Tag Archives: Movie

EXPOSED

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I recommend seeing this well-written movie with Keanu Reeves.

I was disturbed by the characters, the settings and their stories. This is a hard cord view of New York City where residents try to live on top of one another in a very nitty-gritty world.

Reeves is the partner of a cop killed while on duty; he investigates the death. If the investigation exposes all the “dirt” belonging to the dead cop, his family will not get his pension. Reeves proceeds against orders to stop. He finally interviews the final witnesses and learns how dirty his partner was – how justice was served and how keeping silent about the facts of death is the best result for everyone.

FRIENDS WITH MONEY

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Frances McDormand, Catherine Keener, Joan Cusack and Jennifer Aniston

I just saw this buddy picture, chick-flick from 2006. Everyone lives in Santa Monica, California. There is no sense of the community. None of the women do yoga. Everyone is married but Anniston, but I have no sense of anyone being married except in the most blasé way. Each marriage is like it came from a book. DAY 1. Here’s what you do. Day 2: Here’s what you do again.

Everyone wants Anniston to get a boyfriend. Scott Caen shows up, and the way he pleads for a second date (because there is nothing going on between them) suggests he need this movie role to advance his movie career. Incidentally, Caen is the most interesting character, McDormand much less so.

Anniston cleans houses for a living. She is so senseless that she takes puppy-dog Caen along to watch her work, and sometime later he helps her clean. They enter the house of an unemployed bachelor; nobody is a home. Caen says, “Let’s f%*!”  “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think so,” Aniston whines as she wonders what to clean first. If Scott Caen devotes all this time to Aniston,  maybe he’ll get the girl. A friend asks her, “How’s the sex?” “It’s fine.” The viewer should never know it because the togetherness time for most of the movie the two are detached. Perhaps Caen and Aniston have coodies.

Conversations and concerns of all the characters never go beyond what anyone talked about in Junior High School. The viewer goes through a teenage morass as characters talk significant complaints and activities. Is the husband of McDormand gay? He meets a man who is married and strikes up a friendship anew. Sounds suspiciously gay, but the film doesn’t show much that friendship and whether the men are straight, gay, bi or trans. Perhaps the basis of the friendship is that both men consider the other gay. Scott Caen has sex (in the bed of another house-to-clean client) with Aniston. That evening Caen dates another woman. Heartbreak. An adult situation. No confrontation but Caen is a bad, mean man. (At least he has done something to get out of this movie!) Keener and hubby are writers, the most improbable writing team. They disagree, not about writing but something juvenile: Her ass is getting big; he has bad breath. They separate, an adult decision based upon insults. This movie is proof that Catherine Keener should never go west of Broadway, New York City to pursue her movie career.

Aniston finds a slovenly guy, who reveals he is rich. He doesn’t like to tell people he is wealthy because he has issues. Aniston admits she has issues. However all issues will be happily resolved because he has the money she will spend to redecorate his house.

LUST CAUTION

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Movie – Ang Lee, Director; Tang Wei, Actress

This two and one-half hour movie was on a DVD for sale at BigLots, $3.00. English subtitles, Chinese language film shot in China.

This movie is worth seeing. It drives to its denouement, set up well and can reached by acting. The story is about a novice spy (Tang Wei) enlisted to set up a Chinese man  who is collaborating with the Japanese during the occupation of China during World War Two. The sets, costumes and art direction are excellent. The novice is part of a cell, the politically leaning of which is not entirely clear except every person detests the Japanese.

The first attempt to set up the collaborator fails. He moves from Hong Kong to Shanghai. the novice returns to her family in Shanghai and lives simply while attending classes. She is recruited by a member of her former Hong Kong cell to approach the collaborator again. She is controlled her handler, who is more senior and experienced in spy craft. He dismisses her inexperience and asks her to do too much.

Tang Wei plays the novice very well in her relations with the collaborator. She mixes the emotions of her first long romance [with any man] with the desire to arrange the collaborator’s killing. Toward the end she is unhinged when she demonstrates her unsettled mind – job and love. It is never stated, but the collaborator suspects the novice of being part of the Resistance.

She fulfills the plan to get the collaborator in a place where he can be killed. But in offering her a ring, the collaborator shows love and care. The ring is on her finger. She wants nothing bad to happen to him; her emotions run against the mission. She warns him, indirectly. He avoids assassination. She has signed her own death warrant along with arrests and death of everyone in her cell.

Only an actress like Tang Wei can pull off the non-verbal communications to tell this story on film.