Takashi Miike is best known for chaotic films of extreme violence and hyper kinetic camera work such as “Ichi the Killer” and “Dead or Alive”. However, given that he regularly churns out several films a year, and that Western audiences are generally exposed only to his more sensationalistic efforts, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that there is more to the man and his talents than many may be aware.

Based on a novel by Makoto Shiina, “The Bird People in China” is a very different film from Miike. There is little violence, no fast editing, and no incoherent plot involving the nominal hero mutating into some kind of giant penis monster. Instead, the film is thoughtful, measured, and at times achingly beautiful, standing out as one of the director’s greatest works. It may disappoint some looking for another dose of the crazed excess they have come to demand from Miike, or conversely those viewers who are put off by the mere mention of his name, because “Bird People” is a delightful and inspiring film that deserves to be watched and enjoyed on its own merits.

The film follows Wada (Masahiro Motoki, “Gonin”), a Japanese businessman on a trip for his company to investigate a possible seam of valuable jade near a village on a remote mountain in China. Accompanying him is Ujiie (Renji Ishibashi, of “Gozu” and a variety of other Miike films), an aging yakuza who has been charged with making sure that his gang gets their share of the find. They make their journey using a variety of decaying vehicles, led by a rather odd Chinese guide named Shen (Mako).

But after an incident involving hallucinogenic toadstools, the trio find themselves lost and with no idea how to get to their destination. As they travel further into the mist-shrouded mountains, they encounter a strange local legend about ‘bird people’ who are taught to fly, and who appears to have links to ancient Japanese culture. After they finally reach the village they find themselves stranded in this beautiful, mysterious region, and begin to investigate the myth, forgetting more and more about the outside world as they discover more about themselves.

“The Bird People in China” is a thoughtful film that focuses mainly on the characters’ relationships not only with each other, but also more importantly with nature and traditional culture. Miike raises many interesting questions about the advances of modern civilization and the effects it can have on small, untouched outposts such as the film’s village. What is most interesting is that this is not mishandled with simple eco-ranting or pontifications about the awful modern world. Instead, Miike asks some far reaching questions, analyzing the affect of the village and mountains on the two visitors.

The development of the characters’ relationships with each other and their surroundings is subtle and believable, and recalls Miike’s “Dead or Alive 2″, perhaps unsurprisingly, as both films were written by Masa Nakamura. Even more so than in that film, this gentle exploration is quite at odds with what would be expected from the director, and results in something that is thought-provoking, touching and ultimately life-affirming in a way that most films are not.

Miike’s direction is excellent. Far removed from his trademark gimmickry, he makes the best possible use of the stunning Chinese mountain scenery, with its lush green forests, rain swept valleys, and mist covered mountains providing one of the most beautiful film backdrops of recent memory. The film is rich with symbolism and shows a mature composition and style that cements Miike’s reputation as one of the best Japanese directors, albeit one of the most unpredictable.

Although the film is slowly paced and contains no action, there are some flashes of Miike’s style, generally in the form of some oddball humor and odd imagery. These scenes are nicely woven into the rest of the film, and thankfully never detract from its overall feel. The ending of the film, in particular the final shot, is one of the most memorable I have ever seen, and packs a punch that fills the viewer with awe and longing.

“The Bird People in China” is definitely not what the director’s fans, or indeed his detractors, would expect. It explores the relationships of man not only with nature, but also with himself, and does so in an evenhanded and mature fashion that fascinates and leaves the viewer with a strong desire to experience the mysteries of our vast world.

Annie Hall
1977 94 minutes

Now over thirty years old , Annie Hall brought happiness to a number of people. The two small British exhibitors, who took the movie on when United Artists showed no interest in releasing it, made a fortune and were each able to lease another couple of cinemas. Popular audiences, who had never much cared for Allen (despite his earlier pictures' indebtedness to Bob Hope), took him to their hearts more warmly than before or since. As for Woody himself, the picture picked up four major Oscars (best film, direction, screenplay and actress) though it didn't exactly make him happy. His working title for the movie was Anhedonia (a clinical term for the inability to experience happiness) and he spent Oscar night playing his clarinet at Michael's Pub in New York.
The movie gave a fresh confidence to Woody and a generation of solipsistic stand-up comics and it created a new genre, what we might call 'the relationship picture', that dispensed with formal narrative. Annie Hall is openly autobiographical, Allen (as comedian Alvy Singer), his one-time lover Diane Keaton (as Annie Hall) and his best friend Tony Roberts (as Rob) playing versions of themselves, though the actual production was a chaotic affair and the picture only came into focus when its editor Ralph Rosenblum reduced the first cut of 140 minutes to a tight 95 in which the real and the surreal co-exist. If the movie has a message, it's the same as most later Allen movies - that love inevitably fades and only Louis Armstrong and the Marx Brothers abide.

or

Small Time Crooks
2000 95 minutes

Artistic ingenuousness is something that's difficult, if not impossible, to fake. That's one reason why Woody Allen's silly new comedy, "Small Time Crooks," is such a pleasantly surprising little treat. In this sweet, funny wisp of a movie, Mr. Allen shucks off his fabled angst and returns in spirit to those wide-eyed days of yesteryear, before Chekhov, Kafka and Ingmar Bergman invaded his creative imagination. As willfully goofy and freshly scrubbed as Mr. Allen's 1969 directorial debut, "Take the Money and Run," it suggests that that once a naïf always a naïf, that at the core of Mr. Allen's sensibility persists an inviolable strain of innocence.

The plot of this flighty caper comedy that begins as a spoof of "Big Deal on Madonna Street," then morphs into something resembling a child's-eye "Bonfire of the Vanities," often feels as if it were being plucked out of thin air while the movie was being shot. Put a bunch of children in an attic with a trunk full of costumes and have them improvise a play, and what they come up with might well have the same short-term memory as "Small Time Crooks," in which some seemingly major characters all but disappear once the movie shifts gears.

"Small Time Crooks" suggests that despite the excoriating bitterness of such 90's films as "Husbands and Wives," "Deconstructing Harry" and "Celebrity," Mr. Allen is in many ways still a wistful, wisecracking boy from Coney Island laughing at the fancily dressed grown-ups and their pretensions as he munches cotton candy, his nose pressed to the glass separating him from the Manhattan dream world. Look, Ma! What are those weird little things on the dining room table? They're finger bowls, dear.

Although it's set in modern New York, the mood of "Crooks" feels like every movie decade (but especially the 1930's) compacted into an eternal comic present.

Like his "Manhattan Murder Mystery," the new film owes as much to 1930's screwball tradition as it does to the present. Not the least of its accomplishments is its portrayal of a bunch of colossally stupid people with trashy tastes as adorable bumblers who emerge as much more human than the rich and snooty sharks with whom they amusingly rub elbows.

Instead of objects of ridicule, the movie treats its "little people" as true-blue common folk whose vulgar tastes reflect a groundedness and even decency, notwithstanding their lust for larceny. For a self-conscious intellectual like Mr. Allen to convincingly express such generosity toward the unlettered is disarming. When one character confuses Henry James with Harry James, we sympathize with her humiliation instead of sneering with the snob whose highbrow name-dropping sails over his companion's head.

What sets the story whirring is a preposterous scheme for a bank heist proposed by Ray Winkler (Mr. Allen), a meek, addle-brained ex-convict whose socially ambitious wife, Frenchy (Tracey Ullman), a former New Jersey stripper, harbors dreams of becoming a Manhattan hostess of wealth and culture. Ray's solution to their dire financial plight is to rent a vacant store next to a bank and set up a phony storefront business while he and his accomplices -- Denny (Michael Rapaport), Tommy (Tony Darrow) and Benny (Jon Lovitz) -- try to tunnel from the basement into the bank.

Some of the movie's funniest moments observe the incompetence of these inept fools who drill into a wall only to rupture a water main. Meanwhile, upstairs, the cookie shop that Frenchy has opened unexpectedly takes off and quickly makes the Winklers wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. At this point, the movie abruptly drops its caper plot to concentrate on the Winklers' embattled ascent up the social ladder.

In this middle chapter of a three-part story, Frenchy, who speaks in the same nasal cadences as Ms. Ullman's television character Fern Rosenthal, more or less takes over the movie. Pursuing her quest for higher things, this good-hearted, credulous arriviste places her dreams in the lap of David (Hugh Grant), a charming, unscrupulous art dealer whom she employs as her Park Avenue Pygmalion.

Ray soon decides he wants none of this high culture business. He'd much rather stay at home in their tchotchke-stuffed apartment (hideous souvenir dolls line the bookcases and table surface and the living room is adorned with a huge gold harp), drink beer and play poker. As David pitches snooty high-cultural woo to Frenchy, Mr. Grant deftly imbues his character with exactly a perfect blend of charm and nasty calculation.

The story takes another U-turn, and suddenly Ray and Frenchy collaborate on another robbery scheme. This time it's the theft of a priceless necklace from Chi Chi Potter (Elaine Stritch), a wealthy art patron. This final turn of the story is the most problematic part of the movie because it relies more on sitcom-ready plot twists than social satire for its humor. Mr. Allen often seems careless in the way he ends his comedies. And even for a movie as scatterbrained as this one, the outcome of "Small Time Crooks" feels rushed and pat.

The fleeting delights have to do with its tone, its light and lovely throwaway humor, and its deftly easygoing performances. In softening his standard schlemiel to make Ray more of a stumblebum than a whiner, Mr. Allen has come up with a new, likable variation on a familiar character. Ms. Ullman's Frenchy is such a twinkling, upbeat vulgarian that you wish her discontinued HBO series, "Tracey Takes On . . . ," would be revived immediately.

The movie is nearly stolen by Elaine May, as Frenchy's dimwitted cousin May, who goes to work at the cookie shop and unwittingly spills the beans about the heist every time she opens her mouth. May is the kind of stubbornly eager dullard who sends guests running at a swank Manhattan party by enthusiastically burbling out the day's weather to anyone who will listen.

How light is "Small Time Crooks"? So light it makes Mr. Allen's last film, "Sweet and Lowdown," seem almost Dostoyevskian by comparison. But it is also funny enough to leave you smiling.

Stephen Holden for NY Times

Hosted by Cannibal, Saltgrass, Harp & Altar, & Tight

Ana Božičević
John Coletti
Kate Greenstreet
Sarah Gridley
Katy Henriksen
Shannon Jonas
Jennifer Kronovet
Mark Lamoureux
Timothy Liu
Chris Martin
Jess Mynes
Cate Peebles
Christopher Rizzo
Matthew Rohrer
Frank Sherlock
Joanna Sondheim
Shanxing Wang
Rebecca Wolfe

typomag
flesh eating poems
harp and altar
salt grass contents
tight journal

Ana Božičević moved to NYC from Croatia in 1997. She’s the author of chapbooks Document (Octopus Books, 2007) and Morning News (Kitchen Press, 2006). Look for her recent work in Denver Quarterly, Saltgrass, Hotel Amerika, absent, The New York Quarterly, Bat City Review, MiPOesias, Octopus Magazine and The Portable Boog Reader 2: An Anthology of NYC Poetry. Ana co-edits RealPoetik.

John Coletti is the author of The New Normalcy (BoogLit 2002), Physical Kind (Yo-Yo-Labs 2005), and Street Debris (Fell Swoop 2005), a collaboration with poet Greg Fuchs with whom he also co-edits Open 24 Hours Press. He currently is the editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter.

Kate Greenstreet is the author of case sensitive (Ahsahta Press, 2006) and three chapbooks, Learning the Language (Etherdome Press, 2005), Rushes (above/ground press, 2007), and This is why I hurt you (Lame House Press, April 2008). Her second book, The Last 4 Things, will be out from Ahsahta in 2009. Her poems can be found in journals like Cannibal, Fascicle, and Handsome. New work is forthcoming in Filling Station, Practice, and The Columbia Review.

Sarah Gridley is Poet in Residence and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana in 2000, where she was a Richard Hugo scholar and won the 1999 Merriam Frontier Award for excellence in creative writing. The University of California Press published her book Weather Eye Open in 2005. She has recently completed a new poetry manuscript, whose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Fourteen Hills, NEO, Harp & Altar, Crazy Horse, jubilat, Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, and Chicago Review.

Katy Henriksen was born and raised in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the design editor of the poetry journal Cannibal, which she creates with her husband Matt Henriksen in their tiny railroad apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She also helps run the Burning Chair Readings. Her music and culture writing may be found in Venus Zine, The Brooklyn Rail, Paste, Publishers Weekly,  Pure Music, Rust Buckle, and elsewhere. Four of her poems are forthcoming in Tight.

Shannon Jonas is the author of Compathy (Cannibal Books, 2007) and lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
 
Jennifer Kronovet is the author of Awayward (BOA Editions, 2009), selected by Jean Valentine as the winner of the Poulin Prize. Kronovet is the co-founder and co-editor of CIRCUMFERENCE, a journal of poetry in translation. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Harp & Altar, Ploughshares, A Public Space, and other journals. She was born and raised in New York City, and has lived in Chicago, St. Louis, and Beijing.

Mark Lamoureux is a poet, critic and translator who lives in Astoria, NY. His work has appeared in numerous publications, both in print and online. He is an associate editor for Fulcrum Annual. He is the author of three chapbooks: City/Temple (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003), 29 Cheeseburgers (Pressed Wafer, 2004) and Film Poems (Katalanche Press, 2005).

Timothy Liu is the author of six books of poems, most recently For Dust Thou Art. Two new books are forthcoming, Bending the Mind Around the Dream's Blown Fuse (Talisman House, 2008) and Polytheogamy (Saturnalia Press, 2009). His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.  Liu is currently an Associate Professor at William Paterson University and on the Core Faculty at Bennington College’s Writing Seminars; he lives in Manhattan.

Chris Martin is the author of American Music.  His new book, Becoming Weather, is trying to become published.  His newer book, On Song, is an ongoing investigation of song’s ontological use from the Caveman Days until Tonight.  He is the editor of Puppy Flowers, an online magazine of the arts, and resides near the Prospect Park Zoo with a beautiful lady and her cat.

Jess Mynes is the author of Birds for Example, Coltsfoot Insularity (a collaboration with Aaron Tieger), In(ex)teriors, andFull on Jabber (a collaboration with Christopher Rizzo). He is the editor of Fewer & Further Press. In 2008, his If and When (Katalanche Press), Sky Brightly Picked (Skysill Press), Recently Clouds, and a second edition of In(ex)teriors(Anchorite Press) will be published. He lives in Wendell, MA where he co curates a reading series, All Small Caps. His poems have appeared in numerous publications.

Cate Peebles lives in Brooklyn and works at the literary agency, Sobel Weber Associates, in Manhattan.  Her poems have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Tin House, Octopus, La Petite Zine, MiPOesias, Capgun, and others.  She co-edits the on-line poetry magazine, Fou.

Christopher Rizzo is a writer and publisher who lives in New York. Over the years, his work has appeared in Art New England, The Cultural Society, Cannibal, Dusie, H_NGM_N, and Spell among other magazines. Christopher has also authored several chapbooks, such as Claire Obscure (Katalanche Press, 2005), Zing (Carve Editions, 2006), and The Breaks (Fewer & Further Press, 2006). Full on Jabber, a collaborative work written with poet Jess Mynes, was released by Martian Press in 2007. Christopher also edits Anchorite Press, an independent poetry publisher of innovative work. He is a doctoral candidate in English at the University at Albany.

Matthew Rohrer is the author of five books of poetry, most recently RISE UP, published by Wave Books. He teaches in the creative writing program at NYU and lives in Brooklyn.

Frank Sherlock is the co-author of the newly released Ready-to-Eat Individual with Brett Evans.

Joanna Sondheim’s chapbooks, The Fit and Thaumatrope, were published by Sona Books in 2004 and 2007, respectively. Recent work appears in Unsaid magazine.

Shanxing Wang was born in Jinzhong, Shanxi province, China, in 1965. He moved to the U.S. in 1991 to pursue a PhD in mechanical engineering at University of California at Berkeley. While an assistant professor of engineering at Rutgers University, he began taking writing courses at Rutgers and later the Poetry Project, and subsequently received a Zora Neale Hurston Scholarship to attend the summer writing program at Naropa University in Colorado in 2003. His first book Mad Science in Imperial City (Futurepoem Books, 2005) won the 2006 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. His current thinking and struggling focuses on intersections of poetry/poetics with physics/mathematics, history, visual arts, and continental philosophy. He is also a competitive table tennis player and a table tennis coach. He lives and writes in Queens and he has a blog.

Rebecca Wolfe is the author of Manderley, Figment, and The King (forthcoming 2009). She is the publisher and editor of Fence, Fence Books, and The Constant Critic, and is a fellow of the New York State Writers Institute, with which Fence is affiliated. She lives in Athens, New York.

Among other distinctions, Fritz Lang's 1931 classic M is credited with giving birth to the modern psychological thriller, specifically the dreaded serial-killer movie, but that doesn't do justice to its real achievement. While it's true that Peter Lorre's performance as a child murderer who terrorizes the Berlin streets brought unprecedented depth, even hard-won sympathy, to what might have been a stock monster, Lang's grip on societal evils remains most persuasive. Without underplaying the horrific nature of Lorre's crimes, Lang examines another kind of sickness that seizes the city, both in the mass hysteria that affects the tenor of everyday life, and in a criminal underworld consumed by self-serving moral outrage. It takes guts to humanize a serial killer, but Lang goes further than that by making Lorre into a tragic hero, victimized by overwhelming forces from within and without.

Making his first foray into sound, a transition that many actors and directors never mastered, Lang (Metropolis) takes pointed advantage of the new technology without losing the bold visual expressiveness that had always distinguished his work. Lorre first appears in profile, looming over his next young victim, but before anybody ever sees him, they hear him, whistling a telltale refrain from Edvard Grieg's "In The Hall Of The Mountain King." In just a few chillingly suggestive shots—a long shadow, a dropped ball, an unleashed balloon caught up in power lines—Lang covers a little girl's abduction and murder, the latest in an eight-month rampage. As desperate authorities adopt increasingly heavy-handed tactics in an effort to track the killer down, the local criminals find it difficult to go about their business, so they launch their own investigation. Using a guild of street beggars to collect information, the self-serving thugs want to capture Lorre before the police and courts can administer the ineffectual rule of law.

With a keen satirical eye, Lang notes the hypocrisy of thieves and murderers administering justice: In one brilliant sequence, he cuts between two smoke-filled meeting rooms, making it seem like the top detectives and crooks discussing plans to catch Lorre are all engaged in the same dialogue. When the street syndicate finally corners Lorre in the attic of an office building, it also dispatches safecrackers to loot the bank vault downstairs. With his sad eyes and a face rounded with baby fat, Lorre was cast in M because he looked like a man whom no one could believe was a murderer; in the end, he seems more pitiable than frightening, and the truly diabolical villains—the ones who can choose their wicked destiny—are serving as judge, jury, and executioner.

Scott Tobias The Onion

Locked in a magnificent battle

Julian Schnabel's superb film recreates the courageous, unsentimental example of a visionary human being.

Jean-Dominique Bauby was a successful, highly regarded author, a major figure in Parisian journalistic and fashion circles, editor-in-chief of Elle, a father with a little son and daughter, and a mistress, when suddenly he suffered a cerebro-vascular attack while driving in the countryside in his smart new BMW convertible. Waking from a lengthy coma, he found he was in a hospital at Berck-Plage near Calais, totally paralysed and capable of communicating only by blinking his left eye, one blink for 'yes', two for 'no'. Using this device, devised by a speech therapist, he dictated his reflective memoir, the 139-page The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly (aka Le Scaphandre et le papillon). It was published here a matter of weeks after his death in March 1997 at the age of 44, and is one of the most moving and thoughtful books I have ever read.

Bauby was a dedicated cinephile and called the hospital's balcony of his hospital - it over looked the town's shabby suburbs and the English Channel - his 'Cinecittà', where he would sit for hours thinking about movies. 'There, I am the greatest director of all time,' he writes. 'On the town side, I reshoot the close-ups for Touch of Evil. Down at the beach I rework the dolly shots for Stagecoach, and offshore I recreate the storm rocking the smugglers of Moonfleet.' There has been talk of a film since shortly after the book appeared (Bauby expressed to his wife an interest in one being made), and the picture that the American painter Julian Schnabel has directed is a triumph, a major advance on his earlier pictures (Basquiat, a portrait of the doomed New York painter, and Before Night Falls, about the struggles of the gay Cuban dissident author, Reinaldo Arenas). It's made in French from a screenplay by the British playwright Ronald Harwood, and exquisitely photographed by Janusz Kaminski, the Polish cinematographer who has lit all Steven Spielberg's movies since Schindler's List, and stars Mathieu Amalric, who has made a corner for himself as the cinema's favourite quizzical, witty, womanising Gallic intellectual, and who is wholly convincing as the man his friends called Jean-Do.
Ever since the cinema was invented, film-makers have been experimenting with different points of view, ways of getting inside people's heads, conveying unusual states of mind by visual and aural means. The world of the deaf, the dumb, the blind, the schizophrenic have been explored in pictures as different as Pabst's Secret of a Soul, Duvivier's Carnet de Bal, and Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, and numerous films have tried to present a narrative through a single pair of eyes. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly uses a variety of ways to convey the feeling and texture of the book. It begins with Jean-Do coming out of his coma and being told by a neurologist that he's suffering from 'locked-in syndrome' (the English term is used by the French medical profession), and the audience shares his isolation. Only we, the spectators, have an unmediated access to his mind and we understand his frustration at the world going into and out of focus and his inability to frame for himself the picture he sees. Later on, after we've experienced along with him the process of learning a new way of communicating, the film-makers are freed to follow his memories and his imagination as he starts assembling the materials that will make up his book. There are also occasional views of Jean-Do as he appears to others and the way he envisages his present self after seeing his image in a mirror. One consequence of making the movie in French is that we become very aware of the English subtitles because they frequently bear little relationship to the words Bauby is painfully spelling out letter by letter.

Initially he must come to terms with his condition and get over death-wish despair. Then he's faced with assessing what makes human existence not merely endurable but worthy of celebration, and what is the irreducible minimum of such things that can keep us alive. Fortunately Jean-Do has the enviable literary gifts, the well-equipped mind and the ironic wit to consider these matters in a philosophical yet concrete manner, and the final result is a joyful, unsentimental, unself-pitying affirmation of life. It's rather as if an exuberant, sociable extrovert has suddenly found himself cast as the isolated loner in a Samuel Beckett play.

A visiting friend compares his experience being held for four years as a hostage by terrorists in Beirut to Jean-Do's locked-in syndrome. There are two wonderful sequences with his 92-year-old father (Max von Sydow). One is a memory of shaving his dad and thinking about the rewards and duties of parenthood, the other a phone call that makes him realise how like his own position is that of his crippled father, living alone and waiting for death. Jean-Do's experience is what eventually we'll all come to in the end - spectators in our personal galleries of memories, the dreams, crossroads, transgressions, regrets, joys, disappointments of a lifetime. The film ends, as does the book, with that fateful drive accompanied by his son.

Philip French The Guardian