Night on Earth

I'd been telling someone about the taxi driver story in the book I'm writing and they recommended me this film. I thought I'd check it out, so stuck it on while eating a Chinese takeaway banquet.

I'm really glad I got to see this! A Jim Jarmusch film from 1991 that had completely slipped under my radar. Looking at the credits it seems like it was funded/produced by a Japanese organisation.

The film is made up of 5 stories, in 5 different cities throughout the world. They are linked through an interlude scene which shows the 5 different time zones on clocks on the wall. The camera then zooms into the clock, through it to a map, to the city. The 5 cities are: Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki. From the intro where we see the Earth in space, it almost looks as if we are an alien coming down to Earth for the night to witness the lives of 5 taxi drivers. Maybe it's an alien writing a PhD on Earth's taxi drivers...

The LA story kicks things off, and this was the ropiest of them all – Winona Ryder is the Tom Boy taxi driver, and who would guess it – she's also a babe who's about to unexpectedly get cast as a movie star by the female exec passenger she takes on. But the ending saves this part of the film, and then it just gets better. I loved all the characters, I loved the dialogue – and a lot of the film revolves around dialogue, but it never drags – and I loved the shots of the cities the cabbies drive through.

I can't decide which of the stories was my favourite, because I think they were all as strong as each other.

The film made me nostalgic for a time when storytelling and pace could be a bit slower. I think the shift to digital has made filmmakers rush too much. Everything is rushed now, there are no slow builds and we've lost a lot in the way of atmosphere from modern films.

Really enjoyed this. 8/10

The Birth of Saké

Yeah, this was an interesting documentary.

I have to say – I was more interested in the lives of the workers than I was in the saké itself. Watching it with a hangover was perhaps one of the reasons why I didn't get too excited about seeing lots of shots of booze.

To be honest, therein lay the issue with this documentary. I looked up the director Erik Shirai on IMDB afterwards and saw that he was a director of photography/cinematographer. There were too many atmospheric shots of steam rising etc. He didn't focus on the people who made the nihonshu enough, and I think that's what slightly marred what could've been an amazing documentary. In comparison to Jiro Dreams of Sushi, this documentary spent too much time trying to look pretty, and would've benefitted from delving into the lives of the brewers more.

Because they were so interesting! These guys have an amazing amount of dedication to their jobs – sometimes at complete sacrifice to their own lives. For example – it was interesting to learn that they all live at the brewery for 6 months and leave their lives behind, but I honestly would've loved to see what these guys do for the other half of the year! It would've taken a tiny bit more work on the filmmaker's part, but I think it would've made for a better film overall. Like the dude Chi-chan who lived in a big old house by himself, and we found out that his wife had passed away, and so he couldn't wait to get back to the brewery. Why couldn't we have spent more time with the characters?

A good subject, and nicely shot, but I think slightly flawed in its insistence on pretty camerawork and slowed down footage. 7/10

Mean Streets

Well... this film was just plain bizarre.

I think I tried to watch it many years ago and couldn't get into it. I can see why – it's a very peculiar film, and there's a lot of WTF moments in it.

I managed to see it all this time, but it did take me two sittings. Started it yesterday, but got tired midway through so I finished it off today.

It's not necessarily a bad film at all. But it is rather confusing and chaotic. A lot of the time the editing and the voice overs (coupled with bad sound recording) make the film feel lurchy and distorted. The drunken scene with Harvey Keitel when he has the camera strapped to him great, and I think works really well, but other parts of the film are equally disorienting due to shaky camera work and choppy composition, when perhaps that wasn't the desired effect.

There's lots of bad cutting between scenes that often makes you scratch your head, or jump back a bit in surprise. I spent a bit of time wondering wait, where are we? What's going on? And I don't feel like it was in a positive way.

Some of the storylines seemed like non sequiturs, and I wasn't sure what they meant. For example, just off the top of my head, the scene where the drunken soldier back from Vietnam jumps up and tries to attack the girl, why did he do that? And why did Harvey Keitel end up dancing with her in a cupboard? What was the deal with the dancer who he invited out for Chinese food, but then didn't show? And why did we cut to a scene with her at the end after the car crash? Why? What? When? How?

The final scene was pretty good (and very unexpected). Robert DeNiro was great in it, and I found the character he played pretty different from anything else I've ever seen him do. The music was also fantastic.

I wasn't sure about all the religious themes running through the film. At times it felt a little overdone.

But the thing about the film is, in this weird way, from the moments of brilliance here and there, you can see that Scorsese was destined for bigger things. 7/10

Contact (Re-watch)

It was a rainy summer's day, so we decided to stay in and watch a film.

I'd seen this film many years ago, and I remembered bits and pieces. My viewing partner commented on the excessive use of music throughout the film, and once this had been drawn to my attention, I couldn't quite block it out.

The film is OK. I liked a lot of the ideas behind it, but I wasn't sure of the execution in parts. It reminded me a lot of the the film Arrival, which I saw at the cinema in November last year. But I have to say that this film hasn't aged so well, and that Arrival just does it all a lot better.

We couldn't quite work out how Matthew McConaughey's character went from being some crackpot journalist in the jungle, all the way to being some hotshot bigwig in the White House. It seemed to be the most far-fetched aspect of the story.

It made me want to watch Carl Sagan's TV series called Cosmos. 6/10