Film: Permanent Vacation (1980)

A boy spends this time wandering the streets, at times coming across some odd characters.

I'm a huge fan of Jarmusch's work so I was excited to finally see this film. Permanent Vacation is his debut feature film, completely self funded and shot of 16mm. Jarmusch was a film student at the time of production and actually quit university to finish the film. It doesn't seem too surprising to me that the film has the same feel as a student film. The acting from the main leads is pretty terrible and is a far cry from the dream set of players that Jarmusch would soon be hand picking and writing parts especially for. Because of this the film seem too scripted and the actors at times seem to be too reliant on the script, with later films such as Down By Law a lot of the dialogue is improvised. The building used for the hospital scene also gives off an atmosphere of a student made film.

But enough of the negatives, John Lurie who would play keys in Jarmusch's next two film, has a small part as a street saxophonist. He and Jarmusch also collaborate on the soundtrack together. The main character Allie mostly wanders around streets of decay, which is the films main attraction however I think the sequence shown with the opening monologue as the stand out a moment. It shows an array of once occupied rooms which could be still in use but are purposely lacking in personal possessions.

Permanent Vacation is interesting but possible only to those with a liking towards Jarmuash or independent cinema, though it seems to be setting itself up as the archetypical indie-art house film it's probably safer to say that Jarmusch's next film Stranger Than Paradise is his true debut.

Film: Three Came Home (1950)

Since I'm currently reading a book on actor Sessue Hayakawa it is appropriate for me to at least watch some of this work. The nearest and cheapest I could find is the war drama Three Came Home, which is in the public domain and downloadable for free. Hayakawa was at the height of his fame during the nineteen teens so this may not be the best example, but I will go on about his work and the book I am reading at a later date.

Three Came Home is about a family living in Burma, when the Japanese arrive they are soon transferred to POW camps. The film reminds a lot of the BBC series Tenko however less like ahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif soap opera and more cinematic which gave me the feeling of a better realism. Hayakawa plays a Japanese Colonel who is a fan of a book written by Claudette Colbert's character which is probably the key to her survival. The relationship portrayed by these two in actual fact isn't to dissimilar to Burt Kwouk relation to his prisoners in Tenko.

The film is enjoyable and probably one of the finer examples, if but few, of a woman POW camp in the war. The copy I download unfortunately went out of sync in the middle so I had skip about 20 minutes though thankfully I didn't get too lost. It is certainly a film i will have to see again.

The film downloable from archive.org in divX format, but be warned with sound problems:

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Cinema: Lust, Caution (2006)

In the build up to the Second World War a group of students plot to kill Yee, a collaborator working with the Japanese. It is up to 'Mrs Mak' to become his mistress in order to take his guard his down.

Ang Lee's Lust, Caution brought controversy when released in China due to the explicit sex scenes which were cut out. Consecutively in the US the film will be released in both R and NC-17 cuts. The sex scenes are indeed explicit, getting more so through out. The first being quite tame compared to what follows.

Took a little while to get in to this film but overall i loved it, even being over two and half hours long it didn't seem to drag.

Cinema: Little Dieter Needs To Fly (1997)

The story of Dieter Dengler, a German-America pilot who was shot down in the Vietnam war and struggled for survival both in the jungle and in the hands of his capturers.

A few weeks ago I mentioned I enjoyed several of the pieces on Ten Minute Older: Trumpet and desired to look more into the works of these directors. I was lucky that at my local art cinema (Metro, Derby) they were showing three of Werner Herzogs pictures, the first showing last night and the last at the start of next month. Little Dieter is an unique documentary told throughout by Dengler himself. Dengler take us through his life and even to the past by re-visiting his hometown in Germany and then going back to Laos where he fought and was captured. As he describes the horrors he encountered the film suddenly becomes very cathartic as Dengler even replays some of the moments surrounded by local people filling in for the role of his capturers.



This approach to me seems very daring, even the fact that Dengler re-visits his hometown to tell his story is something you usually see in documentaries, it is far different then the usual talk heads followed location shooting by the crew alone.

The film was shot on 35mm but by the look of the projection to me it looked like video at times. It is possible that the projection itself was from the video source, at times there were moments of interlacing. To me this low quality did not distract from the film as a whole but probably made it even greater then it ever could be. The quality to me made the film feel and look honest. Dengler and Herzog have done an amazing job with this film. Dengler tells his story boldly and without remorse whilst Herzog dones a magnificent job at capturing his unique character.

Little Dieter is an amazing, sometimes funny and sometimes shocking insight. Werner Herzog recently adapted this story into a films tarring Christian Bale called Rescue Dawn (2006), which I will see on the 3rd of February but before then it's Herzogs documentary Wheel of Time (2003), showing next Wednesday.

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Film: Lord of the Rings (1978)

Yesterday I watched Ralph Bakshi's animated Lord of the Rings, which is based on the first two books.

Recently Peter Jackson completed the trilogy across three 3 - 3 and an half hour films (not including deleted scenes included on the extended cuts), Bakshi managed to tell half of that story in just over 2 hours. Originally subtitled as Part One, a second film was planned but never created despite commercial success. The helm would later be taken over be Rankin Bass Productions Return of the King which was made more as a follow up to their earlier film The Hobbit.

Bakshi, like in his previous work, uses rotascoping to animated his characters, the process of filming live actors and then using that as a template to create more realistic movement. The use creates an odd mix of style in this work, at times you would think this was never done and then suddenly a shot would appear with such life like characters that it looks more like Richard Linklater's Waking Life (2001) or A Scanner Darkly (2006) then your archetypical cartoon [sic]. Though Bakshi at this time was seen as one of the most daring and cutting edge animators, it's no wonder that these shots look almost like dark pop art pieces.

At two hours for an animation this may seem long but considering the depth of the original books by many this may not be long enough. I thought the earlier moments of the film just skimmed past to quickly. There are some great moments in this film the most memorable for me was the encounter of Gandalf and Saruman, however i found the unbalanced mix of animation style i bit cheap and in general it seems a little flat at times.

Film: About Love

A trilogy of love stories set in Tokyo, Mainland China and Taiwan each featuring a foreigner from one of the other respected countries.

One of many films backlogged in my DVD collection that needed watching. An interesting film that has its moments but not something that i would watch again. The subject matter around language barriers is quite intriguing.