It's Back!

Leave whatever you're doing and go see the season premiere of "Damages"! If you read this as soon as I publish it you might catch the encore presentation, which wouldn't make too much sense and would take precious seconds away from watching perhaps the best drama on television.
In a nutshell, FX's show is back with a supporting cast that now includes the amazing Lily Tomlin, Martin Short (who mentioned my hometown in a creepy moment) and the brilliant and constantly underrated Campbell Scott.
Apparently the third season is set to be a mind bending whodunit with Chanel purses as evidence. What's not to love?

No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti ***

Director: Leon Dai
Cast: Chen Wen-Pin, Chao Yo-Hsuan, Lin Chih-Ju, Ma Ting-Ni

How many times do you imagine the backstory behind a sensationalist piece of news?
In his sophomore film "No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti" director Leon Dai did just that, he read an article about a father who threatened to jump off a bridge with his seven year old daughter because of the way society had been treating them.
Unlike people who would've fashioned a condemning essay on unfit parenthood, Dai gave his characters the benefit of the doubt and dug into the possibility that maybe society was a contributing villain in this case too.
Therefore the movie begins with the bridge scene but soon enough takes us back in time to see what drove Li Wu-Hsiung (Wen-Pin) to risk his daughter Mei's (Yo-Hsuan) life.
He works as a diver, making underwater ship repairs and lives in an abandoned warehouse where the two of them share what can be taken for a happy life. When the time comes for Mei to go to school, her father learns that he can't enroll her because he's not her legal guardian.
He finds out that because Mei's mother, who abandoned them years before, remarried she and her husband have legal rights over the child.
Frightened by the possibility of losing his daughter, Wu-Hsiung embarks on a journey that takes him from across cities and government offices looking for a way to stay with Mei.
If the story doesn't sound precisely new, Dai's aesthetic approach gives it an odd sense of freshness: he fashions the film like something straight out of Italian neorrealism, perhaps something Vittorio de Sica would've made.
Shot in crisp black and white which forces us to concentrate on the actors' faces-even if the amount of detail in the set design is stunning-the whole movie works because of its simplicity. Shaped to be something akin to a tearjerker, the results are in fact deeper because behind the plot's straightforwardness there's a harsh criticism of a system that has forgotten kindness.
"In this economy it's hard to eat, how will you build savings?" asks someone to the concerned father as he desperately tries to look for ways to preserve his family.
The movie forces us to see beyond the fairly common melodrama and ponder on the consequences inconspicuous acts may have on someone. It would've been interesting to see Dai explore Wu-Hsiung's psychology a bit more, because he often puts more of the blame on the system than on the average man.
Dai's too innocent view of a world where it's the good people against the establishment would've worked better in post-WWII Italy, but in contemporary Taiwan with its blooming economy, the father's carelessness, comes off as something not so easy to justify.
That's why the movie works at its best when it sees the world through Mei's eyes, when other characters talk about her future as if she wasn't even there, Dai lowers his camera and reminds us that she's the one who will be most affected by the outcomes.

The Milk of Sorrow ***

Director: Claudia Llosa
Cast: Magaly Solier, Susi Sánchez, Efraín Solís, Marino Ballón

Peruvian contemporary history is examined through the story of Fausta (Solier) in Claudia Llosa's "The Milk of Sorrow".
Fausta lives in Lima with her family after they migrated from the country; when the movie begins we see her mother on her deathbed as she sings about the horrors she lived through at the hand of terrorists.
The song, done in Quechua, has a haunting quality that makes it disturbing to fully grasp that the events narrated in it actually occurred to Fausta's mother. She sings how terrorists not only raped her but made her eat her husband's penis and wants her daughter to always keep this present. She dies, leaving Fausta in a state of complete sadness and desolation.
The indigenous people think this deep sorrow comes from a disease called "la teta asustada" (literally translated as "the frightened tit") transmitted by mothers to their offspring through breastfeeding.
With the intention of taking her mother's body to her hometown, Fausta moves in with her uncle (Solís) who urges her to arrange the funeral before his daughter's wedding and gets a job as a maid in the house of upper class musician Aida (Sánchez) where she slowly befriends the gardener (Solís).
The shy Fausta has to learn how to live in a world filled with rapists, murderers and evil spirits without her mother's guidance.
Somewhere between raw social drama and magic realism, Llosa's film is filled with allegories and actual events that might sound like allegories.
When we learn that Fausta introduced a potato in her vagina to avoid being raped and we see how calmly she owns this-even the doctor that discovers it reacts to it as if it was the most natural thing in the world-we are caught in a dreamlike place where thousand year old traditions coexist with social fears.
While the Shining Path is never referred to specifically, one doesn't have to be an expert in Latin American history to understand that everything that happens to Fausta is a direct manifestation of the violence that erupted in Perú with the terrorist group.
Interestingly because the film never attributes any specific actions to the Shining Path, one can assume that Llosa understands that it's impossible to throw the whole blame on a determined group. The rapes and murders in "The Milk of Sorrow" might also have been committed by the military and the government who had as much responsibility as the terrorists.
Through Solier's devastating performance we become witnesses of how a group of people had to cope with things they had never imagined. For the indigenous people of Perú to fathom why strangers with machine guns were massacring them, would be the same as us understanding why Fausta mummifies her mother and talks to her corpse every night.
The audience and Fausta stand in almost extreme opposites and Llosa creates strange beauty out of otherwise mundane situations like the kitsch wedding ceremonies in Fausta's neighborhood that evidence the materialism-as-means-of-new-tradition conveyed by people who are learning to adhere to the rules of a foreign society.

SAG-ged.

How the SAG awards manage to be the dullest awards show year after year will always be a mystery to me, this year they were no different and went along with what's been going on for the whole season awards wise.

Mo'Nique, Jeff Bridges, Christoph Waltz and the cast of "Inglourious Basterds" won as expected (they both deserve all their accolades for a change) but just what the hell is going on in the minds of people who voted for Sandra Bullock?
Sure she's nice and fun and everything, but she gave the fifth best performance in her category. Since people have suddenly become so reluctant to keep on awarding Meryl Streep why not then recognize the best female performances in the category which would be Gabourey Sidibe's and Carey Mulligan's?
The only reason I can explain Bullock's win would be that the actors secretly hate Meryl Streep (considering that Mulligan and Sidibe are somehow non-factors to these dumb voters) and wish she would retire so she wouldn't make them all look so lazy and mediocre.

Moving on...a few thoughts from the ceremony.
I love how retro Simon Baker and Anna Paquin looked together.
He looked straight out of the "A Single Man" collection while she evoked Twiggy and Jane Fonda.

Say what you will of the movie, which wasn't the devil's envoy as most people say, these women were by far the best dressed cast.
Whoever advised Nicole Kidman to do some pot and think Woodstock when dressing for tonight, did her a great service as she's never looked so fresh and free.
Marion Cotillard looked straight out of a runway, that dress is spectacular and a mini! While Kate was breathtaking. Penélope somehow was the most meh of them all.
But she has me used to being all blah during these award shows and then just blowing my mind at the Oscars, so let's hope she does it again.

Sexiest male cast ever? Probably.

Now on to my favorite looks,

I've always had the notion that Lanvin can make magic on anyone.
With Carey Mulligan they gave her by far the best look she's had during this whole season. She's looked pretty before, but this time she actually made me go "wow".
Something about the draping makes Carey look like a classic screen siren, not the underfed waif she's been looking like in the past.

After last week's odd pink thingamajig, Diane Kruger is back to looking like an icon. In this stunning gown, in that risky color, she pulls off what Michelle Williams almost did at the 2006 Oscars. But she takes it to another level.

Alexander McQueen makes a vision out of Anna Paquin.

I don't love Joan Allen's look but I found it interesting that she and Nicole Kidman went for the same free spirited style, complete with free flowing tresses and hip jewelry.

Although it must be said that the huge back cleavage showed me more than I'd ever want to see from Goldie Hawn's offspring, Kate Hudson has never looked so damn good before!
Sure the dress is essentially Hilary Swank circa 2005, but the color gave her an aura of elegance, sexiness and drama no other lady achieved during the awards.

Thirst ***

Director: Park Chan-wook
Cast: Song Kang-ho, Kim Ok-bin
Shin Ha-kyun, Kim Hae-sook, Eriq Ebouaney

Leave it to Park Chan-wook to take Émile Zola's "Thérèse Raquin" and turn it into a perverse exploration of faith, love and mortality.
Kang-ho stars as Sang-hyun, a Catholic priest who decides to appease his spiritual unease by volunteering for a biological experiment aiming to find a vaccine for the Emmanuel Virus. When his health begins to deteriorate he receives a blood transfusion which helps him make a full recovery.
Being the only person who's survived the virus turns him into a sensation with followers thinking he has healing powers; truth is that the strange blood turned him into a vampire. He begins to have even more spiritual conflicts when his new side makes him develop a "thirst for all sinful pleasures".
He experiences lust with Tae-ju (Ok-bin) the frail wife of his childhood friend Kang-woo (Ha-kyun) who looks after him while he battles cancer. They begin an affair and think of ways to get rid of the husband.
There are two movies in "Thirst", one is the dissection of Zola's classic which itself became a staple for noir cinema and the other is an interesting character study that follows a man's transformation in the midst of moral crisis. Both are strong themes to study and could make great movies on their own; but Chan-wook finds the common thread to link the stories and filters them through naturalism's concept of the human beast.
On one side we have the chilling actions that Tae-ju and Sang-hyun commit in order to fulfill their passion which embody the naturalist approach to a human being who no longer controls his moral center and gives it the qualities of an animal.Then there's the darkly funny side that Sang-hyun has literally become a human beast by turning into a vampire which takes the director's vision into a postmodernist, almost farcical examination of the classics.
It's also interesting that Chan-wook filters this through Catholicism because it gives him an opportunity to make some fascinating points about the Vatican's stand on various issues. If being a vampire is to be compared with a disease like HIV, Chan-wook ingeniously weaves it into the plot without making a big deal out of it (that he named the virus Emmanuel provides deep symbolism and purpose).
When Tae-ju, who doesn't have much sexual experience, wonders if she's a "pervert" for enjoying the way Sang-hyun bites her during sex, she's got nothing on the implications sexuality involves for the priest. It's sad that before long the director seems to give up on the layers he teased us with and concentrates on the "horror" part of the movie.
"Thirst" soon turns into a genre flick with a slightly absurd edge that doesn't diminish its previous achievements but leaves us craving what it could've been like.

Jean Simmons 1929-2010

Two time Academy award nominee Jean Simmons has passed away today at the age of 80.

The British actress known the world over for her incredible beauty leaves behind a legacy of over fifty films over the course of six decades.

Her first starring role came at the hands of David Lean who had her play the young version of the cold hearted Stella in "Great Expectations".
Her breathtaking beauty shone in the gorgeous black and white cinematography. One year later she would star as Kanchi, the exotic peasant who falls for a royal in the stunning "Black Narcissus".
If she had made an impression on black and white, her perfect features astounded moviegoers in Jack Cardiff's luscious color cinematography. Made up to appear Asian, Simmons becomes an apparition among the breathtaking murals of the Himalayan convent.
Just a year after that Simmons went to star as Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Oscar winning "Hamlet" for which she received her first Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress. Her take on Shakespeare is imbued with imminent doom that makes her eventual fate a heartbreaking account of lost youth and immortal beauty.
Simmons starred in classics like "The Robe", "The Egyptian", "Elmer Gantry", "Spartacus" and "Guys and Dolls" which won her a Golden Globe for Best Actress.
She was married to actor Stewart Granger whom she divorced in 1960. She later married director Richard Brooks who had her star in "The Happy Ending" which gave her a second and last Oscar nomination for Best Actress.
Over the last two decades she went to star in TV miniseries like "The Thorn Birds"-for which she won an Emmy- and in 1998 she appeared once more in "Great Expectations", only she played Miss Havisham this time around. In 1995 she appeared in "How to Make an American Quilt" for which she won a SAG nomination as part of the female ensemble. She spent her last years living a quiet life but contributed to film as part of the English version of Hayao Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle".
She is survived by her two daughters Kate and Tracy who she named after Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. May she rest in peace.

Winter in Wartime **1/2

Director: Martin Koolhoven,
Cast:Martijn Lakemeier, Jamie Campbell Bower, Raymond Thiry
Melody Klaver, Dan van Husen, Tygo Gernandt
Yorick van Wageningen

Set in Holland near the end of WWII, "Winter in Wartime" offers an interesting, if poorly executed, examination of a generation forced to age too quickly.
Michiel (Lakemeier) is a 13 year old boy who witnesses how the Nazis took over his town. We can assume he's lost privileges he once gave for granted and now watches in horror as the German soldiers irrupt into houses and take prisoners that never return.
His father, the mayor (Thiry) has become an ornamental figure, since the Nazis take all the important decisions. Michiel sees this as a sign of weakness and chooses to set his paternal admiration on his uncle Ben (van Wageningen) a mysterious resistance member who warns the boy to stay away from any war business.
The boy isn't able to keep his promise for long when he accidentally becomes caretaker of Jack (Bower), a British pilot whose plane crashed on the outsides of Michiel's town. He finds himself not only hiding a secret that could warrant his execution but also making a symbolic Oedipal transference by acting what he thinks his father should act like.
"I take care of Jack and you shut up!" he screams at his nurse sister Erica (Klaver) when she aids in bandaging the soldier. Michiel's life gets more complicated when his father is held responsible for a crime committed by Jack, which leads to a conflict between his values and feelings.
A satisfying coming of age story, the film is shot in icy blues and whites (to evoke what was the coldest winter in Holland's history) and features some exciting action sequences including a bridge escape that's only botched by crappy editing.
The film has a hard time convincing us of what it wants to be, mostly because within its fairly conventional melodrama it fills itself with facile thrills and plot holes done on the spirit of shocking twists. Almost every action in the film occurs merely to push the action forward and not as some sort of organic succession. We often wonder why is this and this happening to these people if not to put them in perilous, exciting situations.
Fortunately Lakemeier gives an impressive performance that keeps most of the film grounded and he makes the transition of child to adult something easy to empathize with. The screenplay might try to reduce him to sentimental moments but he aptly overcomes them and becomes the movie's greatest ally.
It would've been interesting to see the director develop more the psychological implications of Michiel's forced growth and improvised maturity instead of trying so hard to be an average movie about heroes and lost innocence.

LOL