19 posts from 2007

I don't know what I was expecting, but I know that I haven't seen a Johnny Depp movie that I've actively disliked. Even if everything around him is crazy and unbelievable, I always enjoy his performances. Sweeny Todd is a different sort of role where Depp gets to play a true villain. And I love villains. I'm the asshole who cheers for the antagonist at a vaudeville play. So even though I detest musicals and shy from horror, I wanted to see Sweeny Todd.

Well, it's still a musical, and there's still plenty of blood. A delicious villain won't change or overshadow that. Because it's Tim Burton and it's a musical, the violence is stylized and not so bad to stomach. But the misanthropic overtones of cannibalism and murders fueled by cold fury are enough to come through all the cartoonish actions and sing-songy-songs. It's truly macabre in this dichotomy, intentionally so, but I couldn't enjoy the disjoin.

I think it's all the damn singing. What a weird thing for a girl named Divadrummer to complain about. As a performer, I was impressed at the talent - particularly the child actors and their pristine vocal chops. Alan Rickman is a joy to hear when he's speaking, and can carry a tune, but that special timbre to his voice does not translate well to music.

Depp and Bohnam-Carter do well, but in their roles and their music, I couldn't believe them as Mrs. Lovett and Sweeny Todd, just as Johnny and Helena in really cool costumes and makeup. This may be the consequence of their mega-stardom, roles that aren't too far fetched, and a film where the characterizations and story are a little shallow in order to make room for more singing.

I've seen so many movies this season and have neglected to review any. My creativity and ambition have been drained by my husband's hospital stay and some amazingly stressful times at work. I've gone to the movies to self-indulge, to escape, not to analyze. The immersion process worked well. Mostly!

I Am Legend
Sam wrote a review of this on Pixielate, but I actually wound up liking this movie a little more than him. Will Smith is the last man on Earth (probably?), living in a New York city turned wild. We know there's more from the trailers - "Nighttime: survive." So who or what is this mysterious force that opposes Robert Neville as he ekes out a lonely life from society's dusty leftovers? I Am Legend artfully ropes you in with the premise, but it's like a clumsy teenager trying to make love from that point on. Some people will be disappointed by the way things wrap up, but I appreciated the sentiment and obvious affection for how the film was crafted.

This is one of those films where the setting is its own character, it's so well-developed and omnipresent. The movie's appeal lies mostly there, and with Will Smith being almost impossible to dislike. Plus there's a dog. Who doesn't love smart dogs in movies?

I enjoy survival stories that don't highlight any serious physical pain. Robinson Crusoe, Lost, the Boxcar Children from my youth. You get to see everyone revert to a much simpler life as hunter/gatherers. I Am Legend is full of tiny, well-thought out details for how man might survive in a post-apocalyptic city. Neville keeps a hydroponic garden in his kitchen and harvests corn in the park. Even with a fancy rifle, hunting deer is difficult and best done on foot. Drugs, TVs, and money are useless, but bacon is priceless. Robert is strong, but painfully lonely, and talks to mannequins to maintain some sort of social normalcy. Daily exercise must be rigorous if Robert wishes to compete with the wild and survive the monsters.

And the monsters are where I start to get lost. It wouldn't be enough to have Robert Neville wandering around for two hours, so there must be a direct conflict. That's well built up when we see Neville revert to hysterics when Sam the dog runs off, or when his daily routine is timed to sunset. Why does Robert freak out when the dog disappears into darkness? Why is it important that Robert returns to his home by sunset? Why must he bar the windows and doors to his own home and pour some unknown liquid over his tracks on the doorstep?

The monsters, of course, are us. By playing God and finding a viral cure for cancer, the punishment handed down was death and vampirism to all. Neville is immune to the vampire virus, but still has to worry about surviving their mindless aggression. This could have been very poignant if we'd never seen a monster, or if the monsters had retained at least some of their humanity.

Halfway through the movie, it stops becoming a survival story and starts morphing into a survival of the fittest story. Neville gets into violent battles with hordes of CGI vampires. It's not very realistic, though the irony of being immune to a virus and dying from the secondary effects anyway is not lost on me. As with Signs and nearly every survival horror story before it, the suspense vanishes completely when the horror stops being psychological and starts being primal. It's appealing to a lot of people - enough that survival horror is its own genre - but I seem to loose my connection to the hero as soon as he enters a dark hallway. I'd never do that, after all! And the monsters never frighten me when I can see them. Pyramid Head is a pushover.

The movie ends abruptly and unnecessarily, and for that, a lot of people won't like it. But I enjoyed the ride. I Am Legend really delivers through the first half of the movie, where the build is immensely interesting and suspenseful. But the conflict and resolution just isn't scary or satisfying.

PS: leave the children at home, please. CGI vampires are not for younglings (usually).

Originally posted to http://pixielate.com/games

I once had a screaming nightmare that affected my sense of reality so badly that I couldn’t get back to sleep. Instead, I stayed up and played video games. Harvest Moon was my last grip on reality at 4AM. After that incident, I had a new respect for the cute sim games. We play games to escape, to participate in worlds where our actions have a predictable outcome, and all things can be achieved through persistence. Fantasy worlds strewn with flowers and happy shining faces are safe and eternally comforting. People knock these types of games for being monotonous and over-cute, but for Collector-type gamers and Cute Enthusiasts, they’re radically addictive and can take months to start losing freshness.

Rating:

Replay Value: High

Current House Stats: 11% cute, 9% geeky, 6% happy, 19% tasty

Favorite Neighbor: (so far) Roxie Road

My Sims is a promising installment in the sim genre, and a serious contender with mainstays like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon. It is not a game for your “Mii”s, or a cute-ified version of The Sims, but a concept to itself. Your customized avatar rebuilds a town of your naming by enticing new neighbors into town and building them customized houses and furniture to suit their tastes. There are “essences” scattered around the town - growing on trees, swimming in lakes, and so forth. You gather these and reuse them as objects or paints to give furniture a special appeal: cute, fun, spooky, geeky, studious, and tasty. As you complete furniture requests for your residents, your town grows in popularity and adjoining areas open up with new places to explore and different essences to gather.

I like having specific quests to complete for my neighbors, rather than just giving them things that you think they’ll like. It gives the game more of a linear progression, so you feel like you’re actually progressing through the game. You can give random gifts and redecorate their houses and your own, so you’re truly omnipotent. Apart from collection, the game’s all about home design.

With any new franchise, there are design issues. When you’re building furniture, you’re doing it piece by piece to a blueprint on a grid, with different sized blocks in different shapes. The blocks you need for each piece are highlighted and snap into place when they’re close to their location on the grid. But because the furniture is 3-dimensional, it can be very difficult to place all of the tiny pieces properly, especially if you’re going against the plan. It can be very time consuming to make an intricate piece of furniture exactly the way you want.

There are also some problems with the menus. When you have a few essences, you can access them easily, but as the game progresses and you get more essence types, you have to scroll through all of them to select the one you want. If the essences were organized by type (geeky, cute, etc.), this would drastically cut down on that frustration. The Sims games do this for their “collections”, so I really wonder why they rejected this feature for My Sims. The furniture and building pieces have a similar scrolling setup. When building, you have to leave and re-enter your workshop for each piece of furniture. If you want to redesign a neighbor’s furniture, you basically have to steal it from them and take it back to your workshop to edit it. It would be better if there were some way to edit furniture directly in the houses.

But many of the design mechanics are impressive. Some artist obviously spent long hours making sure all of the essences in each category were complimentary to each other, and there are four different paint types for each essence you collect - generally, two patterns and two solid colors that represent the item you picked up. The variety of essences, blocks, and other objects is truly astonishing. Each neighbor has their own subset of decorations, and you can unlock new designs by giving them gifts of furniture that match their tastes.

My Sims will be instantly addictive to anyone who’s ever played a sim game and wanted to design the town down to a micro level. There’s a wealth of content that pushes the game past a stale freeplay sandbox and into a joyous explore-and-collect expedition. I hope they release a My Sims 2. With a few more features and some improvements to the interface, this game will solidify its place as a franchise to be reckoned with.

Originally posted to http://pixielate.com/booksmovies

Based on the book “Northern Lights” (marketed as “The Golden Compass” in the US) by Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass features a star-studded supporting cast and newcomer Dakota Blue Richards as the crafty main character, Lyra. Pullman’s books are some of my favorites, and the Golden Compass stands out in the His Dark Materials trilogy as the most whimsical and adventure-driven. The movie captures some of this tone while borrowing stylistic elements from popular fantasy movies that came before it. The story should be enough to elevate Golden Compass beyond its stunning graphics, but becomes somewhat lost in the spectacle. Golden Compass fails to make a distinguishing mark on the ever-growing list of CGI-driven fantasy for children.

The movie takes place in an alternate world where peoples’ souls reside outside of their bodies in animal forms called daemons. Lyra is an orphan sent to live with her uncle Asriel (Daniel Craig). Asriel works closely with a society of scholars, and the college sees to Lyra’s care and education. Asriel uncovers the mystery of Dust - a substance that has some unknown connection to a person’s soul. Against the efforts of the Magisterium - a faceless theocratic government - Asriel travels north to learn more about Dust. He leaves without Lyra, but she still gets to travel north. An unknown woman with influence - Ms. Coulter (Nicole Kidman) - convinces the college to release Lyra into her care for a journey into the north. Before Lyra leaves, the president of the college gives her an alethiometer, a one-of-a-kind artifact that can tell the truth of any question asked. These story elements are all initially disconnected, but start entangling very quickly as Lyra becomes an important figure in a power struggle between the scholars and the government in the search for answers about Dust.

As a trilogy of books, His Dark Materials is highly symbolic and anti-religion. The Golden Compass should not pose a problem for parents who are concerned about the portrayal of religion - this movie (and the first book, for that matter) don’t get very deep into anti-establishment attitudes. The mystery of Dust is hyped, but explained only briefly by Ms. Coulter as evidence of human defiance of The Authroity. The Magisterium is vilified, but it’s not entirely clear in the movie that it’s a metaphor for the Church. It will be interesting to see how these attitudes will develop through the next two movies, when the conflicts are laid clear and heavenly entities enter the fray.

The main problem with The Golden Compass lies in execution. We’ve all seen the CGI-fantasy movies, and it takes more than fantastical creatures to make a memorable movie now. The style of The Golden Compass is very familiar, with everything washed in gold and backlights, a violin-heavy score, a giant CGI predator, and a bevy of minor adult characters that lend their names to the posters and their aid to the heroic efforts of children. Narnia, anyone? The Golden Compass being marketed as a RING turning into a compass doesn’t help much, as this is not really even the same sort of story or audience as Lord of the Rings.

We like watching most fantasy movies as adults, because they’re typically made to suit a happy medium. The Golden Compass may have been made intentionally for children, as the story is very lightly handled. The story’s editing is nowhere near as smooth and detailed as an adult audience will expect. Each scene is short and action-packed, but little continuity exists between them. Like many movies that were made from much longer books, the creators must have really struggled to keep everything from the book in the movie. There were still some things missing, but the general effect is that too much is going on, and none of it seems to be connected. This works for movies like Harry Potter, where all of the audience has read the book, but I’m not sure The Golden Compass can assume as much.

The experience is entertaining, but often confusing. Pullman’s alternate world is intriguing, there’s never a dull moment, and everyone loves a movie where the protagonist is a cheeky little girl. But The Golden Compass will fail to meet the expectations of many. Fans of the book will be disappointed at the loose treatment of the story. Moviegoers expecting a cohesive plot may have to read the book.

Straddling drama and thriller, A Simple Plan is Scott B. Smith's adaptation on his novel of the same name. Sam Raimi directs Bill Paxton, Bridget Fonda, Brent Briscoe and Billy Bob Thornton, leading Thorton to an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. The film strives for irony, symbolism, emotional depth, and a twisted storyline, but doesn't quite come together. Though all of these elements are a little overwhelming, the acting in A Simple Plan stands out as stunning and multi-dimensional.

The story begins with Hank (Paxton) and Jacob (Thornton) - two brothers on short car trip with a friend, Lou  (Briscoe). The group stumbles upon a crashed plane carrying 4 million dollars in unmarked bills. At first Hank is against keeping the money, but changes his mind and in short order becomes the trio's leader and banker. Assisted by his wife Sarah (Fonda), Hank fashions "a simple plan" to keep the money and not get caught. Of course, money doesn't fall from the sky without consequence, and as you might guess, the plan unravels irreparably as the would-be-millionaires do their worst to keep their horde a secret.

Hank and Jacob have a close but strained relationship. Hank is a respected small-town family man, while Jacob struggles to keep jobs and stay out of trouble. Hank's character is unsettling but not noteworthy: his morals are paper-thin, and he's easily influenced by the people and events around him. He's mostly a vehicle for the story. The real surprises in the movie come from the supporting cast.

Sarah is a pregnant librarian, and she's often photographed through Hank's adoring eyes: backlit and in soft-focus. But the stony dialog she delivers is a stark contrast with her angelic image. Her suggestions alone guide Hank through his new life of secrecy, and her ideas are the basis for nearly all elements of the wicked simple plan. After she's through with labor and her child is placed into her arms for the first time, Sarah cooly instructs Hank on how to deal with a particularly grisly matter, all while nursing the newborn infant. That's hardcore!

Billy Bob Thornton gives the most complex performance. Jacob could be relegated to the role of the lovable goof, but his is the only character in the movie that's capable of deep affection, shame, and compassion. Jacob does like to have fun, but he's also a classic example of the nice guy finishing last. His plans for the share of his cash are the only truly simple ones in the movie, and his life is revealed as a shockingly lonely one. In spite of all of his problems, Jacob continues to have an optimistic outlook, and continues to love those who do him wrong. Jacob may  seem ignorant, but we learn that years of being on the outside looking in give Jacob a special and often painful insight into the actions of others.

While the characterizations are rich, the rest of the movie is a hodgepodge of composition. The film might be classified as a drama, but the physics-defying violence and skewed, low-angle shots seem more at home in a thriller. The pristine snowy settings and stark bloody contrasts are too opaque to be artistic. With the exception of the occasional crow or fox, symbolism is too obvious or obviously absent in the face of the ever-twisting story.

The story is a series of turns, which often draw focus away from the acting performances. The concept is not very original: many people will draw an immediate comparison to the movie Fargo. The popular "good people involved in bad crime" story type means that the developments were very predictable for anyone who's seen a movie that employs this story. The ending is particularly inelegant and melodramatic; a last-minute thread that needed to be tied.

The final effect is surreal, for good or ill: all the pieces exist to make an affecting drama, but the plot cuts cruelly between standard dialog and stylized action. What may have been a poignant comment on the fickle nature of man is lost in the overactive story. But the actors do offer dynamic performances that take the film from unremarkable to entertaining.

     Roger Ebert's criticism of The Three Season argues that the film “... romanticizes prostitution, makes poverty picturesque, transforms hardship into fable.” It's true that The Three Seasons offers very few portrayals of violence, illness, death or despair. Against all odds, all of the seasons are love stories - romances. The formal elements of the movie further suggest that The Three Seasons is deliberately styled as a romance. While other genres are expected to show the consequences of a hard life, in a romance film, romanticism should be accepted.

     The Three Seasons represent three main story lines within the film. These stories all take place in present day Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon of Vietnam. Kien An is a woman who farms and sells lotuses. Woody is a child who peddles watches and other small valuables. Hai drives people with a bicycle-rickshaw, and his story becomes tangled with Lan's - a prostitute. The three stories are connected by their common theme of hard work. Within their jobs, every main character finds love and manages to lead a charmed life despite exploitative and impoverished conditions.

     Kien An's story of spring is free of hardship. She works as one of many women at a lotus farm, paddling a personal canoe in a still lake of lilies. When the bulbs are gathered, Kien An goes to sell them in Ho Chi Minh City. As Westerners, we're certain that selling flowers is not a path to riches, yet Kien An doesn't seem to mind. Like the rest of the women, she sings as she works, and we never see her dwelling, her family, or her diet. We don't know how poverty touches Kien An's life, since we only see her working happily. If we did not guess the price of lotus, we could assume that Kien An lives as a princess, and the film would not contradict this point. There's an absence of evil bosses chastising the women for the languorous pace they work in. They may be paid poorly (we can't tell), but the working conditions seem fine, and the view is spectacular. We know her labor is exploited and that she's living in poverty, but these are assumptions that are not supported by events in the film. The only suffering Kien An seems to endure is sweating. Kien An's story represents a charmed spring season.

     Woody's winter also contains harsh conditions, but like Kien An's, we don't see his hardship. Woody is a young boy who works at night, in the pouring rain. He sells trinkets to tourists. We feel sorry for Woody because we feel that children should not have to work. We assume that Woody is poor because that is the common condition that forces children to work. Woody's trinkets don't seem high-end, so we can't imagine that he's profiting much from this hard work. Woody has a poncho to keep him dry as torrential rain hits Saigon nightly, so his story is not precisely a sob. Woody's inventory gets stolen, and he's smacked for it (by an adult we assume is his guardian). But through all the rain, rejections from tourists, and loss, Woody never cries. He doesn't go hungry when he's unable to peddle his wares. He doesn't get sick from working nightly in the downpour. He continues selling, searching, and harassing tourists. He even takes a break for a movie and a game of soccer. In our society, children are afforded an open display of emotion when they are unhappy, but Woody never delivers one. Woody's winter is wet by nature, not by tears.

     Hai and Lan's fall romance continues the theme of poverty and exploitation without despair. Hai works as a cyclo - a rickshaw bicycle driver. His fortune is made from the sweat of his back as he drives tourists around Ho Chi Minh City. He hangs out with lots of other cyclos, who have varying opinions on the importance of wealth and the best way to earn a living. Hai takes part in these conversations passively. He toils under the weight of others but never complains. He has quarters, but at one point, he chooses to sleep outside with the homeless cyclos because "it's too hot to sleep inside." Hai's colleagues admonish him for this, but Hai doesn't seem to care. Hai chooses to buy real lotus from Kien An instead of fake lotus, even though the fake ones are remarkably realistic. Hai seeks to rescue a prostitute, Lan. His involvement with Lan goes beyond affection or feeling that the job is beneath her. Hai sees more in Lan and knows she's not being true to her own ideals.  Hai goes beyond being indifferent or pragmatic - he's a man of morals and upholds honesty as a virtue in every aspect of his life.

     Lan is a prostitute undergoing an obvious crisis of conscience. She feels that the highest paying job is the best job. We know that prostitutes are commonly abused or killed by their clients or their pimps and are at high risk for sexually transmitted diseases or unwanted pregnancies. But Lan has no pimp, no disease that we know of, and is only harmed once when a client ejects her from a slow-moving taxi. Lan lives in a bad neighborhood under the threat of gangs, but they do nothing more than intimidate her. Lan's suffering is internal.

     Lan suffers because she doesn't want to be a prostitute but feels that her other options are severely limited. She remarks that the sun rises for her clients and the tourists, and the rest of the world lives in their shadow – Lan feels that there is a fundamental difference in those who are wealthy and seeks scraps from them as her only chance at being a part of their world. Lan is an escapist, using nice hotels and fancy clothes to shadow an impoverished life at home. She feels poverty and exploitation keenly but not due to any physical hardships. Lan's problems lie in her own insecurities, and she feels that money is the only way to remedy this.

     Each of these stories become romances. Hai rescues Lan from herself and a life of prostitution. Kien An meets her reclusive boss, Teacher Dao. The Teacher is a man racked by leprosy, and Kien An connects with him through compassion and a shared love of poetry. Even Woody finds a playmate - a little girl in a poncho like his, also making a living from the streets.

     Hai and Lan's romance is the central story of the movie, as it receives the most time and development on screen. Theirs is a story of romantic love, familiar from the conventional definition of Plato's eros: "Eros is passionate love, with sensual desire and longing" (Wikipedia). Hai makes one of Lan's explicit desires come true by buying a night with her and proceeding to let her sleep unmolested in a fancy hotel room, enjoying the air conditioning. Later in the movie, Hai massages Lan's back with a hot spoon, similar to the skin scraping used in Asian homeopathic practices (“Dermal Scraping Therapy”). Lan recounts memories of her schooldays, where red flowers bloom and are exchanged as valentines. In the ending sequence, Hai takes Lan to the old schoolyard, blindfolded, and gives Lan a red flower.

     But the initial definition of eros has additional implications: "Although eros is initially felt for a person, with contemplation it becomes an appreciation of the beauty within that person, or even becomes appreciation of beauty itself"(Wikipedia). Kien An appreciates Teacher Dao in this way - though he's disfigured, this is the farthest thing from her mind. After Teacher Dao dies, his assistant shows Kien An a picture of Dao in his early years, and proclaims him a handsome man. Kien An makes no comment and pages through Teacher Dao's poems instead. Clearly, she has a contemplative appreciation of the beauty within Teacher Dao.

     "Romantic" is defined as "marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized" (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary). The Three Seasons appeals to us on all of these fronts. Han is a hero who rescues Lan from her life as a prostitute. All of the characters, facing adversity through poverty and exploitation, can be considered heroic. Vietnam and the characters' lives are remote and mysterious to the "invisible norm" of the audience, with regard to race (whiteness) and class (middle-class) (Lehman/Luhr, 309). Our characters are Asian, and their lives would be considered lower or working-class in the US. All of the conditions in the movie are idealized, as our characters seem to face no ill effects from poverty and exploitation.

     Formal elements of the film also create the aesthetic experience expected of romantic art. The cinematography is classically beautiful. Teacher Dao's lotus farm is picturesque, quiet, and timeless, muted in misty colors. Woody's world is dramatically framed in a constant blue and black downpour, or smoky, amber bars. Hai and Lan live in the wavering heat of the night, in fancy crystal-draped hotels, or in a red dawn. Special attention is given to the setting and scenery as the characters make their way through long shots of these magic places without speaking. When the characters do speak, they speak in poems. Kien An repeats a song about multitudes in nature through the film, and when she learns that Teacher Dao will no longer write poems because he's lost his fingers, she proposes: “Let me be your fingers.” With each bicycle ride she receives from Hui, Lan speaks of her dreams and memories. When confronted with the possibility of love, she cries “please don't make me feel what I'm not capable of,” a conversation within one sentence.

     Though the lives explored in The Three Seasons are different than our own, it is still easily recognizable as a romance. Each season contains highly aesthetic pictures and words and familiar narratives of love and idealized, painless portrayals of working life. The Three Seasons appeals to our need for escape from desperation and despair, and into the world of film, beauty, and love.

Lust, Caution is a polarizing film. I suspect some will see this and love it for the setting, intrigue, costumes, and subtle characterizations. Others will find it plodding, opaque, and full of unsympathetic characters. While I realize most drama deals with topics that are unsettling, Lust, Caution brought it to a new level for me: I was so uncomfortable I very nearly left.

Lust, Caution is a tale about a group of Shanghai college students turned assassin during WWII and the Japanese occupation of China. They plan on murdering Mr. Yee, a government official with ties to the Japanese presence. It's a classic Mata Hari-type tale with a new circumstance and a fresh setting. Wang Jiazhi is a young actress with manipulation and deceit skills that border on the supernatural. Despite the ineptitude of her classmates, she easily takes on an alias, infiltrates Mr. Yee's social circle, seduces him, and falls in love.

We can read Wang Jiazhi's character a few different ways. She can be a naive woman caught up in something much larger than herself, and highly sympathetic. While this isn't precisely wrong, I saw something more: Wang Jiazhi is an extremely twisted character; a devil in a blue dress, and a true femme fatale. She agrees to become a spy not just for acceptance among her peers, but to prove to herself and everyone that she can be a starlet. She's obsessed with movies, and learns to cry on cue. She takes on a life of lies as if it were her own, without hesitation, with seemingly little promise of reward or personal benefit, beyond being able to hobnob with the wealthy and dangerous. When Mr. Lee has sex with her for the first time, he's horribly violent, and she seems to enjoy every minute of it, smirking to herself once Mr. Lee's left her. She does protest to her friends, but I can't tell if she harbors a genuine hatred for her job, or is simply waffling. Eventually, Wang Jiazhi lets her selfish and materialistic ambitions completely overshadow her original goal, and endangers all her friends. Reprehensible.

Beyond having a heroine I hate, Lust, Caution has a paper-thin premise. None of the 6 students involved in the espionage seem to have any strong motivations, with the exception of Kuang Yu Min, whose family was killed by Mr. Yee. None of the supporting characters get much screentime, and their portrayals are callously one-dimensional and forgettable. The assassination group is woefully unequipped to deal with assassinating Mr. Yee, and they owe their success completely to the talents of Wong Jiazhi. Before she seduces Mr. Yee, the students convince Wong Jiazhi to do something unthinkable, which seems to have very little practical value in reality or in the story, except to introduce shock value into the movie - about an hour in, and it gets better (worse?) from there.

The sex in this movie is so explicit it's pornographic. Except instead of being turned on (because I do enjoy porn), I found myself burying my head into my husband's arm, which is a position I usually only reserve for horror scenes. These scenes are important, as they're some of the only scenes that establish the dynamics of the relationship between Mr. Yee and Wang Jiazhi. However, these graphic scenes are so frequent and so long, they're simply gratuitous. We're voyeurs looking in on an extremely unhealthy relationship - the sex appeal is gone and replaced with the grit of realism.

Some of the editing made the film hard to follow, particularly at the beginning, when events are explored non-chronologically, without any exposition. Through all the movie, there's an importance on significant glances, and if you're not clued into them, you might miss some of the story. The film achieves some success at noir, and I found the cultural portrayals to be interesting and accurate (from what I know).

Lust, Caution aims for high cinema and loses credibility in the loose story, shallow secondary characters, and shocking sex scenes. What could have been a coy romance is stripped of its charm when the covers come off and we realize how emotionally immature our heroine is. See this film if the concept captivates you. Anything less may leave you bored, confused, or nettled.

Wes Anderson films are required viewing for the hipster crowd, and regardless of whether or not the movie's any good, it'll make money from the cult following. But coming out of DL, I feel like I'm a victim of marketing. A film needs more than some critically-acclaimed actors, a cameo Bill Murray appearance, a retro soundtrack, and some bright colors to impress me.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a fan. But I'm seeing a disturbing trend. What made the original "indie" films so successful was a good juxtaposition of all of these elements, along with an ensemble cast of characters who were quirky and likeable yet flawed. The characters in DL are flawed but not particularly likeable, beyond possessing the faces of actors who we already know and love. None of their quirks are very enduring, none of their actions are very interesting, and their relationships are mystifying. While we do eventually get some insight into why they are the way they are, some of the details of their important relationships are never explored. Are we expected to take everything at face value? I think comedy is at its best when the characters are relatable, and I just can't relate.

I found most of the soundtrack - particularly the first "short" at the beginning of the movie - terribly annoying, as if the bottom of the barrel is being scraped for retro tunes, which I know can't be true. The movie mostly lacks any semblance of symbolism, except for one moving scene, which is fairly isolated from the rest of the story. Bill Murray is on screen for a good 2 minutes in a completely insignificant role, seemingly added for fanservice purposes only.

This movie's been done before, and better. Others may be captivated by style alone, but to establish longevity of the genre, substance will need to evolve as well.