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I mentioned on a literature thread that I saw 'The Black Dahlia', but had not read it as I thought I might have. I may want to see exactly what was there after this.

This was worth seeing in a theater, because the only virtues I could see in it--the visual and musical settings--wouldn't be as apparent on television. It's enjoyable even though almost always awful, and I kept wondering why I didn't hate it.

I don't know that much of DePalma's work, and have never cared much for it. There seem to be these big crude echoes of classics sometimes. It works as in 'Dressed to Kill' doing something on 'Psycho', and here he is always calling 'Chinatown' to mind, but it doesn't work. There's no love here that I could pick up, and I'd think that 'noir' was all through after 'Mulholland Drive', but then 'Far from Heaven' was masterful, even if set in Connecticut. 'The Black Dahlia' is coarse and campy throughout. If you missed Echo Park from 'chinatown' the first time here, it's there twice. I only read one review and all of the principle actors were faulted except Hilary Swank. Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johanssen and Aaron Eckhart all started out as if doing something in acting class, but I thought they all got some better after awhile, although Eckhart as Blanchard was the only one who had the right style. All of the hard-boiled dialogue falls flat. Swank may embody the 'virtual reality noir' that De Palma seems to have decided on, or ended up with by default. The obligatory Bel Air or Holmby Hills daughter, her 'Madeleine' role is a composite of Faye Dunaway's voice in 'Chinatown' (perfectly imitated, except that it doesn't then seem hers), Jennifer Connelly's sex-bomb attitude in 'Mulholland Falls' (except that it doesn't come natural to her as it did to Connelly), Charlotte Rampling's classy bad girl in 'Farewell, My Lovely' (but less so), and Claire Trevor's vulgarity in 'Murder My Sweet' (and she succeeds in only looking like her).

There are two sex scenes so camped up as to be egregious, and these are so bad they ruin the whole film, which is already mediocre enough. Hartnett and Johanssen finally cannot resist each other and this pre-sex scene is so tacky it breaks the low but pleasant spell caused by the music and reminded me of the ending of 'Carrie'. The other one follows maybe 10 minutes later and is the same thing, but less fuss, with Hartnett and Swank. It's almost as if DePalma was saying 'You mean you really took my movie more or less seriously all this long?'

Beautiful photography if you're an LA buff. Good footage of the Pantages Theater, and they may have even used the Bradbury Building for the umpteenth time when Blanchard and DeWitt are reunited after jail time for the latter. 'los angeles plays itself' by Thom Andersen was excellent on these LA film-set landmarks. Some other of the old buildings of DT (possibly One Bunker Hill) as well as City Hall are beautiful here. Otherwise, pretty grainy movie.

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I just saw The Departed and for the first 30 minutes I thought this was the most cliched film. But it really grew into a thrilling nailbiter. Damon tapped into his Mr. Ripley persona again as he played pure concentrated evil masqueraded in an ordinary good ol' boy facade. Jack Nicholson is of course predictably over-the-top but it works well. Leonardo di Caprio does the best work in a long time as the neurotic undercover, and Mark Wahlberg has a great supporting role. Really, it's a great nailbiter.

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papeetepatrick writes:

The obligatory Bel Air or Holmby Hills daughter, her 'Madeleine' role is a composite of Faye Dunaway's voice in 'Chinatown' (perfectly imitated, except that it doesn't then seem hers), Jennifer Connelly's sex-bomb attitude in 'Mulholland Falls' (except that it doesn't come natural to her as it did to Connelly), Charlotte Rampling's classy bad girl in 'Farewell, My Lovely' (but less so), and Claire Trevor's vulgarity in 'Murder My Sweet' (and she succeeds in only looking like her).

The effect was eerie, as if Dunaway had dubbed her. But she missed completely the fragility and desperation that Dunaway was hiding; you had the feeling that if you touched Dunaway, her skin would start to craze like old porcelain. Madeleine didn’t have to be an exercise in camp. I’m not sure what can be done with Swank. She’s very talented, but the qualities that made her ideal casting as a cross dressing petty criminal and an aspiring boxer don’t translate well to more conventional roles. The casting of Swank also did damage to a critical plot point, the physical resemblance of Madeleine to Elizabeth Short, as Swank didn’t look anything like pretty little Mia Kirshner and it just seemed weird when people kept referring to it.

Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johanssen and Aaron Eckhart all started out as if doing something in acting class, but I thought they all got some better after awhile, although Eckhart as Blanchard was the only one who had the right style.

I felt sorry for them. They needed help from De Palma and didn’t get it (not that anything would have helped the hapless Hartnett). There was an agreeable bit of unintentional humor early on when Johannson is watching a movie in which a terrified woman is threatened and she is supposed to be registering distress. Eckhart had the bad luck to be following Russell Crowe, who played what was basically the same character in “L.A. Confidential.” There’s a scene that resembles closely one in the earlier picture, in which this character reacts violently to the mistreatment of a woman, and the contrast in acting and staging was glaring.

The movie went off the rails for good, IMO, in the dinner scene at Swank’s family’s house. Leaving Hartnett and Johansson to twist in the wind is one thing, but when a great actress like Fiona Shaw comes across as a circus freak, it's unforgivable. (Also, I don’t know if that scene was taken from Ellroy’s book, but the whole family thing is a barefaced steal from The Big Sleep.)

It's enjoyable even though almost always awful, and I kept wondering why I didn't hate it.

It's watchable, but everything about it is slightly off kilter; the tone is wrong. The De Palma Virtuoso Action Set Pieces ™ are fun.

I don't know that much of DePalma's work, and have never cared much for it. There seem to be these big crude echoes of classics sometimes.

The most intelligent defense of the movie in auteurist mode that I came across -- actually, you can’t really call it a defense, as the writer conceded it was mostly terrible – was written by Stuart Klawans in The Nation.

All of the hard-boiled dialogue falls flat.

And the actors’ smoking was totally unconvincing. :wink:

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Dirac--thanks for those excellent notes. I just saw that some 70 people want to check out copies of the book from the library, and mine is 'in transit' so it will be interesting now to finally read it.

Good point about how ridiculous it was talking about Swank looking like Kirschner, and reminds me that I left another important point out: Kirschner's performance in the sad porn flickers was probably the single true performance in the film, this despite that that is a thoroughly stereotyped sort of character. She has the most humanity, and it is as though DePalma didn't care about the fact that somehow the heart of the story had been protected. When Madeleine kills Blanchard, there's something of 'KillBill' there, as well as the unnecessary sound effects for the fighting--all connected to the Virtual Reality sensation, but not skillful as in Tarantino, which is mostly surface but is content with it, at least. The porn loops were also too reminiscent of the ones with Connelly and Nolte in 'Mulholland Falls', but they were effective and should have informed an infinitely better whole film--if DePalma hadn't wanted to be so tacky and cute the rest of the time.

Not satisfied to have come up with 4 examples Ms. Swank seems to have studied in order to produce her thoroughly hollow performance, I also just now thought that she may have studied Laura Elena Haring in 'Mulholland Drive' as well for the visual look--and also for some of the 'atmosphere' she would have needed for the Lesbian club part. But I imagine it was more to recall Ms. Connelly, who really took my breath away as Alison Pond--not a single false note there (Nolte was excellent, though, too; I thought 'Mulholland Falls' was underrated).

Will report back to the other thread in a few weeks after I have read the novel.

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I just saw The Departed and for the first 30 minutes I thought this was the most cliched film. But it really grew into a thrilling nailbiter. Damon tapped into his Mr. Ripley persona again as he played pure concentrated evil masqueraded in an ordinary good ol' boy facade. Jack Nicholson is of course predictably over-the-top but it works well. Leonardo di Caprio does the best work in a long time as the neurotic undercover, and Mark Wahlberg has a great supporting role. Really, it's a great nailbiter.

Just a note that I didn't mean to ignore you, canbelto. :) If the praise and the box office finally get Scorsese his Oscar, then okay by me, but after all the critical tub thumping I expected more from this and came away disappointed. I will say I thought Nicholson started out note perfect and it's too bad he didn't stay that way. I'll blather at length when I have the chance.

papeetepatrick writes: Will report back to the other thread in a few weeks after I have read the novel.

Please do. I saw an interview with Ellroy and he seemed most pleased with the picture. I understand the movie does depart from the book, but apparently a real effort was made to follow Ellroy, although there were significant changes.

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dirac, the reason I liked The Departed was that it didnt scream Oscar baiting. I just thought it was a fun, exciting thriller, and well-acted. I admit that Nicholshon's over-the-top antics eventually became a distraction, but (BIG SPOILER AHEAD) I thought they killed off his character early enough in the movie. The heart of the movie was the cat-and-mouse game between di Caprio and Damon, and I thought both of them were absolutely great in their parts. I think we can safely pencil in Mark Wahlberg and di Caprio for Oscar nods, and they both deserve it. di Caprio especially plays exactly the kind of character the Academy loves to nominate -- the morally torn. Much like Benicio del Toro's character in Traffic. I also liked the tribute to The Third Man at the funeral.

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“The Departed” is, as everyone knows, based on the Hong Kong film “Infernal Affairs”, directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak and starring Andy Lau (not the same person as Andrew) as Ming, the undercover cop and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai as Yan, the undercover hoodlum. Anthony Wong is Lau’s police supervisor and only contact within the force while Eric Tsang plays the Triad crime boss. Andy Lau is one of the biggest stars in East Asia, both as an actor and a singer. Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, mainly known in the west from the Wong Kar-Wai films “In the Mood for Love” and “2046”, is one of the most popular Chinese actors of this generation.

“Infernal Affairs” is well worth seeing. When I first saw it I thought the title was just another odd English rendering of a Chinese title that couldn’t really be translated but it is actually much more, freighted with meaning for those who strive for the Middle Path of Buddhism. Both the undercover characters yearn for a new life, a “rebirth” but because their entire lives are built on deceit they suffer constant fear, hatred and guilt. There is a title over the beginning of the first scene of “Infernal Affairs” that says (in Chinese) "The worst of the Eight Hells is called Continuous Hell. It has the meaning of Continuous Suffering.” The horrifying reality is that Ming and Yan are locked into a living hell of unbearable pressure that must lead to the ultimate darkness of Avici Hell, where time and space seem not to exist until one’s noxious karma is spent.

All of that aside, “Infernal Affairs” is a thrilling movie and has the additional advantage, at least for me, of not having Jack Nicholson once again playing Jack Nicholson.

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After reading A.O. Scott's review today, I'm definitely going to 'Babel' when the crowds simmer down in a couple of weeks. It sounds extraordinary, and even reminded me of 'Intolerance' in the way it's structured. This isn't one for the TV size.

That was a rather odd review -- as if Scott couldn't quite decide if the picture was actually any good. To me, it sounds like another one of those 'gorgeous white movie stars discover things are really bad in poor countries populated with brown skinned folks' opuses, but I plan to see it and I hope I'm mistaken.

Ed Waffle writes:

All of that aside, “Infernal Affairs” is a thrilling movie and has the additional advantage, at least for me, of not having Jack Nicholson once again playing Jack Nicholson.

Hi, Ed. Nice to hear from you and thank you for bringing up IA, which is terrific. Nicholson started off note perfect and I began to hope that we'd actually get a good performance, but no. I'm not sure that it was really his fault.

I didn't get to the theatre this weekend -- going to try to catch 'The Queen' this week....

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Mirren is wonderful in "The Queen," but I had mixed feelings on the film as a whole. It felt like Frears was trying very hard to resolve to a conclusion at the end, and he didn't quite full it off.

Actually, I thought one of the more interesting characters was the Prince Charles character. I used to see Alex Jennings onstage in London and NY quite a bit, and I think he did a great job pulling together a fully-fleshed out character with very little screentime.

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Mirren is wonderful in "The Queen," but I had mixed feelings on the film as a whole. It felt like Frears was trying very hard to resolve to a conclusion at the end, and he didn't quite full it off.

Actually, I thought one of the more interesting characters was the Prince Charles character. I used to see Alex Jennings onstage in London and NY quite a bit, and I think he did a great job pulling together a fully-fleshed out character with very little screentime.

Jennings' was my favorite performance. I particularly admired the scene in which his secretary is on the phone with Blair, passing on Charles’ conviction that Charles and Blair are both ‘modern men.’ Charles doesn’t say a word, but the fretful/fearful expression on his face speaks volumes about what’s going on inside him. (The mother-son relationship is very “Ordinary People”; when Mirren deals with Jennings, she’s like Mary Tyler Moore refusing to give Timothy Hutton a hug.)

I came away with mixed feelings also. Mirren is fine, which you might expect, she’s on a roll these days, and the supporting cast was exemplary. It’s puzzling. The movie is quite obvious on some levels – the stag = Diana symbolism, for example – but finally it wasn’t clear to me what the point of it all was. As far as I can tell, the picture is telling us that even though there may be some unnecessary fuss and expense about the monarchy, it’s all right to like it and the Queen (a member of the Greatest Generation, as the film is at some pains to point out), and republicans are probably a disagreeable lot anyway, especially as represented by an opinionated career woman who can hardly be bothered to curtsy to the Queen and nags at her husband to clean up after himself. (Tony Blair, in this telling, is a Thurber husband, caught between two withholding female authority figures.)

The view of the royal family in general is a bit of this and a bit of that. A moderately satirical tone is taken toward individuals, especially Philip and the offstage Margaret, who is never named. I assume this was done in order to keep the film from being an extended exercise in forelock-tugging, but I didn’t see why the Queen and Charles are seemingly eligible for audience sympathy and Philip and the late Princess Margaret aren’t. Both of them came in for their share of criticism over the years but defenses can be made for them as well as anyone else in the family. When Blair starts carrying on about what a fine woman the Queen is and all she’s been through, I couldn’t help reflecting that at least Elizabeth got to marry the man of her choice, which was more than poor Margaret could say.

Minor point: Would the Queen really find herself marooned on her estate alone in a malfunctioning vehicle without some sort of security detail around?

The director, Stephen Frears, does a good job of keeping things moving, not necessarily easy to do when much of the action consists of the actors watching television and reading the papers. Slight tedium did set in for me, however. Genuine footage of Diana, et al., is cleverly mixed with material shot for the movie.

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I saw the Queen today. I thought Mirren was fine, and this is the kind of performance that screams Oscar, but I too found the movie a tad pointless. I never knew whether the Queen had reached some kind of epiphany. I compare this movie to last year's Goodnight and Goodluck. Both were about famous events, and featured historical people, and both have some kind of political message. But GN&GL I thought was more elegant, witty, and eloquent. I thought The Queen was kind of muddled, and although it focused much more about her personal life, I thought Straitharn brought me closer to Edward Murrow than Mirren to Queen E. I'm glad I saw it to see what the fuss was about, but I definitely won't see it again.

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I saw the Queen today. I thought Mirren was fine, and this is the kind of performance that screams Oscar, but I too found the movie a tad pointless. I never knew whether the Queen had reached some kind of epiphany. I compare this movie to last year's Goodnight and Goodluck. Both were about famous events, and featured historical people, and both have some kind of political message. But GN&GL I thought was more elegant, witty, and eloquent. I thought The Queen was kind of muddled, and although it focused much more about her personal life, I thought Straitharn brought me closer to Edward Murrow than Mirren to Queen E. I'm glad I saw it to see what the fuss was about, but I definitely won't see it again.

I think she's supposed to experience an epiphany of sorts when she sees the stag for the last time. It didn't quite work for me, but I saw the point.

Thank you for posting that review, papeetepatrick, although I can't say I agreed with much of it. But then the reviews I've seen have all been raves to one degree or another, so perhaps it is just me. :)

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Ok here's a more detailed review: I think we can safely pencil in Helen Mirren for

an Oscar. She really gives a stunning performance. I have no idea what

the Queen is like in private, but I believed Mirren's performance

100%. It never descended into parody. And I like how the Queen is as

inscrutable in the end as she is at the start of the film. She's cold,

regimented, and her life is duty, duty, duty, for a job that she

probably did not want. And her hurt at being told that she was out of

touch with the English public was palpable. I thought her best scene

was when she was sitting up in bed, watching old Diana interviews.

Mirren's face expressed so much: both admiration and resentment for

Diana, with her calculated heart-on-sleeve personality.

Yet for all the justified hoopla about Mirren's astonishing

performance, I found the movie lacking in something. I don't know what

it is exactly. It was entertaining, with the right mix of humor,

pathos, and drama. It was evenhanded -- neither a shameless apology

for the monarchy or a message about "modernization." And there are

some nice supporting performances -- Alex Jennings as the more

emotional but calculated and media savvy Charles, Michael Sheen as

Tony Blair, James Cromwell as the curmudgeonly, unfeeling Prince

Philip, and Sylvia Syms as the sly, witty, gin-guzzling Queen Mum.

I think in the end what it lacked was emotional impact. I would have

felt for Queen E, but the movie made me feel too buttoned up and

regimented to sympathize with her. In a way, Mirren's embodiment of

the Queen was so complete that it was projected into the audience. To

me, at least. I would have empathized with the Queen, but it wouldn't

feel proper, as she'd say.

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dirac--I posted that review in case others wanted to read it, and just read it myself now. I don't plan to see the film during the current run, but I didn't care for the review anyway. I don't like much writing about the English royals, in fact, but things like, in comparing Blair and the Queen, 'if he was a concert, she was a museum' is just not good enough for the New York Review of Books, of which I am a loyal reader. Mr. O'Hagan wanted to identify with the queen and agree with her about the prime minister's more fragile hold on the public--pretty old hat stuff by now and cloyingly predictable.

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I enjoyed the NY Review of Books review, largely because it puts the film in the political and constitutional context. The photo of Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) on his knee "kissing hands" with the Queen is worth the price of admission all by itself. Not that Americans aren't quite capable of grovelling to those in power. But we do it in a less courtly fashion.

I also liked the following:

If one chose two dysfunctional families struggling with image problems, big appetites, and tearful neighbors, it would be difficult to slide a cigarette paper between the Windsors and the Simpsons, yet Frears's movie pays Britain's first family the supreme compliment of taking it seriously, and it's hard not to feel that the results will enjoy a long and fruitful reign in the affections of moviegoers.
When I first read it, I thought "the Simpsons" referred to the late Wallace Simpson and her husband at the time she took up with a previous Prince of Wales. This confusion demonstrates (a) how out of it I am in terms of American popular culture, and (b) that I'm probably an excellent candidate for loving this movie.

Thanks, papeetepatrick, for posting this review. It never occurred to me that this unique and wonderful publication, which I've subscribed to since the 60s, was available on line.

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Not all of the magazine is available online to nonsubscribers, unfortunately, only selected articles, including this one.

bart writes:

When I first read it, I thought "the Simpsons" referred to the late Wallis Simpson and her husband at the time she took up with a previous Prince of Wales.

I also took it as a reference to the Duchess of Windsor at first glance, before reading it closely.

A quote from the review:

One of the beauties of The Queen is that it shows not only what the British sovereign had to learn from Mr. Blair but ultimately, and perhaps even more poignantly, what Mr. Blair had to learn from her. "Some day they will try to get rid of you," she says to him, as he sits across from her at the end of that summer, trying in his Tonyish way not to gloat. "And quite suddenly." This proves to be one of the film's prophecies, and a great, crowd-pleasing joke—

I’m not sure what other ‘prophecies’ Andrew O’Hagan, the reviewer, is referring to, but this remark certainly isn’t much of one. If the Queen hadn’t figured out after all this time that prime ministers are sometimes booted out unceremoniously, she’d be a dim bulb indeed. (And I didn’t think it really applied to Blair, who’s been clinging to office in barnacle like fashion.)

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BABEL

This is sensational--it's got tons of sensation but profound too. You definitely need to see it in a theater. This is a sort of Essay on the Other, and it is not superficial. The telling point is that the supposed 'stars'--are far less interesting and full-bodied than literally every single actor among 'the Others.' There's more than structural similarity to 'Intolerance' than even I thought, therefore, with this matter of the Foreign Other. One of the most beautifully photographed films I've ever seen--in Baja (with the border between the U.S. and Mexico very important), Morocco, and Tokyo--it's got subtleties in it that you think are being lost in the interests of some ordinary style of narrative, only to then find them surprising you. All 3 stories in all 3 lands are tied together with the merest thread which nevertheless hugely affects all characters involved. One of the most amazing things is the reverse-chronology over a short period of time, which is even somewhat reminiscent of Robbe-Grillet (including some of the serialized images echoed in an intertextual way from one story to another), except by now new things have occurred and what is spectacular is that Director Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu makes you feel the power and presence of both the Global Spectacle and it's Internet Instant, but also the many-hours difference in time zones as still existing and juxtaposed to each other! The high-tech editing and lingering over 'still lives' like various interior an exterior shots near the action but with nobody in them are part of the grammar of this truly cinematic masterpiece--as are the striking sound images and use of music.

As for the 2 Malibu stars...er, um, San Diego characters... played by Cate Blanchett as pure drear and Brad Pitt as a caricature of the hot American movie star who gets down to breaking heads and doing quite difficult things (read 'China Syndrome', read Robert Redford, read Richard Gere doing tough and brooding)--well, they are rendered, miraculously, as 'exotic Others' in quite as much a way as all the non-Malibu actors are: They seem so dessicated and uninteresting by comparison to all the rest of the cast that you don't care anything about their characters' fates, at least I didn't. I never ever once saw either of them as anything but Blanchett and Pitt doing 'movie star.' Brad Pitt runs after a disappearing bus and he definitely needed a stunt man or double to do this, but his weird running has a cramped authenticity to it all the same.

The most moving story is the Japanese one, to my mind, about the deaf-mute daughter of a woman who has recently committed suicide. However, in one of the Baja segments there is a Mexican wedding that is pure pleasure to watch, reminding one of the big crowds in Robert Altman, but a lot more sensual and human.

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Mirren is wonderful in "The Queen," but I had mixed feelings on the film as a whole. It felt like Frears was trying very hard to resolve to a conclusion at the end, and he didn't quite full it off.

I saw this today and also had mixed feelings. Mirren was good in a difficult part to pull off. Her QEII played her cards very close to the chest and sometimes I had trouble reading them. Of course it's a much more colorful character but her QEI for HBO was a much showier job for an actress.

Other than that , Frears plowed through the events of 1997, helped by tons and tons of documentary footage. At times I thought I was watching a made for TV piece, other times I felt the atmosphere opened up.

Again, mixed feelings.

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I saw this today and also had mixed feelings. Mirren was good in a difficult part to pull off. Her QEII played her cards very close to the chest and sometimes I had trouble reading them. Of course it's a much more colorful character but her QEI for HBO was a much showier job for an actress.

Other than that , Frears plowed through the events of 1997, helped by tons and tons of documentary footage. At times I thought I was watching a made for TV piece, other times I felt the atmosphere opened up.

Again, mixed feelings.

It did seem like an HBO Special Presentation at times. It's not bad by any means, but I admit to some confusion on reading some of the extraordinarily laudatory reviews. Would be interested to hear other views.

papeetepatrick writes:

One of the most beautifully photographed films I've ever seen--in Baja (with the border between the U.S. and Mexico very important), Morocco, and Tokyo--it's got subtleties in it that you think are being lost in the interests of some ordinary style of narrative, only to then find them surprising you.

I hope to see it when it makes its way out here.

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