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Sept 7 movie: Irma Vep. Kicking off the Maggie Cheung tribute with a winner: this is a hilarious French film about an eccentric, formerly brilliant director named René Vidal, doing a remake of the silent French classic Les Vampires, which stars Maggie Cheung (playing herself) as Irma Vep. René starts to fall apart and the production follows him down, with a lot of great moments along the way: Maggie's silly costar, who tries to rehearse a scene using a squeak toy shaped like a steak for a gun; the reporter who interviews Maggie, knows nothing about her career and only wants to rave about John Woo; the replacement director who talks about high principles and then admits that he needs the work because his welfare is about to run out. Irma Vep is low-key and dryly funny until the last few minutes, when they show the footage René edited before (or maybe after) he completely lost his shit. It's bizarre and brilliant. A fitting tribute to Ms. Cheung.

(I tried to take a picture of the movie within the movie, which is when I found out that my camera was dead. I miss my camera!)

September 6 movie: Hero. Georg has already posted just about everything I wanted to say. So I will just add that this was amazing. Zhang Yimou's sense of visual spectacle doesn't fail him; the use of color is exquisite. There's been some criticism of the politics behind Hero. I don't know too much about it because I was trying to avoid reviews before I saw the movie. But I think it has something to do with the story about sacrificing oneself to help a tyrant who does good for the people despite his brutality. I guess some people feel like that message is a little convenient for the current Chinese government. Perhaps that is a compromise one has to make in order to make films in cooperation with the Chinese government. Or perhaps Zhang really feels that way. Or perhaps people are reading too much into Hero & it shouldn't be treated as an allegory. My understanding of Chinese history and current politics isn't what it should be, so I can't really come to a decision on that one.

Anyway, back to the movie. All the principles were great -- Jet Li, Tony Leung, Zhang Ziyi, Chen Daoming -- (though I didn't even recognize Donnie Yen!) but for me the standout was Maggie Cheung. She is simply luminous. While the plot is more about Jet Li, the emotional core of the movie is the relationship between Cheung and Leung. She's come a long way from playing Jackie Chan's ditzy girlfriend in the Police Story movies.

I added several Maggie Cheung movies to the Netflix queue -- Heroic Trio (which we've seen before), and The Soong Sisters, Ashes of Time and The Dragon from Russia (which we haven't). We've got the DVD of Irma Vep around here somewhere, I might watch that if I have time in the next couple of days.

Sept 1 movie: Zatoichi Challenged. We finally got around to watching the second Zatoichi movie IFC had shown a couple of weeks ago. This one has Zatoichi delivering a boy whose mother has died to the father, in another town. I must say, the addition of a cute child to the Zatoichi formula was not an improvement. Bonding scenes between Zatoichi and the child took up way too much time that could have been spent with Zatoichi kicking bad guy ass. This was probably my least favorite of the Zatoichi movies I've seen. The subplot (about an artist who is forced to paint pornographic images on fine china for the black market) probably would have made more sense if I were more familiar with Japanese cultural history.

I don't know whether we read this in a review, in an IFC factoid, or if Georg looked it up somewhere online, but apparently "zato" means both "blind" and "masseur" in Japanese. Which is interesting because Zatoichi is a blind loner who makes his living as a masseur. And "ichi" means "one," so I guess that makes him the "lone blind man" or "lone masseur."

August 31 movie: Arsenic and Old Lace. This was a bit -- actually a lot -- zanier than I typically prefer, and I'm also not crazy about play adaptations that still feel stagey (all the action in one room, everyone projecting to the balcony, etc). But Cary Grant makes just about anything worth watching. Plus a great role for Peter Lorre, whose character has more sense of humor than in any other movie I've seen. The constant reminders that it was originally a play actually increased the humor in Grant's job as a theater critic. (Though I can't help thinking that they could have made him a movie critic -- did they have movie critics back then?) And the last line -- "I'm not a Brewster! I'm the son of a sea cook!" -- is, if not quite as good as the last line in Some Like it Hot, still up there.

September 2 movie: Fiesta. Last night was our own little fiesta: Sylvia came over for dinner and Ricardo Montalban movies. We had originally planned to also watch My Man and I, which Sylvia has on tape, but due to the lateness of the evening we only got to Fiesta. Montalban's first English language movie, Fiesta is a fun little romp about a young Mexican who is expected to become a matador like his father, but secretly wants to be a concert pianist. For an Esther Williams fan I think this would be a disappointment as the movie is sadly lacking in water. But for a Ricardo Montalban fan, it's a treat.

The movie is an unintentional exercise in multiculturalism, with Esther Williams playing Montalban's twin sister, Mary Astor as his mother, Fortunio Bonanova as the father (at least he's from Spain), Akim Tamiroff as the family retainer, John Carroll as Williams' boyfriend, and Cyd Charisse as Montalban's girlfriend. Montalban may be the only Latino actor with a speaking part in this movie entirely set in Mexico.

We had fun with the accents (or lack thereof): Astor, Williams, Charisse and Carroll didn't even try (we laughed every time Williams addressed her boyfriend Pepe as "Peppy"); Bonanova and Tamiroff produced passable accents; and Montalban's was so over the top we would have thought he was faking if we didn't know better. It was as if he felt like he needed enough Mexican accent to make up for all the others.

Other funny moments were watching the bullfighting scenes, as they shifted from close-up to long shot, with a running commentary of "Ricardo .... not Ricardo! Ricardo ... not Ricardo!" Also, early in the movie the father bizarrely threatens another character with "And for that, he must pay with his life!" From then on every time anyone disagreed with the father, Sylvia would hilariously add "and for that, you too must pay with your life!"

Dinner was as fun as the movie. We had Mexican food, naturally! Nothing fancy, just a Rick Bayless recipe for a stew of chorizo and chayote. Which is a summer squash that looks vaguely like a pear but tastes vaguely like zucchini, only milder and sweeter. Raw chayote also leaves a gluey paste on your hands when you handle it. The cookbook said you just need to scrub your hands, and I did (with the scrubby pad even), but that stuff does not want to come off. I still have some of it on my hand. Next time I will definitely wear gloves.

We also had green rice (rice with pureed parsley and cilantro added to the cooking liquid) and Sylvia brought fruit salad, heirloom tomatoes and some really nice avocado flavored cheese. She also brought a "Hungarian Black" pepper which looked a lot like a black jalapeno. Georg and Sylvia ate it but I did not. They said it was not as hot as a raw jalapeno, but still hot. It was really nice to make dinner for a friend without it being some huge elaborate dinner party that takes days to prepare. Just a fun, low stress evening.