Jonas Ferry’s blog

Lady in the Water (M. Night Shyamalan, 2006). Shyamalan plays a visionary writer with an important message to mankind. There’s also a water woman that needs help to return to her fictional world, but her story doesn’t overshadow the obviously more important Shyamalan story. This is a self-indulgent, self-absorbed and self-centered film written, directed and acted by Shyamalan. [4/10]

All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950). The fan of a famous actress starts to take over her life. I love Mankiewicz’s scriptwriting, both the characters and the story are interesting. [9/10]

A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951). A woman moves to her sister to recuperate, but is troubled by her sister’s husband. I like Marlon Brando, and he carries the picture together with Vivien Leigh. [7/10]

Viskningar och rop (English title: Cries and Whispers) (Ingmar Bergman, 1972). Three women watch over a fourth dying woman in a dreamlike 19th century mansion. While this isn’t my favorite Bergman film, excellent acting and harrowing scenes at the death bed still make this worth watching. [7/10]

The Scent of Green Papaya (original title: Mùi du du xanh - L’odeur de la papaye verte) (Anh Hung Tran, 1993). A young Vietnamese woman works for, and falls in love with, a pianist. Beautifully shot, simply and effectively told. [8/10]

Taxidermia (György Pálfi, 2006). Three generations of Hungarian men are all intimately involved in bodily functions in their own ways. A grotesque and disturbing film that portrays disgusting events in visually beautiful ways. [8/10]

Travellers and Magicians (Khyentse Norbu, 2003). A young man is tired of his small village in Bhutan and decides to go to New York. On the way he gets to know some fellow travellers. This is the first film produced in Bhutan, and a nice little story of strangers and casual friends. [9/10]

Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947). A woman with no memory reveals to her psychiatrist that she may have killed someone. The story is presented in flashbacks and gives an interesting portrait of a disturbed woman. [8/10]

Save the Green Planet (original title: Jigureul jikyeora!) (Joon-Hwan Jang, 2003). A young man convinced that aliens have infiltrated human society kidnaps a businessman and tortures him to reveal the aliens’ plans. For a long time you don’t know if the young man is correct or merely insane in this strange mix of horror, thriller, splatter, science fiction and comedy. [7/10]

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (Clint Eastwood, 1997). A local millionaire in Savannah, Georgia, is arrested for killing his young male lover. Kevin Spacey plays the millionaire and is good as usual. The story is good, but predictable. [7/10]

The Constant Gardener (Fernando Meirelles, 2005). A female aid worker is killed in Africa in what appears to be a violent robbery, but her husband uncovers that her death was ordered by people in high places. A good thriller, interesting and gripping, but with a couple of flaws. First of all they do too good a job in the beginning of the film when they present the woman as being a rather bad person, and even though they try to make it appear like she did it all for a good cause the film makers don’t quite manage. Another flaw is the complete and sudden turnaround of the main character from indifferent to the peoples’ situation in Africa to very passionate. It didn’t feel motivated. [7/10]

Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006). Superman has been away checking out his home planet, but returns to Earth to deal with Lex Luthor’s plan to destroy America. The film is continuity wise tucked in somewhere in the middle of the earlier films, but it was too long since I saw them to really care. I think they tried to present Superman as more human, being jealous and stuff, but what they managed to do was create a stalker with heat vision and tendency to fly in to young kids’ bedrooms. Creepy. Kevin Spacey did his job, as usual. [6/10]

Factotum (Bent Hamer, 2005). An alcoholic writer does temp jobs to support his drinking habit and his writing, but can’t keep jobs or women for long. I really like films about writers, and this is nice in a way. While I don’t agree at all with the message presented, that you have to suffer to be a true writer and that you should therefore torment yourself, it’s presented in a good way. Loosely, I think, I’m not that familiar with him, based on the life of real-life writer Charles Bukowski. [7/10]

La Jétee (English title: The Pier) (Chris Marker, 1962). A black-and-white film in French on the aftermath of World War III, time travel and what’s needed for people to trust each other. This short film (28 minutes) is light years ahead of its time, and I wonder how many times the creators of Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995) watched it. Very suggestive, using stills to focus the viewer’s attention on time as a sequence of instants. [9/10]

United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006). The story of one of the hijacked planes of 9/11, told without any special characters or story. They could’ve destroyed this kind of film by adding a romantic subplot or something equally outrageous, but instead the story is told matter of factly and everyone feels real, which makes it even harder to watch. [8/10]

Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin in Beyond the Sea (2004).

Beyond the Sea (Kevin Spacey, 2004). Bobby Darin was a famous nightclub singer in the late 50s and onwards. The film itself is too long, but what lifts it is Spacey’s singing and acting. [7/10]

Tell Me Something (original title: Telmisseomding) (Yoon-Hyun Chang, 1999). The South Korean police investigates multiple murders and finds that they’re all former boyfriends of the same woman. We’re thrown right into the story, which is ok if the movie later fills the gaps. This one didn’t, but instead continues to add random stuff and far-fetched acts seemingly plucked from the air, like how they need to find the murderer’s room and asks a random kid who knows it. Maybe it’s lack of attention, but I don’t think so, I think it’s just poorly explained. The one highlight was the peanut-eating and balding police boss who, because of his flaws, seemed like the only real person. The music was good, though, and used both Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand” and Enya’s “Boadicea” to provide the right mood. It was fun to see a StartCraft poster in the background of a music store as StarCraft is huge in South Korea with professional players and TV broadcasts of games. [6/10]

Zatôichi (Takeshi Kitano, 2003). The blind masseur/swordsman Zatôichi gangs up with two geishas to defeat a common enemy. Oh, the blood! They used CGI effects to create the blood spurts, but didn’t even try to make them look realistic. The dreamlike effect of the blood spurts hanging in midair for half a second is beautiful. A good samurai movie, with the two geisha’s pasts being quite creepy. [8/10]

The United States of Leland (Matthew Ryan Hoge, 2003). A young man is sent to a jail for juveniles after killing another boy, and is befriended by one of the teachers who wants to write a book about him. This movie tries so hard to be profound, but falls well short of the line. [5/10]

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977). Aliens visiting Earth, and the people whose lives are affected. This is a good film, apart from the annoying tone sequence that was repeated until it burned itself into my brain, most interesting as a story of people obsessed with things others can’t see. [7/10]

Eyes Without a Face (original title: Les Yeux sans visage (Georges Franju, 1960). A plastic surgeon and his female assistant kidnaps young women to remove their faces and put on the doctor’s daughter deformed face. A chilling story, with the eerie mood increased by the daughter “floating” around in the mansion with a nondescript white mask on her face to hide all emotions. [8/10]

Ken Park (Larry Clark and Edward Lachman, 2002). A bunch of kids with different difficulties in their lives, mostly with parents, look for calm and support in each other. They really manage to make the parents unsympathetic (child molesting fathers, beer-drinking pregnant mothers), but in the end the whole message of the film is “shrug”. [7/10]

Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997). Two men attack a family in their home and makes them perform sadistic games. A statement on media violence and how we as viewers respond to it, the film breaks the fourth wall a couple of times to great effect. [9/10]

Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957). In the trenches of World War I a number of soldiers are sentenced to death acting cowardly to cover up the superiors’ tactical mistakes. A very good film that conveys it’s message brilliantly. You can almost taste the hopelessness of the soldiers’ situation. [9/10]

Intacto (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2001). Some people have the ability to steal people’s luck by touching them, and then compete against each other in games of chance to decide who’s the luckiest. Visually very good, with a nice story and cool games. Also, Max von Sydow plays the luckiest man on Earth, and he’s good as always. [8/10]

Happiness (Todd Solondz, 1998). This ironically titled film is about different people being unhappy with various things in their lives. The humor is pitch black, but I rather enjoyed it. It was fun to see Cynthia Stevenson playing the sister of someone called “Joy”, as her character in Dead Like Me (TV-series, 2003) is called exactly that. Then again, I don’t know how common the name is in America. [8/10]

Julien Donkey-Boy (Harmony Korine (uncredited), 1999). Julien is a schizophrenic man, and in disjointed scenes we follow him in different parts of his life. I liked that Korine had used a relative as a basis for the character, as he feels real, and I really liked Werner Herzog as the father. But I didn’t like the obvious event that happened to the sister, how you can’t know if you’re supposed to be mad because exactly what you expect happens. [7/10]

Les Misérables (Bille August, 1998). After 19 years in jail Jean Valjean falsifies his identity papers and becomes mayor of a small French town, until his past catches up with him. Beautiful film, nice characters and a very well thought-out story that connects them together. [8/10]

Proof (John Madden, 2005). When a great mathematician dies his daughter carries on his work, but few people believe it’s really her work and not her father’s. I guess it’s a professional film, but I didn’t like the main character and couldn’t feel for her at any point during the film. [6/10]

Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (English title: The Mystery of the Yellow Room) (Bruno Podalydès, 2003). A woman is murdered in a room locked from the inside, and the members of the household are all suspects. Parts of it were cool, but it failed to actually show any of the clues to the audience and instead depended on a “now the detective will reveal the whole thing” scene at the end. [6/10]

The Life of David Gale (Alan Parker, 2003). A death-penalty opponent is sentenced to death, but continues his campaign with the help of a journalist from the outside. Kevin Spacey is great and Kate Winslet is good as the self-centered journalist, in a story that twists and turns without ever feeling forced. Highly recommended. [9/10]

Pay It Forward (Mimi Leder, 2000). As a school assignment a kid, the annoying Haley Joel Osment from The Sixth Sense, comes up with the idea that you should be nice to people. This is the typical feel-good movie, the kind that usually leaves me bitter and enraged afterwards. [5/10]

Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971). A death-flirting young man befriends an older woman and follows her on her wild antics. The woman, played by Ruth Gordon, is refreshingly crazy and the film brilliantly balances the fun and sadness. [9/10]

4 Inyong shiktak (English title: Uninvited) (Su-yeon Lee, 2003). Two young girls die and haunt a guy, who meets a narcoleptic woman who can see ghosts and through her tries to go on. Honestly not very memorable, a common Asian horror flick. [6/10]

Rakvickarna (English title: Punch and Judy) (Jan Svankmajer, 1966). Two puppets fight it out over a guinea pig that both want. A brilliant 10 minute short by Svankmajer as an allegory of greed and fighting over scarce resources. Apparently the title is mistranslated and the character besides Punch is Jody, not Punch’s wife Judy. [9/10]

MirrorMask (Dave McKean, 2005). The story of an adolescent girl that’s thrust into a dream world with the inhabitants all wearing mask, where she has to find a way to get out. Pretty apparent coming-of-age story with the girl choosing between being “good” or “bad” person. [7/10]

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (original title: Kozure Ôkami: Kowokashi udekashi tsukamatsuru) (Kenji Misumi, 1972). The Shogun head executioner is betrayed and goes ronin to avenge himself, with his young son in a baby cart with him. Based on a really good manga, the first film in a series delivers nice action and good characters. [7/10]