Cinema Girl

Director Clint Eastwood comes up with another tour de force, a strong contender for picture of the year.

Scraggly, sick, underfed elements of the Japanese Army are about to defend a barren chunk of rock in the middle of the Pacific against a vastly superior American force. As emphasized by messages from Tokyo, they are expected to sacrifice their lives for the fatherland, if only to delay the inevitable.

The film, for the most part, focuses on two of the Japanese soldiers: one high and mighty, the second the lowest of the low--men we come to know through flashbacks and letters home. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) has just taken command of defense of the island, knowing full-well there is no chance of victory. An aristocrat who once lived in the U.S., he wishes he were somewhere else while preparing his spent forces to sacrifice their lives with pride and love of country. At the other end of the spectrum suffers Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a conscripted former baker from Yokohama who clings to a tenacious will to return to his beloved Kanako and a newborn he has never met.

Once the battle begins, the horrors of modern war fail to tear these men away from their honor and sense of duty, as they manage to be among a few who survive five days of merciless siege through to the bitter end.

'Anti-war' war films don't get any better than this. While Watanabe played the part of the general brilliantly, this was really Private Saigo's story. General Kuribayashi, through his humanity and calm under pressure, becomes Saigo's saving angel.

Eastwood's skill at human drama excels. He pulls us into his characters, make us want more than anything for Saigo to survive against all odds... and maybe in the end he will.

I went to see, "Children of Men" with a friend last week. I liked the movie a lot and it was well done. The plot had this fatal flaw, though. Set in the near future, human females have somehow become inexplicably infertile. The story begins with the death of the youngest person on earth, at the time eighteen-years-old. The world is in chaos and ruin, with no future past the death of those then alive.

The flaw? All of modern research into genetic science--things such as frozen eggs or embryos or cloning--are just ignored, never mentioned.

Try and suspend your disbelief and see it. The dire, grubby, hopeless future depicted in the film casts an artful dark shadow off our human frailties, then saves us in the end with a small glimmer of hope. It works.

A child will be born at last.

Thank goodness it's a girl.

It's been a while... it's not easy being the tree that falls in the woods when no one is around to hear it.

At the end of Babel, one of the final credits told us, "based on an idea by (whoeveritwas)". I said to my son, Matt, a fellow victim, "Based on a BAD idea by (whoeveritwas)."

It's too bad. The acting was excellent, the cinematography outstanding, the direction of every scene right on. The only problem -- there was no coherent story, at least none to write home about.

The film almost inexplicably consists of three threads. First, Kate Blanchette, while travelling on a tour bus through the rough hill terrain of Morocco, is shot by a local farm boy playing with a new gun. Left in the middle of nowhere, her until-recently estranged hubby, Brad Pitt, tries to save her life and their marriage. Next novella: the couple's children back home in Arizona fall into dangerous circumstances after being taken to Mexico by a well-intentioned, though careless nanny. Finally, half a world away in Tokyo, a deaf-mute teenager of affluent circumstances struggles to find her identity through risky behavior after the suicide death of her mother. The girl's father, it turns out, was the original owner of the gun the boy used to shoot at the tour bus. While on a hunting vacation, he gifted the rifle to his Moroccan guide, who in turn sold the piece to the goat herder's father.

The three threads are interspersed and their chronology enticingly unclear, but in the end it didn't matter. The children in the Mexico scenario could have belonged to anyone; the Tokyo girl's plight unrelated except for the fact of her rich Daddy's hunting hobby.

It was too long, well, for so much of an ado about nothing. If there was a point, it wasn't one I could care about.

I would still (cautiously) recommend seeing this film, though only for the eye-candy and film art.

On the scent of a good laugh, I went to see, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan", over the weekend. It was, at times, brilliant, especially when it wasn't overly busy being disgusting.

Sacha Baron Cohen spoofs an unsusecting public as Borat Sagdiyev, a clueless, very un-PC TV journalist from the Central Asian former Soviet Republic. Borat, with his 'producer' Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian), arrives in New York City on an assigment from the Kazakh Cultural Ministry to learn America culture, but soon gets diverted onto a horn-dog cross-country quest to (literally) bag Pamela Anderson.

Borat's naive biogotry and social dis-grace seems to bring out the worst in the 'real' people he meets. The geeky, clumsy reporter is threatened with violence by Big Apple passers-by as he greets them with kisses and advised to shave his mustache by a rodeo official, so as 'not to look like a terrorist'. Three drunken college boys in a camper educate Borat on the finer points of mysogeny and racism, and he is converted to Christianity at a bizarre Charismatic service, of course to enlist the Lord for the conquest of the comely Ms. Anderson.

This is Candid Camera meets Saturday Night Live with full-frontal nudity.

I could have done without the prolonged scene where naked Borat wrestled with his naked producer, a man dripping rings of flab off ashen, coarse-hair-covered blotchy skin.

Get the picture? This is where we -- the audience -- get spoofed as well, part of The Joke.

It's worth seeing and you will laugh... much of the time nervously.