Ryan Watches a Motion Picture #15: Taboo (1999)

I love samurai films. When I think about what taking in cinema feels like, I get certain senses of things bubbling in my brain, maybe a loose, iconic image. One of those is usually of a samurai, holding a sword out and standing in an elegant posture, just waiting. Can’t get enough of that. I’m always willing to watch a samurai film, and once I heard a few things about Oshima's Taboo, I was positively fuming with feudal fascination. The film’s about Kano, a young samurai who takes another samurai in his regiment as his lover, and when news of their relationship spreads, other samurai begin to seek Kano's affections.

Now, I think Taboo lacks the gravity it might have achieved if it had focused a bit more. The plot tends to get a bit lost at times, and frequently a change in the story and the introduction of a new character makes the film seem flippant. But Taboo makes up for it with its visually arresting cinematography. The drifting, ethereal camerawork is wonderfully atmospheric and fluid, and does well to highlight the sense that we are observers. The action sequences are elegant, and they really swept me up. Deft use of steadicam pulls you in and around the samurai blade strikes without resorting to the shaky camera style that's so fucking popular in movies today. Sorry, rage.

I was glad to see that the film contains a questioning of the samurai's role in the rigid feudal Japanese caste system of the 1800s, and doesn't, like many samurai films, revel in the romance of honour and glory that you might well imagine when you read the word 'samurai'. There's an interesting parallel in effect where the samurai hegemony and its penchant for using men's lives for political posturing is matched with the sexual hegemony, and the men entangled in love affairs with their fellow soldiers are secretly loathe to give up their lives in the name of the samurai order. There's even some attempt to hetero Kano, but attempts fail, and in the end, even the officers high up in their chain of command question their sexual roles, while paradoxically, Kano’s lovers come to use Kano as the military system uses them - for their own ends.

The film's pretty casual acceptance of queer lifestyle is, to my knowledge, not too consistent with feudal Japanese culture, but it serves to put a new spin on such an influential and pervasive genre, and Taboo is worth a look.

Wendy's Films of 2010 #57: But I'm a Cheerleader (1999)

I enjoy bright, colourful, campy things, so watching Jamie Babbit's But I'm a Cheerleader was a lot of fun. It's about Megan, a high school girl on the cheerleading squad who, without realizing, finds herself attracted to other girls. She is confronted by her parents and friends, who accuse her of listening to Melissa Etheridge and having posters of girls on her bedroom walls, and then sent to an over-the-top "rehab" camp called True Directions. With steps like "Admitting You're a Homosexual," "Rediscovering Your Gender Identity," and "Demystifying the Opposite Sex," the group of teenagers are supposed to learn to suppress their homosexuality and conform to the expectations of their heterosexual society. In opposition to True Directions are Larry and Lloyd, two ex-ex-gays who attempt to show the youngsters that they can live a happy life without suppressing their true identities.

What I really loved in this film were the little things: how the camp leader's hunky gay son would hit on the other guys, the way Megan and the surliest girl at camp begin to quietly and beautifully fall in love. The film takes what most consider a serious subject, and turns it into something entertaining, something to laugh at and enjoy. It blows things out of proportion to make them more understandable, making every small and intimate moment even more human.

Wendy's Films of 2010 #46: A Single Man (2009)

I think that perhaps all designers should create films, especially if they end up being as good as this one. Tom Ford's first and only film to date is wonderful. The visual style is gorgeous, with every shot thoroughly thought through to the smallest detail, like the indents on someone's arm from an object that has supposedly been sitting there for hours. The costumes, of course, were amazing. Everything was stunning, but not in an irritating, pristine kind of way.

One of my first thoughts after watching it was my appreciation of it being a film about a gay man, that doesn't make the fact that he's gay the main focus of the narrative. Instead, it focuses on his emotions, his life, his difficulty in dealing with the loss of a loved one. I wish more films encouraged the idea that being gay isn't the most important thing about a person and his or her life, it just happens to be one aspect of a full and varied individual. Colin Firth's performance is the icing on the cake; his ability to create a character that is not only experiencing an incredible loss, but is also so layered and human, is stunning. I felt like I knew his character George as if he were a real human being. I think this is why his performance was nominated, and perhaps should have even won best actor at this year's Oscars. The rest of the cast: Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult, Matthew Goode and Jon Kortajarena, were superb . Definitely check this one out.

Maggie's Films of 2010:

#17. Black Books, Season One



You can't watch a British comedy idly: Most require your full attention to make the best of their dry wit, and Black Books is no exception. About a reclusive bookstore owner who hates customers and cleanliness, but loves alcohol (openly) and the shop owner next door (secretly), Black Books manages masterfully with a central cast of just three characters: the aforementioned Bernard Black (Dylan Moran, series creator); the aforementioned suppressed loved interest, Fran (Tamsin Greig), and the Not Quite Right employee, Manny (Bill Bailey), who alternates between being very much together and altogether balmy. Having seen the series before, I greatly anticipated such comic escapades as The Night They Drank £7,000 of Wine and Thereafter Killed The Pope ("The Grapes of Wrath"), and... pretty much anything else in the season that involved severe liver abuse. Which, seeing as this is a British comedy, meant most of it.

#18. Shrink



Well, Spacey's back from K-PAX, that's for sure, but in what form? I never can tell with his films anymore. Nonetheless, from the get-go, Shrink defines itself clearly: This is a film where we start out with what should ostensibly feel like a dizzying number of seemingly unrelated story lines that will fuse together perfectly as time goes on. And it does! Hey! Who'd've thunk it. So from Kevin Spacey as a self-medicating celebrity psychiatrist grieving over his wife's suicide, to Robin Williams as a thinly veiled version of himself struggling with the desire for extramarital relations, to Dallas Roberts as an anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive talent agent, to Mark Webber as a struggling screenwriter with a thing for Roberts' pregnant saint of an assistant, we're meant to be overwhelmed by the breadth of this film's reach and the depth of the issues it's addressing. But wait! I daresay we're still missing our catalyst in this whole, murky affair: young Jemma (Keke Palmer), whose deeply troubling case file is handed to Spacey by his character's father in a really unethical ploy to get Spacey past his wife's suicide. And yes, I know it's "really unethical" because my housemate's a psych grad, and for what it's worth she loved the movie for the hypothetical scenarios it allowed her to mull over in relation to her own work. As for me? The acting was decent, but the plot was far too pat. I was especially incensed by the cozy ending to a huge breach of ethics and betrayal of trust. These themes have been worked over before, elsewhere and better.

#19. World's Greatest Dad



I didn't intend to watch two back-to-back films with Robin Williams, but I can't say I minded. As a kid I watched Toys ad nauseum, and I've since always admired the breadth of roles he takes on. World's Greatest Dad belongs to a very particular role subset therein -- The Sad Man With A Smile -- and he plays it quite well here, as the middling private school teacher (Lance Clayton) with five unpublished novels and, as he later typifies it, a "douchebag" of a son. Sadly, this film reaches its zenith a third of the way through, when his son accidentally kills himself while masturbating and Lance enacts the perfect love of a father by providing a measure of dignity to the death. The trouble is, this action spirals out of hand -- going from a quiet familial moment to something that gives Lance the audience he always wanted, but at a price Lance ultimately can't bear. Oh, there were a lot of fun moments in this film, but a directorial conceit involving the school pool at the end (to push a metaphor down our throats) clinched my growing disillusionment with the script itself: Everything in this film happens because it needs to happen to fit the plot; but precious little of that follows sensibly from individual character motivations. How Lance's relationship develops with Claire (Alexie Gilmore) and ends, why he uses the precise words he does in his ultimate speech, the choices he makes with some of "his son's" writing, the way he treats his son's best friend, or his neighbour... a lot of little things make it clear Lance isn't really a character, but himself a plot device. Which is too bad, because again, the film's got a lot of fun moments. In the end, though, it tries to Mean Something -- and that's probably where it started to fall apart.

#20. The New Women



I was going to include this film in my upcoming LGBT-a-thon, but to my great surprise, this independent film from the LGBT section of our store really isn't LGBT at all. A really low-budget number about middle-aged women with run-of-the-mill marital/social problems, whose husbands all fall asleep one night and don't wake up, this film should have the makings for at least a silly romp into Bisexual-in-a-Pinch territory, but it doesn't even come close: All the women do is grumble about their husbands, with a few even mounting their comatose mates when they get desperate or lonely, and drive around the country looking for some semblance of civilization in the aftermath of males everywhere falling asleep. Yes, there are a couple intimations of bisexuality: A power-play by a vengeful woman run out of town after she slept with another woman's husband (she hijacks the latter woman's RV and forces this woman to dance for her -- a very brief humiliation that wouldn't even suffice for soft-core entertainment) and a couple lines from impressionable young women at a nearby women-only cult being tricked into thinking their leader is a god. Sorry, but if that's LGBT content, so too is prison rape. That aside, was the movie worth it? God no. For some reason the director thought shooting the whole thing in black-and-white would add a measure of classiness to it, but it doesn't work: For a more enjoyable look at this kind of post-apocalyptic scenario, do yourself a favour and read Y: The Last Man instead. There's even a movie coming out for it next year!

#21. The Book of Eli



I've had some time to put aside my crankiness about this film's blatant similarities to The Road: the post-apocalyptic desert, the male protagonist with a desperate need to get to the ocean, cannibals in waiting, and a quest involving the preservation of the Light. Denzel Washington plays Eli, a man from before The Flash (an event that eradicated most of civilization across North America), who's been traveling towards the sea for 30 years in possession of the last Bible. (The rest were burned after the war by people convinced that religion had caused this dystopic future in the first place.) Cue the tyrant of a small roadside community, Carnegie (Gary Oldman), who leads by threat of violence but is desperate to find a copy of the Bible, so that he might better prey upon the weak with that "weapon" too. Integral to the story is also Solara (Mila Kunis, in a perfect, transformative role from her famous performance as Jackie in That 70s Show), who gets Eli in hot water with her silly need to escape a life of rape and abject helplessness in Carnegie's city, but also redeems herself by helping him get to his final destination. It's a fun enough film, with all the samurai-esque fight scenes The Road will never in a million years provide, but with a very blatant message about the existence of god, miracles, and The Purpose God Has Laid Out For Those Of Faith. Personally, I've seen too much of the likes of Carnegie's spiritualism in the real world to think this film's approach to religion as anything but sugarcoated in the end. And a rip-off of The Road. Did I mention that? As a friend of mine declared yesterday, he's just about "plum tuckered out with charcoal'd films" (post-apocalyptic desert scenarios). Well, now so am I.