JFF: What Was the Last Film You Saw, and How Would You Rate It? (Pt. 19)

Heaven Official's Blessing (2020) 

Season 1 Episode 2

No rating yet

Aesthetically, the series stays as beautiful. But, already I see clichés and the influence of censure in BL donghua. I'm a bit scared for the rest.

Heaven Official's Blessing (2020)

Season 1 Episode 3-7

This show proves that Chinese animation can equal Japanese animation. At the same time, I would have wished for a more distinct visual identity. 

On another aspect, the alchemy between the two main characters evolves. The creators are obviously doing their best at circumventing the Chinese censure with the help of poesy, and I respect that.

@cinephile 

I gave it a 9, I don't know if you've seen many Dardenne brothers' films but I can only encourage you to go further in your discovery

https://www.imdb.com/review/rw4062292/

I know a bit about the cinema of the Dardenne brothers, but this is the first film of theirs that I have seen. My library has four of their films (including this one) so I might rent them next week.

The power of the film resides in its ambiguity for a lack of better words. The Dardenne brothers show a truthful, exempt clichés depiction of childhood innocence's consequences in a grown-up world without desacralizing the myth. Despite all Bruno's remorseless acts, you can't grow to hate him. That aspect of the film really mystified me to the point where I wonder if the "enfant" of the title isn't Bruno.
Idi i smotri and Les 400 coups have a similar approach, but their cinematography removes a certain realistic appeal which you can find in L'enfant. The shaky-cam and the Super 16 do all the difference.

You should really watch their debut film "The Promise" starring their two fetish actors: Jeremy Renier (14 or 15 at that time) and Olivier Gourmet as his father. 

While the many subplots, sensationalist tone helped highlight the brave moments, they also have their drawbacks. In the post-war immediacy, in this tribute to the brave heroes who died in the war, Roberto Rosselini forgets what makes his later films, at least the one I saw, Germany, Year Zero, so impactful. The desperation of a true German boy in post-war Germany has no equal in Rome Open City. If the actors and Rossellini witnessed Italy during WWII, through the film's portrayal of bravery, you know they weren't tortured.

Rome Open City is still a great movie. Putting it in context, you could say it's a miracle. But for me, this is only the first draft of neorealism.

https://www.imdb.com/review/rw6869358/

 I'm glad to know that someone loved Under the Sun of Satan (1987). I considered buying/renting it but refrained after reading so many bad reviews.  Would you consider it a great film to start exploring the filmography of Maurice Pialat? 

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I have seen 5 of the movies you reviewed this month. I must say that our opinion diverges on almost all of those films.

1) I believe Dunkirk is a masterpiece. A film mixing popularity and quality. It is strange to say, but it could be Nolan's most experimental work since Memento. The film maintains constant suspense throughout its whole duration as if it was a 1h47 climax. Not a lot of other films (if at all) have achieved that. (9/10)

2) The Trial of the Chicago 7, like many films this year, was directed by someone coming from plays. Aaron Sorkin's screenplay was meant for the stage, he tries to make a real movie out of it with the help of editing for example, but it doesn't work. It only makes his vision harder to grasp. It is for this reason that Sorkin needs to work with real cinema directors such as Fincher.

(6/10)

3) Ma Rainey's Black Bottom brings complexity to my opinion of The Trial of the Chicago 7. Like Aaron Sorkin, George C. Wolfe is an inexperienced director who has his roots on the stage. Except unlike the latter, Wolfe wasn't trying to mimic Hollywood. He was recording his play on film. There are the flaws that come with it, but I think the process was more humble than with The Trial of the Chicago 7.

(7/10)

4) Cecil B. Demille's The Ten Commandments hasn't aged so well. Like Harryhausen, Cecil B. Demille was a magician of his time, but only of his time. I respect his efforts regarding visual effects, and therefore, I give a 7/10 for the film. But, I can't regard as good the directing in and of itself. And, most performances except for the Moses of Heston didn't work for me.

(7/10)

5) I don't remember much about I, Tonya. For me, some of the humor worked, and other parts didn't. For example, I have praises to give to Margot Robbie and Allison Janney for the performances. But, the range of comedy where the characters are brought in didn't hook me. That is especially true for the disposable comic relief that Shawn was in a film that didn't benefit from such a character.

(7/10)

Hi cinephile,

I just began my Pialat exploration, having just watched his first success "We Won't Grow Old Together", a film about separation I could relate to. Pialat is definitely a director I'll keep under my radar and I'm looking forward to discovering his other films, especially "Van Gogh".

I appreciate your feedback and the time you took to share your thoughts with me. I think it's all relative in the end, giving a 6 or a 5 might not reflect what I think about the film but what I thought about the way I experienced it, if you see what I mean. Sometimes, the rating is proportional to the disappointment, it's precisely because I enjoyed many aspects of the film that I felt cheated by flaws or mistakes I believed were unworthy of them.

I totally agree that "Dunkirk" was experimental. And I applaud the guts of Nolan to try new things while he could just pull a Spielberg or a Tarantino and make the kind of movies fans expect from him. He's getting out of his zone of comfort more than any other director and that's good.

But I really feel he blew it on that one. It's one thing to keep us in constantly heightened tension but I  "too much suspense killed the suspense"; for me a film is an alternation of low and high spots, the lowest giving their edge to the highest. By keeping the film in the same tone, there was no momentum, no climax, no emotional relief, making for a rather stressful experience.

For some, that was a reason to appreciate it, for me, it wasn't. That's what makes it relative. :)

Now, imagine if "Full Metal Jacket" was only about the sniper sequence or "Das Boot" didn't have that party at La Rochelle and the whole exposition of the way a submarine works... Nolan tries to be minimalist and straightforward but I think it's very telling that he only directed one Oscar-nominated (and winning) performance, he can be so wrapped up in the technical aspects that he doesn't know how to handle 'human' problems.

Take the Cillian Murphy character for instance, granted he has PTSD and doesn't want to go back to Dunkirk, then he accidentally kills a teenager who expected at least to die drowning or killed by a German bullet. A really stupid death and the kid who plays Rylance's son tells him "he's okay". Are we supposed to accept that he still cared about his state of mind at that point?

And superficial as it may, the beach just looked empty, a few planes here and there, some boats, it didn't have that epic scope à la "Saving Private Ryan" and I'm not sure it reflected the historical chaos it was.

Or maybe the film just needed a few well-placed voice-over, try to imagine some famous films without the narrations, i'm not sure they would have been as enjoyable. I'm saying this because I actually liked the ending of "Dunkirk".

Now, "Trial"  accomplished a remarkable achievement: making an accessible film out of a complex plot full of political intricacies, with ten major names to remember, and allowing each voice to be raised without turning it into sheer cacophony... even the noisy and messy moments were deliberate and had a pay-off within the scene or later.

For me the biggest sin of excessive theatricality is monologuing, but the film never made me feel like one moment was designed to glorify or shed light on a character, when someone spoke, his words were as crucial as the reactions it inspired... and well, I missed a good old legal drama.

"Ma Rainey" disappointed me  just like "Fences" did, in fact, I don't even care if it's based on a play or not, I'm tired of films that are all "tell but don't show", that expect us to root for characters because they went through hell, well how about showing even a tiny slice of that hell, make it a short introduction, a flashback, a nightmare,  a voice, a mannerism, a spasm, whatever, but don't just establish a character and then set a whole monologue that will explain to us why we should respect him or her more. I'm sorry, it doesn't work that way for me.

And I just love that quote from Ebert: 

"The more specific a film is, the more universal, because the more it understands individual characters, the more it applies to everyone"

And that's it, it's the specificity of the individual that makes the story, today's film are so eager to deliver a message, to make a statement, that they do it at the expenses of their specificity. And it's actually a problem you can extrapolate to today's world where everyone wants to 'shine' through past stories rather than current actions: I was bullied as a kid, I was victim of this or that...

Anyway, I don't mind victimhood but I need to see the character living an experience of his/her own, not something that as factual as it is, is still an abstraction on a cinematic level (even "Green Book" showed an actual incident). The story LeVee told was heartbreaking but it feltas if the directors were telling us: see that cocky guy is deeper than you think, just wait.

For as long as the film was centered on music, it was a delight to watch, but the digressions to makes speeches about racism felt out-of-place. Oh, and that climax felt just so forced and random that's what dropped the rating from 7 to 5.

"I, Tonya" didn't know whether to be a comedy or a drama, the way it broke the fourth wall during the beating scenes was awkward and in the #MeToo timing, I was surprised the film didn't get any backlash, it seems okay to mock a girl like Tonya Harding and not give her story the emotional weight it deserved. The film made me feel it was Robbie banking on the popularity of a story she wasn't familiar with in the first place, about a girl who looks nothing like her, but that could bring her fame and Oscar respectability. Robbie was smart and Harding is still hated.

As for "The Ten Commandments", normally I would give it a 8 but I judge the film within the criteria of an epic,  I didn't expect Oscar-worthy performances but as far as spectacle goes, it was really something. And three climaxes in a row... come on:) 

By the way, have you watched any Powell & Pressburger movies? Or are you at least familiar with them? 

Thanks for your response.

 While I don't relate to them, I can understand some of your critiques on Dunkirk. Some elements that you raised as flaws, I see as beneficial to Nolan's vision. About Nolan, you say: "can be so wrapped up in the technical aspects that he doesn't know how to handle 'human' problems." Dunkirk wouldn't be the same with fledged-out characters. The film is so visceral, so intense because the characters aren't humanized. After all, the enemy's face is never shown either. Dunkirk is one of the rare war films made today that doesn't build on the codes perfectioned by Saving Private Ryan. Not only does it make fresh and original, but Dunkirk maintains thrills where most movies following the Saving Private Ryan formula lose it.

I concede that with the Trial of the Chicago 7 Aaron Sorkin successfully made a non-messy and accessible film. That was the bare minimum. The political context and theme are disappointingly bland and frustratingly unsubtle, just as were its characters. Talking about the characters, I forgot about them, their motivations, their faces, in brief, their personality. In 129 min, The Trial of the Chicago 7 couldn't even approach the greatness of what 12 Angry Men did in 96 min, and both films are very similar.

For Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, there are indeed flaws intrinsically related to it being at first a play. You explain one of them by saying how the film was what you call a "tell but don't show". I didn't grant that much importance to all of these flaws. By explicitly deciding to film Ma Rainey's Black Bottom like a play, the directors limit his tools to those of the stage. 

As for I, Tonya, we shouldn't spend so much effort judging Margot Robbie's intentions concerning the making of the film.  But, on the rest, I agree with you.

Finally, on The Ten Commandments, I have not much to had. The film stays a spectacle but it has also problems that I can't ignore after watching Hestonian epics like Ben-Hur, Khartoum, or other biblical films such as Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew.

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By the way, have you watched any Powell & Pressburger movies? Or are you at least familiar with them? 

I never saw any movies that they made that they co-directed together. Nevertheless, I'm familiar with them. I read Martin Scorsese's review of The Red Shoes. Also, I saw about 1 hour of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom a few months ago, the copy that I had was damaged so I couldn't finish the film. 

I'm sure you analysis is spot-on regarding "Dunkirk", it all comes down to me not just enjoying the 'finished product'... I guess I need a little 'humanizing' to be reasonably engrossed by a story  :)

As for "I, Tonya", I'm not too proud of what I wrote but it happened to be my gut-feeling so I went with it... I just didn't feel the film played fair with the 'Tonya Harding' case and tried to be so many things at once, "Goodfellas", "Casino", "Spinal Tap", "Fight Club" that it was more of a demo reel than an absorbing drama about a complex character. A little less would have been a lot more :)

You are so lucky you never saw Powell and Pressbuger's films, Their movies are so unique by their era's standards and they have all aged extremely well, everything from the story to the cinematography, the acting, the set-designs... you never know what you're going to get with them.

Their masterpieces (in order of recommendation)

A Matter of Life and Death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0veuSLLWZ0

Peeping Tom

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

The Red Shoes

Black Narcissus

and honorable mention for: I Know Where I am Going

For me, they're the greatest British directors of all time, closely followed by David Lean. Naturally, there's Hitchcock but his best work was from his American period :)

Stylistically and genre-wise Rambo franchise is uneven to a point of being all-over-the-place. Not as much as Death Wish, but close. 

@cinephile 

The streak of Best Picture winners that go from "Midnight Cowboy" to "Kramer vs. Kramer" is perhaps the closest to provide full satisfaction from any movie lover... I adore "Ordinary People" but some consider that was the year of "Raging Bull" and so its win was an upset... retrospectively.

But you just can't beat the New Hollywood Best Pictures... even the other contenders were classics.

Not sure that I agree with that affirmation. Out of these 11 years, only 4 were according to me the best of the nominees of their year. Occasionally, the Oscars chose the right film, but they never chose the right film more than 3 years in a row.

My favorite streak is from 1992 to 1994 (The Silence of the Lamb, Unforgiven, Schindler's List).

1970- I have only seen Midnight Cowboy

1971- I have seen none

1972- I would have given it to A Clockwork Orange

1973- Deserved win

1974- The Sting is a good film. However, I won't give a verdict before I have seen Cries and Whispers 

1975- Deserved win

1976- Barry Lyndon should have won.

1977- Taxi Driver should have won

1978- Deserved win

1979- Deserved win

1980- Apocalypse Now, but I'm interested to watch All That Jazz.

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Out of the time frame, but I listed 1981 nonetheless.

1981- The Elephant Man should have won.

Note: For most of these years, I haven't seen more than 3 nominees.

Yes, but it's not like the actual winners didn't stand the test of time. The Sting is still a classic, Rocky has made it in at least 7 American Film Institute Top lists, and isn't an inspiration for many people of different generations...

... the catch of the New Hollywood generation is that many films had to be gritty, bleak, violent and "with a political/social statement"  to be regarded as 'serious', Rocky suffers from its sequels and the fact that it's regarded as a crowd-pleaser while there's more to appreciate in this film. It's not a gourmet taste but it's a great film nonetheless.

Cries and Whispers is a masterpiece.