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Drive (2011)
Cool? Yes, but that does not save it
2 out of 5 stars
Do we need another overrated Hollywood production that provides nothing but a sensation of coolness? Our beloved audiences, after all, have been much in love with Inception and Black Swan the very year before. Of course, Drive does not sink to the same embarrassing level of pretension, obscurity and manipulation as those two; but on the other hand, there is not much to derive from this so-called "powerful love story".
Mind that there is a fine line to be drawn between a powerful love story and a foolish one. For the record, Ryan Gosling's Driver is that all-perfect guy who is, ironically, too timid, too shy (or too manly?) to take his innocent neighbor away her screwed-up husband (and why she married that loser is an unsolvable mystery to me – maybe it is simply there to make us feel desperate than ever for Gosling and Mulligan's characters to be together).
While any in-heat female (and zealous male) audience will no doubt fall prey to Gosling's stunning performance as The Driver, those who are able to see with the organ above their eyes will certainly not be satisfied. Every plot point is pretty much predictable; and if you don't really understand what is going on, do not worry. As long as the kissing and the head-blowing sequences are back to back, you will forget everything else. This flawlessly corny love story does not push the audiences to the edge but can still extract loads of sympathy from them. Christie Lemire even declared that Drive's "more about the questionable choices that drive people -- and, ultimately, the ones that drive them away" – as if the double take on the film's title is anything but ridiculously obvious.
The question is: Would Drive be so warmly embraced within the art-house circle had it not won the Best Director Prize at Cannes in 2011? I was fooled too, and I even included it in my list of Best 2011 Films initially. However, the difficulty with which I tried to find nice words to praise it for anything beyond its crazy 80s' stylistic flourishes speak to its emptiness. On a first encounter, it is easy to accept it as some kind of high-standard crime action film. Refn found incredible ways to make use of sunshine and night lights to lighten up his picture, creating a permanent dreamy state that, when combined with the minimalist style of performance and dialog, can easily distract the audience; not to mention the effective use of electronic music. However, all of these can hardly mask Drive's flaws – the film lacks a personality, it is not intriguing in any way, and much less deep. And while one can forgive the unbearably easy manners that Ryan Gosling's Driver holds his toothpick, it is much harder when Drive's values add up to not more than the very toothpick that he holds.
Bi, dung so! (2010)
Good try, but where is the sense of humility?
2.5 out of 5 stars
The difficulty (or comfort) with reviewing a film from your native country is that your own knowledge and familiarity might lead to a certain degree of bias. Bi is not the first ground-breaking Vietnamese film, certainly, but the word "ambitious" does not seem to be ill-fitting here (Look, Dang Di just participates in the Sight and Sound Director Poll, barely with this debut! What do you think?)
Which is not to say that the film is good enough. Bi seems to look at the Vietnamese family and individuals through a perverted glass. The casting of actors from north to south gives the film the license to extend its comment on the incestuous nature of familial relationships, or the excessiveness of modernity, or the very basic, run-of-the-mill desires of the educated class, to a near universal level, at least within the country. If this symbol of a family represents the way that Vietnamese society currently works, we do not need to look further into the government or the business for a source of corruption.
However, the director cunningly defended his ideas. In one kitchen scene, he suggested that the source of the patriarchal pattern of the family unit in Vietnam is rooted in the Confucian nature of national ideology (which, in his opinion, is never removed during the Socialist period). The uninformed audiences might be easily taken in by his thesis, but those who have at least some basic knowledge about the contemporary history of the country know that this is not entirely true. If anything, the Socialist period provides some level of power to Vietnamese women. If Bi is set in a rural area, Dang Di's ideas about female imprisonment might have worked, but are we supposed to believe that a family at the center of Hanoi still functions in this way? Something like "Season of the Falling Leaves" (Mùa Lá Rụng, a fairly popular TV series in Vietnam) is a much more honest portrait of a broken Vietnamese family on the brink of modernization.
What brings the film further away from reality is the lack of real motivation behind the characters. The mother (played by Kieu Trinh) is beyond submissive, but there is no clue to why she is so. Her husband's (Hai Phong) family never does anything to suppress her, or force her into submission. The fact that she is from Saigon makes it even less believable that she enslaves herself in that manner. There is no back story (for example, her family background, her level of education, etc.) to explain her behavior so as to make her character more convincing. The only explanation that seems to work here is that she is enslaving herself out of love for her husband. Yet, there is no chemistry between the two of them to begin with (except for a dirty, labored sex scene that exemplifies the tone of the entire film). We are left to wonder: why did the two of them even fall in love and marry at the first place? That the wife subjects herself to so much endurance seems more like an plot device to beg for our sympathy, rather than an attempt to explore a recognizable human tragedy. The aunt's (Thuy Hoa) story is actually the better sub-plot here. Her dirty desire (to have sex) with one of her hunky students speaks to her fragility as a woman as well as her pure feeling of boredom with the world around her. Yet, her characterization is so weak, just like other characters in the movie, that at times, she is reduced to a plain "horny" creature, acting out of instincts, without any sense of rationality. So many things in this film are presented purely for shock effects, rather than anything more meaningful. The scene when Kieu Trinh's character embraces her father-in-law in bed after falling to sleep best exemplifies this trend in the film. The shot seems to have less to say about the incestuous tendencies as part of human nature or the rigorous, oppressive familial rule in Vietnam, than the grip that Dang Di's arrogant directional style has on the audiences.
If you want to do a movie that broadly comments on society and family like this one, you have to possess a sense of wisdom and acuity. Look at Edward Yang's Yi Yi, for example. The late director's masterpiece also reveals the hidden desires as well as the materialistic tendencies of an extended family in Taiwan, but his sense of humanism means that we are able to sympathize for the characters. He looks at every issue from a balanced perspective. Dang Di is ambitious, but he is bull-horned, immature in his social philosophizing (if he ever attempts to do so). He simply lacks the emotional hindsight to make a great film. His characters are so one-dimensional, his story construction so futile that I am not sure whether there is anything meaningful to gain from Bi. At the end, the film screams the two words "misogynistic" and "misanthropic" – maybe too loud – but there is no hint what the film is decrying exactly. Or maybe it is attacking everything at the same time: tradition, modernity, materialism, familial ties... In short, nothing seems to escape its offensive pretension (apparent in the film's sexual overdose) to being something higher than itself. We are not Bi, but we are, perhaps, no less frightened.
Schindler's List (1993)
Mediocre and overrated
The story is about the efforts that Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), a World War II profiteer, put out in order to save the Jews from Plaszow concentration camp. Let us make it very clear: from the starting point, Schindler has no interest in saving the Jews. His sole interest, at first, was to make money. How was this man converted from being an opportunistic businessman into a courageous human soul who was willing to save thousands of lives? He even appeared initially unaffected when SS-Lieutenant Amon Goth (Ralph Fiennce) blissfully murdered innocent Jews. How, then, could this man break down at the end of the film because he could not save just one more life is baffling. Agreed that he was surrounded by good Jews, but the probable reason for his transition (encountering a dead Jews who thanked him) was utterly self-congratulatory. Was he even terrified by the murders that were going on (if he was, he never showed it on screen any way)? Perhaps, only the extraordinary Schindler himself could help Spielberg realize it. Or did Spielberg care about strong characterizations, at all? There was no complexity here.
However, Liam Neeson's Schindler was given pretty decent treatment when you consider the other elements in Schindler's List. Particularly was, the vicious monster of the story, Lieutenant Amon Goth. Was he the only one who killed (or loved killing) Jews throughout this whole affair? I had this question on my mind when the film exclusively focused on him insanely shooting random Jews from his bedroom. Giving a mad figure the special treatment of being the leading culprit of this mass murder is a laughably simplistic way to make sense of the Holocaust. And it fits into the general audience's banal understanding of the event. The key to Holocaust is the diffusion of responsibility among the persecutors and the lack of moral convictions on the very part of the human race. Those complex concepts were given no treatment in Schindler's List. Instead, everything is reduced to insanity. The very possibility of the Holocaust, therefore, remains alien to a whole audience, who, perhaps, come to see the film just to feel a sense of grandness and liberal guilt. Raplh Fience was terrific in his performance. However, his role, sadly, served as a springboard for the audience to blindly put their blame on. How revealing!
In short, the treatment of both Schindler and Goth shed no light on the ambiguity of human nature. Schindler suddenly became "good" while Goth was inherently "bad" (This only makes the visual comparisons between the two men all the more exploitative). Everything seems pretty common sense, and obviously very digestible. However, if there is a most deplorable injustice being done here, it was the presentation of the Jewish community. Perhaps, everyone who has watched this film can recall the scene of a little girl splashed in red that Schindler spotted during the liquidation of the concentration camp. Anyone could have been fooled by this imagery, whether a film amateur or a veteran film fan. However, if you sit back to think about it, the image is pretty fortuitous. What does this present exactly? Hope? Love? Future? Or even blood? This middle-browned attempt to convey some visual meanings does not succeed in any meaningful way. Worse still, it is an exploitation of the bathos of childhood innocence, which does not make sense in this circumstance. We are dealing with the Jewish community as a whole, not some selective individuals that were singled out from this whole in order for us to dwell on 'sophisticated' feelings of loss and hope. If there is a lesson that is unforgettable about the Holocaust, it is the unjustified prejudice and hatred inflicted upon the Jewish community as a race, not just the brutality and violence that any particular Jew experienced (if you want to know about brutality and trauma, you can ask the 20 million Russians who were dead also). Why not color every Jew red then? Any selective visual presentation in this case is misguiding; and manipulative. Even the sequence that precedes it, a moral struggle between mother, daughter and childhood friend during evacuation does not feel like a climax. It is so trite, so predictable that one might just allow himself to rumble with all the emotions that Spielberg has designed for him. It feels as if, the audience is told what they already know, and all they need to do is sit there, ruminating like an act.
The saddest thing is that at the end, when the credit rolls "In memory of the 6 million Jews who died during the Holocaust", I wonder what the whole film has to do with those 6 million deaths. If you are inattentive and easy-going, you would freely accept it as an earnest tribute to them. But really? Telling the cliché story of a thousand who were alive is the tribute to the 6 million who were dead? What does this film have to do with the dead anyway? The desperation, the horror, the pain, the shame and the doubt of those who went dead were not adequately conveyed. Oh, just tell the marvelous story of saving lives to make the audience open their mouths and wonder. And we can forget about those who were dead. What a lovely tribute that Spielberg made!
The real story is extraordinary. But there must be a way of telling it without this pretentious sense of self-importance that makes it so easily consumed by an uninformed audience. At no point in this film, do I feel a sense of desperation, that sense of "needing to get out of this horrible nightmare". It was just like watching a prodigious show that make you feel "wowed" (and admire, and cry?). But remember that grandness cannot replace substance. Indeed, Holocaust is a very difficult subject matter. It needs to be approached first with intelligence. But Spielberg evidently failed to do so.