Movies

Seen 3 movies recently.

The romantic fantasy drama The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn was fun to watch as a reflection of teenage girls' fantasies about ideal mate. Curiously, it had one ideal male figure (Edward) for girls on pill, with soft demeanour and a sensitive interaction style. It also had a strong hothead (Jacob) to appeal to girls not on the pill and are on their period. I was also surprised by the obsession to make Edward tick all high status marker boxes.

Although it was not realistic, it was the only movie which dealt with serious topics (mate choice, sex, pregrancy a la Rosemary's Baby) and where human beings behaved according to human psychology. (The main reason I don't really like movies is that many make my "people just don't behave that way!" warning lights flash red.)

Action flick Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows offered 2 hours of good entertainment, but I'm already forgetting the plot, which was too inconsistent to stay in memory. The central theme was 'steampunk Lord of the Rings', Sherlock was Gandalf, complete with a sneak into Mordor and meeting with Balrog.

Drama road movie This Must Be The Place told about a super wealthy former rock star. It had post-singularity feel, as most people in the movie had all their material meets met, and they mainly drifted in existential void, seeking ways to amuse themselves. Having no material competition left and not that much need for workplace style co-operation, they used disproportionate effort to control the frame of conversation and refuse to answer questions straight.

Tampere Film Festival: My Village in 2007

Village Documentary Project distributed filming equipment to 10 rural villages for amateur filmmakers, including Zhang Huangcai, a 50 years farmer at Shijiazai village. His third documentary My Village in 2007 shows what life is like in a very backward village. What makes the film special is that the storyteller has lived there his whole life apart from doing odd jobs in cities. The lifestyle is normal for him, while being utterly alien for Westerners viewing the film at Tampere.

The village was so backward that the film had just 3 motor vehicles: a car, a harvester and a motorcycle. They still collected hay by raising it manually to drying poles. In the scene where they went to a city to sell handicrafts, they walked. By contrast, in rural India motorcycles are widespread.

The villagers subsisted by farming corn. The houses had big bunches of corn drying on their walls, suspended with ropes. Apparently they were well nourished, as there weren't any excessively short people in the film.

My father lived his youth in Tuupovaara, a settlement in Eastern Finland in the middle of forest and tens of kilometers from the nearest city. He said that they lived practically in subsistence economy, by fishing and farming, rather than in money-based economy. Logging and construction were ways to get some income. When he visited Haiti, he was a bit shocked from seeing how life was there and said that in no situation would their life in Tuupovaara be that bad. Getting basic needs met does not depend on technology, it depens on how people organize their lives. In Shijiazai as in Tuupovaara, poverty does not mean malnourishment or exploitation. Rather, it means hard manual work, little education, shoddy houses and thrift.

Talking about education, the film didn't touch literacy directly, but stacks of books and magazines were nowhere to be seen. Another factor which hinted at low reading fluency was lack of imagination. All topics discussed in the film were very concrete and practical. There were some memories from cultural revolution and a few mentions of work gigs in the cities. Other than that, they only talked about things that happen in the village.

Social porn does not turn on healthy people. This film managed to pull off the hard trick of describing backward life as normal. The film had low technical quality - it was more like a collection of home videos without plot, exposition of background etc. It was still the best out of 4 films who described rural workers in China, because it had insider's perspective.

Overall, about half of the films in Made in China series were designed to raise awareness of various social issues. It mirrored Western mass media's bias of seeing China primarily as a collection of human rights violations, third world poverty and totalitarian oppression. This bias nowadays irritates me after seeing what overseas Chinese write about their country themselves.

Chinese documentaries at Tampere Film Festival

A collection of modern Chinese documentary films.
One each day 9.3 - 13.3.

Schedule (in Finnish)

I'll go there with the attitude "let's see well-chosen movies I would never have heard about otherwise", and will not read movie descriptions in advance.

Movie: Dear John (full of spoilers)

Dear John tells about a soldier named John who falls in love with a college student named Savannah during his vacation from the army.

This chick flick is the first sob story which I have seen on the silver screen. The audience was 3/4 female, with a few token boyfriends in tow. In the most intense scenes of loss, you could hear sniffs from several directions.

Why did I pick this film? I just walked in the theater and chose the least descriptive film name. "Haikein terveisin" won. If I try to choose a 'good' movie I usually end up watching crap.

The best part of the movie is the beginning where John and Savannah meet. John has just finished a day of surfing in the beach and is walking topless. OkCupid profile picture research supports that males showing muscles is attractive.

From Mystery Method's three big value-demonstrating character traits (leader of men, preselected by women, protector of the loved ones) John hits heavily on protector of the loved ones from the very beginning. There are no other women involved. His absence of leadership is balanced by painting him as a lone wolf with dark and mysterious background.

From the game perspective, John does not demonstrate much psychosocial dominance. Others talk more and Savannah decides the next steps all the time. However, there are many scenes where other men crumble when placed in conflict against John. It is not about John having great character, rather it is about other men around Savannah having terrible character. John is a bit simple athlete who has gone through rough places and made it alive.

One theme in the movie is the autism of John's father. Frankly, the person who is supposed to play autistic seems merely introverted to me. There is only one scene where he loses his nerves and escapes and is clearly crazy. Then again my own standards may be twisted, since I had very weak emotional connection with my father when I was young.

If I could change one thing in the movie, the final hour would contain more scenes where communication breaks down and characters can't agree on a common frame of reference. Instead, they would laugh at each others, question their views, change the subject and blame the other for overreacting. It would have been better acted by amateur actors who can't deliver a single line of dialog right, since people under strong emotions can't punch straight verbal blows either.

Death proof

Saw Inglourious Basterds in the weekend. Can't recommend it to anyone, though. Like Kill Bill, it was a purebred genre movie which didn't reference anything real, just other movies in the same genre. While Kill Bill was fun, Inglourious Basterds was just filled with cruel violence that was unnecessary for the plot.

There was one good scene in Inglourious Basterds though - the opening scene. It includes a long conversation during which nothing happens except two people talk politely with each others, but which is full of suspense anyway.

One criteria for good art is that it tells facts about reality. In this sense, realistic, long conversations can be art. Many important things depend on vapid chit-chat in small groups. The devil is in the details and in subtle signaling. The blogs of pick-up artists tell stories how vapid chit-chat determines the success of seduction, and also deal with relationship game. Families are one fundamental building blocks of society, and their formation and stability depends much on vapid chit-chat. It also determines very much how various professional and hobby groups get stuff done or don't.

The only TV program which takes vapid chit-chat seriously is Big Brother, and it is hugely popular around the world.

Death Proof is another Tarantino a movie, where the first hour consists entirely from vapid chit-chat. It even lacks proper suspense, as things start to happen only afterwards. It is both boring (nothing happens!) and ingenious (at last they film the stuff that social reality is made of!) at the same time.

Videos don't need cutting

Yesterday I saw the special effects movie 2012. Having watched too much Youtube videos where the same shooting angle lasts for 5 minutes, I found the cuts confusing. It did contain spectacular scenes of destruction (but no mosques were harmed while the film was made). The effects would have been even more spectacular had they not been cut every 5 seconds.



For example in this video the singer clearly has a choreography for hands, but frequent cuts make it hard to match hand movements to musical patterns and dramatic peaks. Half the time hand movements are cut away or too far to be seen. No cutting at all would have been better.

High-budget movies made by pros contain a lot of cuts while amateur videos often contain none. This does not make cuts any less distracting.

Warnings (2003)

This cheap thriller is in my opinion a masterpiece, but most people hate it deeply. I can't recommend it to anyone, since most people have the same taste as most people.

The atmosphere is really thick, and keeps the viewer in suspense all the time. It starts in Stephen King style with an extremely intense scene. There is a man living alone in a farm house. He's drunk, carrying a gun and scared as hell that aliens are coming to get him, proclaiming loudly that he's ready to take them. There's a psycho-style scarecrow in a sofa, and he's talking with it all the time. Then there are noises and strange lights and the man starts to chase them, but it's not clear if he's just lunatic or if he's after something.

The main events start when a cousin of the man in the farm house hears that the he's dead. He goes on to clear the house with a group of his friends. The suspense stems firstly when they discover various signs of lunacy, secondly when they start to see inklings of the phenomena that caused the lunacy, and lastly about aliens themselves.

The strength of the film is that it relies on dialog and instead of showing the beast, it describes people's reaction to the signs left by the beast. The second strength is the intense atmosphere, which is created by skillful play with viewer's expectations, good soundtrack and massive but controlled onmarch of pretty much every suspense trick you have ever seen in any thriller.

On meta-level, the film works even better. The director is showing off and making a challenge to others. He's saying "I'm showing you how thrillers should be done! I can make this good film by concentrating on storyline, atmosphere, social interactions and other things that matter! Keep your special effects, all I need is 12 days and a budget under one million!" Here are the observations that support this:

• He packs all known thriller effects to same film - haunted house, scarecrows, traces of something big and scary, tarot cards, beasts that are not seen, claustrophobic corn field, not knowing what is lunacy and what is real, kitchen utensils that cut, sudden appearances that are sometimes other people and sometimes the beast.


• When the beast is finally shown, it is almost anti-climax, as if he was making a tribute to films that are free from supernatural forces.


• The film is very consistent. By consistency, I mean that it doesn't contradict itself, doesn't invoke "people just don't behave that way!" reaction and sticks with its assumptions. Consistency usually means that the person making the film knows exactly what he's doing.

Talking about assumptions, it makes one big assumption (which is spelled out in the end) and sticks with it. On my own thriller consistency meter, Wicker Man and Witchfinder General score the highest level. Everything is explained by personalities, situations and social dynamics, no supernatural beings are assumed and large-scale consistency reigns to the end. Warnings gets to the second-highest level: it makes one assumption and sticks with it, and pretty much everything is explained by that assumption and its lemmas. I'd put The Excorcist to the same consistency level.

If I had to choose one film that captures the spirit of Stephen King's novels, this would be it. The intensity structure is the same. It starts with a short, intense scene that gives foretaste of what is to come. Then it does a series of "speed tests" that start out in normal, sane and peaceful conditions, increase intensity gradually and end up in a panic. In the end, there is long uninterrupted mayhem. When it ends, the whole film ends - there is no clean-up. And did I mention the atmosphere, skillful assembly of standard building blocks and emphasis on people's reactions?

Here's one review from IMDB which explains why I like the film but others don't:

"I saw this movie on the sci-fi channel, and I was suprised how good the story line was. I was enjoying the movie until the pitiful cartoon computer generated looking aliens showed up. They should have had men dress up as the creatures, at least they would have looked more realistic than the cartoon looking creatures. The storyline gets a 8 out of 10, but the effects get a very lousy 1 out of 10! Overall the movie I would give it about 4 1/2 out of 10!"

Not for, not against (France, 2002)

Caty, a 27-years old news photographer meets a chance to make money quickly by photographing a robbery. She starts to hang out regularly with the gang ...

The back of the film box tells this much, and I won't spoil more. It's a noirish film, where an ordinary citizen is gradually attracted to the dark side. "In the beginning: How I became Femme Fatale" could be its second name.

I like the first half for several reasons.

Firstly, it meets my minimum standards of realism. There wasn't any single scene which would have invoked "People just don't behave that way!" alarm. The petty criminals have low impulse control and don't care about harm done to others, and are attracted by glamorous life of bling-bling and sex. The criminals as well as the girl believe that you can get something for nothing - the lottery ticket which the girl scrapes sum it up quite well.

Secondly, the sexual market value interactions were about right. The man showed high status by demonstrating his affluence. He demands that thing are done his way; at the same time he signals indifference by making it clear for the girl that she simply leave if she doesn't like his way. The man also gives protection for the girl; the gang liberates the girl from unwelcome approaches by threatening with violence those who try to approach.

Thirdly, it captures well the sense of urban existential void and isolation, both in some scenes and in the background music.

The girl is somewhat contradictory combination of high class and low class. The fact that she practiced ballet dancing, chose a semi-artistic profession and lives in a spacious apartment implies middle-to-high class. His eagerness to make quick money and lack of parent involvement during the whole film implies low class.

The second half is like an entirely different movie, but the final solution is superb.

Sexual Market Value 101

That could be the second name of Dumplings, a Korean thriller/horror movie. The main character is a formerly beautiful woman who has attracted a rich man to his side. Her decreasing looks cause a temptation for him to trade up...

The best thing about the film is that it is free from hypocritical feminist undertones. Both men and women are equally capable of evil, and both view the sexual market as a game with losers and winners.

FTO 1/3: Future Time Orientation in Oldboy (Korea, 2003)

Oldboy depicts a man with short FTO right from the first scene. In this scene, he's drunk in a police jail, noisy, impatient, resisting his chums and police, a disgusting and unempathic anti-hero. This image is strenghtened in later scenes.

The film also shows the strength of short FTO - namely, ability to make the best out of every situation. This is especially visible in his popularity with women. The film shows two successful seductions and hints at much more. (That bring this post by Bulletproof Pimp into my mind. In both Oldboy and this post, physical fitness was the only factor where the men showed long-termism.)

There are also two few scenes where long-term approaches turn out to be useless. The first of them happens at the imprisonment period, but I won't spoil it. The second happens some hours after the main character has been released. He faints and wakes up again. He utters a scientific-sounding hypothesis that lack of vitamin D and sudden sunlight made him faint. His girl answers "I hope you don't always talk like that." In the end, the hypothesis turns out to be false. Reliance to scientific explanations, a long-term strategy, turned out to make him unpopular and misguided.

The short-termist philosphy of life is also pronounced explicitly. In one scene, a gangster boss takes a tooth out of the protagonists mouth as a revenge. Then the gangster puts the pliers close the his mouth as if planning to pull another teeth. The protagonist shouts, expecting pain. At that point the gangster takes the pliers away and says "Don't imagine. You fear because you imagine what might happen. Don't imagine, so you don't fear."

The ending reflects well the main character's revulsion towards long-termism. The most important causes and consequences of the plot turn out to be arbitary and unbelievable. Things are not really explained in the end; they are messed up in the end. And in the eye of the madness, the short-term tactician wins over the long-term manipulator.

Smoking in Oldboy (Korea, 2003) and Lady Vengeance (Korea, 2005)

Oldboy and Lady Vengeance are two revenge-themed films by Chan-wook Park. They have the coolest smoking scenes ever.

In Oldboy, the main character has trained martial arts against a wall in prison, not being able to practice against opponents. When he gets free, he wonders if "15 years of imaginary training can be put into use". He goes to a gang of 5 juveniles, takes a cigarette from one gang member's mouth and inhales. In the next scene, he gets a strong kick to stomatch and falls on his back, arms and legs spread. He raises the hand holding a cigarette, puts it to his mouth, sucks a dose of Nicotine Power, and rises up to beat the gang with bare hands.

In another scene he's in a schoolyard. There is a girl riding bicycle around the yard. In order to see better under her skirt, he goes to a push-up pole, hangs upside down in it and lights a cigarette. A schoolteacher comes to say that he can't smoke in a catholic school, but the main character dismisses it with a cool rebel attitude by saying that he leaves the school tomorrow. After some minutes, he goes on to seduce the girl.

In Lady Vengeance, the strong and independent main character lights a cigarette after soul-shaking session of sex.

PS. 50% of Korean high school males and 30% of females smoke more than 5 cigarettes a day.

Bang Rajan (Thailand, 2000)

The cover of the film advertised it as "the Braveheart of Thailand". After summarizing the plot, I'll compare it to Braveheart.

The film is set in 1800th century Thailand. Two Burmese armies are on its way to Thailand's capital Ayuttaya, destroying, looting, raping, killing and enslaving everything on their way. Bang Rajan has successfully resited earlier Burmese conquest attempts. The survivors from other destroyed villages are escaping there for a final showdown, having few other places left to escape to.

In Braveheart, I wondered why the Scottish preferred the abstract concept of freedom to a violence monopoly of the most successful and enlightened sea power of the time. In Bang Rajan it is more clear why people choose to fight. There are long flashback footages where the Burmese come to burn and loot Thai villages. There also seems to be a mutual acceptance of killing: both the Burmese and the defending Vietnamese are very keen on killing them all in the opposing side. However, there are two scenes where the Burmese imprison and enslave the Thais instead of killing them, so it's not all about genocide.

Braveheart concentrated on one heroic individual and his defining experiences. The main characters of Bang Rajan represent the wider experiences of the villagers. There are escapees from another village who witnessed the destruction of their homes and killing of the people with whom they lived. There is a squad of men who have successfully fought against the Burmese before. There are pregnant women who are worried about the future of their men and offspring.

The most striking difference between Bang Rajan and Braveheart is the total lack of sophistication in Bang Rajan. The motivations or the villagers are very simple, usually linked to survival, sex, security and food. When they choose a leader, the best justification they give for him is that he is "strong and hates Burmese". There's very little tactical reasoning, which could be compared to Braveheart's long spears that are used against a cavalery attack. Even the Western-style moral sermon - where a Buddhist monk claims that also Burmese are human beings - is quite naive.

I didn't watch Braveheart to the end, since the rugged individualism got too thick. But I did watch Bang Rajan. Despite its crudeness or thanks to it, it stays consistent ("pysyy kasassa") through the whole film. It is the perfect propaganda movie: There is nothing abstract or delicate or implicit, but instead it blasts its message to viewers' face in cat-sized letters in its long, unambiguous, repeated, gruesome scenes.