December 5, 2004
Last night Yen and I settled down for another extended viewing session. (First we watched Chan-Wook Park's mega-hyped revenge film Oldboy. The first half lived up to the furor, and I still smile when thinking about the one-take fight scene or (especially) the ant on the subway. The second half, though, just kept getting worse until I really just didn't care at all. We followed that up with Thomas Vinterberg's It's All About Love, which Strand Releasing is apparently FINALLY going to give a limited release in the US. It's an endlessly intriguing film that is frequently so vague that it ceases to be narratively compelling. Still, it's worth seeing, especially for the final shot. Even though it's incredibly non-commercial, i.e. frustrating, I don't understand why a film with Joaquin Phoenix, Claire Danes and Sean Penn would have so much trouble getting released in the US, and why a niche distributor like Strand would be the only one to pick it up -- kudos to them for doing so, of course. Then we watched Bright Future by Kiyoshi Kursosawa. I really loved his thriller Cure and really disliked his ghost story Pulse, but this was something completely different -- a supremely simple, deceptively subtle story of an alienated young man. It's so lax in its pace that it verges on being boring now and then, but the viewer's patience is eventually rewarded in full when the full, slightly surreal scope of the film is revealed. It reminded me a lot of Ming-liang Tsai's What Time Is It There, although it isn't quite as good as that film.)
Then we arrived at the crown jewel of the evening -- the Hong Kong DVD of 2046. Sadly, we had already decided not to watch it. Online reports warned of a ridiculously bad transfer and audio quality, and there was no way to justify watching it under those conditions. We did watch the first two or three minutes, just to make sure the DVD was indeed of inferior quality (it was), and they were tantalizing. There's really no way to justify watching it on the small screen at all, except that no US distributor has picked it up yet and we're going to go crazy waiting for it.
Although I suppose that if we were to end up in Europe early next year for some reason (fingers crossed), we'd have the perfect oppportunity to see it...
Posted by David Lowery at December 5, 2004 4:43 PM