The Armond White Thread - THE GRANDMASTER and THE WORLD'S END

GeneralGogol wrote:

Yep, it's one of the more reassuring reviews in a sea of positive feedback. I'm glad for the Everything or Nothing documentary too... it sets up Skyfall really well.

Where can we see this documentary? Is it going to released on dvd perchance?

I may be about to tread where I'm ill-equipped to do so, but; wouldn't Nolan's Batman movies only be truly nihilistic if the villains, well ... WON?

tiffanywint wrote:

GeneralGogol wrote:

Yep, it's one of the more reassuring reviews in a sea of positive feedback. I'm glad for the Everything or Nothing documentary too... it sets up Skyfall really well.

Where can we see this documentary? Is it going to released on dvd perchance?

I saw it on Youtube, have a search - I hope it's still around.

Blunt Instrument wrote:

I may be about to tread where I'm ill-equipped to do so, but; wouldn't Nolan's Batman movies only be truly nihilistic if the villains, well ... WON?

Well, that would then be extremely nihilistic. As they currently stand, they're what Armond calls "dark sentimentality." Nihilism plus fake pathos.

GeneralGogol wrote:

tiffanywint wrote:

GeneralGogol wrote:

Yep, it's one of the more reassuring reviews in a sea of positive feedback. I'm glad for the Everything or Nothing documentary too... it sets up Skyfall really well.

Where can we see this documentary? Is it going to released on dvd perchance?

I saw it on Youtube, have a search - I hope it's still around.

It was taken down by zse copyright police.

Largo's Shark wrote:

It was taken down by zse copyright police.

So how is it to be commercially presented do you think? A dvd release per chance?

tiffanywint wrote:

Largo's Shark wrote:

It was taken down by zse copyright police.

So how is it to be commercially presented do you think? A dvd release per chance?

I sure hope so. It's very good. Watched it in this thread.

https://bondandbeyond.forumotion.com/t1895-everything-or-nothing-the-untold-story-of-007

Largo's Shark wrote:

I sure hope so. It's very good. Watched it in this thread.

https://bondandbeyond.forumotion.com/t1895-everything-or-nothing-the-untold-story-of-007

I tried. No longer able to view. I think there will be a dvd release at some point. It sure would be nice if it was included as a SF blu-ray bonus.

Eh disappointed in that review. Expected more bashing of Nolan and Bourne. Surprised he thinks GF and OHMSS are the best rather than say TMWTGG or MR. But then again OHMSS' greatness is still contrarian to an extent. Still he thinks Bardem is better here than in No Country so I got to give him points.

I get the feeling he gave SkyFall a good review since he likes Bond and SF is Bondian enough for his tastes.

Wouldn't be surprised if at the end of the year he writes that Resident Evil is so much better than SkyFall.

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Myopic Bio-Pic
by Armond White on Nov 28, 2012 • 9:00 am

‘HITCHCOCK’ SHOWS THE MAESTRO WITHOUT HUMOR



Sacha Gervasi’s Anvil: The Story of Anvil, the 2010 chronicle of the little-known rock band, was a rare excellent documentary; a film distinguished by its good-hearted recognition of what lies beneath artistic motive. Only a little of that beneficence is apparent in Gervasi’s dramatic debut Hitchcock, which takes a fanciful approach to biography. Its problem isn’t simply a lack of documentary veracity but the absence of good intention.

In Hitchcock, Gervasi seems to disbelieve the transformative, or at least extenuating conditions, of art-making. The film’s scandal-based view of Alfred Hitchcock’s personal eccentricities—his egotism, marital self-absorption and professional exploitation—overwhelm any appreciation that its subject is one of the 20th century’s undeniable artists. It was in the fin de siècle wrap-up Histoire(s) du Cinema that Jean-Luc Godard referred to Hitchcock as “the greatest poet of us all.”

Gervasi’s film concerns the making of Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece Psycho. Its dramatic and aesthetic shock came as the culmination of a fantastically successful career in England and Hollywood. But Psycho wasn’t just a career move following the popularity of North by Northwest. Psycho altered the culture, as much a revolutionary moment as Battleship Potemkin or Citizen Kane—two movies that rivaled Hitchcock’s extraordinary use of montage and mise-en-scène.

Because no one was prepared for Hitchcock’s gear-shift at the time doesn’t excuse Gervasi’s indifference to the fact. His movie is completely vacant of a sense of period—that unsuspected transition from post-WWII affluence and Western confidence to an era of fearful change, suspicion, brutality and cynical, inbred violence. Arriving on the cusp of social revolution, Hitchcock’s Psycho ushered in new perspectives on cinema and popular art. It was surprisingly coincidental with experimentation of European film artists as well as the investigation of unrefined genres begun by Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil and continued with Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom—but outclassing both and later surpassing himself with the pinnacle achievement of The Birds.

This film’s recounting of the great moment is too comfortable with the banality of the maestro’s mundane domestic life with wife Alma Reville, a former colleague and creative partner. And of the Hollywood system, treating Hitchcock as a pampered child among the lunatics in the studio system’s asylum. Hitchcock fantasizes conspiring with Ed Gein, the real-life serial killer upon whom the book Psycho was based. These scenes parody the Hollywood religion of psychoanalysis–a perhaps too subtle joke. Gervasi has not achieved the kind of satire that, say, Joe Dante might have successfully brought to a fond reminiscence of Psycho and its discontents. (Recall Dante’s 1993 Matinee) Thankfully, this film is nowhere as hateful—or incompetent—as the recent HBO movie The Girl, which wallowed in malicious rumor about Hitchcock’s relationship with Tippi Hedren.

As the killer-sympathizing, pun-telling, insecure maestro, Anthony Hopkins gets the Hitchcock voice right but his makeup is physically disastrous. Recalling Frank Langella playing Richard Nixon as Bela Lugosi, Hopkins plays Hitchcock like he did Nixon. Helen Mirren’s Alma is a glorified lady-who-lunches, shops, swims and has an outburst of wifely anger no less hilariously overscaled than Beatrice Straight’s in Network.

Sometimes Gervasi’s sense of humor shows when Hitchcock enters and exits the frame like a Goodyear blimp, recalling the famous rotund silhouette of his Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV icon. And the impersonations of Janet Leigh, Vera Miles and Anthony Perkins by Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Biel and James D’Arcy are uncannily buoyant and generous. Their suggestion that the making of Psycho was a Hollywood comedy was a fecund idea that got lost. When Hitchcock was interviewed by Dick Cavett in 1972, he often stared him down, mischief hidden by gentlemanly deadpan, mirth underneath. Too bad Gervasi missed that authentic distinctive quality.

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Presidents in Lust
by Armond White on Dec 7, 2012 • 4:16 pm

Historical Man-Sharing in Hyde Park on Hudson

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s deification–once the preoccupation of Depression and WWII survivors–comes to an end in Hyde Park on Hudson, a tell-all semi-bio-pic that is really about the women in FDR’s harem (?). Screenwriter Richard Nelson’s presumptuous aspersions present FDR’s wife Eleanor (Olivia Williams) as a lesbian, his secretary Missy (Elizabeth Marvel) as a pragmatic concubine and his fifth cousin Daisy (Laura Linney) as a self-sacrificing frump, the film’s sentimentalizing narrator.



What’s going on here outdoes the hero-worship of films like The Queen, The Last King of Scotland, The King’s Speech; there’s a new cynicism that accepts the failings of political leaders, adjusting public disappointment to decadent approval–uncannily like the rehabilitation of Bill Clinton at the recent Democratic National Convention; his all-is-forgiven adoration where a former sex-scoundrel President’s absolution led the way to a current President’s consecration.

In Hyde Park on Hudson, Roosevelt’s perfidy becomes a quasi-feminist standard where women submit to a dominant male’s peccadilloes out of sexual and patriotic fealty. An idiosyncratic genius like Ken Russell might have exulted in the perversity of such arrangements, but Roger Michell’s technique is so drab, he simply accepts the historical perversion as part of dull revisionism. Linney’s Cousin Daisy is too bland to hold FDR to any accounting; she accepts her lot like a worshipful electorate.

Using the visit of stuttering King George (played by Samuel West) to a diplomatic Upstate New York picnic where he is forced to swallow the American delicacy hot dogs, Michell’s film idealizes hero-worship through a metaphorical act of consumption. FDR commands “Show him how we put on the mustard”–a symbolic slathering of compliment/condiment on phallic privilege. This is the Monica Lewinsky film Hollywood has been reluctant to make.

Murray’s clever yet bland FDR impersonation is negligible and Linney’s quasi-incestuous mistress bores. After giving FDR a hand-job, her moment of conscience occurs in a voyeuristic sequence of interminable, unwatchable day-for-photography. She describes an era “When the world allowed itself secrets” no different from today but it’s a way of admitting the dishonesty we accept while pretending it doesn’t exist. Hyde Park on Hudson may be a signal movie of the laissez faire Obama era. (Like the Cahiers du Cinema’s famous deconstruction of Young Mr. Lincoln, the President’s phallus is this film’s structuring absence.) Yet it’s also one of the most nauseating films of the year.

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Litter or Literature?
by Armond White on Dec 5, 2012 • 9:00 am

‘Rust & Bone’ Illustrates Cinematic Decay



Jacques Audiard is one of those French filmmakers presumed intellectual yet forever doomed to mediocrity. He pleases American film critics who are easily impressed by European credentials, but when you actually watch Audiard’s films, they’re merely full of second-rate ideas (minority youth gets out prison to become crime lord in A Prophet), borrowed concepts (The Beat My Heart Skipped is a remake of James Toback’s far superior ethnic-noir Fingers) and grotesquerie: Rust & Bone, his latest, presents us with a love story between an Islamic immigrant mixed-martial-arts boxer, Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), and a wanton French amputee, Stephanie (Marion Cotillard).

Audiard is a model representative of bourgeois sentimentality. His bad-taste audacity goes just far enough to titillate social insecurities yet always refrains from addressing genuine social transformation. (Compare Rust & Bone to its antecedent, Fassbinder’s 1977 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.) Critics and a few unfortunate moviegoers will see Audiard’s movies and pretend that he has broken through their prejudices about the underclass. In Rust & Bone, Ali and Stephanie mix European and Third World desperation; her class debilitation hooks up with his class desperation.

Ali is a buff single father who first meets Stephanie when he works as a bouncer at a dance club. Her entrance is a howler: beaten up on the dance floor, she is escorted home by Ali to her brother/pimp, and thus we learn of her background. She works at a marine park, performing with orcas until one goes wild and bites off her legs. In classic middle-class self-righteousness, her incapacity causes her to relate to another’s disadvantage: Liberty. Fraternity. Disability. This story should be harshly comic (geek-meets-gimp), yet only achieves near risibility when both actors, showing full frontal nudity, get their politically correct freak on. This challenge to sexual timidity suggests one of the Dardenne Brothers’ socially conscious morality tales—a perv’s version, without the aesthetic rigor but full of hipster Sirkian ironies.

After her over-the-top, Oscar-winning turn as long-suffering Edith Piaf, then as the super groupie in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris and a villainess in The Dark Knight Rises, Cotillard has become the 21st century’s Miss Masochism. But this role is so miserable yet laughable (Stephanie becomes Ali’s manager in the MMA underground and sticks by him when his son is left comatose after a near-drowning) that Cotillard may have thrown one pity party too many. She exposes the film’s basic art-movie fakery. The stupid title (symbolizing Stephanie and Ali’s physical and psychic handicaps) comes from an American short story by Craig Davidson. Its literary conceit is all wrong for European art cinema, as is Julia Loktev’s juvenile The Loneliest Planet, which is based on a short story by Tim Bissell.

Is all contemporary literature this rotten, or do these films merely demonstrate literary pretense among illiterate hipsters? The most cinematic moment in Rust & Bone shows Stephanie’s return to the marine park, where she communes with the whale that attacked her, reaching up to appreciate its immensity behind a glass wall. The image is mysterious and poignant as The Life of Pi (another literary folly) was meant to be but wasn’t. Middlebrow literary trash is an undying genre. Ang Lee and Audiard are its avatars.

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Pitt Beats Clooney
by Armond White on Dec 5, 2012 • 9:00 am

‘Killing Them Softly’ amps political movie war



Killing Them Softly earns a footnote in cultural history for being the first dramatic film to question the Obama cult. It happens in a thrilling climactic moment that is part of director Andrew Dominik’s scheme examining America’s current financial crisis as a result of failed political promises from Presidents Reagan to Obama. Dominik shows how their empty bromides trickle down to the mean streets of gangsters and assassins, whose greed and subterfuge make them vulgar, miscreant parallels of elected officials.

It’s facile cynicism, not to be taken too seriously, but coming so soon after Spielberg’s hagiographic Lincoln it’s also a bold, bracing political dare. Against the prevailing snooty political bloviating, Dominik gets down and dirty, using the crime genre as a political abstraction—not against the Right or Left but to subvert political cant. He envisions a venal society run primarily by men (the film’s one female is a prostitute) where the realpolitik is misery: Life reduced to street fighting, drugs, betrayal, survival. Top dog survivor is Jackie Cogan, played by Brad Pitt with riveting authority that gradually resembles a politician’s casual yet lethal demeanor—although Cogan, perfectly, is a political skeptic. This coup should make George Clooney howl; he attempted a similar cynical redemption in the stultifying assassin-movie The American.

Dominik takes a strained, pulp cinema idea of what it is to be American. This infatuated Australian filmmaker’s essay on American genre types makes Cogan operate in the criminal world like a union thug—always out for self, manipulating other miscreants to do what seems in their best interest while he remains the beneficiary. The top-to-bottom pragmatism deserves a better title, like All the President’s Hitmen.

Because Pitt soft-pedals Dominik’s aestheticism (as in their previous arch collaboration The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford), he makes Killing Them Softly feel like a better movie than it is. Here, Pitt is no less magnetic than Gary Cooper in The Westerner; his laconic performance rising just above the lowlife funk that has become over-familiar from the gangster worlds of Scorsese and Tarantino and Guy Ritchie that Dominik imitates. At times Dominik’s nameless no-man’s-land, an abstract dystopia of genuine American ruin (filmed in post-Katrina New Orleans yet resembling Detroit), feels discomfortingly like a simultaneous live-streaming of GoodFellas, Reservoir Dogs and Snatch.

Dominik’s focus on the punchy faces of Ray Liotta, Vincent Curatola, James Gandolfini and Ben Mendelsohn-doing-Gary-Oldman-doing-Robert-De Niro-in-Mean-Streets plays on generic déjà vu.

But those movies avoided political interpretation; their hard worlds simply descended from other gangster movies with only passing reference to reality. Remember, Scorsese started out a realist but soon became a stylish, violent fantasist. Dominik uses style (extreme facial close-ups to suggest hypnotic concentration, an elongated card-game heist, a slo-mo, Cubist murder and lots of talking) to suggest desperation in a moral vacuum. Naturally, playwright Sam Shepherd appears briefly (abstractly) as a mythic killer.

Pitt enters the movie late, echoing Shepherd’s portentousness yet scaling it down to Everyman naturalism. Cogan ranks with Pitt’s best acting (Meet Joe Black, Fight Club, Jesse James) and is simply more interesting than his Clooneyish egotism in Moneyball. Cogan’s candor allegorizes a sensible working man or voter—which makes his ultimate, fuck-Obama pronouncement all the stronger.

The film’s free-floating political and economic rhetoric (in the background of gambling dens and drug hazes) underscores several, redundant personal soliloquies by men in trouble. Cogan walking past a background figure cursing his environment sums it up best. His detached determination makes him nearly heroic in a jaded culture. Dominik’s arty effect of abstracted time, blasted spaces and unsettling masculine dilemmas (Gandolfini and Mendelsohn’s pathetic self-destruction) are held together by both Pitt’s authority and Obama’s recent cant: “Our stories are singular but our destiny is shared.” In other words, they altogether describe an underworld apocalypse. “This country is fucked,” Mendelsohn’s junkie says. “I’m telling you. There’s a plague coming.”

The politicization of the gangster movie started with The Godfather (America as a capitalist corporation, thus the mob), and Coppola’s facile concept succeeded until he brought it to a spiritual reckoning in The Godfather, Part III. Mainstream media reaction rejected Coppola’s summary consequences (including Michael’s repentance), eventually leading to the guilt-free Sopranos—which Obama told Oprah he loved. Bill and Hilary Clinton even emulated that show in a political campaign ad. Now Dominik—not spiritual like Coppola, but shrewd—rewires that immorality to the cause-and-effect subtext of Killing Them Softly. Then remember, Oliver Stone trumped all of this in Savages, his occasionally brilliant study of millennial American character trait.

Given Dominik’s grandiose conceit—featuring anachronistic presidential speeches and ironic pop songs—the film is only a little less hyperbolic than a junkie’s paranoia. This outsider director sees America’s economic woes as a gangster movie purgatory. It’s debatable, but it has a much greater effect than the recession documentary Inside Job and the drab, socially conscious thrillers Michael Clayton, Syriana, Margin Call. Dominik and Pitt go where those films wouldn’t dare. Putting Obama in the tradition of bought leaders sharpens Killing Them Softly’s pretenses. It’s not merely an Obama slam, it’s a wake-up call. In his powerhouse ending, Dominik incorporates Barrett Strong’s Motown anthem “Money”; its indestructible beat underscores Cogan/Pitt’s grassroots realism. It hikes Pitt and Dominik’s disgust—and rips a new one in the self-glorifying tradition of gangster and political movies.

Huh. Surprised he didn't tear into KILLING THEM SOFTLY. Whatever else you can say about Armond White, he's never quite as predictable as his critics claim he is.

You seen it, Harms?

Largo's Shark wrote:

You seen it, Harms?

I haven't. But a friend it described it as one of the most nihilistic films he'd seen in a long time.

Harmsway wrote:

Largo's Shark wrote:

You seen it, Harms?

I haven't. But a friend it described it as one of the most nihilistic films he'd seen in a long time.

Well, Armond doesn't deny that it's very cynical.

Yes. But that's what surprises me; he doesn't dismiss it outright for its cynicism.

One of Armond's idiosyncrasies is how he's willing to buy cynicism, nihilism, rationalism or atheism if they're sincere and intelligent. i.e. he described THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD as "soulful nihilism" and he loves it.

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The Great Gatsby


By Armond White
– May 10, 2013



The ad campaign for Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is pretty snazzy, the movie itself is a mess. The poster’s anachronistic Art Deco silver-gold letters on a black grid evoke the chrome of shiny old Dusenbergs plus the velvet casing of jewelry boxes. It’s about luxury and that’s what the media response (foregrounding Luhrmann’s $125 million budget and hyping Jay-Z’s irritating hip-hop music score) respects above movie content.

When we talk about this Great Gatsby, the event and advertising hype are more meaningful than the film. It signifies a transfer in cinema’s cultural impact from narrative enjoyment to the transient processes of commercialism. Interest in this film derives from political and cultural forces exemplified by advertising, not F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel which romanticized working class 1920s bootlegger Jay Gatsby (played by an aged, agitated Leonardo DiCaprio) whose social-climbing obsession centers on Daisy (Carey “Cry-baby” Mulligan), the flame of his youth now married to rich, bigoted lout Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton, cartooned).

Fitzgerald’s tale here loses its trenchant all-American subject. Luhrmann trades the story of Gatsby’s personal striving for another pointless exercise in excessive computer-generated gimmickry and pop-culture hodge-podge. Media shills, ignorant of film style, submit to this visual torture as if it were original or effective. Luhrmann’s signature camera move changes the zoom into a whoosh–a simulated evocation of cinema’s most glorious kinetic gesture. What an Italian film critic once described as “the bliss of camera movement” becomes an over-amped, unnatural sensation.

Scale and spatial logic disappear, so does any emotional dimension. Luhrmann bloats Fitzgerald’s slim, breezily-worded tale to a draggy, repetitious and pretentious epic. Ideas about class (hidden points about ethnicity), details about desire, frustrated idealism and American history get both dragged-out and run-over. Luhrmann’s screen images whiz around Long Island and Manhattan just as they did Paris in his 2002 Moulin Rouge, destroying any realistic sense of place or experience. Luhrmann’s visual exaggeration is like Gatsby’s corrupt aspirations: he asks “You think it’s too much?” after sending a roomful of flowers to Daisy yet doesn’t heed when told “I think its what you want.”

Instead of representing an authentic modern vision, Luhrmann’s lack of narrative skill destroys comprehension so completely that he inadvertently exposes the novel’s flaws. Luhrmann’s own opportunism reveals Fitzgerald’s. The important subtext of Gatsby’s (ne Jay Gatz) attempts at Wasp integration is lost. His mentor Meyer Wolfsheim becomes an Indian Bollywood figure; Daisy and Tom’s friend Jordan Baker’s haunting line “We’re all white here” is omitted; and narrator Nick Carraway is turned into a sycophantic dolt (miscast Tobey Maguire gives the most googly-eyed performance in recent screen history).

Carraway’s voice-over narration sounds like he just learned to read which may be the key to Luhrmann’s Attention Deficit Disorder directorial style; it replaces visual significance and precision. Making a Great Gatsby that looks like both a comic book movie and Peter Jackson’s King Kong reduces our culture to little more than a TV commercial marketing Hollywood product.

This Gatsby is only about the profit-making potential of what movie exhibitors used to call “film exploitation” and it confirms our news media’s surrender to that goal.

http://www.nyfcc.com/2013/05/the-great-gatsby-reviewed-by-armond-white-for-cityarts/

Gatsby sucks? Gee, I didn't see that coming.

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Kar-Wai “Wow!”

The pure cinema of The Grandmaster

During one of the intricately-edited fight scenes of Wong Kar-Wai’s The Grandmaster, his first feature in six years, I recalled asking Wong in 2008 if it was true that he was actually going to do a remake of Orson Welles’ 1946 The Lady From Shanghai? He replied “Yes, but it won’t be same.” His enigmatic answer explains the splendor of The Grandmaster’s action scenes which owe less to the kung fu tradition of its story than to Welles’ dazzling barrage of romantic fantasy and existential fatalism.



Each of The Grandmaster’s fight scenes–between lovers, rivals, equals and enemies–are so conceptually daring and thrilling they go beyond the genre’s established high standards to recall Welles’ Cubist mirror maze sequence in The Lady From Shanghai. It’s fair to imagine that cinematic connoisseur Wong (now call him “Wow!”) took that tour de force as a guide for his latest, noirish love excursion.

The Grandmaster's plot is certainly different; only common for the kung fu tradition–the story of Ip Man, the real-life kung fu master best known for teaching Bruce Lee. Wong’s film shows Ip Man bringing together different martial arts styles native to China from 1936 to 1953, during years of tribal and national division and World War II. Ip Man (played by Tony Leung) Wong’s solemn, suave love-warrior familiar from Ashes of Time, falls in love with the daughter of China’s kung-fu leader, Gong Er (Ziyi Zhang) who, as a woman, is denied to practice the art despite her filial devotion and skill. Intrigued by Ip Man, she challenges him.

This competitive love story is as fraught with passion-and-restraint as David Lean’s great Brief Encounter. Wong pursues his usual romanticism while exploring martial arts ethics–ideas on virtue, vengeance and honor. Ip Man and Gong Er represent their culture’s complex traditions and morality. Wong salutes both with his postmodern expertise, gracing the kung fu genre with the grandest esthetics of the romantic imagination.

Each fight fulfills the genre’s narrative conventions yet Wong bases them in the characters’ personal motivation.( Jacques Demy displayed the same distinction in his French versions of American movie musicals.) Violent spectacle is less important than emotional expression–the proud smile Ip Man shows when jousting with his compatriots, Gong Er’s unsmiling determination when she fights for her family name. These are the year’s best action scenes since Man of Steel, containing splendid flourishes such as rain spinning off Ip Man’s white hat brim or his urgent rush towards an opponent then stopping for an elegant, balletic foot pivot.

Whether or not The Grandmaster pleases kung fu aficionados, the fights are like dances and the best have the dreamy, slowly-dawning excitement of amorous seduction. (Rogers and Astaire were never as romantic as this.) Wong has seen inside the esthetics of The Lady From Shanghai and applies them to a national epic, making The Grandmaster a cross-genre masterpiece. His slo-mo supplies nervous anticipation, “hesitant” rhythms that convey a fascination with movement, image and potentially unbound human ambition that, indeed, links this film to cinema’s heights.

Grandmaster LeungWong’s mastery of montage and portraiture evokes the superior expressivity of silent cinema. (At one point Ip Man and Gong Er exchange love letters depicted as intertitles.) During Er’s railroad station fight with Ma San (dashing Jin Zhang), the well-mixed train noise and soundtrack music are thrillingly elemental–a magnificent sound/image collage. And Ma San’s soliloquy is superb: gorgeous tragic emotion.

Yes, this is high-style filmmaking–with Wong’s natural chic–but it’s also a touchstone with cinema’s most stylish epics. Years pass as in Doctor Zhivago; fashion connotes character as in a woman’s leopard high-collar coat or the Marcel-waved hair of prostitutes in the Golden Pavillion brothel that evoke The Conformist. Best of all are Wong’s mesmerizing close-ups. He contemplates faces as did Josef Von Sternberg–and Leung and Zhang can act out the complicated feelings. Both have aged since Wong’s spellbinding 2046 but they’re capable of purity, seeming young at will, showing their characters’ spiritual essence. As in Sternberg their mercurial feelings denote an entire way of life; the result is a kung fu movie that is also emotionally epic. The ideas spoken (“To yield is not to lose”) are not fortune cookie sentiments but astute realizations.

Not merely a stylist, Wong evokes more than just the Ip Man biography. The Grandmaster is about courage, passion and conviction. Through expression and gesture, Wong gets extraordinary feeling for circumstances that too many genre movies trivialize. When Er is challenged to abandon her family honor, her objection resonates from the cosmic to the personal—a profound trajectory that makes the story’s romance and sacrifice universal. The Grandmaster is what movies ought to be at their best. Through the rules of kung fu (“Being. Knowing. Doing.”) and his estheticized taste, Wong defines pure cinema.

http://cityarts.info/2013/08/20/kar-wai-wow/

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The Six Eschateers

Edgar Wright arrives at The World’s End

“Bluebloods!” Simon Pegg and Nick Frost shout, standing beneath the bright light of realization in The World’s End. At the climax of their pub crawl over “the Golden Mile” of their hometown Newton Haven, these British lads Gary King (Pegg) and Andy (Frost) retrace their youth along with three other middle-aged mates, Steven (Paddy Considine), Oliver (Martin Freeman) and Peter (Eddie Marsan). Their class sensitivity shows them the truth of mankind’s future.



Satirizing their own immaturity, these once self-proclaimed “Five Musketeers” confront their hard-drinking, club-hopping youth and their adult fears and regrets. At the final stop on their pub crawl, The World’s End tavern, these funny, anguished Englishmen come back to the inescapable issue of class.

This awareness is what differentiates Pegg-Frost’s, and their collaborator-director Edgar Wright’s, humor from American satirist Quentin Tarantino. They all deal with genre tropes but while Tarantino is only interested in compiling adolescent movie references, the Brits can’t help but deal with weighty social subtexts.

Wright-Pegg-Frost’s previous film Hot Fuzz parodied cop-buddy flicks yet found gravitas–and deep laughs–by spoofing British manners. (American critics ignored that, focusing on “entertainment.”) The point of The World’s End isn’t escape from suburban boredom but examining how it affected the lads’ personalities as restless teens drinking along with 90s pop music and now as bored, dissatisfied men who gradually understand the authoritarian nature of their society’s traditions–even in a pub crawl.

A press screening note from Wright requests reviewers don’t “reveal some of the surprises, twists and actors that do not feature in the trailers. Forgive me for asking, as I know you would never dream of doing such a dastardly thing.” So out of respect for that brilliant joker who made Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, I’ll only mention that here Edgar spoofs sci-fi/horror films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Quartermass and the Pit, Children of the Damned along with the nostalgic pleasure of 90s British pop from Happy Mondays and Suede to The Housemartins and The Sisters of Mercy.

It all comes together, unlike a Tarantino jamboree, as a summation of cultural experience–a pop awakening to the nature of hegemony: Bluebloods! Class!

Brits are always shocked at the class system they indulge yet can never escape and this compulsion drives Wright-Pegg-Frost toward action-movie satire richer than most. (They’re heirs to such Ealing comedies as The Man in the White Suit and The Happiest Days of Your Life–heads up for those who think The World’s End is unlike anything ever done before.) Pegg’s characterization of the alcoholic Gary King, drowning his self-destructive, unshakeable rebellion (he sees the end of the world in his own self-loathing), would be Oscar-worthy in a different context and his co-stars are on his level.

Wright’s complex, old-friends badinage recalls dramas as serious as Chayefsky’s The Bachelor Party and Cassavetes’ Husbands as well as Tom Hanks’ antic 80s Bachelor Party and the classic friendship movie-musical It’s Always Fair Weather.  Not a frivolous Tarantino genre mash-up, this reflects how, at the end of the postmodern world, pop cultural experience has turned into genuinely frightening liberal conformity. The Five Musketeers–and Wright, their eschatological sixth member–encounter a “Network” that replaces people of influence and takes over institutions to “change the way we think, make us more like them.” Look around, it’s the year’s most succinct statement on our media age.

From slapstick fight-staging to timing an old flame’s reappearance to the break in Saint Etienne’s “Join Our Club,” Wright shows vigorous panache–superior to This Is the End, the Hollywood-doofus apocalypse comedy that anxiously avoided issues of faith and self-examination. Wright polishes Hot Fuzz and these characters cut deeper, still The World’s End seems like a sequel rather than a revelation. Its familiar themes felt newer in Attack the Block where immigrant youth’s clash with British tradition (and extraterrestrial dopplegangers) transcended genre satire. So did Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, so did Pegg and Frost’s genial solo outing, Paul. This ending isn’t bleak like Tarantino, it’s just shambolic. The sixth Eschateer, indubitably talented Edgar Wright, isn’t simply eschatological; he’s ready to move forward.

http://cityarts.info/2013/08/20/the-six-eschateers/

Interesting to draw the comparison between Wright and Tarantino but having it pointed I can only agree that while their inspiration and aspirations are similar, Wright takes his cultural upbringing and references making them seem smart and relevant, whereas Tarantino delivers them in a heavy handed and superficial manner (I confess I haven't seem Django yet mind).

THE GRANDMASTER is brilliant, but the US cut is hacked to ribbons.

Well, Armond's favourite Welles film is the studio butchered MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS...

In this case, there's no reason to settle for the butchered version. The Hong Kong release is easily obtained via Amazon. The American release dilutes the pervasive melancholy that powers the Chinese cut.

I'm sure he's seen both, but like TOUCH OF EVIL, he prefers the film "unrestored."

Largo's Shark wrote:

I'm sure he's seen both, but like TOUCH OF EVIL, he prefers the film "unrestored."

Perhaps. But if so, he should make his case, considering that there is universal consensus that the American release is a travesty. Both edits were done by Wong, so one isn't more authoritative, so to speak, but one is much, much better. The American version dumbs down the the cultural history and ramps up the action to appeal to brain-dead, action-oriented viewers.