It has been a long time coming but now, it’s official: i have lost what little respect i had left for Ridley Scott.

Much has been said about the historical distortion around which this story of Robin Hood was written. I don’t necessarily approve of such inaccuracies - after all, cinema, as with most visual media today, is a powerful tool with much reach and impact that can influence minds and values - but i can live with them if the movie holds solidly on all other cinematic foundations. Unfortunately, in the case of Robin Hood, it doesn’t.

As i mentioned in my review of Body of Lies, the films of Ridley Scott are usually well-crafted. It is clear upon viewing that one is watching the work of an experienced filmmaker who knows his trade. Yet, in his drive towards the false epic and the commercial saga, Scott has let plenty of weaknesses creep in. Superficial, predictable, stereotypical and clichés characters who can not possibly surprise us with their actions and emotions (except when ridiculous things happen such as Cate Blanchett appearing out of nowhere to fight with the others on the beach, or when we are confronted several times with the face of a screaming Russell Crowe rising out of the water in slow motion - didn’t someone poke fun of this cinematic cheesy faux-pas? Perhaps it was Ben Still in Tropic Thunder or Mike Myers in Austin Powers. I can’t quite remember - ), a carelessness towards making sure that the actors speak with proper accents, an over reliance on what is now starting to seem like a ‘passé’ camera and editing style for his battle scenes and last but not least, a dependence on the limited Crowe as lead actor.

I think Scott has squeezed the last drop of moaning and groaning and growling out of Russel Crowe and there is only one thing left to do, as suggested wisely by The Onion, and that is for Scott to trade Crowe for Johnny Depp. And also to abandon his delusions of grandeur and go back to simpler, more artsy and intelligent films where his craft as a director can shine.

This remake of the John Frankenheimer classic is a relatively decent effort by Demme and his screenwriter, who manage to somewhat preserve the sense of paranoia of the original film and the book upon which it is based, while modernizing the story with 21st century issues and themes. The criticism of the Bush administration and of its support of war profiteering corporations, while subdued, is still quite welcome in such a big budget Hollywood film.
While I tend to think that the film would have benefited from withholding the truth from the audience a little while longer, from forcing the viewer to question the authenticity and reality of more scenes, and from being more audacious in its political ‘incorrectedness’, The Manchurian Candidate nonetheless moves along at a solid and entertaining pace.
Just don’t expect the same quality as the original film.

As has been the pattern in the last few years, Eastwood delivers a film that is very much issued from the Hollywood mould, and that has enough democratic appeal to please a wide audience and enough ‘key people’ to garner various nominations. I know very little about what goes on in LA, but I suspect that Eastwood and Haggis must have quite a few friends in Tinseltown.

The problem I have with Letters from Iwo Jima is the same I had with Million Dollar Baby or Mystic River and with Haggis’s Crash. These films are only a semblance of what they claim to be. They pretend to depict a reality that in fact can only exist in a romanticized view of life. They pretend to deal with a certain harshness of life but can’t help burying this harshness under a pile of motivational speaker-type messages. They want to talk about the evil in the world but spend more time talking about the good. They are afraid to contemplate imperfection and only imperfection. They want to depict the average person’s suffering but only succeed in describing stereotypes and people whose personalities and actions make them stand outside of the norm.

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I love City of Lost Children, respect Amelie, appreciate Delicatessen, and (conveniently) forget Alien 4. I thus consider Jeunet to be an interesting director, one who is not afraid of experimenting and who has a wonderful sense of visual candy and aesthetics.

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To understand the Japanese film industry’s reaction to the coming of sound, it is necessary to look at it in the context of the country’s relationship to performance arts and particularly, to the art of Katsuben. While Japan’s official transition to sound did not come until the year 1935 (and even at that time, silent films continued to play a prominent role), some have argued that sound had in fact existed in Japanese films and foreign films distributed in Japan since the turn of the century.

This argument is not a new one and has also been made for silent films in general, since actors and actresses had always “spoken” in films before the coming of sound. However, in the case of Japan, the argument takes on a new dimension as illustrated by the art of the Katsuben. As we will see, many factors delayed the arrival of sound in Japan, but there is little doubt that the Katsuben, and the influence they exercised throughout the first thirty years of the industry, was the strongest of these factors.

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