Trouble in Paradise

Saw Trouble in Paradise, a delightfully witty film. It follows a diamond burglar who steals women's hearts as often as their jewels. He meets and falls in love with a female thief. Their romance is one of mutual admiration. Their gleeful interest in the criminal and larcenous is supposed to be a sort of endearingly morbid thing. It reminds me of The Addams Family in that way. They fix their sights on a wealthy perfume-heiress who is single, flirty and bored by money-matters. The plot thickens however when it becomes unclear to everyone whether the feigned romance is real.

The film gleefully smirks with innuendo, sexy wit and outright mentioning of unmentionables. At one point a suspicious rival suitor is thrown off the scent with talk of the harems of Constantinople ("they have harems there?" "Yes... all kinds.") The atmosphere is decadent but charmingly so. The film is full of little flourishes. At one point they attend an opera. The camera zooms in on the score. In the background an actress sings "I love him! I love him!" The pages flip indicating a flash forward to the end of the show at which point the actress is now singing "I hate him! I hate him!" Dry but hilarious stuff. It's very frothy of course but if you've a stomach for theatrics, then this is for you.

Also, there's a lot of old Hollywood sexual ambiguity. The seduction scene is marvelous and in addition to the harem bit above, they also speak of gigolos. The thief first connects to the wealthy heiress by critiquing her markup ("I could fix the whole thing in a minute" he declares.) The fey refinement of the burglar is a desirable, enviable quality, far superior to the gruff but stupid, ex-military rival suitors. In this I was flattered by the film and so may be more charmed than fascinated by this movie. Either way, what fun!

Ben Hur (1907)

Saw Ben Hur (the 1907 version.) It was only 10 minutes long, so it was kind of a Cliff's Notes version of the story. The film is supposed to be 15minutes long and the version I got (from here) was fast-forwarded to 10 minutes (I guess they can't host files longer than 10 minutes or something) which is a bit shitty. We frantically rush from the galley to the chariot race to eventual victory (post-spoiler spoiler alert.) The old actors wave their hands in the air (like they just don't care) constantly. I believe they're hailing Caesar or something but in this sped-up yakety-sax-o-vision they look like they're all doing some kind of vigorous, land-based backstroke.

Of the film, there's not much to say beyond reporting the plot which most people know anyway. The film jittered and danced in front of me for a while but I think I'll struggle in future to remember if I've seen this before. Only 4 more ancient movies to go. Ugh.

Blood Rain

Saw Blood Rain (thanks, Basil!) It was a Korean mystery film. Now, unfortunately, I saw it just after getting home and having dinner. The post-caffeine crash + food coma combo left me half-asleep through the middle hour of the film which is not the best state to be in when viewing anything, especially a freakin' mystery. This film tells the very knotty story of a paper-mill island-town whose Imperial tribute of paper was sabotaged by arson. Official investigators are dispatched to investigate and they discover an island-wide conspiracy of silence, cracked here and there by the priestess and a few mill-workers who always seem to wind up dead soon after. We learn a man was recently falsely accused of practicing the criminally foreign mysticism of Christianity (which is a non-twist in the movie that was quite interesting to me. My criminal ignorance of history once again causes me to be blind-sided.) It seems that that man's ghost now haunts the villagers, wrecking vengeance on his enemies. The true fun of this movie is in the central stalking detective though, so of course the supernatural explanation is not all that it seems.

I was happily surprised to find a good deal of restraint in this film (a rare thing in the Asian cinema I've seen, as I've said before.) Several scenes have no background music and are shot coolly in the middle-ground of the frame. There's no baroque little meaningless flourishes of CGI and though there are sometimes violins in the background, they mostly thoughtfully hum rather than weep or shriek. There is also a lot of paper in the film. Several characters are wearing robes made of paper and at one point a corpse is wrapped in thick sheets of paper. I loved it but don't know if it really was some artsy theme, connecting the villagers to their livelihood in an immediate and concrete way, or just historically accuracy. I'm going to assume the latter but hope the former.

I have to add that I found the film very confusing however. I don't know how much is due to my narcoleptic state (probably all of it) but in any case there's a lot going on. At one point we begin flashing back in time heavily. There's also this conspiracy of silence, faked deaths, secret loves, and a blood-borne disease which makes the sufferer feel he is possessed. Also, the supernatural explanation that isn't all it seems? It isn't completely dismissed in the end either. There's a fever-dream climax that reminded me of this scene. Yeah, the blood rains. That climax is amazing. The rest of the film, too confusing to be followed by people who are mostly asleep (and for that the film makers should feel a deep and eternal shame.)

Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

Saw Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. It was an Errol Morris film about Fred Leuchter, a reluctant holocaust denier. Leuchter seems like an amiable sort of nerd. He is mousy, opinionated, and seems strangely innocent. He blundered into the execution-device industry at a young age but I never got the sense that he truly understood his job in anything but abstract, moralistic terms. He defends his grisly vocation by citing the need for compassion and humanity (at one point he bemoans the boring sterility of the cement room where lethal injections take place.) By chance, he becomes an expert in all methods of execution. He is therefore asked to help with the defense of a Canadian holocaust denier who published pamphlets claiming that there were no gas chambers. Leuchter goes to Auschwitz to take chippings off the walls of various chambers. When he comes back, he has the cement chips analyzed without telling the lab what they are looking for. When they find no trace of cyanide gas, he concludes that there could be no gas chambers and publishes a career (and life) destroying report.

The point of this documentary is not to sleazily speculate on the correctness of his conclusion. All along this story his methods are heavily criticized. Leuchter claims there was no ventilation, but the historian tells us there was, it was simply removed later. All of this is recorded in the camp archives but, the historian disdainfully explains, Leuchter can not even read German. The bricks, we are told, had long since been removed and recycled. The bricks which remain come from other buildings. The samples were not analyzed correctly for a surface-coating of cyanide because the lab was not given instructions.

This documentary is primarily concerned with how Leuchter got into this horrible stance. It is suggested that he initially over-prized his powers of observation and deduction. His wife read mystery novels while he collected samples. An unfavorable comparison to Sherlock Holmes is brought up (an especially apt reference, given Conan Doyle's own dubious belief in fairies and the weight given to his opinion, incorrectly transferred from his prowess as an author. Similarly, what does even an expert executioner know about the holocaust?) When confronted by his failures, he doubles down, pugnaciously insisting that he did everything possible and is convinced of his correctness, historical and political ramifications be damned. This kind of posture of fearless truth-teller is also unfortunately typical of nerds. We love to be right and if it makes someone else wrong, so much the worse for them.

He is called a simpleton by the Neo-Nazi publisher who printed his report (a man who claims to have been turned Neo-Nazi when he read Leuchter's report.) An incandescent director of a holocaust survivor's center calls him an antisemite and hate-monger. The historian who explains his errors cannot believe his lack of respect for the monuments he chiseled at, apparently innocent of what they meant and symbolized. The film seems to lean more toward interpreting his actions as those of a proud fool. He has made an error but after his friends and family turn on him and after he is persecuted by total strangers, he inevitably turns to the welcoming arms of "revisionist historians."

One of the most important lessons of the holocaust, I feel, is that we as a species are capable of such things. It could happen again if we are not careful. The point of this film seems to be that holocaust denial could happen to anyone if they are not careful. One of the talking heads says she does not hate Leuchter. She pities him.

The Wrong Man

Saw The Wrong Man, an other Hitchcock. This one deals with a button-down family-man musician who is accused of a crime he did not commit. Hitch himself appears in a pre-movie monologue to assure us that this really did happen. The film becomes incredibly Kafkaesque after he is arrested, with the cops playing mind games with him and making him perform seemingly absurd actions: "I want you to enter that store, walk to the back, and then return to us here." It turns out this is a form of identification, the results of which are to be collected via telephone. We viewers, tied to the viewpoint of the musician, never hear the results. He even rankles at the indignity of it all which echoes The Trial strongly. The tension mounts and things look worse and worse for our hero. There's even a red-herring plot point, a race-track form idly filled out, which I anticipated would become a source of angst but never did. Even the evil is unreliable. The sequence where our hero and his wife try to find two witnesses for his alibi is awesome. It's all dark shadows and looming objects, reinforcing the notion that our heroes are held in the sway of forces they cannot comprehend. The trials are dense gobbledygook, full of seemingly meaningless questions (at one point a witness is grilled about the attire of an unrelated man in a police line-up) and seemingly arbitrary decisions. Even the source of eventual salvation is, it is implied, at the hands of a yet greater force.

The film is great fun. Pulpy as Hitchcock ever is, but oh so gripping.

The Quiet Man

Saw The Quiet Man, a production by that duo of Johns: Wayne and Ford. It's a super-Irish film about an American (Wayne) who wants to settle down in his ancestral home in Ireland. He also wants to marry a high-strung Irish girl who lives next door, to further enliven the proceedings. The film begins in a very tedious way, with grudging acceptance being slowly won by virtue of his picking a fight with the town bully (who happens to be the girl's brother.) For the most part, it sticks to the formula suggested in the preceding. He marries the girl is short order and settles with the mean old brother. The movie left me very conflicted however, as John Ford movies sometimes do.

There's a simplicity about the films that is almost innocent, but which sometimes feels like a pernicious lie. For example, the brother refuses to hand over the wife's dowry. In the wife's mind, that money is owed to her and her not having it means her brother holds sway over her. Now I'm already conflicted. If I were in her position, I would be happy to forgive the debt if only to be rid of the unpleasant relation. On the other hand, she has been working as a maid for her hated brother for years and perhaps what little she has is of greater importance to her (she has a moving speech about how her money and furniture represent her dreams and the dreams of her mothers before her. Are we meant to be moved by this, or are we meant to roll our eyes? I think first the former, then the latter.) She accuses Wayne of being a coward because he will not fight for her (which I feel is nonsense. Fight your own battles, lady.) and of course that Does It. He drags her along to a final show-down, collecting a giant crowd of gawkers en route. One of them, an old lady, offers Wayne "a good stick to beat the lovely lady." To the film's credit, no beating takes place (though he does take the stick,) but that we are presumably meant to feel that physical violence is kind of warranted is unsettling to me. Then again, wasn't I just moralizing that the girl was misbehaving and is a joking reference to a beating really so amiss?

The final fist fight (of course) solves the remaining problems, demonstrating that violence is sometimes the answer. I cringe at the simplicity of it, but maybe things are (or can be ) that simple. It feels so childish and simplistic, really the stuff of playground fantasies, but I'm not sure if it's not really the deceptive simplicity of idealism. OR it may just be escapist nonsense, meant for those who believe problems can be solved by a good punch-out. I'm conflicted. Oh well. A knotty (and possibly too personal) puzzle that goes far beyond this film.

Frankenstein (1910)

Saw the 1910 version of Frankenstein. I approached it as a kind of homework assignment, but it's only 12 minutes long, so it wasn't that bad. The film uses the monster as a sort of metaphor for Frankenstein's evil nature. This evil nature is evidently a Faustian product of too much science which I, who consider myself a scientist of some kind, rankle at. Anyway, the monster hide around the house, popping out to terrorize Frankenstein but hiding impishly from his wife and servants. Frankenstein is also complicit in hiding the monster, reinforcing the monster's symbolic role as weakness of some nonspecific sort. Eventually the monster knocks over Frankenstein's wife and, finally sick of it, Frank turns on the monster. It disappears into a mirror and thus endeth the lesson. An interesting little twist. Frankenstein is still the monster in the end, but this time the alegory is working at a different level and Frank's monstrosity is due to some personal defect, rather than intellectual arrogance, as is usual.

There's some special effects in the "birthing" sequence and in the final mirror shot which are of interest to people who are not me.

UHF

Saw UHF (thanks, Chris!) It was a delightful comedy, helmed by Weird Al himself. He has this very childish but winning style of comedy. It's not overly clever, but it's so utterly guileless and honest I have a hard time leveling serious criticism at it. The humor is so personal and stupid (at one point, we're literally watching Michael Richards spin a toy soldier on a string) but it has its moments and as I say the whole thing is just so sweet. I thought the fake commercials were hilarious. (This one especially. Look at those legs sticking out of the ground!)

I didn't love the film (I like my comedy a shade darker) but it's too good for me to not like it. It's purposefully not manipulative. We are given little reason to like Weird Al's character: his TV shows are lowest-common-denominator style crassness, full of children shrieking and fast-talking voice-overs. He himself is not shown to be particularly clever or hard-working (by today's standards he doesn't "deserve" success.) Even his love-life is comically horrible (witness the funny/horrible voice mail he leaves his ex-girlfriend) but we do like him because that's the default that he's riffing off of. That's what we have to pretend to do, in some sense, to make the comedy work. That's clever enough for me enjoy, but not enough to really thrill me. I expect most normal people would like it pretty good okay though. It's very friendly.

PS - Bob the clown is played by David Bowe, not David Bowie as I very excitedly thought.

Spellbound

Saw Spellbound. It was a Hitchcock movie whose broadest source of interest is that Salvador Dali helped out with the dream sequence. The dream sequence is indeed very Dali-esque, full of melty scenery and those crutch things. The rest of the film which surrounds this incongruous dream sequence concerns a psychoanalyst who falls in love with one of her patients. There's a bit of over-simplified psychology here (I think anyway. I am no expert.) but mental illness is presented as a faulty switch which must be reset and then all is well once more. The flipping of the switch, however, allows for much head-clutching histrionics on the part of the patient which I naturally greedily ate up.

Hitchcock's camerawork is inspired, as usual. His frames capture the characters like insects on a watchglass and he throws beautiful shadows almost everywhere. There are little show-piece shots of light under doors, slow zooms onto details and the climax is appropriately taught and gripping. The film indulges, unfortunately, in a lot of melodrama which must be bought into. Hitchcock was never one for subtlety and there is little to be had here (plot-wise anyway. As I say the mechanics are great.) Also, for today's audiance the madness of men is unfortunately something to be laughed at or ignored and it's difficult to sympathize with a man suffering from a "guilt complex" (especially when he seems just fine soon afterward.)

So, a good film. Slightly dated and pulpy but not without interest and wit.

The Gospel According to St Matthew

Saw The Gospel According to St Matthew. It was a fairly straightforward adaptation of the gospel. We trip from highlight to highlight, hearing the sermon on the mount and then straight off to the loaves and fishes. It is not breathless however. Rather, it adopts the traditional solemn tone. The actors and actresses act as little as possible, remaining statuesque and blank. They declaim the words from scripture which are indeed powerful and stirring enough that they can pretty much get away with this. It leaves the film a bit flat however for someone like me who, in my weakness, hungers mostly for spectacle. It is also quite thorough at times, including the moment when Jesus cursed the fig tree, an often-forgotten moment.

I felt I detected a slight note of absurdism in the film (though absurdism more in the vein of Bergman, than, say, Svankmajer.) Certainly the angel who appears to Joseph and the subsequent miracles of Jesus are clearly influenced by the unexplained 'here it is' feel of the absurdists.

I found the music very interesting. Soulful songs like this and this are cheek-by-jowl with classy numbers like this. It seems like the contrast should be grating, but the songs are used well and never even feel anachronistic.

Also it's kind of shocking to think that this completely respectful film came from the same director who created this monster.

L'Inferno

Saw L'Inferno, a special-effects extravaganza from 1911 based on the famous book by Dante. It's been updated/restored and a few recovered scenes are included, in all their disintegrating glory. It had also been re-scored by the band Tangerine Dream which is nice. Their score is full of dreary strings and a female vocalist who drones in a sorrowful way. She sometimes recites lines from The Inferno which do not rhyme and are arrhythmic, being translated into English. When she quotes the Italian, it's far superior and less distracting.

The special effects are of course quite lo-fi and most could be reproduced today fairly cheaply. There's a scene which calls for souls to be flying through the sky, being blown to their designated punishments. This is accomplished by having the actors lie on a black cloth and using stop motion to make them fly. Flipping the image and then compositing it with Virgil and Dante completes the effect. The souls are all loin-cloth-ed men (some of whom have very nice bodies, hem hem) who expansively gesticulate as is the wont of the silent era. The film bogs down slightly when Dante talks with a soul and is best when they are rushing from one spectacle to another, showing off the film's tricks.

The overall effect is appropriately morbid and slightly oppressive, like an un-scary horror film. Though no slouch in plot or story (though decidedly lacking in terms of acting, from a modern perspective,) I believe the film is most interesting from the point of view of special effects. Not a grueling film, but not slick enough to really hold my attention.

The Thieves

Saw The Thieves (thanks, Basil!) It was a Korean heist movie. I've never seen Ocean's Eleven, but I assume it's pretty similar. There's a casino to be knocked-off and everyone has a little part in the well-orchestrated heist. Of course, things aren't nearly that simple and there's double-crosses, secret alliances, old bad blood, and undercover cops. Unfortunately the cast was large (not quite 11, but up there) and the interrelationships and motives were complex and it got the better of me. The film flashes back and forward in time, confusing me further. Also, though the film is Korean, much of the film takes place in China with Korean subs, atop which my English subs lay (mostly hidden.) Arg.

For the most part, I was able to follow the plot however (just the details are fuzzy) and I enjoyed what I caught. When the film crystallizes into a protracted gun-fight I knew who to root for. In that gun-fight is a fight on the side of a building, with the two combatants in climbing harnesses and that was pretty cool. I greatly enjoyed the original heist sequence which unfortunately ends about half-way through the film, giving way to an extended unpacking sequence where the aforementioned double-crosses and bad blood unfold. This bit I felt went on a bit too long, but as I say, I wasn't really able to follow the intricate histories in the first place, so maybe I'm not the best judge. The heist is great though. I like seeing a rag-tag team of clever people taking down a concrete edifice of power and money.

So, generally a good movie, but before I abruptly end this review, I want to mention a gay kiss that happens in the film. How progressive, you may think, but alas the repulsiveness of the event is played as a punchline and the masculinity of one of our heroes is reaffirmed by way of his disgust. I here wisely restrain myself from an ill-informed rant on different cultural expressions of masculinity. Ok, done.

Fast, Cheap & Out of Control

Saw Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, a sprawling documentary about human mastery over nature. We interview four seemingly unrelated men: a topiary gardener, a robotics researcher, a mole-rat specialist, and a lion tamer. The mole-rat specialist tells us that mole-rats are the only communal (ie hive-like) mammal. They behave in ways that are alternate to our own and thus illuminate our own behavior. As the mole-rats are insect-like, so too are the robots of the researcher. He feels he is not so much programming as inventing new forms of life. Some are maladaptive forms but, he smilingly rejoins, it took nature millions of years to develop locomotion and that intelligence is easy in comparison. Old footage of a sci-fi movie showing a scientist holding off a killer robot with a chair segues us into the lion-tamer. He explains that only by bluff and bluster can we keep a lion from attacking us. As soon as a lion attacks you and know he's hurt you, that lion is spoiled: your tricks won't fool it anymore. Incidentally, the lion tamer got into the business after he was entranced by the glamorous TV serials featuring Clyde Beatty as a child. He too has been bluffed. Lastly the topiary gardener talks of his animals as though they're alive. They need constant attention or they will get out of control. His is a sad case. His animals have got the better of him by simply waiting his life out.

The film circularly links these men. Each of them is grappling with nature, trying to control it through study, emulation, or subjugation. There is an ongoing thematic return to circus imagery. This rich symbol is used to slyly imply that the whole struggle is nonsensical, that we shouldn't be intimidated by it, and that it is fundamentally of our own creation anyway. We are also told (obliquely, through juxtaposition and collage) that over-analysis may destroy something unique to our lives. A shot of the interview monitor illuminates this point while raising interesting questions.

This documentary is very loose and personal. It is not a documentary so much as a sort of extended montage. It's really fascinating and I think it may be the best Errol Morris has done yet. There's so much to discuss in it.

Rope

Saw Rope, a Hitchcock film. The premise is that two ivy-league men murder one of their friends and then hold a dinner-party with his family, the corpse of their son still in the large chest that they're using as a table. The pair are based off of the murderers Leopold and Loeb who, believing themselves to be Nietzschean supermen, murdered as an intellectual exercise to demonstrate their superiority to all the dumb flat-foots of the world. Of course we non-murderous folks can spot the self-justification in their pose a mile off. They have no interest in intellectual exercises, they simply want to kill and posing it as a puzzle makes it acceptable to them. The true pay-off for all this is in the smug sense of superiority which they feel is now justified. To this ego-stroking end they drop all these puns ("Oh where can David be?" "I'm sure he's around here somewhere." "He'll show up hours late as usual." "Why I could just strangle you! You've always sneered at his punctuality.") which arouse the suspicions of their old, equally brainy school-chum Rupert (played with increasing gusto by Jimmy Stuart.)

The film works excellently as a one-room drama. The cast rattles around in the small student digs like atoms in a nuclear reactor, bouncing off one another with ever-increasing energy until the final climactic meltdown which comes in the form of an awesome, show-stopping rave from Jimmy. The final tableaux is a typical Hitchcockian scene of chilly hysteria. In fact, there's a lot of little brilliant scenes that shine here and there like gems. At one point Jimmy interrogates one of the killers who is held captive playing the piano. Every time Jimmy receives a cool-brush-off instead of an answer, he advances the metronome a little, making it tick faster. By the end the killer is playing at double speed and is a nervous wreck. I love this cleverness about Hitchcock.

Also, I'd read that there's a gay vibe about the two killers. This is completely true. They're always standing very close when they talk to each other and clearly have a strange, intense relationship. At one point one holds the other, urging him to be strong and keep his head at the party. If it weren't for the whole murder thing, that scene would be quite romantic. I believe Jimmy's character was meant to be kind of gay as well (they all know each other from their shared childhood at a boys school,) but it's Jimmy flannel-suit Stuart. He's got as much camp as Mr Rogers and delivers his quips with urbane dignity instead of sarcastic playfulness. But of course he's the hero who cracks these shenanigans. Unfortunately the 'sophistication' of the killers is meant to separate them from us real men and women and relegate them to a shadowy world of intellectuals and artistic types. Oh well. A very fun movie despite its historical flaws.

The Band Wagon

Saw The Band Wagon, a show-biz musical film about an old-fashioned vaudeville-type dancer who's star is fading. He teams up with his writer chums, an artistically gay director, and a ballet dancer to put one The Show That Will Save His Career. The film is very self-referential. The aging dancer is Fred Astaire (I drew a picture of him, here.) The director says the play is going to be a magnificent collage of ballet, music, art, and the classics of theater. The director is made into the pretentious artist archetype later on, but he's got his finger firmly on the pulse of this film. Its red nose firmly in place, it is entertainment first and drama a distant second. There's an obligatory romance but most of the fun comes from just watching a show be put on. We have to suffer through a few tedious musical numbers (Louisiana Hayride!) but it's all in good fun.

I wasn't exactly in the mood for simple fun tonight unfortunately, so I wasn't really as swept away as I might have been. This movie's kind of the epitome of the meaningless, goofy old musical.

The Raven

Saw The Raven, a 1915 film inspired by the famous Edgar Allen Poe poem. Edgar Allen is the main character here. The film fictionalizes his life to mesh with the events in the poem The Raven to make the poem into a truthful account. To this end he has girlfriend named Lenore (spoiler: she doesn't last long) and several times lapses into morbid contemplation of his troubled life. The film makes good use of a double-exposure technique that must have just been invented because they rely on it heavily. Fortunately, ghostly double-images are well suited to a spooky film, so it doesn't get (very) tiresome. The film relies much more on pathos and morbidity as that was what was considered scary back then (nowadays of course a less imaginative but more visceral approach is used.) Hilariously, the repeated word 'nevermore' is rendered in a bone-font. The film is silent, slow, and grainy but the acting is jumpy and scuttling. It makes an odd juxtaposition which has actually come back into vogue again with the seemingly ubiquitous security-camera footage employed in modern horror. Here, the mannered acting and deliberate pace are supposed to be conventional and the film-stock is only deteriorated by chance. Taken as a modern film, it is slow but ominous. I would love to see it with a more aggressive soundtrack (instead of the sepulchral organ music I saw it with. Let's get some industrial sounds in here!)

The Caine Mutiny

Saw The Caine Mutiny (thanks, Chris.) It was one of those (slightly stuffy) old 50s dramas. As the name implies, there is a mutiny on a navy ship, but when it comes, it is only as a result of an old struggle in the armed forces (Warning: I know very, very little about the military. Any gross misuses of lingo are not ironic.) This is the struggle between the precise but astringent (see the film Patton for what I'm thinking of here) vs the sloppy but humane (see M*A*S*H, a military which by the way looks a lot more like the "war is hell"-style of films (eg All Quiet on the Western Front) than anything in Patton does.)

The film begins with the lax Capt Challee in charge. Much to the horror of the fresh out of academy Keith (our avatar in this film,) Challee forgoes the requirements of dress and haircut for his crew. The men seem surly, but only to the new recruit. We viewers watch tensely, waiting for the captain to clench his fist and begin to unite the men and Keith under his tyranny. At last, we think we see him begin to show his fangs, but it's a fake-out. Challee's leaving. Enter Captain Queeg.

Queeg is the hard type, nervously fondling steel ball-bearings and played by Humphrey Bogart at his snarliest. Keith at first loves his attention to detail and order, but soon becomes disillusioned after he sees Queeg let a petty error get blown out of proportion and into the way of much more important affairs. Soon, he is siding with the other Lieutenants, one of whom darkly murmurs that Queeg has gone mad.

Punctuating this (and keeping with my pet "order vs humanity" reading) is Keith's romance with a showgirl. This romance is passive-aggressively but staunchly opposed by his twittering mother, the voice of an old-fashioned order. Keith feels his shore-life is too precious to be spent worrying about mother but the showgirl refuses (his mother will never give her approval and he will never be truly happy without it, she mysteriously concludes.) According to my understanding, this sort of thing went on a lost post-WW2. Old fashioned codes of conduct gave way to a more laissez-faire style as soldiers came back from the war with a fresh appreciation for the important things in life.

At last, in both naval and romantic fronts, the humanists win out (as they usually do in movies.) Keep in mind however that this is 1954. Law and order was very much in favor at this point (to gather evidence for this wild assertion, I checked up on the status of the House Un-American Activities Committee at the time and found this chart of McCarthy's public opinion. This film was released in January. Note the bump.) and the law and order types have the last laugh. In a post mutinee-trial coda, a lawyer lectures the mutineers for pathologizing and neutering an old man, disregarding his service and experience. This feels a bit tacked-on to me, but then I'm not the law-&-order type, so I may just be bitter. It also satisfyingly give one character the browbeating he deserves, so I don't complain too much.

A fun film, a bit stuffy and self-serious at times, but an entertainingly tense drama at heart.

Edit: How appropriate.

Where the Wild Things Are

Saw Where the Wild Things Are. It was really cute. It follows Max, a child whose single mother and teenage sister have no time for him, he's is matured enough to feel the social isolation but is not yet autonomous enough to solve his own problems. All he can do is swallow his troubles and deal, but of course without the emotional tools to do this, he resorts to acting out and demanding attention. I felt this bit of the movie was very well-observed, especially how Max overreacts to his own emotions. Overwhelmed by his own indignation at a small slight of his sister's, he throws snow all over her room. This done, he instantly regrets his actions and hides in bed. I could imagine a young version of myself having done this, or something like it. Good show.

Anyway, Max's behavior finally results in him running away to a possibly (though not definitely) imaginary land inhabited by powerful but childlike monsters. They are similarly unhappy with problems which they lack the maturity to handle. They adopt him as their King and treat him as a sort of parent figure, showing off for him and looking to him for guidance. Their childishness is highlighted by their adult voices, rending some of their arguments slightly absurd ("Like you aren't always looking for the opportunity to step on my head.") but making their repeated threats to eat Max sound much more serious. Indeed the monsters are friendly but clearly unhappy and sometimes quite threatening. They need someone to organize them, but if they don't like the way Max orders them, they may well kill him.

Watching Max deal with the monsters' troubles is great fun and is dramatic and interesting. The movie is not terribly whimsical or imaginative however and I fear some scenes might be too boring for most kids. I don't know that kids like seeing childish emotional problems resolved but then I haven't been around kids in a long time so I don't know. For me it was interesting and sweet. It was confusing in parts, but I think I liked it.

A Woman Under the Influence

Saw A Woman Under the Influence, a film about a woman, Mabel, who is a devoted mother and wife and is, it quickly becomes apparent, a high-functioning maniac. She runs about jumpily and childishly. At one point she is so impressed with a dinner-guest's singing that she peers, smilingly, into his mouth. Later, she aggressively harasses pedestrians for the time but only because she wants to know when her kids are coming out of school. When the bus arrives she as deliriously full of kindness and love as a Disney princess. She races the kids home and asks them if she ever seems crazy to them. The film is full of these poignant little kitchen-sink moments. It always feels very intimate.

Her husband, Nick, is a foreman at some kind of construction site. He is brusque and shouty. He wants his wife to behave normally (they married, we find out via Mabel's ramblings, that they married due to pregnancy) and fears what she might do. The climax occurs after a wild, apropos-of-nothing party where Mabel tells the kids to make costumes. One of the guest kids' parents come to find their child amidst strewn clothing, nude. Nick comes home, the parent freaks out at Nick, and Nick, fearing the worst, freaks out at Mabel. Soon doctors and mothers are called and the whole thing spirals into awesome, painful spectacle. The scene is a tour de force of acting. It lasts only 20 minutes but feels like an eternal, horrible, life-ending argument, the sort that rages on for hours and never really ends. The film is strongest in these edgy moments. I think my affinity for melodrama may be informing my enjoyment a bit, but I believe the scenes have a sincerity about them that saves it from true camp. We (or I anyway) care too much about Mabel and Nick to laugh. We know they can work together if only they had a little more time.

Nanook Of The North

Saw Nanook Of The North, the sort-of documentary about Eskimo life. I say sort-of documentary because it has the breezy attitude that it is showing or demonstrating, rather than documenting, life in the tundra. This leaves us viewers prey to the mis/preconceptions of '20s society. Then again, the filmmaker spent a year with the family which is subject of this film so perhaps we don't have to be so skeptical. The film has the feel of the Disney nature documentaries of the 50s, with a faint storyline, plenty of editorializing (the film attempts to instill an adoration the savage Eskimo from frame one,) and dodgy usage of footage. Despite my misgivings I still feel I understand life in the arctic a bit better now, so take that for what it's worth. We are also meant to be sort of amused by the curious exploits of Nanook. At one point he is given a gramophone record to inspect. After looking closely at it, he bites it. Do you think that was scripted?

Edit: it was.

The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate

Saw The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (thanks Basil!) It was a very pretty, period martial arts film. Computers and wires stuff many scenes with splendor and acrobatics. It follows some political dissidents who try and rescue a pregnant maid (Imperial droit du seigneur is implied) from an evil and oppressive bureaucracy run (and staffed, presumably) by eunuchs (apparently evil eunuchs are a thing in Chinese films. I suppose if I was castrated, I'd turn to evil as well.) The plot is very twisty and I completely blame myself for not following it. In my defense, however, the plot seems a bit overstuffed. There's inexplicably identical characters who disguise themselves as each other, a woman with a mysterious past, prophesies, a Tartan woman whose stakes are kind of obscure, and double-crosses and side-deals a-plenty. I could always follow who I was supposed to be rooting in the fights for however and the fights are, of course, the real reason to see this film. They're pretty fun and gleefully physics-defying (the main villain seems to wield the titular flying sword. Bits of it break off and reattach like a boomerang.) There's an awesome set-piece fight that I won't give away because most of the fun is how unexpected it is, but it made me wonder what Wizard of Oz would be like as a kung-fu flick.

This film is fun and campy, not good in the sense that Citizen Kane is good, but pretty and spectacular. The bits between the fight scenes dragged a bit for me, as I watched half-recognized people with mysterious agendas scheme with each other but there's always another spectacle coming 'round the bend, so who cares?