Southland Tales

Saw Southland Tales. It was nuts! Overstuffed with plot, imagery, and allusion in the spirit of The Invisibles, Tank Girl, and Transmetropolitan. Jesus figures, twins, fiercely political pron stars, inexplicable dwarfs (because of course inexplicable dwarfs,) a Watchmen-style ubiquitous smiley face, even a strangely prescient government spying program. On top of all of this awesome nonsense it features performances from Amy Poehler, Dwayne-The-Rock-Johnson, the always-up-for-a-bit-of-weirdness Wallace Shawn, and a bible-verse quoting Justin Timberlake.

This film comes from the same director as Donnie Darko, a film which I didn't like very much. I didn't like Donnie Darko because I saw the absurdity and artistic experiments in it and mistakenly assumed it was trying for (and failing to achieve) some level of profundity. Really it was just trying something new and I expected too much from what was really a grab-bag of intriguing techniques and ideas. Similarly with this film it's easy to mistake this for having (or intending to have) some kind of profound point. There is no profundity here, just amazing visuals and rampant, overwhelming absurdity. This movie is bullshit. Amazing, amazing bullshit.

Klassikko

Saw Klassikko. It was I think a comedy about an unknown writer who goes through life-changing lengths to gain notoriety for his new book. To this end, he first adopts a kind of rock-a-billy persona which he bases on a be-mulletted man he glimpses one day. This be-mulletted man becomes a major character. somehow the writer knows everything about his life. They covet each other's cars and eventually engage in a race across Finland's highways. They wind up in the clutches of a hilarious police man who calls drunk drivers "clients" and scolds other policemen for bad-mouthing them ("without these daring men, life would be like a sterile laboratory!") There's also some funny business with an car salesman who is obsessed with a certain news anchor.

The end of this film reaches an awesomely bizarre and goofy climax, but getting there takes a bit of work. It's not particularly funny, but kind of breathlessly wacky in the manner of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (though, as I say, much of the humor is kind of lost in translation.) A strange movie.

Dekalog VI

Saw Dekalog VI, Thou shalt not commit adultery. A lot of sex in this one. Nothing too crazy though (this is TV after all.) The plot follows a boy who is obsessed with and spies on his across-the-courtyard neighbor, an adult woman who is perhaps an artist and who has many boyfriends. In this post-Hitchcock land, it's always more interesting (and entertaining) to imagine a voyeur as a kind of audience stand-in. to aid us in this endeavor, the boy is cast as a kind of camera early on. One of our first shots of him is through a teller window, his eyes perfectly framed by the little circular hole in the plexiglass. The woman's apartment has this strange fish-eye lens in the window which, although it's never the center of a frame or anything, none the less renders many of her bedroom scenes as little play-house dioramas. The boy later reveals he has excellent memory and can play back any scene he wants to in his head. I felt an homage to Hitchcock's Rear Window in certain scenes, but it may be referencing something slightly more general than Hitchcock specifically.

Of course the peeping tom situation comes to light and the woman exacts fittingly ironic revenge by letting him be her boyfriend for a bit. He is of course completely out of his depth and terrified. He leaves her in a panic and she, fearing for his safety, becomes his watcher/pursuer in the end. One of the last shots is of her eyes framed by the plexiglass hole. Very fun.

But then there's also this adultery thing. Disaster seems to befall the pair when they get closer together. Neither of them really betray the love of anyone else. In a way perhaps she betrays him by dating and pursuing him? This seems a bit shoddy though, blaming the victim for seeking satisfaction from her stalker. True, her actions are not 100% moral (which 100% moral action would be to forgive) but this doesn't seem right to me. Does he betray his love for her by interfering with her life and revealing his obsession with her? This isn't really satisfying to me either. There is also some business with milk and a pendulum that I don't understand. A nice diorama image of her arm holding out this pendulum, btw.

I think I got too distracted and hung up on the "boy = camera" theme-spotting fun. Too bad. At least I have better subs now! I was driven to seek out new subs when an non-correctable error in mine made one subtitle show up for 2 solid minutes while rapid, untranslated dialogue flowed.

Edit: check out the imdb review. I can only aspire to such heights of pretension. "abusive collector of undue slices of reality" indeed.

Prince of Darkness

Saw Prince of Darkness. It was a ripping old horror from the 80s. It's never terribly scary (tense at a few moments, but not bad on the whole) and kooky science abounds ('a message from the future!' 'Must be tachyons.') which ordinarily causes nerd-rage in me, but the point of this film is clearly not to educate but to amuse and surprise so alright. I also liked the colossal computers and pointless hardware. There's kind of a shitty moment when one of the characters seem to imply the homeless are 'lesser animals.' OK. The rest of the film is fun and surprising, keeping the imagery coming at a good enough clip.

I also want to highlight the film's music. That synthed-out soundtrack is so typical of the horror-themed puzzle-games that I used to love in grade school.

There is the usual ambiguously bad ending Carpenter delights in. His 'twist' endings make the film a bit more chaotic, but I find them to be also a bit contrived and cheap, like the inevitable twists at the end of Twilight zone episodes. Horror generally works better the more unpredictable it is, so though it's annoying to see the expected 'or is it?!?'-style ending, it's refreshing to see that Carpenter eschews the prim morality found in many horrors of the era (the only couple to have sex, for example, survive quite long.) Fun, imaginative, silly movie.

Pride and Prejudice

Saw Pride and Prejudice (thanks, Kim!) Its punches were a bit pulled for me, as I am fairly familiar with the TV mini-series. It is not shocking to me that X falls in love with Y after all or what have you. Refreshingly, in this period-piece there is almost no silly are-they-or-aren't-they and instead the more imperative will-they-or-won't-they (the questions have become essentially synonymous in modern rom-com.) I wish they had stuck closer to the cliff-hangers of the plot however. When Elizabeth finishes her epic rejection of Mr Darcy they have this weird almost-kissing moment, which kind of undercuts the preceding awesome tirade. I think we are meant to be reassured, but I would rather have been left in suspense.

Tremendously fun in the margins, this film has excellent business (the mother swinging her legs, Mr Collins' banal horribleness) that it shows off here and there. I'm of course being greedy, but I wish that the humor had been a bit more center stage because what humor there was was perfect. I'm also glad that the attitudes of the characters are accessibly modernized. Only one scene I remember where the girls are talked of as chattel and that one was intended to be distasteful.

My favorite scenes in the film are when it's being swooningly sentimental. There is a scene shot from the inside of Lizzie's closed eyelids that is intimate and wonderful. Later, the camera lazily drifts from window to window, sort of benignly looking in on its occupants. It's a bit treacly but it's artfully done and interesting. A film without any bite, but very sweet, and very kind.

A Serious Man

Saw A Serious Man. It was a troubling Coen brothers film. It ties together questions of morality and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It surrounds a man who seems blessed. All ills which should befall him seem to land elsewhere, usually to his advantage. Instead of becoming happy-go-lucky, he becomes a Dostoyevskian mental-case. He worries that he doesn't deserve this bounty and seeks answers to how to deal with the crushing problem of having no problems. The rabbis from which he seeks answers are in turn absurd, willfully abstruse, and impossibly inaccessible. Meanwhile, through all of this, he is faced with a moral dilemma in the form of a bribe given by a student. The stunning ending seems to answer the riddle of why he is so blessed, but a short shot of this image ambiguously colors the given answer.

The Coens' genius for capturing attention where attention doesn't even seem warranted is on full display. I don't know if it's framing, plotting, scripting ("moral turpitude" what an awesome phrase!) or what it is, but it's great. Little clever nothings of scenes, like when the protagonist climbs onto his roof, there's a shot of blue sky, a ladder rises and falls, then he's on the roof.

Trying to analyze this film is very annoying because a philosophy of apathetic ambiguity is given thematic prominence throughout. Many times our hero is told that it is impossible to fathom the mind of god and to stop worrying and relax. It's tempting to dismiss the entire film in this way: If it's being willfully absurd, why bother? It's so overstuffed with little ideas and themes though, I feel it can't be that simple and disappointing. On the other hand, it's easy to latch too firmly onto one aspect of the film (as I perhaps have at the end of the first paragraph) and miss the forest. There is much machinery to dismantle, and a lot of it seems to be working at cross purposes.

Another cute thing to notice: just before disaster befalls another person, that person starts becoming like the main character in some way: The lover is waiting in the car (setting up this pattern,) his brother keeps shouting "I didn't do anything!" and lastly, his son passes a major milestone in his life.

Alright, off to read some real critics and feel stupid once again!

Talvisota

Saw Talvisota. It was a war movie, a genre I feel I have already thoroughly explored. It follows the usual story arc: fresh-faced recruits become grim warriors, discover war is serious business, have a meaningless and disappointing visit home, witness complete breakdown of rhyme and reason on the front before ending in a victory that maybe (bear with me here) but just maybe wasn't even worth it to begin with? This film does nothing new and a lot that is old. Perhaps it was groundbreaking when it debuted? I've had books and films spoiled for me before by too-frequent homages and thefts by later works (The Hobbit, Citizen Kane, and The Maltese Falcon come to mind in this regard.)

As it stands, this film is about three brothers who go to war. Once shit begins seriously hitting the fan, they all become permanently coated with a shifting layer of dust, grime, and beard. Unfortunately at this point I am no longer able to tell them apart, or even distinguish them from their non-sibling comrades. I believe they die one by one with possibly one last brother surviving. I have no idea really, because apart from one bald character, I couldn't tell them apart at all. I'm only slightly embarrassed about this because (in my arrogance) I feel I already know everything a relatively honest war film has to say. War is a senseless waste which is abhorrent to human nature, there is absolutely nothing ennobling or moral about it, and the combatants ultimately become so dehumanized that by the end they are merely cringing mammals, reacting arbitrarily to stimuli. Being subjected to the same thesis, told in a variety of doleful ways, could be viewed as a metaphor for war itself. It is repetitive, numbing, and unending. I have yet to begin sawing through a list of war movies.

Hopefully I'll look back at the above someday and cringe at how badly I missed the point. I really hope there's more to be said about war by someone, someday. I hate to relegate an entire genre to irrelevance (especially as we are in fact currently in a war, as we have been somewhere or other, continually, for the past 13 years.) I hope the above is just sophomoric reaction to the raw horror of war, and that I'm wrong about war films. I guess I'll see what the future holds.

Dekalog V

Saw Dekalog V, Thou shalt not kill. It had this strange yellow/green filter on the whole time (again, just my copy?) which provided for some visual variety but I think detracted from the chilly austerity of the series. The rough plot: a punk kills a man at random and is then executed by the state. The kid's brutal and senseless crime is contrasted with the grotesque and purposeful state-appointed execution. There is a scene with a man turning a crank that is almost comically hideous. A lawyer taking an oral exam is shown beforehand laying out the difference between justice and revenge which I think is the lens to view corporal punishment through.

Another maybe-Christ-carrying-the-cross sighting: the camera lingers on a man carrying a large step-ladder. Again, a lack of little diorama-like images (save the man at the crank and another scene where the punk winds rope around his fist.) There is plenty of stomach-clenching anxiety produced by the killing(s). This one was a little tougher to watch than the others so far and much less chilly in its ruminations.

Lucas

Saw Lucas. It opens with a locust emerging from its shell, molting. The symbolism is inescapable. It's kind of a sweet little movie about a kid gaining acceptance in high school, gaining the respect of the much hated/feared/envied football jocks. It had some kind of weird leering moments where the camera would focus in on the cheerleaders, swinging their hips in slow motion, revealing this film's exclusive aim at Sensitive Guys. Then again, there is Charlie Sheen's torso at one point, but the female characters (all of whom are relegated to love interest roles) don't really get happy endings. One girl winds up with the kind-of-sleazy-but-essentially-decent Charlie Sheen, the other main love interest winds up alone, though she will presumably wind up with Lucas. This movie kind of hit me at a bad time, coming right after the much more outrageous and honest Chain Camera, so I kept reflexively cringing and sneering throughout.

It has its moments though, and is sufficiently believable and plenty heartwarming. Any scene where Lucas listens to classical music is wistful and great and I kind of wish we'd met his (allegedly alcoholic) parents (though of course the monster in our minds inspires more pathos than any director could ever conjure, which is why we don't.) I wish we'd seen more of Lucas himself, when he's not leaping from plot-point to plot-point. I want to see him collect bugs and be earnest and serene. A not bad movie that becomes a bit saccharine at parts. I wish I'd seen it when I was younger.

Chain Camera

Saw Chain Camera (thanks, Nina!) It was really raw. The concept is this: highschool kids are given cameras to document their lives. The resultant footage is edited together with an emphasis on letting the kids control their own image. Some of the results are awesome, as with Tim, a pro-wrestling enthusiast who is adorable and Amy, the epitome of a band kid. At other times it's quite troubling, as with Jesse who roams the streets while his mother drinks or with Manuel the academic super-star who talks often of losers and failures who are beneath him. I was most upset with Ethan's segment, the kid whose "friends" and then family cruelly mock him for being a kissless virgin. Poor kid.

At the end, at graduation, the class valedictorian gives a rousing call to arms (kind of) against institutional apathy which is great. Notice this though: although the crowd is cheering throughout her entire speech, their cheers are loudest when she reaches an ironic "life's not fair, get used to it." Her point is that this apathy toward the state of the world is holding us back, but the kids merrily cheer this very apathetic stance, revealing that they can't yet tell tough talk from cold cynicism. This movie is just full of little moments like this that reveal how adult and yet juvenile these kids are. There's a lot of meat here. I wish it were a little more 'prepared' and a little safer. This movie shook me up a lot, but in all the right ways. It was fascinating.

Planet Terror

Saw Planet Terror. It was ridiculous. There's very little characterization that isn't broad and easy and kind of hostile and aggressive. Of course though, that's not the point of this movie. The point of this movie is to have a chick with a fucking gun for a leg. And in that respect, oh boy did it deliver. A kick-ass movie that keeps running along breathlessly from one awesome spectacle to the next. I loved the spectacle and the sort of self-parodying uber-macho-ness. In my wimp-itude, I wish it had been a bit kinder (especially to the poor female anesthetist. What'd she do besides marry a psychopath?) but of course had it not been so blood-n-guts it wouldn't be this awesome, glorious, ridiculous movie.

Sauna

Saw Sauna. It completely blindsided me. The plot follows an expedition to map out the border of Sweden and Russia in 1595. The expedition enters a swamp which, we are told beforehand, they will never leave. Inside of the swamp they come across a mysterious village built near a cement cube which they refer to as a sauna. There are creepy ghosts and eerie children and endless black fluids, but there is almost no explanation for anything, so be warned those of you who need mubo-jumbo explanations. I found the film fascinating and mysterious, the mystery heightened by not being really able to follow the action. It's urgent and dreadful and incomprehensible and works toward a fittingly weird and creepy climax. A bit light on spectacle, it reminded me of Tarkovski's slow sci-fis. This film is similarly not exactly what you'd expect from a horror. Interesting film.

Dekalog IV

Saw Dekalog IV, Honour thy father and thy mother. Once again the fraught performances and sad violins. This episode starts with a woman waking her husband up, no, not her husband, her father. She takes an eye test, revealing she needs glasses. She mistakenly spells out FATHER (in English) when reading off the eye-chart. I was very frustrated with my subtitles (my eternal enemy!) this time because as the episode progresses I felt things become distressingly incest-y. I have no idea to what degree the father and the daughter were complicit in things getting a little weird. Is the daughter reacting terribly to crisis? Is the father revealing long-suppressed feelings? Are the two of them swept up by feelings they're ill-equipped to deal with? Is this all in my head due to shitty subtitles?

The genius images in this episode were of a man carrying a kite-shaped, or coffin-like kayak over his head (resembling jesus with the cross a bit, though I'm perhaps thinking a bit too religiously) and later the father walking down the middle of a foot-path (not the first time this image has been used. I hope to see it yet again so that I may augustly declare I have identified a theme.)

A frustrating ending, but a satisfyingly real feeling one. The first time I was really taken with the actors' performances (which may not be a good thing: I have a severe weakness for melodrama.) I feel I spotted recurring parenthood themes, but failed to get them to cohere. A pastiche or a meditation perhaps? A troubling episode.

Fake edit: Someone on imdb points out the emphasis on empathy this series has. For a religiously themed show, it is surprisingly free of condemnation. Very nice.

The Last Boy Scout

Saw The Last Boy Scout. It was pretty silly. A modern mystery movie without the cool. It tries, vaguely, for the moody grimness of the classic noirs, but settles in the end for car chases and one-liners. It keeps the platters spinning and keeps your attention though, so it's not all bad. It does not bear a bit of scrutiny however. The showdown is in front of an audience that somehow knows who's the bad guy and who's the good guy. Cops don't handcuff anyone ever (which, judging from episodes of COPS I've seen, is the exact opposite of their usual tack.) and don't really care if one of their suspects gets a punch in at another suspect ("Hey, now! Break it up you two!") The little girl's perpetual default giggling gets old faster than her supposedly humorous foul mouth.

The movie was competently made and sufficiently exciting. However, it was clearly not my cup of tea.

Fireproof

Saw Fireproof (thanks, Paul!) It was a very strange movie. The acting was a bit stilted which produced both bewildering and delightful surprises (I don't think the husband was supposed to come off as childishly as he did but I was delighted by the Lynchian super-calm the wife maintains (until the very end.)) Some scenes with the wife and husband have a train-wreck-like queasy awkwardness.

The Christian slant was both palpable (it starts the credits with a bible verse and ends them with "To God be the glory!". Also, the husband nurses the wife back to health with chick-fil-a.) and off-putting (the credits include information on where to purchase the book that saves the marriage.)

That said, it was not heinous and actually has a few well-observed moments. I liked that the atheist fireman is not portrayed as deluded or evil (though he seems incongruously eager to bring up the hereafter.) I also liked that the husband's proselytizing dad is a recent, enthusiastic convert. The happy climax holds its own against any blockbuster. However the film contains nothing really complex or fraught. What if the husband had become smug and arrogant when he inevitably wins the wife back? What if the husband's dad had lost his faith by the ending, requiring the husband to be his own guru? What if, despite everything, his wife still wanted to leave him? If love is surrender and sacrifice, what if it's all in vain? Is it then moral to accept the divorce? (The bit where the husband heroically rejects internet porn (The horror! The horror!) is troubling but is not intended to be.) This lack of anything for me to really bite into is what kills the film for me. It provides only unexamined answers, not questions.

Offside

Saw Offside. It was completely awesome! It revolves around some girls who try to sneak into a soccer game in Iran. Women not being allowed in such a sweaty environment, they are caught and cruelly kept in a holding-pen out of sight of the game and the action. I anticipated a sober and difficult exploration of gender roles. I braced for the inscrutability of a completely foreign set of social norms. Instead I got a delightful, brilliant movie about the power of sports to unify and uplift, even in the midst of oppression. I felt the film becomes just a touch too perfect near the end (with the introduction of a firework-smuggling boy,) but the joy of the girls when a goal is scored and their anxiety when their team is in trouble is completely genuine and infectious. Their performances completely make this movie. The ending is so deliriously happy, I cried with joy. Great, good movie.

also: hilarious.

Ripa Ruostuu

Saw Ripa Ruostuu. A very punk-y film about a penniless film-maker trying to scrape enough money together to survive. The situation spirals further and further out of control until the finale. I found its portrayal of dirt-poorness unnerving. I have more stability in my life than Ripa (the central film-maker,) but the endless fretting about cash reserves hits a little close to home. There are inter-cut little montages when he has sex with a woman. I found those montages neat, but I'm glad they restrained themselves to only a few. I think there's some kind of meta-level commentary going on. Everyone says Ripa's films are too full of sex and violence to be marketable, but Ripa is always watching old noir films and this film itself is very violent and full of sex. I feel I missed something, but maybe not. A tawdry film.

Dekalog III

Saw Dekalog III, Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. It was the Christmas special. A woman and a man who had both cheated with each other on their respective spouses spend the night looking for the woman's missing husband. This is a ploy by the woman to get the man to spend time with her again. The action takes place early early on Christmas morning which is a depressing time for lonely people. The woman reveals that tonight was a test for herself to see if she could not spend the night alone. The man and woman resolve that their relationship is better ended and the episode ends. There was a lack of ingenious images in this one. There is a striking little image of a boy (and later a man) in pajamas, but that's it. I liked the ugly scene in the drunk-tank. It reminded me a bit of Sunrise by F.W. Murnau in so far as the two characters are journeying together and coming a bit to terms with each other. As opposed to Sunrise, this has more of an altruistic, rather than a redemptive, slant. Perhaps the man is, in a way, redeeming himself for his past actions by helping and indulging his much more damaged ex-lover (who sort of preemptively redeems herself in a scene with an aging aunt.)

I can't wait to get to the juicier (and hopefully more accessible) episodes about coveting.

Cannonball Run

Saw Cannonball Run. It starred everyone imaginable: Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore, Farrah Fawcett, Dom DeLuise, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Jackie Chan, etc etc. It was a very silly and lighthearted competition to see who could upstage everyone else. Unfortunately, this sort of film is meant to run on fires kindled by my affection for the actors involved and the only one of those people I have fond memories of is Jackie Chan who is relegated to speaking a pidgin-English gibberish and is always introduced with an oriental theme playing on the soundtrack. Ugh.

Besides this, the film is adequately zany to hold my attention but too insufferably smug to make me like the experience. The credits roll to outtakes of the actors corpsing (for heaven's sake.) I recommend it if you like the sort of 'round the world in 80 days film-star pastiches.

Edit: apparently there was once a real cannonball run. I never would have known.

Peut-être

Saw Peut-être (thanks, Nina! It turns out I still don't have subtitles for Tout Ce Qui Brille. It's infuriating.) The film was a French sci fi which in my limited experience means light spectacle presented in a sort of 'here it is' way with a heavier emphasis on character. Full disclosure: the only other french sci fis I've seen were these animated ones which were all directed by this guy, and so are not representative of any kind of cultural approach to science fiction. At any rate, this film was about a man who doesn't have sex with his girlfriend and is contacted by his future-descendants who are now vanishing away Back to the Future-style. The fantastic future is covered with sand up to the rooftops which is pretty neat. I really liked the funky techno soundtrack. The film is light on action and spectacle which is a pity, but heavy on philosophical questions which is nice. Doubly nice is that these philosophical questions are not over-teased and usually relegated to the background behind the much more interesting characters. The film is also kind of playful. Nothing is ever too serious. I was a little annoyed by this because without some stakes, what do we care what happens? But the movie was such a puppy-dog of a film, I forgive it its light heart.

Edit: Darn it all, I messed up the name at first. Now everyone will know I don't speak French!

Grindhouse - Death Proof

Saw Grindhouse - Death Proof (another film with a difficult title. Should it just be Death Proof?) I really liked it. There was a lot of sleaziness, but less and less as the film goes on. I liked the focus on the victims rather than the glamorous killer (who in one scene is relegated entirely to the background.) Later on the killer seems truly pathetic and even downright lame which is, y'know, a lot less ethically troubling than the super-cool murderers seen in a lot of Tarantino films. In its weird, schlocky way this film is almost feminist. The women are seen/used as objects, get angry, and get their sweet revenge. It's a crowd-pleaser. There's a theme of treating women badly in this film which I think is supposed to rankle (see for example the killer's shitty, blind-eye-turning father being mean to a female doctor.) The film almost works best as a kind of horror-film with a happy ending. I'm mainly relieved I could endorse a Tarantino movie without faint praise, or feeling sleazy. Also, I guess I have to see Vanishing Point now.

I also kind of suspect this film is Tarantino making fun of himself (oh my lord, so damn many feet, feet, FEET! and ironically hip oldies tunes out the wazoo) which of course makes all my praise about the various happy surprises in this film ring a little hollow, but I'll accept a bit of self-delusion if it means I can enjoy the two hours I spent.

Edit: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1028528/trivia?item=tr0730733 Young Quentin worked in a 'stag theater.' This explains a lot.

Elina

Saw Elina, a clash of wills between a Professor Umbrage-esque smug school teacher and an adorable little blond girl who spends most of her time traipsing through postcard-ready vistas and mourning her dead father. Guess who wins. The execution of the story is quite satisfying (who doesn't want to see the stuffing get knocked out of scheming teachers?) and although the broad strokes can be seen a mile away, the details are not quite as predictable. I found the magical-realism of the dead father to be very nice. 'Very nice' is a good way to describe this whole movie. A touch too saccharine for my tastes but not overwhelmingly so. The film is sweet and toothless, like a grandmother.

Decalogue II

Saw Decalogue part II, Thou shalt not take the name of the lord thy god in vain. I admit to being very confused by this one. I don't see how this episode connects to this commandment, although I had the juvenile, Sunday-school impression that this commandment was mainly about not saying "god damn it" and so forth and I don't see how to mine much drama out of that pedantic interpretation anyway.

There was a different set of characters this time around which I am very grateful for (just imagine how trite and patronizing it would have been if one family, say, had had to learn the lessons of each of the ten commandments over the course of the episodes) The same genius for resonant images is on display, as is the same chilly plotting. I was particularly struck with the image of the wasp crawling out of a cup of coffee and another image of a coffee cup shattering. The female in this I found awesomely severe. Unable to decide between two terrible choices, her every movement has the abstracted thoughtfulness of someone with much on her mind.

So, I'm liking this series a lot. It's still too austere for me to really go nuts over it, and I feel I'm doing it a severe disservice by not discussing each episode in some classroom environment, but it's fascinating and puzzling and I'm liking it.

Shocker

Saw Shocker. It was a very silly and uneven horror about some murderous electricity-mage who naturally gets the electric chair making him stronger than ever. So, it's up to one football player who is probably his son to take him down. There are warning signs of shaky movie-logic everywhere in the plot, but post-hoc rationalizations are usually forth-coming. There is a really important thing which the footballer's girlfriend never actually tells him (it's not a plot point, I think there's just a scene missing.) The film is also not very scary. There's a few jumps, but mostly the footballer and murderer are rolling around punching and kicking which is not exactly creepy.

The best part of the film is the televisions everywhere. Craven tries to make television into a great evil (possibly into the devil, as is implied at one point.) Endless scenes of televisions showing that clip of a house being blown up by a nuclear bomb, footage of Cambodia, footage of Kent State, etc. It's very weird and neat. This climaxes with a brilliant and delightfully fun chase scene that I won't ruin. So, not a terribly scary or clever film, but a fairly fun one.

Crocodile Dundee 2

Saw Crocodile Dundee 2 (Thanks, Kim!) This time around, it's an action-adventure and I think Dundee fares better in this genre than he does in rom-com. Having a protagonist who is clearly god's favored son is almost to be expected in an action film and I therefore do not count that against the film. Also, it's nice to see him doing something more active. I really liked seeing him competently sneaking around the drug-lord's house. The return-trip to Australia was nice (even though I thought it might happen.) I was kind of blindsided by how quickly the kidnapping was dispatched. It makes sense in retrospect, but why not just start by fleeing into the bush? Of course that way madness lies. Why bother questioning the tall tales of the backwoodsmen? Just sit back and enjoy it.

All in all, I think the second Dundee bore my scrutiny better than the first, but I'd still prefer to scrutinize something else.

Alien 4

Saw Alien 4 (should that be Aliens 4 maybe, or Alien: Resurrection?) It was certainly the strangest installation. The director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, does his usual thing of jarring close-ups and raw, awesome spectacle. The writer, Joss Whedon, does his usual unpredictable homage/deconstruction thing. The two are not exactly an easy marriage though. By all accounts, Jeunet wanted to focus on strange sexual themes, with the human/alien at the end being hermaphroditic and the aliens explicitly having sex with Ripley. There are residual weird scenes of kinda-sex and one incongruously religious scene in a church. Whedon seems to be trying to flesh out what would later become Firefly (a group of hard-scrabble space-mercenaries with Ripley as the creepy space-witch. The total result is that Joss's clever dialogue and scenario serves only to disarm which leaves the viewer overwhelmed by Jeunet's parade of grotesques.

Because each installation of Aliens has had a different writer and director, I treat each film as though it were no more related to the others in the series than the two spidermen are to each other. But this time even I have to concede that this is really some other film (possibly two other films) that were fit awkwardly into the Aliens franchise (including some bad-science stretches. Cloned with DNA-memories? AND the alien inside of her? knee-jerk nerd rage everywhere.) There is none of the usual struggle against corporations/armies, only aliens vs humans. There's no uncomfortable Cronenberg-ish technology (Cronenberg-ish body-horror and creatures, but I'm thinking more back to Aliens 3 when a half-alive android torso comes to horrible life.) I hasten to add however that the spectacle is spectacular and treated as an original movie, I found it an interesting quasi-modo of a sci-fi.