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Reviews
The Human Scale (2012)
Jan Gehl Architects infomercial
The Human Scale looks like an student project, a feature-length amateur video filled with nostalgic vamping about traditional urban lifestyle, virtues of walkability, and the conspiratorial evils of cars, highways, and modernist architecture; it's essentially regurgitating Marshal Berman without reproducing those ideas in a practical context. Many have done it better before, most successfully, I think, Alain de Botton in the Architecture of Happiness and the Channel 4 documentary based on it.
Without giving the historical and economical roots of modernism their due, The Human Scale goes through urban experiences in China, Denmark, US, Bangladesh, and New Zealand. In reality, these experiences are all complex, unique, and different, growing out of the discrete cultural and socio-political particularities of their own; but the big auteur Jan Gehl is looking at all of them a with the reductive and parsimonious lens that makes them all seem as the same bridge that leads to modernism (bad), so they are treated as the same.
Also the Soundtracks doesn't make any sense.
Milarepa (2006)
Lion King in the Himalayas
Something is rotten in the state (well, mountain hamlets) of Tibet. The Prince Hamlet here is Milarepa Thopaga, an eleventh-century yogi, before he becomes the enlightened mila-repa. After his father's death, the uncle denies him his inheritance and the aunt tells his mother: "If you are many, make war. If you are few, cast spells." The mother, an avid watcher of anime, I assume, takes this advice literally and sends away his son to learn sorcery and take revenge. Unlike Hamlet, Thopaga does not spend much time conflicted about the revenge, or whether collective punishment is justified.
The story's sole conflict is really the uncle and his cronies giving chase, and that's the biggest problem with the film, being a Hagiographical biopic, and not venturing to ask him any of the big question. But maybe Hamlet and Edmond Dantes would have been just fine if they had discovered Buddhism.
Landscape shots, especially at the beginning of the film are stunning, but color-correcting filters are over-used and the cgi is lame.
Apparently a second feature concerning the post-enlightenment milarepa was scheduled to be released in 2009, but was later scrapped.
Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect (2008)
Can We Have the Lights Out Please
Rem Koolhaas stands on the ironic horns of a dillema. The media, especially US media, treats him as a starchitect, and his practice benefits from the perquisites of being a celebrity, and on the other hand his art philosophy is built on being an anti-individualist, anti-auteur, anti-French utopian. As Rene Daalder says in A kind of Architect about his early cinematic collabs with Ren "It was all about how eveybody is an auteur."
Considering this, A kind of Architect is a good documentary when it bypasses the subject and almost too vague to understand when it directly interviews (or uses archival footage) of Rem. The interviews with Rem are the least informative, It's almost like Interviews with the people in OMA, as one interviewee points out, is like interviewing different parts in Rem's head. A better documentary would have totally ignored Rem and only interviewed the ideas in his head, with the light out.
Rites of Passage (1999)
Daddy Issues
Victor Salva's Rites of Passage is about six men; one (Billy) has died of AIDS; one (D. J.) is a lawyer; and the other four are liars with secrets to hide. Two of the four (Del and Frank) are father figures, and then there's Cambell, Del's queer, estranged son who in attempt to win a father figure's approval becomes an accomplice in a prison break.
Also there's a 500-thousand-dollar MacGuffin treasure trove buried in a sawmill, but it's mostly about lies, macho secrets, and striving to gain your father's approval.
Writing, directing, and acting are all all right. Sound mixing is a bit distracting, especially over-board with crickets and chirps, and I don't think they would be intentional or symbolic of anything.
The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)
The Fall of Hollywood Epic
TFotRE is not a work of its time. It's a 1950s historical epic that came out in 1964, the same year as Zorba the Greek and a year before Doctor Zhivago, both superb and well-written box-office hits. TFotRE was an expensive flop.
It depicts Jedi Master Marcus Aeurelius's death and the process of his son, Commodius (not played by the Juaqin Phoenix, unlike 2000's Gladiator) going full joker.
The script is a incoherent ragbag of independent subplots. One subplot, concerning rebellions in the eastern provinces and a four-army war involving the Sassanids is absolutely unnecessary and only there to drag out the second act.
Sophia Loren's overacting is a bit distracting, but I guess she had to give something back for the one million she got, being only the second actress ever to get that figure. Boyd's just muh. Guinness and Plummer are all right.
There's a couple of senate debate scenes which for me were the most intriguing parts of the film, although perhaps not because of their dramatic importance, but more because they contained a shoehorned summation of 20th century political thoughts.
Action scenes are all the same and generic 1950s epic, maybe even a little bit spaghetti western.
The ending tries to be cynical, and I'm not sure if it was supposed to get a laugh, but it did. But even though it's not as funny (or historically informative) as Monty Python's historical epic, the Holy Grail, at least it has got horses.
House of Cards: Chapter 53 (2017)
We Thought We Knew Him (#5.1)
Frank Underwood is back, and he's here to stay. The episode's opening five minutes, in which Frank thwarts republicans' plan to investigate his crimes (as reported by Tom Hammerschmidt) asks the congress for a formal declaration of war on ICO, quickly sets the tone for the season. political intrigue, Frank's cheeky attitude toward laws, and his tenacity in the face of opposition coalesced in his retort to the House Speaker, who insists that the President yields the floor, "I will not yield, I will never yield."
After the session is adjourned (the Secret Service has to step up to protect the POTUS against the Sergeant at Arms), Frank leaves for the funeral of the beheaded dad, where he confronts the flustered wife and the defiant daughter. "You killed him," the daughter tells Frank, "I wish you die and Clair becomes the President," Foreshadowing or not.
The odd-ball data scientist is still around. He was the one behind the algorithm that manipulated search results to favor the Underwoods. Now he believes NSA is figuring him out, and wants out. LeAnne (Neve Campbell) tells him that the Underwoods will survive, and that he has to help them win the election if he wants to survive too. He sneaks in NSA and steals a manifold of Zero-day exploits ("waterfalls"). I can't tell where this story-line is heading, but it seems to be "Fake News" themed.
Frank and Clair take on a new initiative to "dial up the terror." The news cycle is fixated with the terrorist at large, and Claire takes advantage of an accidental explosion to warn the American people of their families and coworkers. She is thrown a ball of black paint and called "War whore", still she remains insouciant, also "Tom is waiting" for her.
In a remarkable surprise, it turns out that the terrorist is already captured. "Did you think I didn't already have him? I thought you knew me." Tortured and broken in a super-max prison, he is being taunted by Frank, just for the sake of it- "Get rid of the asset, get some good, usable footage of his killing," Frank tells his haunch-man, Agent Green. He wanders into the night to shake the hand of his subjects, gathered in front of the white palace in fear or in protest. We learn that republicans want to use Frank's "war on terror committee to investigate his crimes, and we are left wondering what the King is doing next.
Ezhdeha Vared Mishavad! (2016)
A "Nothing" Arrives :(
Mani Haghighi is royalty in the Iran's so-called Intellectual community. By being related to a handful of eminent artists, he has acquired a sense of confidence with which he delivers a stew of clumsy story-telling and amateur symbolism, with awkward pandering to Iranian intellects' nostalgia and a stuffy sense of humor. In my humble opinion, this movie is yet another fix for Mr. Haghighi's wounded ego; there, I've said it.
As for the story: days after 1965's assassination of Prime Minister Hassan Ali Mansour, an exiled Marxist revolutionary hangs himself. The secret police (SAVAK) suspects a link between the two and sends Agent Bobak Hafezi to investigate. Bobak finds himself in a horror-movie cemetery and shipwreck remains of 16-century Irano- Portuguese wars, where he experiences a "macguffin" earthquake, goes rough and employs a sound designer(?) with silence-fetish (who of course works for Director Mani Haghighi's folks) and a stiffly acted seismologist-ish civil engineer to uncover the truth(?) without the agency's knowledge(?). The plot makes no sense, and it's still not the worst thing about the movie. Countless cringe-worthy cameos by politicians and flaunt intellectuals is nothing but embarrassing. They do make the movie look like a documentary; a bluffing, unintelligible documentary.
The movie fails, even as a parody, even in the surrealist context of "anything goes". I give it two stars for its decent cinematography and two for Christophe Rezai's mind-sweeping music. The rest deserves nothing.