Timecrimes

Saw Timecrimes (AKA Los Cronocrimenes.) It comes from a list of horror films but is decidedly non-horrifying. There is a masked killer, but the protagonist is this shlubby, balding dude who looks constitutionally incapable of screaming and, when he is told the killer is right behind him, slowly walks away (with much backward glancing) and does not run. Like Triangle, it is very enslaved to its central conceit which is time-travel. I wonder if the filmmakers saw the success of Primer and thought they should make a slightly dumbed-down version of it with more sex and violence. (It's not necessarily a bad idea, mind you. People like to feel flattered by their own cleverness. Look at how successful Inception was.)

Anyway, the film itself is not very interesting. It has this interesting loop structure, but it's also frequently obvious what's going to happen. It has a video-game-ish feel of being predictable by virtue its own internal logic. The character often feels less like he's making decisions than ticking boxes off of his quest-log. Drive car A to point B, lock door C with key D, hiding it in location E afterward. It's sort of satisfying, but satisfying the way watching the internals of a clock is satisfying. I can dig a clockwork movie. I thought De Palma's Femme Fatale was pretty great and it indulges in many of the same shenanigans. Alas, this movie just isn't engaging (for me anyway. The usual caveats apply.)

The film is not horrendous but it is fairly dull. Watch this if you liked Primer, but want something easier as a warm-up.

The River (1951)

Saw The River, an American film set in India. The protagonists are Americans of some kind. The film is incredibly beguiling. It opens on the festival of lights and closes on the festival of colors. The meaning behind the festivals is vaguely dismissed as being "about some old battle" but then such is the indifference of the 1950s viewer (and, not to be blunt, but today's viewer as well.) Anyway, the film is one of those sincere, strident films about life going on. It's a coming of age film where the female protagonist falls in love with a wounded captain much her senior. He is introduced in voice-over by the protagonist as running away from the world. A hero whom the world has stopped caring about. This romantic description makes us pity and love him.

The protagonist vies for the captains attention, against the charms of other girls. His colossal impact on their lives and total indifference to their attention mirrors the impact and indifference of the Americans to the Indian natives. The film is not preachy about this (indeed I suspect I may have made it up) but is instead very gentle and calm. Life always moves on. The river serves as a symbol for the endless, purifying, onrushing flow of time. The film is terribly romantic and terribly sincere. It's a bit uncomfortable at parts, but is quite progressive for its time (one of the romantic rivals is actually an Indian woman. This is not treated as terribly shocking or amazing. For context, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner came out in 1967 and certainly considered itself to be edgy as fuck.) A comfy, tourist-y movie. A sweet movie.

Perfect Creature

Saw Perfect Creature. It was a vampire film that has way too much going on (much like the last vampire movie I saw, Priest.) At first this film seemed like it had a lot going on just beneath the surface. The back-story is that plagues have decimated the human population and thrust us back into a steam-dependent society (because of course it has.) Due to genetic experimentation arising from an effort to combat the plagues, vampires are created who are immune to the plagues, immortal, but also sterile, reliant on blood, and all male. They form some kind of theocratic elite, officiating over ceremonies involving their own blood and also researching microbiology. They periodically release flu vaccines derived from their blood or something to the populace.

The plot is that one of the vampires has gone crazy and started killing humans. The police-woman investigating these killings is contacted by a head vampire who begs her to keep the identity of the murderer quiet because he fears the backlash of racism (species-ism?) and prejudice against vampire-kind. Okay, I thought at this point, we've got a lot going on here right now. There's victim-hood used as a weapon by an ostensibly in-power group, there's an organized religion angle, there's vaccination-paranoia. Where's this all going? Well, nowhere it turns out. The film is clumsy but it really seems to want to portray the vamps as a kind of super-cool lower-class. The evil vampire has angry monologues about being subservient to human trash and the vamps wind up pretty much being the heroes.

The cop and the vamp team up to hunt the evil vampire (and do they fall in love? What a silly question. Of course they do.) The evil vampire tries to spread a plague around the city which results in a lengthy reenactment of the cholera outbreak in London. Progeneration and infection become major themes and plot points. It's all very accessible and very goofy. My initial interest gave way to vague amusement as I realized that this film was just mind-soothing eye-candy. It's just a collection of cool-seeming images and ideas held together by an overly detailed plot. It's the sort of film that stops the action for a moment so that one vampire can talk about his feelings for a certain lady-cop for a while, before dashing up a wall in a stunning display of vamparkour. It's complete nonsense, but then it was entertaining nonsense and I guess that's all I can really ask for from any film.

Terror Firmer

Saw Terror Firmer (thanks, Anne!) It was a long, masturbatory pat-on-the-back by the Troma crew for having brought the film The Toxic Avenger into the world. It probably would have helped if I had seen The Toxic Avenger, as I suspect there were some in-jokes I missed. I also suspect there are other in-jokes relating to Troma movies that I haven't even heard of. It follows the fictionalized production of Toxic Avenger. In this version, the production is haunted by a serial-killing woman in a black dress.

The movie has these cute meta-level jokes where they'll talk about an escalator murder in the film they're shooting, but then the woman kills a dude on an escalator for real. Also everyone involved is clearly having a great time (in the escalator murder, the guy being killed is clearly grinning with glee under all the fake blood and guts.) The film's enthusiasm is infectious, but it's also very, very self-indulgent. It's got the signature snotty obnoxiousness of most Troma films. One of the main characters falls in very wholesome and conventional love with another character. Because this is a Troma film, we know this will not end well. It's a tad predictable in its "wild creativity" sometimes but the film is disorganized enough that you will indeed not see the twists coming.

It's very punk-y and is clearly in love with the idea of staunch independence and with its own foul mouth. This manifests in a lot of sex and poop jokes (which are not, in and of themselves, particularly transgressive) and in a few speaches about the importance of independent film-making (which are instantly followed by something dismissive because the Troma films are incapable of sincerity) Although the film is dumb, its rebuttal to any criticism is obviously "Didn't like it? Film your own movie!" which I think is a pretty healthy attitude to have. We can always use more art.

That said, I didn't really like the film very much. It seemed childish and crass, not smart-dumb just dumb-dumb. I got the sense that they were making a lot of references that I didn't understand. Have you ever looked back at films you made with your friends in high school? Sure, they may look pretty cruddy now but you can still fondly remember the blast you all had making it. This film was like that. Sophomoric and not as shocking as it thinks it is, this is clearly the baby of some group of people. They obviously had tremendous fun making this, but as near as I can tell it's crap. Amusing crap.

House of Tolerance

Saw House of Tolerance, a film set in a French brothel in the 1890s. It starts off with the women dressing and then marching down a flight of stairs to the sound of a snare drum, to meet the clients. The image struck me as soldiers going off to war, but it is clear in retrospect that the director wanted to evoke a more gallows feel. The film becomes sexy and sultry with little ominous flashes of creepiness such as the gallows-marching. There's an image of a man in a mask that strongly evokes the weirdness of the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut. Disaster eventually strikes in the form of a knife-wielding client who scars a woman's face ala The Joker from Batman. Then a title-card falls and Act 2 is stagily announced.

The film then shifts into a sort of sad, tawdry feel. The sex and sexiness is still there, but the playful nature is gone, replaced by a listlessness. We get more and more shots of the girls vacantly smoking opium. The film is portraying these women as victims and though they are sexy, they are also deeply sad. The film is a bit arty and not very accessible. There's a scene near the end where they actually enact a dream that one of the women had described earlier. The non-linear shooting covers the same scenes over and over, from different angles and viewpoints. The highlight of the film, for me, and the moment when I felt closest to understanding what was going on was during a decadent showing of the woman's scars to a room full of dissipated old men and women. As they stroke her face, they kiss each other. The woman herself, painted up like a doll, rolls her head under their hands and gazes directly into the camera. Her gaze is challenging and defiant.

That scene is pretty awesome and the rest of the film, though slow and kind of glum, is also very sumptuous and intimate. We see all aspects of these women's lives, the highs and the lows. The film does feel a touch exploitative sometimes and I don't think it every really escapes that. The women are portrayed as victims but therefore also as objects to be exploited and fantasized about. It's not bad, it's just there. The film is moody and titillating (if you're into that kind of thing (which I am not)) I couldn't figure it out, so I can't speak much about its point (other than hand-wringing about exploitation.) An interesting film.

One Missed Call (2003)

Saw One Missed Call (the original, Japanese, film that is.) It was thankfully mostly jump-free. Apart from that, it was a fairly usual mix of hauntings and procedural ghost-hunting. The "monster" here is a series of chain-letter-like calls that are made from suicide victim's cellphones. Of course these suicides are supernatural and there's a big-momma-super-curse somewhere to be slain. The use of cellphones continues a rich tradition of horror mining the creeps from our new-fangled gadgets (a very refreshing change from the zombies of our past.)

This film was directed by Takashi Miike, who you may know from Ichi the Killer, or Visitor Q, or Audition, or some other extreme horror film. This is not one of those. It deals with unpleasant stuff and there's some great, gruesome special effects on display here, but nothing to compare with the rich psycho-sexual horribleness of Ichi, or the "Kiri-kiri-kiri" scene in Audition. This film is far more tame, far more straightforward. You can definitely tell that someone who knows what he's doing is behind the camera though. There's very few missteps and everything flows logically, ominously, and directly from the preceding information. There is no tedious i-dotting and t-crossing as with some horrors, and there's no pointless misdirection. If you're scared, it because of ghosts, not because of asshole teenagers.

I don't really have much to say about this film and I finished it quite late, so goodnight everyone!

Only Angels Have Wings

Saw Only Angels Have Wings, a film about fly-boys in some remote south-american country who risk their necks delivering mail. There's intrigue and romance and so on, but the film is really an exploration of nihilism. The main characters are people who risk their lives on a daily basis. One of their number dramatically and awfully dies in the first quarter of an hour and within minutes, everyone is laughing, drinking, and eating lustily. Our audience-proxy, a pretty woman fresh of the boat is shocked, but then, they can't mourn every death, now can they?

The film has a palpable sense of doom hanging over much of it. We know disaster is lurking and in any film where disaster lurks, the disaster is going to have to strike eventually or we'll feel confused and cheated. This lends a dour air to the proceedings. When the pretty woman is trying to seduce the handsome leader of the camp, her efforts seem less warm and jokey than sad and desperate. The little bits of warm-up tragedy are all the more poignant. At one point the camp leader must ground a pilot for failing his eye-test. Neither one of them really acknowledges it and both adopt a gung-ho, "well that's the way it's got to be" attitude but it is clear that the pilot's heart is breaking.

I found the film really sad. The whole point of the movie however, is that of course death can come at any moment for any of us, but instead of giving in and cringing in fear or perpetually tensing for it, we must celebrate what we have. That I allowed the inevitable sad ending to depress me and to color the proceedings is fairly ironic. I've done exactly what the film was warning against doing! The ending, by the way, is pretty melancholy, but also uplifting and pleasingly ambiguous. We are almost (but not quite) cheated of our gory end.

Although I did indeed find the film depressing, I also found it fun, cute, tense, and well-made. It's a slightly hysterical, lightly philosophical, emotional roller coaster. It's a classy old film and has a lot of goofy 50s-isms (at one point the pretty dame is wearing a bathrobe with shoulder pads. Another time she's wearing one of those trench coats with buttons sewn on right over the nips.) and a good dose of the associated super-sincerity. I'm a total sucker for that stuff though. I try to play along with films and when they're this earnest, well, how can I not get sucked right in? Fun stuff. A good old movie.

Escape From the Bronx

Saw Escape From the Bronx, a deeply silly movie. The title is a bit of tease because there's very little escaping going on. Indeed, most of the film is spent on people trying to enter the Bronx. Anyway, the film is a sequel to the Bronx Warriors and also stars that lovable rascal, Trash. He's a bit older now and less tightly clothed. Some of his background is revealed, however, when we see his parents. Their house is decorated with a painting of a muscle-man, another painting of a Siouxsie Sioux-ish-looking woman, and a giant poster of Trash sneering at the camera in a kind of cocky way, plastered on their living room wall. Perhaps this creepy familial adulation explains his preening clothing-choice and silence? Or is his silence instead caused by his obvious phonetic mastery of English?

The film starts with Trash shooting a helicopter out of the sky with a handgun. This sets up the subtle motif of exploding bullshit that the film has running through it. Many things explode when shot at: cars, people, little bricks, etc. The repeated explosions quickly move from exciting to boring to unintentionally hilarious. There's also a lot of bewilderingly bad writing (best example: No one will sit on a john... full of DYNAMITE!) Even when the wrtiing is okay, the delivery is so stilted by the Italian actors (I spent the first half hour trying to determine if it was just dubbed. I don't think it was.) There's a little boy who speaks mostly in onomatopoeia and I swear you can hear the extra u when he says "boum!" At one point the bad guy shouts "Terror... is our STRENGTH!" What?

The film is crap. It's amazingly good/bad crap. It's full of half-measures, stretched scenes, abrupt camera-changes, and fond call-backs to worst parts of the previous film (the lamé outfits make a cameo.) It's hilarious, even watched alone. Just bewilderingly stupid and awful.

Police Squad!

Saw Police Squad! (thanks, Chris!) It was a six-episode Leslie Nielsen cop comedy. Its humor was based on zany wordplay and nuttiness. There's a couple of recurring gags which give a flavor of the show's tone: Every episode opens with a guest-star... who dies as soon as they are introduced, never to be referred to again. Every episode has the protagonist cop visiting his man-on-the-street, a wizened shoe-shine boy who is always bribed into coughing up the pivotal clue. After the protagonist leaves, some other person (a doctor, a baseball player, an advice columnist) bribes him for help on their problem ("Why, I don't know nuthin' about brain surgery, mister.") During the end credits, the characters freeze-frame, but are clearly just standing still. During one of these moments, their prisoner looks around, confused, and then escapes. It's not high-brow, but it's goofy and genial.

I marathon-ed the series, somewhat unwisely. The humor really was intended to grow with repeated call-backs and as you notice the running gags, but of course all put together it's slightly exhausting. Once again, the bizarre way I watch videos gets in the way of my enjoyment. Well, it's a hard life. This isn't to imply that I didn't enjoy the series, mind you. Quite the contrary: I enjoyed the nuttiness and the goofy silliness. It's never crass, or cruel, or bitter. There's some very slightly dark humor, but it's of a very gentle, soft kind. A crying doll will be crushed, for example, crying like a baby. It's shown post-crushing, one arm coming out of its forehead. The image is a bit grotesque but only shown briefly, such is the gentility of this series.

Most of the jokes are derived from puns and wordplay but, even though I could see some of them coming, I was usually blindsided. In the last episode, a drug baron tells the cops that their car can be found at the docks. The car is shown in a doctor's office ("the doc's," get it?) There's another running joke: every time the protagonist offers someone a cigarette he says "cigarette?" And they look at it before responding "yes, I know." There's also a lot of visual gags and subverted expectations and a lot of just solid comedy. The show has a stand-up comic's sense of a good set-up rewarded with a delightful little one-liner.

So, I think I did the show a disservice with the way I consumed it, but it was fairly solid even so. It's full of goofy little gags and hilarious send-ups of the Perry-Mason-cop-show genre. This was a solid set of episodes which I enjoyed a lot.