La Notte

Saw La Notte, a classy little Antonioni film. Antonioni uses his default imagery of urbanely dressed people at lavish parties and in run-down neighbourhoods. There's rich drunk people and a night club act that we watch the entirety of. The film follows a writer and his literary wife over the course of a day. They open the film with a visit to their friend and mentor who is dying. The wife is so moved by his illness that she flees the room and weeps in the stairwell. The husband (the writer) follows her but is side-tracked by a passing nymphomaniac who gaspingly smooches him. This sets up the twin themes of loss and sex. I think the sex theme becomes a sort of subjugated-women theme, but it's hard to tell because of course the 60s were a slightly more sexist time than now and female sexuality may have just been considered synonymous with female subjugation. At any rate, these two themes are brought together in a climax that is pretty dazzling but unfortunately also tiresome.

The films of the New Wave of the 60s in general, and the films of Antonioni in specific, I find to be quite boring. They often take place at endless parties where fidelity is tested, or some version of decadence is explored. I used to rankle at the idea of sympathizing with rich twits, but now I realize it's just a simplifying metaphor. These people are free to devote their entire day to a difficult problem (ie fidelity or integrity) without having to worry about bills and taxes and other such distractions. That said, I'm not at a point in my life where the problems that preoccupied the Europeans of the 60s are even real to me, never mind actually troublesome. I'm too young and innocent for this world-weary malaise. I understand it, I just don't respond to it.

So La Notte is the usual thing. It was dry and restrained, arch and cool, and left me completely unmoved. It wasn't horrible and it was definitely not bad. I hesitate to say I thought it was 'good' however. Oh well. Someday, maybe.

Metropia

Saw Metropia, an animated dystopian film. The animation style is a sort of photoshop-distortion layered over photographs. It's like South Park, but with photos. The animator is also bad at action, so the effect is sort of like dolls bouncing around, nervily talking about mind-control. The plot is that Europe is connected by a gigantic metro network. Somehow (it's really not clear) this metro network is also producing mind-controlling shampoo. The protagonist is contacted by la resistance and is quickly won over to their side when he finds out about this blatant, ham-fisted manipulation. There is a bit of irony that the film makes, that he is being emotionally manipulated by the resistance members who are promising to free him (but are, of course, not all they seem.)

The film is a bit empty. It feels like an animated short that was stretched out to an hour and a half. It's very unusual and I liked it better than some of the films I've seen recently (Beneath the Planet of the Apes springs to mind as an example.) It's fairly hermetically sealed, not touching on any modern angst or topical issues. It also lacks any more poignant, universal messages. It's mood of nervousness is very well constructed and illustrated. It has an excellent sense of place and tone. The characters are cyphers and the action is relatively meaningless but, like I say, it's unusual and worth a look. An odd, nervous little film.

The Sum of All Fears

Saw The Sum of All Fears (thanks, Basil!) It was a Tom Clancy action-thriller. I don't know how, but his films always seem to get the triple-A treatment. The directors are not the same (take that, auteur theory!) Donald Steward wrote the screenplays of the original trilogy, so I guess that's it. Anyway, mechanics aside, this film is tremendous fun. It starts off as West Wing-style fan-fiction of the grim, dignified American government. People briskly march around, meeting in super-cool, floor-lit secret meetings. There's international tensions and secret cabals and all of the best things.

Although this is indeed an action film, it only really crystallizes into a 24-esque grim-faced shout-fest near the end. I suppose I can't fault it for doing so however. The script motivates the action sufficiently and, jaded though I may be, the dumbest tricks often work best (they don't, thank god, resort to one-liners. I hate one-liners.) At one point a bomb goes off and the sheer spectacle of it is astounding. For the majority of the film, it feels like an intimate, downright educational look into the American intelligence community. It's extremely fun and interesting. You're left (I was left) childishly thinking and talking in snappy, efficient quips. Addictive.

So I liked it! It overwhelmed my analysis-engines and I'm left with very little to say (except good show!)

Planet Earth, Episodes 7 and 8

Great Plains:
We explore the plains of the earth. It's episodes like this that make me appreciate how large the earth is. We are told that the Eurasian Steppe circles a third of the globe. A few episodes ago, we were told that the Sahara takes up a good fraction of the earth and a few episodes before that, the same about the poles. How is there room for all this stuff? Anyway, we watch some half-mad geese lay their eggs on the ground, chasing foxes away with hisses and hunched postures. There's a heart-breaking scene where a fox raids a nest, grabbing almost all of the goslings. It's mouth full, the parents come back and the fox scatters, leaving behind dead goslings in heaps. Then again, the fox has babies and is photogenic. Nature is complicated. We are treated to intentionally unintentional humour surrounding asses ("females asses are mysterious creatures." Indeed, David.) Colossal bison snort and fight, their great heads looking like walls with horns and eyes. They're pretty freaky and awesome. There's an adorable bunch of pygmy hogs which are, we are told, the size of rabbits. Adorable! Episode animal mascots: pika and those adorable pygmy hogs.

Jungles:
Jungles are awesome places. They're so bustling with life, like a metropolis for animals. There's the staid, antish regular folk, but also colourful crazies who are somehow able to exist. We open on birds of paradise who, as in the first episode, are always shot down by the females, no matter how crazy their display. When will we ever get to see them slake their filthy avian lusts? There's a sequence about frogs which is eerily pretty and a fairly freaky sequence about cordyceps. Somehow, it was the image of a mouldering moth that got to me. How alien and ghastly! The narration transitions smoothly over to awesome mushrooms. Monkeys are put on prominent display. Howlers are so cool looking. Chimps are shown flourishing and beating the shit out of each other. A raiding party of chimps lustily devours the baby of a rival troupe. Attenborough tells us that it is unknown why they resort to cannibalism. Nature is complicated. Episode animal mascots: Monkeys, frogs, and colugo

This week, Richard Attenborough died. This is a great pity. He had a marvellous voice and a kindly, kooky manner which he brought to nature documentaries he voiced. My film blog is full of ad hoc obituaries recently :(

On the Beach

Saw On the Beach, a film about the nuclear apocalypse. It's fairly well thought out. It's set in Australia which, due to winds and currents and so forth, is the last to be hit by the nuclear fallout. Horses and bicycles are the main methods of transportation, now that gasoline is impractical. Everyone spends their time getting drunk and partying, alternating this with wallowing in soul-crushing despair. There's a lot less rape and murder going on than I would imagine, but this film was made in the 50s, so there's a lot more charitable dignity given to society.

Unfortunately, that's sort of the main weakness of the film. Lacking any of the spectacle of a world falling apart, we are left with the clenched jaw of Gregory Peck hunting for traces of hope and urging us to behave with dignity. As all apocalypse films are (or at least all of the ones I've seen,) this film is really about existential despair. All of human history is ending soon. What do you do? The answer, of course, is to seek out some human contact and affection before the end. Nothing too surprising here, although one character hysterically ignores the coming doom until she is cavalierly drugged into an appropriately submissive state by doctors. Which was a bit bracing.

I didn't think much of this film, but then I was not in the mood for quiet dignity. For a sorta-sci-fi it's very well thought out and seems very accurate. It portrays society as a bit more genteel than we now believe ourselves to be (and to have been,) but this is the weakness of the 50s. Very grim, but in a low-key, understated way. More sorrowful than horrific. Not a bad film, all in all, just one I was not in the mood for.

Imitation of Life

Saw Imitation of Life, an ingeniously clever melodrama. It follows the rags-to-riches life of a Broadway star with many side-stories and discursions. The film is kept ingenious by the major theme of identity vs and mixed with the theme of performance. The Broadway star is an actress. Twice she is accused of "acting." The first time she is being genuine but she is not believed. The second time she is so much an actress that she realizes that she is actually acting. She has a black maid whose daughter is white (she takes after her father, you see.) Her entire life revolves around who she is vs what she seems to be.

There is a secondary theme of interruption. During a beautiful soliloquy, the person being soliloquised to interrupts. During a declaration of love in a narrow hallway, a man bustles through for no damn reason. Later, the phone rings. The star's tedious rags-to-riches story is interrupted by furious, messy 'real' life. A story of the nativity is interrupted by the maid's daughter demanding to know if Jesus was white or black (she fiercely insists that "he was white - like me!") Later on, the daughter's issues drive her to a strip club where she preforms on a stage decorated by masks.

On top of the literary cleverness of the script is an entire cast's-worth of diabolically manipulative and melodramatic performances. The film is smothered in increasingly unwelcome, schmaltzy background music. How much more stark and upbraiding it could have been! I wonder if the music is also, in its way, meant to reenforce the cloying artificiality of the protagonist's life. She lives as if in a dream, blithely relying on her saint-like mammy (who, true to form, has the decency to selflessly die at just the right moment.) and stuffing her daughter in an uber-feminine pink music-box of a bedroom.

Clearly, I thought the film was great. It comes from the 50s and thus isn't quite up to date with the latest thoughts on race (and race is a huge deal in this film.) It goes through great pains to make the maid/protagonist relationship into a symbiosis (rather than a parasitism.) I couldn't really find much fault, apart from the straight-up martyrdom of the maid (vastly entertaining thought: when the maid directs the star's handsome love interest to her will, imagine she has rigged it with dynamite and the rest of the film is just her ghost sitting in the ruins, cackling with glee.) Anyway, the film is quite clever and dances delightfully around this interplay of fiction and reality. There's a lot here and it's quite juicily dramatic to boot. Good, good film.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes

Saw Beneath the Planet of the Apes, a sequel to the one everyone knows, The Planet of the Apes. In this one the speaking humans (as opposed to the mute future-humans) discover that the ruins of New York City exists underneath the ape planet. This ruined city is inhabited by psychic humans who communicate by sonar-like brain-hums and worship an atomic bomb.

The film is very pulpy and comic-book-ish. The original was as well though, so I feel this is a kind of fitting sequel. There's much less tongue-in-cheek juxtaposition of human and beast. The apes still refer to the humans as animals and a sympathetic ape bandages a human, informing him she is trained as a vet. There's some heavy-handed allegory involving anti-war apes who are carted off into cages as their anti-war posters are ground under the heel of marching soldiers (subtle!)

Also there's the whole outrageous outrage of the psychics worshipping a bomb. They're kind of cast as hypocritical utilitarians. They claim to be a peaceful people who "force their enemies to destroy each other." The film ends with a piece of schadenfreude which makes the humans exactly as spiteful and hypocritical however, so so much for any message.

The film isn't bad, just very pulpy and heavy-handed. There's a lot of though floating around, but not much cleverness. Consistency plays second fiddle to spectacle and pat cuteness reigns. It's got the 70s messiness thing going on though which ensures that the cute isn't too overly cute, but it's not exactly trenchant either. Kind of a toss-off, but not bad.

Dark Victory

Saw Dark Victory (thanks, Paul!) It was a disease film. Bette Davis plays a vivacious rich woman. When she is introduced, she is shown in the company of a dashing drunk and a flock of genially befuddled dukes and dowagers and so forth. Amidst all of this decadence and corruption, she stands out as one of the few who doesn't let a life of comfort sap her of her vitality. Her corruption, we discover, lies within. She suffers from a degenerative brain disease. She is given an operation and four months to live. The rest of the film revolves around her coming to terms with her death. Or rather, the most interesting bits do.

The film irritatingly throws a few distractions in her way. The doctors at first bewilderingly insist that she "never know" of her immanent death. Why? Surely she'd appreciate the opportunity to get her affairs in order. There's also a weird almost-plot-line where she believes her best friend and her doctor (who she has developed feelings for) are dating behind her back. She also engages in understandable but empty self-destructive behaviour. Humphrey Bogart has a cameo as an Irish horse trainer (his accent is almost non-existent. It's sort of funny.) She makes a pass at him that I found deeply interesting. He talks of riding hard and fast and of being proudly unrefined. He seems to represent the implacable illogic of nature which is killing the protagonist. She almost succumbs to him which would, to me, symbolize a reconciliation with her fate. Not only a surrender to but a marriage with the inexorable forces which we only kid ourselves that we understand. However, the film instead uses the scene to represent her darkest moments, when she almost embraces hedonism and (gasp!) marries the stable-boy!

This film was made in the 30s, when elegance and class were next to godliness and the embrace of nature, to the filmmakers, represents an embrace of the bestial. Instead, she comes to terms with a sort of martyrdom and resolves to die beautifully. She hides the last moments of her illness from her husband (I find this completely inexplicable, again.) It's a good death and there's some great speeches about death being a sort of old friend by now. It's treated extremely classily and well. I kept tensing for christian moralizing which never came (thank goodness.) There's a bit of sexism in there as well (the woman's vivacity mainly is bent toward throwing awesome parties and buying wicked dresses (!) This is the 30s after all.) The film surprised me in how seriously it approached its subject. Apart from a few small excursions into melodrama, the woman's death is kept centre stage. The ending descends a bit into pathos, but where else could it go? I found the film pretty good. It doesn't have that oh-so-clever quality I like, but instead it has a more enduring, guileless simplicity, a sort of wisdom.

23

Saw 23, a fictionalized re-telling of Karl "Hagbard" Koch's story. He was a German citizen hired by Russian spies to hack into American military computers. The film is essentially a drug-dealer story. He starts out on small fry, just enjoying himself and hacking socially. Soon he moves on to bigger scores and ultimately gets peripherally attached to world politics and dangerous, heavy men. In addition to the symbolic, digital drugs, he is involved in literal drugs as well. This provides for some excellent spiralling-out-of-control montages later in the film.

I have to commend the film for its relative accuracy. In this modern time of computers being essentially magic picture-boxes, this film almost fetishizes the giant, chunky computers, the little sleeves that fit over the phone's receiver, the smoke of solder and room-filling mainframes. It's great stuff and makes me itch for the steaming guts of a computer. The explanations of how passwords are brute-forced and how Trojan horses work are a bit belaboured but I guess you can't have everything. The phrase "one-way hash" is thrown out as techno-babble but, marvellously, refreshingly, it is correctly used.

The rest of the film is fairly interesting. Like I say, it follows the general rags-to-riches-to-prison arc that many films about the drug trade do. I was sufficiently dazzled by the tech to give much of the film a pass but generally it holds up. There are some delightful descents into full-blown paranoia. The protagonist at first seems irritating and I was deeply worried that this was going to be one of those films that shows how clever a character is by how incredibly dickish they are. After he looses his political idealism and begins to get scared and cramped, things get much more comfortable. I recommend this film to my fellow nerds. It's not bad at all and gets the tech just right. A fun movie, though of course ultimately kind of a sad one.

Halloween

Saw Halloween, the original John Carpenter film. It was a prototypical slasher film. Female sexuality is punished most severely, annoying inconveniences are amplified to life-or-death levels, the killer is unstoppable and inside the house(!) The film is incredibly sleazy at parts. I particularly thought the cute, breathy little gasps the girls make as they're stabbed or strangled or whatever to be in bad taste. Whatever, I guess. It comes with the territory.

In the film's favour I will point out that the Halloween setting is perfectly used. Instead of mining it for cheap symbolism and spookiness, the film uses the holiday as a means for everyone to dismiss a screaming woman, for example, or a missing tombstone. Also, John Carpenter is very good at evoking the pleasant messiness of suburban life but, as opposed to his good-universe counterpart, Steven Spielberg, Carpenter uses this power to provide a real-seeming backdrop for his psychos and demons.

It's a well done slasher. The element of sexualized violence is present, as are all of the annoying quirks of the slasher film, but it feels fresh and the performances are good. There are several good shots (I was struck by a scene of the villain, Michael, admiring his handiwork. He's framed by a doorway and shot at a distance. The effect is eerie.) and the plot is believable. There's schlocky nudity, but it's relatively well woven into the plot and not used too often. An all 'round paragon of a slasher. Dumb but not terrible.

L'argent

Saw L'argent, an unsparing film about justice. It opens with two rich boys scheming on how to get rid of a counterfeit note. They pass it off to a photography shop which passes the note off to a septic worker who at last catches the blame. He is unaware of the nature of the bill and is done an injustice. This being a cruel sort of film, he goes to jail. The judge who sentences him is attractive, indicating that this will not be a film with clear villains. Criminal law and justice is not being skewered here. Rather, this is a sort of meditation on the corrupting nature of crime. Things get worse and worse for our protagonist while the crooked clerk who originally fobbed off the bill continues a life of petty white-collar crime, eventually becoming a sort of Robin Hood character. The rich kids 'fess up to their parents who discretely drop a bribe and than vanish from the film entirely.

Almost everyone comes off badly. The rich people are infuriatingly exempt from the laws us mere mortals are subject to. The crooked clerk has grandiose visions of self-importance and loftily talks about his philosophy not recognizing such petty things as "laws." The central man, the septic worker, goes to jail where he continues to be arbitrarily victimized. He starts off as a stoic martyr but quickly begins to earn his punishment (or, perhaps, to be corrupted by the injustice of it all.)

There's a very important-seeming sequence later, after jail, when he stays at a woman's house who seems to be supporting four of her relatives on her own. He has by this point embraced the injustice of the world and therefore a life of crime. The woman, in contrast, has never expected justice and is therefore not outraged at the lack of it. She martyr-ishly toils on, uncomplaining. She has an effect on him that seems positive and redemptive but it may be that his watchful pauses are only him hatching further schemes. We close up on an axe. Police follow the old woman, as if to inform her of her house being robbed, but they turn away at the last second, revealing this to have been a fake-out. We are kept in the dark until the very abrupt end of the film.

The film is shot in a slightly jarring manner. It spot-focuses on small details. A hand grabbing a lapel, the sound of footsteps on stairs. Several shots are entirely static, telling the story only through off-screen sound. It's very austere, but not too boring. I was able to keep awake anyway. The subject matter is a bit heavy and the plot is full of kinks and twists, the better to keep us guessing about the film's stance on justice/redemption/etc. I enjoyed it pretty well, but it's not an every-day kind of movie.

Sleeping Dogs

Saw Sleeping Dogs, a New Zealand war film. It opens with the prime minister announcing that protests and demonstrations are illegal due to the increased tensions over oil scarcity and that elections will be temporarily suspended. The fascists have taken over and the guerillas start organizing. Our beardy protagonist attempts to escape all the conflict by relocating to a remote coastal island. Despite his attempts to not be involved, he is inexorably pulled in. First scooped up by the fascists and later bullied by the guerillas, he clings to a freedom and an independence. This film, of course, is from the 70s when every other film, it seems, was exploring exactly what freedom meant and what its price was.

As such, it has the 70s super-sincerity and messiness. The messiness is incredibly refreshing. The fascists are not grim death machines in tanks, but squashy middle-aged men in canvas uniforms who stuff our hero into a cheap Honda. There's a later sequence where the soldiers are stationed in a motel. It feels messy and genuine. The prosaic details add realism to the depiction of a fascist coup. This is a war film where the greatest danger comes not from enemy troupes, but from forgetting the password when rifles are shoved in your face.

It also has a good deal of the old sex and violence which was also kind of endemic in the 70s. This is a war film, after all. Its preoccupation is with the nobility and independence of the protagonist but this independence is displayed by which side of the fight he points his gun at and by which woman he screws. There's great, well-observed moments and the film is very non-glamourous for a war film, but don't go into this thing expecting antiseptic symbolism.

The Hunted

Saw The Hunted (thanks, Basil!)     It was an action-thriller. It's the premise of Rambo with a good bit of The Fugitive mixed in. The idea is that super-ranger Aaron has gone rogue and Tommy Lee, his trainer and all-round gruff but cool guy, must bring him in. The film is very fun. I enjoyed watching the two wily survivors outwit each other. Usually action films repulse me for their insistence on macho posturing. In this one, the two square off in a feral, desperate manner. There's less adoration and more fear.

The film opens with the golden voice of Johnny Cash telling a folksy version of the story of Isaac. This is slightly off, I think. The rest of the film tries to tie a father/son relationship between the ranger and his trainer, but Isaac's is a slightly different story than one of mere infanticide. Daedalus and Icarus would have been more apt I think (unless, as ever, I've missed the point.) There's also some stuff with Tommy Lee establishing himself as a true woodsman by rescuing a white wolf (don't do this, by the way. Wolves will bite the shit out of you.) It gives the ending a hopeful note however. Elements of the film are quite clever. Not clever enough to move this film from action to think-piece, but who wants a think-piece?

The film felt fresh to me and interesting. It entertains and gives fights that are not kung-fu ballets and are not jittery messes but are ugly and efficient. There is a refreshing lack of glamour and an emphasis on setting up themes and getting the characters to represent things. These themes and so forth don't always gel perfectly, but A for effort, man.

Planet Earth, Episodes 5 and 6

Episode 5: Deserts
The episode genially looks in on the world's deserts, first stopping off at the Gobi which gets a good deal of snow. Not all deserts are hot all the time, Attenborough reminds us. There are some awesome shots of sandstorms and otherworldly camels are put on display, their lips moving industriously. Predictably, most of the episode focuses on how harsh the desert is. There's life, but its always scraping about for a bit of food and water. There's a strange sequence where red kangaroos are shown under thermal imaging. It gets the point across about how they dissipate heat, but it's oddly analytical for this show. There's an eerie couple of shots showing swarms of locusts coating the land. They're cast as villains (the word 'plague' is dropped. That's their word, Attenborough, not yours) but I find them too unreal to take seriously. Also people eat locusts, so it's just food becoming a different kind of food. Sure they destroy the environment, but so does beef. Sweet, delicious beef. Episode animal mascots: Fennec foxes (but of course they would be.)

Episode 6: Ice Worlds
This episode focuses mostly on the poles. We are told that the south pole is as large as the US (but also that it doubles in size in the winter. Get it together, David.) Coincidentally, in the desert episode, we're told that the Sahara is as large as the US. I wonder how many USes it would take to cover the earth? (answer: about 52) Anyway, the episode takes a strong stance against global warming. Polar bears are shown dismally falling through ice and crawling to increase their surface area. Meanwhile, on the south pole, smug penguins seem to effortlessly survive the winter, huddling together and failing to mate with their girlfriends (idiots.) There's a strange sequence where the deep parental instinct of the penguins is put in contrast with the lack of chicks to go 'round. Life is chaos for animals (for us too, actually.) Musk oxen make a surprisingly adorable animal, their babies bleating in this winningly ugly, grunting way. Episode animal mascots: Musk oxen, ice foxes, penguins.

The Innocents

Saw The Innocents, a classy horror. An adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, it follows a young Maria von Trapp-like governess who is put in charge of an adorable girl and boy. Slowly, over the course of months, she becomes morbidly convinced that the house in general and the children in specific are haunted and possessed. The film allows a dual interpretation of either a genuine haunting or simply a case of hysterical insanity. I really like psychodrama, so several scenes I loved. There are the by-now-usual scenes of creepy music boxes and clown dolls, but the film makes excellent use of the children. The governess's theories of possession and conspiracy are nicely juxtaposed with the children laughing in what seems, fleetingly, like a conspicuously conspiratorial manner.

The film is really rooted in the neurotic fears of the governess that the children have been given bad influences. The possession of evil spirits is, more prosaically, the bad habits and foul words of a previous generation. There is a slight element of religious mania about the governess's actions. She is so convinced of the innate goodness of children that she attributes bad behaviour to demons. On the other hand, the boy sometimes smiles knowingly at her distress and sometimes the little girl purposefully ignores her. At all times the children are evasive, either changing the subject maliciously or at random, depending on your interpretation. The film is really good at flickering these interpretations back and forth, allowing you to really get inside of the governess's head. Well done.

As a horror, it's quite tame. There's no part where I even jumped. The film really works better as a psychodrama. the dread mounts slowly and though it never becomes acute, it seems all the more real. People do go insane, after all. Children do pick up nasty habits. The uncertainty makes the dish all the more piquant.

Written on the Wind

Saw Written on the Wind, a cozy little tragedy from the 50s. As usual, it revolves around the fabulously wealthy and emotionally crippled. This is one of those films where no one can decide who to marry. The central characters are Kyle and his sister Mary, his girlfriend Lucy and his boyfriend Mitch (ok not really boyfriend, but the Hayes-code-era homo-eroticism is thick. To make things worse, Mitch is played by Rock Hudson.) Mitch was poor but had Character and longs for Lucy (Kyle's g.f. Keep notes, everyone.) but is pursued by the slatternly Mary. Kyle is rich but fey, especially in contrast to the uber-masculine Mitch. In one scene he tries to subdue a drunk who is hitting on his sister. He's bested by the drunk, so Mitch finishes the job. Kyle is ashamed and Mary looks on, drunk and laughing. This scene serves as a kind of introduction to the characters.

The film reminded me of the claustrophobic dramas of Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams (unsurprising as both of them were active shortly before the 50s and had a profound impact.) We have a melodrama celebrating pain here, a kind of flip-side of the screwball, the miscommunication that apparently plagued the 50s is a potent force for evil. The only moments of mercy are fleeting and understanding is in short supply. The film is sometimes unimaginably hysterical.

I enjoyed the film somewhat, although I think I was not totally in the mood for a sincere film about rich drunks. Kyle's big revealed-in-the-third-act problems seem alternately trivial and unnecessary to me. We understand he feels inadequate. We don't need to see him rave drunkenly, speaking his Great Truths in a halting, pop-eye-ed manner, over-emoting like a silent film star. Mitch is far more restrained and likeable. This is definitely done on purpose, but I wish the filmmakers had left Kyle wimpy and not gone for repellent. The sister Mary is just evil and may as well have been named Jezebel. The girlfriend Lucy is the archetypical sweet little girl. She's given a bit of tooth by Lauren Bacall who portrays her (and in whose honour I guess I watched this. Farewell, Lauren. I hardly knew thee.) but she is supposed to win our hearts and therefore ultimately melts into a pathetic damsel in distress.

A merrily sad movie, it suffers a bit from its self-serious tone and dated action, but it holds together as a frothy drama none the less. If you're into that sort of this, check it out. They do well.

Soldier

Saw Soldier, a sci-fi about a group of super-sodiers trained from birth by The Government. The protagonist is a hostage-killing dude named Todd (get it?) He is shown going through a montage of battles before being replaced by a new edition of super-duper-soldiers. The duper-ness of the other soldiers is established in a one-on-one fist fight between Todd one of the other soldiers (overseen by Officer Thin-Moustache. Guess who the villain is?) In the battle Todd is bested but he manages to put out one of his opponent's eyes. This creates (and loudly broadcasts the creation of) a one-eyed nemesis. He (Todd) is then exiled to Trash Planet, occupied by Space Hippies who teach him how to feel.

At this point the film comes into its best moments, I feel. Todd slowly comes to terms with post-combat life in a great, though fairly melodramatic, depiction of post traumatic stress disorder. The volatility of his situation is allowed to take centre stage for a while. I was really interested in how super-soldier Todd, who has known only the fear and comfort of discipline, would adapt to space-farmer life. There's a fascinating story there somewhere. But, just as he's beginning to get the hang of this not-killing-people thing, the showdown comes, as it inevitably must, and the film descends back into stupid action-film hedonism once more.

The film ends on a morally dubious note. (spoiler)I particularly thought the condemnation of Officer Thin-Moustache's co-officers for collusion was a bit of a difficult position for a veteran to hold. We can only presume Todd's wars were just ones.(/spoiler) The sci-fi effects restrain themselves to a dusty, junky aesthetic, like Firefly. They're used to good effect and I was duly impressed. The story, apart from that surprising middle section, is predictable and boilerplate. This is not a bad movie, it's just nothing special. The sci-fi element is it's most compelling one, but even that feels a bit gimmicky (honestly, this story could very easily have taken place on earth.) It's fun though and has kick-ass bits and dramatic bits. There's something there about the necessity of violence, but it falls back on the old crutch of assuming other people are without reason. Nothing new here, but repackaged slickly and prettily.

PS - Apparently there's a ton of sci-fi-movie references and Kurt Russel references hidden in the film that I missed. So, have fun spotting them!

Place of Execution

Saw Place of Execution (thanks, Paul!) It was a British mystery mini-series in three 45-minute parts. The all-told the show is 2 hours and 15 minutes long, so I counted it as a long-ish movie. The film revolves around a decades-old cold-case which we re-live in flashbacks. It follows the investigation of a child murder in a small village called Scarsdale (the cute etymology of this name is discussed even though it is both obvious and merely thematic scene-dressing. To be pleasing, a mystery has to make its explanations obvious and this sometimes leads to hand-tipping and over-explanation.) There is a simultaneous b-story about a investigative journalist and her relationship with her daughter.

The common thread here is parenthood. This figures into the plot in all kinds of thematic ways. The journalist's mother is a minor character, the inspector leading the investigation is given two father-figures. The journalist professes a profound love of the investigator (who she is interviewing) because he reminds her of the father she never had. Parenthood everywhere!

The journalist's reconnection to her daughter (spoiler?) provides the emotional arc of the b-story. The daughter is a Bad Girl who gets arrested and drinks. In the pat way of mysteries, this behaviour is only a cry for attention and soon the mom and she are the best of pals. Mysteries present a world which is satisfyingly sensible. There is no mystery which cannot be cracked by enough persistence and cleverness. I think this is why mysteries are often period pieces. They play on our (incorrect) impression of the past as sensible and orderly.

Anyway, the mysterious murder is of course the main event. The three-episode format leads to a lot cliff-hangers. It has the usual mysterious fake-out suspects and meddlesome bit-characters who wind up being suddenly invaluable. It also has two riots of outraged citizenry and there's a completely unnecessary side-plot where the journalist's boss (??potential father figure??) keeps threatening to take her off the case. It provides fodder for next-time-ons but is a bit tedious.

The camerawork is television-pedestrian. TV has gotten a lot better production values than it used to have in the 90s and such, but apart from a few cool scenes (the murdered girl's father lighting a cigarette in close-up, the clock perfectly framed above a calendar) this is not particularly outstanding stuff. I quite liked the performances. I'm a sucker for melodrama, but this still struck as good acting. The journalist particularly is great, but there's little surprises here and there. The investigator in the past is terrier-like and nerdy-ly intense. The murdered girl's father is magnificently condescending and oily. I dunno. I liked it.

Finally, the film closes on what felt to me like a profound point about truth vs justice. This is slightly incongruous with the rest of the film, but is interesting. I kind of disagree that this is the correct argument to make (I prefer to think of justice vs revenge, but then the film would have had to have ended differently) but it is interesting anyway. So, not a bad film, very workmanlike and polished. There's not a lot to dig into but it's a good way to feel clever and interested which is more than can perhaps be said of a lot of television. (And by the way, for what it's worth: I was able to figure out who dun it way before the reveal!)

Vexille

Saw Vexille, a not-bad 3d-animated sci-fi anime. Set in the enar future, Japan has become completely isolationist and technophilic, achieving mastery in the art of robotics. The protagonists is this American woman (unusual for an anime) who is a soldier of some kind (more common.) They must infiltrate Japan and find out what's up. The film is episodic. I'm now about 15 minutes through the plot in this description but there's a few times where they drop giant plot-bombs on us. The first of which is that androids exist and are passably human. This element has a rich sci-fi history and is not treated very uniquely here.

The protagonist-woman feels isolated by the computer-centric world she lives in. It shows her morning routine to reinforce this point. She wakes up next to her husband and does not speak or even look at him as she has her coffee and reads her morning paper. They seem to get into the same car to go to work, but the camera shifts and they are in separate cars. Later, when she gets to the androids, she remarks that they seem so human. She particularly points out what a great community they have. Oh, ho ho, dear reader! Who are the real androids here? (I'll bet it's the androids. Is it the androids? No? Dang.) They then drop this talking point to have an extended action sequence wherein they try to take down the evil android overlords.

This film is an action film at heart. It has a brain and is a bit thinky, but themes come second to gunplay. As usual with action films, I was disappointed that the themes it raises aren't really explored. There's not a lot of insight here. The action is pretty good, I guess. There's a scene where an airplane drops a bunch of mechs into a battle and then morphs itself into a giant mech and drops down into the fray. That was pretty cool. The animation is (I think) motion-captured and therefore eerily realistic. Very pretty and the soundtrack was pretty good too. Not bad, all 'round, just not really clever. A good waste of time.

The Girl Next Door

Saw The Girl Next Door. Oh my god, this movie. It's the fictionalized retelling of Gertrude Baniszewski's crimes. A woman gets custody of two girls and begins slowly but surely torturing them, with the aide of her sons and sons' friends (of both genders.) The film is just ghastly. It's told from the perspective of a kid who is never really into the whole 'torture the orphan chick' thing but hangs out there anyway for thin reasons (really, of course, to provide sympathetic eyes for us to see through.) The worst part of the film is the slow sliding descent into full blown, strung up by the wrists torment. The sadistic children, aided and inspired by the horrible central woman, torture the girl (and her crippled younger sister) in lurid, sexual ways and also in uninspired, blunt-force ways.

The entire film is quite lurid. The bulk of the cast are child actors and their performances are amateurish and clumsy. The film sometimes has a very exploitative feel to it, with sensitive issues of abuse and a good helping of ugly gender issues being handled clumsily and luridly. The mother is often over the top horror-show and unbelievable. There's a scene near the beginning when the abused girl begs the witness/protagonist for some food which I believe. I also believe a scene where the mother twists the girl's words into an unintended personal attack. The subsequent grotesques I have a hard time believing, although I know that something like it must have happened.

I was a bit let down that we didn't get more into the heads of the evil mother and especially her children. I wish this because then I could have distanced myself a bit and become more analytical. As it is, they are unrelatable monsters. The film is anyway incredibly hard to watch and is a miserable experience. It's extremely effective at being upsetting. I had to pause the film for a while near the middle and just do something else for a while. Ugh. Awful.

La Belle et la Bête

Saw La Belle et la Bête (AKA Beauty and the Beast) an old version of the story. It begins with a plea for us to regress back to the credulous acceptance of youth, to believe and not question. The film then renders this plea completely unnecessary by utterly dazzling us with old-timey special effects.

The atmosphere of the film is dark and magical. When Belle's father stumbles into the Beast's castle, there is a dead doe lying on the ground. It is shown, but neither he nor the Beast pay any attention to it. Belle's bedroom is overgrown with reeds and tree branches. When she looks at her bed, the bearskin bedsheets writhe. This is a land oppressively filled with wild magic. You get an untamed sense not only of wonder but of threat. At one point Belle and the Beast meet by a pond with two swans swimming in it. As they talk, the swans hiss and snap at them. The swans are beautiful but malevolent and they will hurt you if they can.

The sequences in the Beast's castle are extremely serious, extremely theatrical, extremely weird. As with all fairy tales, the establishing frame story of her shitty home life and evil sisters is a bit dull. The actors are going for a comic over-the-top villainy which is a bit tedious when put up against, for example, the Beast appearing outside of Belle's bedroom, seemingly drunk with fresh blood steaming off of him. Of course the steam is only dry ice, but it was easy for me to fall under the spell of the film and believe. If you can stomach whimsical films, you'll dig this. If you can put up with dated special effects, it's magical.

Mad Max

Saw Mad Max, a defacto sci-fi film set in "the near future" which is essentially now. It follows the adventures of near-future cops vs near-future motorcycle hooligans. It's a frustrating film in some ways. You know everything's building toward a climactic showdown, but the film endlessly delays this showdown. It tries to frame the event as a sort of Straw Dogs-esque compromise of moral integrity, but I at least just wished the film would get to the shoot-out already. Perhaps this indicts me as well in the moral compromise? I think the film would like to think so.

Made in the '70s, the film unfortunately labours under the delusion that effeminate men are terrifying. Many of the bad guys wear eyeliner and during the climax the main antagonist hisses like a cat. Adorable. It also believes that tight leather cop-uniforms make the wearer look bad-ass (when in fact it only makes them look hot-ass.) It comes off as a bit homoerotic sometimes, but honestly I think the '70s in general was just kind of like that. Weird vibes everywhere in any case.

This film didn't really grab me. I was distracted throughout (and may well have missed the point.) I was expecting action-film macho posturing and grizzled performances and instead got endless shots of car fetishism broken up by scenes of Max hanging out with his wife. Like I say, the film seems mainly preoccupied with the moral compromise of its hero and while that might be an interesting angle, I've seen it played out before and was disappointed that I didn't get the brainless action film I was all set for. I suspect also that this film may have been a victim of its success. Morally ambiguous heroes are no longer unusual creatures. The showdown is perhaps delayed only because the filmmakers didn't realize that it was the carrot to their moralizing stick. It may be that this film broke the mould and subsequent films refined its advances. This doesn't help me retroactively enjoy it any more, unfortunately, but it does redeem the film a bit. It came off as a muddle of a film for me but, as ever, your mileage may vary.

Black Death

Saw Black Death (thanks, Basil!) It was a grim little meditation on the more painful aspects of religion. Set during the plague years, Boromir is sent by a bishop to a remote village which is mysteriously untouched by the plague. Because the plague is a punishment from god, a village that does not suffer must be overrun with heathens. Therefore, they must all be killed. He is guided to the heathen village by the protagonist, a young, perpetually gobsmacked monk, and accompanied by a crew of monstrous torturers. I never got the sense that these torturers were actually dangerous however. They mostly seemed more like douchey, macho poseurs than like seriously dangerous men. Anyway, that's the setting. The film has a few twists and turns which I'll skip.

Religion's main benefit (so far as I can tell) is to bring existential comfort in times of hardship. That this hardship is sometimes the product of the institution of religion is frequently brought up in this film. Another, twin point is also raised: if that is all that religion is, what matter if it's only really smoke and mirrors after all? The film frequently pits humanism against the implacable logic of religious philosophy but curiously, humanism is not always allowed to win.

There is a scene early on where a frightened woman is being burned as a witch by an angry mob. Boromir cuts her loose and then cuts her throat (this was not too shocking to me. At this point the film was still trying to establish their unenlightened brutality. I knew things couldn't end well. Anyway,) He explains to the shocked monk that she was doomed anyway with her village against her and that a quick death was at least merciful. This scene serves as a sort of thesis of the film's philosophical preoccupations. Religion fuels the angry mob, but religion is also the only succour to the harsh pragmatism of a life in the midst of such madness.

Ultimately, I think this film is a bit too preoccupied with establishing the brutality of the times. There's a slightly leering attitude it takes in regards to suffering (though I may feel this only due to the lingering bad taste that Philosophy of a Knife left in my mouth.) It's interesting however beyond the suffering of its characters and the aforementioned twists keep it interesting. It's not wise or clever enough to escape me, as other films have, so I feel like it's not the most trenchant of films, but it is pretty trenchant and pretty entertaining, which is more than can be said for a lot of think-pieces. It reminded me a lot of Sauna which investigates civility rather than religion (if memory serves) but tackles it in much the same way. This film is also not afraid to investigate religion, thank heaven (even though it does this investigation is a sort of ginger, equivocal sort of way.) This could be construed as church-baiting, I guess, although the imdb board on this film has a hot topic condemning its pro-christian themes, so who knows. Perhaps for some people, the only comfort for their outrage is that selfsame outrage.

Planet Earth, Episodes 3 and 4

Saw more Planet Earth. Let's get to it!

Episode 3: Fresh Water
We follow the fresh water of the earth from high up in the mountains down to lakes and streams. We see Angel Falls, the inspiration for Paradise Falls from Pixar's Up. There's some brutal nature on display lower down. A cayman body is eerily mirrored in the water's surface. Its limp body so alien and ominous. We see a ridiculous-looking juvenile spoonbill get thrashed by the caymans. The spoonbill's elegant and awkward body becomes messy and limply splayed. Little-known fact however: if spoonbills were of human intelligence, they would all be jackasses, so don't worry too much. There's a gorgeous shot of wildebeests running in water. They too are running from crocodiles, but they're so richly brown and just gorgeous. Episode animal mascots: Adorable otters and river-monkeys.

Episode 4: Caves
Caves are cool, so there was less in this episode that I didn't already know (I think I may have caught it on TV or internet somehow?) There's beautiful stalactites and stalagmites, glow worms looking weird and kind of sinister, sulphuric acid eating industriously away at rock, and blind everything. A bat piteously falls into the roach-infested guano. Horrid cave centipedes scuttle about (shudder!) Attenborough makes his arched eyebrows audible as he narrates about extremophile bacteria which survive purely on rock but I wonder how remarkable that actually is. Is there any place on earth which is actually devoid of any life? Presumably lava is, but short of that? Life seems very good at, uh... finding a way. I think we humans have a tendency to be aristocratically shocked at the deplorable living conditions of bacteria, but they flourish quite effortlessly in their squalor. I am in no way a biologist but I think that sometimes, in our efforts to protect and conserve, we forget how fragile our glass castles really are. It is not the animals that we are saving, but ourselves. Episode animal mascots: bats, bats, bats, and swiftlets.

Philosophy of a Knife

Saw Philosophy of a Knife, a very tasteless documentary about Japan's infamous chemical/biological research unit 731. The actions of unit 731 are horrific and something I know very little about. It was therefore all the more infuriating that this documentary was a sort of Halloween-ization of the events. The film opens with the sound of buzzing flies as credits roll over gynaecological equipment. Already warning signs are apparent. Why gynaecological equipment? Because it looks creepy, that's why. We proceed to a narrator describing Lenin as an "evil genius" and describing communism in virological terms. Okay, so bias is apparent. We then progress to lurid depictions of pregnant women having their foetuses removed. Tits are focused on as growly music plays, the narrator talks, and we hear stock sound effects of women screaming. It is not clear from this muddle of sound what this footage has to do with anything. Clearly, the point of this film is to horrify and repulse, not to educate and not to illuminate. Especially egregious in this regard are various farcical reenactments of atrocities, each trying to out-atrocity the actual event and each invariably involving gallons of fake blood and Halloween-tier makeup.

These reenactments are narrated by some woman with an unplaceable accent reading from a diary. The diary describes various horrors, such as the notorious frost-bite experiments. In the reenactment, we unaccountably see a woman's face being removed by doctors. A vinyl record is shown playing but the sound on the soundtrack is that of a radio knob being twiddled. After her face is removed, a cockroach crawls out of the woman's mouth and hangs out on her flayed nose. This is all very gross I grant you, but what the hell does that have to do with anything? Are we to understand that the frostbite experiments involved face-ectomies? Are we to understand that the prisoners were incubating cockroaches in their mouths? There's a shot of the doctors tossing hunks of meat onto their tray of surgical instruments in a messy, desultory way, as though they were in an infomercial, demonstrating the improper way to harvest fake organs.

The narration provides chilling and awful information about, for example, the vacuum chambers which would make the blood inside of a prisoner's veins, eyes and teeth boil. Their organs, we hear, writhe out of their mouths as though alive. This horrific fact is at once forgotten when we see the ridiculous, hyperbolic reenactment where the prisoner's head just fucking explodes. If you really want to horrify me, dear filmmakers, just let the facts speak for themselves. If you provide me an escape via snide criticism and ironic lampoon, I'll take it. Don't give me that out. I want to know and understand. I don't want to be shown a Marilyn Manson music video. (Typically, the film ends with some heavy-metal song about death playing over the credits. Very brutal. Very brutal, everyone.)

You know this was an actual event involving actual people, right? It seems immensely tacky to me to turn this into a haunted fun-house ride. Imagine if this were about the holocaust. On that note, actually, I kept mentally contrasting this film with the far superior Shoah. In Shoah, we are made to feel the filmmaker's frustration with the deteriorating information of the past. The facts which are of the utmost importance are so frustratingly difficult to find. In Philosophy of a Knife, meanwhile, we not only gloss over the authenticity of our facts but eagerly participate in making up new ones. We can only hope that the filmmakers have not deluded themselves into thinking that they are actually honouring the events with any of this crap, but a dedication to the victims and executioners at the start of the film makes me wonder.

Okay, as for the actual film itself, it's quite hard to watch. The filmmakers go for an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-too style of horror. Baby cries, women screaming, maniacal laughter, synth organs, and actual organs fill up the soundtrack. The action is all foley-ed unto absurdity. Every scalpel slice makes a sound like cloth ripping or like stones grinding. Every scene involving surgery is accompanied by the sound of a sponge being energetically squeezed. The visual effects are gloppy and involve endless gallons of fluid.

The film is not entirely reprehensible. The filmmakers display a sympathy for the Japanese which is noble and bespeaks a mature recognition that even monstrous people are not actually monsters (well, either that or a sleazy sympathy for the devil.) The best parts of the film, for me, were the bits of narration that came from the diary and an interview with a Russian dude who worked as a translator. These actually informed me about actual events and were not silly or ridiculous. But then again, they weren't in very good company either. Maybe they're part of the film's fabrications as well.

This film is tacky and gross. Regarded as horror, it's not so bad. If we treat it like it's riffing on these atrocities instead of documenting them (as it claims,) then the film improves a great deal. If you must see this thing, regard it as the tasteless exploitation that it is. It's quite effectively repulsive and sensational exploitation, but it is exploitation none the less.

Paths of Glory

Saw Paths of Glory, a chilly little war film by Kubrick. Set in WW1, it opens with a pair of generals intricately waltzing through a decision to mount an impossible attack on a fort. One of the generals is pudgy and fatherly, the other growling and scarred (and even has a goatee. Oh dear, oh dear.) The scarred general quickly reveals himself to be the bad guy. He is hopelessly out of touch with the common soldier. He declares that shell-shock is imaginary and when he hears one soldier's wistful desire for a desk job, he assumes it must be a joke. He is the face of deluded military corruption.

The film establishes the wine which the soldiers drink as a symbol for this corruption and then reveals that the evil general drinks cognac. His corruption is that much more refined and sophisticated. His character is excellently written and acted. His self-delusion is both obvious and believable. You get the sense that he is beyond compassion or reasoning. His worldview is consistent, self-sustaining, and utterly cruel. He's an excellent villain.

Up against him is the noble Kirk Douglas who never drinks. He defends his men from the aggression of the general and from other petty tyrants. He eventually works his way up to an ur-general who seems to be the source of the institutional evil. This general however seems yet more refined than the evil goatee-ed general. His is a world of acceptable losses and greater goods. The soldiers, he points out, are there to die. If their death gains headlines instead of a few yards of trench, what difference? Kirk gives him a satisfying what-for. Then, because Kubric likes complexity, we get a closing scene of soldiers in a tavern, ugly and drunk, bullying a poor German girl to tears. Are these men's lives really worth Kirk's sacrifices?

A lot of war films are anti-war. This one, I think, is almost anti-military. Ultimately this one is fundamentally about the clash between compassion and progress. Kirk would argue that the soldiers' lives are more important than any paper ideal, but the generals would argue back that the paper ideals which the soldiers die for will improve the lives of untold millions. Both camps heavily entrenched, there is no end to this war, only skirmishes back and forth, muddled by wine and ulterior motives.

Judge Dredd (1995)

Saw the 1995 version of Judge Dredd. I'm unfamiliar with the Judge Dredd character but sort of thought that, as a paragon of law and order, he was kind of a fascist. I was therefore confused that he was the hero (and not an anti-hero either!) It turns out they play this trick of making a fascist hero by making him the least egocentric fascist in the room, so we side with him by default. Probably-mistaken accusations of fascism aside, the film is mainly amazingly silly fun. Stallone sneers and does that weird thing with his lip when he shouts "I AM THE LLLUUAWA!" and is generally goofy. It's hilarious and fun.

The film's futuristic aesthetic borrows from the busy, industrial look of Blade Runner and the Star Wars films. The plot revolves around a future city where crime is only barely held in check by roving gangs of cop/judges who pass sentence on arrest. This is, obviously, a fantastically bad idea which is only supported in-film by the massive amounts of chaos that the city-state seems to exist in. Strangely, the antagonist is this dude who wants to mass produce super-cops. Surely this is exactly what the city-state needs. Why is he an antagonist? The bad guy is overacting-ly, scenery-chewing-ly evil though, so we're clearly meant to hate him. I think the audience is not expected to think too much about the ideologies at work here (or again, what is more likely, I am so far away from this law-n-order mindset that, flattened by distance, everything over there just looks like fascism to me. I'm on shaky ground here.)

There's some annoying action-movie quirks that the film has. There's a motor-mouthed "comic" relief sidekick who I hated. Dredd has a completely unnecessary love interest (okay, it kinda fits into themes of being more "human," but this shorthand of love being the ultimate symbol of all that's good is pretty lazy.) A female scientist suddenly joins forces with the bad guy for little to no reason. The actual reason, of course, is so that when the guys are fighting at the climax, the girls can have a mini cat-fight, but they never give her character an actual, rational reason for doing it.

All in all, a ridiculous summer flick. It's a product of its time but holds up pretty well. The film is pretty cheesy, but it's kind of campily aware of its cheesiness and silly movies are fun once in a while, so dig in. A perfectly fine film, just don't kid yourself that Judge Dredd is anything other than a pulp hero (not that you would.)