Comments on: UPU2?

By: colinr

colinr — Thu, 08 May 2008 23:36:54 +0000

If you want a taster of The End of Violence there was an article written on the film in The Onion’s My Year Of Flops!: (http://www.avclub.com/content/blog/my_year_of_flops_case_file_58_the).

For comparison Southland Tales also appeared in the series and received the same ‘Fiasco’ rating (better than a ‘flop’ not as good as a ‘secret success’!)

By: dcairns

dcairns — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:25:38 +0000

I liked most of the first half of Until the End, apart from racist portrayal of comedy Japanese, but the film grinds to a halt when the road movie part ends. I think the halfway mark in that film is the precise point where Wenders stopped being any good, for me.

But if a copy of End of Violence swings by, I might grab it.

By: colinr

colinr — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:32:27 +0000

It is worth seeing but I think it works best with the knowledge that there is not really any satisfying dramatic payoff from the events of the film. It can be a very frustrating experience because of that but I’ve found it works better on repeated viewings (and brilliantly the last time I watched it with the sound turned down, subtitles on and appropriate ambient music playing!) when the wish to see where everything is leading to becomes less of an issue.

I guess it fits with Wender’s other films where the journey is more important than the arrival.

In fact, combine the surveillance and memory loss aspects of The End of Violence with the kind of dated futurisim of Until The End Of The World and I think you’d end up with Southland Tales! And I mean that as a compliment, though I can see how it could be an acquired taste!

By: dcairns

dcairns — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:12:40 +0000

Well, Kelly himself re-cut the release version of Southland, so it still has his style, but it’s a sort of panicked, anxious-to-be-understood version of his style. In a way that’s like the Director’s Cut of DD.
Is The End of Violence worth seeing? I had a very bad feeling about that one!

By: colinr

colinr — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:36:43 +0000

That Culture Show review was a bad one - it sort of verged on groupthink when I was left thinking how much I liked the “future is going to be much more futuristic” line only to be confronted by the reviewers saying it showed how bad the film was and the ‘Laverne and Shirley’ person nodding as the audience crowded around them like a silent zombie army! (I might be over reacting but I much preferred it when The Culture Show’s audience pretended they were having their own conversations rather than listening in on the show!)

I think Southland Tales is a bit of a mess but an extremely fascinating one and I would much rather have more films like this one than any number of bland films.

I posted a little on criterionforum.org about the film which mainly can be boiled down to the idea that this seems an epic, rather than high school based, version of Donnie Darko, only this time the film itself is the tangent universe. (It seemed ironic to me that this recut version of the film plays a lot like the directors cut of DD with the religious passages substituing for the time travel book).

Also I kept thinking this would make a fascinating double bill of ‘insane Los Angeles follies dealing with paranoia and surveillance’ films with Wim Wender’s The End Of Violence!

By: dcairns

dcairns — Wed, 07 May 2008 07:36:20 +0000

There are a few good things about Kermode:

1) He sings rockabilly.
2) He had tockabilly hair.
3) He has a chicken called Elvis.

Actually, he’d be much better off appearing in Southland Tales rather than reviewing it.

I would be delighted to have this alternate edit of Southland Tales, but I need the director’s cut FIRST! But I like your description of it. Mario Bava’s butchered version of Lisa and the Devil, known as House of Exorcism, has some of the same pleasure for me, even though the added scenes are terrible.

By: simon kane

simon kane — Wed, 07 May 2008 00:01:49 +0000

Really nice write-up. This was maybe my favorite new release of last year, I didn’t want it to end. I think I went and saw it for the same reasons you did, it was only afterwards I found out anything good had been written about it (there was a great piece in Sight and Sound which touches on the tenderness of the whole deal). And I didn’t mind seeing this cut. That was part of the fun of it for me. All the best bits were just chucked in and yet I still got a weird sense of the - I don’t know - “geography” of the story. It almost felt like I had been allowed to wander around the film unchaperoned but with Justin Timberlake providing commentary on a tape I’d been handed at the door. Down that road a couple with prosthetic noses are hilariously screaming at each other. In that van, obviously, was Christophe Lambert (his presence making so much sense). I felt very at home. I did also love - although I’m not supposed to - the idea that the whole film might have just been an elaborate practical joke played on the Rock: “Yes, you’ll get to play a messianic action hero and work with a wildly popular director, now say these terrible lines and drum your fingers together…” Anyway, yes, I loved this, and Mark Kermode, something really should be done about that man. I remember his appearance as an appalled talking head bemoaning Freddy Kreuger gloves in toy shops. And he was supposed to be the “face of extreme cinema”. Let’s kick him.

By: dcairns

dcairns — Sat, 03 May 2008 14:26:34 +0000

Of course Kelly references PK Dick directly with the “Flow my tears” line, spoken by a policeman, natch. Once it got onto the time travel stuff it seemed to work much better — I still didn’t quite understand it but it was interesting at least, and seemed to be going somewhere. The first act (which seems like about an hour) is so desperate to set things up in an orderly fashion they forget to make us care. What’s good is the quirkiness, a genune desire to make something different. The more of that the better, so we need the original edit.

By: Dan

Dan — Sat, 03 May 2008 12:46:20 +0000

The film reminded me of reading hi-brow sci-fi books when I was young and not getting anything because it seemed as though I needed to have read 5 preceding books and probably 5 following books too in order to understand the world well enough before I could get to grips with the actualy story. In a good way because it meant that the book was set in a dense and complex world.

Unlike Matrix Reloaded which made me suffer for not knowing the back-story and encouraged me to go out and buy, buy, buy. Southland Tales made me intrigued and made me think a lot afterwards about what I had seen. Because a hell of a lot was going on. Some of it though was, I thought, pointless. Like the ice cream van, it seemed to be there just so people would think “Repo Man” and I didn’t get the “I’m a pimp stuff” as it had never been referenced before, at least in the version we saw.

Anyway, I liked the film and will probably watch it again but like you I want to see the Director’s Cut in the hope that it proves a more satisfying experience.

By: dcairns

dcairns — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:15:17 +0000

Well said! I liked what I saw but I feel like I saw a fraction of what was meant to be.