Evil Dead 2

Saw Evil Dead 2 (thanks, Steven!) It was a lot of fun. Creepy in parts, but so full of fluids and goofy spectacle it didn't really register as a horror. It's completely over-the-top and invites its own loving mockery. Unfortunately, I really don't have much to say about it. I don't want to spoil any of the scenes (the 'groovy' scene is fairly well known, but apart from being stupid and awesome, I don't have anything to add) and anyway they're much more reliant on rubber suits and gallons of colored liquids than on cleverness or visual poetry. There's no tree-rape this time around. The entire thing is kind of campy and spectacular. (I feel like I'm just saying the same things over again.)

Suffice to say it was exactly what I expected and I'm tired right now. Sorry to disappoint.

Stellet Licht

Saw Stellet Licht. My god, what a tedious movie. Every scene is a creeping pan, a crawling zoom, or an arid static shot. Characters spend entire minutes on end stuck in pregnant pauses, regarding each other. Eventually the scene changes. What story there is is as follows: a Mennonite farmer falls in love with a woman who is not his wife. He is tormented by this, but open with his wife about his feelings. His father, a preacher, preaches fortitude. Eventually things come to a head, his wife dies of a literally broken heart (which is a cute touch) and then the only lyrical or at-all-interesting thing in the entire movie happens. Unless you have a strong stomach for endless shots of nature, or a large pot of coffee, it's not worth it.

My viewing of this film had a lot going against it. I was extremely tired and thus not up to these very long takes. At one point, I found myself wondering why the protagonist didn't fire his blast lasers at his mistress thereby breaching her hull because I was falling asleep while watching this. Also, I had no idea until I looked it up that the characters were Mennonites and I have no idea what Mennonites are exactly. So there's that source of drama and symbolism gone. There's many vistas of lush nature and gorgeous skies which were unfortunately jpg-ed into mushy blurs by my copy. Such are the dangers of movie-watching. To be honest, I think I missed the boat on this one. It does itself no favors by being so austere, so I semi-excuse myself.

The long takes, I believe, are intended to force us to regard and consider the characters, getting us to wonder about them and getting us inside their heads a bit. I just felt sleepy. I kept nodding off at the beginning which makes me worry that I missed some of the visual poetry I noticed at the end. I may well have, but I now have an almost hysterical disinterest in seeing this film ever again. I found it very oppressive and very dry.

Edit: a review I read connects this film to Terrence Malick whom I find more accessible and also Carl Dreyer, which comparison I think is dead-on.

Wecome to the Dollhouse

Saw Wecome to the Dollhouse. It was a deeply frustrating movie. It revolves around Dawn, a girl who is the bottom of the social ladder in junior high. She sticks up for others who are victimized like she is but, recognizing her desire for companionship as a weakness, they instantly turn on her, cashing in her friendship for miniscule status-points. She seeks safe-harbor with her family. A family that, when they aren't actively ignoring her, are demanding sacrifices from her (with punishment, of course, if she does not comply.) Her barbie-doll-adorable little sister prances about the house in a ballerina outfit, whimsically highlighting the contrast between her effortlessly easy life and Dawn's life of unending trials and indignities. Her brother is a skinny lump of emotion-free nerd and her mother is a narcissist who probably resents her non-ballerina children for ruining her perfect life. Dawn's every attempt to fight back at the injustices in her life backfires spectacularly. She tells on a kid trying to cheat off of her, she gets in trouble. When she protests the harsh treatment, she's assigned a 100-word essay on dignity. The irony is cruel and what humor there is is pitch black. After about 15 minutes, I was rooting for Dawn to burn the whole fucking school down.

She even tries to buy affection with her body, seeking comfort and attention from an impossibly sleazy high-school boy (who looks about 30) who casually steals from her family and talks about ex-girlfriends who only lasted a few days. Her only other 'friend' is an angry, knife-owning boy who uses her in public as an outlet for his rage and in private as an outlet for his insecurities. Of the entire film, he is the kindest to her and even he sees her as just a resource to be exploited. It is depressing, but little wonder, that by the end of the film she's becoming just as bad as the rest of them, selfish and cruel. The only escape seems to be New York, a dangerous but perhaps better land. She never gets to New York.

I highly recommend this film to anyone who had a good experience in high school/junior high. If you had a shitty time of it, avoid this movie. A painful and frustrating film. Dawn is a pillar of strength in a sea of bullshit and that pillar is sinking.

Red River

Saw Red River. John Wayne plays against type, from under a black hat. He plays a man who is one of three survivors of an Indian raid on a wagon train of settlers (oh, did I mention this is a western? It's a western.) The other two survivors are the comic relief (a Shakespearean wise-cracking servant (here a cook)) and a callow youth with a lot to prove. Wayne slaps everyone and they then merrily steal some land from some Mexicans. Luckily, they have a bull and a cow so... fade-a-few-years-into-the-future... they have a ranch. The callow youth has become the quite attractive Montgomery Clift and Wayne has become a hard man. "The war" has sucked the money out of the south and Wayne is broke. He stakes everything on a desperate trek from Texas to Missouri, where beef is in high demand. He rounds up his cattle, instructing his field-hands to gather up any other cows that might be out there as well. The other ranchers grumble about this but he buffaloes them into agreeing to a small cut. On the trek the situation deteriorates, with cowboys abandoning Wayne, shooting at him, and eventually mutinying.

I was surprised by Wayne actually playing an actual bad guy. He softens somewhat eventually, but he snarls and swears he'll kill anyone who crosses him and is generally beastly. The only people who can handle him at all are the ancient cook and Clift. The deterioration of the relationship between Wayne and Clift is the most interesting aspect of this film. At first fiercely loyal, Clift grows critical of Wayne and finally becomes openly rebellious. I entertained myself by imagining that they were lovers whose relationship was crumbling. The film gave me much fuel for this allegorical reading. Twice the cowboys talk about the trail as being no place for a woman (they are not 'strong' is why) and there's a strange intense relationship Clift develops with another rancher who always seems to be wandering around in this shirt. Later when they come across a troop of gamblers/whores, one lady gambler (not a whore, of course! She's still marriageable) declares that Wayne and Clift love each other too much to hate each other. Of course in this more innocent time they mean as a father loves a son, but the line made me smile.

So, not wild or histrionic enough to fully entertain me (or at least not enough to distract me from mentally pairing up the male actors) but a ripping yarn and not terrible and not ethically bankrupt. Perhaps there's hope for the western genre after all. (I hope so, because I kind of dread an upcoming list of westerns I have to saw through.)

Edit: Ha! Ha ha!!

True Romance

Saw True Romance. It was about a comic-book store employee who falls in love with a delightful and winsome "call-girl." Prompted by the desire to maintain a self-image of bad-assery (as personified by the ghost of Elvis,) he kills her pimp and accidentally steals a lot of cocaine. They then travel to LA to sell to a Hollywood exec, always just out of reach of the mob who he stole from and the cops. At first we're rooting for him, he being a normal nerd with grand ambitions, but later on, though our affection for him stays constant, he himself actually changes. He dispatches mob goons at first by great difficulty and later on with relative ease. The first goon that's killed actually has a monologue about how the first killing is always the hardest but that, by repetition, even murder becomes dull. Indeed, by the end, cops are laughing at what a slick, stone-cold killer this kid is and he's finally become just another gangster. But he's the gangster we're watching and somehow we like him therefore.

Cinematic slight-of-hand is used to keep us liking him. This gradual shift from naif to actual bad ass goes unremarked by the film. Similarly the desire of the protagonist to be as cool as Elvis, despite working in a comic-book shop and having nothing at all, is deeply pathetic but is never portrayed as such by the film. Notice that he delivers a monologue about how awesome Elvis was to a woman in a bar and later, when he's with his girlfriend, we catch the tail-end of the same monologue, probably delivered again, word-for-word, but if this is noticed at all, it more funny than sad. In general, the film does not comment at all on his desire for cool and either wants us to make up our own minds or hopes we forget about it.

Thematically, an obsession with pop-culture and a desire for cool pops up again and again. When the protagonist and girlfriend first meet he asks her about herself but she responds noncommittally to every question until he asks about her favorite band and movie. Then she responds without even thinking. Of course she knows which altar of media she worships at, doesn't everyone? Most tellingly, near the end of the movie, the girlfriend narrates that "three words went through my mind endlessly, repeating themselves like a broken record: you're so cool, you're so cool, you're so cool." Note: not "I love you." I submit that though this film is called True Romance, these two are not in love with each other, they are in love with their adopted personae.

Dragon (2011)

Saw Dragon (2011) (thanks, Basil!) It was a martial arts movie that borrows the rough outline of A History of Violence. The central character is a man trying to escape his violent past by starting afresh as a paper-maker. A detective uncovers his past and indirectly reconnects the paper-man with his old 'friends.' The detective, in a bizarre addition, self-medicates via acupuncture to kill his own emotions. The detective explicitly thinks of his emotional self as another person who is sometimes seen by us viewers. This is kind of strange but is thematically interesting as both the protagonist and the detective have other "selves" they wish to overcome. One by running and hiding, the other via (a kind of) medication. This struggle to escape one's past takes on an interesting tint when viewed through a Chinese lens. As far as I know (with all of my vast worldly knowledge, gleaned from years of never leaving New England,) the Chinese have much more faith in destiny. There's not as much emphasis on choosing your own life as there is in America. Again, this is only so far as I know, but I feel like there's a paper on comparative culture to be written here.

As usual with Asian cinema, the emotions are completely over-the-top. Everything is so dramatic that the very scenery takes notice. At one point a character shouts "WHAT HAS HAPPENED?" and the entire house around him rattles in shock. Hilarious. The fight scenes are pretty good. There's about four, each one better than the last. I particularly liked the fight between the paper-man and the woman with two short blades. There's also a scene where the detective and paper-man concoct a plan to evade their enemies that for some reason causes a montage of previous and future scenes from the film. Though the choice of montage is strange, the montage itself is awesome and thrilling.

Brother Bear

Saw Brother Bear. It was alright. Everything about it was kind of middling. They were doing something strange with the background art. I think they were showing off some technique of partial matte-paintings made available by digital backgrounds. Neat. The artwork is pretty but unremarkable. It's the pinnacle of the kind of art you'd find on jigsaw puzzles. The characters are animated in the trademark Disney way, all shovel-shaped eyes and comfortingly cute characters with lyre-shaped mouths. The animators have clearly done their homework and when the headstrong protagonist transmogrifies into a bear he indeed sometimes moves like an actual bear and not like a man in a fur suit.

The plot is more interesting: a young man wants to prove himself as a man (thereby, of course, signifying his current immaturity) and decides to take revenge on a bear who indirectly killed his brother (full disclosure, his brother sacrifices himself as a means to save our hero. Not 15 minutes in and there's already a suicide for the greater good.) The "spirits" do not take kindly to this however and turn him into a bear to teach him a lesson. As a bear, he befriends a precocious cub who is in full-on annoyingly cute mode and travels to a mystic mountain to turn himself human again. The film's ending surprised me (though not terribly) and the message of general acceptance is a good one. Especially nice is the slight breaking of the gender roles what with the male bear acting as caregiver/big-bro to the young cub. Also interesting was the removal of any real villain from the film. This meshes nicely with the central thesis of what makes something a "monster."

The songs were tiring and the comic relief was (I think) pitched mostly at the younger crowd. It smacks slightly (the humor does) of Shrek-damaged snark, but it's not quite as cruel. So the whole thing is not exceptional but is competently made and perhaps I was just up too late when I saw it, but I thought several parts were quite moving. Like a sausage, it is undistinguished but good.

Rocket Science

Saw Rocket Science, a coming-of-age story about a bitter little boy with a stutter who joins the debate club. He joins mainly as a means to get to know the assertive female star of the team. She initially recruits him and at first it seems like the film's going to be a cut-n-dry girl-fixes-boy love story and nearly veers in that direction, but the girl is uninterested in romance (good for her) and the boy quickly sinks into histrionics and yet bleaker bitterness. I found the protagonist fairly unlikeable. It's kind of hard to feel much sympathy for him when the only sentences he manages to quake out are sullen ones. Okay, okay, he's just a kid and, as the narrator puts it, he has this dream of a beautiful, confident voice and keenly feels the distance between the dream and reality.

Ultimately, he comes to accept himself, in all his limitations (no real spoiler there, this is an immediate consequence of the coming of age archetype.) He contacts an ex-debate star who spectacularly failed at the height of his game, clamming up mid-speech. The opening narration implies that on the day the ex-star stopped speaking, the beautiful dream of the voice appeared in the protagonist's head. This is not established very well however, especially since the protagonist and ex-debater look strikingly similar (I thought they were the same person at first. I had to write down their names.) I feel like this film was based on a short story that was probably better. It has these devices which feel terribly awkward.

Also of note: every debate topic is frankly sexual (Masturbation: good or bad? Abstinence: should schools advocate it?) The seasons always change suddenly, always marked by a nicely-framed shot of a couple kissing. There is a Korean neighbor who is either supposed to be inscrutably foreign or is slightly insane (and also maybe gay?) All of these things annoyed me to some degree.

I think this movie was stealing heavily from Wes Anderson (there are worse people to steal from, but they seem to only copy his stylistic quirks.) A strange mishmash of a film, it's full of false starts and red herrings (as I said, the first half of the film seems like a slightly quirky romance) and I think I got a little frustrated with it. In any case, I was left feeling dissatisfied and wanting to discuss it with someone. A surprisingly troubling film.

PS - No trivia on imdb. Nothing involved in making this movie was trivial.

Black Narcissus

Saw Black Narcissus, a '40s film about nuns trying to establish a convent in an old palace in India. There is a heavy dose of the mystical orient here, but done in a low-key kind of way. There's no actual magic, just talk of clear air and heat and 'this place' and so on. There's also a good dose of outdated imperialism as well. At one point the people are compared to children (as usual. Eyes cannot roll hard enough.)

The convent is located in a palace called 'the palace of women,' where harems of women used to be kept. The irony of the nuns praying while overlooked by frescoes of smiling, large-breasted women is inescapable. Indeed in its restrained, important-film, 1940s way the film throbs with barely suppressed female sexuality. There is a young girl who is sent to the convent to cure her wonton ways. The only other English person nearby is Dean, the hot (well, hot by 40s standards anyway) assistant to the general whose palace this is. He's always hanging around and being infuriating and attractive and generally stirring the pot. Eventually one sister, sister Ruth, falls in horrible love with him, although he clearly favors the mother superior. Ruth confronts the mother superior in a jealous rage, baring her teeth in a rat-like grimace. The mother superior sends her away after a tense argument and the scene fades into a jarring shot of bright, red flowers (oh, Georgia O'Keeffe! Oh!) Much drama is mined from the interplay of the characters' restrained faith and their weak flesh.

Eventually things come to a head during a sunset, as the mother superior walks and talks with Dean while Ruth listens from behind a screen, barely containing her fury. This scene is set just at sunset and the light is beautiful and golden. It may be the most beautiful scene in the whole movie. Shortly after, there is a tense showdown which is also quite beautiful, though in a more sinister way. The ending is almost Herzogian, in its long shots of untamed nature. An interesting film. At first restrained, but becomes wilder and wilder as it progresses, unto a very nice crescendo. Nothing breathtaking, but surprisingly effective.

The Road

Saw The Road. It was very sad. The protagonist and his son struggle to survive amidst an unspecified global catastrophe. Bands of marauding cannibals are an ever-present threat. Often other survivors are reduced entirely to the weapons they wield, their faces obscure but their knives flashing. This is meant to signify the open hostility of this post-apocalyptic hell. A dismal soundtrack keeps things sorrowful and their desperation as they search houses and gas stations for food is palpable. The film is technically excellent, spare, and powerful. But why must it be so sad?

The obvious answer is to help convey the shittiness of the situation, but then why flash back to when the father's wife was alive? Why intercut footage of his idyllic youth and focus on the bird-like crying of his son? Sad movies try to work on your sense of empathy to put you in a receptive mood for their (often extremely humane) moral. In general, really sad movies are desperate attempts to make us better people. So, with this in mind, I tried to uncover the film's moral leanings.

There's some grist to argue for a religious allegory: they talk a lot of 'carrying the fire,' there is a prominent son, talk of God abounds (the father even narrates a line about if he were god,) and they spend a night in a church, gazing at the murals of saints. Unfortunately, I don't know what to make of all of that, except to buttress my argument that this film has ethics on its mind. The son is clearly the moral compass of the film however, often nagging his father into merciful acts, referred to as an angel, and, in the opening narration, as "the word of God." Indeed. A more interesting take on all of this, I thought, was revealed by the ending which I'll discuss in white font (highlight to read the next paragraph.)

The film ends with the simultaneous death of the father and rescue of the son. It is revealed that the shadowy figures pursuing the duo are benevolent but wary, keeping their distance out of fear of the father, rather than for any sinister purpose. The father is always reprimanded by the son for being too suspicious and every time the son is correct. The black dude was harmless, the old man friendly, even the dog snuffling around their bunker was, it is implied, attached to the friendly family. The father usually responds to this reprimand by calling the son naive, but it is the father himself who is naive. His experience has made him so paranoid that he perpetuates the hell which he believes he is escaping. In the narrated line I mentioned above, the father says "If I were God, I would have made the world just so and no different." I thought that was interesting (though to be honest, I've come across this meme of the self-perpetuated hell before in The Sandman, among other places. There's a connection to prison life here as well.) Alright, enough of this.

The story bleak but the message uplifting, this is a hard movie. It is indirect in its points which may annoy the more literal-minded, but it's a lot more intelligent than some other post-apocalyptic films, with their mindless glorification of rugged individualism and pseudo-sophisticated dismal outlook. This film is, underneath it all, suffused with hope.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

Saw It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (thanks, Mark!) It was an ensemble piece where various comedians compete for attention and screen-time, chasing the famous jackpot under The Big "W." It reminded me a lot of Cannonball Run, but better. I feel both films are overstuffed and rely too heavily on our assumed affection for the actors involved, but I thought that Cannonball Run had too much behind-the-scenes competition for lines and a few times it seemed like the actors were trying to out-mug each other, whereas that problem doesn't occur in this film. I suspect the actors were kept a bit more isolated and a bit more tightly controlled in the group scenes. Also the morals involved are a bit better. This film condemns the greed of men in a non-school-marm-ish way. One of the women has this incongruously melancholy monologue about wanting to just get away from these greedy people she's gotten involved with. I sympathize with her because whenever I watch screwballs I can't help but think "why don't they just leave all of these jerks to their jerk-ery and be done with them?" She never gets another line for the rest of the film after that.

So the film is good, but very slap-sticky (which I don't find very funny. I'm an absurd humor kind of guy.) Also, the women involved in the films are all either useless and irrelevant if not actively damaging. 60s sexism aside, the film is mad-cap and fun. I liked the bit just before the intermission, where the film intelligently spins the various story-lines up to a fever-pitch. Also the crescendo in the park is good.

I think this film fell slightly flat for me, but other cameo-heavy screwballs like Cannonball Run and Around the World in 80 Days similarly fell a bit flat, so this is my problem I guess.

Shattered Glass

Saw Shattered Glass, an apparent drama-doc about a young cool journalist who runs into hot water over a possibly fake story. I liked this film, though for purely evil, schadenfreude-laced reasons. The journalist is this young guy who flirts with the secretary, talks winningly to classrooms of pretty, blond girls, and remembers birthdays and that one woman once said she prefers her diet coke partly frozen (protip to any guys reading this: remembering unimportant details about people for years is serial-killer behavior.) At one point he oh-so-adorably bribes two people into bailing him out of a deadline with gum. I hated this guy within the first ten minutes or so and therefore had a vested interest in seeing him squirm, suffer, and fail. When he pitches his stories to the editors, he always milks his story until he has them practically drooling for more and then says "Well, I guess it's all pretty dumb, I don't know if I'll even finish it." Which of course elicits groans and teasing from the other journos and a gee-whiz grin from the protagonist. What an ass.

The film has little twists and turns, but the conclusion was so far-gone for me it was only a question of the film fulfilling my expectations or being annoying. Does that count as a spoiler? I think the ending is telegraphed pretty hard, especially for anyone who can recognize html from a slight distance.

A marvelously hate-able sociopath of a protagonist makes this picture an interesting character study and an ultimately satisfying one, if for evil reasons.

The Puffy Chair

Saw The Puffy Chair. At first it seems like a garden-variety romance, but soon becomes a kind of anti-romance. The anti-romantic Josh goes on a road-trip with his just-about fed-up girlfriend Emily (her attendance on the trip is supposed to be a kind of apology for badly screwing up a romantic goodbye dinner, so you know things are off to a good start.) He thuds around deaf-tone to her needs (when she asks him late at night why he loves her, he responds "isn't it kind of late?") and unattractively schemes for 10 dollars off at a motel, to the inconvenience of everyone involved (and further impotent finagling later.) Part of the Josh-ian puzzle is solved when we meet his artist brother who whiles his days away filming lizards and talking huskily of how his gift for his father's birthday was going to be himself. "It's me" he groans. "I'm the gift." At first a nice change of pace from the artless Josh, the brother's oh-so-sensitivity slowly becomes oppressive and infuriating. There's a scene in a hospital near the end where I think the brother is meant to be touching/cathartic, but I just wanted to slap him.

Most of the movie is spent on the dynamic between Josh and Emily. Their relationship is clearly deeply troubled. Emily's romantic nature is at direct odds with Josh's grim and sullen outlook. Josh seems to be set up to be an ogre most of the time, but at one point he plays a beautiful song he'd written that he's clearly shy about and when, after an argument with Emily, he's proven right, he doesn't gloat. He's got feelings too it seems, but they're all so buried and guarded he may as well not have them at all. The ending is touchingly ambiguous about his feelings. We are made to try to understand this jerk, not just condemn him. It's a great ending too. Very real and believable. There's no Hollywood schmaltz in this picture.

Don't Look Now

Saw Don't Look Now. It was a scary movie. Well, not exactly scary so much as ominous. There's all these baroque signs and omens which could be considered scary, but need not be.

The story follows a married man and woman working in Venice shortly after the death (by drowning) of their daughter. One example of an ambiguously menacing omen is as follows: the two are lost in the side-streets. They come upon a narrow set of stairs leading into the water. White rats scurry around their feet. The man mutters "I know this place" while his wife keeps shouting "let's get out of here." Eventually they leave. I can offer no explanation for that scene. Ominous and weird but nothing you could actually pinpoint as creepy, just kind of Lynchian and oppressive. I actually really liked this at first. I liked that the possibility of self-delusion was also part of the horror. Similarly, I argue The Exorcist is scarier before the possession is revealed. What's worse than watching your child dying, dying of an illness without explanation or reason? Demons come as a relief to that. In this film, however, the omens become increasingly less prosaic and more spiritually suggestive, so so much for mundane horror.

Anyway, all of these signs and portents must be building up to something of course. The movie is not so brave/stupid as to cheat us of a climax after all. Unfortunately when that climax occurs the movie kind of falls apart for me. The ultimate cashing-in of the residual creep in this film is cinematically awesome, with its weaving together of predestined through-lines, but just don't see it with other people or the laughter may never die down. Truly disappointing.

Far better in terms of buildup and payoff is the girl's initial death scene. The husband is looking at photographs of a church in Venice while his children (they also have a son) play outside. The son runs his bike over an inexplicable pane of glass just as the father drops a glass of whiskey, cutting his finger. A drop of blood drips onto the photo, right over a shot of his daughter's blood-red raincoat. He stares transfixed as suddenly the drop runs across the photo on its own. He runs outside but his daughter is already dead. The movie works in this kind of dream-logic. Water and red appears again and again from then on. This film is like a tamer version of The Tenant. There's the same eerie creep, but little payoff. The ideas feel slightly half-formed and too ambiguously wishy-washy for me. The horror is pitched at an almost subconscious level which is fascinating, but requires you to play along too much. I could see this film inspiring interesting, and more accessible, horror films. It has the right evocative ideas, just not the finale I could have hoped for.

PS - according to imdb, this was originally a double-feature with the original Wicker Man, which is awesome. Both are super-British and low-key horror.

Boogie Nights

Saw Boogie Nights. It was great. It charted the rise of a male porn star through the cheap drugs and easy love of the 60s and 70s. All is right with the world, everyone's getting high and getting laid. Then, during a new-years party, William H Macy finds his wife fucking some other guy for the last time and starts shooting. Welcome to the 80s. Suddenly cute-n-cuddly love-making turns into angry screwing, pot gives way to crack, unshaven pits turn into silicone tits, and porn theaters give way to cheap videotape. Some of the impact of the above is kind of force-fed via voice-overs (I'm thinking specifically of Jack's direction on set. "No girls, that's nice, but there's no passion in it.") but it is effective, and I'm perhaps only seeing the machinery.

Music is used to great evocative effect to place the scenes. The soundtrack is great. The character of Roller-girl had an interesting arc: at first she flees from normal society into porn because porn (adorably) still respected women. Later on porn catches up and she beats the shit out some asshole who chastises her for "leaving him with a hard-on" during some porn-van shoot. That scene is awesome with its hateful, cheap, smeary videotape lights. It's also inter-cut with the rock-bottoms of the other characters, so the whole mood is pretty shitty. The worst scene by far is one of a drug deal gone wrong. Some cracked-out gay guy is playing Russian roulette while the latest pop hits blare out of his stereo. Meanwhile his goon carefully weighs the fake dope while a Chinese twink blasts off fire-crackers. The music plays at deafening levels, punctuated with the gun-blast explosions of the crackers, and our heroes just sweat and sweat. Just awful.

I'm kind of rambling, but the movie has a lot in it that's great. Homosexuality is used interestingly as well: the fat, ugly Seymour Hoffman is the only gay character and is kind of side-lined in the 60s. The whole world is an orgy but he's not invited. Later on, his attempt to kiss the protagonist at the new-years party is the little pre-death of the free-love era. When our hero is at his lowest, being beaten by homophobes for resorting for prostitution, their shouts are almost kind: "You shouldn't be doing this." They're right, he shouldn't. Homosexuality is unfortunately mostly used in a negative context in this film (see also the cracked-out gay guy above,) which is a pity because things were going great for gays for a little bit in the 70s, before AIDS. In fact, this film could have focused on gays without losing too much.

Anyway, the film is great. I would expect nothing less from P T Anderson.

PS - I didn't see this mentioned on the imdb page, but listen to the end of the credits. It gets weird.

Dragon Inn

Saw Dragon Inn (thanks, Basil!) It was a ridiculous martial-arts movie. Set in feudal china, the children of an executed political dissident are being smuggled to safety by his friends. They hole up in the Dragon Gate Inn (or Dragon Inn, depending on translation, apparently) where they are delayed for a period by weather, then by elaborate games of pretend played with scouting troops hunting for them, then by the army coming to kill them. There is also a scheming mistress of the inn whose allegiance swaps at a dizzying rate. The whole thing is really an excuse for awesome fight scenes. The fights never reach the eye-popping spectacle of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (et al) but what it lacks in beauty it makes up for in quantity. No one walks, only jumps and twirls are allowed. No one has a conversation, only talking during battles. My favorite scene in the film was when our heroes, the inn staff, and the scouts are in a three-way standoff one night. The mistress comes out of her room to find secret fights breaking out around every corner. Does no one sleep? Hilarious.

A deeply goofy movie. Possibly the goofiness is accidental, but I think not. It feels like a comedy-action where the comedy is mostly lost in translation.

Slasher

Saw Slasher, a film which, in spite of its title, is a documentary about a high-pressure used car salesman, called a "slasher." He travels from car sale to car sale, with his "mercenary" DJ and salesman in tow. I don't know where the director found this guy but he's fascinating. He's simultaneously repulsive and loveable. Probably suffering from some form of ADD, he constantly twitches and shakes, his high-adrenaline patter very effective for moving cars, but impossible for relationships. He drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney, and has been "inside" as he puts it. He only ever calms down (to merely excited levels) when he talks about his wife and two daughters whom he obviously loves very much (although they seem to live in a storage unit. I think I misunderstood this though. That's a bit too weird.) In one scene he calls his wife from outside a strip-bar, one cigarette in his mouth and a second one (also lit) in his beer-holding hand to tell her that he's okay and he loves her. Later on, he talks at length about how sweet his wife is and reveals that he doesn't think he deserves her. He wonders aloud what she sees in him. Like I say, he's repulsive but loveable.

His partners in crime, the DJ and salesman, are respectively a mild-mannered man and an eternally frustrated joker. The salesman is great on camera, utterly un-self-conscious, funny, and friendly. The three of them are summoned to the grotesquely impoverished Memphis, Tennessee where they must move 30 cars in 3 days. They hit upon the gimmick of having one secret car that's being sold for only $88 (as one winner remarks, "It sure drives like an 88 dollar car.") Enticed by this deal, waves and waves of hostile, suspicious, poor people haggle and dither and make the 30-car goal almost seem completely unreachable. There is some manipulative editing going on, but the frustration of the three as the last day looms is palpable. It kind of got to me and I began to hate the jackass customers for wasting our heroes' time (even though, of course, the patrons are only trying to save money.) One woman haggles for an hour, is ready to sign, calls her father-in-law, re-haggles for another hour and then, finally, signs. The salesman gloats about how he talked her up at the last second and I felt glad for him.

An interesting documentary, it is everything I wish reality TV were. An intimate look into the life of a man I'd never want to actually meet. For a while, we share in even the hopes and dreams of the lowly used car salesman and for a while at least, he becomes human.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

Saw Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. It was one of those quirky rom-coms that are kind of mainly aimed at guys I think. A too-perfect girl swoops in and 'solves' some dude's life (she's even rich in this story.) I think the existence this genre shows that guys like a little (ridiculous, improbable, escapist) romance in their life as well. Kind of egalitarian in its way.

I didn't hate this movie, but I wasn't very impressed. Like the hipsters it worships, it is arch and lazily pretty and deeply judgmental. It embraces quirks and what it imagines to be honesty, and so it imagines itself progressive and accepting when it is in fact only reinforcing its own particular mores as hard as any other movie. A naked attempt at bottling and selling the youth culture of the 00's. It clearly strives to have that Garden State-style kickass soundtrack, but relies too much on unpolished charm which came off (for me) as messy and sloppy.

Also, the supporting cast is entirely unnecessary. There's two exes (one for him and one for her) which serve only to pointlessly and momentarily delay the central pair's inevitable hook-up. This movie also takes place in the space of one night. The boy gets over his ex in less than a day. There's a drunk chick who is just gross. She later shouts 'I love you New York' to remind you, once again, that this is set in NY.

There's also a trio of gay guys who act as sort of fairy god-mothers. I'm often annoyed by gay guys in movies. Maybe it's that I take them too personally. They almost never feel like actual real characters to me, just daring rejections of stereotypes or even more daring confirmations of stereotypes (to say nothing of that they're usually played by straight guys anyway. Are there no gays in Hollywood?) In this movie they prance and deliver glib one-liners but tellingly never so much as kiss each other. We do, however, get to visit a drag bar (the less said about that horrible scene the better) and for some reason the gay guys just happen to have a trunk full of bras (??) in their car. The gays get more likeable eventually and anyway I think some of my annoyance may be misdirected ego-centrism. My most common thought when watching/judging gay characters is 'I don't act like that.' which is sort of beside the point, isn't it?

... Anyway, the film's not bad, but it's not really good either. The least bit of digging pulls it apart, so, if you watch this film, don't dig.

Earth

Saw Earth. It was a 1930s silent piece of Soviet propaganda. The title refers to soil (not the planet) and the story revolves around noble peasants trying to eke out a living in the shadow of a rich neighboring farmer. The film opens with a promising scene of an old man dying, lying in an orchard, surrounded by ripe apples which a nearby child is eating (the symbolism is clear: the circle of life.) Later, the peasants buy a tractor (or, as they later call it, a communist iron horse) and begin tilling the soil and harvesting at super-oxen speed. The rich neighboring farmer kills the young, attractive leader of the peasant commune and the image of a child eating near a corpse is repeated, this time highlighting the uncertain future of the child, as he cumbersomely picks seeds from his mouth. The commune seems set to fall into despair and a dessicated, ancient priest begins hanging around. But then, the noble, Captain Haddock-esque father of the slain leader casts the priest out (an ugly peasant woman offers the thinnest possible defense of religion at this point: "There may be no god... but what if there is!?") and leads the commune in not a funeral march, but a great parade, affirming their glorious future. This scene is awesome and amazing.

The peasants are always shot from below and with a huge sky behind them. It gives them the appearance of enormous colossi, beyond archetypal and into mythic territory. There was a shot of a peasant when the tractor is delivered that struck me. The peasant is so wizened and ugly, and yet iconic and almost picturesque. Religion is truly shafted by this movie. The priest is clearly a villain, later calling on god to "smite the impious." Even in this he is unwittingly aiding the peasants. They are clearly not the impious ones here. Rather, the evil rich farmer goes mad with guilt, faced with the unbreakable resolve of the peasantry. The climactic parade/funeral is truly nuts. There are inter-cut images of horses stampeding (the unbridled passion of the communists,) a woman giving birth (to a new movement?) the rich farmer losing his mind, the priest screaming to god. Even typed out, it seems so wild and over the top! A scene to rival the staircase scene in Battleship Potemkin.

Clearly propaganda (the climactic march is brought back to earth with a stirring speech about their soaring future, soaring like that communist airplane there (airplane noises are heard, but no plane is shown. Indeed.)) but surprisingly good and effective for its reverend age.

A Serbian Film

Saw A Serbian Film. It has a reputation of being very difficult to watch and it was indeed an ordeal. I understand it has some kind of allegorical message about politics in Serbia expressed via S&M-themed porn (in the grand tradition of the Marquis De Sade,) but this is not clear from the film itself. The film itself is a kind of horror film where a male porn star is drugged for a film shot and then, finding his wife and son missing after waking up, he tries to recreate his footsteps from the previous night (hint: wife and son are not okay.) The film is seemingly full of commentary about the porn industry and sexual politics and also has some crypto-message about politics (allegedly) but I think it's mainly an excuse to push boundaries and gross people out. In this endeavor it succeeds admirably. Grotesque and gross, it is not ugly or cheap enough to be easily dismissed but neither is it smart enough to be anything but dumb torture-porn (a genre I wish was not an actual genre.)

I don't mind having my boundaries pushed and it's really not all that bad (the special effects are okay but sufficiently lacking to make it obvious that most of it is fake. I mean, like comedy and horror, you kind of have to play along for it to be effective.) The gross-out scenes (such as they are) are pretty imaginative and well-shot, but don't expect a good plot or even very interesting ideas. Avoid.

Vanya on 42nd Street

Saw Vanya on 42nd Street (Thanks, Steven!) It was essentially a filmed play. The film is set in modern times, where a group of actors are putting on Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (translated by David Mamet!) in a beautiful, crumbling theater. The actors are all dynamite (with the exception of the guy who played Waffles. I think his readings were too 'stagey.' I could probably do no better mind you, but then I'm not on stage with Wallace Shawn and Julianne Moore.) I was a bit disappointed that the freedom afforded by film wasn't used as much as it is in other stage adaptations (eg: Doubt.) Indeed because this is a play within the context of the film, self-consciously stagey lighting queues and off-stage sound effects are used. There are even inter-act breaks where the actors go out of character and snack and chatter quietly to each other. There's a name for this technique of making the viewer conscious that they're watching a performance, but I don't know what it is.

So, essentially this is really just a play that someone happened to film. But it's a great play (it always shocks me that Chekhov wrote his plays more than a century ago and yet his plays are more relevant to modern life than many films in theaters now are.) and as I've said, the actors are dynamite. It's slightly disappointing as film but as theater, it's glorious. Really, I wish this were more of a thing. If only people would just film and talk about live theater. So many great performances are completely off my radar simply because they were live, and only possibly recorded. Such a pity.

Big Fan

Saw Big Fan. A very dramatic movie about fandom. It revolves around a Marty-esque loser played by a never-shlubbier Patton Oswalt. He plays a fanatical NY Giants fan. That team is his one ray of sunshine in his depressing life, living with his shrill mother and working a dead-end, minimum wage job. His small-time lawyer brother owns a colossal house and a spray-tanned wife with tits out to there, his boring but kind sister works as a dental assistant and offers to help find Patton a job, which he interprets as charity and grumpily rebuffs her. He is a man who has painted himself into a corner. His fandom acts as a cage, protecting him from the sadness of life, but also stifling his growth. Much of his life is spent on insisting that he's happy.

One day he spots the power-house quarterback of the Giants in a parking lot, follows him, unwittingly witnesses what is probably a drug deal, follows him further to a strip club, fan-boys all over the quarterback, accidentally lets slip about the maybe-drug deal, and has his ass beat. The quarterback is suspended pending investigation and Patton's family urges him to sue. The papers descend, his brother tries to get him declared mentally incompetent, cops are sniffing around, sport news-casters are talking about him, and without their quarterback the Giants are losing game after game. All of this mounts and mounts up to a climax that is almost hilarious in its melodrama. Still, it's very effective in its mundane, (sometimes literally) kitchen-sink drama.

The final conclusion of the film seems to be that, yes, Patton is an overgrown child. But he is a happy one, or at least believes himself to be. The film argues/hopes that this is the same thing. A deeply sad film, but hopeful in the end.

Baghead

Saw Baghead. It was, I believe, an actual real-live indie movie. It had actors I'd never seen before, clearly no budget whatsoever (I think I could have financed almost everything in the film on 20$,) lots of money-saving close-ups, and believably improvised dialogue. They had the artless 'um'-filled conversations that actual real people have. Amazing.

The plot is as follows: four struggling actors hole up in a cabin the woods to write the film that will star all of them and make them famous. Little romantic crossed wires and petty jealousies are revealed and then a boogeyman (or men) begins terrorizing them. It's only slightly scary (even for a big wimp like me) but it's fun. There's a lot of low-key comedy in the thing (at one point they hear the bad guy tinkering with their car. One character looks out the window and says "Is he fucking stealing the car?" As though killing them weren't bad enough. Hilarious.) as well as some predictable plot points. But the film they're writing (yeah?) is THIS FILM! I know, contrived, but I liked it. There's a lot of playing with what's going on vs what we're seeing to notice here.

Not a bad movie. Unexpected and low-key. It's an interesting take on the slasher genre with plenty of line-blurring to keep things interesting. I tepidly recommend it.

Paisan

Saw Paisan, a 1946 war film. It was structured as a series of vignettes set during the allied invasion/occupation of Italy. I was surprised at the nuanced view of the allies. The final vignette ends with a clearly telegraphed war-crime on the Nazi's part, so it's not like this film totally transcends its time-period, but there is another vignette about an American MP who has his shoes stolen by a street urchin. He demands his shoes back and makes the urchin bring him to his shack in a sort of tent-city, a place thronging thick with displaced woman and children. At first their excitement at seeing him seems almost charming, but then the hungry eyes and outstretched hands of starving children get to be too much for him and he flees their slum, still shoeless.

Many of the vignettes similarly avoid pat happy endings. They show a worrying similarity to the 'gotcha' twists of The Twilight Zone (especially the first vignette,) but never actually become quite that campy. The nonsense and black irony of war is on full display here, but avoids becoming wearying or trite. Perhaps the memories were still too fresh for anyone to dare to try and provide morals or points.

Very interesting and quite exciting. This film also predates the discovery that dirt existed on the soldierly form, so everyone's very clean-shaven and photogenic.

Return of the Pink Panther

Saw Return of the Pink Panther. It was a passable and pleasant Peter Sellers comedy. He does his usual thing of being hilariously bumbling (there's a scene in a night club where he slurs "here's lookin' at you cuh-hid" that I think had his scene-mate genuinely laughing.) I noticed an increase in things going wrong beyond his control (there's a bathroom that disintegrates around him through no (er, well, little) fault of his own) I think he's best sewing his own discord. The actual plot is kind of boringly advanced by the jewel thief of the previous installments. There's some awkward '70s racial humor ("his little yellow skin" eh? Oh dear.) and clearly the jewel thief is supposed to be a sort of James Bond type (though not nearly as entertaining and just as pompous.) The final catastrophic set-destroying joke I saw well in advance, but it was the best part of the film just the same. Not Sellers' best work, but funny in a laff-a-minute sort of way and a pleasant way to waste two hours.