. Newcomer Vinicius de Oliveira doesn't have as complex as role to essay, but his performance as a young, lost boy touches the heart. Together, the two actors create a palpable, and very special, bond (not only with each other, but with the audience).
Central Station placed third in the 1998 Toronto International Film Festival's popular balloting (behind Life is Beautiful and Waking Ned Devine), which is a testament to its mass appeal. The reason is understandable. Central Station is both literate and emotionally powerful an increasingly rare combination. It does not rely upon camera tricks or overwrought performances to touch the viewer. There's manipulation going on here, but it's subtle and skillful, and, as a result, we don't feel like our heartstrings are being twisted and pulled by an unseen puppeteer. For that reason, Central Station is well worth seeing, especially if you're in the mood for an affecting drama.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Eat Drink Man Woman



(Summery)
Eat Drink Man Woman, derived from an original script by James Schamus, Hui-Ling Wang, and the film's director, Ang Lee, is much more satisfying as literature than it is as film. Even at that, though, the picture is simple, light, and affecting, and hard to hold anything against. Most of the plot can be summarized as a glimpse of what might happen if The Joy Luck Club sat down to eat Babette's Feast. The main character, Mr. Chu (Sihung Lung), is a consummate chef whose sense of taste has begun to dull as he enters old age. Also growing less secure are his relationships to his three, very different daughters—as though three sisters in the same movie ever have anything in common. In fact, part of what gives Eat Drink Man Woman its appeal, at least for an American viewer like myself, is that the unfamiliar pleasures of the scrumptious fine food and the Taipei setting are comfortably nestled within a tried-and-true, instantly recognizable plotline.

So, as I was saying, Chu has three daughters who all have different ideas about what they want to do with their lives. Oldest sister Jia-Jen (Kuei-Mei Yang), still nursing wounds from a love that evaporated long ago, now teaches school to a rowdy roomful of horny adolescent boys. Middle sibling Jia-Chien (Chien-lien Wu) has made herself a successful career in an airline corporation, though she might have preferred to prefer the culinary arts her father so magically practices. Finally, Jia-Ning (Yu-Wen Wang), who comes up with tuition money by working at a Wendy's in Taipei, just wants to get by and get along with everyone, at least until she grows attracted to the lonesome boyfriend of her fickle, teasing coworker.

Actually, Jia-Ning is not the only sister whose routine is disrupted by a new man; Jia-Jen is suddenly pursued by a gym teacher and volleyball coach in her school, and Jia-Chien begins a scrumptiously close working partnership with a colleague who, as it turns out, she recognizes from long ago. Meanwhile, Chu himself mostly notices these romantic, professional, and emotional developments by observing how all three daughters make less frequent and more restless appearances at his ceremonial Sunday night dinners. Chu lives a small life, a quiet life of mostly simple pleasures, though such flavorful delights as Joy Luck Dragon Phoenix are themselves as exquisite in taste as they are in name. Indeed, Chu seems to direct all of his great passions and grand statements into his cooking, so that he may operate on the cool, resilient level that works best in dealing with his three daughters, all of whom still live at home when the picture begins.
There are also a few surprising, abrupt leaps forward in the story, especially given the overall deliberateness of the pace. When a daughter who has been at a similar point in a love relationship for almost a full hour suddenly reveals she has been married, we wonder why Lee has taken so much time with the build-up only to leave out a climactic moment.
(The Theme)
A major theme of the movie is that romantic relationships give life meaning and are necessities of life (such as eating and drinking).
The film features numerous scenes displaying the technique and artistry of gourmet Chinese cuisine. Since the family members have difficulty expressing their love for one another, the intricate preparation of banquet quality dishes for their Sunday dinners serves as a surrogate for the spoken expression of their familial feelings. Another theme is the burden of aging. Chef Chu is depicted as having lost his "one true love" (his wife), losing another (his ability to taste) and about to lose all three daughters to marriage, not to mention the usual specter of old age.
(Reaction)
So Eat Drink Man Woman can be imprecise in its perspective and a little quick to play the trump card of enticing cuisine. These tendencies may keep it from being great art, but they certainly allow for a casually pleasing and easy to watch story about a group of people who are almost always likable and identifiable, even when they aren't getting along. Also, the cast and filmmakers pull off one major task that so many films fumble around with—though more and more characters are constantly being introduced in Eat Drink Man Woman, we never have any uncertainties as to who is who, or how they all relate to one another. If the film is not the sort of succulent feast that Chu so often prepares for his family, it more than qualifies as a pleasing snack, endearing if sometimes trapped in its conventions, but just unfamiliar enough that you never tune out.