The Descendants

Saw The Descendants, a film about a lawyer who controls the finances of his dynastic family. He lives in Hawaii and is about to make his family another small fortune via a land deal but alas, et in arcadia, his wife falls into a coma. His internal conflict between the mechanical management of the land deal and the personal angst of losing his wife is contrasted with the soulful, peaceful, timeless beauty of Hawaii. This is a film about mercy.

Pain in various forms is dealt with in various ways. Throughout, the protagonist neurotically tries to come to grips with his own emotions, usually (hilariously) looking to his teenage daughter for advice. I got the sense that he hadn't really dealt with things by the end so much as just accepted them, but in this way too life goes on. The film has a very literary feel due to its intense but oblique focus on human affairs.

The film also connects the island and the family. They are a plastic imitation of what they once were, loaded down with McDonalds' and mosquitoes, saddled with money and private educations, they are diminished but still worth something. They are also, it is pointed out, a whole which is drifting apart. In the face of this geologic timescale, what matters one life?

I feel this film got the better of me. For once I don't blame sleepiness or coffee, I think this is just above my head and dealing with emotions I haven't had to face yet. This is adult in a way that porn is not. This film is sensitive, compassionate, and ultimately very merciful.

It (1990)

Saw It, the Stephen King clown picture. It was a really really good adaptation of a Stephen King book. I used to read a lot of his stuff in high school and in this film, as with all of his books, a grand mythology is synthesized out of prosaic things. There are also the King hallmarks of lionized but troubled childhoods, and a horror writer who just happens to be the protagonist. It's not particularly scary but it is interesting and unusual.

The logic behind this film ties it together pretty well, and on paper I imagine this works really well because King is good at grounding outlandish and surreal horror with very specific and familiar details that make it seem more real. On screen, of course, it just looks ridiculous. There is a post-climax mini-climax where a grown-ass man peddles a child's bike, his knees sticking out like chicken wings. The actual climax of this film is indistinguishable from a stop-motion-powered serial from the 50s. The worst thing about this film is the endless nostalgia which the plot elevates to monster-killing mythos. This mythos is well-integrated and a really well-though-out approach to take, but it's still glorifying fond memories into something they aren't. The best thing about this film is the antagonist, Pennywise.

Pennywise is just great. He minces and roars and terrorizes everyone. He's anarchic and unstoppable and fun, damn it. I even enjoyed the "everyone floats down here!" nonsense. I may be over-thinking it here, but it somehow seemed like something an alien intelligence would fixate on. Anyway, Pennywise is the secret hero of the film, slain by the lame and villainous ponytail-sporting, leather-vest-clad, feather-haired, middle-aged, nostalgia-dunk weenies. As kids they seem understandably scared and wimpy, as adults, they just seem to constantly interrupt the flow of the film with "I just remembered!" which gets annoying quickly.

Apparently this was originally a miniseries however, which explains a lot of the uneven pacing and frequent fades-to-black just after a cliff-hanger. This mirrors King's habit of either eschewing chapters or leaving cliff-hangers at the end of each one, in the grand tradition of page-turners. Like I say, this is probably a line-for-line adaptation of the book. It really feels like I'm watching one of his books. How much you'll enjoy this film I think depends largely on how willing you are to suspend your disbelief (and your snark.) It probably works better on paper, but it's not terrible on screen.

Shoot the Piano Player

Saw Shoot the Piano Player, a French, black and white, new-wave film about a piano player whose brother is involved somehow with gangsters of robbers or something. Anyway, the piano player gets sucked into this gangster drama after the brother hides out in the piano player's bar for a bit. The piano player has a sad past of faded glory and is undergoing some subtle love affair with a waitress and in an interesting inversion of the usual formula, this romance and drama of faded glory is the focus, while the trenchcoated baddies occupy the background.

These dual pasts of a life of crime and a life of concert performances vie for screen-time via the genres of romance and thriller. Running from bad memories, the piano player is hiding from both of these past lives and spends a lot of screentime not reacting to things. The film is dryly funny in its way. At one point a girlfriend reveals she cheated on him and he just peers at her wooden-faced. Later a gangster swears on his mother's life that his tie is silk. We immediately cut over to an old woman keeling over, clutching her heart. Very silly.

This is a fairly dry film, or at least I wasn't able to engage with it. The genre-clashing games were kind of interesting and I suspect if I were more alert I would have enjoyed it better, but of course the same may be said of many films. Oh well.

Turkey Shoot

Saw Turkey Shoot, AKA Escape 2000. It shares many similarities to the Death Race films: heavy-handed allegory about oppressive society and the violent overthrow of same. This one is set in a prison camp which is hastily introduced before the plot is put into motion. The plot follows a human-hunt of the inmates by bored upper-class folk. This is clearly an absurd and surreal exaggeration of actual events, but such is the nature of satire. This one increasingly loses its sense of sardonic fun and becomes increasingly sincere, even solemnly flashing an H G Wells quote before the credits: "Revolution begins with the misfits..." dot-dot-dot indeed.

The film is fairly dour, guards sneeringly attempting to rape an inmate one moment, having their brains righteously bashed out the next. The decadent hunters are fairly fun in their despicable dissipation, the lone female especially being this great melding of murderous psychopath and blue-blooded fox-hunter. The others are variously repulsive, but of course they're the villains and are mostly in the background of our noble and personality-less leads.

Most of the film's interest anyway lies in awesome explosions of which there are many. The woman hunter, for example, uses a crossbow that shoots explosive arrows. Kick-ass am I right? Unfortunately, explosions don't do much for me. This film is pretty dour and lurid. For some reason men's groins are focussed on a lot. Several groin-kicks are had and it's suggested that the prison guards are eunuchs, which in a DeSade book might suggest a harem-esque direction, but alas this film is a fighter, not a lover. It smacks of a juvenile obsession with methods of inflicting pain. Okay, okay.

Crazy Eyes

Saw Crazy Eyes (thanks, Anne! In your recommendation you said this film was from 2013, but I could only find one from 2012. I assume it's the same film.) It follows the adventures of Zach, high-functioning alcoholic and unaccountably rich dude. He falls in lust or something with a girl named Rebecca AKA Crazy Eyes. Night after night, they get drunk together and go back to Zach's place. There he always tries to have sex with her and she always shouts "no!" until he stops trying. So, on one hand there's an explicitly rapey vibe to the whole thing, but on the other hand Crazy Eyes always happily agrees to go to the bars with him the next day, so who's to say what's going on. This is some abusive nonsense beyond my understanding.

It is very uncomfortable however seeing the two of them, drunk and nude, wrestle back and forth in bed, her whining and slurring protestations while he snorts like a bull. We also meet some supporting characters who are similarly bewildering. A douchey coke-dealer who is Zach's best friend, a lingerie designer who's interested in Zach's money, an ex-wife and mush-mouthed son. An epilogue montage of all of these characters crying suggests that this film is supposed to be some poor-man's Leaving Las Vegas, but since it focuses on the manipulative drunk (who anyway only seems interested in Ms Eyes because she won't have sex with him) I find it hard to feel very bad for anyone. I mean, there's the people Zach hurts of course, but they both don't seem very hurt and they also don't seem very nice themselves. Eyes is the nicest one of them and even she is obviously in an advanced stage of alcoholism herself.

This is kind of the flip-slide of yesterday's film, Young Adult. This time, instead of being mostly an ephemeral chick flick, it's mostly an ephemeral misery porn, and without anything new to say either. All we get is a shitty situation circling the drain. It's not being solved, but it's also not getting any worse, just dragging on and pointedly failing to resolve itself. Kind of a miss for me, alas.

Young Adult

Saw Young Adult, a sort of anti-romantic comedy. It follows the ghost-writing author of a semi-popular young adult series. She is living a life in the big city of Minneapolis that would be pretty sweet for, like, a college freshman but is kind of listless for an adult. The film drops its first notes of deadpan observational comedy in the decor of her apartment: the ubiquitous Ikea furniture, the tiny little dog, uggs, her aging and finger-smudged macbook. It's pretty funny in its perfect box-ticking. She even meets with up with a friend for starbucks who speaks to her in a bored, glottal fry.

Her obvious arrested development is underlined during the credit sequence where she drives home, rewinding a mixtape over and over again to hear the chorus of a song. She is on a mad adventure to rekindle a high-school romance with some once-football captain. The film more-or-less subverts the rom-com archetypes. There's the old love but it's not really there anymore. There's the romantic rendezvous undercut by mercenary-feeling beautification montages. There's also a pseudo-gay sidekick who was bashed for being gay but is actually straight. She's so out of his league though, she considers him essentially sexless anyway.

So, the film tries to do the high-wire act of both subverting and using the cliches of the genre and I think it more or less succeeds. It's hard for me to tell though because the film feels so ephemeral and substanceless that I frankly have a hard time focussing on it (then again, I am pretty tired right now.) I was entertained, I just don't think that I was challenged in any way. I enjoyed the experience nonetheless, but then I enjoy seeing women be cruel and vicious (in films) more than I enjoy seeing women be delightfully wooed and charmed. Here we get the protagonist calling her not-gay bestie a "piece of shit." He toasts to that. It's definitely still strongly chick-flick-flavored, but it's boozy and grumpy and at least not as cutesy-poo as most rom coms. Also, this is written by Juno-author Diablo Cody, so the writing is pretty snappy. Not a great film, it's essentially a contractually-obligated throw-away I think, but not too bad a flick for all that.

Hard Candy

Saw Hard Candy. Ellen Page stars as a very young girl who turns the tables on a pedophile who was hunting her. It's a fairly fun watch. It's essentially a protracted psychodrama, the guy playing cat-n-mouse with her but then (whah-ho!) the hunter becomes the hunted. There's times it veers into stagy proclamations and pat pop-psychology, the former from the increasingly desperate man, the latter from the always-supreme Page. On that note actually, to enjoy this film you essentially have to accept that Page not only symbolises but is the spirit of vengeance. She's more competent and capable than most adults I know.

The film is tremendous fun though. It's an evil-hearted crowd-pleaser, catering to the ugly animal instinct we share to dream up brass bulls and iron maidens. Perhaps a less morally bankrupt person would find it challenging and frankly it is rattling. I was always rooting for Page, even after was abundantly clear that she was keeping the upper hand. I kept wondering if there was going to be a sympathy switcheroo, the film suddenly focussing on the pathetic struggles of the man, but that never happened as far as I could tell. This is essentially a revenge flick. We may feel good for a while, but of course revenge solves nothing.

A guilty pleasure of a film. It's only guilty in retrospect and is very fun while it lasts.

The Passenger

Saw The Passenger. It opens with a war correspondent kicking the hell out of his car in the desert. He is futilely raging against his life in general, dissatisfied with a life of professional tourism, always moving, never belonging. He sees an opportunity when the only other occupant of a hotel (who closely resembles him) suddenly dies. The journalist assumes this man's identity and attempts to at last live the way he wants to live. However of course he has not escaped himself and soon the numbing, depressing meaningless feeling returns. He moves on and on, subconsciously seeking to outrun himself.

The film is an exploration of identity. The protagonist talks about how his identity is both unchangeable and blank. The identity he adopts, a gun-runner for African warlords, is very exciting but also one which prevents him from settling down. Of course we know both of his identities are, on paper at least, fairly rewarding and interesting: war correspondent and gun-runner? Now that's a life! But he seems bored and humiliated by the mundane details of missed appointments, hotels, and intractable interviewees who take control of the interview.

The protagonist has two very telling monologues in the film: the first is about how no matter how much he travels, he always translates the different experiences into the same set of sensations. I think this reveals that he has broadened himself to the point of dissolution. In an effort to soak up a whole world, he has lost track of who he is. The second monologue is about a blind man who has eye surgery to see again. Overcome by the mundane, everyday, drabness of the world, he retreats into his house and at last into suicide. This story mirrors our own hero's arc: he seeks his own space for introspection but cannot find anything remarkable there. This, combined with his isolation makes his depression almost inevitable. Then again, we may argue, he never really had his own space.

The movie is vague about whether he had a comfortable life before the fake death. I feel that the protagonist was really looking for something which didn't exist and which perhaps had yet to be created, slowly. His world-weariness was at odds with his genuine love of the world. He loved it, but I believe he felt like there was nothing behind his eyes, just voyeurism. A vacation from his life seemed to confirm this. A melancholy but not too depressing film. Chilly and intellectual but empathetic.

World on a Wire

Saw World on a Wire, a film originally broadcast on TV in two two-hour parts. The film opens with the head of a research project mysteriously dying. The project is a simulation of the real world inside of a fantastic super-computer. The protagonist is his assistant who is promoted to head lead following the scientist's death. The film is now at its most exciting, laying out its themes and building a world. A theme of identity is immediately and obviously of great importance in this film.

In a world where a perfect replica of our own exists, the immediate question is "how do we know that we are not also a simulation?" The project is part of a top-secret government project making identity a slippery subject. At one point a man disappears mid-conversation with the protagonist. Everyone denies seeing him and the computer databases, of course, deny his existence. It is an otherworldly, Lynchian moment where we're not sure if the shadowy government has disappeared this person, if he has simply left abruptly, or if he's an artifact of what will be revealed to just be a simulation. Soon after, a detective mistakes the protagonist for another man and the protagonist freezes up, terrified that now his identity has been swapped or erased. Of course, this is just an innocent mistake.

This theme comes up many times. The protagonist's secretary is changed for a more attractive woman. She refers to herself as a "gift" with the clear implication of anonymity and exchangeability. She introduces herself with her measurements: 29-24-39, clearly mimicking the serial numbers of the simulated people. Mirrors are often used as cinematic shorthand for deception and unreality and so mirrors abound in this film. The film opens with the original project lead challenging a man to say what he sees when he looks in a mirror. The obvious answer is "myself" but this answer glibly removes any identity behind the image. A more obvious image, of a person standing between two mirrors, is also used. Their image, multiplied to infinity, implies the existence of an infinite hierarchy of worlds and of people. Of course however, each individual "person" is creepily robbed of their identity. If there are infinite copies of myself, then who am I?

So, the next question after "is this real?" and "am I real?" is "can we jump between worlds?" Soon before the end, the protagonist is escaping the police in a parking lot, ascending through levels 3, 2, 1, to freedom. Later still, the concept is explored less symbolically.

this film is a slower exploration of the themes raised in The Matrix. The simultaneously released, but much less well-known, film The 13th Floor is actually much more obviously inspired by this film. It's very thinky, not terribly exciting except in a dry, intellectual way, but there is that at least. Plato's cave, the nature of reality, and the simulation of the computer versus the simulation of a film are all brought up. A good conversation-starter, though of course I only enjoy mostly pointing out the clues but not connecting them together.

Dracula (1992)

Saw the 1992 version of Dracula (thanks, John!) It was a glorious romp. The film opens with a backstory involving knights and a double-cross executed by the crafty Turks (oh, those crafty Turks!) The overblown, operatic opening progresses with the decrepit, modern Dracula, whose speech is backed by a halloween special-effects record of babies crying and wolves howling. Rats crawl upside-down and everything's just sumptuous. I loved it.

The film removes any and all subtlety of the Dracula story. The sex is blatant. When Dracula appears as a fog, it's glowing green. It's just a never-ending romp. By the end, when a sensory overload like this often drags, the film slows into a sultry crawl, the good guys eternally chasing the bad, the sexy ladies eternally seducing the upright Van Helsings. Everything is dialed up and excessive and showy. There's reversed film for no damn reason apart from just looking weird. There's tons of shots where the actors are on dollys, wheeling forward unnaturally. This is the sort of film that consumes imaginations.

There were a few odd bits: I didn't like Keanu Reeves' goofy accent, nor the accent of the apparently southern-american suitor of Lucy. Dracula has his own absurd accent, of course. I don't think he says "Dracula" the same way twice ("Drah... ghula", "Dracool-ah", "Drah. Gu. La.") But this, like Keanu's accent and all, are supposed to be overblown, stagily gaudy, and I loved them even as they annoyed me. This is a great fun spooky movie, like The Addams Family. Just goofy, whimsical, delightful nonsense.

Edit: also worth noting is the lack of computer-tricks. There's a ton of silent-era camera magic on display here. Just delightful.

The Mill and the Cross

Saw The Mill and the Cross, a slow and almost wordless sort of film based on the Bruegel painting The Way to Calvary which depicts the passion of Jesus. This film is slow and hypnotic, very Terrence Malick-ish. It's the sort of film which either mesmerizes or puts to sleep. Alas, I got the latter.

It's really too bad because I know very little about art history and the film slowly unpacks much of the symbolism of the painting. There's also long-shots of people walking about, communicating wordlessly with their postures and small gestures, shots which are meant to portray humankind as sort of animal, and beautifully instinctive. These are themes I enjoy and which I like seeing in films, but my gosh it's all so slow! The shots are beautiful, the film dense and complex. The pacing is leaden, and I didn't really enjoy it much, but this is transparently my fault. A good, dense, difficult, arty film which one should only embark upon with a good dose of caffeine.