Boarding Gate, I Live in Fear: Record of a Living Being, & The Ballad of Narayama

Boarding Gate is dreck. Asia Argento cannot act at all. Michael Madsen isn't all that good either. Kelly Lin is fine, but Kim Gordon is not at all an actor either. Just a miserable film. Olivier Assayas has done some good stuff (Clean, Demonlover (the greatest corporate espionage and hentai porn movie ever), Irma Vep, and convincing Maggie Cheung to marry him), but this one wasn't worth watching at all.

I Live in Fear: Record of a Living Being is a mid-50s Kurosawa movie about an old man who is trying to move his entirely family to Brazil to escape nuclear fallout. It's occasionally played for laughs, but it's also a depressing movie about how much some in Japan were affected by the bomb. Considering Kurosawa's later Rhapsody in August, he is one of those affected and horrified.

The Ballad of Narayama is Shohei Imamura's epic film of sex and a horrible way to treat old people. Let's just say that if there were actual Obama Death Panels proposed to replace what they do to old people here, it would get a lot of support. At least they'd have a chance. One thing I want to say: I never need to see another person slamming their own head into rocks in order to break teeth. Eesh. And the extremely weird sex stuff really freaked me out. As such, the movie is well-made, but I just couldn't get past how rough a time everyone had. Again, eesh.