Restrepo

Saw Restrepo, a documentary shot at the soldier's-eye view of the Afghanistan war. It's very moving. We get to know this gang of rowdy boys who wrestle and pull pranks and who express their deep affection for each other via ironic homoeroticism. They're obnoxious and adorable. We watch them as they barely cope with the constant stress of imminent death. They try to deal with the natives and try to "fix" the valley they've been deployed to. Their fight over this tiny valley is the war in miniature.

This is a soldier-worshiping but also anti-war film. The army higher-ups are constantly misstepping and you get the sense that the army is only barely tolerated by the locals, that everyone is one grudge away from grabbing an AK. At one point the army mortars the house of a civilian they thought was related to the insurgents. This results in the deaths of a bunch of kids and women. A colonel is brought in to apologise but all he does is lecture them about the justness of the war, as they hold their dead children. Later, they talk of job-opportunities and growing a local economy to village elders who are so wizened they look like nosferatu. Do they really think rural Afghanistan cares about the same thing as Norman Rockwell's America? I shake my head at this, but then what would I have them do? The film focusses on the increasingly haggard faces of the soldier boys.

A moving film, I thought I would be repulsed by the rough masculinity of the soldiers but instead I felt welcomed into their circle of camaraderie. I realize of course that in real life I would be eaten alive, but it's nice to be able to visit a place I could never go. Anyway, this film is a fascinating look at a reality we seem to be much more comfortable ignoring. Good film.

The Taste of Others

Saw The Taste of Others (thanks, Nina!) It was a French comedy/drama, exploring integrity and judgement. The title is a sort of pun. The word "taste" meant to convey not only a quality of other people, but also their aesthetic ideals. The central protagonist is an industrialist of some kind who is so rich that he must hire bodyguards to follow his every move. His wife is a rich twit who cares more about her yappy little dog than she does about her husband. Bored by her, the industrialist fixates suddenly on an actress in a play he's forced to attend. She represents to him the integrity missing from his life, the sincerity and nobility. To her, he represents cynical power, trying to buy with money what he has lost due to indifference.

Ancillary to all of this are the romances of the industrialist's bodyguards, his sister, the actresses friends. They are all in different stages of self-delusion, repulsion, and attraction. The drug-dealing bar-maid starts a relationship with the straight-laced but experienced bodyguard. This relationship is probably doomed, we viewers suspect, but mistaken first impressions are what the film is largely about, so.

This film is largely a drama, but there are a few wryly comic scenes. Small glances and petty arguments provide laughs which are touched with a bit of melancholy. For example at one point the industrialist, his heart broken, buries his head on his wife's shoulder. "Do you want a biscuit?" she asks. He shakes his head, but she was talking to her dog. Funny but sad. Sad but funny. Poignant. The film is a bit slow and mainly preoccupied by the characters' relationships, but I enjoyed it. The characters are drawn compassionately but wryly and I loved the nostalgic back-stage business of a live play.

Corman's World

Saw Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, a documentary about prolific cheap film producer Roger Corman whose titles include Death Race 2000, The Big Bird Cage, The House of Usher, and the original version of Little shop of Horrors, upon which the musical was based, upon which was based the Steve Martin film everyone knows. He directs wild, freewheeling exploitation genre films. He discovered Jack Nicholson and William Shatner, both known themselves for crazy-eyed, go-for-broke performances. His films are lurid and stupid and amazing. However he is also an artist of some renown and thus is responsible for a few breakthroughs.

The first such breakthrough was with the youth-centric films of the 50s. The kids of america were sick to death of cheery little disney films and wholesome entertainment. They wanted something more aggressive, something that would allow them to dream about conquering the authority figures who seemed so powerful. The documentary draws a parallel between these outsider kids and Roger, a man whose work was roundly rejected by the respected established machinery of Hollywood.

Roger went on to discover girls and tits and aliens and explosions. Although he helped to distribute the films of Kurosawa and Bergman, he only produced films that would be the primeval ancestors of the summer blockbuster. Effusive praise is heaped on Roger by modern artsploitation kings, such as Tarantino, Carradine, and Scorcese (who is wryly introduced by the documentary as "Director of Boxcar Bertha")

This film is a love-letter to the accidental art of the cheap film. It seductively promises hidden gems, lurking in dollar-store direct-to-video bins. It half-heartedly condemns the Hollywood machine that first cast him out and then cannibalized him, but the film's true heart is in just chuckling over the sheer shameless, brave madness required to create such pure candy of films as Piranha, or It Conquered the World, or Night of the Blood Beast. Great fun.

The Human Centipede

Saw The Human Centipede. It was a pretty fun movie. It relies very heavily on its premise which is by now known to every school-child and their grandmother, but it's a new concept if nothing else. Unfortunately this reliance on the concept leads to some flailing once the concept is exhausted and we descend into boilerplate cops and escape plans. This latter half of the film is not so fun, but the beginning and particularly the middle segment, when the centipede is revealed, is wonderfully grotesque and excessive in a grand, unhinged, Marquis DeSade sort of way.

The beginning of the film is pretty boilerplate as well, opening with two heavily made-up girls who ask the local Germans if they "speak American" and whose car breaks down in the woods where (Wouldn't you know it) there's no cellphone signal. From this unpromising start, we get to the mad scientist who is just great. Slow and malign, selfish and refined, he's like some disgraced SS officer, hiding out in the wilds all this time. The actor is clearly digging his role.

This is not the greatest film, but it's ambitious and I was able to overlook its flaws and enjoy its excesses and ridiculousness.

Meshes of the Afternoon

Saw Meshes of the Afternoon, a cute little art film. It's only 15 minutes, so it doesn't outstay its welcome, but it's got all of the hallmarks of a capital-A-Art film. Black and white, mirrors, knives, flowers, repeated scenes and an oppressive groaning soundtrack. The perpetually startled female protagonist is the cherry on top. I feel I have a fairly good handle on the symbolism involved anyway. The plot is this: A (startled) woman picks up a flower while walking home. Arriving home she listlessly toys with a knife on the kitchen table and has a nap in an armchair. The rest of the film is occupied by her ominous and prophetic dream.

She is clearly dreaming about death (probably suicide.) A tall figure robed in black with a mirror for a face stalks through her house. This is death who bears her face. The knife transforms into a key (but what lock, eh? What lock does that open?) In one fantasy, she finds the knife hidden in her bed. Is she Emily Dickinson-ishly conflating one form of penetration for another? Multiple versions of herself sit around a kitchen table, seeming to confer.

This film is full of nicely symbolic little moments. It lends itself to wry interpretation and knowing jokes. The actual "real world" explanation of events is obscure but guessable and anyway doesn't really matter to me. A nice little gem with many sparkling facets. A cute little riddle.

The Bridge

Saw The Bridge, a film about suicide by means of the Golden Gate Bridge which claims more lives, we are told, than any other place on earth. It's kind of a heavy film. We interview the surviving families of suicides and witnesses to their final moments. There are many stages of grief on display here. One woman accepts her son's death, saying that at least he's free from suffering now. A brother of one woman refuses to accept that her death was a suicide. "I don't know that she went on the bridge alone. I don't know that... maybe someone was encouraging her to jump." There is deep, difficult emotion on display here.

The film is for the most part beautiful. It treats all of the mourning friends and family with respect, but does not shy away from the reality of what we're discussing. Several picturesque shots of the bridge are interrupted by something suddenly but gently falling down from the bridge and into the water with a resounding splash. The film mercifully gives us a few poignant ideas to hang on to and to lift our minds up onto an intellectual level. These ideas are as follows:

• Below the bridge, seals frolic, people surf, and tourist-laden boats ferry about. Up above, people pace back and forth, trying to muster the power to jump into death but towards life.
• The image of the bridge reaching across the bay, disappearing into mist.
• There is also the frequent connection of birds with the soul.

This last idea is easiest for the filmmakers to use, being so close to water, but it's also the most effective. A bird dives into the water, single-minded and driven. A man falls from the bridge and a quartet of black birds rise into the sky. A woman on voice-over says "Maybe he just wanted to fly one time." Heavy, heavy, heavy, but very good. Unflinching, stark, compassionate, human. This is a rare and fine breed of documentary.

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)

Saw Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (thanks, Thomas!) It was a 60s sex-drama. It starts with husband and wife duo Bob & Carol going to some kind of couple's retreat where they undergo a gruelling and cult-like 24-hour group therapy session. It culminates with them having some kind of epiphany that they love each other while the therapist hugs them both, inserting his blond head between them, awkwardly separating them as the other therapist groupies dog-pile on, hugging and weeping. The result is an ugly tangle of squashy men and overly made-up women clad in the finest brown and pastel colors. This moment is confusing to me because I don't know if I'm supposed to seriously interpret this as a beautiful (if messy) outpouring of emotion or am I meant to actually be repulsed by the dog-pile, and to see this as bored suburbanites fooling themselves into meaningful moments? This encapsulates a lot of my feelings about this film.

Anyway, as for the plot: the rest of the film deals with Bob & Carol experimenting with free sex (or as they winsomely call it, free love) and their more suburban friends Ted & Alice trying to deal with it. The film is very believable and the characters are written and acted well enough that I could identify very complex emotions passing through them. (We can tell from very early on, by the way, that B & C & T & A are gonna be playing bed-hopscotch by the end of the film. I mean, this is the freakin' poster.) But this film is like an optical illusion. At one moment it seems very sophisticated and edgy and progressive and then you get just a glimpse of a maid in the background, looking on bemused as they delicately change partners during a dance. Their endless talk about love and sex suddenly seems just like so many childish games of truth or dare.

This film reeks of the rich and comfortable trying to horn in on the counter-culture spirit of the 60s. They don't exactly want to sell their belongings and feed the poor, but they'll have another helping of this easy sex and drugs if you please. At one point Ted is fantasizing about picking up a woman in an airplane. "I've never cheated on my wife" he imagines he'd say "I don't have the same attitude towards sex as your generation." Jesus Christ. There's many scenes like that which I believe are supposed to be funny but are somehow not aware that they're supposed to be funny. Maybe it's just super understated? I actually think this film is trying to walk the tight-rope and appeal to both the older folks (by letting them gaze hopefully at the idea of decoupling sex and romance) and also to the kids (by letting them laugh at these rich twits.)

I found it a frustrating film in the end. It kept pulling the rug out from under me. Goofing off when I was taking it seriously and being serious when I was ready to laugh. It was an interesting watch however and very well acted. I just wish it were more easy to read.

Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest

Saw Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, a recent documentary about the early hiphop group A Tribe Called Quest. I know extremely little about A Tribe Called Quest (or indeed about hiphop in general) so it was a perfect little sample-pack of all the important titles and moments for the band. I suspect an actual fan would know all of this stuff forward and backward and perhaps to the documentary's credit, it does little hand-holding for newbs. They don't explain, for example, how exactly the group affected the hiphop scene or how big they got. This is assumed prior knowledge. Rather, most of the time is spent moving from album to album, exploring influences and group dynamics.

The documentary is interesting and full of great glimpses into the lives of talented musicians with earned but huge egos. There's a completely out-of-left-field sequence near the end which deals with one member's kidney transplant in excruciating detail. I wonder if the filmmaker had put undue importance on this footage suspecting perhaps that he would catch the artist's final moments? I imagine the film may be slightly frustrating to the band-members as well because, with the exception of one of the lead singers, the documentary all but ends with a "The End", putting a final period on the careers of like ten dudes.

Anyway, an interesting film about an interesting topic I know nothing about. There wasn't a lot of action or drama, but funky visuals kept it from getting stale and anyway it's a documentary. I'm deeply suspicious of any film that draws morals from real life.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space

Saw Killer Klowns from Outer Space. The film is about a group of malevolent aliens who happen to resemble monstrous clowns. Their UFO is a big top, their tracking devices are popcorn kernels, and their seed-pods and giants bales of cotton candy. The theory that the evil clowns (or klowns, as the credits call them) visited our forefathers is floated at one point, but only by the comic relief who is immediately told to shut up. And that was exactly my attitude. Shut up, comic relief. This explanation for this movie's plot is clearly "because it's funny." There is no logic beyond that. This is a pure parody of sci-fi creature-features.

I thought the premise did sound hilarious and there are brilliant moments scattered throughout, such as when a bunch of clowns go door-to-door, scaring the populace, or when the heroes are being chased through the clowns' ship, only to be impeded by a corridor full of balloons. The ideas here are pretty great, but I wouldn't say, in the end, that it's really a great movie.

I felt a little underwhelmed due to inconsistent characterization and not enough, well, fun. One of the first scenes is a boy and a girl at makeout point and she is obviously only interested in checking out those lights they saw flashing in the woods but he only wants to make out. Fine, but why, in this boilerplate scene of conflict, is she constantly giggling? I know she's supposed to be a desirable and therefore (via movie-logic) agreeable, but surely not manic. Perhaps she is another, lady-shaped, alien come to study the unsuspecting humans? I suppose if I were in a more receptive frame of mind, I might chalk this up to the B-movie experience and in some of the early scenes I assumed it was making fun of the poorly-written women in the likes of Friday the 13th and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but the film never dwells on or makes a point of her bad writing (which is never really comically bad in any case) so I think the filmmakers (a team of three brothers) really just can't write all that well. Also, whenever they're writing comic dialogue (the comic relief, the boyfriend's early-movie clowning) it's horrendous.

So the writing is a bit weak and I was gluttonously left wanting even more excesses (the title is Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Feel free to take it to the limit, won't you?) but the concept is inspired and a few scenes here and there are great little moments. The connective tissue of the 30-year-old teens trying to save the day is pretty grating and this (for me) is what stops it being a really great film. A cult classic, I guess.

Miracle in Milan

Saw Miracle in Milan, an utterly delightful fantasy. It opens with an old woman finding a baby boy in her cauliflower patch. She raises him as her own and one day comes back to find him gazing sullenly at a pot which has boiled over, its contents spilling in a stream across the floor. Rather than getting angry, she pulls out toy trees and houses and places them around the overflow like it's a river. "What a great grand place the world is!" She cries. This sets the tone for the film. Everything always gets better. It's wish-fulfillment pure and simple, but it has enough whimsy and magic to carry the film, I felt.

I have a great fondness for whimsy, so take that for what it's worth. I thought that this was unpredictable enough to always surprise and delight. As the film progresses, the boy grows up, his old mother dies, and he goes off to find work. With no work to be found, he winds up in a hobo-ville shanty-town which is so miserable and cold that people spend most of their time rushing about from sunbeam to sunbeam. There is a bit of hand-tipping at this point, when a hobo with a slightly nicer coat tries to hoard a sunbeam all to himself. Clearly the have-nots are the heroes, oppressed by the evil haves. I wouldn't go so far as to claim any (particularly strong) political leanings for this film however. Rooting for the underdog has always been crowd-pleasing.

Anyway, the boy organizes the shanty-town into a shanty-metropolis so nice, even the rich are moving in. The film continues to get more and more hysterically happy from there. At times it's a little cloying, and there's some 1950s race-relations stuff that is pretty cringey, but on the whole, I thought it was great.

Anvil: The Story of Anvil

Saw Anvil: The Story of Anvil, a documentary about the struggling metal band Anvil. They are acknowledged as influential and talented by a montage of famous metallurgists but alas the world is not fair and the record industry doubly so. As Slash remarks, everyone ripped them off and now they sound just like a pale imitation of everyone else. But they kept at it deep into their 40s and 50s, getting older and shaggier and yet still dreaming of that one break that never seems to come.

This film is tragicomic, oscillating rapidly between pathos and humour, sometimes compassionately showing the lead singer struggle to keep his dream alive and other times cruelly contrasting his ambitions with his reality. At one point they play a wedding. The camera lingers on bored faces and kids clamping their hands over their ears. The film is like a real-life Spinal Tap (there's even an amp that goes to 11.) At times it's very touching but at other times hilarious. I feel like the film is being slightly cruel sometimes, but (if wiki is to be trusted) the film launched them to TV spots and album re-releases, so maybe it was all for the best.

The Anvil band members are tremendously sweet and winning. They seem devoted to their families and sensitive and kind, but they have this madness driving them, this high-school dream of making it big. It would be delusional but for that opening montage.

Wicked Priest

Saw Wicked Priest (thanks, Lea!) It was a fairly obscure martial arts film. The film is shot in an extremely stagey way. The opening fight scene takes place with everyone standing shoulder-to-shoulder like birds on a wire, as though they were on a stage that was one foot deep. When characters die, it's always the greatest tragedy and in fight scenes there's great splashes of blood but no wounds on the actors. The film feels very abrupt and arbitrary at parts. There's an idiot side-kick who is introduced and then never shown again until the very end. Bad guys become good guys with no redemption scenes. It's like they just stopped being evil. Unusual.

Anyway, the plot is this: the titular Wicked Priest starts out the film being exiled from his temple for fighting. In exile, he drinks and gambles and whores it up with a heavy emphasis on the whoring. This is whoring is portrayed by the film as absolutely no big deal and indeed almost everyone in the film is revealed to be shacking up with someone eventually. I like the film's approach to sexuality and to the act of sex which it treats as a great humanizer and leveler, however it also takes this approach to far less savory sexual matters. One of the early scenes in the film is a gang of three boys and a 10-year-old girl menacing a woman, clearly about to rape her. "Don't resist or they'll hurt you!" sings the little girl. This gang becomes one of the Wicked Priest's side-kicks, one eventually nobly sacrificing his life to defend some women. Presumably they just get sick of treating women badly. One of the main protagonist's jobs is to seduce women into a life of prostitution. At first we hate him, but then it's revealed that he's doing it to get money... to save his girlfriend from a life of prostitution. It's really weird. The whole film is also kind of lumpily paced. After the climactic fight-scene, for example, there's one last fight scene which I guess gives closure to the characters but is really fairly unnecessary.

All of that said, I enjoyed this film. It's really ridiculous and strange and often would make me laugh when it didn't intend to. It's not quite "so bad it's good", more "so odd it's fascinating." I suspect this is the sort of film Tarantino would love. It's sexy and in kind of bad taste and is kind of a scattered mess. Interesting though and a good waste of an afternoon.

The Muppets (2011)

Saw The Muppets (no subtitle, just The Muppets) It was a lot of fun. The film has some great gags and a lot of squirmily on-the-nose jokes involving celebrities ("Did somebody say something about a career opportunity or something?" asks Whoopi Goldberg) The film makes a lot of fourth-wall breaking jokes where they travel "by map" or sadly say "this is gonna be a really short movie" when faced with an obstacle. This is good fun and reenforced the idea that it's all a big show and all in good fun, but it's also my main complaint with The Muppets.

They're always super-sincere and sweet but at the same time kind of glib in a show-biz-ish way. I never get the sense that anything bad will happen or even could possibly happen. It doesn't matter how Piggy reacts to Kermit because we know it'll all work out eventually. So okay, this children's film does not delve deep into the human psyche. I enjoyed it anyway. It's a little inconsequential and goofy, but entertaining. I liked the 80's bot best of all.