KNIGHT OF CUPS(directed by Terrence Malick) Isn't My Cup of Tea.

Here's some advice for Terrence Malick. Lose the actors(who stand around clueless), voice-over narration(that sounds constipated), and script(if that's what it is). Lose the classical music, which is overly solemn and formal for Malick's joyrides. Just do travelogue and show us pretty pictures. KNIGHT OF CUPS works on that level. The main characters, such as they exist, are little more than bored tour-guides for Malick's attention-deficit-disorder visual skate-boarding. Everyone else is either eye-candy, exotica, or distraction, though always posturing as if on the verge of epiphany.
Stylistically, this latest monstrosity is an improvement over horrors such as THE NEW WORLD and TREE OF LIFE. The camera-work is nimbler, finer-tuned to shifts of moods and action. TREE OF LIFE, the most expensive home movie(or youtube video)ever made, couldn't reconcile the monumental with the momentary, no more than Einstein could unify stars with sub-atoms.

Rating: 2/5

POINT BREAK(directed by Ericson Core and written by Kurt Wimmer) Is Retarded

This could have been a captivating adventure movie about the extremes of masculinity and megalomania. The themes are all there. Pushing mortality to the limit for a glimpse of immortality. And there are spectacular moments on waves and along cliffs. But shallow characterization deflates the tragic dimension, the only thing that can sustain and redeem a story such as this. Some of the action scenes are beyond ludicrous; they 'jump the shark', making the feats seem more fantastic than feverish. And the damn tattoos. Maybe getting more than one tattoo should be a capital crime. Enough already.

Rating: 1/5

PIRATES OF SILICON VALLEY Is Silly Fun

A cheapie TV production, it lacks the finesse of a top-notch production feature like SOCIAL NETWORK. The acting is uneven, and the plot isn't always convincing. But the low-budget amateurism has charm and captures the nervy and nerdy spirit of ne'er-do-well but high-IQ garage geeks chasing after their dreams by fits and starts of ingenuity, cunning, and luck. It works on the level of romp. While Fincher's movie and Danny Boyle's STEVE JOBS are technically more impressive, they are overloaded with seriousness and relevance, whereas PIRATES OF SILICON VALLEY grooves to the vibes of geek egotism. If John Hughes made a movie about high-tech world, it might have been something like this.

Rating: 2/5

BOILER ROOM(directed by Ben Younger) Is a Memorable Movie

BOILER ROOM features some Jews acting like Italians acting like Negroes. It has wall-to-wall Rap music, which drove me crazy, but it suits the tacky material. It has the familiar elements of drama, like father-son conflict, but then, well-done formula is next best thing to art.

Smart successful Jews make it to Harvard and Yale and go directly to Wall Street. The smart-but-not-smart-enough and driven-but-not-disciplined enough Jews must find other routes to fortune and success. These Jews must go 'Sopranos' and 'goomba' route, traipsing the thin line between legality and illegality. BOILER ROOM effectively shows the underbelly of this kind of enterprise. The illegitimate crassly masquerading the legitimate. But given recent revelations about Wall Street, maybe BOILER ROOM is just a grubbier expose of what goes on in the legitimate sphere too.

Rating: 3/5

WALL STREET(directed by Oliver Stone) Still Entertains and Delivers

What is one to make of Oliver Stone? Usually, Hollywood directors make asses of themselves as wanna-be artists. They work well within formula but easily get lost outside it. Stone is the opposite. He is best in artistic mode and falls flat with formula.
Stone's villains are usually the most interesting. Stone cannot endorse their positions yet is too much of an artist to simply caricature them as monsters. Also, the egotistical side of Stone makes him, at least subconsciously, identify with power-hungry men. So, the character of Gordon Gekko shines in WALL STREET. He's a crook, a shark, but also a creature of strong drive, instincts, and insights. There is magnificence in his greed, a real passion for life than mere greed for money.

One could argue that Gekko is too sensational, especially with handsome Michael Douglas in the role. Good or bad, he is the star like Hannibal Lecter is in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. He is above conventional morality, beyond good and evil.

Stone succeeds with Gekko because he is artist enough to see Gekko from all angles, ranging from disgust to admiration. Where Stone falters(in this movie and in others) is in featuring the Good Guys, the representatives of Labor. Stone falls back on formula and gives us trite speechifying about the Common Man. It's like Stone is on auto-pilot doing assembly line screenwriting. It is by rote than wrote.

Rating: 3/5

A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY(directed by Edward Yang) Is Maybe Summit of Taiwanese Cinema

Slow-going at times but a carefully observant socio-cultural diagnosis of unsure direction of youth in conflict with family, peers, and authority. Like a doctor's stethoscope, Yang's creative senses attunes us to the heartbeat of history so often drowned out by distractions and hyperbole. 

Rating: 5/5

THE MISSOURI BREAKS(directed by Arthur Penn) Wind.

Chigurh of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN may be scarier, but Brando's role as Grand Inquisitor is more perverse. Not sure that's a good thing but what a singular performance: eccentric, indulgent, demented, funny, vicious. This movie sort of has 'good guys' and 'bad guys'. As an Anti-Western, the 'good' or 'gooder' guys are petty outlaws while the 'bad' or 'badder' guys are the bosses of a pioneer community. Kind of Sam Fuller Western on dope. Confused, not very convincing, and ugly at times but one of a kind story that guts the Western and drags out the entrails along the frontier trails.

Rating: 3/5 

LA CHIENNE(directed by Jean Renoir) Is a True Classic

Jean Renoir's LA CHIENNE blends the mundane with murder without betraying the spirit of either. A remarkable film, one of the first talkies, along with Fritz Lang's M, to illustrate that cinema can stand tall and equal with the established arts. It justifiably made Renoir's name as a film-maker of great promise. An artist who veers into extremities of life without losing sight of what makes us human as creatures of routine and rare moments of grace.

Rating: 5/5

COMING HOME(directed by Zhang Yimou from Novel by Geling Yan)

Cinephiles should be familiar with films about the turmoils of the Mao Era and their physical and emotional tolls. Think of FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE, BLUE KITE, TO LIVE, and SUNFLOWER. Less examined, at least to my knowledge, is the aspect of psychological trauma, the effects of which can be radical beyond the political, social, and personal. The loss of sanity itself. On the intimate scale, it is more terrifying to lose sanity in a sane world than to retain sanity in an insane one. Mao era was an insane period, but many people still managed to preserve a modicum of sanity. Even amidst the ideological fervor, most people at least clung to a basic sense of time and place. They could be driven to do terrible things, but at least they knew what they did and why. In a world gone insane, even Red Guards, rabid and murderous as they were, knew what day of the month it was. Despite their political madness, they still had psychological balance.

Sense of reality itself is what is lost in COMING HOME where Gong Li's character, due to emotional duress and/or physical trauma, loses her ability to retain new memory and to recognize her returned husband. Viewers will find shades of MEMENTO and MULHOLLAND DR., though the similarity is somewhat jarring because it co-mingles with the humanism that defined the Fifth Generation Chinese Filmmakers. Generally, we associate humanism with ordinary people faced with worldly problems. COMING HOME begins in that context but slides into something closer to psychological drama. This shift isn't entirely convincing and is even a bit gimmicky. But even if COMING HOME isn't art, its heart is in the right place. We learn that there are many meanings to the idea of 'coming home'. There is the physical journey of the husband from prison. But there is also the journey of the soul and spirit of the woman who awaits her husband whom she no longer recognizes. She awaits his return home as he awaits her return to sanity. For her, there is the never-fading hope of his return, and for him, there's the sadness that her mind will never return to him. But in their mutual patience and acceptance, they are reunited on a deeper level.

As horrible as the Mao years were, sanity allowed the survivors to pick up the broken pieces of their lives and start on a mending process. But for those who lost their sanity, there was no going home. This film is a fine tribute to those lives.

Rating: 3/5

REGRESSION(directed by Alejandro Amenábar) Is Too Stylish for Its Own Good

Alejandro Amenabar is a master manipulator of mood that, in his finer moments, takes us to the heart of the matter. In this, he is comparable to M. Night Shyamalan. But what worked in the enclosed unreality of THE OTHERS doesn't work here: Small Town American milieu. The characters are unconvincing, as if solemnly reverse-engineered from Hollywood cliches into realism. Instead of realism derived from reality, we get the mere designer realism fabricated by way of coarsening dime-a-dozen cliches about rural America and religious culture. It's like affluent people buying 'grungy' or 'worn' clothes from the fashion industry. REGRESSION suffers the same fate as PRISONERS directed by the French-Canadian Denis Villeneuve. Their vision of American Gothic is based on movies, TV, and urban legends. It's like no amount of ham-fisted realism in THE DEER HUNTER can shrug off Cimino's ludicrous Tolstoy-Visconti treatment of material that called for intimate detail than epic scale.
If THE OTHERS worked in mode of morbid chic, REGRESSION aims at social commentary that seems as off-base as over-waxed with style.

That said, REGRESSION is a timely movie in the age of Jackie Coakley & Haven Monahan, Emma Sulkowicz the Mattress Girl, the KKK sightings at Oberlin college, the sheer lunacy of Camps 'Rape Culture' hysteria, Black Lives Matter outrage, Putin as New Hitler, and ridiculous fear of Sharia Law taking over America. And let's not forget Americans think 25% of the population is homosexual or transsexual.
The boy in THE SIXTH SENSE says 'ghosts see what they want to see'. Well, it can happen to real individuals too. Indeed, to entire communities and even nations. Though the hysteria in REGRESSION is checked before it gets totally out of hand, we do live in a society where the media, academia, and government are in the business, even mission, to bury reality with the Narrative. And these Narratives are so pervasive and relentless that entire colleges are under the impression that white males(instead of black males) pose the main sexual threats and that most blacks are being killed by 'racist' white police officers. Among Conservatives who fear being labeled 'racist', 'antisemitic', or 'homophobic', there is the easy scapegoating of Muslims as the source of all ills.

REGRESSION is less of a film than THE EXORCIST but smarter on the theme of evil. In Blatty and Friedkin's movie, evil is obvious. He, she, or it pukes all over and looks wicked and gross. In REGRESSION, evil permeates through hearts and minds without notice. Even people who think they are pursuing justice or doing penance are caught up in the evil web that, instead of having a single source, emanates from vanity and egotism of everyone. Evil arises from distrust but also from trust. From lack of faith but also from faith that turns everything into a black and white morality play. In other words, there is no identifiable Evil. Rather, evil is the sum of all the broken lives aspiring for dreams that turn into nightmare.

It's too bad that Amenabar got excessively caught up in style(impressive as it is, especially in the hypnosis scenes that almost bear comparison with Kubrick and Kobayashi), because REGRESSION is a most relevant movie in a world where the power of Narrative has so many people hallucinating faux-realities of goblins and spooks as imagined and sensationalized by the globalist media.

Rating: 2/5.