Banned from Broadcast: April's Films
Short reviews of every movie I watched in April.
Welcome to the fourth installment of my movie review series! After having slacked off last month (only coming around to 12 films in total), this month saw me getting back into average-ish territory, having watched 20 feature-length and short films.
Seven of those alone were Tsai Ming-liang films. What can I say? It's my boy! His is also the first filmography I can see myself complete at some point in the future – assuming I can find all of his lesser known works.
This month marked the first time where the number of relevant posters turned out to be a prime number (20 - 1), meaning I can't evenly divide the poster collages below. Minor inconvenience, grr.
The Night: God, I loved this one. Very high up in my (as of now nonexistent) Tsai ranking. This short is perhaps best described as a film in his Walker series, but without the monk. What remains are the surroundings – and Tsai masterfully documenting a night somewhere in Hong Kong. I was immediately immersed, imagining myself aimlessly wandering the streets on display. I do think you need the right mindset to enjoy this one, but I definitely did when I watched it, as I did so when it was already dark outside and I was pretty much ready to go to bed.
Banned from Broadcast: The Movie - Saiko! The Large Family: I saw this because I wanted to watch ReignBot's video essay on it without spoiling myself. I loved how subtle it was with its horror, but by masquerading as a legitimate TV broadcast, it's locking itself away from a lot of potential, mainly better cinematography. A few short scenes in this were very uncomfortable. Needed, but uncomfortable.
No Form: Another entry in Tsai's Walker series that I was finally able to track down after not seeing a simple glimpse of it on the internet for months. This entry is interesting because its approach is way more experimental: There is a lot of symbolism here (which, frankly, I could not decipher), and, in general, it feels a lot more like an actual story. From what I can tell, it's sometimes not even counted as an entry in the series. In any case, it was still very enjoyable. Also, Nina Simone's Feeling Good at the end? Perfection.
Diamond Sutra: Yet another Walker film that I was finally able to see for myself. It might be the simplest entry to date – there is but one scene, the monk walking from right to left in his usual slow speed, next to a wall, the camera slowly moving along, eventually revealing a steaming rice cooker. While there may not be much here on the surface, Tsai did say that "gazing at the steam rising from a rice cooker reminded him of his mother’s face as she laid dying, exhaling her final breath".
Your Face: Tsai sits down with a few people, filming their, well, face. Sometimes these faces share personal stories, and while those parts were very interesting and engaging, the rest – where they would just sit there – didn't really do it for me. I wasn't able to get lost in these people's faces as easily as I can get lost in, say, the environments of his Walker films or The Night. It was a very weird experience; some scenes went by in a glimpse, while others seemed to drag on forever.
Resolution: This one was fine; I had a good time with it but it was nothing outstanding. Perhaps this is because I'd already watched The Endless and Synchronic, both from the same directors, and Resolution is one of their earlier works. Maybe they were still finding their style, throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. That being said, I don't want to spoil too much, but there's a, let's say, quirk this film has that can easily be dismissed as a stylistic choice, but in the end, actually ties in to the story. I thought that was really cool.
Lemon: It's a lemon. Yeah, not sure why I watched this either. Or why it was made, for that matter.
Tokyo - Ebisu: I've been meaning to check out some of Nishikawa's work for a while now. Not sure where I first heard of him, but this short was a nice way to spend five minutes. It shows us several train stations throughout Tokyo, filtered through something that looks like broken glass, every shard showing the same shot, but at a different time. A train will enter on the left side of the frame, passing through, seemingly disappearing into thin air at the edge of the leftmost shard.
Shibuya - Tokyo: More of what I'd already seen in Tokyo - Ebisu. Instead of solely relying on the glass shard look, this short also uses some other effects, such as, well, essentially the same as before, but without the shards – a neat, mostly invisible transition between one part of the frame and the next. I liked this one a bit more than Tokyo - Ebisu, mainly because of the different effects at play.
Sound of a Million Insects, Light of a Thousand Stars: Five stars for this title alone, am I right? For this silent short, Nishikawa buried 100 feet of 35 mm tungsten film near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and left it there for 24 hours. When he dug it back up, the radiation was all over the film, the results of which are now available for everyone to see. This isn't just a cool experiment, but there's also a clear message here, a paragraph at the end of the film reading: "The Japanese government says that it is safe for people to return to their homes in this area."
Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon: Even more of the concept behind Tokyo - Ebisu and Shibuya - Tokyo, but with bridges along the Yahagi River instead of train stations in Tokyo, cars replacing the trains. Some nice nature shots in this one!
Amusement Ride: The last short I watched during my Nishikawa binge is just that, a ride on the Cosmo Clock 21 ferris wheel. The way it's shot is pretty trippy – while watching, you have no idea if you're currently at the top or the bottom – and, for absolutely no reason, it has the best color grading and palette of any film I've seen this month.
Where Do You Stand, Tsai Ming-liang?: As part of the Where Do You Stand? series, the Centre Pompidou commissions filmmakers to make free-form shorts answering this very question in any way they want. Tsai's response is a series of shots of his paintings and chairs, located in the abandoned buildings he now lives in, together with his partner Lee Kang-sheng. There's a very interesting, more in-depth review on Letterboxd about their situation, which I encourage you to read.
Kwaidan: An anthology film consisting of five shorts with amazing colors and set designs. The Black Hair is a nice way to kick off the anthology. It drags a bit in the middle, but features a sick twist at the end. The Woman of the Snow makes full use of the film's color palette and sits very close behind Amusement Ride in the ranking of prettiest film this month. Hoichi the Earless does go on for a bit too long, but it's also kind of really terrifying, and the shot of Hoichi covered in writing has burned itself into my memory. Finally, In a Cup of Tea is the shortest of the bunch, and a silly, fun note to end on.
The Settlers: Jeez, okay. I was told this film would get kind of brutal. I mean, even the poster is covered in blood! And then I watched it, and it was a surprisingly relatively slow burn, but that was fine, because the scenery and, again, coloring was mesmerizing – and then, all of a sudden, shit hits the fan and things do get brutal. The Settlers is a film that is, strangely, both beautiful and haunting. Also, that time skip was unexpected. Also also, amazing final shot.
Madame Butterfly: Officially a "free interpretation of the myth", but it really doesn't have much to do with the original. Tsai follows a nameless woman through a crowded bus station in Kuala Lumpur, the woman having almost no money (certainly not enough for a ride) and getting increasingly nervous as it becomes clear that her lover, who promised her to come over and help her get a ride, would, in fact, break his promise. Then, a bed. This short does a great job at capturing that indescribable feeling of loneliness while you're technically, literally, surrounded by people.
Influenza: An entirely found footage-based film by the director of Parasite, filmed entirely by actual security cameras placed around South Korea? This was made for me! And, sure enough, I ended up liking it a lot. The fact that actual CCTV footage was used makes it look extremely realistic, which makes it all the more shocking when, uh, things start happening. It's crazy to see how much the themes that, through Parasite, would later reach a larger audience, are already on display here, 15 years earlier.
Late Night with the Devil: Okay, let's talk about the elephant in the room. This film gathered a lot of criticism because it used artificially generated images in some of its sequences. All of this was huge news, the first time something like this happened in a relatively popular movie. At the time of writing, the most popular comments on Letterboxd are about exactly this controversy. It's not distracting per se – I only noticed it in one graphic, which was on screen for maybe 5 to 10 seconds total – but I get it. If we let this slide, where do we draw the line? I certainly don't want future entries in this series credited to OpenAI's Sora. I don't have an answer to this question, so for now, I'll just say that the film itself was fine; a fun watch for found footage fans, which includes me.
A Conversation with God: Tsai wanted to film a spiritual medium through which God would, apparently, occasionally speak, so he grabbed his camcorder and jumped on his motorbike, only to get caught in "a traffic jam of people gathered at another god’s festival". And so, instead of the medium or God, he just filmed what he saw. There's a power outage at the festival, which is eventually fixed, and as the festival comes to a close and the night turns into day, Tsai wanders off, filming underground passages and fish out of water, perhaps still finding that conversation with God he was hoping for. After all – quoting Sally Jane Black on Letterboxd – "power outages [do] feel like divine intervention at times".
Knock at the Cabin: This is one of those films that I had on my watchlist for a while, not really remembering why I added it in the first place, and it turned out to be just fine. I'm not too familiar with M. Night Shyamalan's filmography, but I do know that everyone always talks about how crazy the plot twists in his films are, so I patiently waited for one. And then it happened, the twist was revealed, and ten minutes later I was suddenly thinking "Wait, was that it?", having expected something way heavier and deeper. But again, in the end, this film is fine. That's all there is to say.
While writing this post and adding the TMDB links, I noticed that, apparently, they now have a vibe ranking, which allows users to not just rate films on a scale from 0 to 100, but also on, well, vibes: How did this movie make you feel? Happy, interested, surprised, sad, disgusted, afraid or angry? How much of that emotion did you feel? Were you just a little scared or absolutely terrified?
This is such a cool, unique, dumb, interesting, odd idea. I don't know. I could keep listing adjectives. It's weird but I love it. I'd love to see which movie currently has the most "disgusted" votes.
Also – I know, I know – I didn't publish anything non-movie related this month. I did actually have a post lined up about Vocaloid. It's a unique, fascinating medium that defies definition, but in the end, the post just didn't work out. But that's life. Until next time, whenever that may be!