I'd seen Chou's 2016 Diamond Island, which I found memorable enough to want to check out Return to Seoul, which turned out to be quite a daring movie with a tremendous performance by Park Ji-min. The main character is a veritable storm of contradictions, and Park avaiils herself well to the opportunity of inhabiting a bottomless abyss. The film doesn't quite gel for me on a writing level, though I appreciate the cutting away of vast swathes of time a la Pialat; maybe my reservations would fall away on a second viewing, however.
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The Holdovers 2023
Catching up with old Alexander Payne. Script was underwhelming and hokey -- couldn't get invested into Giamatti's plight whatsoever. Enjoyed the nostalgic '70s vibe, however, not least because of the film's distinctly The Last Detail-inspired structure, with the prisoner and his jailer's ending up enjoying each others' company. And the cinematography by Eigil Bryld looked really good.
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The Unbelievable Truth 1989
I started formulating a thought halfway through this movie that Hartley is basically the anti-Bresson, or perhaps one might call his style con-Bressonian; instead of removing movie affectation and performative flourish until all that remains is the skeleton of the act, which Bresson might call the truth, Hartley dials up the movie-ness, pitting his overworked artifice against a drab and intelligent formalism to arrive at an "unbelievable truth". Hartley pushes the rhythm of dialogue into something like mechanical, speeding through…
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A Month in Thailand 2012
This is the sort of film that seems somewhat unfashionable to make. The pictorial pleasures are not obvious; it is written–very well-written, I’d argue, but noticeably so; and it’s about small-s society, in a way like Metropolitan but in its own milieu.
It’s easiest to argue for Negoescu’s mastery of the medium by pointing out moments of essentially cinematic pleasure. For instance when our protagonist, disappointed and dejected, wanders into a ballet hall and ends up enjoying the spectacle for…
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