The Magic Christian

Saw The Magic Christian (thanks, Basil!) It was an extremely British comedy from the late 60s. It shares the sensibilities that shaped much of the material of Monty Python and indeed much of the 60s: a strongly anarchic disregard for respectability and for capitalism in general. The comedy is broad with an actually cruel undercurrent. This sort of satire is both biting and completely unsubtle. One of the characters, for example, is named "Laurence Faggot."

The film follows a rich man who adopts a homeless guy to be his son. They then travel to art galleries, high-end restaurants, rowing competitions, and various other hang-outs of the overly-monied. There they bribe their way into all kinds of practical jokes. A meter-maid is payed £500 to eat the ticket he wrote out for them. At the art gallery, they buy a portrait and then cut out the nose of the subject with a pair of scissors. The useage of money to tweak the nose of the monied is funny and cruel. Many of the jokes are pretty good but they all have this undercurrent of seething scorn and cruelty. The humour left me a bit nonplussed sometimes, as when they spend ten minutes or so bombing toy churches, but other times there were subtleties which I really enjoyed.

At one point they walk by a pool. The extras are all beautiful men and women, lounging around in small swim suits and tossing beach balls. There is also a bald, hairy, fat man off in the corner who is desperately trying to scrabble up on top of an inflatable shark. I thought the incongruity was pretty funny. Also I enjoyed when they call an airstrike on a pheasant (which is far less subtle, but also very anarchic and fun.) The film exhibits the early fascination with unbridled chaos that would eventually give rise to free-wheeling, good-natured, nonsense-fests like the Troma films.

The talent on display here is also quite varied: Peter Sellers (with an extremely variable accent) is the rich guy, Ringo Star is the homeless dude, and John Cleese and Graham Chapman guest-star and co-wrote (indeed, I wonder how many of the (mostly harmless) gay jokes came from Chapman.) Apparently John Lennon and Yoko Ono were peripherally attached (which further illustrates/explains the strong anti-capitalist thing.) The ending contains a brief reference to Battleship Potemkin, as a horde of men in suits rush down a flight of stairs, hurrying to fish pound-notes out of a vat of animal blood. This ending typifies the mixture of obvious satire and genuinely high-brow reference in the film. An odd movie, I'm not really sure I liked it totally but it was certainly unlike anything I've seen in a while.

Winnie the Pooh (2011)

Saw the 2011 version of Winnie the Pooh. It's fairly winning. It follows Pooh as he tries to get his hands on another hit of honey. Eeyore is missing his tail and the animals are hunting for Christopher Robin who has abandoned them for reasons unknown. The film is very much a kid's film with everyone generally smiling, virtually nothing scary at all, and a plot that sort of wanders from thing to thing, not so much unveiling a plot as stringing events together like beads on a string.

It contains some very hip references for the adults (Craig Ferguson and Zooey Deschanel have guest-songs, for example) and some tame snark (at one point Christopher actually says "Ooo-kay." It's an ironic response which slightly surprised me.) There's also ample opportunity for grumpy adult snark. Christopher's abandonment of the stuffed animals, for example, suggests the inevitable coming of young-adulthood. Most obviously, Eeyore seems to be suffering through some cotton-stuffed hell where even suicide is denied him. Many times I wanted to crack a wry joke just to diffuse the wholesome sweetness of it all. And the film obligingly hangs some fruit low for me to lay in to. Good for it.

The film is really quite pleasant. In an era of children's entertainment which is sharp, biting, hip, and ironic, this mellow little film stands out as an oasis of quiet. I'm sure it would become like nails on a chalkboard after the twentieth viewing, but the first time around it's sweet. There's also a world-of-honey fantasy sequence which is pretty great. The animators put a good deal of effort into getting the dripping, beautiful, golden honey just right. That's pretty awesome and the effect is pretty fun.

This is essentially a harmless film. It knows it, I know it, you know it. It's charming the way a nice thick sweater is charming. A comfy-core film.

Sakebi

Saw Sakebi (AKA Retribution) It was a fairly low-key japanese horror. It's one of those police procedurals/ghost stories. It's creepy rather than outright scary, using Lynchian ominous rumbles and weird, deliberate visuals. The plot follows a police investigation of a woman's body sound in an empty lot, her head submerged in a puddle of seawater. Things get creepy when all signs point to the protagonist detective as the primary suspect. He finds a button from his coat on the scene and has vague and ominous dreams. Meanwhile earthquakes keep happening, threatening at any moment to obliterate the past, precious domain of ghost stories.

The fragile nature of the past is a central theme. Not only is the mysterious woman's body found in an empty lot but this empty lot is going to be a brand new condo development soon. The detective himself is playing his part in erasing the past and in re-killing the murder victim. When the ghosts show up, they are old friends.

The film is very gentle, using unease instead of shock. Until I picked up on the whole ghost = past symbolism, the story struck me as quite arbitrary. When it came out who the woman was and why the ghost was hanging around, it seemed completely ad-hoc to me. I mean, for example, there's a sanitarium introduced but it may as well have been a boarding-house, an abandoned jail, a hospital. Unless I missed it, there's nothing in the plot tying the ghost to mental illness. It's an interesting film in spite of its (seemingly) random plot. The ghost's visuals alone were worth the time for me. A sleepy little creepy movie.

Diary of a Country Priest

Saw Diary of a Country Priest, a film about an effete young priest's relationship with his faith. He starts off full of zeal in a small country parish. Soon however he becomes embroiled in the domestic affairs of the local rich-guy and converts his invalid wife just before she dies. He convinces her to stop her eternal mourning of her dead son as this is transparent idolatry. She casts his portrait into the fire. Soon locals are murmuring that his cruel uncompromising approach resulted in her death. This version of events is made stronger by a cruel little girl who saw parts of the showdown. Soon the priest is openly reviled by the populace, a martyr to his beliefs.

However, there is a subtle (possibly imaginary!) counter-narrative going on: all of this is reported by the diary of the priest. He quickly establishes himself as an unreliable narrator. Sections of his diary are blotted out, censored, and rewritten. At one point he narrates that he fell instantly to sleep while we see him blinking up at the ceiling, eyes wide open. In the first few scenes, he reports that he eats only bread soaked in sweetened wine. This obviously religious diet struck me as overzealous and mad. He reports that he's often light-headed and it is little wonder. His zeal, we see, is the cause of his weakness. At one point he visits an older, wiser neighboring priest who is hale and fat. His pragmatic wisdom lacks the fiery passion of the young priest, but at least it is not killing him.

The protagonist swoops about in a black cape, mooning and swooning like a Lovecraft hero. He seems to be able to communicate best with the local teenage girls. During his showdown with the invalid wife, he narrates (via the diary) that she was terrifying and "imperious," that he was backed against a wall, leaning on it for support. He consistently reports himself as being weak, trembling, faint, as though he could buy the moral high-ground with his health. He clearly seeking martyrdom of some kind. When the inevitable victimization comes, he does not say one word in his own defense. He is working through some kind of intense religious mania and unfortunately he's doing it alone, in the country, surrounded by people who are completely nonplussed by his theatrics.

However, all of this could be imaginary. I may be reading too much into mere bread and wine. The overt storyline of the priest's and the counter-plot which is only hinted at flicker back and forth like an optical illusion. I found the film fairly morbid. The intrigue really comes down to what we think of the priest. Do we buy his version of saintly martyrdom at the hands of small minds, or do we side with the locals, marvelling at his self-serving illusions? It's interesting stuff. Not terribly entertaining (there's no car-chases and not a single boob to be seen) but it's sort of chilly-ly fascinating.

Dead End Drive-In

Saw Dead End Drive-In, a gloriously 80s film. It's set at some point in the future when some kind of series of calamities has left the world in some kind of depressed, messy state, with graffiti everywhere and random small fires also quite common. It's a very 80s apocalypse. Anyway, after a bit of world-building, the plot follows Crab and his girlfriend who go to a drive-in and become trapped there. The gates of the drive-in are locked an electrified. There are many others there but they spend their time in petty factionalism or in complacently watching films. The film is pretty obviously a metaphor for how we are happily trapped in our own system.

So, the film is a sort of fable. As such, it requires various characters to behave a little stupidly: Crab's girlfriend immediately feels like the drive-in in home. When Crab is beginning to get scared that they'll never escape, he rejects her advances. She accuses him of not loving her anymore. When he talks about leaving, she sulks about them being together. She identifies so strongly with what is transparently an awful prison that she can't even conceive of leaving it. There's also a gang of jerks who are the main antagonists. At one point Crab pleads with them to help him escape. They reveal that in their old lives they were unemployed and starving. Even a prison, they argue, is preferable. They have a point.

The film is fairly clever. It's very proud of its cleverness and makes all the symbolism pretty explicit. I'm grateful for this because by making it obvious, at least I'm sure of picking up on it. There's also tons and tons of music-video-tier outrageous costumes and makeup. There's one scene where the prison guards pick up a prostitute. She's wearing functioning headlights over her tits. The aesthetic is so punk-80s it's amazing. It's very excessive and very delightful.

I liked this film. It's central message is very spelled-out, but this doesn't detract from the action. The sets and characters are wonderfully freaky and hilarious. This movie is kind of a romp. It's not very subtle in any way, but its excesses are delightful to behold. As one character puts it "you'd better think about that, because I will by god-zilla!" Delightful.

Ocean's Thirteen

Saw Ocean's Thirteen (thanks, Paul!) It was another heist film, fresh off the assembly line. The ensemble stalks around quipping and smirking and wearing sunglasses. The crosses are doubled, the security system is custom, the explosives are plastic, and the motivations are perfunctory. The film starts essentially in medias res, with the heist not even being introduced. We're just in the middle of the planning stages. It hardly matters what the heist is, of course, only that it exists. The cast has lost both girlfriends from the previous film but gained the cat-burglar and the villain from the first film who is now a kind-of-good guy. The film is a frothy, popcorny jaunt not meant to be taken seriously.

I'm getting pretty bored of the series by now which is lucky because it's over now. The films are essentially wish-fulfilment fantasies. The smart, cool guys who care deeply about handshakes and liquor and suits walk around and effortlessly outsmart the grim supercomputers and statistical models and all of the other symbols for the machinery which rules our lives. The wish being fulfilled here is the same as the one fulfilled when the rebels overthrow the cruel dictator: that we need not live our lives in this system. This dream has only become stronger in this modern age, when more and more is becoming remote and unreal. Indeed, dystopian films have become quite popular recently.

The film is not bad. Everyone is sort of on auto-pilot. The characters are all quip-delivery systems and therefore the actors don't have to do anything beyond affecting a detached, deadpan manner. The writer must have had fun but, again, beyond excessive over-complication, there's not much clever going on here. It's not bad, again, just bland-feeling.

Tuesday After Christmas

Saw Tuesday After Christmas, a Romanian drama about a man and a woman and another woman. The film opens with the man and the other woman rolling about in bed, adorably teasing each other and talking amiably about what to buy the man's wife. Ah, I thought at that point, this is one of those oh-so-sophisticated films where the man+wife+otherWife arrangement is made to seem easy and drama-free. Then we see the wife with the man. They are shopping and are reminding each other of various chores and duties in what seems like a perfunctory, businesslike manner. They have long conversations over banal details, of who got who what last year and when will their daughter outgrow her current obsession with the color pink.

This is the unexciting stuff that real life is made of. It's not exciting but its meaningful in its own way. We understand that the man is bored though. His wife seems severe and dowdy in her horn-rim glasses and tight bun. The mistress meanwhile is blond and young and has an apartment full of kitschy asian decoration (which is perhaps a cross-cultural joke. China has a long history of second wives, concubines, and so on. Maybe some subtle nod anyway.) She is sexually exciting but of course their home-life is completely predicated on her being the mistress. There's no talk of bills, only of perhaps thinking someday about introductions. So, this film is not about how polyamorous relationships can totally work, no really you guys! (as though this were news to anyone anymore) but rather it's about waiting for the wife to find out and seeing what she does.

The film has the beats and rhythms of a sort of mystery. An intricate web of names and personal and professional relationships is woven and it's quite hard to keep track of everyone. We don't know exactly what the wife knows or what will happen when she finds out. There are some great scenes and great speeches however and some tremendously realistic performances. The film is an acting showcase definitely. The plot is not terribly exciting but it's going for realism and humanization of everyone involved. There's no fireworks, just the tense, kitchen-sink silences that quietly change lives. As one character says near the climax: "so, everything changes." I feel if I had been in this situation before that this film would have been too real for me to handle. Also, notice how near the end of the film, the man has a long talk with the mistress about if he can throw out a coffee can. The mundane details are beginning to seep into their relationship as well. The film ends abruptly, but maybe it's just a matter of time before this all begins again.

Haute Tension

Saw Haute Tension, a clever little horror film. It follows two female students, a blonde and a brunette, who are going out to visit the brunette's family in the country. All seems nice but sure enough, a slouching fat man in an industrial jumpsuit (with a collar peeking out of the top which is indeed sky blue) and a handy straight razor comes a-calling. The blonde girl is obviously the protagonist and, seeing as we've already dispensed with the mandatory fake-out-"I totally got you!"-scares, all signs point to bog-standard, single-female-survivor-style, boiler-plate horror.

Well, almost all signs that is. At the very beginning of the movie, we are watching a dream the blonde is having where she is running through the woods, covered in cuts and blood, screaming for help. When she wakes up, she tells the brunette about it, adding that she was running from herself. The blonde has a boyish pixie cut and is revealed to be a virgin. She wields a knife and a gun in self-defense and at one point hides from the bad guy in a men's room. She seems to be coded as male (or perhaps as lesbian, though all the phallic symbols would be a really shitty way to make that connection, so probably not.) Most tellingly of all: the killer only shows up at the house while the blonde is masturbating. He rings the doorbell at the moment of orgasm. So we can definitely tell that something is seriously up very early on.

All of these phallic symbols eventually coalesce into a plot point so I'll leave it here, but the film is pretty clever. Its primary aim is to shock and terrify and it doesn't do a superlative job of that. Either I was strong or the film was weak but I didn't go scurrying to my volume knob like I usually do and I don't think I ever jumped. The tension is not particularly haute, but the film is clever and it's fairly fun watching this blonde girl squirm and writhe and try to stay alive in the face of placid, dull, implacable evil. I suspected the film was also doing something about the class struggle what with the blue-collar vs female students thing but in retrospect I think that was just me reading too much into a shirt collar.

Not a bad film, it entertains and repulses with gore rather than jumps leaving it a bit tame but very engaging none the less. The little symbolism games are fun but not particularly inspired (they tie into the plot and don't actually serve as commentary or a statement or anything transcendent like that.) Like I say, a clever little horror film.

Sans Soleil

Saw Sans Soleil, a strange and beautiful film. It is a sort-of documentary in the style of Grin Without a Cat, another haunting film directed by Chris Marker. Here, a woman reads letters from a film-maker travelling in Japan. His discursive, complex letters deal with the best and deepest obsessions of film: images, fascination, memory, experience. He includes a bewildering variety of images and ideas, ranging from Japanese youth culture to Hitchcock's Vertigo in a holistic, inclusive way. As opposed to yesterday's film (Strange Days) where complexity was used aggressively, to bewilder and confuse, here it is used poetically and lyrically. Rather than grating, the contrast is harmonious. The filmmaker is trying to communicate to us in a frank and straightforward way about ideas he is actively struggling with.

This film was amazing. It tips its hand fairly early on that this is a capital-A Art film when it fills the soundtrack with incongruous bleeping computer noises. I found this a bit annoying but it's a necessary signal to bail now if you're gonna bail. The rest of the film is much more straightforward, mostly spent simply marvelling (in a respectful way) at the alien weirdness of Japan. Some of this is by-now familiar (such as the overabundance of manga and anime and the strange youth subcultures) but there's also fresh curiosities, such as a department store which is holding up JFK as a style icon. His speeches are sung by a choir as an animatronic puppet Kennedy mouths along. Weird...

But don't get the wrong impression: the whole marvelling-at-Japan thing is completely set dressing for the dazzling connections and mediations in the narration. The attack on Pearl Harbor is connected with a cat-shrine via the film Apocalypse Now. Hitchcock's Vertigo is said to be about the impossibility of film to capture what's truly there. War and death are coins in a fountain. Heady stuff! Thinking back on it, it's not the most concrete of stuff, but it's beautiful and poetic and lovely. Like Baraka and the Qatsi films, this is not the most gripping film. You're not on the edge of your seat, but neither are you supposed to be. You are meant to be intrigued and delighted and I certainly was.

Strange Days

Saw Strange Days. It was one of those messy films with way too much going on. I'm almost positive it started off life as a comic book. The first few scenes are really aggressively over-stuffed. The protagonist drives his car down a city street as he flips through the radio. The camera pans giddily over two hookers beating up a man in a santa suit, cops kicking over a homeless person's cart, a flaming car. A blare of electronica cuts off a newscaster's voice. Yes, ladies and gents, the future is now and it's a whole lot of obnoxious bullshit.

The film is built upon a skeleton which is essentially noir. The ex-cop protagonist still pines for his ex-girlfriend who is a hooker with (of course) a heart of gold. He teams up with his trusty black female side-kick to figure out who's killed some other hooker-friend of his ex's. That's the core of the film. Around that, we're also in the future. A new type of media now exists that lets you record and play people's experiences. This is entirely unnecessary and pointless but sort of fun. Also: there's a race war of some kind brewing. This is the film's stab at cultural relevance I guess and it sort of sputters.

The film isn't bad, just empty. It's kind of a party of a movie, always something going on. The thing which is going on is usually kind of dumb and loud, but it's entertaining and mesmerizing so okay. the race-relations thing is kind of interesting but I don't really think it becomes coherent enough to really go anywhere. This incoherence is typified by the protagonist's ambiguous relationship with his side-kick. They establish that he's still pining for his hooker-girlfriend but then the sidekick gives him back-rubs as he falls asleep with his head on her lap. Odd. She'll bail him out of bad situation while incandescently cursing him out but then, not one scene later, she's back to bail him out all over again. Why is she hanging around this dude? There's a romantic vibe between them, but then he's banging on about his girlfriend again and it makes no sense.

Anyway, I'm being kind of dismissive but this is a pretty entertaining film. It's sort of barely on the cusp of being a really dazzling film though which is frustrating. At heart, like I say, it's a noir. There's cyber-punk trappings to keep us interested but the slowly unravelling mystery is what really keeps us watching. This is very high-quality popcorn fare.

Highlander

Saw Highlander (thanks, Basil!) Well, I was just complaining about pretentious navel-gazing in the last review so it's fitting that this film be one the most bombastic, ridiculous pieces of 80s excess I've seen in a long time. The plot is familiar but here it is again: for no very well explained reason there are immortal people who roam the world battling each other and absorbing the life-force (or something) of their foes. On the arbitrary date of 1986 they must finally battle it out on the rooftops of New York City and determine a winner. In one corner is a floppy-haired Scottish dude who sounds like Peter Lorre and in the other corner is an industrial-goth-y Russian dude who sounds like a werewolf (he's the evil one btw. The black leather is a dead giveaway.)

Most of the film is concerned with mapping out this mythology and with the mechanics of exactly how immortal people could exist in present-day society. All that is very fun and interesting. On top of that is a thick layer of 80s hair-metal, neon lighting, fog machines, cartoon special-effects, pointless lightning storms, and a soundtrack exclusively composed of music by Queen. It's glorious 80s trash all the way, baby! The film is tremendous fun.

I found the fight sequences most interesting. They predate the now-ubiquitous wire-fu and shaky-cam and instead are lumbering, clumsy-looking affairs with giant swords being swung around like axes or baseball bats. Also not to be missed is the roulette-wheel of accents on display! Sean Connery makes an appearance as a Spanish/Egyptian dude with a trade-mark, thick, Scottish accent. The protagonist is supposed to actually be Scottish but is unplaceable (his native tongue is German if imdb is to be trusted. Why didn't they just make his character german??) (Edit: apparently that was on purpose.)Crazy accents everywhere!

The film is really brainless fun. It was precisely what I was looking for. Full of interesting but irrelevant ideas it catches the imagination and dazzles the senses. It does not engage our brains or our hearts so much, but it's not repulsively brain/heart-less either so ok. A fun movie.

Rubber

Saw Rubber, the film about a tire that somehow comes to life and can explode people's heads. I didn't really like it. It starts off with a speech (which is repeated during the credits) about how entertainment is inherently meaningless and that furthermore life is inherently meaningless. It follows of course that this film is also going to be self-satisfied-ly meaningless. This is not too terribly shocking. Based on the premise alone I had assumed this was going to be an empty romp of weirdness and spectacle, but the film explicitly explains this to an in-film audience, just in case you missed it. This is a worryingly patronizing note to start on, but okay, so we're in for meaningless entertainment. As the film wears on we find that it's lacking both meaning and entertainment, alas.

This film is fairly odd. Head-exploding aside, it's very drawn out and slow. It seems to promise spectacle but nothing too spectacular happens. It's more content to futz about with fourth-wall breaking and obvious commentary on entertainment. It has an irascible entertainer's hatred of the audience, so the perverse lack of bells and whistles makes thematic sense, though it doesn't make it any easier to sit through. It has the feel of an improv skit gone on too long. There are long pauses, illogical shortcuts, a mounting feeling of frustration and desperation, and ultimately no real payoff. I suspect the filmmakers locked themselves in a room and would not come out until they had a script.

I found watching this film more entertaining than watching stupid action films, so it's not awful, but it's not very good either. It's too bad too because the premise seems promising (or novel, or interesting at least) but the reality is just vague, post-modern nose-tweaking. I think the tire sort of gels into a symbol for a dangerous idea by the end (hence the head-exploding and all) but as the movie emphatically states, there may be no real meaning whatsoever, so who knows? This film should have been workshopped a bit more I think.

Noroi

Saw Noroi, a Japanese horror film. I liked it. It's a found footage film, ala Blair Witch. The film follows a squashy, middle-aged paranormal investigator as he just sort of pokes around and talks to hobos and neighbors of weird people. It picks up soon after everything (of course) becomes connected and soon there are exorcisms and dead babies and all the best things. In several scenes digital corruption is used to great effect. Also like Blair Witch, this film is far more creepy than scary; more David Lynch than John Carpenter and therefore I liked it all the better.

This means that it relies on the viewer to do most of the work of actually scaring themselves however. Much is suggested and tension slowly mounts but I sort of knew nothing much would come of it. Horror aficionados be warned: there's no jumps and barely any gore at all. The tension and a sense of unease mounts however and I enjoy a queasy sense of dread much more than a sudden shock, so good. The film starts very slowly, with clips from cheaply produced TV-specials on paranormal abilities. The film uses the tacky feel of reality TV to great effect, making the genuinely paranormal look cheap and fake. Then things mount steadily until a post-credits sequence which is dynamite.

I liked many parts of the film. It's not the most original or visceral horror film (frankly, I found Weekend harder to watch,) but the lame-to-awesome ascent makes it very winning and the awesome bits are pretty sweet. A good horror for non-horror fans.

Weekend

Saw Weekend (the Godard one, not the gay one.) Well, no sooner am I whining about Godard being boring and tedious than he is taking aim square at my self-satisfied burgeoning yuppie-hood. This film stars a middle-class couple trying to get to the wife's father before he dies. This film makes the subsumed passive aggression of polite society into full-blown aggression. The film opens with them serenely regarding some road-rage taking place outside their house: two men get in a near collision. One tries to drive off, only to be stopped by the other man. They start fighting. The other man tries to get a tire-iron, but the first man's wife is faster. En route, she dumps his briefcase on the ground. The situation just escalates.

The entire film is fairly unpleasant. At last, it seems, I've found the source of studio Troma's and Harmony Korine's aggressive snottiness. Car horns are perpetually honking for the first half of the films, only to give way to the drone of airplane engines and gun-fire. The visual aesthetic is lo-fi and grungy. This mixed with increasing amounts of guerilla fighters reminds me strongly of Sleeping Dogs (which post-dates this film by a decade.) At one point violent political rhetoric is linked to pornography. This link is subversive but also apt.

The central couple are dumped on pretty hard. They're constantly revealed to be stupid, self-serving, and barbaric. They're hurrying to the wife's father, for example, only to ensure their inheritance. At one point God himself hitches a ride in their car and offers to grant them wishes. When they wish for blond hair and a fleet of bentleys, he calls them selfish and stupid before leaving them. Later on, the husband looks on, indifferently, as his wife is raped. The only time we hear the couple say "I love you" is when we are looking at a close-up shot of a skinned rabbit's face which is being soaked in waves of blood. The couple are planning a murder at the time (of course.) There's a scene where a garbage man is reading from some sociopolitical book about the inhuman barbarity of modern civilization. The bored faces of the central couple say it all.

This is a common theme in 60s/70s cinema, that of the evil-minded modern man, but this film feels definitive. It even hat-tips Luis Buñuel who would go on to produce the identically-themed Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. This is a smart, obnoxious, challenging, artful film which I'm glad I saw and do not want to have to suffer through again.

Alphaville

Saw Alphaville, a very definitive-feeling dystopia film directed by Godard. It's very boiler-plate by this point: secret agent Lemmy Caution must assassinate the scientist-leader of the computer-controlled Alphaville. This futuristic city is so emotionless that women mostly are employed as walking sex-bots (it's actually unclear if they are meant to be literally robots in fact.) The population is so thought-controlled, they refer to the dictionary as the Bible and do not know words like "conscience." They are so isolated, they refer to other cities as "galaxies." They are so backward that nodding means no and shaking one's head means yes. Sometimes the film negative is shown, the entire city is so inverted.

So, this is very visually creative, but the theme is kind of old-hat by now. It's science vs art, once more. This is silly for a few reasons, not least of which is that under a dystopia propaganda would presumably still be needed. Also, of course this was in reaction to the nukes of the 40s and 50s, when the horrified general public decided that science had evidently lost sight of it humanity. This is a recurrent issue to this day however, so I can't be too dismissive (although I really do think this is a false dilemma. Let's just work together, okay?)

The central horror of the dystopia shown here however is supposed to be its inevitability. I can kind of get behind this. I have personally given up an elements of my privacy and autonomy for the sake of convenience, so I think I would be one of the ant-people the protagonist scorns. Then again, this has nothing to do with the film.

The film is visually creative and the evil computer-mastermind is very novel (it speaks exclusively in rumbling bump-like noises. It sounds a lot like the dialogue in Papers Please.) The plot is a bit done by this point, but this film is quite early as the dystopia genre goes, so this may be the original document that everyone cribbed wildly off of. I found the film a bit boring but then I've been working my way through a list of dystopian movies and I'm also quite tired. I fear Godard is consistently getting the better of me. I find his work nigh-on impenetrable and often kind of dull. Well, let this be yet another reminder that I'm just a pretend-reviewer.

Ocean's Twelve

Saw Ocean's Twelve (thanks, Paul!) It was the sequel to the remake of Ocean's 11. This one was another foray into the land of gentleman thieves and high-wire heists. This one introduces more gleeful cliches: the secret society of master-burglars who all inexplicably know each other, the secret and significant lineages of everyone, the knock-out police-woman who is following their every saucy move. This one however is a bit inferior to the first film. It's not that it's not good, mind you, just not as good.

the introduction of a league of super-thieves sort of takes the magic out of it for me. The first film threw lingo around which suggested but, importantly, did not explicitly state the existence of this shadowy world. Explicitly spelling it out feels like showing the staircases move in Harry Potter: it's really better to imagine what it might be. I mean, either that or embrace it whole-hog ala Pirates of the Caribbean and camp it up. Anyway, the film feels too indulgent as is. There's also that Julia-Roberts-is-Julia-Roberts thing which is such low-hanging that even Family Guy took a pot-shot at it (seriously though, couldn't they just use the suspiciously-looking-like-Matt-Damon-Matt-Damon instead? Kind of a plot hole there...)

That said, it's still pretty fun. I enjoy watching cool dudes be jerks to each other and feel like, yeah, I'm one of them, without actually having to be in the same room as any of them. The heists are fun and the inevitable double-triple-crosses are cutely executed. The film sort of unfairly prevents you from figuring out what's going on ahead of time, but whatever. This is a movie for bros. Full of the signifiers of class (suits, rings, leather, poker) but with the snotty attitude of teenagers grown big. It's fun to watch as a show though.

Super

Saw Super. It was another deconstruction of the superhero genre, this also mixes the absurd fantasy of a crime-fighting man in tights with the grim reality of a pipe-wrench to the head. This is a dark comedy in the style of Taxi Driver or Leon The Professional. It stars Frank, a dude who has never gotten any respect. When his wife runs off with her drug dealer, he super-heroes up in an effort to gain control of his life and... he still doesn't get any respect. He's alternately mocked or feared by everyone. It is explicitly stated that he is a lunatic. His only ally is a girl who is somehow yet crazier than him and who regards him not as a person but as some sort of fantastic dream-come-true.

Anyway, if you can stomach the relative grimness of it, the film is pretty crowd-pleasing. It stars an ugly and crazy person who we are first made to identify with and then to marvel at, like a bug on a watch glass. This feels exploitative and caters largely to our basal instincts to leer at the outre and violent, but this is supposed to be a satire so this is par for the course. For what it's worth, I think the side-kick character is an excellent use of satire. She cackles madly as she murders people and we the audience are cackling right along with her even as we are repulsed by her madness. There's a lot of fantasy/reality clashes. At one point the protagonist's wife is told that she's just parroting what she thinks she should be saying, which she's picked up from TV shows. The protagonist's visions contain many references to TV shows he watches. Indeed, for a comic-book movie, mostly the film uses TV as a pop-culture shorthand. I suppose this is Hollywood writing what it knows.

I don't really have much to say about this film. I liked it okay. It's violent, entertaining, has some clever thoughts about superheroes, is largely condemning of the idea (I think.) It's much what I expected, so it wasn't terribly surprising, but then I also expected it to be pretty entertaining which it is, so there you are. A fun film. Not the most subtle and it is, ultimately, only about masked super-folk, so it's not like its revealing trenchant truths about the human condition, but then who expected it to anyway.

Ringu

Saw Ringu, the Japanese original that The ring was based on. It was a very faithful adaptation, it turns out. The pre-story intro has silly school-girls talking about boys and trying to scare each other. This film then introduces the main female character who is a bit of a wimp but at least is not repellent. I think in an effort to make her character "stronger," the Americans just made her "pushier." Anyway, the writing is weakened slightly by the introduction of her actually-psychic boyfriend (who was a mere AV-tech in the American version.) This allows them to extract information from fathers of spooky little children without having to do a song-and-dance interrogation and reveal. This keeps the film moving along but at the price of straining our credulity a bit.

The film is sort of a paranormal police procedural. By the end, you don't get the sense the heroes are facing down a ghost so much as closing in on a perp. There's not so much screaming as there is scouring through books in libraries. It's a nice reprieve from jumps and gore. It also has a theme of abandoned children that didn't come through as much in the remake. To say much more is to kind of give away the ending and if you have seen this film, I think you know what I mean. Anyway, it's there.

So, much easier for me to watch but this may be confirmation bias talking. I may be falling prey to fetishization of original works, but in any case I think this was the stronger Ring. Perhaps even the Ring to rule all versions of this film, and in the darkness bind them.

The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums

Saw The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, a black-n-white Japanese film about a young actor who is the son of a famous actor and is therefore constantly heaped with praise. One day a servant admits to his face that he isn't that good an actor and, blown away by this gem of candid wisdom, falls in love with her. The actor's family disapproves so they run off together to try to make it in showbiz on their own terms. It's a period piece and also a showbiz film. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes intrigue and puffed-up egos and so on, but also Shakespearean loyal servants and courtly, godlike rulers. There's an interesting mix of genres going on.

Of the story, it's very fable-like and kind of saccharine. The whole emotional core of the plot comes from the servant-girl being endlessly, endlessly self-sacrificing. The archetype of the martyr has significant traction even today, of course, but it gets wearisome by the end. The actor dude is fairly likeable and, for all its treacly goodness, the film does tug at the heartstrings so it's not bad by any means, just not very progressive. But obviously not, seeing as how it was made in the 30s. The actor also plays mostly women, so it may be that there's some intelligent gender-business going on (though I doubt it.)

Anyway, the film was most interesting to me as a sort of historical document, intermixed with . It's the 30s' take on the 19th century. I also stayed up way too late to watch this film and to write this, so I think I'm mainly addled with exhaustion right now. Also, chrome's spell-check is confusing and enraging.

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes

Saw Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the next installment in the Apes series. This one follows the events of The Escape. Dogs and Cats have died and apes have taken their place as a sort of slave-class who shops and makes beds for the humans and forth. This is a bit absurd but then again many science fiction stories about super-AI start out with them being domestic servants or toys. The ape-ish training center has rows of neat little tables, evoking the image of the registry tables from the holocaust although obviously the African slave trade is much more on the film's mind. Anyway, it's up to super-intelligent talking ape Caesar to lead the slave revolt that will ultimately result in the planet of the apes.

The film is deeply troubling. It's very much on the side of the apes and evokes the struggles of black slaves at every turn. The person who most sympathizes with the apes is a black dude. While this comparison is (perhaps) not directly made by the film, the usage of actual apes as black-people stand-ins is pretty creepy. The film is, at any rate, on their side at least, depicting the humans as unspeakably cruel and callously indifferent. We know they will overcome and are happy when they do, but again creepy race-politics rears its ugly head.

The film undercuts its own message by virtue of its established universe. We know that the ape-revolt must result in the humans being subjugated. If this is supposed to be a metaphor for the civil-rights struggle (and it clearly is,) then under scrutiny surely it becomes a warning that the black man will enslave his white oppressors. This is not exactly a popular message and it's daringly spelled out pretty explicitly in the climax. Test-audiences rebelled however and a lame-ass can't-we-all-just-get-along coda was added to the ending which is incongruously delivered against a backdrop of flames and amid close-ups on Caesar's malevolent eyes. And still, even this half measure only saves this particular film. The prequels set in the future still exist! The apes will inevitably crush the humans! We know how this will end, you guys. What message are you trying to send exactly?

Social politics aside, it's a very crowd-pleasing film so long as the message is not examined too closely. The future is fairly well-constructed. There's the fanciful ape-slave thing, but there's also geometric, concrete plazas and a perpetually black-clad citizen class, and all the trappings of a fun little dystopia (which is frankly fairly utopic for the humans (up until the end.)) Its a bit dated, what with everything looking kind of Kirk-era-Star-Trek-tier, but also a crowd pleaser. I wouldn't really recommend it. Even without the race thing, it's kind of predictable and goofy. I was never once surprised, for example. The climax is pretty great, but I had to kind of endure it up to that point.

The Relic

Saw The Relic (thanks, Basil!) It was a thriller from the 90s which was pretty good. It follows a museum where a mysterious shipment from a researcher in Brazil is causing a bit of mayhem. After a few bodies show up a detective is called on the scene. He is the foil for the attractive female evolutionary biologist who is the other main character in this film. There's a good dose of leftover-80s silliness, what with the cop being superstitious and the scientist imperiously rolling her eyes at him. There's also only two distinct classes of people: the snooty intellectuals and the hard-bitten cops. But apart from all that, the film is quite fun.

I think I was mainly just in the mood for a slightly goofy thriller, but of course to preserve my self-delusion of impartiality, I seized upon the setting as being a great selling point. The museum's back-corridors are wonderfully twisty and stuffed full of specimens and samples. The oak paneling and the mesh cages seemed very authentic and reminded me of my undergrad university and my current school with its industrial "steam tunnels."

This film is thematically concerned with the relationship between science and religious lore, this relationship literally playing out between Mrs Scientist and Mr Cop. When they inevitably team up and become friends, the film weds the "primitive peoples" hocus-pocus with the scientific hocus-pocus. Some of the science there, by the way, seems fairly plausible to me, but there were a few times I could definitely smell the bullshit (eg: they claim that individuals evolve, not populations) so I don't know how much of the techno-babble to trust. Also, a word about the cop-scientist relationship: it never blossoms into full-blown bullshit romance. It's heading there, but we are spared unnecessary smooching, for example. I think this is to remain kid-friendly, but I'm refreshed to think that a man and woman could kind of altruistically cooperate.

Anyway, the film is deeply silly but fundamentally entertaining. I've seen better but I've also seen much worse. This is definitely popcorn fare but it's good popcorn fare. If you're in the mood for mindless entertainment, this is at least not cruel or incompetent. In fact, even if you're in a hostile mood, it obligingly provides a soft underbelly to bite into. This is a congenial film.

Take Shelter

Saw Take Shelter. It followed a construction worker who is suffering from recurring nightmares. He dreams of his dog turning on him or about strangers abducting his daughter, always during a raging, apocalyptic storm. Clearly nature is being set up as the villain in this film but, as we soon find, nature is a red herring. It is human nature which is the true source of terror. The main character is struggling with some kind of mental illness. His struggle is compounded by his need to be the strong, masculine head of the family and by his embarrassment over the disease. He is mortified into silence and inaction by his fear and by his inability to separate fact from fiction. We clever viewers know that essentially he's right: there is a big storm coming and it will be the end of the world.

The film is essentially a drama, mostly following the relationship with his lamb-like wife (whose transparent vulnerability only compounds his feelings of inadequacy) but we are drawn very deeply into his fantasies. Several scenes from his dreams and from his life are as terrifying as any horror movie. With The Exorcist I love to argue that it is a better horror film before the demons show up. This entire film is like that pre-demon bit of The Exorcist. What ghost or goblin could be more horrifying than having a loved one slowly turn unpredictable and violent? What monster is worse than the betrayal of our own minds?

I really enjoyed the movie. It delivered dread and drama without the danger of jump-scares (which have essentially ruined horror films for me forever.) The characters are realistic and their struggle is portrayed without sacrificing our sympathy for either the husband or wife (although sometimes I felt like the wife was kind of asking for trouble. If your husband is having serious freak-outs, please don't ask him to attend public events, ok? Jeeze.) The film is essentially a drama with an ancillary pro-metal health message. It's very sublimated, very masculinely restrained. I dug it.