jürgen fauth’s muckworld

“Amélie in a mental institution,” Marcy quipped as we walked out of the Kulturbrauerei in Berlin, where Park Chan-Wooks latest played as part of the Fantasy Filmfest. As usual, she had a point: at the center of I’m a Cyborg is an adorable waif (Lim Su-jeong) who insists on seeing the world in her own peculiar way and is surrounded by a quirky cast of lovable supporting characters.

The filmmaking, as you’d expect from the director of Oldboy, is muscular and inventive. But unlike Jeunet’s unbearably cute Amélie, Cha Young-goon has to face some all-too-real pain. The girl believes herself to be a cyborg (”You know, kind of like a robot”) and is sent to the mental ward after trying to “recharge her batteries” in a way that reads to the rest of the world as a suicide attempt.

Continue reading my review of I’m a Cyborg But That’s OK at About.com.

Saibogujiman kwenchana. Park Chan-wook, 2006. ***

• The trailer
• I’m a Cyborg on Wikipedia
• Review by David and Adrienne Hudson

Otto Friedrich, who is also responsible for a delightful history of Berlin in the 1920s, takes on Hollywood in the 1940s. He’s got some great anecdotes about Gene Tierney, Charlie Chaplin, Ronald Reagan, Howard Hughes, Rita Hayworth, L.B. Mayer, Orson Welles, and of course his favorite Bert Brecht. I especially liked the sections dedicated to the German emigres; Heinrich and Thomas Mann reading laudatory speeches about each other at their birthdays etc. Like the decade it covers, the book finally gets bogged down in subcommittee hearings.

Spike Lee’s slick hostage thriller offers a handful of new twists on the genre but doesn’t transcend it. Clive Owen plays the wicked smart criminal who trades the familiar lines with Denzel the negotiator: “You’ll give me exactly what I ask for or I’ll start killing hostages!” etc. Willem Defoe is the SWAT team leader who gets this close to botching it all, and Jodie Foster can’t quite get a handle on her role as supertough mystery woman. The few fresh ideas make the movie worthwhile, and it’s curious to see Lee’s attention to race bleed into a big-budget thriller like this: there’s a Sikh screaming for his turban, a gangster lectures a kid about violent video games, and in my favorite jokey moment, a bunch of cops argue about train connections like only New Yorkers can. At times, the Terence Blanchard soundtrack made this film feel strangely like When the Levees Broke.

I won’t lie. Fritz Lang’s two-parter Die Spinnen is only recommended if you’ve seen most of his other movies already and can’t wait to see one of his earliest, from 1919/20. The image quality is as lousy as you’d expect–the picture is flickering with scratches–and the score is organ-only. Still, the pulpy adventure yarn is pretty watchable. It concerns Kay Hoog, a proto-Indiana Jones (Carl de Vogt), who travels to a lost Inca city and is persued by a shadowy crime organization known as the Spiders. Lil Dagover plays a Sun Priestress. Lang had projected two more sequels (the first adventure franchise?) but after he hooked up with Thea von Harbou, he went on to Destiny.

Nathalie Baye plays the veteran dry alcoholic cop in this gritty ensemble thriller about a bunch of Paris detective. The ‘young lieutenant’ is Jalil Laspert, who comes fresh from the provincial police academy and thinks it’s going to be like the movies. Has a very realistic feel to it; it doesn’t get much more unglamorous than running after Russian bums in the Metro. Some very surprising twists, and Baye is always great to watch. Opens soon. About.com review forthcoming any minute now.

Moody, slick, and stylish detective thriller about TV Superman George Reeve’s death in 1959. With Ben Affleck, Diane Lane, Adrien Brody, Bob Hoskins, Molly Parker etc etc. Opens in a couple of weeks.

They prefer Walt Disney to John Waters, straight to gay, and blood to sperm: the MPAA ratings board. In his witty and enlightening documentary, Kirby Dick investigates the mysterious, undemocratic organization that decides what plays in American movie theaters. This Film Is Not Yet Rated opens tomorrow. Read Jürgen’s review.

After Breaking Open the Head, Daniel Pinchbeck is now gearing up to become the Leary/McKenna of the Oughts. Contemporary shamanism, I suppose, is the word. He takes his trip pretty far out in the new book: the regular iboga/ayahuasca explorations are back, told with blunt first-person honesty, and solid scholarly work that touches on anybody who’s even remotely relevant, from obvious ones like Castaneda and Fritjof Capra to more obscure figures such as Rudolf Steiner. There are chapters on quantum mechanics that shouldn’t thrill no one any longer, there are UFOs, Stonehendge, Hopi prophecies, and of course–much to my chagrain*–the Mayan calendar. The general theory here is that the end of the Long Count on December 21, 2012 will usher in some sort of revolution of global consciousness, activation of the noosphere, what have you. I was particularly taken with his treatise on crop circles, on which I’ll soon post more. Interesting for a mind-bending ride, expert synthesis of hermetic traditions, and very revealing personal stories from Burning Man, Amazon villages, and the depths of DPT trips. Recommended, even just for the jolt of Pinchbeck’s courage to go very far out there.

* Ever since Tikal, I’ve been wanting to do something with the end of the Long Count. He got there first, next is Mel Gibson….

A couple of links.