Here's what I think of (some) movies.

Death Train
Home Movie
I Know Where I'm Going
Ingen numsil (Die Geschichte vom weinenden Kamel / The Story of the Weeping Camel)
Intolerable Cruelty
Sparklehorse: Piano Fire (video)
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
The Time Machine
What Time is it There?
Yadon ilaheyya (Divine Intervention)

Death Train (1993)
I caught a bit of Death Train on TV. At first I thought I might be watching Atomic Train, but an IMDb combined search on Patrick Stewart and Pierce Brosnan informed me I was mistaken. Interestingly, both Atomic Train and Death Train were directed by one David Jackson (no apparent relation to Peter).
     Death Train looked awful, but what caught my attention was how the twenty minutes that I watched consisted entirely of people calling other people on telephones. In every single scene, and I'm not exaggerating, every bit of dialogue was phone, as the same five characters or so kept calling different people. Stewart called Brosnan, then called the Soviet bad guy. Then he called the terrorist on the train. Then somebody called somebody else. It was somewhat strangely compelling.

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Home Movie
1. The film spends far too much showing who's talking rather than showing what they're talking about—the homes, things they point to. This contributes to the sense that the film is more about the people who inhabit these homes than the homes, but in a way that seems exploitative and condescending. Some interviewees say silly things, but the filmmakers could still treat them with respect, rather than repeatedly waiting a beat after someone finishes speaking to cut to the next shot (which makes the interviewee look dumb).
2. Since we can read what the interviewee is saying faster than they can say it, we need to see things other than close-ups of them speaking (assuming that the film is interested in something other than mocking these people).
3. The film could have used voice-over for the scene in the noisy waterfall hydroelectric control room—poor planning, I guess.
4. The hand-held camera was distracting—the filmmakers don't know how to really look at things. Stabler, wider, deeper focus, shots would have worked better. Too much motion blur during pans. Poor sense of space.
5. The "Louisiana is god's country" section toward the end uses wider shots and seems more transcendent, but immediately after that, the film ends. Some dialogue by the Kansas couple starts over the last shot of the Louisiana man in his boat among the plants, and there is a montage of the various people; more of this throughout would have helped. 6. Potentially interesting avenues not pursued: What were all those videotapes in the cat-lovers' house? Why does the husband in the missile silo family do almost all the talking (especially since he's not an interesting speaker)?
7. The director didn't grasp the subtleties of Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, although he's obviously enamored by it.
8. The shot of the Louisiana man eating crabs, rather than ending the sequence it ended (which made him look silly), should have opened the next sequence in which he appeared (when he tells the story of the firecracker and lost ashtray). Such connections between segments would have made the film less arbitrary.
9. The end sees a subtle theme of dead sons (Hawaii, Illinois). But it's left undeveloped. The entire documentary remains surface-level, never transcending the novelty of the "crazy" homes. It needed to eventually find something more significant. Instead, it just ends, since there's nothing more to say without repeating itself.

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I Know Where I'm Going
If the film had ended with the shot of Kilarn pushing against the door to the forbidden castle, I think my heart would have stopped.

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Ingen numsil, better known as Die Geschichte vom weinenden Kamel, and even better known The Story of the Weeping Camel
I liked this well enough while watching it, but the doubts rolled in with the credits. It describes itself as a "Narrative Documentary," and its narrative's pretty rudimentary: entirely suspenseless, with no real conflict. The mommy camel has a difficult labor and won't suckle her calf, so the two boys ride into town to bring back a musician who will play a ritual song that will reconcile the mother to her baby. Yeah! The rest of the film presents scenes from the everyday lives of Mongolian herders. It's pleasant enough, I suppose.
     But. Only the bits of dialogue that contribute to the narrative get subtitled, and every scene seems staged (read: sanitized). As a documentary, it's suspicious. As a narrative, it's thin. What is this film, then?
     For one thing, it's a good reminder of how brilliant Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) is. That film's being set in "mythological" time accomplishes at least two things:
     1. it sets the older Innuit way of life in a mythological time, which is a political statement in and of itself;
     2. and it generates a continuous, dialectic struggle with the DV footage, complicating our notions of myth and Innuit life.
     Weeping Camel Story takes place now, and is shot exactly how you'd expect it to be ("painterly" landscapes...). The filmmakers's strategy at every turn is to avoid conflict, whether it's interpersonal, between human and environment, or between lifestyles. They have little to say, it would seem, about the conflict between nomadic life and the city life 50km away.
     Here's why I don't like this movie: While in town, the younger brother watches television and decides he wants his family to buy one. His older brother explains that televisions and electricty are expensive. Returning home, the boy nonetheless asks his dad for a TV. His dad says no, because he doesn't want his son to watch TV all day. But the film ends with the little boy setting up a TV, and his older brother arranging a satellite dish. The scene is played as a heartwarming coda: a cute endnote for the film. The audience around me chuckled, as they were supposed to. I thought, "What the hell just happened?" The filmmakers obviously don't want the viewer to think here. This kid's brother and father were both right. And if the audience enjoyed watching this "simpler life," shouldn't they feel some twinge of conern at an event that would seem its symbolic death knell?
     The film contains some wonderful moments, like a powerful sandstorm. At its best, Story of the Weeping Camel is a cute but slight portrait of nomadic Mongolian life. Many will think it astonishing and profound. It certainly contains lots and lots of cute footage of cute baby lambs and cute camels. But the cuter the film gets, the more it feels like the Mongolian human equivalent of Two Brothers. Like that film, this is a quietly racist portrayal of simple brown people doing what simple brown people do. It left me queasy.
     This IMDb user comment says it better than I can.

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Oh How Intolerable That Cruelty Was, When It Was Intolerable (aka Intolerable Cruelty) I didn't laugh once while watching Intolerable Cruelty. Maybe I wasn't supposed to. Maybe postmodern irony is now so advanced that it's beyond laughing.
     A friend of mine wrote regarding it:
     "It takes a while for the film to introduce either of the major characters, and when they are introduced, there's really very little done to establish their goals. (In effect, each character just goes 'Here are my goals.') The film then preceds to an illusory ending, which is dispelled by further plot complications. But since nothing (or very little) seems unresolved at the illusory ending, one has to recommit oneself to caring about the goings-on, and since the goings-on at that point progress from the satirically comical to the outrageously absurd, I found myself not making that commitment."
     I think the film is able to get away with the main characters not stating their goals right away because their goals turn out to be those we assume for them: she's a gold-digger, he's hot for her, they're going to fall in love, but we need suspect their intentions due to their chosen professions. The film is a romantic comedy and they're going to end up together. The mysteries are "How?" and "Are the Coen Bros. going to subvert the formula?" The Coen Bros., despite their extreme cynicism, do not subvert the formula.
     I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't something so lazily made.
     Carter Burwell's music was unremarkable. Roger Deakins's cinematography was unremarkable. The costumes and sets were unremarkable. The attention throughout was focused on the actors, often in very close shots of the characters' faces. I disagree with the Coen's decision to direct everyone (save Zeta-Jones) to push their performances way-past-way-over-way-over-the-top. Rexroth's character's escalation of his train fetish makes sense, given the character's divorce victory. But the rest seemed like actors trying to look silly so they're funny. While "funny-looking people" is a Coen standby, it's unimaginatively employed here.
     And it doesn't hide the fact that the screenplay's not funny: entirely surface-level. The perfunctory wordplay grates. Everything feels removed from every other thing, and arbitrary. Usually the Coens are able to unify everything, even if superficially; here they didn't bother.
     I walked into Intolerable Cruelty thinking about a friend's criticisms of the Coens. While this friend likes certain of their films—some of them very much—he argues that the Coen Bros. do best when they subordinate their smart-alecky and cartoonish impulses to the material's relevance. He makes a fair point.
     The "bellowing fat man" is a Coen Bros. staple. Although I don't share their fondness for that image, I don't care if they always put it in: I ask only that the fat man bellows well.
     John Goodman's destroying the sports car in Big Lebowski is an imaginative manifestation of the archetype. Beyond being hysterical, his tantrum contributes very positively to Goodman's character, retards Lebowski's investigation, and contributes to one of the film's major tensions: playing one 60s stereotype (the militaristic, bitter Vietnam vet) against its opposite (the fried 60s stoner)—which is part of the larger theme of meditating on the relevance of those types in early 90s, specifically during the First Gulf War.
     By contrast, Rexroth's popping up and attempting to strangle the Baron Klaus von Espy contributes nothing substantive to his character, nor to the narrative (the judge simply allows it), nor to any theme I can see, other than something like "law is debase": That courtroom, it's a circus! Making the courtroom such a circus, however, diminishes Massey's character: He succeeds in this case not through his skill, but because a peculiar judge chooses to overlook his client's egregious behavior. Why do the Coens do this? For a bellowing fat man that isn't funny, and a tired punchline.
     Wheezy Joe will show us how lazy this film is. He allows Massey to demonstrate his caution and his immorality he is (traits previously established), and provides some broad comedy in terms of his appearance: he's walking asthma, and looks like a heavy from a Bugs Bunny cartoon. He serves as a little threat to three characters, and then the Coens push a button that exchanges his gun and inhaler. The surprise in our seeing him shoot itself is due entirely to the resolution coming from so far outside of the film's logic (which is to say that it's sloppy). The best part of the gag is when Massey's assistant—himself a lazy character who simply cries and gapes while serving as a sounding board for routines and allowing Massey to exposit—redescribes the scenario as a much more amusing one (which makes me think that the Coens et al just wanted to get to that punchline, and didn't care much about the setup). Narratively, the Wheezy Joe adventure serves no real purpose in the plot other than to delay the ending.
     Too much of the film is arbitrary, simple, and too obviously played. The better elements, like the Scottish-themed Vegas chapel and the laid-back singing priest, don't add up to anything other than "What a wacky world." There's too much of the de facto Coen Bros. stamp on the material, and no work toward building it into anything more than broad surface comedy with an uplifting (and unearned) moral: "Love conquers cynicism." (It does?) Maybe the problem is that the Coens are so broadly lampooning vast targets like "marriage" and "lawyers."
     Maybe they meant to demonstrate through form that cynicism in fact conquers love, but that would be so...solipsistic.

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Sparklehorse: Piano Fire (video)
It's fun that they're dressed up like police officers, but the look of the footage reminds me of Leprechaun 2. There's little payoff for the concept. The best part, by far, comes at the end, with the team-building footage--particularly the shots of blindfolded people falling backwards to be caught by others.

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The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
Gilliam famously never finished this film, about which the online fanzine Dreams once said:
     "Gilliam summarised the plot, It's about an American advertising executive
     working for a British company in London and making commercials. One of
     the commercials he's making is using the characters Quixote and Sancho.
     They're making it in Spain and he somehow stumbles into part of Spain, he
     gets his tender little brain a bit confused and somehow he finds himself
     in the seventeenth century. And it goes back and forth between the two
     worlds. [...] The script, written by Gilliam with Tony Grisoni, requires most
     of the actors to play dual roles. Says Gilliam, the characters that are in
     the modern world are also in the seventeenth century."
What I wonder is how Gilliam intended to reconcile his adding to the adventures of Don Quixote. Cervantes's warns at the novel's end and against anyone else ever adding to the adventures of his character. Why do I suspect the film would have glossed over that?

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The Time Machine
I like this, Heaven knows why. I guess it's because the plot really develops: you can't predict where the film is going to go (unless you know the book, I suppose). It doesn't develop logically, but...who cares? The Time Machine special effect is beautiful and actually contributes to the film's thematic content, which culminates in final, pretty splitscreen shot. Jeremy Irons makes an appearance as "the Uber-Morlock," and though his performance here is far more subdued than his turn as Profion in Dungeons & Dragons (Belushi's samurai deli worker is more subdued than Irons's Profion), it's still a treat.

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What Time is it There? | Tsai Ming-Liang
1. The camera is always stationary. Takes are fairly long, tending toward a minute or more (I counted 14 shots in the first 20 minutes of film). Focus is deep with a few exceptions. Compositions are highly stylized through foreground/background interaction, variant lighting, and a use of the screen edges for important shot elements/contrasts.
2. Each shot is a character shot, medium to long; there are no establishing shots.
3. For almost the entire first hour of the film, nearly every shot comprises a unique scene.
4. Regarding the scene in which the male protagonist steals the clock, followed by the bathroom scene: Each shot its own scene, but the shots are linked temporally. This sequence introduces a new space (clock shop), but we don't know how this space relates to the others we've seen. Indeed, we never learn how any of the spaces relate.
5. During the first 45 minutes of the film there is a good deal of uncertainty as to how far locations are from one another, as well as to how much time passes between the shots/scenes. The film feels as though a lot of time is passing, but it may only be a few days.
6. About one hour in, we get a scene divided into more than two shots. In the second shot, the main male character turns on The 400 Blows. We then cut to footage from that film (the sequence in which Leaud's character steals the milk). After this footage, What Time is it There? uses more than one shot per scene, although the shots remain stationary and long. What Time is it There?, then, uses the 400 Blows sequence to transition itself toward a more conventional multi-shot scene construction.
7. The scene with the two women in bed contains the first shallow focus photography, as well as a focus shift.
8. The film progresses toward sexual encounters, sleep, reincarnation.

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Yadon ilaheyya (Divine Intervention)
I found it annoying. First—and this is hardly the film's fault—the Thai movie club I was attending had advertised that they would show The Fast Runner. But they showed this instead, projected from the DVD. So all along I kept thinking that I could instead have been watching The Fast Runner.
     There are things to like about Yadon ilaheyya: the film doesn't have much dialogue; it uses lots of single, long-shot, deep-focus takes; it favors conceptual imagery and disjointed absurdist vignettes over a unifying narrative. The problem is that it doesn't add up to much beyond an extended metaphor for the Middle East as a pressure cooker (a metaphor which the last scene, which I liked, makes explicit). A lot of the conceptual scenes are pretty shallow. Meanwhile, there seems to be little reason for why some of the scenes are included—as the film stretches on, connections between a lot of the scenes disappear, making the film seem slight.
     The longer narrative thread that runs alongside the more disparate scenes is inelegant; too many shots repeat the same information. And, despite the English subtitles, I couldn't figure out at times what was going on, something I don't think it was my fault. The IMDb summary and most of the online reviews that I read claim that this continuing plot involves two lovers meeting at a checkpoint, but I don't think that they were lovers at all: I think they were meeting to pass back and forth subversive information. But who knows? The movie didn't want to say. But it showed so many shots of them rubbing one another's hands in such complicated ways without any other context that I don't think I'm incorrect to interpret their actions as surreptitious communications. (Other characters are also depicted throughout the film as wanting to undermine the occupation, and the female character doesn't seem to be real.)
     The film also contains CGI effects so embarrassingly bad that I can't figure out why Suleiman, the director, went to the trouble. A large part of the problem is that the scenes in question are staged so as to present blatant symbols, and I didn't find the symbols interesting, and in any case could have been presented without using CGI. E.g., there's a lengthy sequence in which a red CGI balloon imprinted with an image of Yassar Arafat's face floats above Jerusalem and finally comes to rest on the Dome of the Rock. It's hardly worth it. Likewise, there's a section in which the mystical female protagonist transforms into a ninja and defeats a bunch of Israeli soldiers. The fight and explosion effects look like something on USA TV, and the scene goes on for way too long.
     The film opens with a vignette in which some Palestinian kids chase Santa Claus up a hill and—it's difficult to tell (the montage is like something out of a Troma film)—stab him. A subtitle appears identifying the location as "Nazareth." I like the idea—killing Sanata Claus in Jesus's birthplace—even if I don't understand what it means. But it's obviously the opener purely for its shock value. Well, that's the sort of film we're dealing with.
     Ebert mentions in his review that he was reminded of Songs from the Second Floor. I guess I can see some connection—the camera stays still a lot of the time in both films—but Yadon ilaheyya is by far the inferior film.

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