Screening Log
This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.
January 2007 activity
Total Log Entries: 84
- Adam (16)
- Andrew (0)
- Chet (0)
- Chiranjit (0)
- David (0)
- Eva (0)
- Evan (0)
- Ian (5)
- Jenny (8)
- Katherine (0)
- Leo (5)
- Megan (0)
- Rumsey (19)
- Teddy (0)
- Thomas (0)
- Timothy (0)
- Victoria (0)
Total Comments: 32
- El Topo (0)
- A Hole in My Heart (0)
- Little Miss Sunshine (0)
- The Decalogue (I) (0)
- An Inconvenient Truth (0)
- Eraserhead (0)
- The Man Who Knew Too Much (0)
- Deja Vu (0)
- Mildred Pierce (0)
- Babel (1)
- 3 Godfathers (0)
- Children of Men (0)
- Mikey & Nicky (0)
- One Eyed Jacks (0)
- Nashville (0)
- Hearts of Darkness (0)
- Apocalypse Now (0)
- In the Bedroom (0)
- Babel (0)
- Harold And Maude (0)
- Superman II (0)
- Flags Of Our Fathers (0)
- Predator 2 (1)
- Leave Her To Heaven (0)
- Lola (0)
- Still Life (0)
- His Kind Of Woman! (0)
- Stand By Me (1)
- Only You (0)
- The Descent (0)
- Office Space (0)
- Northfork (0)
- The Good German (0)
- Dreamgirls (5)
- Curse of the Golden Flower (0)
- Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (1)
- Little Children (0)
- The Great New Wonderful (0)
- Twelve and Holding (0)
- Good Morning (0)
- A Dirty Shame (0)
- Another Gay Movie (1)
- Scoop (0)
- Apocalypto (0)
- Idiocracy (0)
- Shampoo (0)
- Seabiscuit (0)
- City Slickers (0)
- While You Were Sleeping (0)
- Night At The Museum (0)
- The Black Dahlia (0)
- Borat (0)
- An-Magritt (0)
- 2046 (7)
- Shoeshine (0)
- Blood Simple (0)
- Through a Glass Darkly (0)
- The Painted Veil (0)
- Henry V (4)
- Love Object (0)
- PlayTime (0)
- Take the Money and Run (0)
- Climates (0)
- Pan’s Labyrinth (1)
- Children of Men (6)
- Cries and Whispers (0)
- Miami Vice (0)
- Notes on a Scandal (0)
- Pan’s Labyrinth (0)
- Volver (0)
- Night Watch (0)
- The Long Goodbye (0)
- Thank You For Smoking (0)
- Look Both Ways (0)
- Children of Men (3)
- The Bat (0)
- Shadowboxer (0)
- Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (0)
- The Bishop’s Wife (0)
- Children of Men (1)
- Delicatessen (0)
- McCabe & Mrs. Miller (0)
- Infernal Affairs (0)
- Dial M for Murder (0)
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Still Life / Sanxia Haoren / China / 2006
Two viewings have already convinced me that this is going to be one of my top films for 2007. As much as I liked it, I had some reservations about The World – the cellphone animation was a distraction, and the ending was too resolved for a Jia film. But Still Life is simply magnificent. It’s a new setting for Jia – a town in Sichuan about to be flooded in the Three Gorges Dam project – but he populates it with characters (and familiar actors) from his home province of Shanxi, and once again he focuses on the people that are losing out in China’s rushed economic modernisation: these are the “good people” (haoren) of the original Chinese title. Shot predominantly but not exclusively in slow (but never too/ slow) masterful long takes, this is a film of immense formal beauty and of profound feeling for its characters. I’m not sure about the couple of moments of magic realism (the UFO, the spaceship taking off!) but the final shot with the tightrope walker in the far distance ends the film splendidly.
This Mainland Chinese DVD (with English subtitles) also has an unsubtitled disc of the documentary Dong that Jia made at the same time. This I like a lot less – one of the problems for me is that the subject, Liu Xiaodong, is a painter whose realist style is banal and regressive. In addition, the second half shot in Bangkok lacks the authenticity of the Fengjie setting. But one interesting aspect to the documentary is that it includes shots from Still Life, some of which – those in which Han Sanming appears – are clearly “acted”.
by Ian Johnston | Source: WB DVD
21 Jan 2007 11:18 AM | Submit Comment