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By Mainstream Chick, on November 9th, 2009
 It’s good to see Hollywood paying homage to a bevy of strong, independent, talented and spirited women (Fanny Brawne in Bright Star, Amelia Earhart in Amelia, Coco Chanel in Coco Before Chanel). I just wish these movies weren’t quite so… boring.
All three felt excessively slow to me. Excellent performances seem wasted on scripts and pacing that will surely fail to spark – or keep – the interest of mainstream audiences. They will likely find an appreciative niche among festival-goers, arty Netflix queuesters, and curious industry insiders in aviation, poetry and fashion. But that’s about it.
Coco Before Chanel is a [... Keep reading]
By Arty Chick, on October 1st, 2009
 I heard about this film when it came out and was somewhat intrigued, but the reviews I read were cryptic about the story and I took that to mean it was deep or convoluted, so I put it off. In reality, it is hard to talk about it without giving away plot points that might take away the enjoyment of this wonderful drama. The basic set up is Jacob is running an orphanage in India. He is summoned to his home country of Denmark to meet with a very, very rich businessman, Jørgen, who is offering enough [... Keep reading]
By Arty Chick, on August 28th, 2009
 This sweet coming of age story is almost worth seeing just for the scenery alone. Shot in southern China’s Yunnan province, When Ruo Ma was Seventeen uses the beautiful landscape of terraced paddy fields as a reminder that we are not in any place we know. It is far removed from our world. But Ruo Ma has lived here all her life with her old grandma, working these terraced fields with her fellow Hani (aka Xiani.) Now 17, she goes to town to make some money selling roasted corn on the street.
Tourists flock to this quaint [... Keep reading]
By Arty Chick, on August 25th, 2009
 The French make breezy little romantic comedies as easily as they do a good cup of coffee. Perhaps it is because it is a more romantic sensibility. Maybe it is just that the language sounds more romantic and the locations are so quaint. But I can enjoy absurd situations in a French film that I could never accept in an American movie. Case in point is Priceless, starring Audrey Tautou (Amelie, The Da Vinci Code) and Gad Elmaleh as Irène and Jean. Irène is a gold digger staying at a fancy hotel on the Riviera with her [... Keep reading]
By Arty Chick, on July 14th, 2009
 If you’re looking for a tasty little French romantic comedy, Apres Vous is just the ticket. Nothing deep here, nor laugh out loud funny, but the French have a way with the romances and I have a thing for Daniel Auteuil. Here he stars as a restaurant manager (Antoine) who saves a stranger in the park (Louis) from hanging himself and then tries to repair his life. He finagles him a job as sommelier at his restaurant but things get a bit more complicated when he decides to get Louis and his ex-girlfriend Blanche back together. Of course, [... Keep reading]
By Arty Chick, on June 27th, 2009
 If you’re looking for a good musical romance in Chinese, “Perhaps Love” is your movie. It stars Asian heart throb Takeshi Kaneshiro and Superstar singer Jacky Cheung in a love triangle with Zhou Xun. The movie opens with Lin Jiandong (Takeshi Kaneshiro) arriving in Shanghai to co-star in a musical film with his old flame Sun Na (Zhou Xun) who is in a relationship with the famous director Nie Wen (Jacky Cheung). The musical they are all making together is about a young woman who loses her memory and is taken under the wing of a circus owner [... Keep reading]
By Arty Chick, on June 19th, 2009
 “The Road Home” is a fantastic chick flick, a 3 hankie love story set in a small village in north China sometime during the Cultural Revolution though you’d never know that from the look of the village; it could be any time. It is the edge of nowhere, surrounded by stunning scenery, gorgeously shot by director Zhang Yimou. The film introduces the beautiful young Zhang Ziyi who lept on to stardom in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ” and “Memoirs of a Geisha,” here playing a village girl who falls for the new school teacher who comes to [... Keep reading]
By Arty Chick, on June 8th, 2009
 I rented two films this week that coincidentally both center on older men and fractured relationships with their grown sons. Why do so many men and their fathers have such stormy relationships? Is it a testosterone thing? Of course it makes for good drama, though I am not sure men go out of their way to see films that remind them that their machismo gets in the way of a close bond. (We’ll leave the mother-daughter thing for a later time.) Ikiru 生きる, “To Live” (1952), a classic from Kurosawa, deals with a career bureaucrat finding [... Keep reading]
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