CineBad!!!

This film wasn’t exactly cheesy, per se, but it was presented in an extremely cheesy manner. The story itself was interesting– Ishmael, a white guy in the 1950’s Pacific Northwest (Ethan Hawke) is dumped by his Japanese childhood sweetheart (Youki Koudoh) for a Japanese guy (Rick Yune). The Japanese guy is now on trial for murder in an extremely racially biased case, and Ishmael has evidence to prove he’s innocent. Will he let the past slide and do the right thing? Or will he let bitterness well up inside him until he gets back at the girl for dumping his ass? It’s an interesting story, with dialogue that only bordered on corny a couple of times, but didn’t really go overboard.

However, the entire film looks like a giant Calvin Klein commercial. It’s gorgeous to look at. I spent the first few moments gazing in awe at the panoramic views of snow-covered trees and pebble beaches. There are washed-out slow motion battle scenes of dead soldiers lying on beaches with waves lapping at their bodies. And there’s the fish imagery. Why do we keep seeing washed out images of dead fish? Probably generations of film students will explore this, or maybe it’s already obvious to you and not to me, not being a film student.

Anyway, all of the photography is completely breathless, until you realize that it seems like it’s been eternity since we’ve had any plot development. Something will happen that’s central to the plot, and then we are subjected to a ton of artsy montages of beautifully dripping trees and flashbacks of little kids laughing in the sunlight in strawberry fields. It actually gets irritating after a while. It’s really distracting, at any rate. I was thinking OK, OK, I’ll buy the next Sierra Club calendar– when do we see the movie? I kept waiting for the words “Obsession by Calvin Klein” to pop up on the screen.

All in all, it was gorgeous to look at. If they wanted to make Koyaanisqatsi III with the images that would be fine. I wouldn’t be writing this at all if they had made two separate films, or even one with only a few artsy shots. But I suppose if you took all of the artsy imagery away, the film would be about 15 minutes long.