DEATH IN VENICE {1971}

C  I  N  E  M  A     R  E  T  R  O  S  P  E  C  T  I  V  E

Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Bjorn Andersen
Director: Luchino Visconti
Screenplay: Luchino Visconti
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures
Runtime: 130 mins
Genre: Drama/Arthouse
Country: Italy






To outwardly loathe, or the very least deny the power of Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice  is like ignoring cinema as an artform. There are a few films in the history of celluloid that could split audience opinion as sharply as a guillotine could chop heads, and this is one of them. For a great number of puritanical critics, Visconti's screen adaptation of the Thomas Mann novella had been chewed, spewed and spurned, reduced to being nothing more than a pointless, ponderous pile of paedophilic wetdream, with a central protagonist obsessing with a pretty boy he cannot obtain. Meanwhile, the liberal-minded leftists champions this a sublime study of humanity's search for beauty, the inevitability of death and the profundity of Great Art. Whatever field you stand on, Visconti might have had the final laugh: he made a film that drew controversy, attention and a big confusion. 

The question: is Death in Venice really that good? Yes, it is. Sure, it wallows into an excruciatingly slow pace that often you could allow an actual funeral pass through most scenes that allow Dirk Bogarde's beleaguered German classical composer Gustav van Aschenbach eternally sitting on a beach, contemplating his existence, walking through Venetian streets and gazing longingly at his object of desire. Or obfuscation, rather. But most people who gripe about this are usually those with virtually sub-zero attention, those that cannot comprehend depth and implications, and cannot stand wordless sequences. Death in Venice is not supposed to be entertainment, for god's sake. That's why there's 'death' in the title, you dweebs. For all Visconti's abstraction, this is a sombre, melancholic mood-piece, with Venice so beautifully photographed like a vintage postcard, and a burnished cinematography that very well matches the city's old grandeur. There are scenes which you can literally freeze-frame and hung it on your bedroom wall. The opening scene alone is perhaps one of the most gorgeous opening scenes I've ever seen in film. Visconti also deliberately changes Aschenbach, a novelist in Mann's novella, into a classical composer and tailors Gustav Mahler's elegiac compositions, the Third and Fifth Symphonies, into the film's most devastating scenes. 


Yet, Visconti's vision is far from being perfect. It is deeply flawed, such as his reckless and haphazard use of zooming throughout the first half, a lazy technique that blemishes this exquisite vista. It's narrative also meanders too often into aimlessness, such as a rather stale and contrived sequence in an outdoor restaurant as the hotel guests are being serenaded by a street musician. But most gripes are really centred on the tale's homosexual undertones, an unrequited yearning of a stressed-out, middle-aged gentleman with a beautiful youth Tadzio, whose appearance had been hailed by feminist Germain Greer as "the most beautiful boy in the world", resembling like those portraits painted by the Renaissance masters. If we're all being unintelligent, we could easily dismiss this as a film about an unfulfilled, repressed homosexual going to Venice for a last gasp of sexual fervour for an unsuspecting thirteen-year old. What is the point of cinema and literature but to explore even the darkest, meanest side of humanity? Aschenbach is portrayed as a struggling artist, fleeing his debilitating work and even condescended by his best friend that his music bears no meaning anymore. He is an artists in self-exile, whose craft is bereft of beauty and seeks refuge in Venice to find peace, only to find beauty and perfection in the form of an innocent youth. Even Tadzio may be unaware of his own actions, or even his own sexuality. He's thirteen, lacking of any wisdom and experience of the world. And Aschenbach follows him throughout, lured into obsession, yet so terrified to taint Tadzio's purity. There's a magnificent scene where Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde gives a legendary performance) has a makeover, dying his hair, restoring his own lost youth, and trails Tadzio around the city amidst the spread of cholera and sirocco and ends up sprawled on a fountain, weeping and laughing at the same time - bemused, bewildered and dripping with self-pity. Bogarde achieves this without even saying a line of dialogue. That closing scene alone where he dies in his chair is a moving paean to performance and filmmaking.




Never has a film about dying so beautifully photographed. This is also a sombre, melancholic mood-piece that daringly explores hefty subject matters such as the inevitability of death, unattainable perfection and cruelty of youth. Visconti's vision of beauty and Great Art maybe flawed, but such is life.





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The Social Network {2010}

F  I  L  M    C  R  I  T  I  Q  U  E

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Juston Timberlake, Rooney Mara
Director: David Fincher
Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Runtime: 121 mins
Genre: Drama
Country: USA




As 2010 is nearly coming to a close, perhaps it's about time for cinema to turn its head and look back at what really defined the past decade in this planet - Facebook. Nothing short of ubiquitous, you may or may not disagree with it, but Facebook has undoubtedly revolutionised the way we, earthlings, socialise and communicate. This phenomenal, culture-shaping online platform has as much influence as any radical movement in the past century, which is also, in turn, a great cultural irony - it connects 500 million users around the world, whilst rapidly destroying this generation's skills to communicate properly. So a film about 'Facebook' could easily explore this central theme by zapping throughout the globe, creating a clichéd über-montage of people's faces glued into their screens, lighting up souls in a subconsciously desperate bid to impress, to connect, to be liked. Yet, this is not that Facebook movie. Director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin leaves that entire social-commentary lecturing in the Media Studies department. Instead, their sole focus is the founding of Facebook and its progenitor Mark Zuckerberg. It's a tale brimming with technological banters, legal battles and verbal put-downs, but if you've imagined a cluster of techno-nerds huddled around together, programming a website, is astronomically yawn-inducing, you're proven wrong. The Social Network is perhaps the cleverest, most exhilarating film ever made about website-making, and a genuinely strong contender for this year's best screenplay.

From the film's opener itself, a fast-paced dialogue exchange of Zuckerberg (a spectacularly spot-on Jesse Eisenberg) and his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara as The Social Network's Rosebud, Citizen Kane's unattainable one, and now Fincher’s dragon-tattooed girl), the scene is set for the rest of the movie. We have an anti-hero in our hands: an egomaniacal, narcissistic, socially-inept, ambitious, coldly logical piece of work, condescending his girlfriend, and perhaps everyone around him. This rivetingly reflects the very main themes Fincher and Sorkin are trying to nail here, the distancing of human relationships and failure of communication. Fed up with Zuckerberg's intellectual arrogance and obsession of infiltrating Harvard’s ultra-elite final clubs, said girlfriend dumps him in a pub in a classic break-up scene, and instead of bursting into catharsis, his self-absorption barely allows him to understand where his relationship went wrong and launches into a barrage of hate-blogging, calling ex-girlfriend a flat-chested bitch, followed by a palpably misogynistic online beauty contest "Facemash", and lo and behold, the birth of Facebook.

It sounds simple, but the film doesn't surrender to easy film viewing. Sorkin's brilliantly sketched screenplay moves in a linearity breakdown, yet still remains chronological, leaping through timelines, from a latter-day lawsuit case hearing and back into the online network's early conception, exploring all characters involved with unexpected depth and nuance. Those that gripe whether what we’re seeing have actually taken place or not, accuracy here is beside the point. Cinema is art, not a history documentary channel. Even Schindler's List got plenty of historical details wrong, and that’s the Holocaust we’re talking about. The Social Network isn’t interested on finger-pointing, on who’s telling the truth or not, who are the villains and the heroes in this fiasco, but rather keen on exploring the nature and subjectivity of truth. Often, it plays like a modern rendition of Akira Kurosawa’s incendiary Rashomon, where every single player has their own version of truth-glossing. Sorkin’s narrative lurches from one perspective to the next, from Zuckerberg’s insistent intellectual proprietorialism, to ex-BFF Eduardo Saverin’s claim of partnership and fiscal betrayal, to Harvard’s upper-class Aryan bluebloods the Winklevoss twins, who accuse Zuckerberg of stealing their idea of exclusive Harvard networking. None of these characters seem worth rooting for, but in Fincher’s tightly controlled yet perceptive drama, we see motivations, psychologies and hurt beneath these individuals. Zuckerberg – part-billionaire, part-genius, part-arsehole – is hardly a protagonist to root for, but actor Eisenberg shows an impressive understanding of Zuckerberg, a young pioneer driven by the need to belong. There is a quietly poignant opening of Zuckerberg walking through the Harvard campus at night in a hoodie and flip-flops, an outcast traversing through a social jungle and ends up in his dormitory, flaring up the blogosphere. This is intercut with scenes of the super-exclusive night-parties of the Harvard elite, ramming home the message of Zuckerberg’s disjointedness, far-flung from the parties he is never invited and welcomed.

Focusing on the human drama that revolves around Facebook is a stroke of genius. Fincher, arguably an underappreciated director of our time, takes a thriller approach to excite the proceedings, all rapid-fire editing, darkly yet beautifully lit cinematography, but he never undermines all that emotional undertow here. When we see Eduardo Saverin (a subtle, vulnerable performance by Andrew Garfield) losing his temper at Zuckeberg and Sean Parker (a smart casting of Justin Timberlake) for their corporate betrayal, we feel his car-crash outburst. When we see free-spirited, Machiavellian Napster-founder Parker transform from swaggering, cocksure bastard to a rabbit-caught-on-headlights for dealing with coke, we feel pity. That’s because Fincher invests much on dramatic build-up throughout scenes. Come the inspired final shot, Zuckerberg perpetually pressing F5 (Refresh) on Erica’s Facebook page, it’s plainly obvious that The Social Network isn’t so much a movie about Facebook as a timeless, cautionary tale of selfish ambition and capitalism pursued in expense of lifelong values such as friendship and real human relationships. At its bitter heart, the 500 million users might want to befriend Zuckerberg, but he remains inconsolably, incontrovertibly alone.





Beneath its understated workings, The Social Network emerges as a deceptively crafted, erudite, marvellously written and directed piece of zeitgeist-nailing screenplay. We have films that reflect a generation in our lifetime – The Graduate, Easy Rider, even Fincher’s own Fight Club – and this is one of them.





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Gran Torino {2008}

Cast: Clint Eastwood,
Director: Clint Eastwood
Screenplay: Laeta Kalogridis
Studio: Paramount Pictures
Runtime: 140 mins
Genre: Drama/Thriller/Horror/Noir
Country: USA





Clint Eastwood, at 80, shows no sign of slowing down. Without a doubt one of the most prolific and most respected American filmmakers alive today - he averages two films a year - we'd somehow assumed that old, shrivelled-up Dirty Harry had had his golden days and that it's time to clear out his desk and say adieu to Hollywood. No. Instead, in the last two years, he's produced and directed films that some of us unfortunate souls can only dream of making at least one in our entire lifespan. There was the superb Changeling, the somewhat mellow Invictus and this year's Hereafter, films that boasts that grand, sweeping, old-school Hollywood emotional sucker-punch. It's easy, then, to surmise that Eastwood's increasingly becoming a sentimentalist, a big softie beneath that grizzled, rough-hewn façade. Perhaps that comes with age. Or perhaps that's just craft and emotionality being refined.

Gran Torino, thankfully, is given a subtle emotional undertow without resulting into schmaltz. It's a Western film without horses and saddles, an action film without gunfights, a Hollywood weepie without the three-piece hanky and a social indictment without being full-on preachy. It's also a well-developed character-driven piece with Eastwood himself playing the central protagonist, the grey, furious, war veteran Walt Kowalski. Eastwood is a sheer galvanising presence that sums up an entire acting panoply of cowboys and cranky gunslingers. Here, he's an old-age, grumpy pensioner at odds with the world - disgruntled with everything and everyone including seemingly harmless South-East Asian neighbours in his Detroit 'hood, his selfish kids, obnoxious grandchildren, local gangbangers, his priest and even God - and only takes temporary relief in swigging beer in his porch and his immaculate Gran Torino. Even in his wife's funeral at the film's opener, he doesn't so much mourn as growling at his disrespectful clan. It's a rapacious, magnificent turn, with Eastwood managing to be equally menacing and sympathetic. It's also a star quality unrivalled by any other actor his age, where his onscreen presence just overshadows everybody else in the film, which reduces the Asian kids in his block acting as plummy.

At heart, the narrative structure is reminiscent to a John Wayne Western, or even Eastwood's own canon, where the embittered, mortally-ill hero-with-a-gun saves a bunch of folks in his land, the Southeast Asian minority a shoo-in as Indians. This issue is also given much more complication with Kowalski being portrayed as a certified racist, spewing out slurs that oozes with breathtaking offensiveness. Yet Kowalski is never reduced to neither a sour curmudgeon nor ham-fisted misanthrope. There's humanity within. Come the unexpectedly moving finale, there's a noble, pacifist intention behind Kowalski's final act of resolve. It will tug hearts, and make you forget of the first-half, which resembles like a middlebrow, live-action version of Pixar's Up with Carl Fredricksen going all Dirty Harry with a gun, raiding punks in the 'hood.




Gran Torino isn't astounding filmmaking, but it is a quiet, reserved and dignified one worthy of respect. If this would be Eastwood's swansong to silverscreen acting, it's a memorable one.





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Dogtooth {2010}

Cast: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor
Director: Giorgos Lanthimos
Screenplay: Efthymis Fillipou
Studio: Boo Productions
Runtime: 94 mins
Genre: Foreign Film/Horror
Country: Greece





It's hard to imagine a more brilliantly bizarre picture this year other than this Greek import Dogtooth. Here is a film that doesn't deliberately, and figuratively, mutilate audiences' eyeballs as Lars von Trier set out in Antichrist, nor mercilessly heightens violence as Gaspar Noé's Irreversible - yet still remains profoundly shocking. Violence in Dogtooth isn't intended, but rather a disturbing effect of innocence, and simultaneously, ignorance. Which makes it all the more disturbing, as the three twentysomething children living under the tyrannical rule of their bourgeois parents are misled, misinformed and totally detached from the outside world, the social 'norms', and hence, reality. In their own isolated, fence-ringed world, they are told that a zombie is a flower, a pussy is a lamp, a cat is a savage beast, and Frank Sinatra is their Uncle. And any sign of misbehaviour would mean homegrown capital punishment such as holding Listerine in the mouth until it burns.

If all of these sound absurd, director Giorgos Lantimos roots absurdity in context to this social conditioning. Although laced with some Lynchian weirdness, he doesn't plunge the film in total darkness; Dogtooth's cinematography looks like its shot by Sofia Coppola, all sun-dappled environs, idyllic mood shots, quietly understated framing. But despite of this, there's an air of eerie dread and claustrophobia, its entire running-time an unpredictable carnival of derangement. Lanthimos refuses to offer explanations to the motivations of the parents, especially the haywire, control-freak father, and the passive-aggressive mother, which makes the entire harrowing affair more unsettling. His approach is rather observational, as though he's letting us take a peek into this madcap culture, an extreme case of parental fascism. Dogtooth, for all its horrors, takes a Buñuelian dissection of middle-class isolationism and a fearless glimpse into the face of one of humanity's bleakest moral cruelties - social control.




Unsettling, provocative and tragic. Dogtooth may be one of this year's most bizarre yet genuinely haunting films, exploring parental fascism with devastating results. As soon as this bites, it leaves a lasting mark.





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Sunrise {1927}

Cast: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor
Director: F. W. Murnau
Screenplay: Hermann Sudermann
Studio: Fox Film Corporation
Runtime: 94 mins
Genre: Drama/Silent Film
Country: USA





1927 was a crucial and ironic year for cinema. For one, silent films were dying. Warner Bros. had unleashed the studio's technical gambit The Jazz Singer, the first ever full-length feature that paved way to the sound era. Yet, on the other hand, two silent movies were released that year that somehow eclipsed The Jazz Singer's status in the annals of filmmaking history, and both dazzlingly demonstrated silent cinema at the peak of its powers - Fritz Lang's sci-fi behemoth Metropolis and F. W. Murnau's Sunrise. Today, what the former has contributed to the science-fiction genre is comparable to what Sunrise has done to melodrama. Murnau's first ever Hollywood gig (he was invited by William Fox to direct a feature) illustrates the fruition and marriage of two very distinct filmmaking styles: German Expressionism and Hollywood mainstream craft. Despite its breezy title, underlined with A Song of Two Humans, this begins as a dark psychological domestic thriller, all warped sets, noirish lighting and intensified expressions, as local farm husband The Man (a brutish yet engaging George O'Brien) is seduced by Margaret Livingston's city-vamp femme-fatale to drown his lowly, dowdy Wife (Janet Gaynor) in the nearby lake. What seems to be a twisted film that initially celebrates unfeigned hedonism miraculously transforms into a genuinely heart-wrenching melodrama, a moral journey from betrayal, devotion and subsequently, redemption.

Many have accused Sunrise as being simplistic, but they have completely missed the point: simplicity is where silent cinema draws its power, and Sunrise is a far better film than hundreds of noisy, brassy movies that came during the advent of sound. Take Janet Gaynor's performance for example - her transformation from dramatic strength to another, from shell-shocked to being repulsed, from frightened to wounded, beleaguered, and ultimately forgiving and loving. All this range of emotions without even a line of dialogue. That first ever Oscar for Best Actress in the history of the Academy is wonderfully deserved. There is also Murnau's masterful direction and superb technical authority. He lends Sunrise a flowing cinematography that seems impossible in 1927's standards, employing long takes, following characters through farmlands, cameras gliding through trees, marshes and even lakes. And from the idyllic, moonlit rural setting, he brings the entire film into a bustling Jazz-age metropolis as the couple regain what they've lost, and here Murnau brings the film fully alive. His camerawork doesn't stop moving, tracking the couple in busy streets, shops and even nightclubs. Watch that showstopping sequence with the Man and Wife causing a traffic jam as they vanish into a sun-dappled countryside stroll. It's a sweet hymn to human love that forever influenced modern day cinema. See Pixar and its abashed romanticism.




One of the greatest testaments to the power of silent cinema. F. W. Murnau's sublime wordless weepie transcends crowd-pleasing melodrama into high art, luminous poetry and a virtuous moral fable. This is, arguably, the Citizen Kane of the silent era.






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Salt {2010}

Cast: Angelina Jolie, Liev Schrieber, Chiwetel Ejiofor
Director: Phillip Noyce
Screenplay: Kurt Wimmer
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Runtime: 100 mins
Genre: Action/Thriller
Country: USA





There's nary an A-List Hollywood actress working right now that could slip into svelte suits, run like the wind, leap atop moving lorries and blast a horde of armed forces single-handedly whilst maintaining conviction, credibility and physical aplomb like Angelina Jolie does. Honestly, who else does? Despite Salt's ludicrous premise - a CIA agent accused of being a home-grown, planted Soviet sleeper spy to annihilate America's stronghold and kickstarting a nuclear warfare - Jolie roots the whole shebang with a naturally convincing turn as the eponymous Evelyn Salt. In this post-Bond and Bourne era, spies have regained some humanity and emotional conflict, but what's remarkable is that Salt locates a female in this genre populated by the Big Boys with Big Guns, and by the looks of it, Salt is certainly not the one to be messed around with. Salt's fiery intensity feels like she could well wipe out those bunch of Expendables with barely a scratch.

Essentially, Salt is Bourne without the amnesia, and Bond without the glamour. She's a no-nonsense killing machine who fully knows her own mission. It is us, the audience, who could only guess her allegiances in a movie with fast-shifting loyalties and blurring moralities. The narrative twists and turns are beside the point (the story swerves so many times you'd hardly be pressed for getting dazed and confused), director Phillip Noyce is the second director this summer blockbuster arena next to Christopher Nolan to blast the brains of his audience, whether Salt is really a skilfully-trained Russian spy or an American sympathiser. The answer is neither of both. That's why we come back again to Jolie's magnetic presence, whose roles in action films Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Wanted have cemented her iconic status as a top-billing actress who could hold her own ground and guns, who manages to show here her almost feral versatility to jump, leap, run, plunge and then manages to nail emotional brevity in some of Salt's standout moments. The prologue after her release from the North Korean camp, the moment she discovers her boyfriend's (August Diehl) resolve to find her whereabouts, there are tremors of both relief and despair present in her face without saying anything. And later on, in a genuinely agonising moment, Jolie beautifully captures stoicism and betrayal of emotions employing nary a word, and yet letting us view the inner pain within. It's these notes that makes Salt emerge not as an action hero, but a fighter whose losses only contribute to her steely determination in her road to vengeance. Consider her alongside The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo's Lisbeth Salander as one of the recent year's most electric heroines - scarred by a wounded past yet knows how to fight back.



Preposterous as a spy thriller, but masterful as an action movie. Salt is a well-geared and efficiently calibrated slick machine propelled by a terrific dynamo of a performance by Jolie. Her action goddess status is, by now, entirely a league of her own.






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