Silver City, The Saddest Music in the World, & Princess Raccoon

Silver City was a disappointing Sayles film. It felt like it was going to build up to something much better than it ended up as. He's clearly very capable of putting together a sprawling cast and making a brilliant film, but in this case, it just didn't work nearly as well as it could have. Had I not been such a big Sayles fan, I probably would have been more forgiving to the film, but I can't. And I only seem to like Billy Zane when he's making fun of himself, which both doesn't happen nearly enough and is a really bad sign for him and his almost non-existent acting talents.

The Saddest Music in the World is bizarre. I didn't recall that it was filmed like an early talkie with a filter for an almost black and white effect. But it was, and it was um... strange in a funny way? I really didn't know that Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the original screenplay. If you haven't read Remains of the Day, you need to, by the way, because it's excellent. Beer-filled glass legs, a ridiculous contest that rewards winners with a slide into a beer vat, and a crazy Canadian family are some of the things that make this film completely unique. Plus, there were lots of stereotypes and (I hope, intentional) mergings of cultures of the other countries involved in the contest.

Princess Raccoon is another unique film. Well, actually, I find it sort of a weird amalgamation of the crazy musical stylings of The Happiness of the Katakuris, the tanuki of Pom Poko, the colorwork of Tokyo Drifter (makes sense since it's also a Seijun Suzuki film), and both Snow White and Romeo and Juliet for plot. Oh, and it's also done with CGI and green screen work to make it look like a play. Seriously, just a weird frickin' movie. Some of the songs were also terrible, and in the styles of Edith Piaf, classic movie musical, rap, Metallica-ish rock, mariachi, and Buddhist chant, of course some were going to suck. But it's very hard to get past the pairing of Zhang Ziyi and Jo Odagiri, two very attractive people. Oh, and the subtitles were typical horrible mistranslations and grammatical mistakes. And how much more difficult is it to write out Princess Raccoon rather than just Princess? I know little Japanese, but even I know that tanuki hime means Princess Raccoon. Well, tanuki aren't exactly raccoons, more like raccoon-shaped forest sprites, but it's close enough. I know I say this a lot, but there are no movies like this. Even the closing dance sequence, somewhat reminiscent of Zatoichi's (Takeshi Kitano's brilliant film), just messes with you.