Saw The Cure, a Japanese suspense/horror. It structured itself as a police procedural, following a detective as he investigates a series of ritualistic murders, all carried out by normal people who have no idea why they did it. The source of the murders slowly turns out to be an amnesiac dude who I think is supposed to be a very annoying version of Hannibal Lecter. He masterfully manipulates people by getting under their skin and enraging them. This sounds very sly and clever in abstract, but in practice it manifests as him being incredibly obtuse and frustratingly stupid. If you want a taste of this master-manipulative behavior, just pop on over to 4chan and make a short post introducing yourself. A welcoming committee will be by in no time. In real life, trolling comes off as far less clever and much more dickish.
Anyway, the film is very good at creating ominous moments and implying malign influence. There are times when a character will grab a knife and you internally cringe, sure some shit is about to go down, but no, nothing at all happens. By refusing to fulfill our expectations, the film has increased our discomfort and also our tension. There's a scene where the bad guy smokes a cigarette, the ember at the end lighting up only, lost in his silhouette. I wonder if this scene is meant to invoke Rear Window? The Hitchcock-ian reference would be apt.
In addition to this classy morbidity, there's a dose of grisly gore as well. It's nothing too shocking (nothing worse than, say, CSI) but it adds a lurid note to the motif. At one point the detective finds a monkey's corpse, murdered like the human victims were. The image is flashed again, almost subliminally, signifying that the detective is succumbing to the bad-guy's influence.
I don't want to give away the exact mechanism of the bad-guy's machinations, but his methods are linked to the thrumming, whining noises of modern life. Characters gaze distractedly at flickering fluorescent lights, or listen to washing machines whir, before casually grabbing a lead pipe and beating their wife's head in. The urban ennui seems to trigger the violent behavior as much as any action of the bad-guy. This sense of isolation and modern angst is common in films from Japan, home of the hikikomori. It's used well here.
An interesting film. Fairly scary, but in a subdued, 1970s kind of way. It was perfect for me, but it will utterly disappoint hard-core horror fans. I think describing it as Japanese Silence of the Lambs is as good as you can do. It's fairly similar, but far more subdued and more, kind of, poetic. It's much more oblique and suggestive. It's central baddie is not as magnetic as Lecter, but his miserable jerkiness almost makes him more sinister. You can almost see the detective, after he has let the bad guy get to him, beating himself up, thinking "I fell for that load of crap?"
Oct 30, 2014
Oct 29, 2014
Berlin Alexanderplatz, Episodes 12 and 13
Episode 12, The Serpent in the Soul of the Serpent:
This episode starts with Franz taking Meize to the bar, ominously telling the bartender that she insisted she it "once before she dies." He is joking. Reinhold spies Meize and decides he must steal her from Franz. There's a biblical allusion in the title of this episode and the title-card is shown over Reinhold whispering into Meck's ear, strongly resembling a serpent. Reinhold seems to bear a colossal grudge against Franz for not taking revenge for his arm. Reinhold is seemingly consumed by guilt and has retreated into the comforting role of villain. There's possibly a moralistic allegory here I've missed.
Anyway, Meck, you recall, is Franz's one-time friend who abandoned him and stole his then-girlfriend. He sets up a meeting with Meize under the guise of telling her about Franz's past. She tells Franz she has another client and will be gone for a while. On the trip she is sweet and childish but becomes icy and adult when she sees Reinhold. Reinhold inveigles her into taking a walk with him in the woods where she and Franz had recently laughed. On the walk, she plays a complex game of withholding affection, granting it, becoming childish, becoming hard. Reinhold does his usual thing of being cruel and brutal, pushing her head into his chest and squeezing the breath out of her.
While this goes on, the narrator talks of slaughtering animals and recites Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, repeating the bit about "A time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to reap that which is planted" twice. Reinhold reveals he has a tattoo of an anvil on his chest. He claims it's his family crest and Meize interprets this (correctly by my judgment) as meaning that he gives out "poundings" (if you know what I mean.) The symbolism of the anvil suggests a strengthening, purifying force, however, which I find speaks distasteful volumes about his mindset.
At last, after much attack, feint, and counter-attack, Reinhold finally tells Meize that he's responsible for Franz's arm (which is his fault, I had misunderstood what went on back in episode 5 or so.) Meize begins shrieking "help" and "murder" until Reinhold strangles her. The episode ends with her lying on the forest floor, seemingly dead. I believe Reinhold did this thing mainly to get back at Franz in some sense. The narrator talks of revenge being the most destructive force which neatly sums up the preceding and promises further fireworks to come.
Episode 13, The Outside and the Inside and the Secret of Fear of the Secret
Meize is dead. The episode opens on the grotesque image of Franz in Meize's clothing, lipstick smeared clowinshly over his face. He is convinced she has run out on him. Eva visits to comfort him and reveals she is pregnant with his child. Franz goes to woods where Meize was killed and calls for her. He wistfully says to himself that Meize really deserves a "whole" man. After this, Franz visits the fruit-gang where they vote on whether to oust the leader of the gang or not. The leader laughs at this idea. Shades of a dictatorship?
Meck's hand is burned during a failed heist, prompting Reinhold to mock him. As Franz is bandaging his hand, Meck warns Franz that Reinhold is a bastard but Franz bristles at this idea. The narrator informs us that Franz only loves two people: Meize and Reinhold. But Reinhold's cruelty has either pricked Meck's conscience or his pride and so he goes to the police about Meize's murder. The police dig her up from the woods where her corpse sparkles like a modern vampire. I think the image is meant to be incongruously pretty, as though she were a princess waiting to be woken by a kiss. Very odd.
Eva shows up at Franz's apartment which has degenerated into a hoarders-style mess. She tells him about Eva's body and that the police think he, Franz, is to blame. Franz goes into shock, relief at the fact that Meize didn't dump him after all floods his mind and he laughs hysterically. Finally he stops laughing and, while talking of death, fishes the bird out of its cage and absentmindedly crushes it in his fist. Clearly, Franz has lost his reason and his soul. The bird in the cage was not meant to represent a canary in a mine-shaft or a captive woman or man, but the human soul. I fear I've missed the mark on this show by a wide margin!
I've allowed my association of Germany with The War to completely overwhelm my analytical tools. The show is really most interested in Franz's slow but inevitable fall from grace. Most of it's allusions therefore are biblical and moral, equating people with animals being lead to slaughter, using the indigent as a symbol of man struggling to be good in a world where that is not easy, indeed almost impossible. There is a certain perverse delight to be had in watching a not-so-great man fail, but of course this is schadenfreude of the ugliest sort and must be avoided. The episode ends with a text-card, claiming that it is time for Franz to be destroyed "He is finished."
One last episode to go!
This episode starts with Franz taking Meize to the bar, ominously telling the bartender that she insisted she it "once before she dies." He is joking. Reinhold spies Meize and decides he must steal her from Franz. There's a biblical allusion in the title of this episode and the title-card is shown over Reinhold whispering into Meck's ear, strongly resembling a serpent. Reinhold seems to bear a colossal grudge against Franz for not taking revenge for his arm. Reinhold is seemingly consumed by guilt and has retreated into the comforting role of villain. There's possibly a moralistic allegory here I've missed.
Anyway, Meck, you recall, is Franz's one-time friend who abandoned him and stole his then-girlfriend. He sets up a meeting with Meize under the guise of telling her about Franz's past. She tells Franz she has another client and will be gone for a while. On the trip she is sweet and childish but becomes icy and adult when she sees Reinhold. Reinhold inveigles her into taking a walk with him in the woods where she and Franz had recently laughed. On the walk, she plays a complex game of withholding affection, granting it, becoming childish, becoming hard. Reinhold does his usual thing of being cruel and brutal, pushing her head into his chest and squeezing the breath out of her.
While this goes on, the narrator talks of slaughtering animals and recites Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, repeating the bit about "A time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to reap that which is planted" twice. Reinhold reveals he has a tattoo of an anvil on his chest. He claims it's his family crest and Meize interprets this (correctly by my judgment) as meaning that he gives out "poundings" (if you know what I mean.) The symbolism of the anvil suggests a strengthening, purifying force, however, which I find speaks distasteful volumes about his mindset.
At last, after much attack, feint, and counter-attack, Reinhold finally tells Meize that he's responsible for Franz's arm (which is his fault, I had misunderstood what went on back in episode 5 or so.) Meize begins shrieking "help" and "murder" until Reinhold strangles her. The episode ends with her lying on the forest floor, seemingly dead. I believe Reinhold did this thing mainly to get back at Franz in some sense. The narrator talks of revenge being the most destructive force which neatly sums up the preceding and promises further fireworks to come.
Episode 13, The Outside and the Inside and the Secret of Fear of the Secret
Meize is dead. The episode opens on the grotesque image of Franz in Meize's clothing, lipstick smeared clowinshly over his face. He is convinced she has run out on him. Eva visits to comfort him and reveals she is pregnant with his child. Franz goes to woods where Meize was killed and calls for her. He wistfully says to himself that Meize really deserves a "whole" man. After this, Franz visits the fruit-gang where they vote on whether to oust the leader of the gang or not. The leader laughs at this idea. Shades of a dictatorship?
Meck's hand is burned during a failed heist, prompting Reinhold to mock him. As Franz is bandaging his hand, Meck warns Franz that Reinhold is a bastard but Franz bristles at this idea. The narrator informs us that Franz only loves two people: Meize and Reinhold. But Reinhold's cruelty has either pricked Meck's conscience or his pride and so he goes to the police about Meize's murder. The police dig her up from the woods where her corpse sparkles like a modern vampire. I think the image is meant to be incongruously pretty, as though she were a princess waiting to be woken by a kiss. Very odd.
Eva shows up at Franz's apartment which has degenerated into a hoarders-style mess. She tells him about Eva's body and that the police think he, Franz, is to blame. Franz goes into shock, relief at the fact that Meize didn't dump him after all floods his mind and he laughs hysterically. Finally he stops laughing and, while talking of death, fishes the bird out of its cage and absentmindedly crushes it in his fist. Clearly, Franz has lost his reason and his soul. The bird in the cage was not meant to represent a canary in a mine-shaft or a captive woman or man, but the human soul. I fear I've missed the mark on this show by a wide margin!
I've allowed my association of Germany with The War to completely overwhelm my analytical tools. The show is really most interested in Franz's slow but inevitable fall from grace. Most of it's allusions therefore are biblical and moral, equating people with animals being lead to slaughter, using the indigent as a symbol of man struggling to be good in a world where that is not easy, indeed almost impossible. There is a certain perverse delight to be had in watching a not-so-great man fail, but of course this is schadenfreude of the ugliest sort and must be avoided. The episode ends with a text-card, claiming that it is time for Franz to be destroyed "He is finished."
One last episode to go!
Oct 27, 2014
The Thirteenth Floor
Saw The Thirteenth Floor, the film that my father swears (to this day) is The Matrix. His confusion is understandable: it deals with a simulated reality which the inhabitants do not know is simulated and was released in 1999, the same year that The Matrix was. It was one of those weird doubles of movies, like A Bug's Life and Antz, or all of those penguin movies that came out around the same time. Anyway, the film is a sort of mystery, opening with an old man being murdered. He is the head of a computer firm and it's up to his handsome lead programmer to find out who done it (spoiler alert: he never does anything remotely resembling programming.)
The tech firm is building a giant simulator which is so complex that it can simulate hundreds of human-level intelligent people at the same time. Naturally, you can jump into this world and wander around in it. It's a short jump of logic when the characters begin arguing that the simuloids are really alive, in the sense that you and I are alive. Souls are spoken of. This film is really most interested in throwing these ideas around, so things like character and plot play second fiddle, alas.
The ideas being thrown around are interesting but I frankly prefer histrionics to philosophy. What there is is explored naturally and entertainingly, but there's only so far you can push thought-experiments and paradoxes before they become slightly tedious. Also, the problems being fretted over are largely imaginary (what if a person escapes from the simulation, one character wonders. I too have lost sleep over what would happen if Microsoft Word were to escape from my laptop.) Also these problems are of course 100s of years down the road. I know about exponential growth and so on, but we don't understand our brains well enough to even duplicate them, never mind simulate new ones.
Anyway... the film brings interesting ideas to the table relating to very sexy, exciting concepts like consciousness, artificial intelligence, and the reality of the world. Unfortunately, the writers lack the skill to weave these ideas into a relevant or gripping screenplay. The plot is fairly tedious and the characters are fairly flat. A quick example of this muddly-ness: the film opens inside of the simulation. Later on, someone enters the simulation and there's a full-on, crane-shot, swooning soundtrack, reveal of the simulated world which is undercut a bit by us already having seen the damn thing in the first scene! The film is a good conversation-starter and, like I say, full of interesting ideas, but it's heart is so invested in those interesting ideas that it's just not very full of the things that traditionally make a good movie.
The tech firm is building a giant simulator which is so complex that it can simulate hundreds of human-level intelligent people at the same time. Naturally, you can jump into this world and wander around in it. It's a short jump of logic when the characters begin arguing that the simuloids are really alive, in the sense that you and I are alive. Souls are spoken of. This film is really most interested in throwing these ideas around, so things like character and plot play second fiddle, alas.
The ideas being thrown around are interesting but I frankly prefer histrionics to philosophy. What there is is explored naturally and entertainingly, but there's only so far you can push thought-experiments and paradoxes before they become slightly tedious. Also, the problems being fretted over are largely imaginary (what if a person escapes from the simulation, one character wonders. I too have lost sleep over what would happen if Microsoft Word were to escape from my laptop.) Also these problems are of course 100s of years down the road. I know about exponential growth and so on, but we don't understand our brains well enough to even duplicate them, never mind simulate new ones.
Anyway... the film brings interesting ideas to the table relating to very sexy, exciting concepts like consciousness, artificial intelligence, and the reality of the world. Unfortunately, the writers lack the skill to weave these ideas into a relevant or gripping screenplay. The plot is fairly tedious and the characters are fairly flat. A quick example of this muddly-ness: the film opens inside of the simulation. Later on, someone enters the simulation and there's a full-on, crane-shot, swooning soundtrack, reveal of the simulated world which is undercut a bit by us already having seen the damn thing in the first scene! The film is a good conversation-starter and, like I say, full of interesting ideas, but it's heart is so invested in those interesting ideas that it's just not very full of the things that traditionally make a good movie.
Oct 26, 2014
Pitch Perfect
Saw Pitch Perfect (thanks, Amanda!) It's a pretty funny chick-flick comedy. It gives us two kinds of funny right-off: the small funny of a packed crowd at the national collegiate acapella tournament (complete with dead serious announcers) and the big funny of projectile vomit. This is a great start to a solid comedy. It mixes low-intensity, slow-burn humor with quick jabs of shock and gross-out humor. The protagonist is this heavily eye-liner-ed girl named Beca. She sulks through college, giving it a try at the behest of her dad before someday moving on to her dream career of DJ-ing. She meets up with a love-interest and with the psychotic duo who lead one of the four acapella teams. From there, it's only a matter of time until she gets the guy (or rather, allows the guy to get her) and joins the psychos.
I know the end of that paragraph reads like snark, but this film is very in on the joke. The head psycho says stuff like "Chloe, your voice didn't sound Aguilerian at all!" and "That's not an opinion I will allow you to have!" in a chipper, Stepford voice. It's hilarious. Also, the love-interest's rival is the campus radio DJ who shows absolutely no interest in Beca at all. His role as rival is completely perfunctory. There's a great, ongoing joke about how cool everyone thinks acapella is. During the college activity-fair, one rival acapella group suddenly springs into obviously-choreographed action. Instead of being alarmed and mildly annoyed at this burst of attention-seeking behavior, the crowd is charmed and delighted. Beautiful.
The film is really funny. It's weakest moments are when it has to do some plot-moving. The scenes with the love-interest are usually fairly tedious and the scenes with Beca's father are even worse (except for the first, establishing scene, which is great.) I suspected this might be a buried-so-deep-it's-bedrock joke about the predictability of rom coms, but I think it's just disdain for the machinery of the genre. Really, it's just the writers wanting to get back to the funny. Also, although you know this by now, there's a lot of singing. I always feel just embarrassed when a film tries to capture a really great performance (This, for example, yields this reaction.) There's invariably something cloying and brittle about all of these "stellar" performances.
When the movie is being funny, it's great and vicious and clever and firing on all cylinders. When it tries to be sensitive, it falters a bit, defaulting to cliche and tame lameness. It's never actually bad, mind you, just a bit stale. The trite romance is easily balanced out by the great comedy and, yes, for all of my squirming, the songs are really a lot of fun. I enjoyed the film. It's not a total tour de force, but damn near to it.
I know the end of that paragraph reads like snark, but this film is very in on the joke. The head psycho says stuff like "Chloe, your voice didn't sound Aguilerian at all!" and "That's not an opinion I will allow you to have!" in a chipper, Stepford voice. It's hilarious. Also, the love-interest's rival is the campus radio DJ who shows absolutely no interest in Beca at all. His role as rival is completely perfunctory. There's a great, ongoing joke about how cool everyone thinks acapella is. During the college activity-fair, one rival acapella group suddenly springs into obviously-choreographed action. Instead of being alarmed and mildly annoyed at this burst of attention-seeking behavior, the crowd is charmed and delighted. Beautiful.
The film is really funny. It's weakest moments are when it has to do some plot-moving. The scenes with the love-interest are usually fairly tedious and the scenes with Beca's father are even worse (except for the first, establishing scene, which is great.) I suspected this might be a buried-so-deep-it's-bedrock joke about the predictability of rom coms, but I think it's just disdain for the machinery of the genre. Really, it's just the writers wanting to get back to the funny. Also, although you know this by now, there's a lot of singing. I always feel just embarrassed when a film tries to capture a really great performance (This, for example, yields this reaction.) There's invariably something cloying and brittle about all of these "stellar" performances.
When the movie is being funny, it's great and vicious and clever and firing on all cylinders. When it tries to be sensitive, it falters a bit, defaulting to cliche and tame lameness. It's never actually bad, mind you, just a bit stale. The trite romance is easily balanced out by the great comedy and, yes, for all of my squirming, the songs are really a lot of fun. I enjoyed the film. It's not a total tour de force, but damn near to it.
Oct 25, 2014
Meek's Cutoff
Saw Meek's Cutoff, a frustrating western. Gone are the days of John Wayne and slouching, strong-jawed ease. This more modern western contains filth, ugliness, overexposed shots of the plains, and the slowness of dehydration. Our heroes are a band of three families heading west, lead by prototypical wild-man, Mr Meek. He keeps reassuring them they're on the right track, that mountains and water are just over the next hill. He scares them with stories of wild Indians and bears. Our heroes begin to suspect that Meek is lost and, although he maintains they're on the right path, they stop following his directions, going north and not south, pressing on and not stopping for the night. It is unclear if he is indeed lost. All signs point that way, but it's also abundantly clear that traveling to the wild west is not an exact science and that he may well be correct after all.
This ambiguity about their course reveals that the film is not, ultimately, interested in declaring winners in this particular game. The film is much more interested in the tempest in the teapot that is slowly brewing as the families turn against Meek and against each other. It begins with friction between Meek and Emily, the wife of the caravan leader, who is a tough woman who feels she is being lied to and dislikes Meek's casual fear-mongering. The caravan's collective arguments take place between long, endless shots of them trudging through the plains. It feels less like people eagerly indulging in power-struggles and more like people finally succumbing to their very real fears.
Early on, they capture an Indian who they try to bribe and threaten into taking them to water. Meek is deeply wary of the Indian and swears that he is of a tribe so evil that even other tribes hate them. Emily defends him however, arguing that if he did not lead them to water eventually, that he would die too. Throughout, the Indian stands, silent and inscrutable, not a noble savage but a dirty, balding old man. The Indian becomes the lightning-rod of their fears. Most of the film is concerned with this claustrophobic feeling of uncertainty. Was Meek correct? Does the Indian mean to help them or to kill them?
The film works best as a depiction of this deep, life-and-death uncertainty. The social aspects of the group crystallize and change as misfortunes befall them. Also interesting is the warts-and-all portrait of the times. These people are not brave, cheerful families going off to a sure future, but scared, lost people who do not know what lies ahead. Our romanticization of the past, along with modern conveniences (like maps) make this difficult to imagine. I think the ending of the film will be deeply frustrating to most people, but it's the only way they could have ended it well. A frustrating film, ultimately, but an interesting one.
This ambiguity about their course reveals that the film is not, ultimately, interested in declaring winners in this particular game. The film is much more interested in the tempest in the teapot that is slowly brewing as the families turn against Meek and against each other. It begins with friction between Meek and Emily, the wife of the caravan leader, who is a tough woman who feels she is being lied to and dislikes Meek's casual fear-mongering. The caravan's collective arguments take place between long, endless shots of them trudging through the plains. It feels less like people eagerly indulging in power-struggles and more like people finally succumbing to their very real fears.
Early on, they capture an Indian who they try to bribe and threaten into taking them to water. Meek is deeply wary of the Indian and swears that he is of a tribe so evil that even other tribes hate them. Emily defends him however, arguing that if he did not lead them to water eventually, that he would die too. Throughout, the Indian stands, silent and inscrutable, not a noble savage but a dirty, balding old man. The Indian becomes the lightning-rod of their fears. Most of the film is concerned with this claustrophobic feeling of uncertainty. Was Meek correct? Does the Indian mean to help them or to kill them?
The film works best as a depiction of this deep, life-and-death uncertainty. The social aspects of the group crystallize and change as misfortunes befall them. Also interesting is the warts-and-all portrait of the times. These people are not brave, cheerful families going off to a sure future, but scared, lost people who do not know what lies ahead. Our romanticization of the past, along with modern conveniences (like maps) make this difficult to imagine. I think the ending of the film will be deeply frustrating to most people, but it's the only way they could have ended it well. A frustrating film, ultimately, but an interesting one.
Oct 24, 2014
The Descent
Saw The Descent, the caving horror. The film opens with the protagonist, Sarah, an attractive blond woman, whitewater rafting with her extreme-sport-loving friends. She playfully pushes one of them, Juno, into the water. The day progresses but the camera keeps focusing on the sodden friend. Her face is neutral but she can't help looking grumpy, maybe even angry, in her dripping clothes. Sarah drives home with her husband and daughter and, while Sarah is talking to her husband, they are hit by a car. She wakes in the hospital, hallucinating that she is alone and without any lights. And then we get to "one year later..."
Sarah is back with six of her friends. She has little moments of pain (very well acted too! There's a moment when she hesitates, mid-swig of beer, and it becomes clear that she's kind of forcing herself through the motions. Such a small gesture to convey so much. Kudos, actress and director.) And she suffers from bad dreams but is otherwise fine. They decide to go caving at an easy, "level 2" cave. They party a bit beforehand and Juno, dressed in black, is curiously focused on amid the blond, brightly-dressed women. The film gives us ominous silences and darknesses. After two of the women gigglingly share a cigarette, they go inside their cabin and the camera rolls for a few seconds too long, letting us hear their muted talk and the hush of wind in the trees. The effect is ominous and eerie. There's a threat to the nature here which is completely ignored by the women.
So, they drive to the cave, ominous details jarringly focused on: a watch, the guidebook being put in the glove compartment, rope. They descend into the cave and go further and further into its twisty innards, until at last a cave-in traps them. This is not the cave they mean to go to and only Juno knew that. They're trapped, turning on each other, one is injured, they've lost a good amount of rope. And then the bat-creatures show up.
As with the exorcist, I think this film is much more horrific before the monsters show up. When it's just indifferent rock and oxygen who are the enemies, what can you do? Even with bat-monsters, at least there's something to fight. How do you fight two miles of rock above your head? The scariest scene in the film may have been a bout of claustrophobia just before the cave-in. Anyway, this film is clearly not that realistic and dismal. Throughout the intro, there were incongruous, red-flag jump-scares which hinted at something bad coming.
What follows are a few observations and guesses which largely rely on spoilers, particularly about the ending. Proceed at your own risk, friends! There are indications of a previous expedition. Perhaps these bat-people are their descendants? Near the end, Sarah starts fighting back against the bats. She kills a child bat, a mother bat, and then a male bat, possibly killing a whole family. She then jumps into a pool of blood and emerges, covered in gore. After this point, she becomes more ruthless, biting necks and leaving the remaining humans to die. Has she become a bat-person herself?
The women are filled with hope at one point by finding a cave-painting depicting a cave with two exits. I believe one of the exits to be death, the other to be perhaps madness, bat-creature-hood, or triumph. I also suspect that the bat-folk are metaphorical, symbolizing Sarah's grieving process. The cave is the labyrinth of her mind, or perhaps her body. This may explain the film's exclusive use of women. Women often symbolize nature and earth (warm, wet caves and so on.) Under this theory, she has perhaps latched onto Juno as an antagonistic force. In the cave, Juno is always the voice of pessimism, shouting that they will die, will run out of batteries, are not seeing daylight. The name "Juno" has connections to Roman mythology, but Juno-the-godess's role is so nebulous, I'm not sure what to make of this connection. If there is one, then I hasten to point out that the pool of blood may well be the Lethe, making Sarah forget her humanity. The original, non-happy ending has Sarah hallucinating an escape, then hallucinating once more the image of her daughter with a birthday cake. This may be her last gasp of humanity or a last gasp of sanity.
Interesting stuff. The film is fairly scary, but relies a bit too hard on jumps for my liking. I'd much rather see what suggestive silences and psychodrama can do. Then again, I was grousing about the creatures earlier as well, so maybe I just wanted to see a fundamentally different film. Oh well. A good film, rich with metaphor and grim action, only sometimes a bit cheap with the jumps.
Sarah is back with six of her friends. She has little moments of pain (very well acted too! There's a moment when she hesitates, mid-swig of beer, and it becomes clear that she's kind of forcing herself through the motions. Such a small gesture to convey so much. Kudos, actress and director.) And she suffers from bad dreams but is otherwise fine. They decide to go caving at an easy, "level 2" cave. They party a bit beforehand and Juno, dressed in black, is curiously focused on amid the blond, brightly-dressed women. The film gives us ominous silences and darknesses. After two of the women gigglingly share a cigarette, they go inside their cabin and the camera rolls for a few seconds too long, letting us hear their muted talk and the hush of wind in the trees. The effect is ominous and eerie. There's a threat to the nature here which is completely ignored by the women.
So, they drive to the cave, ominous details jarringly focused on: a watch, the guidebook being put in the glove compartment, rope. They descend into the cave and go further and further into its twisty innards, until at last a cave-in traps them. This is not the cave they mean to go to and only Juno knew that. They're trapped, turning on each other, one is injured, they've lost a good amount of rope. And then the bat-creatures show up.
As with the exorcist, I think this film is much more horrific before the monsters show up. When it's just indifferent rock and oxygen who are the enemies, what can you do? Even with bat-monsters, at least there's something to fight. How do you fight two miles of rock above your head? The scariest scene in the film may have been a bout of claustrophobia just before the cave-in. Anyway, this film is clearly not that realistic and dismal. Throughout the intro, there were incongruous, red-flag jump-scares which hinted at something bad coming.
What follows are a few observations and guesses which largely rely on spoilers, particularly about the ending. Proceed at your own risk, friends! There are indications of a previous expedition. Perhaps these bat-people are their descendants? Near the end, Sarah starts fighting back against the bats. She kills a child bat, a mother bat, and then a male bat, possibly killing a whole family. She then jumps into a pool of blood and emerges, covered in gore. After this point, she becomes more ruthless, biting necks and leaving the remaining humans to die. Has she become a bat-person herself?
The women are filled with hope at one point by finding a cave-painting depicting a cave with two exits. I believe one of the exits to be death, the other to be perhaps madness, bat-creature-hood, or triumph. I also suspect that the bat-folk are metaphorical, symbolizing Sarah's grieving process. The cave is the labyrinth of her mind, or perhaps her body. This may explain the film's exclusive use of women. Women often symbolize nature and earth (warm, wet caves and so on.) Under this theory, she has perhaps latched onto Juno as an antagonistic force. In the cave, Juno is always the voice of pessimism, shouting that they will die, will run out of batteries, are not seeing daylight. The name "Juno" has connections to Roman mythology, but Juno-the-godess's role is so nebulous, I'm not sure what to make of this connection. If there is one, then I hasten to point out that the pool of blood may well be the Lethe, making Sarah forget her humanity. The original, non-happy ending has Sarah hallucinating an escape, then hallucinating once more the image of her daughter with a birthday cake. This may be her last gasp of humanity or a last gasp of sanity.
Interesting stuff. The film is fairly scary, but relies a bit too hard on jumps for my liking. I'd much rather see what suggestive silences and psychodrama can do. Then again, I was grousing about the creatures earlier as well, so maybe I just wanted to see a fundamentally different film. Oh well. A good film, rich with metaphor and grim action, only sometimes a bit cheap with the jumps.
Oct 23, 2014
Berlin Alexanderplatz, Episodes 10 and 11
Episode 10, Loneliness Tears Cracks of Madness Even in Walls:
The episode starts off with Eva showing Mieze around her new apartment. Some rich guy is keeping her there, as though she were a one-woman harem. Dead center of the apartment is a cage of monkeys. The cage is indicative of Eva's situation and is also a repeated image, mirroring Franz's situation in a larger sense (birdcages usually.) Eva makes an off-hand comment that she'd like to have a baby with Franz and this causes Mieze to guilelessly scream for joy. She clings so tenaciously to Eva that Eva accuses her of lesbianism. But no, it turns out Mieze can't have children and sort of feels like Eva has volunteered as a surrogate mother.
Meanwhile, back at the bar, medicine is the talk of the town. One drunk remarks that doctors are useless and mired in bureaucracy. His wife is dying but is accused by the doctors of suffering only from hypochondria. The sharp-dressed man shouts that Nietzsche is the only philosopher worth listening to and the drunk rejoins that it seems to him that the rich never get accused of hypochondria. There will always be rich and poor people, the bartender says, but, the drunk replies, generation after generation, they always seem to be the same people. Franz is drunk out of his mind at this point and dithers outdoors.
He wanders around, mechanically parroting snatches of the conversation from the bar and leering at a young man who is hawking newspapers, as he once had (the headline: "Czech Jew is child molester!") Eventually, he hails a taxi and goes back, at last, to the prison from episode one. He is woken up by a cop from where he is sleeping, in front of the prison. He hustles back home where Mieze helps him inside. Passing out, he raves about men with golden flowers coming out of their mouths, of green flowers which do not bloom, and of a coming "black order," which is black like newspaper-ink. I believe this man with the golden flowers to be a reference to Hitler, the man with the golden oration, and that the coming order is of course national socialism. I've no idea what the green flowers are though. Money? My guess-work-engine needs more time for that one.
Anyway, we get two jealous-murder scares as Mieze tells Franz that 1) she is becoming a kept woman of some married rich dude and 2) she wants him to have a baby with Eva. Both times Franz is distraught at the news because he feels jealous and (weirdly) inadequate, respectively. When Mieze tells him about the Eva-baby thing, Franz declares he is an animal being lead to slaughter (another recurrent image, with obvious implications with regards to the future of Germany.)
They decide to get drunk and Franz has a momentary vision of murdering Mieze (we are told via narration. While this narration is going, we see a cartoon spider crawl over a photograph of a nude woman.) The rich patron of Mieze shows up and they leave together, leaving Franz drunk and distraught. Sad, at least, but hopefully not murderous. Then agian, Mieze is the best thing to happen to him and I get a sense of doom from this show. I anticipate the worst!
Episode 11, Knowledge is Power and the Early Bird Catches the Worm:
Well, this episode was madness. It opens with Franz meeting up with that horrible Reinhold again, this time asking to join the fruit-gang. He claims he has a cuckoo in his head which forces him to work. This image evokes the bird/bird-cage image and also the specter of the cuckold, which has caused Franz so much angst. The fruit-gangsters believe he's trying to get close to hurt one of them (ie Reinhold, the man responsible for his lost arm) but let him join anyway. The gang is stealing a "gas cylinder" this time. I wonder if they are supposed to be the Nazi's? Anyway, he helps them and brings his share of the take back to Meize.
Meize is distraught at her failure to provide for her man. Franz insists that it's only because he's bored out of his mind that he's working now, but Meize is having none of it. She calls Eva who repeats the guess that he's doing it for revenge. We are told via title-card narration, however, that Franz loves Reinhold in some way. The director of this series is gay, actually, and many of his films contain gay subtexts if not characters and themes, so I don't know how I should take this "love." Anyway, Reinhold, to preempt Franz's supposed revenge, corners Meize and tells her about his and Franz's girlfriend-swapping days. Meize becomes convinced that Franz is going to sell her to Reinhold.
So, Franz is drinking with Reinhold and concocts a plan to show Reinhold how full of love his relationship with Meize is. He brings Reinhold back to his apartment and hides him in his bed. Meize comes home, dejected. She confesses that she's developed feelings for her client and that, as a consequence, she's cut him off. Franz loses his shit. He flies into a jealous rage and beats her for minutes on end, until Reinhold jumps out of the bed and pulls him off of her. She screams and screams, exactly like the previous, murdered girlfriend, so Franz throws her down and smothers her face with his gut for a while until again Reinhold gets a hold of him. She stumbles about, one shoe off, burping and vomiting blood, as Reinhold hustles Franz out of the room. The scene is horrible, ugly madness. It's amazing.
After that fucking scene, we flash forward to the next day. Eva tells Meize that she must forgive Franz (why?) and tells Meize that "dark things" are behind Reinhold's being in their bed. It is indeed a troubling image: a strange man hiding in your bed. She meets up with Franz who is flush with embarrassment and regret. They go off into the countryside where they go to a beer garden. One of the waitresses stares at them, making Meize believe Franz knows her (what is more likely: she is staring at Meize's fresh cuts and bruises.) The episode ends with Franz and Meize in the woods, where, in happier times, they had frolicked.
So, this episode built to an insane climax. I really thought we'd see him kill her at last. Also, I'm really retiring the Franz=Germany equation. There are some echoes and some parallels, but nothing concrete and nothing overt. If I'm not purely imagining it, it's really, deeply subtextual. Okay, I'll stick to established themes from now on. Also, I'm really getting sick of this show. It's difficult to review shows without repeating the same points over and over (cages, jealousy, slaughtered animals, booze) Hopefully a closing review will be more cohesive.
The episode starts off with Eva showing Mieze around her new apartment. Some rich guy is keeping her there, as though she were a one-woman harem. Dead center of the apartment is a cage of monkeys. The cage is indicative of Eva's situation and is also a repeated image, mirroring Franz's situation in a larger sense (birdcages usually.) Eva makes an off-hand comment that she'd like to have a baby with Franz and this causes Mieze to guilelessly scream for joy. She clings so tenaciously to Eva that Eva accuses her of lesbianism. But no, it turns out Mieze can't have children and sort of feels like Eva has volunteered as a surrogate mother.
Meanwhile, back at the bar, medicine is the talk of the town. One drunk remarks that doctors are useless and mired in bureaucracy. His wife is dying but is accused by the doctors of suffering only from hypochondria. The sharp-dressed man shouts that Nietzsche is the only philosopher worth listening to and the drunk rejoins that it seems to him that the rich never get accused of hypochondria. There will always be rich and poor people, the bartender says, but, the drunk replies, generation after generation, they always seem to be the same people. Franz is drunk out of his mind at this point and dithers outdoors.
He wanders around, mechanically parroting snatches of the conversation from the bar and leering at a young man who is hawking newspapers, as he once had (the headline: "Czech Jew is child molester!") Eventually, he hails a taxi and goes back, at last, to the prison from episode one. He is woken up by a cop from where he is sleeping, in front of the prison. He hustles back home where Mieze helps him inside. Passing out, he raves about men with golden flowers coming out of their mouths, of green flowers which do not bloom, and of a coming "black order," which is black like newspaper-ink. I believe this man with the golden flowers to be a reference to Hitler, the man with the golden oration, and that the coming order is of course national socialism. I've no idea what the green flowers are though. Money? My guess-work-engine needs more time for that one.
Anyway, we get two jealous-murder scares as Mieze tells Franz that 1) she is becoming a kept woman of some married rich dude and 2) she wants him to have a baby with Eva. Both times Franz is distraught at the news because he feels jealous and (weirdly) inadequate, respectively. When Mieze tells him about the Eva-baby thing, Franz declares he is an animal being lead to slaughter (another recurrent image, with obvious implications with regards to the future of Germany.)
They decide to get drunk and Franz has a momentary vision of murdering Mieze (we are told via narration. While this narration is going, we see a cartoon spider crawl over a photograph of a nude woman.) The rich patron of Mieze shows up and they leave together, leaving Franz drunk and distraught. Sad, at least, but hopefully not murderous. Then agian, Mieze is the best thing to happen to him and I get a sense of doom from this show. I anticipate the worst!
Episode 11, Knowledge is Power and the Early Bird Catches the Worm:
Well, this episode was madness. It opens with Franz meeting up with that horrible Reinhold again, this time asking to join the fruit-gang. He claims he has a cuckoo in his head which forces him to work. This image evokes the bird/bird-cage image and also the specter of the cuckold, which has caused Franz so much angst. The fruit-gangsters believe he's trying to get close to hurt one of them (ie Reinhold, the man responsible for his lost arm) but let him join anyway. The gang is stealing a "gas cylinder" this time. I wonder if they are supposed to be the Nazi's? Anyway, he helps them and brings his share of the take back to Meize.
Meize is distraught at her failure to provide for her man. Franz insists that it's only because he's bored out of his mind that he's working now, but Meize is having none of it. She calls Eva who repeats the guess that he's doing it for revenge. We are told via title-card narration, however, that Franz loves Reinhold in some way. The director of this series is gay, actually, and many of his films contain gay subtexts if not characters and themes, so I don't know how I should take this "love." Anyway, Reinhold, to preempt Franz's supposed revenge, corners Meize and tells her about his and Franz's girlfriend-swapping days. Meize becomes convinced that Franz is going to sell her to Reinhold.
So, Franz is drinking with Reinhold and concocts a plan to show Reinhold how full of love his relationship with Meize is. He brings Reinhold back to his apartment and hides him in his bed. Meize comes home, dejected. She confesses that she's developed feelings for her client and that, as a consequence, she's cut him off. Franz loses his shit. He flies into a jealous rage and beats her for minutes on end, until Reinhold jumps out of the bed and pulls him off of her. She screams and screams, exactly like the previous, murdered girlfriend, so Franz throws her down and smothers her face with his gut for a while until again Reinhold gets a hold of him. She stumbles about, one shoe off, burping and vomiting blood, as Reinhold hustles Franz out of the room. The scene is horrible, ugly madness. It's amazing.
After that fucking scene, we flash forward to the next day. Eva tells Meize that she must forgive Franz (why?) and tells Meize that "dark things" are behind Reinhold's being in their bed. It is indeed a troubling image: a strange man hiding in your bed. She meets up with Franz who is flush with embarrassment and regret. They go off into the countryside where they go to a beer garden. One of the waitresses stares at them, making Meize believe Franz knows her (what is more likely: she is staring at Meize's fresh cuts and bruises.) The episode ends with Franz and Meize in the woods, where, in happier times, they had frolicked.
So, this episode built to an insane climax. I really thought we'd see him kill her at last. Also, I'm really retiring the Franz=Germany equation. There are some echoes and some parallels, but nothing concrete and nothing overt. If I'm not purely imagining it, it's really, deeply subtextual. Okay, I'll stick to established themes from now on. Also, I'm really getting sick of this show. It's difficult to review shows without repeating the same points over and over (cages, jealousy, slaughtered animals, booze) Hopefully a closing review will be more cohesive.
Oct 21, 2014
Kin-dza-dza!
Saw Kin-dza-dza!, the film with the preemptive exclamation point. It's a Russian scifi comedy. It's scifi by way of Tarkovski: very slow, very oblique and strange. The plot here is two guys are warped to the planet Pluke where they must navigate the rigidly stratified social structure of the inhabitants. Initially, there's a bit of promise for clever comedy when one of the guys says, of the inter-dimensional teleporter, "well what do you know, the shitty gadget worked!" That's pretty funny, I think. Then a giant tin can sets down in front of them and two men come out, shouting "coo!" and gesticulating wildly. This scene goes on for about five minutes.
Tedious absurdity and slap-stick seem to be the source of much of the comedy. It's pretty dire. There's not much I can actually identify as funny. There's a period near the end of the film where someone wears a flashing light on his head for a long time. That's funny after a while, just in how absurd it is and how he doesn't just take off the damn flashing-light hat. There's also a running joke about how the word "coo" stands for every proper noun except for a very few (man, money, police, etc) That's a funny concept, but isn't so funny as to be included in the opening and closing credits (which happen over a pair of old men cooing like creepy doves.)
The extreme social stratification is an interesting thing to note in passing however. The communists were big on how racist, sexist, and class-ist the capitalists were. Under communism, because all people were equal, this was a thing of the past. Counter-intuitively, this ethic of equality only deprived victims of prejudice of any recourse (how can you claim your boss fired you because you're black? Don't you know there is no more racism?) Although this film was made after the collapse of communism, I wonder if we're seeing these echoes of race/class preoccupation play out?
So, socio-politics aside, this movie is not that funny. It is, however, hilarious if you imagine stern-faced old Russian men and women watching this film in a theater, bewildered at first but then nodding and blinking, confirming to each other that, yes, this is comedy. Extremely pure and efficient comedy. 100% comedy. Maybe 110% comedy? No. This is absurd. But yes, this is comedy.
Tedious absurdity and slap-stick seem to be the source of much of the comedy. It's pretty dire. There's not much I can actually identify as funny. There's a period near the end of the film where someone wears a flashing light on his head for a long time. That's funny after a while, just in how absurd it is and how he doesn't just take off the damn flashing-light hat. There's also a running joke about how the word "coo" stands for every proper noun except for a very few (man, money, police, etc) That's a funny concept, but isn't so funny as to be included in the opening and closing credits (which happen over a pair of old men cooing like creepy doves.)
The extreme social stratification is an interesting thing to note in passing however. The communists were big on how racist, sexist, and class-ist the capitalists were. Under communism, because all people were equal, this was a thing of the past. Counter-intuitively, this ethic of equality only deprived victims of prejudice of any recourse (how can you claim your boss fired you because you're black? Don't you know there is no more racism?) Although this film was made after the collapse of communism, I wonder if we're seeing these echoes of race/class preoccupation play out?
So, socio-politics aside, this movie is not that funny. It is, however, hilarious if you imagine stern-faced old Russian men and women watching this film in a theater, bewildered at first but then nodding and blinking, confirming to each other that, yes, this is comedy. Extremely pure and efficient comedy. 100% comedy. Maybe 110% comedy? No. This is absurd. But yes, this is comedy.
Oct 20, 2014
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
Saw Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa. I liked it. I had low hopes coming in as the first film hadn't impressed me too much. This one follows its lead in as much as it is light fluff, but there's no real decrease in quality. The film opens with a lunge at the emotional jugular, showing the moment when the lion is poached from his lion-family. It's really sad but also kind of artificial-feeling. There's a lot of high-pitched shrieks of "Daddy!" and so on. Anyway, then we whirl-wind recap the previous film, ending with a great scene of the animals trying to escape the titular Madagascar via broken plane.
There's a bit of topical war-on-terror stuff there, with one of the characters being grabbed by security for having scissors and hand-cream. Just prior to that was a gentle parody of the candle-light vigils held by New Yorkers (this time over the lion.) Later on in the film, there's some outright (but, nicely, plot-necessary) NYC-worship. Even here, in kids' movies, the shadow of no towers looms! It's a little weird, but is very much in the background.
The animals arrive in Africa after much airline-comedy (what's the deal with peanuts? Am I right?) and immediately split into five sub-plots: The lion must prove himself to his parents who disapprove of his dancing (nary a Billy Elliot joke to be found. I shake my head.) The zebra joins the herd and feels he has no individuality (this is actually quite creepy. Imagine a field of creatures, all with Cris Rock's voice.) The hippo finds herself a man. The giraffe becomes a doctor. The penguins try to hilariously rebuild the plane. And! Bonus side-plot: a group of tourists are united under the rule of the little old lady from the first film who kicked the lion in the balls (as she does in this film as well. Sigh.) Oh and also King Julian the lemur is around, causing trouble.
With all of these plates spinning, there's always something interesting to watch. There's a few tedious relationship-building scenes, but these are soon dispensed with. There's a lot of cheap laughs and some clever ones as well. The idiotically decadent King Julian and the penguins get the best parts, but that's their function: to provide high-octane humor to pull us through the slow parts. Again, not a bad film, definitely on par with the first one, also light fluff, but enjoyable light fluff. It makes complete sense to try to turn this into a kind of slow television show (like the slow Marvel-themed television show now happening in a theater near you.) The characters are likeable but essentially blank and apparently the writing team possesses an endless supply of penguin-related humor and Sacha Baron Cohen. Bring on round three say I!
There's a bit of topical war-on-terror stuff there, with one of the characters being grabbed by security for having scissors and hand-cream. Just prior to that was a gentle parody of the candle-light vigils held by New Yorkers (this time over the lion.) Later on in the film, there's some outright (but, nicely, plot-necessary) NYC-worship. Even here, in kids' movies, the shadow of no towers looms! It's a little weird, but is very much in the background.
The animals arrive in Africa after much airline-comedy (what's the deal with peanuts? Am I right?) and immediately split into five sub-plots: The lion must prove himself to his parents who disapprove of his dancing (nary a Billy Elliot joke to be found. I shake my head.) The zebra joins the herd and feels he has no individuality (this is actually quite creepy. Imagine a field of creatures, all with Cris Rock's voice.) The hippo finds herself a man. The giraffe becomes a doctor. The penguins try to hilariously rebuild the plane. And! Bonus side-plot: a group of tourists are united under the rule of the little old lady from the first film who kicked the lion in the balls (as she does in this film as well. Sigh.) Oh and also King Julian the lemur is around, causing trouble.
With all of these plates spinning, there's always something interesting to watch. There's a few tedious relationship-building scenes, but these are soon dispensed with. There's a lot of cheap laughs and some clever ones as well. The idiotically decadent King Julian and the penguins get the best parts, but that's their function: to provide high-octane humor to pull us through the slow parts. Again, not a bad film, definitely on par with the first one, also light fluff, but enjoyable light fluff. It makes complete sense to try to turn this into a kind of slow television show (like the slow Marvel-themed television show now happening in a theater near you.) The characters are likeable but essentially blank and apparently the writing team possesses an endless supply of penguin-related humor and Sacha Baron Cohen. Bring on round three say I!
Oct 19, 2014
Drive
Saw Drive. It was directed by the same guy who did Only God Forgives. This film is very similar in its shocking colors, its meditative pace, its zen calm. This one is much more accessible however. It follows a stunt man/getaway driver who starts cozying up to his pretty neighbor whose husband is in prison. Husband comes back from prison and the driver, great guy that he is, tries to help the husband get out of his mob ties. This spirals out of control further and further. The film is very well crafted. It's poetic and simple, entrancing but without tipping its hand.
The film opens with hot-pink credits written in loopy hand-writing over a fly-over shot of a city. It's hearkening back hard to the blockbuster action films of the 80s. The protagonist works in film. A supporting character is a film financier. There's a moment early on when the driver and the neighbor are on a kind-of date and this song comes on singing that "you're a real human being and a real hero." This is so on-the-nose with what the film is trying to accomplish in this scene, it can't be accidental. It seems like a self-aware deconstruction of the 1980s action hero. The protagonist is completely selfless (children love him) but then there's also a scene where he stomps on a man's head until it bursts into mush. The brutality of the archetype is not soft-pedaled in this scene. The protagonist says little and implies much. He seems iconic; archetypal.
The film's beautiful slow shots are entrancing. The other characters have a similarly iconic feel to them (the crooked friend, the stoolie, the dame) and the film consequently has a simple and closed-world feel. All of the characters are set up and then interact. No new characters are introduced after about the half-way point. At one point the neighbor's son is watching cartoons and the protagonist asks him who the bad guy is. When the kid points and says "that one" he presses him about how he knows that that's a bad guy. "Just look at him," the kid says. The man whose head the protagonist stomps on is not clearly identified as a bad guy, but, being a man in a cheap suit, he clearly is. Just look at him.
A very interesting film. Slow and entrancing and much more comprehensible and accessible than Only God Forgives. Check it out.
The film opens with hot-pink credits written in loopy hand-writing over a fly-over shot of a city. It's hearkening back hard to the blockbuster action films of the 80s. The protagonist works in film. A supporting character is a film financier. There's a moment early on when the driver and the neighbor are on a kind-of date and this song comes on singing that "you're a real human being and a real hero." This is so on-the-nose with what the film is trying to accomplish in this scene, it can't be accidental. It seems like a self-aware deconstruction of the 1980s action hero. The protagonist is completely selfless (children love him) but then there's also a scene where he stomps on a man's head until it bursts into mush. The brutality of the archetype is not soft-pedaled in this scene. The protagonist says little and implies much. He seems iconic; archetypal.
The film's beautiful slow shots are entrancing. The other characters have a similarly iconic feel to them (the crooked friend, the stoolie, the dame) and the film consequently has a simple and closed-world feel. All of the characters are set up and then interact. No new characters are introduced after about the half-way point. At one point the neighbor's son is watching cartoons and the protagonist asks him who the bad guy is. When the kid points and says "that one" he presses him about how he knows that that's a bad guy. "Just look at him," the kid says. The man whose head the protagonist stomps on is not clearly identified as a bad guy, but, being a man in a cheap suit, he clearly is. Just look at him.
A very interesting film. Slow and entrancing and much more comprehensible and accessible than Only God Forgives. Check it out.
Oct 18, 2014
Cthulhu
Saw Cthulhu, a modern film set in the famous Cthulhu mythos. The film sets up the elder-gods thing early by having a news reporter talk about rising sea levels over the opening credits. The protagonist, Russel, is introduced. He's a gay guy who escaped his back-woods home to teach at a prestigious university, where he is a professor of ancient religious history, a favorite occupation of Lovecraft protagonists. He is recalled back home by the sudden death of his mother. Russel returns to his home where he reunites with his father who runs some kind of cult (of course) which the whole town seems to be members of (of course.) He has an argument with his father about ancient religions and also about grand-children. I liked the disagreement because it hinted at a much longer, angrier, and deeper argument that had pushed Russel away to begin with. Anyway, Russel's sister seems like a more sympathetic character but then introduces Becky, her bleached and rouged friend, to Russel with obviously dubious ulterior motives. Russel rekindles a romantic relationship with his childhood friend.
The film has a throwback feel to me, evoking the extreme frustration of the horror films of the 80s. Most of the frustration stems from the smug conspiracy of silence, coupled with all kinds of small-town ugliness. There's a lot of talk of "you kind of people" mixed in with the smiling denials of complicity or knowledge. Horrible legal trouble is used as a weapon against Russel often. There's an infuriating sense of his real life being slowly destroyed. There's also an extremely troubling rape in the middle of the film which Russel gets over fairly quickly. This upset me greatly.
The imagery is fairly modern, copying Lynch a bit I think. There are inexplicable old men who suddenly appear and attack. There's a dream sequence with a fairly memorable scene of waving arms sticking through holes in a large crate. It's sometimes a bit cheap, as when Russel must navigate a sewer by the flash of his camera (and do creepy things show up? Of course creepy things show up.) There's a moment when Russel is being chased through a suburban neighborhood. He pauses to peek through a window and sees a boy watching an off-screen television. The blue reflected light of the TV evokes an underwater feel very nicely. These eerie, creepy scenes are a nice change of pace from the frustration of no one admitting that anything is amiss or even admitting that they're behaving in a pretty fucked up manner. All of this unpleasantness is softened somewhat by some genuinely heart-warming scenes of Russel and his lover. The relationship is set up in a slightly icky flashback, but becomes very believable and sweet by the end.
I generally liked this film. It was annoying, but it treated the Cthulhu thing well, not devolving into creature-spectacle or even into something so simple as a conspiracy. There's always something a little shadowy, a little unexplained. It keeps exactly what's going on nicely hidden, even until the end which is itself pretty ambiguous. It has a low-budget feel of being slightly lumpy, one scene being a bit jarring from the last. Often Russel will behave in an overly-crazed manner, shouting at his friends or talking down to them. I excuse this as realistic character flaws (and also the dude had just been raped for like half of the film) but it also contributes to the sometimes amateurish feel. An interesting film in the end, I guess. Not a slam-dunk, but definitely not bad.
The film has a throwback feel to me, evoking the extreme frustration of the horror films of the 80s. Most of the frustration stems from the smug conspiracy of silence, coupled with all kinds of small-town ugliness. There's a lot of talk of "you kind of people" mixed in with the smiling denials of complicity or knowledge. Horrible legal trouble is used as a weapon against Russel often. There's an infuriating sense of his real life being slowly destroyed. There's also an extremely troubling rape in the middle of the film which Russel gets over fairly quickly. This upset me greatly.
The imagery is fairly modern, copying Lynch a bit I think. There are inexplicable old men who suddenly appear and attack. There's a dream sequence with a fairly memorable scene of waving arms sticking through holes in a large crate. It's sometimes a bit cheap, as when Russel must navigate a sewer by the flash of his camera (and do creepy things show up? Of course creepy things show up.) There's a moment when Russel is being chased through a suburban neighborhood. He pauses to peek through a window and sees a boy watching an off-screen television. The blue reflected light of the TV evokes an underwater feel very nicely. These eerie, creepy scenes are a nice change of pace from the frustration of no one admitting that anything is amiss or even admitting that they're behaving in a pretty fucked up manner. All of this unpleasantness is softened somewhat by some genuinely heart-warming scenes of Russel and his lover. The relationship is set up in a slightly icky flashback, but becomes very believable and sweet by the end.
I generally liked this film. It was annoying, but it treated the Cthulhu thing well, not devolving into creature-spectacle or even into something so simple as a conspiracy. There's always something a little shadowy, a little unexplained. It keeps exactly what's going on nicely hidden, even until the end which is itself pretty ambiguous. It has a low-budget feel of being slightly lumpy, one scene being a bit jarring from the last. Often Russel will behave in an overly-crazed manner, shouting at his friends or talking down to them. I excuse this as realistic character flaws (and also the dude had just been raped for like half of the film) but it also contributes to the sometimes amateurish feel. An interesting film in the end, I guess. Not a slam-dunk, but definitely not bad.
Oct 17, 2014
Berlin Alexanderplatz, Episodes 8 and 9
Episode 8, The Sun Warms the Skin, but Burns it Sometimes Too:
I think I have to give up on the idea of Franz as Berlin-symbol. Nothing Nazi-ish has manifested and no heavy-handed metaphors about oppression have appeared, so I guess I need to give up on that lead. New theory: this show follows Franz's struggle to stay straight and clean, in a legal and moral sense. This would explain the repeated images of birds in cages, and also the fickle nature of women (who are mostly prostitutes, selling their affection on the fringes of legality.) and it also renders some stuff a little less comprehensible (for example, I thought the Berlin=Franz paradigm was a good way to view the alcoholism episode. Then again, maybe it could be equally fruitfully viewed as Franz struggling with vice.) Well, on to the episode.
Franz struggles to come to grips with his lost arm. In the last episode, he was utterly morose about it, dejectedly drinking himself into stupors and listening to sharp-dressed men talk of the arbitrary cruelty of the world and the subjectivity of morality. At the start of this episode, Franz indulges in cruel gallows humor, laughing uproariously at a news story about a father who drowned his own children. He further exercises his pessimism by insisting that the father is sleeping soundly in prison, and is not gnawed at by his conscience. Later, at his apartment, he is visited by the sharp-dressed man from the last episode. The man offers him a job as a fence for stolen goods. Franz agrees almost instantly. We then flash forward a bit and find Franz successful in his new job which is conducted entirely off-screen.
Franz is visited by Eva. Eva congratulates him on being so up-beat and successful despite his lost arm and dances with him, miming as though she were holding on to his absent hand. He is hurt and retires from the dance. Eva than offers him a prostitute to "own". She is a pretty woman who behaves sweetly and childishly. She talks about her "stage" name vs her real name. One day she adopted a new name and then, she simply concludes, that was her name. Franz names her Mieze. There's an oblique lesson for Franz here, I think, that he can choose, to an extent, his own fate and can choose to let his handicap define and limit him or he can rise above it. There is a scene of him rowing a rowboat with one arm. It's pathetic but also kind of hopeful.
The episode ends with a minor incident where Mieze receives a love letter which sends Franz into a jealous rage. The footage of him beating his old girlfriend to death is played over dense narration. He contacts Eva who first confirms that Mieze is not actually cheating on Franz, and then comforts Franz. The episode ends with Eva and Franz talking.
There's a lot of text in this episode. Several times bricks of text are presented like title-cards. This show is based on a novel, we know from the credits, and these passages may require too much set-up for too little pay-off to actually film. It's much better than obtrusive and incongruent narration, which this show seems to prefer. Ah well, on to the next episode.
Episode 9, About the Eternities Between the Many and the Few:
Well, well, oh me of little faith! The Germany=Franz equation returns to prominence! First, though, the rough plot: We open with a re-showing of the beating-to-death scene, played over a dense narration of airplanes and electric street cars. Following this, Fritz makes up with Mieze, bringing her flowers and picking her up from her street corner. The music becomes ominous and the camera zooms in on the wilting flowers, undercutting an otherwise kind of sweet moment. Franz visits Reinhold who is wracked with resentful guilt at the sight of Franz. He asks to see the amputated stump and we viewers are treated to a bit of grotesque imagery. Reinhold accuses Franz of coming for revenge, but Franz reveals that he will not exact any revenge, not out of nobility, but out of cowardice.
Back at home, Franz adores Meize as she shines his shoes. She puts them on his feet and gives her a mighty chomp. She returns his bite with a kiss. Maybe she can redeem him? The sharp-dressed man shoes up and they go to the bar. The bartender lectures Franz on falling right back into his life of crime, pimping and fencing stolen goods. For the second time in one episode (!) the beating-to-death scene plays, this time over narration about the sacrifice of Isaac, the narrator becoming breathy and gasping, suggesting a perhaps erotic undertone.
This flashback done, Franz retorts that he has exhausted every legal avenue of honest work. As the German society had tried to make democracy re-function, ladies and gentlemen, so too has Franz tried to live an honest life! Ah, the German=Franz equation holds true once more! They then give me more fodder by actually going to a fascist meeting. Franz, in his role as common man, fantasizes about sex while listening to flattering half-logic about how fascism will accelerate the promises of the communists for the working man and that also communists are promising impossible things. Franz claps while imagining Eva licking the fingers of his missing hand.
After the meeting, Franz lectures some old man about how stupid the current economic system is. He cheerfully admits to a life of crime which somehow sticks it to the powers that be and sneers at the old man's suggestion for strikes. To underscore his weird, regressive, childish cynicism, he does all of this while swinging on some kind of indoor playground. He then goes to Eva's to lecture her incoherently about the virtues of fascism. He drinks steadily as the episode ends.
Franz seems to be sinking into some kind of ironic pessimism, where he out-grumps everyone's world view, childishly mistaking people pointing out systemic problems with people just being self-defeatingly cynical. He is ready to embrace any justification, no matter how thin, for his actions. It seems the prophecy at the beginning of the film, with his looking back at the prison, will come true. I wonder if he will manifest as the oppressed or the oppressor when the national socialists come to power. I think/hope exciting times lie ahead!
I think I have to give up on the idea of Franz as Berlin-symbol. Nothing Nazi-ish has manifested and no heavy-handed metaphors about oppression have appeared, so I guess I need to give up on that lead. New theory: this show follows Franz's struggle to stay straight and clean, in a legal and moral sense. This would explain the repeated images of birds in cages, and also the fickle nature of women (who are mostly prostitutes, selling their affection on the fringes of legality.) and it also renders some stuff a little less comprehensible (for example, I thought the Berlin=Franz paradigm was a good way to view the alcoholism episode. Then again, maybe it could be equally fruitfully viewed as Franz struggling with vice.) Well, on to the episode.
Franz struggles to come to grips with his lost arm. In the last episode, he was utterly morose about it, dejectedly drinking himself into stupors and listening to sharp-dressed men talk of the arbitrary cruelty of the world and the subjectivity of morality. At the start of this episode, Franz indulges in cruel gallows humor, laughing uproariously at a news story about a father who drowned his own children. He further exercises his pessimism by insisting that the father is sleeping soundly in prison, and is not gnawed at by his conscience. Later, at his apartment, he is visited by the sharp-dressed man from the last episode. The man offers him a job as a fence for stolen goods. Franz agrees almost instantly. We then flash forward a bit and find Franz successful in his new job which is conducted entirely off-screen.
Franz is visited by Eva. Eva congratulates him on being so up-beat and successful despite his lost arm and dances with him, miming as though she were holding on to his absent hand. He is hurt and retires from the dance. Eva than offers him a prostitute to "own". She is a pretty woman who behaves sweetly and childishly. She talks about her "stage" name vs her real name. One day she adopted a new name and then, she simply concludes, that was her name. Franz names her Mieze. There's an oblique lesson for Franz here, I think, that he can choose, to an extent, his own fate and can choose to let his handicap define and limit him or he can rise above it. There is a scene of him rowing a rowboat with one arm. It's pathetic but also kind of hopeful.
The episode ends with a minor incident where Mieze receives a love letter which sends Franz into a jealous rage. The footage of him beating his old girlfriend to death is played over dense narration. He contacts Eva who first confirms that Mieze is not actually cheating on Franz, and then comforts Franz. The episode ends with Eva and Franz talking.
There's a lot of text in this episode. Several times bricks of text are presented like title-cards. This show is based on a novel, we know from the credits, and these passages may require too much set-up for too little pay-off to actually film. It's much better than obtrusive and incongruent narration, which this show seems to prefer. Ah well, on to the next episode.
Episode 9, About the Eternities Between the Many and the Few:
Well, well, oh me of little faith! The Germany=Franz equation returns to prominence! First, though, the rough plot: We open with a re-showing of the beating-to-death scene, played over a dense narration of airplanes and electric street cars. Following this, Fritz makes up with Mieze, bringing her flowers and picking her up from her street corner. The music becomes ominous and the camera zooms in on the wilting flowers, undercutting an otherwise kind of sweet moment. Franz visits Reinhold who is wracked with resentful guilt at the sight of Franz. He asks to see the amputated stump and we viewers are treated to a bit of grotesque imagery. Reinhold accuses Franz of coming for revenge, but Franz reveals that he will not exact any revenge, not out of nobility, but out of cowardice.
Back at home, Franz adores Meize as she shines his shoes. She puts them on his feet and gives her a mighty chomp. She returns his bite with a kiss. Maybe she can redeem him? The sharp-dressed man shoes up and they go to the bar. The bartender lectures Franz on falling right back into his life of crime, pimping and fencing stolen goods. For the second time in one episode (!) the beating-to-death scene plays, this time over narration about the sacrifice of Isaac, the narrator becoming breathy and gasping, suggesting a perhaps erotic undertone.
This flashback done, Franz retorts that he has exhausted every legal avenue of honest work. As the German society had tried to make democracy re-function, ladies and gentlemen, so too has Franz tried to live an honest life! Ah, the German=Franz equation holds true once more! They then give me more fodder by actually going to a fascist meeting. Franz, in his role as common man, fantasizes about sex while listening to flattering half-logic about how fascism will accelerate the promises of the communists for the working man and that also communists are promising impossible things. Franz claps while imagining Eva licking the fingers of his missing hand.
After the meeting, Franz lectures some old man about how stupid the current economic system is. He cheerfully admits to a life of crime which somehow sticks it to the powers that be and sneers at the old man's suggestion for strikes. To underscore his weird, regressive, childish cynicism, he does all of this while swinging on some kind of indoor playground. He then goes to Eva's to lecture her incoherently about the virtues of fascism. He drinks steadily as the episode ends.
Franz seems to be sinking into some kind of ironic pessimism, where he out-grumps everyone's world view, childishly mistaking people pointing out systemic problems with people just being self-defeatingly cynical. He is ready to embrace any justification, no matter how thin, for his actions. It seems the prophecy at the beginning of the film, with his looking back at the prison, will come true. I wonder if he will manifest as the oppressed or the oppressor when the national socialists come to power. I think/hope exciting times lie ahead!
Oct 15, 2014
The Element of Crime
Saw The Element of Crime, an incomprehensible film by Lars von Trier. He's cribbing pretty hard from Tarkovsky, heavily borrowing his favorite images of stagnant water and eternal, soggy rain. The film is set in some retro-future Europe, where everything is waterlogged and lit by lanterns. a network of pneumatic tubes acts as mail and a perpetual under-class of coal-miners and lottery-ticket-sellers play an illegal bungee-jumping game/ritual. I found the film to be almost completely incomprehensible.
It follows a cop whose been called out of retirement to track down the lotto-murderer, a string of murders of little girls. He follows the footsteps of the killer, retracing his actions and movements. He begins to lose track of his identity, the imaginary killer taking over more and more (you might be able to see where this is going.) The film is very slow and ponderous, full of strange and bewildering symbolism and imagery. There's a repeated image of people sleeping on beds littered with forks, or keys, or surgical equipment, or other strange objects. There's a repeated image of dead horses, possibly linked to their oblique references to hoof-and-mouth disease. At one point, some characters in the background literally beat a dead horse.
This cheap shot aside, the film is interesting. Morbid and oblique, it was too opaque for me to really follow, but was clearly driving at something. I suppose anyway. Maybe von trier was just messing about, indulging in empty sensation and spectacle. I wouldn't know either way. I generally like von Trier, but had to struggle to stay awake through this one. This is my reaction to most Tarkovsky films however, so maybe it's just a good copy-cat. Either way, I think I may have to someday return to this one to find out what it was about, exactly. For now it just too out there for even me.
It follows a cop whose been called out of retirement to track down the lotto-murderer, a string of murders of little girls. He follows the footsteps of the killer, retracing his actions and movements. He begins to lose track of his identity, the imaginary killer taking over more and more (you might be able to see where this is going.) The film is very slow and ponderous, full of strange and bewildering symbolism and imagery. There's a repeated image of people sleeping on beds littered with forks, or keys, or surgical equipment, or other strange objects. There's a repeated image of dead horses, possibly linked to their oblique references to hoof-and-mouth disease. At one point, some characters in the background literally beat a dead horse.
This cheap shot aside, the film is interesting. Morbid and oblique, it was too opaque for me to really follow, but was clearly driving at something. I suppose anyway. Maybe von trier was just messing about, indulging in empty sensation and spectacle. I wouldn't know either way. I generally like von Trier, but had to struggle to stay awake through this one. This is my reaction to most Tarkovsky films however, so maybe it's just a good copy-cat. Either way, I think I may have to someday return to this one to find out what it was about, exactly. For now it just too out there for even me.
Oct 14, 2014
Welcome to the Punch
Saw Welcome to the Punch (thanks, Basil!) It was a semi-political thriller, following a cop tracking down some kind of super-assassin who shot him in the knee three years ago. The film gives the cop a quirky female side-kick, a boss who rubs his failures in his face, a 'driven' attitude, and also a gross knee-abscess which is periodically drained via hypodermic needle into pots and coffee cups and so on. An interesting little touch, but for the most part, the cop is a generic action star. The film is almost entirely blue and green, the characters are all kind of stock. The film is well-done but unoriginal.
Almost entirely blue and green, it feels very chilly. The locations are almost always corporate or industrial. Only one time are they in a homey environment and the contrast is meant to be jarring. Hotel rooms and hospitals give this film a modern and high-tech feel, even though it could well have been re-set in the 60s without requiring major rewrites. It could not have been written in the 60s however: its kind-of-nebulous plot is distinctly modern. Drenched in politico-phobia and purposeful plot-holes (I don't recall an explanation of exactly who this assassin bad-ass is. He's just "wanted" by someone.) It's a refreshing change from the belabored over-explanation endemic to action films and thrillers.
I was a touch disappointed by the female side-kick. She seems to exist only to help the protagonist. She is not a love interest, at least, but only barely. This is a minor quibble. All in all, the film was not brilliant and, being an action film, not really very interesting to me. It is well-crafted but generic. A bit of a miss.
Almost entirely blue and green, it feels very chilly. The locations are almost always corporate or industrial. Only one time are they in a homey environment and the contrast is meant to be jarring. Hotel rooms and hospitals give this film a modern and high-tech feel, even though it could well have been re-set in the 60s without requiring major rewrites. It could not have been written in the 60s however: its kind-of-nebulous plot is distinctly modern. Drenched in politico-phobia and purposeful plot-holes (I don't recall an explanation of exactly who this assassin bad-ass is. He's just "wanted" by someone.) It's a refreshing change from the belabored over-explanation endemic to action films and thrillers.
I was a touch disappointed by the female side-kick. She seems to exist only to help the protagonist. She is not a love interest, at least, but only barely. This is a minor quibble. All in all, the film was not brilliant and, being an action film, not really very interesting to me. It is well-crafted but generic. A bit of a miss.
Oct 13, 2014
The Future
Saw The Future, a Miranda July film. Miranda July specializes in overly sincere, treacly movies loaded with off-putting art-house strangeness. The film opens with the strange, creaky, pitch-adjusted voice of a cat narrating how it was saved by two humans and brought to a "cage-atorium" which was "not cool." It's so weird that I didn't even know whether to start rolling my eyes or to begin anticipating something great. This pretty much describes the entire film. Its plot follows a guy and girl who have been dating for a few years now and believe they'll spend their lives together. She is a dance instructor for children and he is tech-support. Neither one of them are really happy with their lives and feel they are full of untapped potential, that they are capable of beautiful things. The cat that they save becomes the symbol of this untapped beauty. Like their raw emotions, it's wild but can perhaps be tamed.
This is somewhat muddled however, by the alien actions of the protagonists. She is so painfully awkward that sometimes she stands around corners in order to talk to her boyfriend. He changes jobs to become a door-to-door salesman and pours his heart out to complete strangers. His monologues are disjointed and touching, but clearly he should be medicated. There's a scene where the girlfriend wants to make a video of herself dancing beautifully to her favorite music. She hits record on her laptop, puts on an outfit and tries to make the beauty happen. The video that results however looks sad and awkward, like a strange woman flailing about in an empty room. The beauty that she was so sure was there fails to manifest. It's a deeply personal and sad moment. Later on, she puts her legs through the arm-holes of a tee-shirt and pulls it completely over her head, making herself look like a long-legged yellow ghost with a neck-hole vagina. I feel for her, but she's very clearly insane.
This film is definitely not for everyone. I think I'm kind of under Miranda July's sway though. I love her films, even though they are off-putting and freaky. Many actual reviewers rightly call her out for her reliance on the quirky and the cutesy-poo. They are repulsed more than beguiled by her high-school-poetry-level over-sharing and sincerity, calling it precious and twee. I see their points and even agree with them, but I love her all the same. Yes, she's crazy and bizarre, but she's essentially a good person and only ever wants to be understood. Her madness is refreshing and her transparent insecurities validate my own. She's like a giant beating heart, complete with floppy tube-veins and white, fatty tissue. It's telling, I think, that she reminds me of (a much crazier version of) some of my closest friends. There's some imperfection here which I resonate with.
This is somewhat muddled however, by the alien actions of the protagonists. She is so painfully awkward that sometimes she stands around corners in order to talk to her boyfriend. He changes jobs to become a door-to-door salesman and pours his heart out to complete strangers. His monologues are disjointed and touching, but clearly he should be medicated. There's a scene where the girlfriend wants to make a video of herself dancing beautifully to her favorite music. She hits record on her laptop, puts on an outfit and tries to make the beauty happen. The video that results however looks sad and awkward, like a strange woman flailing about in an empty room. The beauty that she was so sure was there fails to manifest. It's a deeply personal and sad moment. Later on, she puts her legs through the arm-holes of a tee-shirt and pulls it completely over her head, making herself look like a long-legged yellow ghost with a neck-hole vagina. I feel for her, but she's very clearly insane.
This film is definitely not for everyone. I think I'm kind of under Miranda July's sway though. I love her films, even though they are off-putting and freaky. Many actual reviewers rightly call her out for her reliance on the quirky and the cutesy-poo. They are repulsed more than beguiled by her high-school-poetry-level over-sharing and sincerity, calling it precious and twee. I see their points and even agree with them, but I love her all the same. Yes, she's crazy and bizarre, but she's essentially a good person and only ever wants to be understood. Her madness is refreshing and her transparent insecurities validate my own. She's like a giant beating heart, complete with floppy tube-veins and white, fatty tissue. It's telling, I think, that she reminds me of (a much crazier version of) some of my closest friends. There's some imperfection here which I resonate with.
Oct 12, 2014
The Ring
Saw The Ring, the English-language remake of the Japanese film of the same name. It was a very frustrating film. Within the first ten minutes or so we hit many horror cliches: Pretty teenagers in catholic school-girl uniforms sleeping over, being dumb ("we're losing, like, ten times as many brain cells as we're supposed to.") talking about Boys and trying to scare each other ("Hah! I totally got you!!") Eventually one of them croaks and we instantly move on to a serious and blank-faced little boy. He's drawing something spooky in an empty classroom because what the hell else could he possibly be doing? We are then introduced to his mother, the protagonist.
She storms into the room, jabbering away at her boss on her cellphone. She's supposed to be tough but vulnerable, in-charge but capable of sobbing hysterically. She has the uncomfortable chore of having to deal with Hollywood's schizophrenic relationship with Strong Women. She spends most of her time being alternately angry and stupid. At one point she asks her ex-husband (who is an A/V tech) to look at a VHS tape. He expresses bewilderment that there's no "control track" on the cassette. "Hey Noah," she says "can you pretend for a second that I don't read Video Geek Magazine?" Look lady, your ignorance is not his fault. Just ask him what a control track is. There's no need to make snide jokes at him (maybe she was restraining herself from just shrieking "Neeerrrd!" at him.) Later on, she breaks his equipment by grabbing at it while shouting "just let me do it!" She then tells him he needs to grow up. Yet later on in the film, she's going through a library's newspaper archive, standing on top of one stack (grinding the paper to pulp with her heels,) she lets one bound collection drop to the ground, unheeded (fuck that one. It wasn't the one she wanted anyway) and finally pulls a stack down on her own stupid head. Even at this simple task she fails. I wrote down many times she failed to act like a genuine, empathetic, human being. I could go on. Also, I hate her face.
Okay, the plot is fairly well-known by now, having been parodied and referenced a lot, but here is a run-down on the premise anyway: there's an evil videotape that's killing people after they watch it. It's up to ace reporter Crazy Lady to track down the source and nature of the evil. The plot touches on the fears of parenthood, that your child will be something you don't recognize, and also an interesting paranoia about sharing experiences. The school-girls in the intro talk about the malign influence of electromagnetic waves, setting up the pseudo-scientific justification for the ensuing evil. One character denounces the reporter for spreading misery around, making everyone experience their tragedy. That's an interesting way of looking at things, if nothing else.
The film is shot in a nice way. Shot somewhere vaguely New-England-y-looking, the film highlights the greens and blues, making everything look very chilly and hostile. There's a recurrent image of water which is more plot-related than thematic. The evil video-tape is neat, in its way. There's a scene with a red tree that is quite nice, though a little silly. I haven't seen the original, so I can't judge which one I like better, but this one was mainly just frustrating to me. The protagonist is annoying, the little boy (who becomes a major character,) I hate almost as much as I hate his mother. The A/V dude is the most likable, but even he has moments of poorly explained nonsense. The film is not jump-y, thank goodness, relying more on mystery and suspense than shock and viscera. Despite that, however, I was just too annoyed by the characters to enjoy this film. This is becoming a theme for me and horror films.
She storms into the room, jabbering away at her boss on her cellphone. She's supposed to be tough but vulnerable, in-charge but capable of sobbing hysterically. She has the uncomfortable chore of having to deal with Hollywood's schizophrenic relationship with Strong Women. She spends most of her time being alternately angry and stupid. At one point she asks her ex-husband (who is an A/V tech) to look at a VHS tape. He expresses bewilderment that there's no "control track" on the cassette. "Hey Noah," she says "can you pretend for a second that I don't read Video Geek Magazine?" Look lady, your ignorance is not his fault. Just ask him what a control track is. There's no need to make snide jokes at him (maybe she was restraining herself from just shrieking "Neeerrrd!" at him.) Later on, she breaks his equipment by grabbing at it while shouting "just let me do it!" She then tells him he needs to grow up. Yet later on in the film, she's going through a library's newspaper archive, standing on top of one stack (grinding the paper to pulp with her heels,) she lets one bound collection drop to the ground, unheeded (fuck that one. It wasn't the one she wanted anyway) and finally pulls a stack down on her own stupid head. Even at this simple task she fails. I wrote down many times she failed to act like a genuine, empathetic, human being. I could go on. Also, I hate her face.
Okay, the plot is fairly well-known by now, having been parodied and referenced a lot, but here is a run-down on the premise anyway: there's an evil videotape that's killing people after they watch it. It's up to ace reporter Crazy Lady to track down the source and nature of the evil. The plot touches on the fears of parenthood, that your child will be something you don't recognize, and also an interesting paranoia about sharing experiences. The school-girls in the intro talk about the malign influence of electromagnetic waves, setting up the pseudo-scientific justification for the ensuing evil. One character denounces the reporter for spreading misery around, making everyone experience their tragedy. That's an interesting way of looking at things, if nothing else.
The film is shot in a nice way. Shot somewhere vaguely New-England-y-looking, the film highlights the greens and blues, making everything look very chilly and hostile. There's a recurrent image of water which is more plot-related than thematic. The evil video-tape is neat, in its way. There's a scene with a red tree that is quite nice, though a little silly. I haven't seen the original, so I can't judge which one I like better, but this one was mainly just frustrating to me. The protagonist is annoying, the little boy (who becomes a major character,) I hate almost as much as I hate his mother. The A/V dude is the most likable, but even he has moments of poorly explained nonsense. The film is not jump-y, thank goodness, relying more on mystery and suspense than shock and viscera. Despite that, however, I was just too annoyed by the characters to enjoy this film. This is becoming a theme for me and horror films.
Oct 11, 2014
Berlin Alexanderplatz, Episodes 6 and 7
Episode 6, Love Has Its Price:
This episode is almost the halfway point for the series and seems to be the beginning of the denouement. The episode opens with Franz reeling from a nightmare. He has dreamed that he became a succession of animals ending as a bird who is bitten by a snake. He turns into himself again and the snake turns into Reinhold, his aristocratic friend from the last episode who gave him his current girlfriend, Cilly. Sure enough, as soon as Franz hits the bar, Reinhold asks him to take another woman off of his hands. When Franz refuses, Reinhold becomes cold and angry. Clearly, Franz has made an enemy.
Franz later comes upon one of his fruit-selling friends who is being beaten up in the street by a gang of thugs. This is meant to indicate the sea-change taking place in Germany, the populace turning against various minorities and violence becoming more commonplace. The beaten friend begs Franz to deliver a message to the head fruit-seller. When Franz does this, he is greeted by a very made-up old woman with a gun. It turns out that the fruit-selling operation is a front for organized crime. All of Franz's friends are involved and all of them thought he was aware of what was going on. When he expresses his amazement, they claim that he has now "become involved" and the head gangsters will not allow him to leave. His friend Reinhold is sicked on him to prevent him from leaving. As Gremany is falling into the hands of thugs and criminals, so too is Franz.
Franz escapes out the back of the "fruit truck" and is instantly run over by another car (the wife of the driver urges him to just drive away, true to the deceitful nature of women in this show.) The other characters claim him to be dead and Cilly runs back into the wife-swapping arms of Reinhold. Reinhold and Cilly get steaming drunk and return to Reinhold's current girlfriend. He pretends not to know her and after some increasingly unpleasant mind-games strikes her, rips her clothing and throws her out. She tries to kiss him but he pulls her face off of his by her hair. The scene is incredibly unpleasant and long as well. Reinhold even has a stutter, to add frustration and that much more unpleasantness to an already dismal and aggravating scene.
A narrator shows up in this episode. There have been bits of narration before but this was the first time it became kind of obtrusive. The narrator talks at length about dark, poisonous waters and the deceit of man (both Franz and Reinhold are accused of deceit via juxtaposed narration.) The episode ends with Franz alive in the strangers' car. The narrator ominously cautions us that "there is no need to despair" and tells us that we will hear this repeated often in the episodes to come. Great.
Episode 6, Remember: An Oath can be Amputated
Franz is fine but has lost an arm. He's back with Eva and her boyfriend/pimp who insists that he extort the fruit-syndicate for money in payment of his lost arm. Franz keeps sullenly repeating that doing so won't bring back his arm, but does not object to Eva and the boyfriend rousing rabble on his behalf.
The fruit-gang catches wind of this and agrees to give Franz some money. Reinhold refuses outright, insisting they should just kill Franz, and leaves. One of the other fruit-ers shows up at Franz's hideout and offers him the money. This precipitates one of Franz's freak-outs and the fruit-er leaves Franz passed out on the ground. The narrator talks of slaughterhouses.
Dejected, Franz visits the red-light district. He is told by a pimp that one of his whores is the Whore of Babylon. He is intrigued but decides that sex is not his vice and waddles off to a bar. There he has a cute scene with a glass of beer and picks up an alcoholic woman with a laugh like a scream. They visit the newspaper-man to find that he has lost his testicles entirely by now.
This episode involves further dissipation of morals and impotence of men. Pimps and whores are featured in this episode. Two rich young dilettantes discuss working and conclude that being on welfare is for suckers and that being a pimp is the best profession. They go on to argue that there is no objective morality and that theft is not always theft. This raises a round of applause from the other bar-patrons.
I'm kind of just reporting plot-points here. I suppose I can argue that by now the German populace has become crippled, but apart from the disintegration of Franz and the newspaper-man, I don't see much to support my grand unified Franz=Germany theory. Also I don't see much new happening. Woman are deceitful, men are impotent, life progresses as usual. The bar patrons talk about how oppressive politics is becoming recently. Perhaps the descent into sex and booze mirrors a willfull ignorance on the populace's behalf. At any rate, the episode ends with Cilly discovering Franz is alive and confronting Reinhold about it.
This episode is almost the halfway point for the series and seems to be the beginning of the denouement. The episode opens with Franz reeling from a nightmare. He has dreamed that he became a succession of animals ending as a bird who is bitten by a snake. He turns into himself again and the snake turns into Reinhold, his aristocratic friend from the last episode who gave him his current girlfriend, Cilly. Sure enough, as soon as Franz hits the bar, Reinhold asks him to take another woman off of his hands. When Franz refuses, Reinhold becomes cold and angry. Clearly, Franz has made an enemy.
Franz later comes upon one of his fruit-selling friends who is being beaten up in the street by a gang of thugs. This is meant to indicate the sea-change taking place in Germany, the populace turning against various minorities and violence becoming more commonplace. The beaten friend begs Franz to deliver a message to the head fruit-seller. When Franz does this, he is greeted by a very made-up old woman with a gun. It turns out that the fruit-selling operation is a front for organized crime. All of Franz's friends are involved and all of them thought he was aware of what was going on. When he expresses his amazement, they claim that he has now "become involved" and the head gangsters will not allow him to leave. His friend Reinhold is sicked on him to prevent him from leaving. As Gremany is falling into the hands of thugs and criminals, so too is Franz.
Franz escapes out the back of the "fruit truck" and is instantly run over by another car (the wife of the driver urges him to just drive away, true to the deceitful nature of women in this show.) The other characters claim him to be dead and Cilly runs back into the wife-swapping arms of Reinhold. Reinhold and Cilly get steaming drunk and return to Reinhold's current girlfriend. He pretends not to know her and after some increasingly unpleasant mind-games strikes her, rips her clothing and throws her out. She tries to kiss him but he pulls her face off of his by her hair. The scene is incredibly unpleasant and long as well. Reinhold even has a stutter, to add frustration and that much more unpleasantness to an already dismal and aggravating scene.
A narrator shows up in this episode. There have been bits of narration before but this was the first time it became kind of obtrusive. The narrator talks at length about dark, poisonous waters and the deceit of man (both Franz and Reinhold are accused of deceit via juxtaposed narration.) The episode ends with Franz alive in the strangers' car. The narrator ominously cautions us that "there is no need to despair" and tells us that we will hear this repeated often in the episodes to come. Great.
Episode 6, Remember: An Oath can be Amputated
Franz is fine but has lost an arm. He's back with Eva and her boyfriend/pimp who insists that he extort the fruit-syndicate for money in payment of his lost arm. Franz keeps sullenly repeating that doing so won't bring back his arm, but does not object to Eva and the boyfriend rousing rabble on his behalf.
The fruit-gang catches wind of this and agrees to give Franz some money. Reinhold refuses outright, insisting they should just kill Franz, and leaves. One of the other fruit-ers shows up at Franz's hideout and offers him the money. This precipitates one of Franz's freak-outs and the fruit-er leaves Franz passed out on the ground. The narrator talks of slaughterhouses.
Dejected, Franz visits the red-light district. He is told by a pimp that one of his whores is the Whore of Babylon. He is intrigued but decides that sex is not his vice and waddles off to a bar. There he has a cute scene with a glass of beer and picks up an alcoholic woman with a laugh like a scream. They visit the newspaper-man to find that he has lost his testicles entirely by now.
This episode involves further dissipation of morals and impotence of men. Pimps and whores are featured in this episode. Two rich young dilettantes discuss working and conclude that being on welfare is for suckers and that being a pimp is the best profession. They go on to argue that there is no objective morality and that theft is not always theft. This raises a round of applause from the other bar-patrons.
I'm kind of just reporting plot-points here. I suppose I can argue that by now the German populace has become crippled, but apart from the disintegration of Franz and the newspaper-man, I don't see much to support my grand unified Franz=Germany theory. Also I don't see much new happening. Woman are deceitful, men are impotent, life progresses as usual. The bar patrons talk about how oppressive politics is becoming recently. Perhaps the descent into sex and booze mirrors a willfull ignorance on the populace's behalf. At any rate, the episode ends with Cilly discovering Franz is alive and confronting Reinhold about it.
Oct 9, 2014
Futureworld
Saw Futureworld, the less-well-known sequel to Westworld. It was sort of interesting. It picks up after the disastrous robo-revolt of the previous film. The lab-coats who run the robo-vacation resort have fixed the robots and, thankfully, disaster comes from a different vector this time. The plot is much more expansive than last time. The visuals are amped up a great deal. The opening sequence is this surreal slow zoom into a man's eyeball. There's also a dream sequence so hold on to your butts, ladies and gentlemen. This film comes from the depths of the 70s, where sexism ran free. The female protagonist is called honey, lead by nose by her male companion, and generally buffaloed throughout the film. It's kind of embarrassing. Also, although the titillating idea of sex-bots is brought up, only lip-service is payed to the existence of male sex-bots (only one is shown and he looks kind of John Kerry-esque. I was deeply disappointed.)
Strangely, this film has a lot of hypnotism in it. Two guests are hypnotized into some kind of fantasy. The robots are programmed via a set of hypnotic suggestions. The whole thing is very strange. Hypnosis has utterly fallen out of vogue as far as I can tell. The robots in general are treated like easily controlled humans. At one point, a robot mourns the absence of it's friend. This is an interesting little event, but the intriguing nature or reality of the robot's feelings is left in the background of the heroes running about and shooting laser-lugers at each other. The film is okay. It's not bad but kind of old and weird and not really, I think, worth my time.
Strangely, this film has a lot of hypnotism in it. Two guests are hypnotized into some kind of fantasy. The robots are programmed via a set of hypnotic suggestions. The whole thing is very strange. Hypnosis has utterly fallen out of vogue as far as I can tell. The robots in general are treated like easily controlled humans. At one point, a robot mourns the absence of it's friend. This is an interesting little event, but the intriguing nature or reality of the robot's feelings is left in the background of the heroes running about and shooting laser-lugers at each other. The film is okay. It's not bad but kind of old and weird and not really, I think, worth my time.
Oct 8, 2014
Madagascar
Saw Madagascar (thanks, Paul!) I enjoyed it. It was a fairly goofy movie about a quartet of zoo animals who decide to run off to the wild. Despite being pampered like movie stars, the Zebra feels they are sliding into complacency and a sort of light decadence. He escapes and, after shenanigans, winds up Madagascar, which is portrayed as a cartoon tropical paradise. Once there, they discover that wilderness is not all it's cracked up to be and that the pampering was actually saving them from strife and hardship. This is particularly evident when we the audience realizes that Alex the lion has no food, and the Zebra is just looking juicier and juicier.
The film is pretty funny. There's an early gag where the lion has something stuck in his teeth only to reveal, Surprise!, that it's a birthday present for the Zebra! The absurdity of it made me laugh. There's a few weaker jokes as well (there are about four nut-shot gags) but there was a slow but steady stream of good jokes as well (or at least jokes that made me laugh. My sense of humor is kind of strange though.) There's a quartet of inexplicably super-competent penguins who are always fairly funny and a duo of monkeys with British accents who exist mainly to give pretentious blowhards like me a cheap reference-chuckle. The references are also gloriously scatter-shot. An obvious Planet of the Apes gag is stretched unto hilarity and there's a reference to American Beauty that seemed kind of nicely obscure.
The film is a bit formulaic however. The penguins are the mandatory delightful B-plot, there's a sassy hippo who acts as the matronly voice of reason to the rest of the protagonists' madness, there's a scene-stealing lemur with a goofy accent. These elements all feel a bit trite to me. They're well-done (except for the hippo who really felt like the voice of plot most of the time) but not new. There were times I laughed or felt bad for the characters or was delighted, but I was never really surprised. It's also not really about anything. Stuff just happens until it doesn't anymore. This is not the end of the world however. I've seen a lot of movies and it takes a lot to surprise me and not all films must have a point. This film is a well-crafted machine. It's a machine whose pieces I've seen before, but it runs smooth and does the job. This film a delightful, light bit of fluff.
The film is pretty funny. There's an early gag where the lion has something stuck in his teeth only to reveal, Surprise!, that it's a birthday present for the Zebra! The absurdity of it made me laugh. There's a few weaker jokes as well (there are about four nut-shot gags) but there was a slow but steady stream of good jokes as well (or at least jokes that made me laugh. My sense of humor is kind of strange though.) There's a quartet of inexplicably super-competent penguins who are always fairly funny and a duo of monkeys with British accents who exist mainly to give pretentious blowhards like me a cheap reference-chuckle. The references are also gloriously scatter-shot. An obvious Planet of the Apes gag is stretched unto hilarity and there's a reference to American Beauty that seemed kind of nicely obscure.
The film is a bit formulaic however. The penguins are the mandatory delightful B-plot, there's a sassy hippo who acts as the matronly voice of reason to the rest of the protagonists' madness, there's a scene-stealing lemur with a goofy accent. These elements all feel a bit trite to me. They're well-done (except for the hippo who really felt like the voice of plot most of the time) but not new. There were times I laughed or felt bad for the characters or was delighted, but I was never really surprised. It's also not really about anything. Stuff just happens until it doesn't anymore. This is not the end of the world however. I've seen a lot of movies and it takes a lot to surprise me and not all films must have a point. This film is a well-crafted machine. It's a machine whose pieces I've seen before, but it runs smooth and does the job. This film a delightful, light bit of fluff.
Oct 7, 2014
The Skin I Live In
Saw The Skin I Live In. I think I'm going to have to see everything Almodóvar has done. His movies are amazing. This one was about a doctor whose specialty is cosmetic surgery. He keeps a woman in a body-suit captive in his house. She does yoga and stares enigmatically into the security cameras he has trained on her, her face blown up to the size of a man on his big-screen TV. We know this woman resembles his wife but is not his wife. We see that she has skin which repulses mosquitoes and is not burnt by acetylene torches. Who this woman is is the central mystery of this film. It is not given to fantasy, so it's unlikely she is an alien or an angel. Vampires are brought up, but she is not that either.
Almodóvar has an amazing talent for telling an entirely cohesive story and then re-telling it in such a way that it flips the story on its head. This film starts with a man in a tiger-print morph suit breaking into the doctor's house and into the captive woman's room. He rapes her but is caught by the doctor who shoots him. Later, we see the woman watching a cheetah devour a gazelle on TV. She lays down to sleep with the doctor and then we flash back to six years ago and everything is recontextualized. I don't want to give anything away but the film succeeded in shocking me, which is no mean feat. Almodóvar's films have this slow, deliberate feel to them, reminiscent of much more milquetoast directors. Unlike Lynch or Guilliam, he does not exoticise his fascinations. He gives no warning signs that madness lurks ahead and it is therefore all the more disarming and bewildering.
Almodóvar has a fascination with transsexuals. This shows up in the film in the flash-back. There is a heavy theme of skins and self-image which the transsexual thing feeds nicely into. We meet a character who literally does not feel at home in their skin, whose self-image is at odds with their actual body's. The captive woman is wearing a body-suit, the doctor's home is decorated with surrealist and impressionist nude paintings, his captive layers fabric skins onto humanoid clay sculptures, her yoga-balls all have brown, patch-work skins sewn on them, even the rapist is wearing a second-skin, patterned like the skin of a tiger. Amazingly thorough!
I'm still kind of reeling from the film. I really liked it. I've read that Almodóvar is sort of a slave to his obsessions (transsexuals, homosexuality, mothers (there two in this film, both with complex relationships with their children,) and presumably others which I am unaware of.) Of his films I've seen, they're sort of hit or miss. His obsessions are his own and sometimes he does not strain to keep us interested in them, along with him. This film, however, was a hit for me. Good show, man!
Almodóvar has an amazing talent for telling an entirely cohesive story and then re-telling it in such a way that it flips the story on its head. This film starts with a man in a tiger-print morph suit breaking into the doctor's house and into the captive woman's room. He rapes her but is caught by the doctor who shoots him. Later, we see the woman watching a cheetah devour a gazelle on TV. She lays down to sleep with the doctor and then we flash back to six years ago and everything is recontextualized. I don't want to give anything away but the film succeeded in shocking me, which is no mean feat. Almodóvar's films have this slow, deliberate feel to them, reminiscent of much more milquetoast directors. Unlike Lynch or Guilliam, he does not exoticise his fascinations. He gives no warning signs that madness lurks ahead and it is therefore all the more disarming and bewildering.
Almodóvar has a fascination with transsexuals. This shows up in the film in the flash-back. There is a heavy theme of skins and self-image which the transsexual thing feeds nicely into. We meet a character who literally does not feel at home in their skin, whose self-image is at odds with their actual body's. The captive woman is wearing a body-suit, the doctor's home is decorated with surrealist and impressionist nude paintings, his captive layers fabric skins onto humanoid clay sculptures, her yoga-balls all have brown, patch-work skins sewn on them, even the rapist is wearing a second-skin, patterned like the skin of a tiger. Amazingly thorough!
I'm still kind of reeling from the film. I really liked it. I've read that Almodóvar is sort of a slave to his obsessions (transsexuals, homosexuality, mothers (there two in this film, both with complex relationships with their children,) and presumably others which I am unaware of.) Of his films I've seen, they're sort of hit or miss. His obsessions are his own and sometimes he does not strain to keep us interested in them, along with him. This film, however, was a hit for me. Good show, man!
Oct 6, 2014
Saw
Saw Saw (I've literally been waiting years to write that.) It was a fairly goofy horror film. The most central character was a doctor who wakes up chained to a pipe in a room whose only other occupants are a stranger, who is also pipe-chained, and a corpse. A spooky audio-tape informs the doctor that he must kill his cell-mate or his (the doctor's) family will be killed. He also gets a hacksaw and a cellphone with which the killer uses to taunt him periodically.
The film strongly reminded me of Se7en. There's a master-mind serial killer with elaborate and ironic traps. The settings are industrial, full of tile, iron, and plastic sheeting. The visual palate is steeped in a chemical green. This industrial aesthetic has become very popular in horror recently. Gone are the clouds of dry ice and Gothic castles. Long live the age of the rusty metal and the soiled tee-shirt, I guess.
The film's editing style reminded me of the opening credits of reality television. Everything is super-sped-up, flashes of white intersperse still shots and pointlessly rotating shots. There's a sequence with a fat man trapped in a maze of razor-wire which is particularly dire. In a slower film we would be made to feel his increasingly desperate pain as he first gets little nicks and scratches and then deeper and deeper cuts. Instead, the film speeds waaay up and he bounces around the room like a pinball, pausing every so often to mug at the camera.
Speaking of reality television, I think the film indulges in a bit of finger-wagging at reality TV. The killer videotapes his killings, prompting one policeman to actually say "what, like reality TV?" I don't know what the film's complaint is exactly. It seems hypocritical to denounce reality TV for being trashy exploitation because, well, this is a film whose main selling point is its murder-puzzles. Perhaps it's hysterically claiming that reality TV is making us jaded and more brutal (again: hypocrisy)?
Anyway, the plot is ridiculous. Much character-building happens in short hand. Tucking his daughter in to bed, the doctor's beeper goes off. "I hate that thing..." murmurs the little girl. Even in the face of such hackneyed indications of bad parenthood, the doctor still rushes off to work. Oh, 80s businessman! Will you ever learn? His wife then opens the very next scene with "How can you walk through life pretending that you're happy?" What the hell kind of question is that? Does she always start conversations with confrontational pieces of pop-psychiatry? "Hey, Doc! Do you hate your mother because she reminds you of me?" The plot reminds me of Korean horror. It laboriously explains everything, flashing little clues quickly by, but replaying them again during climactic montages. The film is so insecure about its own cleverness, it doesn't want you to miss a single cute call-back.
I'm grousing a lot but the film is really not that horrible. The plot is not exactly gripping but it is relatively unpredictable. The characters are weak, but their main function is to be screaming animals, so who cares? Its greatest weakness is its unoriginality. The murder-machines are fairly fun, but I can tell where they got the set-dressing (Se7en), the plot (K-horror), the editing style (reality TV.) The acting is not so good (at one point the doctor is shrieking and writhing in some kind of mental anguish. The killer's cell-phone rings. "Hallew?" he answers it) neither is the script. It's very easy to rip into this film. It might make a good party-film. It's not awful, just hysterical and, technically speaking, nothing new.
The film strongly reminded me of Se7en. There's a master-mind serial killer with elaborate and ironic traps. The settings are industrial, full of tile, iron, and plastic sheeting. The visual palate is steeped in a chemical green. This industrial aesthetic has become very popular in horror recently. Gone are the clouds of dry ice and Gothic castles. Long live the age of the rusty metal and the soiled tee-shirt, I guess.
The film's editing style reminded me of the opening credits of reality television. Everything is super-sped-up, flashes of white intersperse still shots and pointlessly rotating shots. There's a sequence with a fat man trapped in a maze of razor-wire which is particularly dire. In a slower film we would be made to feel his increasingly desperate pain as he first gets little nicks and scratches and then deeper and deeper cuts. Instead, the film speeds waaay up and he bounces around the room like a pinball, pausing every so often to mug at the camera.
Speaking of reality television, I think the film indulges in a bit of finger-wagging at reality TV. The killer videotapes his killings, prompting one policeman to actually say "what, like reality TV?" I don't know what the film's complaint is exactly. It seems hypocritical to denounce reality TV for being trashy exploitation because, well, this is a film whose main selling point is its murder-puzzles. Perhaps it's hysterically claiming that reality TV is making us jaded and more brutal (again: hypocrisy)?
Anyway, the plot is ridiculous. Much character-building happens in short hand. Tucking his daughter in to bed, the doctor's beeper goes off. "I hate that thing..." murmurs the little girl. Even in the face of such hackneyed indications of bad parenthood, the doctor still rushes off to work. Oh, 80s businessman! Will you ever learn? His wife then opens the very next scene with "How can you walk through life pretending that you're happy?" What the hell kind of question is that? Does she always start conversations with confrontational pieces of pop-psychiatry? "Hey, Doc! Do you hate your mother because she reminds you of me?" The plot reminds me of Korean horror. It laboriously explains everything, flashing little clues quickly by, but replaying them again during climactic montages. The film is so insecure about its own cleverness, it doesn't want you to miss a single cute call-back.
I'm grousing a lot but the film is really not that horrible. The plot is not exactly gripping but it is relatively unpredictable. The characters are weak, but their main function is to be screaming animals, so who cares? Its greatest weakness is its unoriginality. The murder-machines are fairly fun, but I can tell where they got the set-dressing (Se7en), the plot (K-horror), the editing style (reality TV.) The acting is not so good (at one point the doctor is shrieking and writhing in some kind of mental anguish. The killer's cell-phone rings. "Hallew?" he answers it) neither is the script. It's very easy to rip into this film. It might make a good party-film. It's not awful, just hysterical and, technically speaking, nothing new.
Oct 5, 2014
Berlin Alexanderplatz, Episodes 4 and 5
Episode 4, A Handful of People in the Depths of Silence:
I've changed my mind from episode 1. I no longer believe this show to be merely about a man adapting to life outside of prison. I now believe Franz to be a sort of canary in a mine shaft, reflecting the state of Germany on the eve of WW2. This explains his interest in the literal canary in the cage at the bar he frequents. The impotence of men I suppose reflects the impotence of Germany after WW1 which was neutered economically and militarily. Anyway, on to the episode.
Franz is now in a flop-house, drinking himself into oblivion. He gets a run-down of the other tenants from the busy-body owner of the liquor store where he gets beer by the pallet. This information is densely and scientifically repeated in voice-over as Franz crawls and stumbles around his apartment in a drunken stupor. One of the neighbors is a lawyer and his dictations form another wall of impenetrable jargon (true to the sex theme, the lawyer's dictation concerns the personal culpability of someone who contracts an STI.) This episode's plot metaphorically reflects the economic woes of Germany. Several times Franz defends his drinking by pointing out that there is no work to be had anyway. Franz's physical sickness directly results from Berlin's economic sickness. Indeed, the entire episode has a grim atmosphere of addiction and sickness.
This episode is also very fixated with religion. Franz's drunken antics attract the attention of a neighboring doctor whose rope-belt and thick overcoat makes him look strikingly like a monk. His cigar acts as a censer. He teasingly asks Franz if he would first accept help from God, who would want to posses him, or from Satan, who would merely want to be repayed. This is meant to imply that he is actually the devil in disguise (and perhaps is also intended to evoke the anti-semitic image of the Jewish money-lender?) He refers to Franz as Job. At one point, Franz mistakes a working man for a priest and begs him for salvation. This brings us back to the economic theme: Franz's delirious begging for spiritual salvation mirrors a Berlin begging for financial salvation from the proletariat.
In keeping with the religion theme, there is a very strange interlude about animal slaughter. A montage of photographs of animal slaughter (mostly horses being struck with sledgehammers, in keeping with the period) plays over narration about how the animal seems to accept its death when it sees the killing floor. Then an old man with white goat-hair glued to his body slaughters a sheep in a white room. He then does some bookkeeping (again, banking?) at a lectern while the sheep bleeds out in the background. "Five times thirteen is sixty-five" he says. Earlier, Franz had said "two and two is four" in his delirious ravings. Is this goat-man some supernatural being, operating on a plane as high above Franz as multiplication is above addition? Is this the devil leading the populace to the slaughter via the account-book? A very incongruously Jodorowsky-ian moment which I enjoyed but do not know what to make of.
Female infidelity is becoming a full-blown theme by now. We hear that one of the tenants, a waiter, recently broke up with his wife for cheating on him. His new wife still cheats on him, but is too smart to be caught. Franz originally went to jail, recall, for beating up his girlfriend, Ida, for cheating on him. In the previous episode his new girlfriend, Lina, hooks up with his friend Meck. This may tie into the male-impotence/sex theme, or may be an extension of it. In this episode, Eva visits him, offering to save him by letting him be her pimp (she is a prostitute.) Lina had offered the same last episode. Franz refuses Eva's offer as he had Lina's.
Anyway, Franz regains his sobriety. He then chats with the pornography-selling newspaperman who reveals he has had one of his testicles removed. Franz gloomily predicts the other will follow, really hammering on the male-impotence thing. He then reunites with Meck, who has begun selling clothing. Franz asks Meck where he gets his clothing and Meck hastily shushes him. The episode ends with a close-up of a newspaper condemning Carl Von Ossietzky in an ominous herald of things to come.
Episode 5, A Reaper with the Power of Our Lord:
Boy, these titles keep getting cheerier and cheerier, huh? This episode is an almost funny one. It opens with all of Franz's friends joining a fruit-selling operation. Franz, true to his canary-status, decides to stick with selling newspapers. Eva pays him a visit and Franz immediately bites her. He then meets up with an aristocratic-looking man who is a serial womanizer. The womanizer strikes a bargain with Franz that Franz will "steal" old girlfriends away from him and keep them for himself. A parade of women are passed around like bad Christmas presents and the idea would be funny if it were a Seinfeld episode but instead we overlay the proceedings with an extremely ominous piano score, rendering everything bleak and mournful. If you think about it, the scenario is fairly cruel to the women. I supposed this episode would herald a slide back to pimp-hood for Franz (precipitated by the initial visit from Eva.) By the end of the episode however, Franz has grown sick of the game, and apart from a new girlfriend (Cilly,) I doubt there will be any lasting effects.
There's a bit more religion here, although a much smaller amount than in the last episode. The womanizer, wracked with despondency over his empty, hedonistic life, attends a salvation army meeting but is scared off just at the point of public repentance by an ill-timed hymn. Like I say, kind of a funny episode. He talks to Franz about death and sex and seems unhappy about both. I'll have to keep an eye out for religious themes in future.
I think I was worn out by the previous episode once again. I suspect there may be some theme-reinforcing which could be done here with regards to the infidelity of women. Franz traps the cast-off girlfriends by seducing them. this leaves the womanizer free to refuse to see them because, after all, they have now cheated on him. This doesn't fit into any narrative I'm constructing yet however, so we'll have to table that observation for now. Perhaps I've hit another dead-end? This show is supposed to be a 14-part film. It's difficult to analyze such a behemoth piece-meal. I write so much for these episodes because I feel I have to include all of my abortive half-guesses as well as the accurate observations. Oh well. Very exciting!
I've changed my mind from episode 1. I no longer believe this show to be merely about a man adapting to life outside of prison. I now believe Franz to be a sort of canary in a mine shaft, reflecting the state of Germany on the eve of WW2. This explains his interest in the literal canary in the cage at the bar he frequents. The impotence of men I suppose reflects the impotence of Germany after WW1 which was neutered economically and militarily. Anyway, on to the episode.
Franz is now in a flop-house, drinking himself into oblivion. He gets a run-down of the other tenants from the busy-body owner of the liquor store where he gets beer by the pallet. This information is densely and scientifically repeated in voice-over as Franz crawls and stumbles around his apartment in a drunken stupor. One of the neighbors is a lawyer and his dictations form another wall of impenetrable jargon (true to the sex theme, the lawyer's dictation concerns the personal culpability of someone who contracts an STI.) This episode's plot metaphorically reflects the economic woes of Germany. Several times Franz defends his drinking by pointing out that there is no work to be had anyway. Franz's physical sickness directly results from Berlin's economic sickness. Indeed, the entire episode has a grim atmosphere of addiction and sickness.
This episode is also very fixated with religion. Franz's drunken antics attract the attention of a neighboring doctor whose rope-belt and thick overcoat makes him look strikingly like a monk. His cigar acts as a censer. He teasingly asks Franz if he would first accept help from God, who would want to posses him, or from Satan, who would merely want to be repayed. This is meant to imply that he is actually the devil in disguise (and perhaps is also intended to evoke the anti-semitic image of the Jewish money-lender?) He refers to Franz as Job. At one point, Franz mistakes a working man for a priest and begs him for salvation. This brings us back to the economic theme: Franz's delirious begging for spiritual salvation mirrors a Berlin begging for financial salvation from the proletariat.
In keeping with the religion theme, there is a very strange interlude about animal slaughter. A montage of photographs of animal slaughter (mostly horses being struck with sledgehammers, in keeping with the period) plays over narration about how the animal seems to accept its death when it sees the killing floor. Then an old man with white goat-hair glued to his body slaughters a sheep in a white room. He then does some bookkeeping (again, banking?) at a lectern while the sheep bleeds out in the background. "Five times thirteen is sixty-five" he says. Earlier, Franz had said "two and two is four" in his delirious ravings. Is this goat-man some supernatural being, operating on a plane as high above Franz as multiplication is above addition? Is this the devil leading the populace to the slaughter via the account-book? A very incongruously Jodorowsky-ian moment which I enjoyed but do not know what to make of.
Female infidelity is becoming a full-blown theme by now. We hear that one of the tenants, a waiter, recently broke up with his wife for cheating on him. His new wife still cheats on him, but is too smart to be caught. Franz originally went to jail, recall, for beating up his girlfriend, Ida, for cheating on him. In the previous episode his new girlfriend, Lina, hooks up with his friend Meck. This may tie into the male-impotence/sex theme, or may be an extension of it. In this episode, Eva visits him, offering to save him by letting him be her pimp (she is a prostitute.) Lina had offered the same last episode. Franz refuses Eva's offer as he had Lina's.
Anyway, Franz regains his sobriety. He then chats with the pornography-selling newspaperman who reveals he has had one of his testicles removed. Franz gloomily predicts the other will follow, really hammering on the male-impotence thing. He then reunites with Meck, who has begun selling clothing. Franz asks Meck where he gets his clothing and Meck hastily shushes him. The episode ends with a close-up of a newspaper condemning Carl Von Ossietzky in an ominous herald of things to come.
Episode 5, A Reaper with the Power of Our Lord:
Boy, these titles keep getting cheerier and cheerier, huh? This episode is an almost funny one. It opens with all of Franz's friends joining a fruit-selling operation. Franz, true to his canary-status, decides to stick with selling newspapers. Eva pays him a visit and Franz immediately bites her. He then meets up with an aristocratic-looking man who is a serial womanizer. The womanizer strikes a bargain with Franz that Franz will "steal" old girlfriends away from him and keep them for himself. A parade of women are passed around like bad Christmas presents and the idea would be funny if it were a Seinfeld episode but instead we overlay the proceedings with an extremely ominous piano score, rendering everything bleak and mournful. If you think about it, the scenario is fairly cruel to the women. I supposed this episode would herald a slide back to pimp-hood for Franz (precipitated by the initial visit from Eva.) By the end of the episode however, Franz has grown sick of the game, and apart from a new girlfriend (Cilly,) I doubt there will be any lasting effects.
There's a bit more religion here, although a much smaller amount than in the last episode. The womanizer, wracked with despondency over his empty, hedonistic life, attends a salvation army meeting but is scared off just at the point of public repentance by an ill-timed hymn. Like I say, kind of a funny episode. He talks to Franz about death and sex and seems unhappy about both. I'll have to keep an eye out for religious themes in future.
I think I was worn out by the previous episode once again. I suspect there may be some theme-reinforcing which could be done here with regards to the infidelity of women. Franz traps the cast-off girlfriends by seducing them. this leaves the womanizer free to refuse to see them because, after all, they have now cheated on him. This doesn't fit into any narrative I'm constructing yet however, so we'll have to table that observation for now. Perhaps I've hit another dead-end? This show is supposed to be a 14-part film. It's difficult to analyze such a behemoth piece-meal. I write so much for these episodes because I feel I have to include all of my abortive half-guesses as well as the accurate observations. Oh well. Very exciting!
Oct 4, 2014
Terminator Salvation
Saw Terminator Salvation. It was pretty silly. It follows the adventures of John Conner & co in the future, where they have to fight terminators of all kinds. There's a much higher element of survivalism in this one. It also therefore has the associated social paranoia. A few times, it is the humans who are the biggest threat to our heroes. It's fairly self-serious and dour but such is the style of modern action films. The film indulges in a bit of that horrible macho posturing which I hate. The rebel command, for example, establishes its friction with John Conner by pointing a gun at his head for no obvious reason and saying "are we on the same page?" John Conner slowly turns to look down the gun-barrel and says "yeah." I wish he had said "Same page? We're on the same book! <awkward pause> I... I don't know. It sounded cooler in my head. Er... look, can we get on with the meeting?" Really, what kind of rebel alliance are they running here anyway?
The film itself has a lot of fight scenes, endlessly struggling back and forth. There's a fight with a four-story-high terminator which was pretty sweet. I wish they had crawled up him ala Shadow of the Colossus, but I guess you can't have everything. There's some scenes where humans are rounded up by Skynet (for obscure reasons) which evoke the cattle-cars of the holocaust a bit. I don't know why the film evokes the cattle-cars here, I think just to reenforce that this is bad, what's going on here.
I don't know. I didn't like it. I think I let the grim/macho tone spoil it for me. It's really just an action/sci-fi with neat and dumb parts. The characters are thin and its plot is disjointed, but the point is the butt-kicking and the explosions, and those are nice, I guess. There's a great show-down scene with Skynet at least. I think I liked that scene because here, at last, was a character (Skynet) who was respected for their intelligence, instead of for their ability to start a truck or to shoot a gun. Oh well, another day, another action-movie dismissed by me.
The film itself has a lot of fight scenes, endlessly struggling back and forth. There's a fight with a four-story-high terminator which was pretty sweet. I wish they had crawled up him ala Shadow of the Colossus, but I guess you can't have everything. There's some scenes where humans are rounded up by Skynet (for obscure reasons) which evoke the cattle-cars of the holocaust a bit. I don't know why the film evokes the cattle-cars here, I think just to reenforce that this is bad, what's going on here.
I don't know. I didn't like it. I think I let the grim/macho tone spoil it for me. It's really just an action/sci-fi with neat and dumb parts. The characters are thin and its plot is disjointed, but the point is the butt-kicking and the explosions, and those are nice, I guess. There's a great show-down scene with Skynet at least. I think I liked that scene because here, at last, was a character (Skynet) who was respected for their intelligence, instead of for their ability to start a truck or to shoot a gun. Oh well, another day, another action-movie dismissed by me.
Oct 3, 2014
Eastern Promises
Saw Eastern Promises (thanks, Basil!) The film follows a nurse who takes care of the infant of a teenage mother who died in delivery. She tries to uncover the teenager's past only to find, ala Blue Velvet, that this leads down a deep and dark rabbit hole. Her only ally seems to be a chauffeur whose true motivations are muddy and mercurial indeed, even in an already shadowy world. The film was directed by Cronenberg but it's a very atypical film for him. The grotesque body horror is kept to a minimum and the strange echoes of noir are kept almost subliminal. At several points we see blood bubble out of necks and there's a finger-snipping scene early on that's fairly toe-curling, but no one, for example, peels off their own skin or anything like that.
One aspect in which this film betrays its Cronenberg-lian origins is in its obsession with the true intentions of the chauffeur. Cronberg is kind of interested in identity and where that identity gets lost, muddled, or perverted. The nurse is drawn into this nether-world but is never exactly touched by it. Her identity remains strong and true. The intentions of every other major character are made fairly plain (even though they are sometimes revealed in oblique ways.) The chauffeur, meanwhile, smilingly and smoothly keeps simultaneous lies alive and implies (but does not, mind you, actually say) much with ambiguous nods and long silences. The ideas of him that other characters have in their heads are projected onto the void that he presents to them. And perhaps, the ending slyly implies, no one is right.
This is also worth mentioning, although it is very small, but the film has a mini-theme of disrespect for the dead causing trouble. Not only do the characters say this to each other often, but the nurse is drawn in to the drama when she takes a diary off of the teenage mother's corpse. Her Russian uncle identifies this as grave-robbing. One character is killed while pissing on a man's grave. In a fight-scene, where thugs attack the chauffeur with linoleum-knives, they do that surprise-not-dead thing (twice!) Like I say, this doesn't fit with my pet-theory about identity and I therefore discard this theme as extraneous.
The film is moody and atmospheric. It plays a sort of mystery or as a subdued gangster flick. It has the usual gangster super-cool but a mystery's sense of disaster kept barely under control. A good movie.
One aspect in which this film betrays its Cronenberg-lian origins is in its obsession with the true intentions of the chauffeur. Cronberg is kind of interested in identity and where that identity gets lost, muddled, or perverted. The nurse is drawn into this nether-world but is never exactly touched by it. Her identity remains strong and true. The intentions of every other major character are made fairly plain (even though they are sometimes revealed in oblique ways.) The chauffeur, meanwhile, smilingly and smoothly keeps simultaneous lies alive and implies (but does not, mind you, actually say) much with ambiguous nods and long silences. The ideas of him that other characters have in their heads are projected onto the void that he presents to them. And perhaps, the ending slyly implies, no one is right.
This is also worth mentioning, although it is very small, but the film has a mini-theme of disrespect for the dead causing trouble. Not only do the characters say this to each other often, but the nurse is drawn in to the drama when she takes a diary off of the teenage mother's corpse. Her Russian uncle identifies this as grave-robbing. One character is killed while pissing on a man's grave. In a fight-scene, where thugs attack the chauffeur with linoleum-knives, they do that surprise-not-dead thing (twice!) Like I say, this doesn't fit with my pet-theory about identity and I therefore discard this theme as extraneous.
The film is moody and atmospheric. It plays a sort of mystery or as a subdued gangster flick. It has the usual gangster super-cool but a mystery's sense of disaster kept barely under control. A good movie.
Oct 2, 2014
Margaret
Saw Margaret, a well-written drama about a New York city highschool girl, Lisa, who plays a part in the accidental death of a stranger. She distracts a bus driver who plows into a woman crossing the street. Wracked with guilt, she lies in her police report and then, wracked with guilt about the lie, tries to make amends. Like The Graduate, this film has a great sense of the frustration of being young, unsure, and easily dismissed. Every person Lisa talks to about the event starts off the conversation with a puzzled look and "I don't understand." To them the matter is done with, but to Lisa her guilt, and her inability to "fix" her guilt, is a reflection of a major flaw in the universe. Throughout the film she is slowly but surely disabused of the notion of a just universe.
The film is preoccupied with idealism versus pragmatism and with justice and guilt. Side-characters in the highschool passionately argue Israel vs Palestine, 9/11, and, broadly, the justice of the world. One boy, for example, cannot believe that Shakespeare's quote "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods." is supposed to convey the unknowable cruelty of life. He balks at the notion of cruel gods and falls back on a "mysterious ways" argument, claiming that this is what Shakespeare really intended. He is wrong but, typically for this movie, the teacher throws his authority around and strong-arms him into silence. Lisa turns to look at the boy, but what she sees when she looks at him at that point is not known.
Lisa meets the bus driver to see if maybe he's just such a nice guy that her initial lie to save his job is made okay in some sense. She discovers he's completely self-deceiving about the incident, claiming to remember exactly nothing about the incident except what's in the police report. She also attends the funeral of the victim and befriends one of her (the victim's) friends, a woman named Emily. I liked Emily. She was feisty and sensible. Lisa tries to treat her a surrogate mother, her own mother being a slightly emotionally needy actress. Emily is willing to be kind, but is unwilling to actually be a mother to her. Once again, Lisa is on her own.
Perhaps now is a good time to point out that Lisa is a very well-drawn protagonist with flaws who makes mistakes. Some of her mistakes involve sex. She is sometimes horrible to people and sometimes people are horrible to her. This is the kind of cocktail of moral ambiguity which drives many viewers insane, trying desperately to figure out if the character is fundamentally Good or Bad. Do not fall into this trap. It runs counter to the entire thesis of the film.
The film is a tour-de-force of acting. There are many quiet conversations with undertones conveyed in glances and pauses. There are also glorious melt-down scenes and mighty arguments where fundamental truths are declaimed ("You don't care more, you care more easily! There's a difference!") The film is mostly character driven which, if you're not attentive, leads to some confusion about motivations and agendas (see the end of the second paragraph above,) but this is almost thematic. The film is fundamentally about how the world is a confusing and very busy place and that merely communicating what's going on inside of our heads is almost impossible in a day-to-day sense. It is little wonder that justice is not done in this world, for it is almost all we can do to convey that an injustice has occurred. The film ends with Lisa at the opera, sobbing as she realizes that the simple world of the opera and of her ideals will never be real life, and that the beauty of the opera is a lie.
The film is preoccupied with idealism versus pragmatism and with justice and guilt. Side-characters in the highschool passionately argue Israel vs Palestine, 9/11, and, broadly, the justice of the world. One boy, for example, cannot believe that Shakespeare's quote "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods." is supposed to convey the unknowable cruelty of life. He balks at the notion of cruel gods and falls back on a "mysterious ways" argument, claiming that this is what Shakespeare really intended. He is wrong but, typically for this movie, the teacher throws his authority around and strong-arms him into silence. Lisa turns to look at the boy, but what she sees when she looks at him at that point is not known.
Lisa meets the bus driver to see if maybe he's just such a nice guy that her initial lie to save his job is made okay in some sense. She discovers he's completely self-deceiving about the incident, claiming to remember exactly nothing about the incident except what's in the police report. She also attends the funeral of the victim and befriends one of her (the victim's) friends, a woman named Emily. I liked Emily. She was feisty and sensible. Lisa tries to treat her a surrogate mother, her own mother being a slightly emotionally needy actress. Emily is willing to be kind, but is unwilling to actually be a mother to her. Once again, Lisa is on her own.
Perhaps now is a good time to point out that Lisa is a very well-drawn protagonist with flaws who makes mistakes. Some of her mistakes involve sex. She is sometimes horrible to people and sometimes people are horrible to her. This is the kind of cocktail of moral ambiguity which drives many viewers insane, trying desperately to figure out if the character is fundamentally Good or Bad. Do not fall into this trap. It runs counter to the entire thesis of the film.
The film is a tour-de-force of acting. There are many quiet conversations with undertones conveyed in glances and pauses. There are also glorious melt-down scenes and mighty arguments where fundamental truths are declaimed ("You don't care more, you care more easily! There's a difference!") The film is mostly character driven which, if you're not attentive, leads to some confusion about motivations and agendas (see the end of the second paragraph above,) but this is almost thematic. The film is fundamentally about how the world is a confusing and very busy place and that merely communicating what's going on inside of our heads is almost impossible in a day-to-day sense. It is little wonder that justice is not done in this world, for it is almost all we can do to convey that an injustice has occurred. The film ends with Lisa at the opera, sobbing as she realizes that the simple world of the opera and of her ideals will never be real life, and that the beauty of the opera is a lie.
Oct 1, 2014
Scream
Saw Scream, a fairly clever horror-deconstruction film. The film follows Sidney whose friends are being murdered by some dude in an Edvard Munch mask and whose mother was killed years ago by some other dude. Her friends are all film buffs and rattle off references to Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th, etc, etc. Sidney's high school janitor is obviously Freddy Kruger. One dude who works at an actual video store sets up the tropes that will be subverted, honored, or fulfilled. The film repeatedly sets up scenes where characters liken reality to film. Sidney's boyfriend at one point asks that they take their relationship from PG to PG-13. I really dug all of that.
Unfortunately, the film also relies on the infuriating frustration of films like Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th. All of the 30-year-old "teenagers" act like the most annoying douche-bags in the world and while teenagers are kind of snotty I remember my childhood and I and my friends were snotty in a totally different manner!! The adults are all bumbling doofuses and Sidney's so-called friends exist only to show up too late to witness anything and to be assholes to her. The film is kind of playing up the stereotypically over-sexed, eye-rolling, jerk teenager here. Several adult characters shake their heads about how desensitized "kids these days" are and indeed the kids are frequently unimaginably mean (though, true to the overarching obsession of the film, they're only repeating what they've seen on TV.) So I get that it's on purpose, but the cleverness of the conceit doesn't make the execution any more palatable. After five seconds I wanted to give all of the characters a hearty slap and as the film wore on, I quickly began rooting for whole-sale teen-massacre, ala Carrie.
It's tough to tell if this film is supposed to be a straight parody or just self-aware. There are a few jump-scares which are so patently not scary, I didn't even flinch. They've gotta be mocking the concept, right? Then again, the killer is implacable and, although he does trip more than Mike Meyers ever did, is still pretty scary. I think the film is attempting this high-wire act of simultaneously subverting and honoring slasher tropes, the way Joss Whedon likes to do (see Cabin in the Woods.) At one point a character is watching Halloween and shouts at the character to look behind her. While he's shouting, the actual killer is right behind him. Later on, other characters shout at his televised image to look behind him. The meta-level leap to imagining a killer right behind us, the viewers, is obvious. The idea is both silly and kind of unsettling. Well done. A secondary and immediately consequential theme is that of violence's effect on The Youth of today.
Sidney's boyfriend is such a film buff that he insists that reality is one big movie. Sidney, far more sensibly, insists that reality is different from a film. Sidney has also been hurt by sensationalized violence, however, as we discover. Her mother's murder was sensationalized by a Nancy-Grace-esque news-barbie (another annoying character to round out the infuriating ensemble) who bedeviled Sidney with conspiracy theories and counter-narratives. The film ultimately puts its thesis, that films don't create homicidal lunatics but they do enable them, in the mouth of the killer. This is a bit equivocal however: if you don't like that argument, just keep in mind it's source! See? You can still like the movie, now! This is Wes Craven's weakness however. He wants to make statements, but doesn't want to cause trouble. He halts halfway and says not much.
The film was very interesting. Some of the meta-level stuff about slashers is so obvious you'd have to be blind to miss it but there's subtle stuff as well and plenty of gray area to discuss. I ultimately didn't enjoy it however. The characters were just way too grating. The film is clever, but man, if I have to see that one idiot's goddamn tongue one more time!
Unfortunately, the film also relies on the infuriating frustration of films like Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th. All of the 30-year-old "teenagers" act like the most annoying douche-bags in the world and while teenagers are kind of snotty I remember my childhood and I and my friends were snotty in a totally different manner!! The adults are all bumbling doofuses and Sidney's so-called friends exist only to show up too late to witness anything and to be assholes to her. The film is kind of playing up the stereotypically over-sexed, eye-rolling, jerk teenager here. Several adult characters shake their heads about how desensitized "kids these days" are and indeed the kids are frequently unimaginably mean (though, true to the overarching obsession of the film, they're only repeating what they've seen on TV.) So I get that it's on purpose, but the cleverness of the conceit doesn't make the execution any more palatable. After five seconds I wanted to give all of the characters a hearty slap and as the film wore on, I quickly began rooting for whole-sale teen-massacre, ala Carrie.
It's tough to tell if this film is supposed to be a straight parody or just self-aware. There are a few jump-scares which are so patently not scary, I didn't even flinch. They've gotta be mocking the concept, right? Then again, the killer is implacable and, although he does trip more than Mike Meyers ever did, is still pretty scary. I think the film is attempting this high-wire act of simultaneously subverting and honoring slasher tropes, the way Joss Whedon likes to do (see Cabin in the Woods.) At one point a character is watching Halloween and shouts at the character to look behind her. While he's shouting, the actual killer is right behind him. Later on, other characters shout at his televised image to look behind him. The meta-level leap to imagining a killer right behind us, the viewers, is obvious. The idea is both silly and kind of unsettling. Well done. A secondary and immediately consequential theme is that of violence's effect on The Youth of today.
Sidney's boyfriend is such a film buff that he insists that reality is one big movie. Sidney, far more sensibly, insists that reality is different from a film. Sidney has also been hurt by sensationalized violence, however, as we discover. Her mother's murder was sensationalized by a Nancy-Grace-esque news-barbie (another annoying character to round out the infuriating ensemble) who bedeviled Sidney with conspiracy theories and counter-narratives. The film ultimately puts its thesis, that films don't create homicidal lunatics but they do enable them, in the mouth of the killer. This is a bit equivocal however: if you don't like that argument, just keep in mind it's source! See? You can still like the movie, now! This is Wes Craven's weakness however. He wants to make statements, but doesn't want to cause trouble. He halts halfway and says not much.
The film was very interesting. Some of the meta-level stuff about slashers is so obvious you'd have to be blind to miss it but there's subtle stuff as well and plenty of gray area to discuss. I ultimately didn't enjoy it however. The characters were just way too grating. The film is clever, but man, if I have to see that one idiot's goddamn tongue one more time!
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