Though they came out earlier this month, my coverage of The Elia Kazan Collection (Fox), The Night of the Hunter (Criterion) and Modern Times (Criterion) is new to my blog this week, due to a combination of late-arriving discs, a weekend not watching any movies and the head cold that followed. As for the rest, read on…

Stallone leads his crew

The Expendables (Lionsgate) – Sylvester Stallone has a spotty track record as a writer/director: passably effective at best, painfully misguided and lost in blind alleys of melodramatic kitsch as worst (“Driven”). He’s best at serving his own screen image (especially if already established by a previous filmmaker, as in the Rocky and Rambo sequels).

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Long ago in a fantasy far, far away...

Tarsem Singh’s The Fall may not be the best film of 2008, but it is was one of my greatest joys of the year, a lovely reminder that stories don’t belong to the teller. They have a life of their own. They live in the hearts and minds of those who hear them, read them, see them, whose experiences ricochet and reverberate off the characters and narrative turns and story details, expanding and enriching them with their own personal meanings. Tarsem Singh’s second feature is a glorious embrace of narrative innocence directed as a deliciously, vividly visual phantasmagoria of an adventure fantasy. As an injured silent movie Hollywood stuntman (Lee Pace) with a broken heart spins his make-believe epic to little immigrant girl Alexandria, a child migrant worker in the orange orchards who broke her arm in a fall, their respective personal experiences and cultural references mix for a story that shifts with each new addition and adjustment. It’s like a Terry Gilliam film directed by Zhang Yimou, with a script concocted by a child. Shot all over the world, it’s stunning to look at and a charge to see the travelers make their through a world where you can leap a continent just by crossing over the next rise. The story imagery and character identities are equal parts imagination and appropriation from the real world, and those connections, far from being deeply symbolic, are almost naively direct reflections of their respective emotional lives. It’s a sophisticated film about the naive pleasures of stories and storytelling.

Director Tarsem solos on one of the two commentary tracks in a near monotone of a voice, but packs his talk with illuminating observations and interesting production details. Actor Lee Pace and co-writers Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis are only slightly more animated and far less informative in their track. Also features two deleted scenes (running barely 90 seconds) and two behind-the-scenes featurettes (that together run almost an hour).

It’s also available in beautiful Blu-ray edition. I review the film in my MSN DVD column here.

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Wong Kar-wai’s English language debut My Blueberry Nights has been getting pummeled by the critics. Maybe it’s just me, but I loved this film.

The delirious poster to a delirious film

It’s classic Wong, circa Chungking Express, Fallen Angels and 2046: the short story format for tales about impossible relationships, unrequited loves, damaged loves, broken romances, and wounded hearts traveling to distract from the hurt. This is a kind of storytelling I love, about moments captured in time, about the sensuality of image, about the overwhelming emotional assault of loving and living. Norah Jones is no Faye Wong, but she has a face just as lush and open and Wong loves to look her and redirect our perspective through her wide eyes.

What is it about the American road movie that so attracts foreign directors? Blueberry isn’t anything like Paris Texas, except perhaps for the broken relationships and a score by Ry Cooder, but both are visions of America from the eyes of a foreign filmmaker making a first-time English film, complete with the romanticized baggage they bring. For Wenders, it’s the frontier, the myth of the cowboy loner in a civilized world, and the responsibility of the man to repair his family and own up to the damage he’s done. For Wong, it’s the confounding world of broken relationships and messy emotions that drive us to either smother or flee the ones we love. It’s no coincidence that Jones’ character, Lizzie, changes the name on her name tags with every new job.

Darius Khondji’s cinematography pushes the signature style that Christopher Doyle created for Wong, super-saturated colors and skip-frame effects that momentarily freeze images to isolate fleeting moments, with even more discreet camerawork, shooting through windows, from behind display cases, around furniture, as if eavesdropping.

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