hyped garbage

Fantastic!

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Have you ever had a conversation with somebody whose voice was so monotone, so breathy, that they almost put you to sleep while you stood there and listened to them? That's the case with Michael Pitt here, whose low speaking narration pretty much gave me a headache from the temples because of its exaggerated gentility. He's a handsome young man, but his screen presence is a negative here, perhaps explaining as to why I never heard of him. With Keira Knightly being a more well known star, I'd expected her to be the lead, but like the Japanese beauty (Sei Ashina) whom Pitt becomes obsessed with, barely gets to say a word. Gratuitous moments of "gentle, loving sex" become simply eye rolling as another crescendo of oh so sweet music plays over the ecstasy that only the characters feel. I hate long recitals of poetry, but that would be more fascinating than the pace that this creeks by in. It's a sight to behold photography wise, but in other aspects, oh what a bore! The music strives too hard to be profound and the long bouts of silence between dialog makes it a struggle to get through. I would have liked more political exposition of the closed 1860's Japanese society, but limited attempt is given to aide the viewer in getting any real example of what had really gone on during that time period. Only Alfred Molina seemed to try to give some passion, and he's rather wasted.Too many films post millennium think that all they need is an exotic setting, romantic characters, and a mist of a plot to have a movie. What ends up happening is that the audience is lost either in the sleepy mood music or too busy looking at the art direction, and any attempt at real cohesion ends up missing. This us one reason I have stopped going to the movies and even caring about the award season, because in the attempt to be artistic or profound, they've just become an empty emotional shell of pretty colors and nothing to really grip its audience.

Sure this one hasn't a fighting / military content but there's a lot of closeness as well: the period, the trips to Japan, the discovery of a another world and also an another love. Likewise, the Japanese way of life is depicted with full of poetry and Yakamoto's soundtracks recalls Zimmer's one. Keira plays the devoted young wife waiting patiently for her husband to come back from his endless trips. So we don't see her often and honestly, if the first trip is interesting, watching the others was tiring and totally repetitive! If « last samurai » moved me deeply with this simple life, here i was quickly bored as the cast isn't great and the hollow missions takes places in winter ! The only connection I had was to marvel about those Japanese wood houses because if the technology is simple, their design is much more complex than our poor cabin and prefigure the mind of this people for electronic.

Gosh, yet another movie with a delicious idea, but mediocre execution. The thing is boring in a pretty way and vaguely calls up romantic notions of singular love. You may not make it until the end, but I urge you to, because the structure is delicious.It has a triple frame, skeins between two worlds and a one-armed billiard master who triggers all. One frame is the man in the story, the target of love, sitting in a garden that his now-dead wife has unfolded for him. He is sitting with his wife's designated listener, and he recites the story that we have seen leading to this. Another frame is the letter which I will focus on. This letter is the centerpiece of a scene quite late in the movie. I know this is originally a book, but it seems to be one conceived cinematically so it is fair to say that this scene is likely to have been envisioned first. We have an ordinary, truly nondescript Frenchman who is chosen to be the connection between two worlds, his world of the earth and garden and another exotic world. He finds a love in both worlds, each natural to the forces in that world.His love at home is played by a dull Keira Knightly. His love in Japan is a Chinese woman, unreachable. This letter is to him in France, from that Chinese woman, writing in Japanese from a location whence she was taken to make her unreachable to him. Now the letter is read to him in the scene that is highly structured. We look at the woman reading, a lovely Asian woman who acts as surrogate writer. We see our man in a mirror, and it is the mirror folds that are wonderful here.This letter is a mirror of one first passed to him. That letter is literally folded in the Shinto fashion where the strokes of the calligraphy are intended to bleed into each other as metapoetry. This second letter is later unfolded when our man comes back to this reader and all is revealed. Here is the structure:The Chinese lover who wrote the letter was a second concubine to a warlord with an honored wife. This lover had her affair with our man through a surrogate concubine. Her letter is read in the scene by another professional surrogate, a (high class) Japanese prostitute in France, who herself is one step removed from her lost Eurpoean love. She reads the letter as if she were the distant Chinese lover. But wait! She actually did write the letter in a conflation of folds of distance-surrogacy and the inherent two-world nature of romance. But wait again, for in yet another fold of the letter we learn that though the alluring prostitute did write the letter, she did not compose it. That was done by the French wife, in a secret act of love.Love, my folded readers, love as a carefully folded letter.Here is the letter. Note the peculiar grammar of "sense" at the end:My dear master, do not be afraid. Do not move. Do not speak. No one will see us. Stay as you are. I want to look at you. We have the night to ourselves and I want to look at you. Your body for me, your skin, your lips... close your eyes. No one can see us, and I am here at your side. Do you feel me?When I touch you for the first time, it will be with my lips. You will feel the warmth, but you will not know where. Perhaps it will be on your eyes. I will press my mouth to your eyes and you will feel the warm. Open your eyes now my beloved. Look at me, your eyes on my breasts, your arms lifting me, letting me slide onto you. My faint cry. Your body quivering. There is no end to it, don't you see?You will forever be throwing your head back. I will forever be shaking off my tears.This moment had to be. This moment is, and this moment will continue, from now until forever. We shall not see one another again; what we were meant to do we have done. Believe me my love, we have done it forever. Preserve your life out of my reach, and if it serves your happiness, do not hesitate for a moment to forget this woman for no sense without a trace of regret. Farewell.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Silk was a flop, not the international success its backers had hoped for after the director's The Red Violin made such a splash a decade earlier. It is worthy of attention, in pinpointing some cautionary messages to other would-be Visionary (that recently overworked term) filmmakers.1. TRAVELOGUE: Film is unfortunately a highly literal, through visuals, medium, and it is easy to become mesmerized by the shots. Mature directors scrupulously avoid this pitfall, but perhaps Canadian director Francois Girard has subconsciously assimilated the approach of Terrence Malick. Like Malick, he only ventures forth from his artistic cave once a decade, and feels compelled to make each shot the most perfect and beautiful of all time. This is not cinema -this is "how I spent my vacation" -a $20,000,000 slide show.2. FOOLED BY THE RUSHES: It could be a by-product of the far-flung co-production status (Silk is structured officially as a Canadian/Italian/Japanese project, an unusual combo), but the movie displays an age-old problem of Hollywood, caused by over-monitoring of the rushes. Many a stiff, stolid film result has looked "marvelous" in the dailies. Studios traditionally made decisions like director firings or bringing in a troubleshooter to haul in the reins on a project based on the quality of the rushes. This makes sense in a bean-counter universe, but has nothing to do with the ultimate movie, which as Hitchcock noted, is stored in the director's head. Watching Silk I was struck that the rushes coming back from the various locations truly must have looked fabulous, but that is no indicator that they would ultimately amount to anything in a gestalt sense. Only the director and his editors know what will be needed in terms of coverage, and how the pieces might mesh into a whole. It's easy to get bamboozled by striking shots, just as at the other extreme it's easy to assume the worst when a neophyte director falls behind schedule and isn't giving the execs their daily meters of processed celluloid.3. DISTANCING: Brecht and Godard have long been the inspiration for film directors to keep the audience at a safe distance -break up the naturally hypnotic effect that a movie has for the viewer, which Hitchcock exploited to a fare-thee-well. In Silk, Girard uses the crutch of voice-over narration to sabotage one's involvement in the action/dialog/story. Like Zentropa, another pretentious exercise by a wannabe "visionary" director, the somnolent narration literally puts the viewer to sleep. His insistence on oft-criticized bland American accents for French characters further abstracts the story, and makes it near-impossible to smoothly enter into the life of the protagonists. Low affect is the instruction to lead Michael Pitt and even Alfred Molina, the latter bringing professional life to his rattled off exposition, and even some wit. Keira Knightley gets to actually emote in her patented shy-but-effusive manner, but I noticed the director cutting away from her as quickly as possible, and even though she is the key central figure of the story's romantic theme, her overall screen time is reduced to the bare minimum. The dialog by Girard and Michael Golding is almost all in the form of recitations: never sounding natural or using vernacular. That's as big a mistake as the bland American accents.4. CRYPTIC: Adapting a novel is difficult; perhaps this is why the Academy gives a separate Oscar category for adaptations as opposed to the Original Screenplay niche for the Woody Allens of the world. Too often a film (or TV) adaptation REQUIRES that the viewer be not just conversant but well-nigh totally immersed in the source work in order to appreciate the film. (I recently watched the British TV series A Dance to the Music of Time, via Netflix, after a marathon reading of all 12 Powell novels it's based upon, and the damn thing would have made no sense whatsoever without having the books fresh in my mind.) For Silk, many basic and virtually all nuanced elements are lost without knowledge of the source, a damning fault. The intended purity of not subtitling the Japanese dialog segments falls squarely into this problem area too. The movie should stand alone, and if it can't, why bother? It's not impossible -everybody's favorite of all-time The Godfather saw Coppola creating a work of art that never requires one to go back and read Mario Puzo's pulp novel.5. THE PITT FACTOR: Folks love to criticize young Mr. Pitt, an actor who future generations will scratch their heads over: "how did he get into so many films?". Pauly Shore, Phillips Holmes in the '30s, and many 4-F performers like Sonny Tufts and William Prince during WW II come to mind. Following the death of James Dean, for over a decade innumerable folks imitated his breakthrough persona, of which I recall Michael Parks and Christopher Jones becoming the most typecast. Now we have Mr. Pitt, the lookalike thespian doomed to live in the shadow of Leonardo DiCaprio, let alone his equally handsome namesake Brad. What a cross to bear! 6. UNLOCKING THE MYSTERY: I was reminded of Werner Herzog's overlooked classic Heart of Glass while watching Silk. Both films have transcendentally beautiful landscapes. Underneath the main romantic and cross-cultural themes, they have the same core parable: a one-industry community (Glassblowing in Herzog, Silk creation here) poised on the edge of disaster. Herzog hypnotized his cast to get a unique, otherworldly effect. Girard has Pitt & most others sleepwalking, to null effect.