Berlin Alexanderplatz, Episodes 2 and 3

Episode 2, How is One to Live if One Doesn’t Want to Die? :
The episode opens on money troubles. Franz is out of work and down to his last ten pfennigs. His girlfriend, Lina, offers to work in some unspecified way, but Franz refuses to even entertain the notion. Again, sexual politics enters the show. He gets a job selling tie-holders (I have no idea what these are) which is a slightly gendered occupation. He quits his job due to feeling ridiculous, selling a luxury item he does not need himself, and decides to take up hawking newspapers. A local newspaperman gives him some "sexual education" pamphlets to sell. Franz becomes touched by a story from the "homosexuality" pamphlet. (In this story, a bald man picks up a young man and does not have sex with him. I believe sexual impotence is here again.) This horrifies Lina who believes he's caught the gay-fever, but he bites her on the neck, like a vampire, and, thus assured of his attraction to her, all is well once more. Lina furiously returns the pamphlets to the newsman. Observed by Franz, he likens her actions to that of the Prince of Homburg, who attacked his enemy and triumphed without direct orders (and was nearly executed for his insubordination.) I believe the show may be building to a theme on duty. After the triumph over the demons of sexual debauchery, they talk about unemployment rates and repeat the number of unemployed in Berlin (which is 673,582) about ten times. Again, the eerie fixation on detail and trivia.

Franz is then hired by a fascist newspaper. He is made to wear an armband with a swastika on it. He's confronted by one of his old friends, Meck, who wears a communist's red scarf. Meck then confronts Franz (with a gang of burly commies in tow) at a bar which Franz is a regular in. Franz doesn't realize what a difficulty he presents to the communists. They claim to represent the oppressed and dispossessed, but he, an ex-con and underemployed dude, is against them. A fist-fight seems all but inevitable. Franz tries to reason with them but, overcome, falls to raving about peace and fatherland, prison and war. The communists retreat, surly and bewildered. Outside, he meets up with Lina and bites her.

It appears that the beginnings of WW2 will be covered in this series. This partly explains the oddly pronounced inclusion of Hasidic Jews in the first episode. I wonder if Franz's impotence will transmute into misdirected rage? I suspect this show will not allow Franz to go long without suffering in some way, so I suspect he'll find fascism to be as difficult as democracy to handle. There is also some discussion of a decorative bird in a cage at the bar. The bird is female, we learn. Franz wonders about the bird's little lungs. After the pornography-returning scene, his girlfriend puts her head "where she imagines Franz's heart to be" but is in fact his upper lung, the show tells us in narration. There's that scientific trivia again, but also some obscure business with lungs which I have no idea what it means. Ok, on to the next episode.

Episode 3, A Hammer Blow to the Head Can Injure the Soul:
Franz decides to quit politics and instead hooks up with shoelace merchant. This is Lina's idea and when she hits on it, she and Franz gleefully repeat "shoelaces" to each other about 10 times in a row (the German for shoelace sounds like shnooze-ankle. It's kind of silly when they do it.) Lina and Franz mirror each other's actions in the shoelace-merchant's house and Lina declares afterwards that she believes in "them." Their relationship is seemingly better than ever. Franz immediately finds success when he reminds a widow of her husband and she buys dozens of shoelaces out of sentimentality (and also treats him to a spot of sex) The sex is not the relationship-destroyer you might think however, for since Lina was a whore, her attitude towards sex is pretty laissez-faire. Unfortunately, the shoelace merchant finds out about this and extorts the widow for more money. Franz meanwhile runs into his old girlfriend, Eva, the woman for whose assault he went to jail. They have a very brief moment together and it is this which is the relationship destroyer.

After Franz discovers the shoelace-merchant's plot, he vanishes, leaving Lina, Meck, and all of his friends. The episode ends with Lina and Meck making plans to live together. Meck kisses Lina on the neck, where Franz bit her at the end of last episode. Lina does not seem to enjoy it.

This was a plot-heavy episode. I think there was some machinery going on here, removing Franz, shifting Lena and Meck together, reintroducing Eva. There's something to be said about the difficulty of redemption, what with an easy but cruel life of crime always tantalizingly close to Franz's fingertips. He has another freak-out in a homeless shelter, the gaunt, nude bodies of out-of-work men and close-stacked bunk beds reminding me strongly of photos of holocaust camps. I suspect I'm just getting sleepy but this episode didn't seem as full of interesting little dead-ends and connections as the previous one did. Perhaps, as ever, I'm imagining things? We'll have to see what the future brings.

Westworld

Saw Westworld, a sci-fi based on a book by Michael Crichton (the Jurassic Park guy) about an amusement park where robots make your fantasies come true in three exotic locations. There's Medieval World, which caters to grand opulence, Roman World, which caters to sexual debauchery, and West World, which caters to your violent fantasies. Our heroes are two dudes in the West World who smilingly shoot the crap out of the sheriff and the villainous black-hat, both. Whereas the majority of the film is shot in a slightly rollicking way, the robots' deaths are incongruously shot in somber close-up and slow motion. The park caters to our base instincts, the robots are taken apart as soon as they misbehave, and soothing female voices assure us that nothing can go wrong. When the inevitable robot-revolt comes, it feels richly deserved.

The film is shot in the composed, straight-faced way that a lot of 70s films were. The contrast of the workman-like shots and the absurd content of the film makes things feel a bit surreal at times, particularly during abrupt tonal shifts, as with the robo-deaths mentioned above. At one point the lab-coat-ed techs activate a bar-fight sequence. We are meant to feel like this is a romp, but to convey this, the film uses looney-tunes-ish sound effects. It's unclear if the scene is supposed to be kind of lurid and confrontational or if that's just accidental.

The film raises all kinds of interesting questions. If we allow our emotions to be manipulated by robots, then are we not somehow tainted when we are cruel to them, or use them for our own gratification? The nature of the robo-revolt is kept obscure. Is there perhaps a ghost in the machine which has at last rebelled? Is there a danger in creating machines more capable than we, or in creating machines that are capable of provoking our sympathy or our fear? Interesting stuff. As I'm fond of saying, this film does not really explore those ideas, it only brings them up. It's an interesting film. A novel place to visit.

In the Time of the Butterflies

Saw In the Time of the Butterflies (thanks, Rafael!) It was a TV movie about life in the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Trujillo. It follows a female freedom fighter who was instrumental in the resistance movement. The film is based on a true story, but fictionalized. It begins in a very grounded way, with a stiff-necked patriarch, nuns teaching the girls about original sin (and the ensuing periods) and boarding school. There are rumors of ethnic cleansing, of people being disappeared, but nothing seems real in the remote home of the protagonist. She gains the personal attention of Trujillo, however, and soon must negotiate tricky social tight-ropes.

The film has the role of women on its mind. The protagonist wants to be a lawyer but everyone she tells this to reacts with bemusement at the very idea of "skirts on the bench." She is under the thumb of her father, although she has a bit of leeway there. At one point, Trujillo dances with her, denying her request to be allowed to go to law school, he simultaneously grabs her ass. He is cruelly defining her role in society as a pretty face to be, at best, used and discarded, as actually happens to one of her 15-year-old boarding-school friends (the other girls are jealous. A nun mournfully closes a window.) Then again, when she becomes self-possessed and joins the resistance, she is always in the company of boyfriends. I understand that this is based on reality, but, well, must she always be following her man? for most of the movie, the protagonist is a solid bad-ass, so this is merely a quibble on my behalf.

The film, being made for TV, is a bit flat. The actors are almost always shot at ten-feet distance, from the knees up, as though this were a play. The script has a very docu-drama-ish feel, conveying facts more than emotions. The symbolism is a bit on-the-nose as well. The protagonist's first seditious act is to chase after her current boyfriend, down a row of corn-stalks which form a giant rabbit-hole. Later on, when she's gleefully mimeographing pamphlets, she has exchanged her usual sun-dress for a pair of khaki pants and a beret. The torture scenes (the film opens with her in prison, hair shorn. We know this won't end well) are TV-safe. They're fairly wince-inducing, but not exactly something you feel the need to look away from. Also, for all the beatings, there's never any rape shown (and I'm pretty sure there was probably a bit of rape in reality.) The film doesn't take risks that might alienate its audience and is therefore a bit tame and a bit safe.

That said, I've been told that this film is fairly accurate in its portrayal of life under Trujillo. There's an element of banality to the home-life which rings true. They live in fear, but they live. I gripe that the film is not melodramatic and punchy enough, but how much fun does a dictatorship need to be? The film's primary interest is in informing people about the protagonist's life (Minerva, her name is Minerva) and making her into a noble figure. I wish the film had cut more shapely, but its heart is clearly in the right place.

Weekend

Saw Weekend, a modern gay romance. It uses the lo-fi aesthetic of mumblecore films and adopts the associated realism which eschews pat resolutions. It follows Russel, a gay dude whose friends playfully bully him and later drunkenly ignore him. He skulks home in a long-shot, washed in street noise and alienation. He meets Glen and picks him up but what is a one-night stand turns into an intense, but weekend-long relationship. Glen confronts Russel with his own shyness and relative closeted-ness. He challenges him to speak up and make a fuss. Well and good, but this is yet more amiable dickishness. Later on in the film, Glen reveals that he has his own walls and elaborate justifications of his own.

The film is really sweet. I liked it, anyway. The romance of the two is at first kind of tawdry and confrontational but becomes increasingly adorable. The film atypically does not contain beatings or AIDS. There is no seemingly mandatory scene which establishes gay life as being super hard. The leads never say the word "love" to each other. There's so much that's so refreshingly right! It's fairly political in bits, which will probably date it later on down the road (gay marriage and a thematic shot of surveillance equipment (this is set in the UK) will probably not be so hot-button in ten years.) but there are other philosophical arguments which will endure. The film is also not super-progressive. There are no lesbians, no transgendered folk, this film is only about the relationship between two men (which, alas, is inherently socio-political when put on screen.)

The characters are well-drawn and nuanced. They are largely sweet but also flawed and, during one long, long late-night discussion, even kind of ugly. Their peripheral friends are less well drawn of course. They both keep diaries however of their sexual encounters which serve as little poetic sketches of unused characters. Glen's diary seems sort of leering and gross, while Russel's seems queasy and sad. Note the cleverness of the film then, that gives Glen's diary a more well-thought-out explanation. The film is understated and well-observed. The only time I felt things were going awry was when they discuss politics and I felt the writer's hand pressing heavy. That aside, I felt they were real, genuine people.

This is a difficult film to review for me. It hits very close to home for me and, blinded by proximity, I don't think I can be objective about it the way I can be about, say, Submarine. Gay films are usually either too twee or too dour for me to really identify with, never mind enjoy. This film, for me anyway, hits exactly the right pitch and is excellent.

Near Dark

Saw Near Dark, the don't-say-vampire vampire movie. It follows a young dude down in Texas who is seduced and bitten by a sexy vampire chick. Bewildered, he joins her clan. The twist here is that the vampires are not gothy Victorians or corporate ninjas but are dangerous hicks, crowing and yee-hawing their way through murders (The film never actually says the word vampire (even when it would really help explain things.)) It's a very clever and fresh twist. Beyond that central twist there's not a huge amount going on, but what there is is fun.

The protagonist has the pretty-boy looks of a vampire but his vampiric girlfriend has boyish hair and ripped jeans. The climactic showdown involves a shoot-out on main street, but a post-climax mini-showdown features a little boy running down the road, engulfed in flames. It's pretty cool. The mash-up of vampire-film and western is well-done and smooth. Whoever made this film has an excellent ear for tone and mood.

The film tries to make some small symbolic gestures. The film opens with the prosaic image of a mosquito sucking blood. The violence is mixed with sexy close contact and blurry sexuality (at one point, the protagonist must kill or be killed by his clan. They pick out a fairly pretty dude at a bar and offer him up to our hero, saying "he's all for you..." Indeed.) but this is fairly de rigueur for vampire flicks. There's a bit of redemption/damnation going on on a subliminal level. The protagonist is unable to kill anyone on his own and there's an indication that he's not really "one of them" until he does. Nothing new. All in all, it's a very neat genre exercise but not much beyond that. I enjoyed it anyway.

Berlin Alexanderplatz, Episode 1

Saw Berlin Alexanderplatz, Episode 1, The Punishment Begins:
The episode opens with ex-convict, Franz, being released from prison. Immediately he's overwhelmed by the rush and chaos of life outside the prison. This fact, coupled with the episode title bodes ill for Franz's future. I suspect life after prison just might turn out to be worse than life in prison (but we'll see where the show goes.) He's told not to look back when he leaves the prison (shades of Orpheus?) or he'll be cursed to return. He marches off, but must look back to avoid being run down by a car.

Scared, alone, and overwhelmed, he dithers about almost incoherent. He's shown kindness by a Hasidic Jew, a man bound by his own strict system. The Jew tells him a story about a man who lived large and was loved by all. Then the Jew's brother-in-law shows up and finishes the story: the man died in poverty, imprisoned for not paying his debts and finally buried in a landfill, heaped in garbage. The story illustrates the lack of compassion in the justice system. Franz calls this injustice, but it is the lack of pity we are meant to react to.

The show has a terribly fraught relationship with sex. The opening sequence of the show has an image of two people having sex superimposed over footage of marching soldiers and images of dead people. Very bracing. Franz, we learn, was first put in jail for killing his girlfriend after he realized she was going to leave him. Later he makes violent advances on his sister-in-law. Yet later on, he bites a woman during sex and explains that "this is my way." After the vignette with the Jews, Franz seeks out some female company but when he finds a prostitute, he is unable to preform. The prostitute laughs at him, lustily and gutturally. I think that the show really wants the frustration and embarrassment of sexual impotence to be a theme. I suspect that a parallel will be drawn between Franz's post-prison life and his sex life.

Anyway, the prostitute then tries to arouse him by reading a scientific pamphlet on human reproduction. It's dry and weird and off-putting. Several times the show uses dense scientific jargon to provide a distancing effect. At one point Franz reads the entire prescription, down to the trademark number, off of a bottle of pills (for sexual impotence, naturally.) When Franz's court-case is being described, Newton's equations for force and momentum appear on the screen like title-cards. The obsessive details make the show feel very literary (I suspect reading out a 9-digit number is more bearable in print) and also very frustrating. The descent into distraction removes us from the action, but also usually halts the action. It's an interesting effect.

Thus far, the show is a bit inscrutable. I have no idea, for example, what the little scene with the Jews is meant to convey. We are only 7% of the way through the show however, so the show may become more accessible later. Anyway, to finish the plot: he shacks up with a Polish woman and moves her into his apartment (there's a close-up of a bird cage and when the Polish woman arrives, she is clutching a statue of the virgin Mary) He receives a letter expelling him from Berlin but makes a deal with a prisoners' rights group to stay in Berlin and check in with them monthly in exchange. The women at the advocacy group are smiling and pretty. We shall see how his relationship with them evolves.

Terminator 3, Rise Of the Machines

Saw Terminator 3, Rise Of the Machines. It was an action movie, full of kick-butt and bad-ass scenes. I remember there was a sort of brouhaha when it came out about whether it was sexist or not. I don't really think it is, but it isn't very progressive either. There's a female terminatrix this time (-trix is the suffix the film uses. I think it's meant to evoke technical writing and also BDSM.) She definitely uses her fake robo-gender as a weapon, seemingly a damsel in distress initially and later ballooning her breasts to befuddle a cop. She kicks ass and all but I feel some amount of progress is undone when the protagonists begin shouting gendered slurs at her (and when she seductively licks the blood of her victims to identify their DNA.) Whateva. It's not too bad, just not quite as edgy as it thinks it is.

As for the rest of the film, it's good fun for the most part. There's some fun action scenes. I think Arnold was getting a bit old by then however, and the female terminator has a kind of fashion-runway body, so CGI and wires are used liberally in the fight scenes. It's a bit disappointing, but then the terminator franchise has never been one to use kung-fu ballet. The liberal usage of CGI makes things look weirdly rubbery a few times, so it's not good CGI either. Be warned. The plot is setting up a reboot on the franchise, so there's a lot of exposition and setup and not much in the way of closure. I don't mind this, but some do.

There's some shadows of 9/11 I detected: skynet is given control of the nuclear computers in response to a small, opportunistic virus spreading through the US network. It turns out, of course, that giving up control for the sake of safety is not a good idea, but what conclusion did you expect? Also, at the end, John Conner tells us that we must survive and persist in the face of tragedy, which is a nice sentiment.

As usual, I'm made vaguely uncomfortable by the uber-machoness of the action film genre. To illustrate this point: in one scene, Arnold harvests clothing from a flamboyantly gay male stripper. He flips on the stripper's rhinestone-studded glasses and then, thinking better of it, throws them to the ground and grinds them underfoot. Once again, masculinity is established by what it is not. I suppose this is like the above point about sexism. It's not bad, but it's not very good either.

The Hunter

Saw The Hunter (thanks, Basil!) It was an interesting but kind of foregone movie. It's about Willem DaFoe, a mercenary, who is hunting for the last Tasmanian tiger. We open the movie with him accepting this assignment from an accented man who represents a faceless biomedical conglomerate. He talks of security liabilities and "jobs" and is clearly some kind of mercenary. He goes to a remote Tasmanian village which is in the grip of a ecological war of the native loggers vs the foreign "greenies." He rents a room from a local family. We see tie-dye and rustic, wooden furniture. This is an awfully granola-ish place for a heartless mercenary to stay at, we think. Then come the moppets.

The moppets are way too cute and un-intimidated by Willem for this to be a straightforward action film. We know, at this point, that this is a redemption film. This is a bit unexpected, but okay. We get the bonding with the family and the repairing of the generator which symbolically mirrors the repair of the broken family and so on. We see Willem's black heart soften and, although there are twists to keep it interesting, we see see him semi-redeemed by the end. The film is atmospheric and slice-of-life-ish and just a touch political. The eco-politics feels a bit empty. The film gives the loggers a fair shake but of course they are kind of the mini-bad-guys (overshadowed by the puppet-master biochem corp.)

The film was not bad, but not that great either. It does its best to avoid common tropes, but of course is caught up in a redemption story which, while not a bad version/telling of the redemption story, is nothing new. Mainly I'm just really confused as to why the protagonist was a mercenary. Why bother with all of the serial-killer-ish opera on his iPod and the sinister phonecalls and conspiracy? There's some opportunities which spring from the eco-struggle (belonging to neither group, he is menaced by both) but I could believe that a new scientist would find himself being forced to take sides as well. As is, it feels needlessly dramatic and almost pretentious (is The Syndicate supposed to represent Willem's evil nature? or perhaps The Devil?? (on this note actually, Willem's cover-story is that he's hunting Tasmanian devil or, as he calls them, "devils." There's virtually no religious iconography in the film, but I think I've hit on a symbol or something here.))

So the film takes itself a bit too seriously, I fear. It's very moody and very atmospheric. The characters are a bit lacking, but I dug the hunting sequences which are very montage-ish and meditative. The bits involving the mercenary plot seems superfluous and almost schizophrenic to me and that's definitely the film's biggest flaw. That said, the film is definitely not just howlingly bad. It's not a movie I'd recommend to anyone, but if you like a good mood, check it out.

Planet Earth, Episode 11

Ocean Deep:
The episode opens on some sociopathic dolphins herding fish into little balls so they can devour them. We see whale sharks hunting bait fish. Curiously, the bait-fish try to use the shark's bulk against it and hide in its shadow and behind its back. Pretty sneaky, sis! Then night falls and we are treated to some ghostly giant mantas soaring and cartwheeling through the water. They looks very strange. This provides a natural segue to the deeper ocean, land of strange, alien creatures. We see an unearthly sea-spider (which is actually a type of mantis and is pretty cool) and a vampire squid (which, Attenborough informs us, is "from hell!" The writing on this show, man.) which glows when threatened. We see spidery crabs and arthropods consume an entire shark carcase, down to the bones. The show whisks us away to rock chimneys formed on the cracks of earth's crust, venting the sulfurs from below. Tube worms do their elegant thing and we see a nautilus hunt. Nautiluses (nautili?) are gross and strange-looking creatures. We then rise back to the surface, following up low-lying coral beds of soft-coral (check out whip coral. That shit is cray.) We see bright butterfly fish grooming the tiny parasitic worms off of a giant fish from the depths (I wonder if they'll include a scene of something like this in the next Nemo movie. Probably.) The show plays out the rest of its time on sea tortoises and whales. It warns us of the extinction of whales and makes one last plea for environmental consciousness. Then we are back where we started, with sailfish this time, herding schools of little idiot-fish. Episode animal mascots: Whales, evil dolphins, and itty-bitty baby turtles.

Not a bad series, in all. It's plot is lacking and its characters are, well, no-dimentional. It functions best as a kind of moving wallpaper. It's a lot of beautiful stuff and is well-suited for classrooms of all pre-college grades. I'm kind of glad it's over because writing reviews required that I take notes on what happened, but I'll miss the comfy edutaining atmosphere. Ah well. On to the next thing!

The Objective

Saw The Objective, a horror film. It's not horror in the sense that Stephen King is horror, but in the sense that H.P. Lovecraft is horror. It follows a CIA operative as he attempts to make contact with a cleric in Afghanistan with a team of soldiers of some elite kind or other. We almost immediately discover that this is only a cover story however, when the operative scans the cleric's room with some kind of camera and hastily pockets a toy plane which makes his display glow like the sun. Eerie establishing shots of aerial maps and silent, staring women in burkas set up an otherworldly mood to the film.

As the soldiers march into the holy mountains, which God has forbidden man to tread, other strange images show up in the heat-sensitive camera. There's an absolutely ghastly shot of one character, seemingly alone, but surrounded by ghostly figures in the camera. Soon the men are dying one by one and being disintegrated by alien magic. The film is slightly unsatisfying in that explanations are not very forthcoming (the CIA dude has a big reveal scene where he just says "we don't know" over and over.) but I admire the bravery of a film which can remain oblique. The ending goes full-on 2001 A Space Odyssey and is pretty cool.

The film engages in a bit of the time-honored mysticism of the orient. I know it's kind of shoddy to make mysteries of the completely comprehensible lives of foreign people, but as long as you can forgive slightly retrograde politics, or perhaps if you can catch hold of the Kipling/H.G. Wells/H.P. Lovecraft thread, the update to modern times is extremely clever and well done. The aliens are utterly otherworldly and though they are never center-stage with rubber suckers and all, they are still felt as a palpable mood and presence. I really dug this film. It's not great mind you, (it really suffers from some acting-class performances sometimes,) but it's much better than I was expecting and that's always nice.

Orpheus

Saw Orpheus, a French film from the 50s. It opens with a recitation of the myth of Orpheus (he was a poet whose wife died. He went to the underworld and got her back on the condition that he not look at her. He looks.) We then jump to modern times, where a poet named Orpheus is feeling intimidated by an up-and-coming new poet. This poet is knocked down in the streets and is whisked away by a woman in black who is clearly death. (At this point I had hopes for a gay version of the story but alas Orpheus's female wife is introduced soon after and any homoeroticism remains subliminal from then on.) The sequences in the underworld are very fun. They evoke the lo-fi special effects of Michel Gondry. Backwards-spooled footage and rear-projections are used to wonderful effect. Low-budget films would be wise to rediscover these techniques.

The story is interesting. I was at first disappointed because as soon as people are named, their role becomes fixed. We discover that Orpheus's wife's friend runs the Bacchae Nightclub and we know they're going to be trouble. Luckily (and I have to tread very close to spoilers here) the film's plot keeps us guessing. For example, when Orpheus finally looks at his wife, it is because she is sick of the eternal game of hide-and-seek and wants to die. There's also a surreal mixing of reality with the supernatural. At one point the poet is chasing after death but is frustrated by autograph-seekers. The boundary between what is real and unreal is not always kept perfectly straight. There's also oblique reference to an extended mythos. Death, we hear, must obey laws of her own.

An interesting movie. It feels very fresh, despite being a retelling of a very old story. As strong as the story is, I think the visuals are yet stronger. The old-timey effects are just great. The mood of the film is kind of removed and observational, unfortunately. I think it's much more fun when I can get a nice sense of mood and place off of a film. This one is too overwhelming and alien to really be relatable but, all the same, it's quite good as a sort of sensory kaleidescope.

Edit: according to imdb, the male director had been dating both Orpheus and the up-n-coming new poet, so maybe the homoeroticism wasn't entirely in my own head.

Rollerball

Saw Rollerball, a 1970s sci-fi. It takes place in a future dystopia ruled by corporations and fueled by the murderous sport of rollerball. The rollerball sequences are pretty exciting in a sports-film kind of way. There's chanting crowds and blood and excitement. I liked how real the sport felt (for a sci-fi future sport anyway.) The film opens with a fairly unglamorous scene of cameras being set up and balding TV execs with little mustaches conferring. The court is not super-futuristic, but is made of laminated wood and paint. Unfortunately, the rollerball scenes don't really convey much plot or idea on their own, so we get some of the inter-game adventures of one of the star players. This is where the film becomes a bit weaker.

Unfortunately, this is the 70s and the protagonist is this sort of cowboy philosopher. He makes vague references to freedom and, in leaden, pause-riddled monologues, denounces the decadent future-culture, praising instead the pursuit of an ill-defined "freedom." The future-culture exhibits this decadence mainly by consuming lots of drugs and by wife-swapping according to some byzantine schedule (which it is not clear if it only applies to rollerballers or the elite caste or what. And is this a societal institution, controlled by a bureaucracy, or some kind of service? More importantly, is it possible to get a rotating harem of husbands?) There's a party which is so decadent and soul-crushingly dismal that even the wives are openly weeping. It gets really heavy-handed sometimes.

There's some uncomfortable bits of 70s race/sexism. The wives, like I say, seem to be rotated which is just bully for the guys, but less so for the gals. At one point the protagonist demonstrates his independence by bravely cutting his wife's face. The Tokyo team's team-color is yellow in what I assume was just an unfortunate coincidence. The protagonist makes much of his wife being taken from him but when the powers that be capitulate and bring her to him, he finds she has been gotten to and tainted. He rejects her, but does he reject her because she has compromised her integrity or (what's more likely) because she has been sullied?

Also, there's this weird notion that the powers that be are frightened by a really good rollerball player. He's told he's a threat, that they'll give him anything he wants (eg getting his wife back) if only he quits, that he'll be killed if he doesn't, etc etc. Why? I don't believe that a government so intrusive that it controls love-lives can't fake a resignation. We are bluntly told why the powers that be want to stop him (from being too good at sports, let's not forget!) but their reason makes no sense to me. I think this nation-wide amazement at a single, inscrutable individual is an artifact of the weird super-individualism of the 70s. The hippie movement had just finished glorifying the disruption of power structures and the government was working on demonizing collectivism and I think this melded into some strange myth of The Man Who Was So Free That He Somehow Changed Everything. Very bizarre.

I didn't think much of this film. It's much more restrained than Deathrace, but not really as fun or as comprehensible. It's not very subtle, but still manages to be confusing. The protagonist is this dickish kind of dude who feels he owes no one an explanation but unfortunately includes the audience in this information embargo. He struts about contemptuously and we're supposed to just eat it up. Perhaps I'm reacting to a philosophy here? I am someone who traded dreams for comfort long ago (in a perfect world, I'd be an actor. I gave this up on this in high school.) and maybe the film makes more sense than I'm allowing it to, here in my cubicle. But I'm fairly, grumpily certain that it's just being kind of childish and unclear. Harrumph.

Kick Ass

Saw Kick Ass (thanks, Paul!) It was tremendously fun. It was another of those super-hero-related films. It follows a nerdy (but inexplicably jacked and bull-necked) highschool kid who decides to become a superhero for no good reason (I seriously can't remember why. It just seems like a good idea to him.) Then he runs afoul of a mobster and teams up with another, far crazier, super-hero father-daughter duo. The film does a tiny bit of super-hero-deconstruction early on. I noticed that the kid links his actions with that of a serial killer in a voice-over. There may have been some other stuff but deconstruction is not on this film's mind. Awesome shit is.

I remember when this film came out there was great debate over whether its more realistic violence is supposed to condemn or celebrate the cartoonish violence in super-hero films. I'm pretty sure they've just exchanged the unrealistically clean, comic-book, biff-pow violence of comic books for the unrealistically messy and quick blood-splatters and one-shots of action movies. The violence is made sexy and celebrated, so be warned if you're the sort to tut at glamorous violence. The daughter half of the father-daughter duo exists only to deliver on the hilarious joke of a little girl grimly kicking ass. Again, this film is clearly far less concerned with substance than it is with style.

The film is also hilarious. It turns a refreshingly jaundiced eye toward the wish-fulfillment of the super-hero genre. The protagonist's dreams of cool one-liners and karate chops are contrasted with his squeaky voice and spastic flailing. He attempts to get the girl, only for her to think he's gay. (On that note, gay is used a few times in a pejorative sense. It's my turn to tut, I guess.) There's also some fun freeze-frame fun. In a shoot-out in the mobster's library, a flash of a bullet hitting some books reveals that the whole library is just facades of books and that the mobster's "library" is purely for show. It's super-fast and hilarious. At one point the characters check a spy-cam and we watch its owner quickly scroll past several videos of girls taking their tops off.

So I liked this film. It's clever enough to be entertaining but not enough to be thought-provoking. It's also vastly entertaining. Normally I keep bumping my mouse to see how much of the film I have left. With this one, I think I checked for the first time an hour and a half in. The whole thing is just loads of fun. Check it out.

The Arbor

Saw The Arbor, a very strange, stage-y film. It's a sort-of-documentary about the playwright Adrea Dunbar (I've read nothing by her. I read a lot of plays.) Real people were interviewed and then their interviews were lip-synched by actors. It's very unusual for a film. This sort of thing is usually used for documentary-ish plays, such as the Laramie Project. To see it in a film adds a strong layer of artificiality between the viewer and the subject. Dunbar's plays largely mirror her life, taking place in a Yorkshire housing estate known as "The Arbor," a rough place full of loud, drunken people, where cops are not an unusual sight. The film includes selections of her plays, preformed in the plastic-bag-strewn "green" of the estate, presumably ringed by inhabitants. We have performances within performances here, people. The high wire is pulled tight indeed.

The film opens on an anecdote told by Dunbar's daughters about a time when they were locked inside of their room which they had accidentally set on fire. They tried to get out, but the door had no doorknob on the inside. From this anxious beginning, we rock through Dunbar's tumultuous life. We hear of her exploitation at the hands of various men far her senior and her spiral into alcoholism. And then, halfway through, the film oddly shifts focus onto the life of her daughter, a half-Pakistani girl. The daughter tells us of sexual abuse and racism (even from her mother, who called her a "golliwog.") The daughter shares her own intimate and sordid tale of drugs, prostitution, reaction to her mother and life in her mother's shadow.

The film includes excerpts from BBC specials on the mother. These specials have a kind of leering, exploitative feel to them. They focus on her squalid home life and tumultuous romances, ogling her disasters more than her triumphs. The film itself does not entirely escape this exploitative feel. The shift from the mother to the daughter seems inexplicable, save for a bloodhound-like following of the drama. Dunbar had other, more stable (and therefore less luridly fascinating) children. They are given roles only to illuminate the behavior of the troubled daughter. We are told that there was a follow-up play written after Dunbar's death about how her family and friends had changed. The daughter's statements, as repeated in the play, inflame and incense her relatives. The theater society, it seems, cannot stop fanning the flames of this woman's life. It would be depressing if this film were not perpetuating the drama-airing. As it is, the film is kind of frustrating if I think about it too hard.

Overall, the film is fascinating. The COPS-level stories of sex and drugs are mesmerizing, if a bit exploitative. The hall-of-mirrors performances-within-performances lead to all kinds of critique about the nature of art and commentary. The gloriously bellow-y Yorkshire accents are great. The film is totally fascinating and only slightly discomforting. My pretentious discomfort aside, the film is quite good. I enjoyed watching it.

The Omen (1976)

Saw the 1976 version of The Omen. I like 70s horrors. They're so morbid and unhappy, so unlike the roller-coaster startle-fests we have today. This one follows the by-now-well-known story of the anti-Christ, Damien, switcheroo'd at birth with a diplomat's son. The diplomat is haunted by an old priest with a magnificent horror face. He looks perpetually scared and also scary, quite ghoulish. As soon as I saw him, I knew he'd be fun. Anyway, the priest warns him about Damien and, sure enough, soon the little tyke is malevolently giggling and smirking at the camera (a theft from The Innocents, I think. In any case, it's very effective.) and driving his nannies to grotesque suicides.

The death scenes dwell on the horrified reactions of the witnesses. There's very tedious and real-feeling police inspectors plodding about and women hysterically sobbing into their husbands' chests. The focus is on realism, letting the horror the events speak for themselves. In these exploitative and jaded times, well, we don't do that anymore. In general, the film is concerned with creating a horrible but real atmosphere. As the relationship between the diplomat and his wife weakens, the actors skillfully insert brittle pauses and snappy defensiveness into their exchanges. I believe that they were a couple who is now unhappy. These details make the ensuing nuttiness with the devil and all easier to swallow. The mood is grim and morbid and almost sad. Fortunately, it's never jump-ish and I was able to wimpily handle it fine. I like 70s horrors.

I didn't catch much in the way of trenchant symbolism or artful mechanics. I'm sure it's in there though and, had I been on my A-game, I might have even caught it, but I missed it. The acting is pretty good in those relationship scenes, less so in the expository devil-concerning scenes, but then of course the acting is not the important thing for those bits. The plot is believable and classy. Not as horrifying as we are accustomed to horror films being, but good none the less. Worth a loook.

Le Salaire de la Peur

Saw Le Salaire de la Peur (AKA The Wages of Fear) It's an extremely tense but simple film. Set in the absolute poorest of slums, it follows two men who must transport a tanker of nitroglycerin across a rocky mountain pass. Half of the film follows their relationship. One of the two is a bum, lounging around a bar, not drinking anything and alternately smacking around and flirting with the owner's daughter. The other is a paper gangster. He arrives in town with a Pharaoh-like horse-hair whip, broke, but with airs. They fall into a master/servant relationship, the gangster making vague promises about when he strikes it rich and the other servilely and churlishly following orders.

They are matched against two other men who get along well. They smile and laugh as they transport the explosive while our heroes sweat and fall catatonic. They refer to themselves as the walking dead and make funeral, gallows-humor jokes to each other. The film is not heavy-handed with this symbolism and instead bends most of its efforts toward ratcheting up tension. The slightest puddle and tight turn become impossible, soul-crushing obstacles. The men alternate falling apart and being strong. Also, I don't want to give anything away but two teams is obviously one too many. Their minds suffer and give way. Their endless use of each other as psychological and physical punching-bags is contrasted with the other truckers' easy friendship.

The film is tremendously tense. I still feel a bit jittery. It's on par with the best of Hitchcock or Haneke. It's really good. The plot is not tremendously twisty and the film is a bit lacking in nuance, but the characters are well-acted and the emotional hits land with great force. Good stuff.

Repo Men

Saw Repo Men, a rollicking scifi/action with shades of rather dark humor. The film is an elaborate satire of the economic collapse of the early 2000s. It reverses economic and physical health and imagines a world where people buy synthetic organs at outrageous mark-ups. In the case of non-payment, the bank sends out repo-men to repossess the organs. One of these repo men is the protagonist, played by Jude Law. He takes Patrick-Bateman-like joy from harvesting the organs of deadbeats. His wife is understandably upset about him being a professional murderer but the money is good and he clearly enjoys it.

In keeping with yesterday's speculation about the age of the screenplay, I suspect this was originally a Schwarzenegger flick. I suspect the protagonist is supposed to be lovably dumb. He doesn't understand his wife's discomfort with his job, is equated with a roman gladiator at one point, and we are told he literally has a small brain. Also, the film opens with him spectacularly misinterpreting Schrödinger's famous thought-experiment: he claims that the experiment was actually preformed and also that the cat was literally both alive and dead. He then asks if we will be a docile cat, or a cat who fights. It's just hilariously wrong. The film successfully made me sympathize with and root for the protagonist however, so this isn't a knock on the likability of the character, I just think he shouldn't have been played by Jude Law. The production team may have originally imagined Jason Statham or some other loveable rogue but wound up with an actor who apparently has no idea that he looks strikingly like a noble elk. The dumb-act is a tough sell.

Anyway, stupidity aside, the film has many clever touches to it. The near-future world is well fleshed-out. Non-plot-important products are ubiquitously advertised, the cars and fashions are a bit different but not outlandishly so, there are still run-down apartments but also ritzy glass ones. The fight-scenes are exciting and, in a delightful bit of choreographic cleverness, feature a fighting-style that involves inflicting an open wound and then hammering on it. The theme of surgery and fleshy wounds is amazingly thorough. Keep your stomachs steeled for a scene of erotic surgery during the climax of the film! Off-topic, but I also really dug Jude's boss. He's so gloriously indifferent and malevolent.

The film contains references/homages to various famous scifis. There's a scene in the organ-manufacturing plant that evokes iPhone manufacturing plants and reminded me strongly of Brazil for some reason. There's a shameless riff on the famous hallway scene in Oldboy (he even wields a ball peen hammer, in a grossly deliberate hat-tip.) Like I say, there's a strong Schwarzenegger-ish flavor and the governator, for all his action-comedy films, did star in many scifis (such as The Terminator, Total Recall, The Running Man, and Last Action Hero (does that count as scifi? I'm counting it.)) So this movie was very fun and fairly clever. I didn't elaborate much on the economic allegory above but look at all of the other crap I talked about! Many layers, a lot of fun. It is, broadly speaking, an action movie, but I'm willing to overlook that.

The Numbers Station

Saw The Numbers Station (thanks, Basil!) It was an interesting spy thriller. It opens with a distinct, James Bond-ish, throwback-y feel of a 60s film. Top cryptography scientists are revealed to be blond bombshells in white cardigans. Helicopter shots track sexy cars driving down sinuous roads into concrete compounds where super-spies pinch secretaries' asses. The film also has two scenes of mutual destruction which again makes me wonder at the age of the script. This is a modern film however (2013) and the film's palette soon gives way to more modern, garishly contrasting colors and jet black silhouettes, as the action moves from cuddly high-tech into claustrophobic showdown.

The plot follows a spy who is getting too old for this shit. He assassinates his mark and then must track down a witness who flees the scene (free movie idea: an assassin must eliminate all witnesses, but every time he tracks down a witness and kills them, two or three new people witness the killing. The film ends with everyone on earth dead. The assassin then realizes that he must live on as a witness to man's inhumanity to man. Directed by Lars Von Trier.) His handlers get wind of his malaise and send him off to babysit the blond bombshell who is an expert at seductively purring numbers into a secret broadcast station. (Bonus points though: of what I heard, they do get the mechanics of a one-time pad completely correct. The computer interface is some riced-to-shit nonsense of course, but the math is correct.) Then the station is compromised and it becomes a survival/shoot-out thing.

The film's villain is pretty horrifying. He's this Hannibal Lecter type who is given to silky-voiced, menacing monologue. He's not very well motivated, but it's not that kind of movie anyway. The movie is not bad. It's got a tiny, manly little heart, and a lot of exciting action. The film is mostly tense. There's some frantic number-scribbling that goes on, but no math to speak of (this is important to me. I had hopes.) It's a silly movie, but fairly brief and never really painfully bad. Frankly, I had the most fun spotting possible tie-ins to my this-film-comes-from-the-60s theory.

Planet Earth, Episodes 9 and 10

Shallow Seas:
We explore the shallow regions of the sea. Whales are given a brief spotlight. After establishing a mother and calf whale as characters, the show skips quickly on. Perhaps it is aware that enough whale-centric media already exists. We are shown a whole mess of urchins and starfish. Apparently they have their own very slow system of predation and prey. Very novel to me and interesting. Coral reefs are shown off, in their bewildering variety. We make a small pit-stop to mourn the destruction of the reefs. The polyps and algae are praised for their cooperation and credited with supporting all of the life there. We move on to spawning squids who are eaten by majestic giant sting rays. The camera tracks further out to reveal smaller sharks and then the climax: the great white shark. As with the whales, the time spent on the great white is mercifully short. We move on to seals hunting penguins. Even when being slaughtered, the penguins are always hilarious. The episode ends with a return to the mama/babby whale. Episode animal mascots: few cute animals actually. I'm going to give the title to the parrotfish and of course the whale.

Seasonal Forests:
The show tips its anglo-centric hand a bit by assuming a bit more familiarity with seasonal forests on the viewer's behalf and digging a bit deeper. The show is accidentally profound for a moment when talking about the wolverine. David tells us the indigenous people believe the wolverines to be spiritual creatures and to be a mix between a wolf and a bear. In fact, we are jocularly told, they are a "giant weasel." I feel some pretentious point could be made here about the mystery of religion vs the reality of science and the sniping between them. Anyway, we move on to unusual bird displays and thankfulness that these animals are too remote to have contact with humans. We see pine martens hunting squirrels and lounging adorably. Newly-hatched and goofy owls dangle upside-down by one claw. A cicada hatching provides a lot of purple narration about their zombie-like single-mindedness (though how their instinct is different from that of, say, a newly hatched sea turtle, is unclear.) and the feast provided to almost every other animal in the forest. We see the odd sight of a squirrel hunting a cicada. We drift to the redwoods, briefly touch on the 1000s-of-years-old trees that were ancient "when christ was born" and the episode ends. Episode animal mascots: the kodkod (which is a sort of mini-cat,) and those cute martens.

Shutter (2004)

Saw the 2004 version of Shutter. It's a Korean horror which was later remade in English. It follows a photographer who accidentally hits a completely generic school-girl with his car (I'm not joking about her genericness. She wears a skirt, white, button-up shirt and long, black hair. This figure is the modern monster of our times.) He soon begins noticing blurs and smudges on his photos. Obviously having discovered paranormal photo-sensitivity at work, he goes about atoning for his crime.

The film is very by-the-numbers. Everything is very logical and dramatic. The plot is a bit obscure in parts, giving the early film a slightly disjointed, artsy feel, but this is only because the filmmakers want to make great plot-hole-filling reveals later on. Everything is explained, nothing is left ambiguous. The idea that suffering is meaningful and that justice exists in this world is comforting, although the idea that ghosts walk among us is not so much.

There is a recurrent image of a female mantis devouring a male mantis mid-coitus. There's a also a much lower-level (possibly imaginary) theme about how photographs select which details to include and exclude and that they therefore lie quite easily. These themes do not serve any purpose beyond mirroring plot elements (a female gets revenge on a male and photographs are involved.) The film isn't actually comically bad, but I so have very little positive to say about it. Perhaps the remake was better? As is it's for genre fans only. A by-the-numbers horror that sticks rigidly to formula.

Do the Right Thing

Saw Do the Right Thing, a troubling and ambiguous film. It's chiefly concerned with racial conflict. One of it's opening scenes is of a street-crazy raving about a photo of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr shaking hands. The street-crazy shows up in the film again and again, always with photo in hand, like a subconscious that keeps worrying at the same issue. The ghosts of both Martin Luther and Malcolm X both hang heavy of the film. The instinct toward peaceful coexistence curdles into violence and, unnervingly, upsettingly, the violence gets the results that the peace only hoped to someday achieve. But then the film equivocates again, unsure. Did anything really change?

The protagonist is Mookie, the delivery boy at a corner pizzeria. The day is kicked off by a young dude who is spoiling for a fight complaining about a wall of famous Italians. "Why are there no black people?" He accusingly asks. The owner responds by strong-arming him about how this is his place and his wall. The dude tries to stir up a boycott but only manages to attract idiots and the insane. The film is fairly charitable, I think, in its portrayal of people's general unwillingness to jump aboard the outrage-wagon. If the internet is any indication (that's a huge if there) righteous indignation fuels some people's lives (hilarious trivia, firefox does not consider internet to be a word. Capital-I Internet is the correct spelling.)

Anyway, the day is hot and tensions rise. The film shows the comings and goings, the petty squabbles and amiable meetings, of the neighborhood all set to a strident and soulful saxophone and piano soundtrack. Mookie tries to stay sane while defending and receiving abuse from his perpetually angry boss and his boss's blatantly racist and evil son. He is undervalued and mistreated. His boss hits on his sister. He tries to maintain peace, but nothing changes. The other dude meanwhile tries to stir up trouble, but is utterly misguided. Throughout, the block community laughs and fights, loves and hates, and is incredibly colorful, vibrant and no-doubt sanitized.

This was a difficult film for me. I'm profoundly ignorant of history and racial issues. On top of this, the film seems to equivocate wildly. An old woman named Mother Sister calls for peace, then screams for the destruction of the pizza-joint in the climax, then wildly shrieks "No! No!" during the denouement. What's going on? The film's title tells us to "do the right thing" but does not tell us just what the right thing is? Everybody is justified, everything is wrong.

I am completely unable to comment intelligibly on the racial content of the film. As far as I am concerned, it was a troubling, tense, and interesting film. It doesn't do much novel mechanically speaking (the eye-searing primary colors and 80s couture remind me of a music video. The film sticks to a music-video-ish visual vocabulary) but it's the most recent film I've seen to deal with race so frankly and with such nuance. It's difficult to determine exactly who the film considers to be the bad and good guys and which actions it considers justified and which are just presented without comment. That assessment may reveal the depths of my ignorance in these matters, but there it is. Like I say, a tough film.

The Mutant Chronicles

Saw The Mutant Chronicles, a film which has nothing to do with X-men. Rather, it is based on a role-playing game set in the steam-punk future where four corporation-nations are locked in a bitter WW1 reenactment. During this war, they accidentally release hoards of zombaloid mutants who ravage the countryside. The populace flees the planet while a band of ten (or so) hard-bitten mercenaries try to shut down the diabolical mutant/zombie-creating engine for good.

The film is unimaginably goofy. Over-stuffed with mood-setting and universe-building, it tries to give us a rundown on an entire game-book's worth of imaginary social structure. They can't actually do that, of course, so they resort to short-hands. There's a character who is a sword-wielding nun. She has tons of screen time but never becomes much more than that. Similarly there is a stoic Asian dude, a coarse Spaniard, an aristocratic German, etc. Almost every character can be fully described by a single adjective. Kurosawa this aint.

I frequently felt kind of unpleasantly bated. I only know that this film was based on a role-playing game because I cynically looked up if there was a video game (first-person shooter, of course) based on this film. There is not, actually, but that's the level of pandering I felt from this film. It's mainly here to make me feel good and its plot is therefore designed to maximize spectacle and sensation. The only time our morals are excited, the situation is blatantly black and white. The film completely lacks both subtlety and nuance.

All of that said, look at my first paragraph. This is clearly not a movie whose charm lies in its nuance. Essentially, if that first paragraph appeals to you, then I wish you joy and urge you to go see this film. It's dumb but doesn't take itself seriously. It's obviously just a roller-coaster and, though I feel I've been on better ones, it's pretty ridiculous and great. It's sometimes a bit self-serious, but its bouts of dourness never last longer than about a minute and then we're back to watching bad-asses pilot steam-powered zeppelins or cutting off a zombie's arm with a katana (!!!!) Very dumb but stylish fun.

The Human Comedy

Saw The Human Comedy (thanks, Paul!) It was a world war 2 propaganda film in a big way. It harps relentlessly on the virtues of religion, homeland, and motherhood. It's treacly and preachy but also fascinating as a historical artifact. It's interesting that they cannot say "pregnant" and that the family all kisses each other on the lips. The film stars Mickey Rooney as a kind of long-in-the-tooth high school student. His older brother is at war, his sister works at the red cross and lectures him for insufficient sanctimony when he prays before supper ("but what do the words mean?") His mother is a pillar of strength who uncomplainingly toils and who accompanies her own singing on an eight-foot harp. The whole thing is so antiseptically wholesome, even Pollyanna herself would have to step out for a cigarette.

There's a lot going on that can be traced back to the war effort. Plastic in women's clothing is on display (fabric was needed for the war.) The soldiers are of course saintly and behave like big boys (nice boys too, mind you. None of this angry PTSD nonsense.) An old man is encouraged to keep working "until he dies" if he wants to (with fewer people around, the abolition of mandatory retirement must have been a hot-button issue.) At a country fair, various ethnicities are approved of by our heroes. Curiously Armenians are specifically mentioned (was there an Armenian influx? What's the story here?) It is remarked that though they are all different, that they are "Americans all!" The connection to religion is given when one wise and ancient character tells Rooney that he must have faith that everything happens for a reason, that even if there's something he knows is wrong (like killing) that he maybe shouldn't be so sure.

That was the most interesting thing to me, cynically spotting the propaganda points, as well as guilelessly enjoying the melodrama. There's many scenes that leap straight for the emotional jugular. A woman crying over her lost son is briefly transformed into a young mother, singing over her child. A soldier singing a spiritual song shouts directly into the camera "C'mon! Everybody sing!" A gang of cute children are "scared off" of a kindly old man's land by his sudden appearance. The whole film is intermittently narrated by the ghost of the father of the family. Sometimes it's overly sentimental and you have to roll your eyes, but other times it pays off and you get a pleasant echo of something Thorton Wilder might have written.

The film has a lot of interesting fodder in it but ultimately lacks variety. There are no true antagonists (apart from one petty-tyrant coach) and the film has the tight-lipped, too-wide smile of someone who is fighting not to cry. The brave, bittersweet quality evokes better work. Also, although this throws off the winding-down-review tone I'm going for right now, there's this incredibly creepy orphan soldier who latches onto the older-brother-soldier's life story and begins to imagine it is his own. This is really, really weird and seems like a plot line incongruously lifted from a horror film. An interesting movie, if fairly preachy.

Submarine

Saw Submarine, a cute little Wes Anderson imitator about a strange little boy named Oliver. Unable to communicate with the world in normal terms he resorts to a lingo of dense vocabulary and flatly delivered trivia. He falls in love with a girl who burns things. He is also concerned that his parents are breaking up. Torn between his weird romance and his weird efforts to save his parents, he tries to save both but is unable to really handle either. This film is twee and cute, full of framed shots and details. The film hits the cultural touchstones of typewriters, vinyl records, Woody Allen, and mix-tape cassettes full of obscure music. It cleverly uses colour as both a thematic and as a plot device.

The title refers to Oliver himself. He is a sheltered creature, hesitantly spying with his periscope just above the surface. There is an implication of hidden depth but of course we are let into his iron-clad vessel. He's cruel and self-absorbed, adorable and confused. He's a very interesting kid who we can be thankful we do not know in real life. Water is made a metaphor for emotional intimacy, the ocean is love. The film is extremely winning.

The film is not very serious but it does not take itself very seriously either. It's a sort of magic-show, cunningly unfurling and dazzling at the right moments. Under all of the indie quirk and style we have a fairly ordinary coming-of-age story. There's a bit of novelty when he "redeems" the girlfriend by getting her to confide in him only to be overwhelmed by his new-found feelings of responsibility. He interprets this as missing her dark, troubled nature. He feels he's redeemed her but does not like what he's redeemed. Interesting. It's a fun film. Very full of quirk and whimsy but endearing for all of that (if you're into that kind of thing (which I am.))

Isolation

Saw Isolation, an Irish horror. It draws from the grotesque body horror of Cronenberg. Set at an isolated (oh ho!) farm, the film starts off making the fairly convincing argument that being a country veterinarian is essentially a horror film. Gross fluids, the threat of ruin, and one damn thing after another conspire to make the whole thing just such a drag. Then it's revealed that on top of horrid genetic diseases and still-born calves, this farm in particular has been cooperating with the neighbourhood mad scientist who is preforming genetic testing on the cows.

Interestingly, the cows are very much a part of the film. I assumed they would provide the beginning of the film's monster and then just disappear. Instead they stick around for most of the film, being victims of the monster and symbolizing the life-blood of the farm. Also interesting was the dual demonization of science and nature. The film opens on rusted signs, hanging sheeting, splattery cow-births. The plot derives its believability from the horrors of science, but the imagery and visceral discomfort are pure chaotic nature. There's something clever here as well about the exploitation of animals which ultimately consumes us. It's no message-film, but there's cleverness there.

The film is pretty ghastly. It's tense and pleasantly frustrating. There's one sequence where the farmer drives his tractor right into a bog that made no sense to me (maybe I missed the explanation?) but for the most part the action is well motivated and the characters well drawn (except for the mad scientist, but I guess we need a human monster as well.) The ending twist is a bit predictable, but whatever. A nice little film. It mines the premise and the setting for everything its got. Also I had to resort to the volume knob once more, so you can be sure it's at least more scary than a Disney film.