Films Seen

When I'm in school, weekends are a very transitory phenomenon. I need to get homework done and I probably haven't finished it all during the week, so they're not strictly "time off" in my head.

Now, even a one-day weekend feels like serious time to recuperate. Friday night and Saturday morning were spent in the company of Trice, thanks to the miracles of Skype. After a lot of relaxing, cleaning and that much-needed connectivity, Derrick invited me out to see a movie. "The Singing Revolution" was playing at a small independent cinema in Tacoma, and Derrick is fascinated with the history of Estonia. When we arrived, it turned out that "Mongol" was playing--a historical biopic of Ghengis Khan that looked promising--and we decided to see both films.

 "Singing Revolution" is a documentary, and while it lays it on thick in places (I don't relate well to nationalism), the history was fascinating to me nonetheless. The narrative is in English, but many of the people interviewed are speaking Estonian, a language I'd never really heard spoken before. It's pretty, and the singing (this film is largely about the cultural resistance of Estonians to the Russian occupation during the Soviet era) is quite lovely. I'm sort of an inveterate nerd--where the film was trying to bill the spontaneous outbreaks of certain songs at the national song festival (and later, actual rallies) as demonstrations of national solidarity, I was more interested in the memetic behaviors evinced in both the narrative and the footage. Sigh. In any case, it was worth watching--I've been rather unfamiliar with the history of the old Soviet bloc, and this was an interesting presentation.

 "Mongol" was better, in my opinion--the film takes a few liberties but gets much right. Most people here know little about Ghengis Khan or the history of Mongolia, but it's a special focus of mine. We actually have very few details about certain of these events,and of course some of it is fabricated simply for aesthetics. That's fine, in my opinion--a biopic shouldn't substitute for history in its own right, and the film is very good for what it is: a portrait of one of the more interesting people in history. Most of the film is actually in Mongolian, which is a nice touch--another language I've never heard spoken, but one I have some familiarity with thanks to written texts. What isn't Mongolian is Chinese; it's an incongruous detail, since the Tangut people didn't speak Mandarin, but their language is lost to us (thanks to, well, Ghengis Khan...). I was surprised to find I could follow the Mandarin by ear, just slightly behind the speed at which it was being spoken. 

 I wasn't overwhelmed by the plot, but the individual scenes, and the character acting especially, are where this film shines. Temujin (Ghengis Khan, before he was known as Ghengis Khan) is actually one of the weaker performances, being moderately upstaged by his mother Oelun and, later, his wife Borte--both very strong female personages in film as well as in life, though Oelun's performance is by far the more memorable to me. However, I found the characterization of Jamukha (Temujin's long-standing enemy-friend) to really steal the show. The little details make this character--the stretching, the throat-singing are nice little touches (and they allow you to instantly recognize this character when we transition from the younger incarnation seen near the beginning, to his adult self after the continuity "fast-forwards" by a couple of decades).

 The combat scenes are nicely-done. They're not as "Hollywood" as I might have feared, and are the more gripping for it. The sense of danger is palpable, and people survive the battles not by being over-the-top badasses but by being smart, quick and lucky...and just badass enough. ^^ The final battle (between Temujin and Jamukha's armies, which ends the film and cements Temujin's rise to power as Khan over the Mongol people) was great, though somewhat disappointing to me. The infamous Mongol archers barely get a nod in this production, despite the fact that mounted archery was what allowed the Mongol horde to ride roughshod over the powers of Europe, Asia and the Middle East). That's a pedantic gripe, though--the battle is nonetheless carried off well, and I love the way this film emphasizes the importance of strategy--not just mentioning it before a general melee, but taking pains to demonstrate it as well.

It's not the greatest of historical dramas, action films, or biographies--but it is good for what it is, and a very worthwhile way to spend two hours and eight dollars. I'd recommend it to anyone who's even vaguely interested in such things.