Mother



Where do you go these days if you're looking for real storytelling in cinema? I mean complex plotting, revelations and reversals – everything that makes for rich narrative pleasure. These qualities are thin on the ground, and even when you find a film that spins a compelling yarn – as in current Argentinian thriller The Secret in Their Eyes – you still tend to feel you're watching the equivalent of a good read translated into pictures.

What's truly rare is the sense of drama totally elaborated as cinema, with the storytelling making itself felt in every aspect of a film. But a few film-makers still have the secret, and one is Bong Joon-ho, a South Korean director whose meticulousness and love of confounding the viewer are altogether Hitchcockian. Bong directed the terrific monster movie The Host, about a giant fish-thing on the rampage (I haven't touched herring since) and before that, the labyrinthine Memories of Murder, about the entanglements of an unsolvable crime.

Bong's new feature Mother is almost a perfect film, in the sense that no image, no moment is wasted: everything plays its part in the narrative web that he spins with co-writer Park Eun-kyo.

Mother begins with a knockout opening shot: in a field of long grass, an elderly woman, mournfully starts to dance to a swaying Latin beat. Is she dancing from sorrow, or madness? The subsequent long flashback explains it all. The woman, played by Kim Hye-ja, is a small-town herbalist and acupuncturist who lives with her son Do-joon (Won Bin), a 27-year-old with learning difficulties and problematic short-term memory. When Do-joon is charged with killing a high-school girl, he can't defend himself because he has no idea what happened on the fateful night. Determined to clear him, his mother parleys with the cynical, lazy local police; calls in a contemptuously high-handed lawyer; then sets out to play detective herself.

The plot takes a drastic turn when a clue emerges by chance, and the mother goes in search of a lost piece of evidence that apparently holds the key to everything. But what's exceptional about Mother is that, in this film, pretty much everything holds the key to everything. There are virtually no throwaway touches: it all signifies. The smallest details play a part in elaborating and unravelling the plot, or else speak volumes about the world in which mother and son struggle to survive.

Take the moment early on where she shuffles deferentially around the police station, handing out complimentary goodies; she's an old hand at abasing herself to keep Do-joon out of trouble. A classic "what-just-happened?" thriller, Mother constantly provides little signposts, nudging you to notice things – but as often as not misdirects you about their significance.

At two crucial points, Doon-jo remembers things out of the blue. One instance is a long-lost memory from his own past that suddenly casts his family background in a very different light. The other is the freak retrieval of a hitherto-unconscious memory, like an image that had somehow fallen between frames of the film – and, given the schoolgirl-murder premise, the eerie echo of Twin Peaks is perhaps no coincidence.

With its edge of social satire, Mother has us rooting for its working-class characters against a corrupt world. The South Korean society depicted here is one in which there's seemingly little in the way of just legal process, not even for suspects with evident mental problems. The system of victimisation seems endemic – from playground bullying to the bitterly ironic way that a small-time hood persuades the mother that he is Doon-jo's devoted friend, even while he's extorting money from her.

The film features some terrific characterisations, the vivid dramatis personae including loathsomely thuggish schoolboys, spoilt bourgeois golfers and a deranged grandmother with a penchant for rice liquor. Won Bin is affectingly mercurial as the hapless Doon-jo, despite being saddled with one of those reverse-moptop hairdos that is international screen shorthand for "lovably challenged".

As for lead Kim Hye-ja, she makes one of the most complex, unsettling mothers in cinema. Forever bustling around in torrential rain, this bastion of unconditional love is an image both of the nobility and the abjection of motherhood. As parent and detective, she's a woman with a mission – but also unavoidably flawed as a sleuth.

A monomaniac fury beneath her stooped, uncertain self-deprecation, she's perpetually surprising: she gets into a knock-down fight with the dead girl's angry mourners, then delicately puts on a dab of lipstick, a lovely picture of the madness of keeping up appearances.

Apparently Kim Hye-ja is famous in South Korea for playing dignified matriarchs – which suggests not only inspired casting, but also audacity on Kim's part in taking on a role so delicately poised on the edge of the grotesque. With its quiet visual brilliance and relishably sombre comic sensibility, Mother is poignant, compassionate and ultimately disturbing in its conclusion that perhaps a detective needs to be deluded to get to the truth.

The thriller of the year, hands down, Mother is about as satisfying as narrative cinema gets.

 "Depp and Jolie in ‘The Tourist’ scheduled for December"; Depp and Jolie in ‘The Tourist’ scheduled for December Relaxnews


Friday, 20 August 2010



The film studio announced yesterday that the international thriller, The Tourist, co-starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp will be released December 10 in time for the holiday season and allowing it to qualify as a contender for Oscar and Golden Globe award season.

Directed by Oscar-winning Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others), the film focuses on an American tourist visiting Italy to mend a broken heart, when he meets an extraordinary woman, and Interpol agent, who intentionally crosses his path.

With Jolie's performance in Salt and Depp in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, the actors could already be awards candidates.

Producers had considered casting Tom Cruise and then Sam Worthington for the Johnny Depp role. Charlize Theron was also slotted for the female lead. Even the director changed with Lasse Hallström, Bharat Nalluri and Alfonso Cuaron as possibilities.

A remake of the 2005 French film, Anthony Zimmer, the film also features Paul Bettany (The Young Victoria) and Timothy Dalton (Toy Story 3).

Also opening that week is the family fantasy The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and David O. Russell's boxing drama, The Fighter, with Mark Wahlberg.

In 2011 Depp will return as Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the animated Rango and The Rum Diary adapted from the Hunter S. Thompson novel.

Jolie will be heard in the Kung Fu Panda sequel with Jack Black next year and she is rumored to be the next Cleopatra in a film scheduled for 2012.

July 16, 2010 Psycho and Breathless: the great galvanizers By Geoff Pevere 

 It's been 50 years since Hitchcock's low-budget horror movie and Godard's crime film shook up audiences and the film industry Fifty years ago, Psycho and Breathless were released. The former was a black-and-white, low-budget studio horror movie made by a veteran marquee filmmaker attempting to get back to basics; the latter a movie manifesto made by a Swiss-born ex-critic as an assault on convention. And they both entered theatres with the same conclusion. Something had to be shaken up and the something was us.

By 1960, movies were firmly installed as the world's most popular form of entertainment. World wars, TV and radio only dented it. Film was the century's defining medium.

Among other things, the cinema had provided Alfred Hitchcock, a working-class Londoner who'd risen to international fame after starting his career as a title designer on silent movies, with a medium in which to hone a formidable artistry.

Although at peak form by the late 1950s - the decade also produced Rear Window, Vertigo and North by Northwest - Hitchcock was feeling the need to strip back and start again. And so came the rather surprising announcement in 1959 that Hitchcock's next project - after the massively audience-pleasing Cary Grant vehicle North by Northwest - would be an adaptation of Robert Bloch's pulp novel Psycho.

Inspired by a real case of murder, dismemberment and cannibalism in Wisconsin, Bloch's book was about a quiet, outwardly harmless man who kills guests who unwisely check into his remote roadside motel.

Hitchcock's adaptation would have no big stars. It would be shot in black-and-white by a crew largely drawn from his Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series. It would be made cheaply on a 30-day shooting schedule. And it would depend on one thing and one thing only to get people to see it, at least until word of more sensational attractions leaked out: Hitchcock's name above the title.

As a critic for the iconoclastic Parisian movie journal Cahiers du Cinéma, Jean-Luc Godard had long ranked Hitchcock as pre-eminent among those Hollywood filmmakers whose vision transcended the commercial conditions in which they worked. For Godard, Hitchcock had always been the real star of a Hitchcock movie and he was determined that his own first feature bear a signature just as bold.

For Godard, movies were essays written by the director. Breathless - which was shot guerrilla-style on a micro-budget with a skeleton crew - would not only be just such an act of first-person filmmaking, it would take as its thesis the need to destroy the past, or at least the exhausted form of popular cinema, for the sake of a future. He called it war.

Both movies were exercises in shattering the familiar - horror movies for Psycho and Hollywood crime thrillers for Breathless - then pulling something new and startling from the rubble. While both took aggressive liberties with form their true target was us. If you really wanted to reduce movies to some kind of esthetic ground zero, you had to hit them right between the eyes. Our eyes.

David Thomson, the renowned author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Filmand a few dozen other volumes about the penetrating powers of movies looks back on his first viewing of Hitchcock's minimal masterpiece as galvanizing. He was a 19-year-old film student in London.

"This was a fantastically rich film," he recalls. "It was full of subtexts, sub-tones. Every shot had something in it. And to the extent that I felt confused in terms of involvement -and I think anyone does with the film - I just wanted to go back and see it again."

"Psycho was very important for me in that it said, 'You can enjoy Ingmar Bergman. You can enjoy Antonioni, you can enjoy Breathless, don't rule out the Hollywood pictures. Because just as you thought Rear Window and Vertigo staggering films . . . Psycho is a demonstration that the Hollywood system can produce absolutely top-class, fabulous work."

Much more than historical coincidence connects the two films. Godard, soon to crest what would be called the French New Wave, wouldn't have made his movie without the conviction that directors like Hitchcock were underappreciated as artists. And the coming decade's international shakeup in movie criticism and education would not have happened if critics like Godard didn't have figures like Hitchcock to get them out of the theatre and on to the streets.

Peter Harcourt was a Canadian living in London at the time that Psycho and Breathless appeared. A teacher and critic who would establish the study of film in Canadian universities, he also credits the climate of vigorous debate generated by these movies as a necessary provocation in the legitimization of film study.

Neither movie permits passivity. While Psycho's instantly notorious shower murder was its own event - an eyeball assault of the first order - don't forget who is murdered: the film's star (Janet Leigh). The movie's barely one-third over and our heroine is killed. More than blood swirls down that drain. With it goes any certainty as to what might happen next.

"That uncertainty, coupled with the realization that this film could suddenly expose you to the most violence you'd ever seen, it was terrifying," says Thomson.

"And don't minimize that feeling. The shower scene in '60 was the most violent thing in film I'd ever seen. It's still one of the most violent things I've ever seen. But in terms of the craft, the vision, the precision, the meticulousness of it is amazing. And it still works as a frightening event."

Hitchcock's movie functioned with such brutal efficiency because it seduces our affinities only to betray them. Breathless just refuses them. From the opening, in which the cocky thief Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) steals a car and hightails it to Paris, Godard embarks on a gravel-spitting flight from the familiar. The getaway itself is diced by cuts and pans, Belmondo yaks right at us and the music skips over the proceedings like pebbles thrown up by a passing jalopy.

Harcourt saw a movie made by a man who was determined to redeem a fallen form: to fulfill the early promise of the cinema as the seventh art, the 20th-century heir to literature, painting and music. He sees this as the defining project of Godard. "With Godard himself it's more complicated," Harcourt adds. "It's a lament for the failure of cinema to remain a fully adult form in the way that painting and literature did. That's how I see it."

The centre of both Godard and Hitchcock's focus was us: looked at and looking, as involved as any character, without whom there would be no movie. This pivot of perspective made it impossible for us to look innocently. Like it or not, we were as guilty as the killers.

The confrontational experience of Psycho and Breathless stirred countless viewers into action: they wrote, they studied, they argued, they taught, they theorized. They opened schools. They made movies.

Until 1960, we'd been hiding in the dark. With the release of Psycho and Breathless, we were being watched.

August 9, 2010 Lonely world credited for YouTube hit By CBC News   CBC News A poet from P.E.I. now living in Halifax has scored a surprise hit on YouTube with her video How to be Alone. A poet from P.E.I. now living in Halifax has scored a surprise hit on YouTube with her video How to be Alone.

Tanya Davis's video, created with the help of filmmaker Andrea Dorfman, has had more than 600,000 views, placing it in the top 10 for this month. It was noted in a tweet by film critic Roger Ebert at the end of July.

Davis said she never expected the video to become so popular. But many people are feeling alone, she said, so this could be a reason for the video's success.

The video presents Davis's poem about combating loneliness as a song in a music video.

"It's helping them with their loneliness," she said.

"I'm getting a lot of quick anecdotes about how people are either going through divorces or breakups or they've been alone all this time, and how some of them have been scared to face it, and this poem has been making them feel braver about going forward."

Davis said she doesn't get any money from YouTube, but she thinks the worldwide exposure will help her career.

"I'm getting all these emails from people expressing their interest and how much they like the video," she said. "And some of them are brand new to my work."

Davis is also a musician with a new recording coming out in the fall. She said she would be using her new connections to help promote the release.

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Shooting the last roll of Kodachrome

What should a photographer shoot when he's entrusted with the very last roll of Kodachrome?

Steve McCurry took aim at the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Terminal and a few human icons. Paul Simon, who sang about the film's rich colors, shied away. But Robert De Niro stood in for the world of filmmaking.

Then McCurry headed to southern Asia, where in 1984 he shot a famous portrait of a green-eyed Afghan refugee girl that made the cover of National Geographic. In India, he snapped a tribe whose nomadic way of life is disappearing - just like Kodachrome.

The world's first commercially successful color film was extolled since the Great Depression for its sharpness, archival durability and vibrant yet realistic hues. It had a mass-market heyday in the 1960s and '70s before being eclipsed by video and easy-to-process color negative films, the kind that prints are made from.

Now time is taking Kodachrome away. Betting its future on digital photography, Eastman Kodak Co. discontinued the slide and motion-picture film with a production run last August in which a master sheet nearly a mile long was cut up into more than 20,000 rolls.

McCurry requested the final 36-exposure strip to load into his Nikon F6, just as he's done "so many tens of thousands of times."

"I thought, what better way to kind of honor the memory of the film than to try and photograph iconic places and people?"

He began a six-week odyssey in June, trailed by a TV crew from National Geographic Channel, which plans a one-hour documentary next year. National Geographic magazine is considering a spread, too. McCurry's original images will go to the George Eastman House film and photography museum in Rochester, N.Y.

"'Sixth Sense' voted film with most shocking twist"; 'Sixth Sense' voted film with most shocking twist By Press Association Reporter





Bruce Willis's movie hit The Sixth Sense was today declared the film with the biggest shock of all time,

The film about a young boy who claims to "see dead people" features a pivotal moment in which the truth about Willis's character is revealed.

It beat 50-year-old chiller Psycho in a poll to find the most shocking plot twist, commissioned to mark the release of Robert Pattinson film
Remember Me on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Pattinson's film - released tomorrow by E1 Entertainment - features its own unexpected ending.

Kevin Spacey plays a key role in two of the films in the top 10 - his performances in The Usual Suspects, which was ranked third, and Se7en, which was placed ninth.

The jaw-dropping moment when Darth Vader revealed he was actually Luke Skywalker's father was in fourth place.

Also in the list - in seventh place - is the moment when Edward Woodward's character Sgt Howie finds he is to be a human sacrifice as The Wicker Man
draws to a close. And the climactic scene in The Planet Of The Apes where the audience learns the action is set on Earth is tenth.

Martin Gough, senior product manager at E1 Entertainment said: "The Sixth Sense will always be remembered for its 'I see dead people' line, which actually
should have given the game away for Willis a lot sooner than it did.

"It's clear that the public loves an ultimate shock and Remember Me's is both sudden and poignant at the same time, revealing its twist before the credits roll."

The biggest film shocks of all time are:

1. Sixth Sense (1999) - Bruce Willis's character is in fact dead.

2. Psycho (1960) - Norman Bates has dressed as his mother.

3. The Usual Suspects (1995) - Kevin Spacey's character Verbal is actually the villain Keyser Soze.

4. The Empire Strikes Back (1980) - Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father.

5. Saw (2004) - Villain Jigsaw is alive and was just pretending to be dead throughout the film.

6. Fight Club (1999) - Ed Norton and Brad Pitt's characters are the same person.

7. The Wicker Man (1973) - Edward Woodward's Sgt Howie has been lured to become a sacrifice.

8. The Others (2001) - Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) and family are ghosts.

9. Se7en (1995) - Spacey's John Doe character has set up the plot to engineer his death.

10. Planet Of The Apes (1968) - The setting is planet Earth in the future.

July 24, 2010 Saw movies 'most successful' horror series By CBC Arts   CBC Arts The Guinness Book of World Records has named Saw the most successful horror movie series of all. Saw, a serial killer film franchise, has been named the most successful movie horror series by the Guinness World Records.

The award was presented to the film's producers on Friday at the Comic-Con conference in San Diego. The conference, now in its 41st year, is a fan-based pop culture celebration.

In the six Saw films, victims valiantly try to escape intricate traps set out by the "jigsaw killer." In total, the films have grossed $733 million US.

The first film debuted in 2004 and since then, a new one has been released each year for Halloween.

The seventh and final installment, in 3D, unspools Oct. 29.

"We are done; this is it. We don't want to be that boxer who fought one too many fights," said producer Mark Burg.

"In this movie we answer every question the audience has ever had."

Saw, originally created as a short film in 2003 by Australian director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, beat out:

• Scream (three films): $507 million.
• Friday the 13th (12 films): $465 million.
• A Nightmare On Elm Street (nine films): $447 million.
• Halloween (10 films) $367 million.

July 22, 2010 Arcade Fire, John Legend to stream concerts live By JAKE COYLE   AP Entertainment Writer Within hours of most any concert, shaky and distorted footage of the show can be found online from front row or the balcony.

But online concert video has been steadily building toward live streaming, digital quality video and accompanying social media interaction. "Unstaged," a new online concert series being launched by American Express, and to stream on YouTube and Vevo, hopes to combine all of these elements.

Arcade Fire will kick off the series by live streaming the second of their much anticipated Aug. 4 and 5 concerts at Madison Square Garden. The concerts follow the Aug. 3 release of the band's third album, "The Suburbs."

"As soon as we booked it, it felt a little ominous," Jeremy Gara, the band's drummer, said of the MSG shows. "Playing there by itself is pretty exciting. Playing there twice seems pretty crazy, and then it's our CD release and now this live broadcasting.

"Well, if we're going to do it, do it big," laughs Gara.

The concert will stream live Aug. 5 at 10 p.m. Eastern on the Google Inc.-owned YouTube and Vevo, the music video site owned by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Abu Dhabi Media Co. It's the first in a planned series of five live streamed concerts, with John Legend and the Roots to follow, and others to be announced later.

Courtney Kelso, vice president of sports and entertainment strategy at American Express, said the concerts won't be "a passive, flat experience."

"It is still a pretty nascent space," Kelso said of live concerts online. "They're kind of taking the television model to it — 'I'll just broadcast it, put it on the Web and someone will watch it.' We think the power of the digital medium is such that you can interact in special ways."

The series is planning interactive features like a choice of camera angles, one to be controlled by an as-yet-to-be-named director and another that a user can choose. Kelso said another option might be having viewers vote on song requests.

Glenn Brown, YouTube's head of music partnerships, said the series was the video equivalent of the up-to-the-minute quality of Twitter.

"With everything being reproducible infinitely, being able to have that time-limited, unique experience is what's really interesting here," said Brown.

YouTube has previously streamed performances at San Francisco's Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival and Tennessee's Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival. The largest Internet audience yet for a concert was YouTube's streaming of a U2 show in October, which was watched live by nearly 10 million.

American Express and YouTube earlier collaborated on an Alicia Keys concert in December. Vevo was brought into the act for a stream in May of a National concert.

When YouTube streamed the Keys concert, it noticed a spike in viewership when Jay-Z made a surprise appearance. The resulting social media buzz led to more viewers, a lesson that will be applied to "Unstaged," which promises more special guests at the concerts.

"The series could expand to be much more than (five acts)," said David Kohl, executive vice president of sales and customer operations at Vevo. "It's an ability for millions and millions of users and viewers to touch a live event."