Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983, UK/Japanese)

What popped into my head near the end of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, was not anything about culture clash or the insanity of war (though the film has both in spades), but the idea of hysterical masculinity. Lawrence is a hyper-masculine film – from the outset, it’s all about manliness, masquerading, at times, as nobility or differing sensibilities about honor. And it’s not the calm, dutiful masculinity of many war films, or one of their closest genre counterparts, the cowboy movie, but a shrill, piercing study of what it’s like to be a man when so many different kinds of men are thrown together.

Lawrence is a strange movie – in many ways, it works to subvert its own genre by almost entirely ignoring the context of the Javanese POW camp where the bulk of the action is set. Sure, the Japanese are in charge here, but it’s not just the English they’re keeping an eye on, but the Dutch, Aussies, and in a way, even the Koreans. There’s virtually no mention of the war that rages on in the Pacific (or Europe) – the camp itself is the only real battlefront that matters, and the battle itself is not necessarily all about East versus West, but more often about what makes a man. The film is also quite marked in its entire lack of women. There are two or three in a group shot during a flashback sequence, and one story about a particular woman, but beyond this, nothing. It’s as if the removal of women forces a closer investigation of how all of these men relate in the context of only one another. There’s the suspicion of femininity, and the fear of the homosexual, obviously, and this underlies a lot of the tension between various characters. There're also the multiple implied manhoods, those of the Japanese versus the English, the idealists versus the pragmatists, the men of action versus the men of thought. And then there is the bizarre world brought forth by Major Cellier’s (Davie Bowie) flashbacks to his relationship with his younger brother. Brilliant casting, by the way – the androgynous alien as an idealistic British soldier? Bowie’s good, too, as is the rest of the cast (I had no idea that Takeshi Kitano was in this film, nor Jack Thompson). And what about the make-up job on Ryuichi Sakamoto?

Despite the fact that in the end, only one man is really left standing, Lawrence is never explicit on what kind of masculinity is “right”, or if any of them are. The movie ends on a hopeful note, a gesture of goodwill and understanding between cultures and between men. But for a film full of men and manliness, Lawrence never seems to be sure if any of it is really a good thing.

Jumper (2008, USA)

It's kind of hard to explain how bad Jumper really is without going into hyperbole. It's so bad that it's not really funny at all, which is a shame, because there's a lot of fodder here, what with a white-haired Samuel L. Jackson chasing an incredibly wooden Hayden Christensen around the world, on the front lines of a war between people who can jump through space and those who wish to stop them. Well, "war" may be a bit overblown, since we only ever see a couple of jumpers in the movie, and they don't seem terribly organized.

In any case, shame on you, Doug Liman. You've made some awfully entertaining movies, but this is not one of them. Worse, it's sloppy - the overall feeling is that all of the independent sequences were shot and then put in a blender rather than edited in any logical way. Thus, David (Christensen) learns to control his jumping abilities, robs a couple of banks, beds the ladies and has lunch on the Sphinx, until one morning Jackson shows up and tries to kill him. Naturally, this is the perfect time for David to hunt down his childhood sweetheart (Rachel Bilson, competing with Christensen for the annual Keanu Reeves blankness award) and drag her around the world. David seems somewhat surprised when Jackson and his friends show up again to try to kill him and take the girl hostage. Really? Because for most people, that would be the first thing expected. But David, and the filmmakers, aren't quite that bright, and their dimness is the enduring takeaway from Jumper.

Shopping for Fangs (1997, USA)

Justin Lin’s first film (together with Quentin Lee) shows all the hallmarks of an overly ambitious couple of film school grads on their first project, along with the newborn legacy of another Quentin – Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction has its fingerprints all over Fangs. The film follows several young Asian-American Angelinos as their paths cross during their explorations of – what else – identity and sexuality. Phil thinks he might be turning into a werewolf, or is it merely the side effects of too much testosterone and bad luck with the ladies? Katherine confides in her shrink about her failing marriage and the weird waitress who seems to be stalking her. The waitress, Trinh, makes friends with a lonely young gay man (John Cho, in his first film) and talks endlessly of her love for Katherine.

Obviously, the whole thing is more than a little overwrought, and it completely loses the thread in the last twenty minutes or so, but the first hour is actually quite entertaining, if not a little silly. It seems as if the first-film plague of trying to prove how smart they are handicap Lin and Lee’s efforts. Similarly, the film’s visual style is striking at times, but a little too schizophrenic in general. But it's easy to see how Lin jumped from this to Better Luck Tomorrow and his more recent Hollywood projects.

Shoot the Piano Player (1960, French)

I’m fairly sure that Shoot the Piano Player is Truffaut’s idea of an action movie. In this, his fourth film, he plays with genre in the same way that he plays with camera tricks and sound effects – and as much as I can see how influential his work and the French New Wave in general were on cinema, I just can’t bring myself to care too much about the films and their characters. I prefer proto-New Waver Jean-Pierre Melville’s more straightforward gangsters and louts. Bob and Silien at least feel like real characters, not just compendiums of tics and happenstance, figures to show off around. And while Melville’s films are in many ways just as stylized as Truffaut’s and Godard’s, they retain stronger ties to classic European drama (in addition to early American noir). I guess this is one of those rare instances where I like the traditional more than I do the novel. One of these days, I’ll quit trying to like the French New Wave.

Slumdog Millionaire (2008, UK/USA)

Danny Bolye’s Slumdog Millionaire may have a Bollywood-esque plot, with all of the twists and turns to be expected of Indian melodrama, but it’s still essentially a Western film at heart. Slumdog doesn’t luxuriate in its inherent ridiculousness, it slams through each moment with the help of Boyle’s shotgun editing and numerous montage sequences. Perhaps it’s this sense of speed that lost the film its impact on me – when we got to the end, it didn’t feel like the triumph that it should have been. It doesn’t help that the first half is much stronger than the second, with an excellent cast of child actors making their way through some of the most dismal circumstances imaginable (though in the most gorgeous manner – Boyle seems to fetishize the colors and textures of the slums). Once the action moves into the present and relies more heavily on the game show framing device, the movie loses steam, just as it should be ramping up. Slumdog is probably one of the most mature films of Boyle’s career, but it just lacked the emotional wallop I was expecting – needing – at the end.

Ghajini (2008, Indian)

That Ghajini is a Bollywood reimagining of Memento is weird enough – that it’s a remake of a 2005 South Indian film by the same name, featuring the same writer/director and half of the same cast . . . well, that’s just bizarre. Aamir Khan and his magnificent torso are cast in the Guy Pierce role as Sanjay, a man who’s lost his life and his love, with nothing to show for it but an acute sense of rage, a wicked pair of skull scars, and a memory that resets itself every 15 minutes. The movie bounces back and forth from the present, in which Sanjay hunts down the titular gangster Ghajini, and the past, where he juggles his high-power life as a cell phone CEO with a secret romance with aspiring model Kalpana (the luminous Asin). Secret, because he wants to make sure that the lovely do-gooder loves him for the man he is, not for his crores.

If ever a movie deserved to be called bombastic, it’s Ghajini. The completely over-the-top storyline and thudding soundtrack start at minute one and don’t let up for another three hours. It’s certainly entertaining, though – I don’t think there was a moment of boredom in all that time, what with the fight sequences, songs, and innumerable moments of suspended disbelief. It’s also quite easy to see the debt that the new Indian action cinema owes to Hong Kong. I would caution Bollywood newcomers, though, as the film is so frequently ludicrous that I found myself giggling at inopportune moments. Maybe it was the way that the costume designers managed to reveal Khan’s abs or pecs at every possible moment, even while he’s giving a business presentation. (Seriously.)

Speaking of Khan, I’m sure he took this role in order to stretch a little, enjoying not only the typical Bollywood leading man lines, but also the chance to go completely apeshit in the memory-loss sequences. He goes so nuts that he manages to imbue the proceedings with some sense of gravity – early on, there’s a great moment when the audience sees Sanjay “remembering” what has happened to him, and Khan manages to import that for this character, the most painful thing is having to relive loss over and over and over again. I wish Khan would work more, and perhaps trade off a bit with one of the other big Khans, Shah Rukh. Shah Rukh has grown on me over the years, and he’s very good at what he does, but he can be terribly hammy, and he also lacks some of Aamir’s guileless charm. I think Aamir is the only Khan who could pull off dancing with four other versions of himself – some of which are wearing faux-hawks – and then throw a guy through a wall 20 minutes later.