Late Stage Films

 The idea of there being such a thing as "Tar" discourse amuses me. It's not that the film is sooo  great that it becomes immune to criticism. It's just that it seems destined to end up with a box office take under $5 mil. Does that matter as far as any individual's enjoyment of the film, no of course not, but the number of people outside of NYC/LA film circles and smaller city newspaper critics who have any thoughts on "Tar" at all must be riding in the range of a few hundreds.   "Tar" is probably best described as a schadenfreude satire, where you watch a bad person suffer a downfall while she insists that she must be too big to fail in spite of all the evidence in the world against her. The person is fictional composer Lydia Tar, brought to life really well by Cate Blanchett, put-on German accent and all. The actual premise of the movie is that Lydia get caught up in a sex scandal, although the fact that there is a sex scandal takes writer/d...

 Park Chan-Wook has chilled out. His newest film, "Decision To Leave", could be described as an erotic crime thriller without it feeling like I'm lying to anyone, but it's pretty low on both sex and violence. The film that takes shape is mellower and tamer than his older western hits like "Oldboy" or "The Handmaiden", but at this moment in time I prefer it to both.  The plot is basic noir in its broadest stroke: a police detective becomes obsessed with a woman he suspects of murder. In its details, there's something more unique under the hood, a script more focused on the idea of desire than any particulars of crime or romance. The cop Hae-Jun (Park Hae-il) starts as a lazy contradiction (characters are constantly telling the audience that he's the best at what he does, even though we only see him make very obvious mistakes). The suspect Seo-Rae (Chinese star Tang Wei, hardly a stranger to the femme-fatale-with-a-twist role she's playin...