Clockers is a 1995 American crime drama film directed by Spike Lee. It is an adaptation of the eponymous 1992 novel by Richard Price, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Lee. The film stars Harvey Keitel, John Turturro, Delroy Lindo, and Mekhi Phifer in his debut film role. Set in New York City, Clockers tells the story of Strike (Phifer), a street-level drug dealer, who becomes entangled in a murder investigation.
June nights! Seventeen! Drink it in.
Sap is champagne, it goes to your head…
The mind wanders, you feel a kiss
On your lips, quivering like a living thing.
In a Paris schoolroom, teenagers recite snippets from Rimbaud’s poem “No One’s Serious at Seventeen.” One of these students, Isabelle Bontale (Marine Vacth), fills her evenings with more than homework and dreams of the boy in the back row. After a summer by the sea, during which she allowed a German boy to take her virginity, Isabelle has turned her blooming sexuality into a business enterprise: freelance prostitution. Earning 300 to 500 Euros for each hotel assignation, she goes by the name Léa and gives her age as 20. She’s 17.
In outline,Young & Beautiful (Jeune & Jolie) appears sensational: I Was a Teenage Call Girl. Yet François Ozon’s film is tender, judicious, fascinated, sexually charged but not prurient. It pins no blame on society, school, the girl’s clients or her parents. Isabelle treats her concerned mother (Geraldine Pailhas) and amiable stepfather (Frédéric Pierrot) the way any teen might: as the security guards of an enemy state who deserve little communication and no straight answers. In fact, they are the innocents, she the daredevil spy with a dirty secret. She is close to her sweet younger brother Victor (Fantin Ravat), who watches her sunbathe nude or masturbate in her bedroom while he remains ignorant of her profitable secret. So is everyone else; Isabelle has a facility for compartmentalizing her double life. That first night, as she lies on the beach, the German boy pounding his manhood into her, another Isabelle stands nearby watching, appraising, detached.
Why does she choose this line of work? That is for the spectator to speculate. “This young woman is a mystery to me, too,” Ozon says. “I’m not ahead of her, I’m simply following her, like an entomologist gradually falling in love with the creature he’s studying.” But a key can be found in Ozon’s last film, In the House, in which a 16-year-old schoolboy devised an elaborate, largely fictional world both to amuse himself and to test his teacher. Isabelle, we may infer, wants to create a life more eventful, dramatic and potentially perilous than those of her classmates.
Young & Beautiful by François Ozon (view the trailer)
Cannes is a place for shocks, jolts and surprises. This change of artistic direction from Chinese film-maker Jia Zhang-ke offers plenty. He has been known until this moment for an intensely considered, quiet documentary realism — particularly in the 2006 movie Still Life, about communities preparing to be drowned in the service of China’s Three Gorges hydro-electric Dam. So this brash, daring and often ultraviolent movie is atypical to say the least, avowedly inspired by the wuxia martial arts films of King Hu, but it has clear debts to Tarantino’s riffs on this same genre, and to Sergio Leone. The idea of Jia Zhang-ke making his own Pulp Fiction or A Fistful of Dollars (or rather yen) might before now have seemed fanciful. But that is what he has done — or almost.
In fact, A Touch of Sin eventually moves back to the calmer, realist cinematic language more associated with this director in its final act. And the film is in any case not simply a racy adventure in exploitation, but an angry, painful, satirical lunge into what the director clearly sees as the dark heart of modern China, and a real attempt to represent this to audiences elsewhere in the world. He sees China as a globalised economic power player suffering a new and violent Cultural Revolution of money-worship in which a cronyist elite has become super-rich in the liquidation of state assets, creating poisonous envy in the dispossessed who hear all about others’ wealth from the internet, and are supposed to gossip aspirationally about it on their mobile phones. A key scene in the film shows someone brooding over Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.
It is a fractured and divided story, like shards of a shattered mirror. Different strands and characters and stories emerge, tangentially concerned with each other. Jia has taken his plotlines from newspapers, violent stories of criminal despair, and by meshing them together, these tales, often involving guns, build up a picture of China as a desolate Wild West of lawless violence and cynicism. A worker erupts with anger at how the mine-chief has somehow been able to afford a sports car and to lease a private plane. Three brothers coming back to their hometown for their mother’s birthday reveal themselves to be deeply unhappy in various ways, and the unhappiness somehow always manifests itself in violence. Two have handguns: one casually slays three guys who have attempted to rob him on the road. Another, who has been telling his wife he has been travelling the country looking for work, reveals himself to be an ice-cool armed robber who doesn’t scruple to murder women in cold blood for their expensive designer bags. Another is having an affair with a sauna receptionist (played by Jia’s longtime leading actor Zhao Tao) and this too ends in a bloody confrontation.
Only in the final section does this arguably overlong movie calm down a little: spinning off into the story of a young man who finds work as a waiter in a bizarre brothel-hostess club for wealthy plutocrats and foreigners, the girls being ironically dressed in skimpy outfits as the soldiers and workers of the Maoist past. But the violence hangs over the film like a haze: gunshot wounds to the face, ugly and very real-looking fistfights.
This is a bitter, jagged, disaffected drama, pessimistic about China, pessimistic about the whole world. One characters asks another if he ever feels like travelling abroad. “Why would I?” he replies. “Everywhere is broke. Foreigners come here now.” Jia Zhang-ke’s movie gives us a brutal unwelcome.
A Touch of Sin by Jia Zhang-Ke (view the trailer)
One day, Ryota (Masaharu Fukuyama) receives a phone call from the hospital. The hospital informs Ryota that his 6-year-old son is not his biological son. After his birth, two babies were switched. Ryota and his wife (Machiko Ono) become torn by the news.The couple must decide whether to take back their biological son or keep the son they have raised for the last 6 years.
Like Father, Like Son by Hirokazu Kora-Eda
The Manor, directed by Shawney Cohen, about his personal experience of growing up in a Jewish family that run a famous strip club in Suburban Ontario.
Mood Indigo, a film by Michel Gondry. Based on Boris Vian’s 1947 novel Froth on the Daydream, the film revolves around a wealthy man named Colin who decides he wants to fall in love just like his best friend Chick. After meeting and marrying a woman named Chloe, everything seems to be going perfectly, but during their honeymoon her health quickly deteriorates due to a flower growing on her lungs.
Battle Royale Re-Covered Film Poster Contest Winner: Keorattana Luangrathajasombat
The Bling Ring (Editor’s note: Trailer makes it seem really saccharine but with Sofia Coppola in the chair I’m sure there will be plenty of asian loneliness.)
Andrei Tarkovsky did not know that The Sacrifice (1986) would be the last feature he would ever direct: initial preparations for the film started in 1983, two years before he was diagnosed with the cancer that would eventually kill him. But the great Russian master must have possessed an uncanny premonition of his imminent demise, because The Sacrifice—the second of his films produced during exile from his native land—bears unmistakable signs of a “final testament.” For one thing the film is dedicated to his son—“with hope and confidence”—almost as a personal farewell gift or parting word of advice. It also contains as a central narrative device a worldwide nuclear war that will destroy civilization. The film thus functions in part as a dire warning about the fate of mankind itself. (via)
