Roger Ebert reviews "Black Snake Moan":
The girl is Rae (Christina Ricci); it is no coincidence that Jackson's character is named Lazarus, and Lazarus determines to return her from near death or whooping cough, one or the other. No saint himself, he wants to redeem her from a life of sluttery.JE reviews "An Unreasonable Man":His technique, with a refreshing directness, is to chain her to a radiator. Good thing he lives way out in the wilderness. Lazarus and Rae have no sex per se, but they do a powerful lot of slapping, cursing and chain-rattling, and the reaction of the blue-collar town on Market Day is a study. I think the point is that Lazarus and Rae somehow redeem each other through these grotesqueries, a method I always urge be used with extreme caution.
If the collapse of presidential candidate Ralph Nader's reputation has been a "tragedy" of Shakespearean dimensions, as his friend Phil Donohue says near the beginning of "An Unreasonable Man," then it's reasonable to ask: What is the nature of that tragedy?JE reviews "Tears of the Black Tiger"Is it that Nader, a consumer advocate who once stubbornly fought for progressive reforms that saved lives and held corporations and government accountable for their actions, has been treated as a pariah since the 2000 presidential election? Or is it that, having entered partisan politics, Nader has just as stubbornly placed the importance of his symbolic candidacy ahead of the real-world reforms he once struggled to bring about?
The term "eye-popping" could have been coined to describe Thai writer-director Wisit Sasanatieng's "Tears of the Black Tiger," not only for its retina-smacking colors, but because some eyes actually get popped. And some brains and lungs and other viscera, too. Bloody and syrupy, tragic and silly, this retro pastiche stands with its right foot in melodrama and its left in camp, shifting its weight woozily from one side to the other like a drunken Sergio Leone gunslinger straddling the camera.
Jim, I really like your Tears of the Black Tiger review, which may be the first I've seen not to reference Douglas Sirk (who used color, and indeed melodrama, in such a different way from Wisit's distillation here, that I'm dubious about whether Sirk was a direct influence at all).
You also don't sound like you're trying to come off as an authority on classic Thai cinema which you're not (practically nobody is), unlike some reviewiers. I've seen exactly one film by Rattana Pestonji, which I suspect is one more than most of the people who seem to feel confident in describing just how Pestonji's films influenced Tears of the Black Tiger. Yes, Wisit has talked of Pestonji in interviews, but at least in the ones I've read, he seems to be admiring his forerunner's independent spirit more than his aesthetic sense. Was there something in the press kit to stir reviews in the direction of thinking the color scheme was somehow a Pestonji innovation as well?
More importantly, I really liked what you have to say about the inextricable relationship between well-worn genre convention and self-parody. As well as your desctiption of details like Mahasuan's 'stache.
Even though the "it should have been shorter" critique is one of my critical pet peeves, you'd accumulated enough goodwill in fairness to the film's strengths and weaknesses that I didn't mind so much. That said, if you're looking for Wisit in a more bite-sized form, here is a pointer to some of his television commercial work.
Cheers!
I remember seeing Tears of the Black Tiger on the World Cinema HD channel last year and I can definitively say I've never seen ANYTHING like that before. It has one of the coolest endings to a final duel/shootout I can remember seeing. Other than that, your review is maybe the best review of it I've seen, noting the difficulty in distinguishing what is in earnest vs. what is parody, but especially in pointing out the running time; there's no reason for that film to run over 85 minutes.
Oh, and, incidentally, you're absolutely right about the documentaries of 2006. For once I wish they could have put up 10 or 15 nominees -- so many were so damn good. Nonfic beat the pants off fiction last year.