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Director Gaspar Noe continues to solidify his reputation as a provocateur with 2002’s Irreversible which, cast his previous obscure I Stand Alone, seemed to court controversy low it played.

It is a tragedy told in reverse, quite literally beginning with the film credits and unfolding from the end. The opening (or closing) line of the film is spoken by a flophouse resident, “You know what? Time destroys all things.” What we then see are two men, Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel), being taken out of a nightclub called The Rectum. The clubs gay s&m denizens sneer and chide them. Marcus is laid out on a stretcher and Pierre is in handcuffs. Next, filmed with an unnerving looping camera shot, we see what led them to this. Marcus and Pierre enter the club and scour every hellish corner for a man called Tenia. A fuming Marcus stalks through the club like a bull. Pierre pleads with him but is unable to calm him down. They are finally lead to who may be Tenia, and they fight the man, the result of which is Marcus having his arm broken and Pierre pummeling the man’s head with a fire extinguisher, crushing the mans face and skull to a pulp.

As the film continues we see why the two were brought to this delirious state of animalistic revenge.
Marcus and Pierre leave a party only to find Marcus’ lover and Pierre’s ex, Alex (Monica Bellucci), brutally beaten and comatose on a stretcher. Informed by two local hoods, they try to track down who was responsible, eventually getting the name of a pimp, Tenia, and his whereabouts at The Rectum. We then witness her harrowing rape in a street underpass, a nearly ten minute sequence that doesn’t shy away from the disgusting attack. We see them at a party. Alex is a beautiful vision and is upset at Marcus taking drugs and bouncing off the walls, being childlike, and obnoxious, so she decides to leave. The we see the trio hanging out, taking a train, comically talking about sex. Then we see Marcus and Alex waking in bed naked, playful, sensual, content in each others arms, talking about Alex’s dream, meeting Pierre later, and their future. And so the film ends with an idyllic begging, the comfort of two lovers heading into the promise of a new life, and it makes the outcome we have already seen even harder to stomach.

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Noe has been called everything from a nihilistic genius to a mean-spirited art snob, and considering his chosen subject matter and willingness to disorient and disturb his viewers, it is understandable. The reactions to his films are often as extreme as the films themselves. Noe’s camera doesn’t flinch. His visuals and sound design facilitates and increases every shocking terrible moment. While it makes the scenes like Alex’s rape and the fatal beating almost unbearable, these are unbearably cruel acts and Noe is unwilling and probably artistically unable to dilute his vision. Because he doesn’t flinch it makes the scenes neither sensationalistic or exploitative and all the more brutal and devastating.

The backwards narrative makes the simple revenge tale enhanced by introspection. At the beginning of every story, things are impersonal as we get to know the characters. With the film’s reverse viewpoint this takes on a whole different meaning, still unfolding like a normal story in that we gradually get acquainted with the characters, but by knowing their fate it makes every detail in every new scene all the more revelatory and heartbreaking. And, that is what Noe aims to do, to break your heart, and make you think differently about time and consequence.

The performances are fantastic, loose, and natural with an improvised feel. Cassel and Bellucci were married at the time (and I believe they still are), and their ease with one another enriches the film (unlike say, Tom And Nicole). Bellucci is so often overshadowed by her jaw dropping beauty, so it is easy to forget that at her best she is a formidable actress. And such is the case here, not only in her casual friendly conversation on the subway with Pierre about the elusive female orgasm, but also in her wince-inducing rape scene that makes Jodie Foster’s assault in The Accused look like an absolute emotional cakewalk.

The DVD: Lions Gate… Now, I know people will ask whether the film is uncut or not. You find various runtimes all over the internet (and we all know how solid info is on the internet). From all I read, Lions Gate released it uncut in US theaters and this version is unrated and runs just over 93 mins. Therefore I assume it is uncut.

Picture: Anamorphic Widescreen. Each scene is composed in handheld/crane shots, in seemingly single takes, and are dizzyingly mobile, leaving one to wonder just how in the Hell Noe did them. In the begging it is a dark film with a dark look, composed with very heavy shadows. As it goes into the more tranquil times, it is bright and full of some beautiful imagery. Sharpness and color details are rich. Contrast is quite deep, though in some of the films early scenes it could maybe be a tad more black. No edge enhancement or artifacts. A very good image transfer.

Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1 or 2.0 French with optional yellow English or Spanish subtitles. The sound is key here and adds just as much emotion as the acting or any visual. Whether it be a looping bassline at the club or the fx of a skull crushing, the audio is crisp and clear. The mix is quite good, realistic, like Marcus and Alex’s dialogue in the house party, straining, nearly drenched by the party music, yet still audible. The techno score by Thomas Bangalter (of Daft Punk) is appropriately nightmarish.

Extras: Chapter Selections— Teaser Trailers for the film (3:07)— Soundtrack Trailer— Two videos “STRESS” (4:37) and “OUTRAGE” (4:19). Featuring music from the film, both are looping camera shots, the first of the red underpass hallway, the second inside the house party. I’d say they are guaranteed to induce motion sickness.

Conclusion: A horrific film- or I guess it is fairer to say a film about life’s horrors- not for everyone’s tastes. But, although disturbing and an experience most viewers wont want to repeat, it does have merit, both in being technically stunning and thought provoking. The basic extras are a disappointment. This is a film that cinephiles would love to see just how Noe pulled off some of the shots as well as the actors feelings about the formidable material. However, it seems that even in other regions there aren’t any English–friendly editions with loads of extras. The presentation by Lions Gate does a great job in the audio/video department, making it well worth a purchase for the curious and brave filmgoer with a strong stomach.

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February 3, 2010 by Dief 

Auto-Tune king T-Pain has produced an animated homage to 1990’s Atlanta Spring Break fiesta Freaknik, which is scheduled to air on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim on March 7. The one-hour special, ‘Freaknik: The Musical,’ took Pain two years to create, and features vocal appearances by Lil Wayne (playing Jesus), Snoop Dogg, Keri Hilson, Kelis, Big Boi, Rick Ross, George Clinton and Bootsy Collins. Saturday Night Live comedians Andy Samberg and Bill Hader also round out the bill. T-Pain also voices “a party ghost.” ‘Freaknik’ focuses on a group of students hoping to revive the party, which at one point attracted more than 250,000 people, until it was shut down in the late 90’s. Check out the trailer here. ‘Freaknik: The Musical’ airs March 7 at 11:30PM on Cartoon Network. …

New York filmmaking soloist Alan Berliner bookends his highly regarded “Intimate Stranger” (1991) with another humorous, poignant, densely textured look at relations and personality in “Nobody’s Vocation.” While its length weighs against theatrical splash, the idiosyncratic doc’s curious charms and stylistic verve make it a regular for fests, strikingly those specializing in nonfiction or Jewish themes.

While Berliner’s earlier film pondered the strange, peripatetic life of his maternal grandfather, the subject here, Berliner’s father, Oscar, is very much alive and hilariously cranky. That makes for a film that often resembles a verbal slapstick duet, though the infectious comedy has a serious, very personal edge.

Pic’s central thread, and an inexhaustible comic reservoir, is Oscar’s feistily contrarian and sarcastic attitude toward his son’s efforts to chronicle his life.

The two are heard discussing the film even as Alan narrates it, and Oscar’s scoffing and derogation are constant. No one could possibly care about a life as ordinary as his, he maintains, though in words that are far more scabrous and colorful.

When Alan brings out maps and documents his research has uncovered regarding the Polish village where his grandparents were born, Oscar says he couldn’t be less interested. Alan seems incredulous that the family’s origin could be of absolutely no concern to his father, but Oscar remains as adamant on this subject as he does on many others: If it’s of no immediate use to him, it can go to hell.

Despite such salty protestations, pic easily wins its implicit argument that no life is insignificant. Though Oscar may not have written symphonies or discovered a cure for cancer, his experience has a fascinating richness that spans many of the century’s big themes, from the immigration of European Jews to America, to World War II and the Holocaust, to the loneliness that can befall people amid outward prosperity and success.

The son brings considerable visual snap to his father’s tale, employing fast-cutting, stop-motion and stylized graphics while incorporating interviews with his mother, sister and various cousins as well as old photos and home movies.

Looking at the yellowed stills, Oscar recalls that his immigrant father was a cold, unemotional man who left the affectional side of child rearing to his wife. Other photos show a handsome teenaged Oscar cavorting with buddies and young women while in naval training for World War II; in unequivocal tones, he recalls this as the happiest time of his life.

Oscar’s old 8mm footage, showing the Berliners as an archetypal nuclear family of the ’50s, provokes the one incident in which his verbal barrage suddenly stops. Alan asks why he took the home movies, and his father literally can’t say.

Yet the non-response speaks volumes about his pained regrets over marrying an arty, vivacious European woman who bore him two children but soon felt trapped in the marriage and only stayed, through several strained, unhappy years, for the sake of the kids.

In pic’s final section, Alan remarks sadly that his father has no friends. Besides a daily chat with his doorman, Oscar in retirement has practically no human contact with anyone outside of the small circle provided by his two kids and their families.

One is left to wonder, however, about other possible sources of meaning. Throughout, pic touches only glancingly on the issues of work and religion, subjects that could have stood more direct address.

Still, it is affecting as well as revealing. Alan evidently intended it not only as a way of understanding himself through understanding Oscar, but also as a way of reaching out to his father in his final years.

Such a gesture may not stand much of a chance against a lifetime of emotional reserve, yet pic buries that poignancy in a final and fitting bit of hilarity: Over the end credits, Oscar chides Alan for being a filmmaker rather than an accountant.

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Normally, the adverbial phrase “charming movie” has me reaching since my broad sword. But John Duigan’s 1989 “Flirting” meets that description with non-icky aplomb.

Set in a boarding school in rural Australia in 1965, it’s about the romantic alliance between gangly outcast Noah Taylor and Ugandan boarder Thandie Newton. Braving resistance from staff and fellow students, their affair is one of the funniest, affecting institutional-life stories to bolt out of the gates for a long time.

“Flirting” is the sequel to “The Year My Voice Broke,” which whispered through Washington in 1988. A wry, coming-of-age drama, “Voice” is about Taylor’s unrequited longing for the sultry heartthrob he’s grown up with in Southwest Australia.

In “Flirting,” set three years later, Taylor finds himself in uniform and out of friends. In this quasi-fascistic, conformist atmosphere, Taylor narrates, you either ran with the herd or “dug a cave deep inside your head, peering through your eye sockets.”

Teased for his stuttering, Taylor opts for the latter. But he deserts all introspective protection when he meets Newton. Temporarily situated at the neighboring girl’s school while her diplomat father works in Canberra, Newton is already getting her share of abuse from her racist colleagues. These two were obviously made for each other.

As the two arrange nighttime meetings — Taylor rowing across the small lake between their respective buildings — they have to contend with an amusing collection of quirkos.

On Newton’s side of the water, there’s stern Scottish mistress Maggie Blinco (as the wonderfully named Miss Guinevere Macready) and snooty head-girl Nicole Kidman (looking decidedly coltish in those pre-Tom Cruise days). At his end, Taylor has to deal with sarcastic pupils, as well as psychotic, cane-happy house master Jeff Truman.

The movie is full of wonderful scenes: Newton caught hiding in a boys’ toilet stall as the unsuspecting lads come in to shower, a line of uniformed boys ritualistically facing a row of ballroom-gowned girls at a school dance, and so on.

“Flirting” is also full of amusing rejoinders and comments: “Remember her needs as well as yours,” suggests Taylor’s friend with secondhand Kamasutra wisdom when Taylor heads toward an intended sensual tryst. “If you can give her pleasure, she’ll be back for more.”

If Duigan maintains the dark yet humanistic humor that has graced both films, we should all be back for more.

By Joe Brown

August 27, 1993

Go out, come out, wherever you are: Two frisky imported comedies explore the still-taboo point of gay moving spirit in China and Japan.

"The Wedding Banquet" is a stylish, cross-cultural "Green Card," directed by Chinese director Ang Lee. American Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein) and naturalized Chinese-born real estate entrepreneur Wai-Tung (Winston Chao) are your typical mainstream Manhattan gay yuppie couple — when we first see Wai-Tung, he's pumping iron at the gym. But Wai-Tung's American life is plagued with guilt because of the flood of "when are you going to get married?" letters from his parents in Taiwan, who go so far as to send their beloved son Chinese computer dating forms.

As a joke, Wai-Tung and Simon return a form filled out with preposterous requirements — a 6-foot opera singer who speaks five languages — and Wai-Tung's parents fly out the impossible dream date to meet him in America.

One of Wai-Tung's tenants is lovely Chinese starving-artist Wei Wei (Taiwanese pop star May Chin), who has lost her job because Immigration is on her tail. At Simon's urging, Wai-Tung agrees to marry Wei-Wei, simultaneously solving her green card problem and placating his parents. "Not to mention the tax breaks for married couples," Simon reminds the business-minded Wai-Tung. Sounds simple, but then Wai-Tung's parents insist on flying over for the blessed occasion, Wei-Wei secretly loves the man she is marrying for convenience, and the little white lie snowballs.

Ang's elegantly orchestrated farce is generous with hilarious moments — preparing Wei-Wei for her green card exam, Simon drills her in every intimate detail of her reluctant "husband's" behavior; Wai-Tung and Simon frantically "de-gaying" their brownstone before the parents arrive — but the "Wedding Banquet" is true to the delicate and complex emotions of all its characters, especially sensitive to the poignancy of parents' disappointment and bewilderment and the conflict between personal freedom and the weight of tradition. The extended sequence at a grand Chinese wedding banquet and its attendant traditions is enchanting.

The title of the wry, dry Japanese comedy "Okoge," is slang for a girl who enjoys the company of gay men — what is impolitely termed "fag hag" in U.S. gay parlance. After watching Goh and his married lover Tochi kiss one afternoon at a gay beach (the gay sex scenes are unprecedentedly frank and sensual), naive single Sayoko develops a fascination for this couple, and offers them her tiny bedroom as secret harbor for their trysts.

Directed by Takehiro Nakajima, "Okoge" has the subversive, unsentimentally farcical feel of a Pedro Almodovar film — at one point a posse of fierce drag queens defends Goh against an attacker, and the convoluted plot evolves into sort of a Japanese "Two Gays and a Baby." This intriguing but somewhat overlong (at two hours) comedy is mostly concerned with the melancholy and frustrating aspects of gay life in Japan, where taboos remain deeply entrenched and there is next to no privacy in puritanical society.

Copyright The Washington Post

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I bear a theory wide live-movement movie musicals. I don’t value their waning acceptance in the history favour century is because the public has squandered its interest in singing and dancing. Spirited musicals and TV music videos thrive magnitude all age groups. I think the movie musical has fallen upon hard times because Broadway has changed its course. The stage, noticeably during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, produced musicals filled with memorable tunes one after another, hit productions take pleasure in “Oklahoma,” “My Fair Lady,” “The Music Male,” “Camelot,” “The Sound of Music,” and “Cabaret.”

Then, somewhere in the late 60s and 70s Broadway at sea its style. For the history thirty-odd years the stage musical has depended largely upon variations of a only musical theme, a good, ear-infectious song that is repeated in limitless permutations, aided by spectacular sets and elaborate costumes. “Annie,” from 1982, may contain been Hollywood’s last snort in terms of a popular screen adaptation of a Broadway stage radio show that overflows with numerous hummable tunes.

I would not advocate, however, that “Annie” will appeal to everyone. Indeed, the music is so saccharine it may cause illness in viewers whose blood sugar is already too high. But, if not, the dusting version of the dais hit is an old-fashioned Lothario. This is especially unexpected because its grizzled, veteran director, John Huston (”The Maltese Falcon,” “The African Queen,” “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “The Misfits”), was not a guy who had had event making lightweight musical comedies, nor had he done much engender with children. Nevertheless, “Annie” comes wrong with an unrelentingly upbeat effervescence as grandly as a sometimes dazzling visual style.

The film is based on the elongated-standing cartoon sign, Little Orphan Annie, created by Harold Gray in 1924. The comic strip ran until 1968 and continued in reruns for many years after. The musical opened in 1977, and the movie was made five years later. The juncture production to this day continues to be popular all over the world, and Columbia TriStar’s new DVD release of the movie should make safe its lasting success.

Annie is played by puerile Aileen Quinn, an actress I have not heard much about since the film but who does a good job in the title role, projecting a wholesome vitality combined with a spunky toughness. She noiseless appears to me a bit too much like a Hollywood child star, but she’s at least as affecting as any of the several other kids I’ve seen in the same task on stage. Annie’s story begins in an orphanage in the interest of little girls in Dimple Epoch Green York City around 1932. The orphanage is riff eventually by a boozy floozy named Miss Hannigan, deftly performed by Carol Burnett. She has some of the film’s best lines: “Why anyone would want to be an orphan is beyond me.” Then, “We’re not having hot mush today.” “Hooray!” yelp the girls. “We’re having cold mush,” says Mademoiselle Hannigan. She is not well liked. Annie escapes from the orphanage whenever she can and is always returned by the neighborhood cop. On one of her escapades she rescues a dog, Sandy, from a gang of young hooligans intent on tormenting it, and Sandy becomes her lifelong friend.

Then the main plot kicks in. Goodness Farrell (Ann Reinking), the unfriendly secretary of the multigazillionaire, Oliver Warbucks (Albert Finney), decides the boss’s image needs upgrading, so she persuades him to perform in an orphan since a week. Ten-year-old Annie is the kid Ms. Farrell chooses, much to Miss Hannigan’s chagrin. Unwanted to command, Annie endears herself to the grumpy tycoon as well as to his secretary and his with few exceptions crew. Warbucks when all is said wants to adopt her, while he also begins to perception his show for Ms. Farrell. Also along from the comic strip are Warbucks’ bodyguards–the magician, “Punjab” (Geoffrey Holder), and the valiant artist, “Asp” (Roger Minami).