The Man Without a Past, dir. Aki Kaurismäki (Finland, 2002).  At first the film worked for me, primarily because of its weirdness, its mystery, its subtlety of characterization.  But after the first half of the film I felt dispirited because the early strength of the film—its weirdness of character and behavior, became stylized and artificial.  Before long I felt “put upon”—that is, manipulated, by the slow pace and lack of tension. As the film begins a man gets off the train and is robbed and beaten, and he has a hard time persuading people that he has lost his memory.  The director creates a landscape of poverty—people live not in a trailer down by the river, but in containers (from container ships) near the docks.  Homeless people and other street people are everywhere.  But nothing is revealed, at least thematically, about the plight of the homeless.  They simply exist, and although they are often a bit weird and twisted, they are not much different from other urban or suburban dwellers.  Then there is the main plot point—our main character meets a woman who works for the local Salvation Army outfit, and there is love in the air.  He is a dour man; she is a plain woman.  No one smiles in the film.  Many of the shots run long—a conventional approach these days in cinema—and yet the editing is often clever and compelling.  Life goes on.  Not much really happens to these folks.  Soon he is working for the Salvation Army.  Reaction shots do not dominate in the film.  The style is simple and straightforward.  Now the men working for the Salvation Army begin to play rock and roll rather than spiritual songs.  The woman in charge of this chapter of the Salvation Army, a former torch singer, resumes her old habits and sings for the group.  Finally, we learn what happened to the man.  All is anticlimactic.  There was a wife; the wife has a new lover.  What does it matter?  The man without a name now has a name.  But he prefers the new ways, the simple ways of existence—so he returns to the docks and resumes his new life.  Something was missing from this film—and I would define it as sufficient tension to help viewers relate to, root for, and feel sympathy for the main characters.  I didn’t have those emotions—after the first half of the film—and at that point the style overwhelmed the content.  I became a watcher rather than a participant.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.  Dir. Gore Verbinski.  There is much to admire in this film: if one focuses on two key principals—the acting of Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush.  I continue to be amazed and delighted at the versatility and creativity of Depp’s acting.  He was the perfect casting as Jack Sparrow.  The way he walked, the way he talked, the way he timed his lines—all were examples of wonderful acting.  Love live Johnny Depp!  He is becoming an American Treasure.  Rush’s whispered lines of villainy were an equal to Depp’s nonchalance and cavalier manners.  Every time they were on the screen together, their chemistry—their performance—satisfied me.  But as for the rest?  In a way it was like the original ride in Disney World, except that the special effects people hired to turn the skeleton crew into wraithlike pirates were given a blank check for their expenses.  Then they cashed in by overdoing the special effects until I was weary of their efforts.  How many sword fights between the living and dead can any one viewer take?  The first sword fight between Depp and Orlando Bloom was fine—imaginative—humorous—and enough!  The last 45 minutes of the film proved the theory of inertia as the film ground to a halt.

Together, dir. Chen Kaige (China) was a mediocre melodrama.  A dedicated father wants his son to become a great violin prodigy, so he takes the boy to Beijing in order to find a suitable tutor.  Early in the film the Beijing scenes emphasize the overcrowded, frenetic pace of a modern city—all new to the rural family.  A subplot has a lonely woman inviting the 13-year-old son to play for her in her apartment—and the boy is smitten by her beauty.  Of course, the boy’s tutor is an eccentric character.  In one of the best scenes the old tutor feeds his cats in his messy apartment.  Meanwhile, the country-bumpkin father loses all of his money (which he had stored in hat—a rural tradition).  The boy, of course, is shown as mature beyond his years. Each of course signals another convention of melodrama.  Plot is contrived and emotions are broad.  Let’s see—then there is the beautiful fur coat the boy buys for the woman he loves, and her boyfriend seizes it and pretends it is a gift from him.  Meanwhile, the eccentric tutor has cleaned up his life (but the director skips his dark night of the soul), and suddenly announces that the lessons are over (after one good lesson) because he is not the right tutor for this boy.  What virtue!  What magnaminity!  What sentimentality!  The film grinds to a halt with the weight of plot. Then a plot twist!  The father discovered his “son” as an abandoned baby—and a violin case next to him.  Oh, filial piety is the key theme here!  The boy abandons his drive for stardom and embraces the bosom of his father.  But then there is another subplot of a young girl who plays the violin—but cannot play it with feelings.  Of course, if she can play it with feelings, then she will be a great violinist!  One of the problems here is that we don’t know the boy as well as we know the father.  He tends to be a reactor to the actions around him. There are moments of greatness in this film—some of Kaige’s shots are masterful—and much of the cinematography has characters bathed in warm, golden light.  But the melodrama undercut the development of characters. 

The Whale Rider, dir. Niki Caro (New Zealand, 2002).  So many of my friends say they have seen and enjoyed this film.  I’m glad for them, but as for me—my response was that sentimentality trumped reality.  One big problem in this film is that the grandfather is a one-dimensional tyrant—holding on desperately to the old ways.  He is mean-spirited, stubborn, and emotionally impotent.  Too often he is wild and enraged.  If he could have been portrayed with greater sensitivity to the sources of his pain, the film would have benefited.  I got no insight from that characterization. The messages in the film are simplistic—for instance, the metaphor of the individual strands vs. the entire finished line of rope means, I suppose, that while the individual is weak and can do nothing alone, the community of individuals is strong.  But the film emphasizes another point—that we are threaded into our ancestors, just as rope is threaded from single strands.  The film pushes this one metaphor to the exclusion of other subtler metaphors.  I kept thinking, “Well, if I were 10 years old, perhaps the film would mean more to me than it does as an adult.”  Early in my notes I wrote, “It is so obvious that the young girl is “the one.”  Perhaps that is one source of my complaint—if the screenplay had been more complicated and suggested other possibilities for “the one,” then the discovery of the granddaughter as the one would have been more believable.  Instead, no other “the one” steps forward to throw us off the trail of the girl. 

What a Girl Wants, dir. Dennie Gordon.  I went to see this film because my wife is a fan of Colin Firth.  She knew it would be an average film, and I agreed that it would be an average film.  But sometimes it’s a good idea to go with the flow and sit next to your wife and hold hands and not make any notes and just try to enjoy a film.  For what it was, it was not half bad. One writer on the Internet Data Base claims the film reminded her/him of “The Parent Trap and The Princess Diaries. A perfectly well written story. And perfectly well acted by Amanda Bynes and Colin Firth, and everybody else. If you're in the mood to see a lighthearted movie, you'll love this one.”  My response: True about the reference to the two films.  Replace the word “perfectly” with the word “adequately.”  As to the last sentence in the quote, replace “you’ll love” with “you’ll get by” and you get the right idea.  Sometimes there is nothing wrong with condemning a film for being mediocre.  It could have been worse.  But the film makes no pretensions to being anything but adequate.  And it was great to spend two hours holding my wife’s hand.