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Front Page News in China

... and whyyyyyyy not?

Ziyi Zhang on the red carpet in Cannes.

So cute it brought tears to my eyes ...

The kids from "Slumdog Millionaire" at the Oscars.
(NYT photo)

Just Amazing

Zhang Ziyi, taking a moment from her hectic and glamorous life just so she can look beautiful.

Friday Night at the Movies

"One Eyed Jacks", one of my favorite movies of all time. Its damn near faultless and gets better every time. Enjoy!

You Betcha.

  

Newman. New Man. So obvious and it says it all.

I wasn't sure how I was going to react when I'd hear Paul Newman had died.

Luckily he had prepared us for the news over the past months with small announcements and news leaks that things weren't as well as they could have been and that mortality was taking its inevitable toll on an immortal.

I first remember him from late night movies on television.

Ending a

huge argument with Melvin Douglas in "Hud", after Douglas as his father tells Hud succinctly how much he holds him in utter contempt, Newman looks up and shoots back:

"My mama loved me, but she died."

Wow, what did that mean? For a nine year old I wasn't sure, but I knew it was a comeback that ended all comebacks.

Later I remember him in "The Hustler" coming to Piper Laurie's apartment in pathetic tears because "They broke my thumbs!" and I really felt it.

I never noticed growing up how embarrassingly handsome he was until I started collecting his older movies over the past few years. He always prided himself on being a salesman, and for him his looks were just another asset to develop and apply and exploit toward the successful pursuit of his career. Perhaps because of that he never really fell prey to narcissism nor fell out of favor as he aged. He was much more concerned with honing his personal character and improving himself and using those rewards as a means to contribute to the welfare of others.   

I first saw him mid-career portraying the Architect in "The Towering Inferno", where by then his gravitas lent even a simply outlined role with great power, withering William Holden's self-righteous builder-in-denial with: "What do they call it when you kill people!?"

Newman seemed to embody for me a man in outrage with turbulent depths and bare ability to contain himself in the face of injustice.

My favorite line of his was a simple one, "You betcha." It was lean and direct and invited no argument. After a certain point it was in every one of his films.

As he grew older his characters explored every facet of what it meant to be a man. A man who teaches, a man who cheats, a man who fights and most of all a man who regrets.

I love them all, but I learned so much about what it was to be a man from Newman's reprisal of Fast Eddie Felson in "The Color of Money". Step-by-step he imparts the golden wisdom of his years, and every bit of it solid, to a callow Tom Cruise who just will never get it. You can take anything from that film and apply it to your own life and come up a winner. But in the end, he realizes that following his own advice is the only way he'll find the redemption and path in life he's looking for.

He aged as gracefully as Gable or Tracy or Grant. None of that hair color stuff for him. His persona became as comfortable as a baseball glove.

I loved that his last movie role was that of an old Hudson automobile in the the animated "Cars". Sleek, dependable and grounded in another time.

Maribel Verdu on My Mind

About three times a year I sit down and watch "Y Tu Mama Tambien". This I did again Tuesday night.

It is a Mexican movie about two teenaged boys who go on a road trip across Mexico toward a mythical beach in the company of an amazing woman.

You can fill-in some obvious plot points, but they are insignificant next to the shifting sands of themes in this film, the passing carnival of sights and sounds, and all accomplished in unbearably long and complicated takes which seem to go on for 15 minutes or more.

Chiefly, in one scene in a beachside cantina at night, Maribel Verdu leaves the conversation at the table and the camera floats after her as she goes to play a tune on the jukebox. When it starts, she begins to move to the music, then turns directly to the camera and begins dancing toward the audience, the first time a character engages us directly, and the effect is electric.

Now you may see these pics and think, "yeah, she's all right, she's cute," but trust me, she is inolvidable ... UNFORGETTABLE.

She was also in "Pan's Labyrinth", and will be sen soon with Javier Bardem in Francis Ford Coppola's "Tetro".

"The House of Flying Daggers"

Yeah, yeah, more China, I know ... BUT ...

I never was much of a fan of martial arts movies growing up. The one guy I knew who WAS a fan was kind of an asshole, so maybe that's why I shied away.

HOWEVER, the recent spate of films over the past ten years, perhaps most exemplified in the mainstream by "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", are all magnificent works.

By blending art and culture and stunning visuals with balletic fight sequences combined with a dash of magic realism through expert wire-work so that people defy gravity and move as one moves in dreams while flying, they are all truly mesmerizing experiences.

Last night I saw "The House of Flying Daggers", a tragic romance starring the incomparable Zhang Ziyi, Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro.

Another masterpiece by Zhang Yimou, the producer of the Olympic opening ceremonies, this really is a must-see. It goes beyond the beyond. And visually its like every frame is an impressionist painting, with landscapes riotous with color and geometry.

Probably the most poetic scene (one out of many) is the man-to-man combat between the two heroes. They fight tirelessly as the autumn landscape turns to winter snow. Its just amazing.

"The Eastern Style Romance"

Last night I finally had the opportunity to see "Curse of the Golden Flower", Zhang Yimou's 2007 movie about the Tang Dynasty, starring Chow Yun Fat and Gong Li as the Emperor and Empress.

Aside from the Shakespearean machinations, the opulence is something that only China can do. It probably surpasses "Cleopatra" in set design elegance. Only what nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox is just the merest bagatelle for the resourceful Chinese.

What you see above is a Forbidden City-style palace built to scale, no CGI f/x, and our hero is in a vast plaza of thousands of Chrysanthemums. A great battle ensues in the plaza with thousands of golden soldiers, and at it's conclusion an equally large army of palace staff in a matter of hours clears the bodies, hoses away the blood, sweeps up the detritus, lays new carpet and replaces the thousands of Chrysanthemums in time for an important festival.

This breathtaking display of sheer manpower in service to one idea could not help but call to mind the extravagantly opulent Friday night Olympic Opening Ceremonies in Beijing, also produced by, yes, Zhang Yimou!

Darcy Zhang, my China correspondent, weighs-in:

Zhang Yi Mou , the director takes 2 years to prepare this , a lot of time and a lot of money , as to the newspaper , there are almost 8 billon people in China watch this show , at the 8 pm that day , the street almost empty , everyone stay with the TV and the show, it is glad that there is no mistake or any bad thing happen to the flame. but as my friends told me in Beijing , It was extremely hot and wet that day in Beijing ,believe me , it must be very tough to wear such heavy and formal clothes in that day.

Interesting thing is , I did not enjoy the show quite much, I prefer the last one in Greece ,I thought it was lack of passion and not catch my eyes , kinda slow , I expected would be more crazy and fashion one , but seems the western and many others do enjoy it .the flame is good though ,but too many wires , they could do it better.but any way , I Do glad you enjoy it . The eastern style romance.

"Sex and The City" - the carybassimages review

My biggest surprise in film school was that I wasn't making films, but I was watching them, and then writing about them.

Over time, I learned that there is a time-honored method behind this. Whether it is singing songs already sung or playing pieces already played, or drawing objects from life for a graphics class, or drawing the facade and plan of an existing building for architecture design, or recreating an existing painting in a museum, you do it not because you are copying something, but because it helps you see and feel the subject better.

Since remaking movies in order to understand them is a ludicrously expensive and chaotic exercise, instead we write about them.

The movies we watched in school were classic, classic films, where all of the entertainment schtick we had grown used to by now had happened first. I pored over Pauline Kael's reviews in "The New Yorker" of all of my favorite movies, and even when she didn't like them, she really wrote about them well. I thought she was the greatest. In class though, it frustrated the hell out of me that we couldn't review a film younger than fifty years old, and so I convinced the head of the program to let us screen "Chinatown" (1974). While in retrospect I could not have chosen a better movie for us to screen in 1982, no one knew what to make of it. There was no distance.

So reviewing movies is different from writing criticism. Reviews fulfill a necessary economic need to quickly and succinctly educate the moviegoing public on how to spend their ten dollars in the most satisfying way possible. Film criticism goes way deeper and makes the assumption that what we are discussing is close to being a work of art. I don't think good criticism can be written on the fly.

One way or the other, all reviews and criticisms are good, even when they are bad. "Sex and the City" the TV show provoked ALL kinds of criticism, and I think that's because it became such a cultural phenomenon that everyone felt possessive of it, like they owned it, and if it did not do the things they wanted or give them what they wanted when they wanted it, they became petulant and pouted and acted-out.

"Sex and the City", the movie, is entertainment with a capital "E", and it is made extremely well. Without ever putting on the airs of taking a thirty-minute TV show and creating from it auteur profundity, the movie takes the characters we know so well and portrays them as real women in their forties, with the usual "SATC" heightened twist.

It doesn't give a thing away to say that I think Kristin Davis as Charlotte ran away with the movie and should be nominated for Best Supporting Actress come Oscar time. She's that good.

The first night I saw the movie was the Saturday after opening night and the lobby was packed with aspiring Carries, Samanthas, Mirandas and Charlottes. It was like "Rocky Horror" for single women. The only seats we could get for being such rabies-free fans were about five back from the screen. Aside from my sore neck and feeling like I was having an IMAX experience, we were so close to the images that David Eigenberger's armpit looked like the Beijing Bird's Nest.

And I still liked the movie.

Still, there were things that nagged me, and experience tells me to listen to the nag because that sensation happens to me after every classic film I have ever seen, from Chaplin's "City Lights" to Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction". But just in case I was hypnotized by subliminal suggestions from a proximity that probably even made the real life actors uneasy in an inchoate existential way they couldn't explain, after reading everything I could find about the movie to help me process my thoughts, some friends and I went back Wednesday night to see the movie from a proper physical and metaphorical distance.

I think it got at least fifty percent better the second time around, and while my geographic feng shue might have contributed, I think this is mainly due to Michael Patrick King's writing. The "SATC" DVDs get better and better upon repeated viewings, just like great movies get better and better with repeated viewings, just like good books reveal themselves more and more with repeated readings, and great paintings and sculpture gain depth and feeling over the course of repeated appraisals. It becomes easier and more fluid to interpret the piece the more you experience it.

Not only that, I had an opportunity to appraise the audience. They howled with laughter and cried big tears and vocalized their astonishment and sympathies. Even our gorgeous sarcastic female friend said afterwards that, to her utter surprise, she was completely absorbed. I think this is what Steven Spielberg would call a hit, and judging by the trouncing "Sex and the City" gave "Indiana Jones", it wouldn't make him a most happy fella to say it.

Once again, its just entertainment, but its damn good entertainment that I think will pass the test of time.

And that's my review. My criticism will have to wait a few years.

Others who get paid to criticize had bills to pay, and so they needed to hop to it. Reviews in the mainstream press were all over the map. "The Dallas Morning News" gave a surprisingly even-handed and insightful review without blowing the plot or saying something obviously provincial, which sorry to say they have done more often than, being a Dallas guy, I'd like to admit. "The Los Angeles Times" lauded the film as a unique paean to the lives of older women, and then curiously used the opportunity to shill for Hillary Rodham Clinton (hey, it's L.A.). But despite the quirks, these were reviews by people who approached the material with diverse thoughts and viewpoints, with a limited amount of time, and gave us, as a viewer or reviewer, that much more material to process in engaging the work.

Still, no one says everyone has to love everything.

Journalists in the city of New York itself seemed to take the most umbrage and hoisted their dudgeons the highest. Manohla Dargis in "The New York Times" seemed to have seen a completely different movie altogether. She peppered her literate but mostly downer review with, "There are no surprises in the movie, at least not good ones ... Somehow it all goes lugubriously south ... There is something depressingly stunted about this movie, something desperate too ... This It Girl has become totally Ick."

Was it because they called them "manolos" instead of "manohlas"?

Whatever Dargis missed when she pissed all over the movie in the pages of the "Times", Anthony Lane in "The New Yorker" pulled his capri pants down and shat all over. He gets the award for the the pettiest, most vicious review I have read in a long time. After giving away the whole movie and then delectably dissecting every minute detail he resolutely reviled, he had by then whipped himself into such a raging snit that he went on to say that Charlotte's husband Harry, the actor Evan Handler " ... is fey and shiny-headed, smiling sweetly about something known only to himself. For a movie about the need for real men - lusty, loyal, and loaded - this unusual earthling is truly a most peculiar advertisement for the gender."

Wow.

Um ... what's with the bitch-on-turbo attitude?

Addison DeWitt(y), it wasn't.

He went on to say that the movie " ... made me laugh precisely once, as a magazine editor let fly with a Diane Arbus gag."

Wow, mmm, so urbane.

Whatever happened to the days when, if she didn't like a show, Dorothy Parker simply wrote: "Don't"?

Sigh. Pauline Kael ... sadly missed.

Sex and The City

All right.

This is my "Sex and The City" article. I promised I would wait until closer to the premiere of the movie, but what the hell.

Back in the 90s I started out with a huge attitude about this show. If it was going to be some pandering HBO attempt at ratings, I wasn't going to participate. I had a similar attitude about "Saturday Night Fever", refusing "to see John Travolta in all his glory", thus of course depriving myself of a decent little movie.

So, when a friend invited me over one night to watch the first season on VHS (VHS!! You see how much time has flown??) I sat down ready to be insulted and pandered to.

What I did was yell back at the television. Miranda was a hopeless bitch, Samantha was a hopeless slut and Charlotte was just hopeless. And Carrie was absolutely clueless about men. All these pronouncements! Please!

This was why I loved Mr. Big.

Big carried the staff (so to speak) proudly for all men. He was rational, unswayed by emotion and was nobody's fool when it came to women. He was pitch perfect every time. His Schooner navigated her Rebecca without ever stepping over the line or taking the bait. As crazy as it made Carrie, during their second argument when he said, "This isn't about us, this is about WORK!" I TOTALLY understood. He had immense ballast of character to buffet Carrie's perfect fallopian storms.

And then, almost cynically, he started wimping out left and right, making bad decisions, cheating on his wife, being morose after trivial breakups. It was at such deviance from his character, which had been built-up over a number of seasons, that it felt like a cheat and a pander to propel the storyline. This guy was losing his shit for no good reason. From then on, I was off Big. I still am.

Carrie should have stayed with Aiden.

And in the meantime, I began to get to know the other characters. I found sympathy with Miranda's insecurity and adventure in Samantha's experimentation and started crushing on Charlotte's irresistible cuteness. I was hooked.

By the time the show came out on DVD in the early 2000s, I was watching it (over and over) for other reasons. It was incredibly well-written and incredibly well-produced. I have had some small experience both in front of and behind a camera, and the huge amount of preparation involved in even the smallest shots for that show has to be huge. Everything is the best. I still marvel.

Easily "SATC" and "The Sopranos" rank at the top in all-time categories.

Despite this, I know a guy in TV production who refuses to watch "Sex", despite my insistence that he'd pick up so much technique, because he perceives it as too female-centric and ... you know ... well ... it just is.

Obviously the other thing the show did was stoke the fires of The Conversation. Casually looking around the blogosphere I see that the show provokes STRONG reactions all around. Whether they are feminists who mock the clothes and girliness, to people who try and pick out a gay agenda, to those who flail themselves in abject worship, the premiere of this movie will be a cultural moment, no doubt.

So, what could the movie be about? I have made a list in my head of plot points which have never been explored which could easily turn up in the movie, not that they will:

1.    Miranda and Samantha have never had a fight. They have had disagreements through proxies and surrogates, but no face to face confrontations. It's time.

2.    Nobody has ever stolen another girl's man. Or even flirted with him. This may violate the program book of the show, or maybe not. Depends on how it is written. Maybe it would be a good thing, maybe not. Discuss.

3.    Brady is, what, almost six years old now? Miranda and Brady need to have a Mother-Son snark-off. It'll be hilarious.

4.    Miranda has never been seen in court. Her court appearances have been referred to, but never seen. There are any number of great outrageous things that can happen in a courtroom which have never been explored. Go there.

5.   No one has been seen explicitly riding the subway, or have gotten caught in the bad part of town (although Carrie was robbed downtown). Let's go there too.

So OK, I'm a gushing fan. So be it. See you at the movie!