From left: Zeitgeist Films, Music Box Films, Anchor Bay Entertainment, Balthazar Productions.
From left: Images from "Jellyfish," "Tuya's Marriage," "Sex and Death 101" and "Water Lilies."
Yet another crazy, mixed-up, fascinating week of new releases hardly anyone will notice as they speed through theaters on their way to Netflix -- but that's what I'm here for, ladies and Internets. Once upon a time, I guess, it might have been big news that the two biggest names in Asian art film are releasing their first Western-made pictures on the same day. Then again, Wong Kar-wai's erratic American road movie "My Blueberry Nights" and Hou Hsiao-hsien's heartbreaking Parisian family tale "Flight of the Red Balloon" are so different, beyond the fact that neither is in Chinese, that it's hard to discern a trend, even for infotainment purveyors such as I. ("My Blueberry Nights" has been adequately covered in this space. I loved "Flight of the Red Balloon" more than anything else at Cannes last year; Stephanie Zacharek's review is here.)
Beyond that, we've got "Heathers" screenwriter Daniel Waters resurfacing as a director, alongside his old pal Winona Ryder, with a sex farce called "Sex and Death 101" that's, hmm ... what is it, exactly? Puzzling and unsatisfying, but hysterical in patches, that's what it is. Far better, if far less likely to attract an audience, is the doleful romantic comedy "Tuya's Marriage," set on the steppes of Inner Mongolia, where 21st century technology and the Chinese social-capitalist state is slowly destroying an ancient way of life. "Jellyfish," an award-winner from Cannes last year, offers a bracing, cliché-free glimpse of alienated life in contemporary Israel. Sneaky and borderline-terrifying, the French debut film "Water Lilies" goes inside the private world of three unhappy teen girls (as well as the whacked-out world of synchronized swimming).