#42 We just watched this on Netflix streaming: Wild Strawberries
Not much of a title screen. Artistic or budgetary?
The Film: Wild Strawberries
Countless filmmakers point to Ingmar Bergman as an inspiration. I have no idea why this is, but I have a theory: Bergman was one of the first, if not the most popular and prolific, to use film as a true medium of introspetive self-expression. Meaning, he made movies that were deeply personal, often to the point of transcending the art form.
What other director would have a man playing chess with Death?
An image that you, dear reader, are likely familiar with even if you don’t know the movie I’m talking about.
Wild Strawberries is a more existential version of Ikiru. It finds a man at the end of his life trying to find peace and makes amends. If not make amends, than at least recognize his wrong-doings.
I have my complaints with the movie. The main and most obvious (to me) is that a great deal of the movie is made up of a flashbacks and voice overs and if he was indeed making a Swedish Christmas Charol than he should have the decency to build in a some type of literary device that made the whole thing less “weird” , if that is a satisfactory word. (It isn’t)
I think the movie works and might fall into the realm of a “spiritual exploration”, but it often annoyed me and didn’t flow well with the story. When similar surrealist visions occur in movies like 2001: Space Odyssey, they flow from human madness and the incomprehensible reality of space, time, and its effect on consciousness. Bergman just plays them off as dreams…
The Scrooge shot.
Why to watch it: It is a decent place to jump into the waters of Ingmar Bergman.
Ingmar Bergman is a great filmmaker – no one can really deny that. His films exist in a different reality than the movies we’re familiar with today. There is something to be said about Bergman being a bit boring - Wild Strawberries does feel long at only an hour and a thirty minutes, but that is because I’m used the to the conventions of modern filmmaking.
The movie is a road story, but asks all questions that Bergman was obsessed with such as death, existentialism, and the existence of a creator. These questions often come off feeling contrived, for example there is a moment where two characters are an obvious (maybe too obvious) dichotomy of religious belief in the existence of God and they physically fight over whether God exists. Bergman = stark storytelling.
Such moments are not unusual with Bergman. His films always scream out questions and ideas instead of subtlety eluding to them. Woody Allen is often the same way – likely inspired by Bergman
One of the last images of the film.
Pay attention to this: “Environments more than entertainments”
Roger Ebert referred to Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies this way. Whether the definition applies to Bergman is not for me to decide, but I think it is a cute way to describe Bergman’s great talent: Creating an atmosphere - not just of aesthetics, sound, and framing, but one of an atmosphere of moral and spiritual questioning. That being a long-winded and clumsy way of saying Bergman’s works aren’t just to entertain, but to create self-contained worlds where a Knight (in the Seventh Seal) really would turn to the camera and express his fears about death and the absence of God.
I must concede that while I liked Wild Strawberries quite a bit, I would not list it with my favorites of the “old greats” (Ozu, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Kubrick, Welles, Hitchcock, Fellini – to name a few of them).
Another note: For those people who would want to cut my balls off for hinting that this isn’t the masterpiece you believe it to be, I want to note that the versions available (especially the one I watched on Netflix) of Bergman’s older films are nearly unwatchable. Someday I hope to hit up a Bergman festival where they have beautiful restored prints available. If you’ve ever seen a completely restored, computer-cleaned Blu-ray, you know what I mean.
-Collin
By Collin, on May 30th, 2011
13 Assassins and a few notes on Amazon On Demand
13 Assassins is such a good film that it shames other action movies with its awesomeness. Miike is a tremendous talent – one of the best. He remains one of the few directors who can incite jealousy and envy in me – David Fincher might be another director who can do so.
Miike’s film, Inchi the Killer, remains one of the greatest splatter house movies ever made. In a recent favorite movies list I placed it third. Even more shocking of a film, and maybe even more entertaining, is his contribution to the masters of horrors series, Imprint. A film so depraved that is was not included in the program’s line-up. I’d heard rumors it was tasteless, but was shocked at the lengths Miike went.
Moveover, 13 Assassins is a traditional samurai film including all the rich mythology and imagery that comes with the genre. I was reading Roger Ebert’s review of the movie and he mentions that young directors should study the movie as a modern example of how to film great action scenes. He he’s quite correct.
Great service! Do NOT steal this movie. Pay the five or six bucks.
Miike’s film style, in his gangster films at least, is very agressive – with a huge emphasis on strange camera movement and dynamic editing. Miike, as prolific as he is, managed to remain true to the samurai genre and make something truly fantastic.
The film is simple enough: The Meiji period (Japan’s modernization) is just over the horizon and many of the Samurai have become lazy, Ronin (masterless), or just plain spoiled.
Few “true” Samurai still exist. As in, contained an uncompromising commitment to their master and desire to die in his honor. The film has a truly evil villain that few besides Miike would dare create. For example Naritsugu, the villain, enjoys raping and tutoring a woman, cutting off her limbs, then leaving her to die in the middle of a storm. He kills women and children without remorse and the threat of him rising to be Shogun is too much of risk.
Shinzaemon is hired to collect a group of “true” samurai to take him out. In a series of events not dissimliar to a heist movie such as Ocean’s 11, different individuals are slowly gathered and we really get to know all the different angles and personalities. This pays off big time later.
The whole movie comes down to the last forty or fifty minutes where the assassins must face off against hundreds of others. Unlike 300, quite a bit of tricks and traps are involved in these fights. The way Miike shoots action and how he stages fights is such a breath of fresh air in comparison to the flash cutting and I-can’t-see-what-fuck-is-going-on action films. I’m not saying one is better than the other, just that it is nice to see someone who actually cares about choreographing a scene and letting the action happen in front of the camera.
The movie is shot with the spirit of all the greatest Japanese directors obsessed with the samurai - what makes the movie so enduring is that Miike’s one-of-a-kind touch can be seen everywhere.
Take one scene where one samurai, knowing death is near, jumps on an enemy with an explosive in his hand. Instead of just cutting away and hearing the blast or just showing it straight on, Miike decides to cut to some other characters, a blast is heard, and what could be enough blood to fill an olympic pool flies over one of the buildings.
Pure Joy.
The movie also contains countless decapitations, split humans, blood sprays, and everything else you expect from Miike. There also is a ponderous scene where a woman is standing in a stream and (forgive me if I saw this wrong because it is a quick cutaway) eating blood coming from her vagina.
Now, I know this sounds like I’ve been overly influenced by Imprint, but this is truly what I saw. When I get my hands on the DVD or Bluray I can investigate further. If anyone knows what was happening in this scene (it might have been edited out) let me know. (Comment or e-mail)
What Miike has created is an action masterpiece. Filled with violence, great characterization, and wonderfully shot action scenes. The only mistake is there is no “day-to-day” activities in the towns. We don’t get a feeling for the how the time period is really. It just jumps into the story, which might be a good thing.
It plays out like a graphic novel and that is in no way a bad thing.
A note on Amazon On Demand:
It has its kinks, but all-in-all is wonderful. I was planning on only watching the preview and ended up clicking to “Rent it”. I was annoyed, tried to cancel it, and ended up renting it a second time! I immediately e-mailed them my error and they removed one of the charges and I just decided to watch it. But the “rental” was gone. I e-mailed them regarding their error and they immediately, withing fifteeen minutes, placed the movie in my rental section.
I really insist people used On Demand (I receive no money from them) and hope to watch other “On Demand and in theaters” movies this way. The customer service was impeccable – it is a great service.
The stars are aligning and the two filmmakers, O’Russell and Hughes, that were odd choices for franchises I love (Uncharted, Akira) have left their respective movies and gone on to do other things. Sadly, Aronofksy (a hero of mine) also left Wolverine – so you take the bad with the good. Deadline reported that:
David O Russell is no longer developing Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. He’s stepped out of the project. Since getting the Oscar accolades on The Fighter, Russell has been juggling a number of projects. Sony Pictures is getting a new writer to work from the draft done by Thomas Dean Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer. Studio’s still keen on the picture.
I sighed a bit of relief on this decision because he might have taken a more serious approach to the movie, which the material doesn’t warrant. Also, Mark Wahlberg, O’Russells alter-ego, might not stay on as Nathan Drake. I think Wahlberg was a weird choice and I’ve always been a champion of Nathan Fillion or Josh Duhamel as Drake.
What also annoyed me about the whole thing is people keep referring to it as an “Indiana Jones remake”. First off, Indiana Jones was a rip-off of older movies that were shown on television. Second, Indiana Jones is an archeologist and intellectual. Nathan Drake, while very smart, is far from a good comparison. His comparisons to the likes of Jack Colton (Romancing the Stone) are better.
I’ve been posting things on and off about Akira because it happens to be one of my most beloved works of graphic fiction. On a side note, my favorite graphic novel, as well as one of the best books I’ve ever read, is Black Hole – a work that I honestly think trancends the medium. But anyway, Akira has been going through a lot of growing pains lately but is still being fast tracked.
I rarely let the fanboy out, but when it comes to Akira I can’t help but nerd rage and the news that the mediocre talent Albert Hughes was going to helm the movie with and that Keunu Reeves was being courted with major roles made me face palm. What a joke. Don’t get me wrong though, Hughes has his talents: Making mediocre movies (From Hell, Dead Presidents, Book of Eli). Menace To Society is pretty damn good, but that was ages ago and he was only a kid (something like 21).
Anyway, in stroke of great fortune Albert Hughes has left the movie and hopefully someone better will step in. Deadline reports that:
Director Albert Hughes is exiting the movie, I’m told. Insiders say that it is an amicable creative differences parting of the ways. Warner Bros will try to put him on another movie right away (Hughes and his brother Allen directed the hit The Book of Eli, and WB topper Jeff Robinov is their former agent and is very close with them).
Also interesting from that article was the little snippet that, “Warner Bros is back to the other plan, and will likely go back to that list of actors in hopes of making the picture later this year or early next.”, referring to their return to using “fringe famous” actors such as McAvoy, Patterson, and Garfield.
I’m still fairly satisfied with how things are going and can always be satisfied I can return to the books and/or movie if this one never gets made.
I’ve disliked all the previous “pirate” movies, but had a certain fondness for the newest one. Maybe it had to do with the fact of expectations – I didn’t care how good it was. I just wanted to get out of the apartment for a couple of hours and it was the only movie playing with the “early-bird” (buck or two off) showing at a local theater.
It was good and had no reason to be. It was big, expensive, weird, even dark at times, and I was glad to see the absence of Keira Knightly and Orlando Bloom. This is not because they’re bad performers, but neither of them really had much to do in the first few films. It reminds me of the characters that Megan Fox and Shia Labeof play in the the Transformers movies – get rid of ‘em. They are the characters that people can point to and say “that’s me”. Stupid and pointless if you ask me (you didn’t).
The best part of the movie might be where Jack is integrated by a big, fat King George the II, played by Richard Griffiths. Griffiths is sort of channeling his character from Withnail and I as a pompous, aristocratic slob. No where in space and time has a person ever looked or acted like that, but if they did, I could watch a movie of just that person.
I’ve often been outspoken of loving stupid, cgi-filled, adventure movies. The Mummy series and Tomb Raider movies are very close to my heart. However, there was something about the earlier Pirate films that turned me off. Probably the action scenes – they were just…bad.
Jack Sparrow finds himself having to go to the Fountain of Youth. Why? Well, we’re never really sure. Mostly because of this chick Angelica, who he banged out before she became a nun. They eventually set up that Jack will get his boat back if they get to the fountain. None of it really matters though.
There are ridiculously cool sequences involving trapping mermaids by using human beings at bait. All the personalities are over the top and Black beard, played by Ian McShane, manages to upstage even the most hammy and ludicrous of personalities.
The movie is notably directed by Rob Marshall. The promising talent who made Chicago, but followed that mediocre movie with the dismal Memoirs of Geisha and the shockingly unwatchable Nine. That he would decide to shoot a conventional, if not “already made” movie, is not surprising.
Pay attention to this: “Environments more than entertainments” 
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