Z/Web

Author: Chris Roberts (II) (story) and Kevin Droney

Director: Chris Roberts

Being bored during action sequences doesn’t bode well for a film. Essentially Top Gun in outer space, this thing’s totally predictable. I love sci-fi and thought it looked interesting, but I got a lot of reading done during this movie.

Author: Peter Greenberg

Director: Peter Greenberg

From Soderbergh’s visually conservative approach to sex we jump to Greenberg’s almost pornographic visuals. But this film isn’t about cheap thrills. I’m honestly not sure exactly what it’s about — it jumps all around, touching on eroticism, literature, sexual identity, the meaning of life, death, calligraphy, beauty, ugliness. It’s the story of a Japanese girl whose writer father painted stories on her face when she was a child, and now as an adult she seeks out lovers to paint beautiful words on her body. Her problem is that the good artists are poor lovers and the good lovers are poor artists. Later, the woman begins to write on her lovers, and realizes her dream of becoming a published author. Oddly, she “submits” her work to the publisher on the body of her lovers. I found it puzzling that one could write a whole book on the flesh of a person, but I guess these are poetry-type books (and since each character is a word, oriental languages are more compact than Western ones). Even more bizarre, the publisher doesn’t seem to find this unusual presentation strange. The film’s title is what we would call a diary or a journal, though with an Eastern slant: most of the writings are Confuscious-like phrases or “lists” (i.e. “Things that make the heart pound.”). Interesting, but not exactly enlightening. (My favorite were the fun ones like “A hand cannot write on itself,” written, of course, on the fingers of one hand.) My knowledge of Eastern culture is minimal, so I’m sure I’m missing a great deal of the film’s message. It’s a complex movie: Greenberg frequently uses overlapping video sequences so several events or perspectives are happening simultaneously. It’s a powerful technique and beautifully done (in one scene he has everything in monotone except for the little girl’s face in the mirror is in full color). Another thing I liked: the multitude of languages. There’s English, French, Chinese, and Japanese mixed almost indiscriminately throughout the film. It’s delightful. (The music’s also similarly multi-cultural.) Overall, however, this is a bizarre, unsettling film: beautiful, exotic, and untouchable. (One other note: the DVD of this film is not widescreen and has zero extra features. Pretty much just VHS on a disc. Lame.)