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Survivors (2008)
Entertaining, but disappointing
The first season of the new Survivors is fairly entertaining cheese, but they totally missed the point of the original series: how do a bunch of ordinary people cope when all the supports of society are stripped away? ... they have to learn to fend for themselves, defend themselves, begin producing their own food, provide their own shelter, etc ... overall, how do they re-institute some form of human social organization which has to deal with everything from planting potatoes to dealing with a community member who commits a murder ... it was made fairly cheaply, but the weaknesses in the production values and the unevenness of the cast were overcome by the quality and intelligence of the writing ...
In the remake, throughout the entire first season (six episodes), the group that come together make no attempt to start providing for themselves, just find a big house and scavenge for food and supplies; the story is made "bigger" by having a nascent group trying to re-form the government at a big, fully equipped facility with its own wind power, computers, satellite links, etc (a group which inevitably quickly takes on a fascist tone), plus there's a secret installation working on a vaccine/cure for the disease (with the implication that they released it in the first place) ...
Meanwhile, instead of focusing on the minutiae of survival, as the original series did, the running time is filled with soap opera stuff among the characters as they pair up, have sex, get jealous, fight and make up ... in other words, a pretty predictable "update" of the original aimed at what the BBC thinks are the interests of a shallow, distracted audience ... people who presumably would be bored with the problems of starting a farm from scratch when faced with imminent starvation ... replacing genuine gritty drama with slick, shallow "drama" ...
Passage (2008)
Good story ruined
The story of John Ray's search for the missing Franklin Expedition, which went in search of the Northwest Passage in the mid-1800s, is a fascinating one. Unfortunately this film, which attempts to mix layers of self-referential documentary about its own making with dramatized scenes among members of the British establishment at the time, is painfully misconceived at every level. Despite some spectacular images of the North, it's an amateurish bore. The climactic device of bringing in Charles Dickens' great-great-grandson to apologize in person to a representative of the Inuit people who were maligned by the great writer as murderous savages offers a ridiculous and irrelevant conclusion.
Haruka naru yama no yobigoe (1980)
Simple story told with great charm and emotional depth
I first saw this film at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in 1981 and have often looked for it since (without any luck). Of the 50 films I saw in those 16 days (including masterpieces by Angelopoulos, and Syberberg's Hitler, A Film From Germany), Yamada's simple story turned out to be my favorite. When it recently turned up in a 5-disk Yoji Yamada box set, I immediately ordered it. Well, the disk is very poor quality, a murky transfer with the widescreen compositions butchered by a truly wretched pan-and-scan job -- and yet the quality of the film still manages to shine through.
On its surface, there's nothing particularly remarkable about A Distant Cry From Spring. A widow struggles to maintain a small farm in a remote area of Hokkaido, fighting the elements and raising her young son. One brutally stormy night, a stranger appears at the door looking for shelter. Though wary, the widow offers him her hospitality. He leaves, but then returns in the spring and asks for work, desiring only room and board in return. What follows is the depiction of a slowly developing emotional bond set against a beautifully observed portrait of daily life on the farm, an endless round of backbreaking chores which constantly threaten to overwhelm the lonely woman.
There is nothing terribly surprising in the revelations which eventually emerge about the characters, but they are so finely drawn and their emotional lives resonate with such authenticity, that only a cold-blooded viewer could fail to be moved by the film's resolution.
Yamada is a master of emotional nuance and a brilliant observer of the small details of ordinary lives, which he obviously holds in some kind of awe, and in which he finds a kind of magic. He makes you feel for the characters without ever stooping to sentimentality or easy manipulation. His work deserves to be more widely known, and he certainly deserves better treatment from DVD distributors.
The Hands of Ida (1995)
Dreadful TV "drama" from "auteur" Maddin
The previous posting is actually describing Maddin's Cowards Bend the Knee, which started as an installation piece before it was released as a film. Hands of Ida, on the other hand, is a half-hour TV drama which Maddin directed for hire and is probably the worst thing he ever made. In revenge for the rape and murder of a girl named Ida, a group of radical women go about surgically castrating randomly kidnapped men. A bickering pair of former lovers who work for a market research company conduct an implausible opinion survey to find out how people feel about what's going on. The script is ridiculous and the acting amateurish in what is, to date, Maddin's only attempt at a contemporary story set in the supposedly "real" world.
Unrequited Love (2006)
Great essay on the nature of desire
The always-interesting Chris Petit here provides a complex meditation on the nature of human emotions in an age where individual experience has become so fragmented and mediated by so-called "communications" technologies that concepts like love and desire become turned inwards and resolve into anger when possession of the object is thwarted. Using various forms of video surveillance to observe the figures involved, Petit presents a disorienting, fragmented visual surface which reflects the dissolving of any sense of identity. This is not a narrative film, but something akin to the great essay films of Chris Marker -- strange, allusive and elusive, and more deeply rewarding each time you return to it. 10/10
Sedím na konári a je mi dobre (1989)
Rich, moving depiction of survival in the sea of history
Twenty years after Birds, Orphans & Madmen, Jakubisko essentially reworked the same material into a wonderful narrative about ordinary people surviving within the sea of Eastern European history. But here the gratuitous ugliness of the earlier film is replaced by a fable-like wonder and deep affection for the characters. Two men fight to make a life for themselves -- and eventually for the damaged woman they come to love -- as the devastation of WWII is replaced by the oppression of communism. The mix of humour, romance and tragedy is reminiscent of Kusturica.