Category: Film review

This weekend, the International Documentary Association began screening its DocuWeek program (not “festival,” they were quick to emphasize) so the films could qualify for Oscar nominations next year by playing in a commercial theater in Los Angeles. Whatever, I’m just glad the films are being shown even if there have been less than a dozen people at each of my screenings. The first two documentaries are stylish, engrossing pieces about art and artists, and the third is one of the best films I’ve seen all year, a sober look at global economics and third world devastation.

Touch the Sound…

UCLA Film and Television Archive’s ongoing Festival of Preservation screened Li Hanxiang’s charming Love Eterne (1963) last night, one of the most popular Hong Kong films of all time. It’s a romantic musical of the accessible huangmei opera genre derived from folk songs, consisting of short stanzas and choruses that are often sung by non-professionals. The movie is a colorful, widescreen Shaw Brothers production; the famed King Hu (1966’s Dragon Inn) is credited as having directed the “action scenes,” but what those might be are anyone’s guess–everything but the final scenes is a placid and cheerful costume drama. Nevertheless, …

Werner Herzog has long obsessed over grandiose imagery and unusual documentary subjects (Kuwait’s burning oil fields, the Loch Ness monster, a lost tribe in the Amazon). So I expected his latest documentary–about a man and his girlfriend who were killed by a grizzly bear after the man spent years living with the beasts for months at a time–to be an exercise in style that would milk the eccentricity of its story. Fortunately, Grizzly Man is much more than that; it offers a humane and multifaceted portrait of an individual whose emotional makeup probably wasn’t all that different from the rest …

Last night, I attended the Los Angeles debut of the subtitled Howl’s Moving Castle, which is screening along with the dubbed version exclusively at Disney’s movie palace, the El Capitan, in Hollywood. The theater was built in the ’20s with an East Indian design and sits across the street from the Grauman’s Chinese Theater but has much less the quantity and quality of seating; general admission, I discovered, is relegated to the far edges of the theater.

Not that it mattered, Hayao Miyazaki’s film would probably prove to be a delight seen from any angle. Its combination of elaborate …