Infernal Affairs is among the best action films I have ever seen, and quite definitely the only Buddhist action film I've seen. The plot, despite having comic book tinges and bad metaphors, develops logically from the youthful beginnings of a story, to a perfect tragic ending.

The plot is a generic "cops vs. thugs" plot, with the twist that the thugs have a spy in with the cops, and the cops have a spy in with the thugs.

The plot would be rather dry if it wasn't for the fact that the "cops vs. thugs" plot is a "macguffin" for a secondary plot about the thug spy trying to go legit. In the end he is unable to and is responsible for the death of the hero of the film, the under-cover cop. The film concludes with a line from a Buddhist sutra about the hell in which one begs for death, but death never comes.

I feel there is little to add to that plot which is so strikingly tragic, unfortunately the film was remade by Scorcese, who completely botched the job (I don't know what led him to think an American could remake a Buddhist action film, without the Buddhist), and Infernal Affairs III really botched the job by punishing the man who's punishment is not dying.

This film should have been left alone. It only causes further suffering to drag people out of their own private hells and expose them to the daylight.

Y Tu Mama Tambien is a beautiful film, and honestly one that I am still puzzling over. In order to facilitate that puzzling I'm going to give away the surprise ending, and its enough of a surprise ending that one shouldn't continue reading unless you've seen the movie (which you should do... unless you are against sex).



I am eager to read this film as a "what would you do if you knew you were going to die" story, which could lead me to a lot of nice places. I am particularly interested in what draws the men and woman of this story together (speaking sexually of course), and I find it quite nice that the woman finds having sex with two young men to be more "real" then spending the time with her husband. Whether or not the film is, in total, an existentialist story, its answer to the existentialist dilemma is a rather interesting one.

I say that, because the film begs the question, what exactly is more "real," about these two boys than her husband. Though the director is obviously signaling this at certain points (she is going to tell her husband she is dying, he interrupts her and tells her he cheated on her), ignoring those obvious "he's a bastard" markers (which are always rather shallow, no one can be as big a bastard in real life as men in film have to be), the film wants to signify less blatantly that the careless sexual relationship has something of the religious in it, that cannot be properly encompassed by a socialized relationship.

Though I mean no disrespect to the religious people who are reading my blog, the concept of an "afterlife," typically considered, somewhat cheapens the idea of life in general. The woman in the film, and thus the film in general since the story is completely sympathetic to her, aims to experience life as bodily as possible, and thus as physically as possible. She attempts to experience beauty (sex with rather attractive young men) in the context of its constant erasure (death).

In this reading the message would be wholly pagan, and at the same time tragic (in the sense of Greek tragedy), because life is constantly being measured by the end annulment of its value.

In the Greek tragedy though there is always the prospect of history remembering you, and really, the truest tragedy is the memory of a person's disappearance to time. The boys do not learn any lessons from the woman, and the hedonism of the two weeks with all the accompanying "magical realism" is a matter for shame between the two of them. The only thing that remains of the woman is a mystery about what she was trying to say, like a ghost signaling without being heard.

I believe there might be a political message to the film as well, though I don't know what it is.

Murneau's version of the Faust tale is a bit of a strange one. The story is actually a combination of Faust and the book of Job, where someones fidelity to the holy spirit is the tested at the expense of hundreds of lives and countless amounts of suffering. The only major difference being that Faust is dealing with the temptation to bed a bunch of hot princesses, and Job is dealing with the temptation to not suffer. Other than that though, its all pretty standard.

I've never been as big a fan of the Faust tale as many people are. It deals with some of the dullest aspects of Christian mythology and its concept of sin is horribly abstract. This film has it even worse because the concept of redemption is just as abstract, and seems to come straight out of a D.W. Griffith film (I mean that in a bad way, I like D.W. Griffith films, but he was more than a bit naive).

What I mean is that, the Faust myth, and especially this version of it, deals with acknowledging yourself as weak, corrupt, and small, and argues that you have to put yourself below another (God) in order to give yourself meaning. This is the bit of Christian morality that Nietzsche referred to as "slave morality," anything having to do with redemption really... In this version of the myth there is a second way to "redeem oneself," through the embodiment of a god-like metaphysical concept - love. Whatever the hell that means.

If you read any of my other postings about love, I make the point regularly that the "what is love" question is much more interesting then the "value of love" question. This film kind of takes for granted some rather generic answers to the question. In this film, and a number of other films from around this time (especially Griffith films), love is self-sacrifice, especially as it exists in relation to family (I work 50 hours a week for you kids, and what appreciation do I get?!). There is none of the metaphysical wonder that arises from the perception of beauty, that uncontrollable excitement from seeing someone and hearing someone. There is only a kid of hopeless pleasure in someone else's happiness.

The real pleasure of this film is watching Murneau's cinematography and Emil Jannings' acting. It is no wonder that Jannings played played Mephisto in this film. In this film, only evil is supposed to give a feeling of awe.

Those of you out there who are inclined to synthesize information, may read the bizarre number of posts where I try to tie issues like love, death, religion, and surrealism, into a single movie that's ostensibly about cops, robbers, or spaceships, and think that I can read these four subjects into anything. Of course some others might glance at the database nature of this site, and come to the conclusion I'm not one who is inclined to synthesize information.

I mention this now, because Jesus' Son is another movie that I enthusiastically enjoy because of its ability to combine death, love, and certain surreal moments, with an overwhelming religious tone. Though there are differences between this movie and other movies I have noted thus far, I would classify the films as part of the same general "conversation."

The film is based on a series of short-stories by Denis Johnson centered on this rather lost young man. The film ads a rather lost young woman to the mix, and ties the stories together with an overarching redemption narrative. This later little bit is what I find most distasteful about the film, because redemption narratives on the whole are distasteful, but we don't really need to dwell on it, since I didn't realize the redemption narrative was there until around the fourth time watching the film. The rest of the film is far too charming to notice anything like a defective plot. (I should note, that this leads me to conclude that the collection of short stories might be the perfect adaptation material for a film).

The plot, as I mentioned, essentially circles around a lost young man, and his girlfriend who gets him addicted to heroin. The young man is called FH by most everyone, which stands for F#$khead, he also has a strangely in depth knowledge of theology. The woman is a heroin addict, and that's about it.

The reason why I don't classify this film as being about love, is that the female character is not really a character, she's a metaphor for something. In the film she really serves as a focal point for the main character's overwhelming passion for everything worldly and dying (the same thing...). Everything she does in the film is physical, dancing, ripping his clothes off, doing heroin, punching him (it helps considerably that Samantha Morton is a wonderful physical actress who can't deliver lines worth a damn). One of the most telling scenes is when he hallucinates her into a drive in movie (in Carnival of Souls to be specific), her actions are like lights projected, which he is simply happy to watch.

She dies of course, as things have a tendency to do. A lot of things in this movie to be exact, at least 3 humans, and a whole lot of baby rabbits. The attitude towards death in this movie is summarized by a minor character later in the film who the main character has a relationship with. Every one of her husbands, every person she has ever loved, has died in some sort of strange situation, from this she has come to see herself as lucky to be alive, and to value every moment of life. When she is having sex she raises her hands to the heavens as though she is in church.

The "value" of life is further brought home by the strange and beautiful moments that are scattered throughout the film: The flying naked woman, the man who comes into the hospital with a knife in his eye, the hallucinations at the drive in movie, seeing Jesus' heart inside a drug dealer, the interactions with the Mennonites, and ultimately the young man's total absorption with his girlfriend.

The relationship in the end though is not about love, and this film is not about redemption, or heroin. It is about the awe which one should have for the strange beauty of life.

Buy Jesus' Son the Book

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Besides being a great movie, Au Hasard Balthazar should be required viewing for everyone who ever wants to make films, because it shows just how much you can get away with if you have a reputation for being an art house director that draws crowds. Bresson was of course horribly popular at the time he made this, for aggressive auteurism (and catholicism), and this is remembered as one of his best movies (and I think it is better than Diary of a Country Priest, which is the first Bresson movie most people watch). Still, I don't think any American could ever get away with telling the backers for his film that he wants to make a slow paced movie about a donkey that is also a saint.

The movie is of course about more than a donkey, it follows the community of people that the donkey is associated with. Primarily an attractive young woman, and a man with a motorcycle who she has a thing for. The nasty interactions that the boy, girl, and various other members of the cast have for one another are countered with the donkey's animal desire for love and affection. The desire to be of service, to nuzzle up against someone, to be "with" someone. The woman and man clearly want the same thing, but there is something fundamentally standing in the way. Something keeping them from humanly connecting.

In the film the donkey's kind of animal idiocy borders between true idiocy and persistent victimhood, and a powerful christlike suffering that breaks through the barriers of indifference. The donkey is a conscious character that stands for what is authentically right, which no one else is able to face.

Human martyrs are a persistently dull subject for a film (and that includes you Jesus), what makes Balthazar such an interesting character is that he is not acting greater than human, he is acting fundamentally human, despite the fact he is an animal. The almost dialogue-less acting on the part of the actors accentuates their similarities in the basic animal needs of all creatures, human and non-human alike. One of which is the experience of "being with" someone.

While each Christian out there seems to interpret their theology different. I think what is so interesting about the best religious filmmakers (Bresson and Tarkovsky are the first to mind), is their accentuation of the physical aspect of the religious experience (see Solaris), not the mystery of the unseen, unknown, the life afterlife, but the mystery of the seen, the known, the life within life.

People are drawn to each other. There has been no psychologist that has been able to adequately explain why that is. Our love for the things of this earth is an issue for the theologists.

Buy Au Hasard Balthasar here

Flower Island is one of my favorite films of the past 10 years, largely because it combines three subjects which are among my favorite subjects to see in films: surrealism, death and religion (no love unfortunately). It deals with these subjects subtly, there is no real message to the film, just an overwhelming feeling of the existence of mystery.

The film is about three women who are going through traumatic times in their life, traveling from a mountainous part of South Korea, to a warm island off the south seas. The island is something of a clear metaphor for death and something of a less clear metaphor for heaven. The woman who is dying of cancer stays on the island while the other two go back to land, and the only resident on the island is a woman who is referred to as an angel.

What makes the movie so fantastic is the little random things that are fundamental to the plot, essential to building a theme, but without any real meaning or sense to them. The best among these scenes is when the bus that is supposed to be driving the two women to the coast, drives them up into the mountains because the bus driver is going to his friend's funeral. Part of the charm in the scene is that the driver acts as though the situation entirely makes sense ("I couldn't drive you to the coast, because I am going to my friends funeral"), and with these little completely sensible moments of nonsense the film manages to make it seem not as though the film was about death/religion, but that death/religion somehow invades life at every point.

Through this slow buildup of theme, the film becomes something of a journey into the realm of death and back again. But it is a different type of death than we are normally used to. In this film death is not something to be feared, it is just a strange thing that happens. When you go from existing to being no more.

Buy Flower Island here