FLM 20 DVD Reviews

Curse of the Golden Flower
by Sean Axmaker, a Seattle-based film critic and DVD reviewer who writes for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, MSN Entertainment and other publications

In Zhang Yimou’s Hero and House of Flying Daggers, idealists and assassins battle for love, honor and power in a frenzy of emotion and action that dances across the screen in kinetic spectacles. For Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang pushes the pageantry to sumptuous extremes but leaves the romance behind, leaving the magnificent backdrop merely a hollow façade for the ugliness behind the palace walls.

Audiences apparently weren’t expecting such a dark and disillusioned drama and it received mixed reviews stateside. Yet it’s unmistakably the work of the director of Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern, a chamber drama played out in a dream palace transformed into a maze of plots and conspiracies. Gong Li and Chow Yun-fat carry themselves with old-fashioned movie star majesty as Emperor Pin and Empress Phoenix, the most hostile royal screen couple since Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter, each playing their part with righteous assurance while their sons are forced to choose sides or get caught in the middle.

The film is all pageantry, magnificent but empty, from the bitter charade of manners and devotion the monarchs perform with dutiful precision (while plotting against one another behind chamber doors) to the martial choreography and epic battles that are more animated action painting than thrilling spectacle. This is not a battle of champions but a war, and the dazzling armies become waves of imposing, unemotional, fatal force. There are no swooning emotions or operatic sacrifices here, but the tragedy of their cold and cruel gamesmanship carries a bitter sting and a resigned authenticity.

The accompanying 20-minute documentary is less a behind-the-scenes peak than a prosaic promotional featurette. The disc also features footage from the Los Angeles premiere.

Following Sean
by Michael Fox, a San Francisco freelance critic and journalist for SF Weekly, SF360.org and GreenCine

The San Francisco in the ’60s still holds a special, sweetly aromatic place in America’s collective imagination, despite the unceasing efforts of conservative historical revisionists. For many, Haight-Asbury was a utopian dreamland where the seeds of a freer society briefly sprouted. But to others, it’s come to represent the apex of self-indulgence and narcissism. The truth is immeasurably more complex, of course, and that is the rocky territory that veteran New York filmmaker Ralph Arlyck explores in his thoughtful and haunting documentary, Following Sean.

Arlyck migrated from Brooklyn to take graduate film classes at San Francisco State University in the late ’60s, and found himself a bit culture-shocked in the middle of the Haight at the height of the revelry. He turned his camera on the precocious four-year-old who lived upstairs, and the resulting black-and-white short—in which Sean casually mentioned smoking pot—achieved international notoriety. Audiences were inflamed and divided by the boy, who (depending on one’s viewpoint) embodied the laissez-faire ethos, rampant irresponsibility or unbridled optimism of the hippie generation.

Thirty-five years later, Arlyck set out to discover what became of Sean and perhaps, by extension, an entire generation. The filmmaker catches up with him in his late 30s, and finds that Sean is (surprise) neither a wasted drug addict nor a buttoned-down corporate drone. Like a lot of people in America, he’s scuffling along, grappling with flattened expectations and revised goals.

Following Sean is a tender, ambivalent and beautiful inquiry, due in great measure to the gorgeous black-and-white clips of the young Sean that Arlyck liberally uses. The filmmaker narrates with a sense of curiosity and occasional bemusement, including himself and his family in this ephemeral and oddly touching American journey. “I’m very interested in ambiguity, and this is not the central thrust of most documentaries,” Arlyck has observed about his work, and this film in particular. Indeed, Following Sean provides more questions than answers, which makes it true to the spirit of the ’60s and deserving of a spot on the shelf alongside the great Bay Area histories Berkeley in the Sixties and The Times of Harvey Milk.