My biggest moment of “hey, I’ve seen that guy in something else” was with James Hong who plays the Evelyn Mulray’s (Faye Dunaway) butler.  I quickly realized that he was the scientist in Blade Runner that designs eyes for the replicants and probably was in something else. Yeah, something else, like every film or TV show that needed an Asian guy.  He had bit parts in possibly every major TV series from Sky King in the 1950’s to The Big Bang Theory and Bones.  I won’t retype the whole IMDB entry but some the TV list includes: Starsky and Hutch, Seinfeld, The A-Team, Friends, The X-Files,  Chicago Hope, Falcon Crest, Miami Vice, Doogie Howser, M.D., Magnum P.I., General Hospital and Fantasy Island and on and on. And a voice-over in every cartoon kung-fu movie ever made.  And Blade Runner.

The reason this surprises me is that it seems like every time a show or movie needs an Asian person they seem to call the same actor over and over again.

“Who was that Asian guy in that movie?”

“Yeah, get me him.”

Lucky for James Hong he has not aged very much since Chinatown so he will always get work.

I know “Asian Guy” is not actually a character that calls for a character actor like a Peter Lorre role would but it does seem to have the same pattern.  Much like all midgets are now played by Peter Dinklage wherever possible.  Dinklage might be a more difficult person to replace but surely there are plenty of Asian actors who can be subbed in for James Hong.  I think he is a fine actor but it does make a film seem more fake when you see them populated by same people over and over again.  It’s sort of like the visual and audio cliches that are ubiquitous.  If someone buys groceries there is always a baguette sticking out of the bag.  If there is a canyon or open space you always hear a red-tailed hawk (the same one you hear when they show the nuclear power plant on the Simpsons).  If there is a Chief Squawking Hawk it most assuredly will be Graham Greene. And if there needs to be a Dr. Wang it will be James Hong.

I suppose the bigger issue might be that all of the lead roles have to go to handsome nondescript caucasians and anyone of a different ethnicity gets a much smaller role.  Writers and casting agents need to be a bit more open minded.  Why can’t Lucy Liu be the love interest?  Does it have to be Rachel McAdams…again?  Let’s have some variety here.

Also if you are inclined to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon then Chinatown is the perfect lynchpin to anything with Hong, Nicholson, Dunaway and John Huston who acted in 55 films and directed 47.  But that’s another matter.

Here are my observations so far.  First and foremost this is a beautifully filmed (yes, filmed) show, which I can even tell through the crappy quality of on demand TV.  The lighting is fantastic with saturated colors that remind me of some of Hitchcock’s films (North by Northwest for example).  The set design and wardrobe choices help this quite a bit, and that’s just the hair and lipstick on Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks).  Add in the pastels of the early 1960’s, some cigarette smoke (some?), and the perfect grey flannel suits and it is a cinematographer’s dream.  It’s a pleasure to watch even with the dialogue off.

While I could watch a show with only Roger Sterling (John Slattery) throwing out flip one liners the majority of the acting is excellent.  There are no superior standouts but the subtleties are what make the characters work.  The non-verbals between Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) are sublime.  The characters for the most part seem to be well thought out with few cardboard personas.

Another aspect that makes this show work for me are the music choices.  Without thinking about it I might be inclined to dismiss the early 60’s as a musical wasteland but the focus on lounge music, Bossa Nova and jazz from the likes of Miles Davis, Bud Powell and Ella Fitzgerald add wonderful color to the show.  The inclusion of more modern music from the likes of the Decemberists also works quite well.  David Carbonara fills out the rest of the score with varied instrumentation giving the scenes a subtle energy without calling attention to the music.  And of course they end season 1 with a Bob Dylan great.  Nice touch.

It’s not often that I notice the editing on a TV show unless it is terrible.  This show has some particularly good tricks which you notice if you watch fives episodes in rapid succession.  Closing a door in one scene and opening a door in the next is a common segue.  Ending a scene with a sexual innuendo and then then opening the next with a visual pun on that innuendo is quite clever.

So let’s see how it goes.  Will they ever figure out where Betty Draper’s character is going?  How much of a louse would Roger Sterling have to be before we start to dislike him?  Will somebody please punch Jimmy Barrett? Oh, thank you, Don.  We hated that guy when he was on Lost too.

How does one make a film that is incredibly disturbing yet visually beautiful?  Pedro Almodovar does this time and time again.  In his latest film, The Skin I Live In, he manages to present yet another set of uncomfortable, often sexual, situations that might keep you up at night.

But don’t let that stop you.  It’s gorgeously filmed by Jose Luis Alcaine who has collaborated with Almodovar several times before including the beautiful Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (if you would like something far lighter than the usual Almodovar bleak sex change themes go rent this).  From beautifully lit kitchens and in-home prison cells to the icy blue hues of a medical lab, each scene is a work of art.  Carefully executed camera moves abound will little hand held photography mucking it up.  Reds jump off the screen from the lips of the female characters and into the theatre (or my living room).

In addition to brilliant set design it does not hurt to have an uber-attractive cast in Elena Anaya and Antonio Banderas.  They both portray equally mysterious and creepy characters quite well but I am sure that Almodovar based his casting decisions on film presence first.  The whites of Banderas’s eyes alone are worth the price of admission.

And yup, this was shot in 35mm.  It was of course digitally enhanced but I have a feeling that Mr. Almodovar will be one of the last directors to switch to a digital format.  If only there were more like him.

American Splendor

Big Fish

Capote

Children of Men

Downfall

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Finding Neverland

Frost/Nixon

Good Bye, Lenin!

Good Night, and Good Luck.

Hotel Rwanda

House of Flying Daggers

Invictus

Juno

La Vie En Rose

Lost in Translation

Master and Commander:

The Far Side of the World

Micmacs

Midnight in Paris

Milk

Million Dollar Baby

Moneyball

Moon

Ray

Sideways

Slumdog Millionaire

Stranger Than Fiction

También la lluvia

Thank You for Smoking

The Artist

The Darjeeling Limited

The Descendants

The King’s Speech

The Last King of Scotland

The Last Samurai

The Lives of Others

The Queen

The Station Agent

The Triplets of Belleville

The Visitor

Up in the Air

V for Vendetta

Vicky, Christina Barcelona

Volver

Wall•E

I often feel like Alexander Payne’s are GNDN movies.  There certainly tend to be story arcs  but the main characters end up in the same physical place in which they started, progressing little in the abstract.  I don’t feel that a film has  to go in a single direction and have neat little lessons learned for the protagonists, but it seems Alexander Payne lives by this rule.  Which is fine.  Chekhov was one of the greatest playwrights that ever lived and his stories had zero progression.

Does there always need to be a plot?  It depends on what your definition of plot is.  If two people sitting at a dinner table have a conversation is a plot then the Descendants might be considered to be full of intrigue, surprises and plot twists that keep you guessing and on the edge of your seat until the final scene.  Alexander Payne is not a director that has kept anyone on the edge of his or her seat.

“Will he finally drink that bottle of wine?  I can hardly contain myself!”

Payne’s brilliance lies in making a set of characters that are believable and interesting and putting them in situations that are just a bit out of the realm of reality, just slightly out of the range of what a normal person would not put themselves in.  Rig a high-school election.  Stalk a spouse’s lover.  Cheat on your fiancee a week before the wedding and just to make it interesting tell the woman you love her.

Some might argue that those are in fact plots.  But try to imagine yourself pitching them to a studio exec.

“It’s about a history teacher who rigs a high-school election.”

“Get out of my office.”

The key here is to make the situation just a touch more crazy than what a person who is not in a movie would do.  Keep the million dollars and hide the body?  No.  But do lie to the cop.  Or hit on her when you are down at the station being questioned.

The Descendants is up for several Oscars and deservedly so.  Oscar doesn’t always need the most ingenious plot.  It does just fine with brilliant acting and a unique perspective on life.  And cinematography with beautiful Hawaiian scenery helps a bit.

It only took 45 minutes to get from the gate to my hotel including going through customs.  Unlike London or New York there is an actual functional highway between the airport and downtown.   And the airport was put much closer to a place you would like to get to.  An interesting fact is that since the airport is so close to downtown, buildings are not permitted to be above 919 feet tall.  There are three that are this tall, soon to be more.

I had to wait a whole two minutes for my luggage.  And it was one of the first ones out just like it was supposed to be!  The “priority” sticker actually means something to Singapore Airlines.

Terminal 3 in Changi Airport is the nicest airport terminal I have ever been in by far.

My glasses fogged up when I got out of the cab.  It’s perpetually humid here.  And it rains.  Often.

Any place that outlaws public gum chewing is a place that I would enjoy that much more.  But it is also a law that you can only keep a car for ten years.  After that they are too old to be driven for safety reasons so you need to get an expensive permit to keep them if you want to hold on to them longer.  It keeps all of those idiots whose car breaks down on the highway.  You know the ones that don’t bother to pull the car over into the breakdown and just sit there on their cellphones like it’s no big deal to hold up traffic for miles.  Not in Singapore.

Singapore is yet another city whose public transit system is far more organized and cleaner than New York’s.  The stations are large so you don’t feel like you will be pushed onto the tracks with the rats when it gets crowded.  That would be impossible anyway since there are glass doors that separate the tracks from the platform which open in tandem with the train doors.  Why do they do this? To keep the air conditioning in.  Yes, the stations are air conditioned.

Is there a price to pay for all of this?  Yes.  On everything.  It’s one of the most expensive cities in the world.  And also you can’t spit on the sidewalks.

So watching a movie that is much like a cartoon in this environment seems to work quite  well.  Computer animation still looks like just that.  Granted this is some of the best I have ever seen.  The emotions portrayed in the faces of the apes is nothing short of amazing.  At some point these will get very close to real and few people will be able to tell the difference.  I think at this point if you are of the age where you grew up watching mostly movies with heavy CGI you might already not know the difference. But for me we are still quite a ways away from looking “too real.”

The film itself was entertaining, thought provoking at points and well acted in the case of John Lithgow who plays an elderly man suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.  It is tough to build much suspense when you know the ending even if you have not watched any of the previous Planet of the Apes films.  The setups are quite contrived and keep reminding you that this will not end well.

While this film is not overly preachy I am sure the pharmaceutical industry was not happy with it.  The film is written so that the audience wants the apes to succeed and wipeout the evil humans, except for maybe good-guy scientist Will Rodman (James Franco) who is attempting to cure his father (Lithgow) of Alzheimer’s disease.  The rest of the humans are just punching bags with little depth and few likeable qualities.  The moral here is that pharmaceutical research is pure evil unless it is for a loved one.

Of course this is a modern film that has a need to explain everything to the lowest common denominator.  Just when you think the film is over and the apes get away the audience is hit with a forensic diagram that shows just how the humans are wiped out by a disease thus making it easy for the apes to take over.  Is this really necessary?  Just how stupid does Hollywood think we are?  Do I really need a map with arrows and lines to show how an epidemic is transmitted from one city to another?  It’s as if they did a poll and the responses were: “Please Hollywood, don’t let me walk away from a film and have to think about any portion of it ever again.”  I think they could have ended the film with a shot of a pilot who coughs up blood getting on the plane.  Go see Twelve Monkeys if you don’t get the theme here.  In fact, just go see Twelve Monkeys.

In films we often have the benefit of omniscience.  Don’t go in that room, that’s where the monster is.  He’s got a gun.  He’s an imposter.  But even in films like The Wrestler where we don’t know what is going to happen, we can see the obviously bad choices coming.  Hey, don’t screw up the sliver of a relationship you have with your daughter or your stripper friend.  Oops.  That was dumb.  Really dumb.  But are we surprised?

So a film about someone who has clearly not make good life choices who continues on that path does not really intrigue me.  Oh, we get teased with a glimmer of hope that the Ram might do something right but…well, read the first part of this sentence again.

Brilliant acting and perfect casting (yes, absolutely perfect) can only take this film so far.  However there are quite a few isolated bright spots in this very bleak film.  Probably the saddest scene I have ever seen is when Randy (Mickey Rourke) invites his young friend over to play Nintendo  (and no this is not in 1991 when that might have been cool).  When the kid tries to explain to Randy what Call of Duty is, he responds like he is an 85 year old who is being subject to  rock music for the first time.

And of course I will have to comment on the use of handheld photography.  I like the use of a much more grainy 16mm stock but the drunken documentary thing has to stop.   Why film makers insist on this style of filming is baffling.  It’s like a pianist who plays beautifully but insists on using an old, beat up, out of tune piano to play on.  Film is a visual medium.  Getting a good script and good actors is the hard part.  Making it watchable should be the easy part.

Ultimately this is a well acted story of a fairly likable guy who can’t get his life together.  If you like watching someone drown (really well) this might be for you.  Three out of five pairs of neon green tights.

I must apologize for even using this misogynist term but I didn’t invent it.  Nor do I want to perpetuate it’s usage, basically because I think a romantic comedy that has any depth to it is not a chick flick.  So I struggle to find a good definition that isn’t horribly sexist, even though this genre of film is enjoyed by both genders (yes it is).  I think I can safely say that any movie that instills the same visceral reaction as a commercial with a cute puppy or newborn baby is a chick flick (the more I write this word the more it sounds like something you get at KFC).

Crazy, Stupid, Love  sounds like it should be a chick flick.  Very pretty woman?  Emma Stone.  Check.  Very pretty guy?  Ryan Gosling.  Check.  Poor relationship that could probably be fixed quite easily except the people involved are to stupid to realize it?   Check.  Somewhat predictable?  Check.  Somewhat.

But this is quite an enjoyable story.  It’s a “rental” for sure but that point is moot by the time you read this.  Steve Carell plays an affable guy (Cal Weaver – must have been written by an Orioles fan) who leaves his wife Emily because she is apparently screwing the lowliest Kevin Bacon character in any movie since Murder in the First.  Predictably Cal attempts to turn his life around as he tries to become more of a ladies man with the help of a younger, much better dressed Jacob (Gosling).  His transformation is quite humorous with a memorable scene where Jacob slaps him and tells him not to wear New Balance sneakers because he is not billionaire Steve Jobs.  Shoes.  That’s how you get the ladies.  And also don’t drink through a straw at a singles bar.

Watching most of the characters in the film is akin to watching a car crash.  Emily (Julianne Moore) is a mess and why she is sleeping with this accountant (Bacon) I am not sure but if everyone in film made logical life choices we would not watch them and feel good about our own lives.  Equally uncomfortable are the two teenagers (as they should be) and Bernie Riley (John Carroll Lynch) who has to be gay but neither his wife nor his friends ever acknowledge it.

All of these dysfunctional characters are linked full circle much like a Seinfeld episode, except with more love triangles than even Phil Jackson could keep track of (two obscure sports references in one film review!).  So if you sleep with a random Marissa Tomei character she will come up in your life later, and not in a convenient way.  Such is the one night stand in a romantic comedy.  Love is for assholes, says Cal’s son.

Ultimately this film is quite entertaining with some very laugh out loud moments.  It’s quite pointless but the title echoes that and since when are our relationships well though out?  No, it is by no means a chick flick.  Unless Roadhouse is your favorite movie.  Three and a half dead roses.

One of the main reasons that I love Zhang Yimou’s films is his use of color.  Both Hero and Raise the Red Lanterns are absolutely beautiful with hues so saturated you want to lick them.  To Live  does not quite have the colors of those two but what it does have is red.  Lots of vibrant red.  Communism and blood.  And more communism.  And just when you think it can’t get worse for the main characters, more bright red blood.

The message here is quite clear.  So clear in fact that the communist party banned Mr. Zhang from making films with foreign money for two years.  Personally I think the film’s criticism of communist China is quite tame but the Chinese government can be a sensitive lot.  As in most of Zhang’s films that take place in this period we do see some of the positive aspects of communist society.  The real issue is that these people are not ever well off.  Being poor under an emperor, the nationalists or the communists doesn’t really make much of a difference.  Life equals hardship.

The two leads (Gong Li and Ge You) give masterful performances as a husband and wife doing what they can to survive (how many Chinese movies don’t have this theme) during the formative years of communist China.  Spanning a timeframe of twenty or so years each get their chance to express their emotions caused by the horrors of a civil war, the Cultural Revolution, child labor, a suspicious government and just plain exhaustion.  Ge You earned a Best Actor award at Cannes for his role as Xu Fugui, a gambling addict who loses his home and wealth before the communists take over China.  The upside is Fugui is no longer viewed as a capitalist and can go on living his meager existence with his wife Jaizhen (Gong Li) and two children as long as he cooperates with the Party.

In addition to the two leads, the children are brilliant.  It always amazes me how Zhang Yimou gets his child actors to perform so well.  His casting calls must take ages.  Decent child actors in the U.S. are rare indeed but the Chinese seem to have a plethora.  I think one of the human elements that always makes Zhang Yimou’s films great is the juxtaposition of smiling children in some of life’s most dreadful circumstances.

So why does anyone want to watch a film where people go through horrible experiences?  Enjoyable is a weird word to use but I have to say that this film is yet another thing of beauty from China’s “Fifth Generation” of film makers.  Throw this into the top of your queue before Netflix does something (else) stupid.  Five out of five bright red stars.