Killer of Sheep

Saw Killer of Sheep, a film about poverty in black neighborhoods. Made in the 70s, the imagery is a bit dated, but the humanity on display feels timeless. There's a fare dose of poverty porn here, as we focus on the wretchedness of the neighbors, but that's not all because of course people in poor communities don't just spend their time being sad and miserable. They celebrate and laugh and get angry too. There's a scene where the neighborhood boys are scuffling in a play-fight. One of them stays on the ground holding his eyes. The fight stops as the boys investigate their injured friend. At last a small cut is revealed over the boy's eye. "Aw, that don't even hurt!" they shout and the fight goes on. The scene shows the boys being tender and brutish, brusque and gentle, all at once. This is a good distillation of the entire film.

The protagonist is Stan who works in a slaughterhouse, killing sheep. (The slaughter of the sheep is fairly graphic, closing up on boiled heads and such, so fair warning to the squeamish.) He's unsatisfied with his life and unhappy at work. His depression leads to him neglecting his wife who is still a pretty and lovely woman. He's also surrounded by temptations for an easy buck as slouching "friends" circle, looking for a man who wouldn't mind doing a little killing. Back in the slaughterhouse, we see the sheep entering a pen, seduced by the nonchalance of the Judas goats.

Stan's life and story are pretty grim, but of course life in the slums is pretty grim. All that surrounds Stan however, is life and struggle and joy. It's shot almost from a child's-eye view, mostly focusing on the absurd pretend of the children. this leads to an abrupt, almost absurd feel. A street-fight ends abruptly with a cut to an enormously fat woman, a little girl in her Sunday finest picks through a pile of rags on the street. The point of the film is to humanize these people. They are not saints and they are not demons. They joke with their children and steal each other's televisions and are all human after all. A melancholy but warm film.

Salvatore Giuliano

Saw Salvatore Giuliano, a historical drama about the death of a guerrilla fighter, one Salvatore Giuliano, who was killed shortly after Sicily gained independence, an independence he was instrumental in bringing about. Salvatore's death was extremely mysterious and controversial. The film rocks back and forth in time, alternating scenes about the battle for independence with scenes of the events following his death, the funeral and trial of his murderer and so on. Salvatore's death was probably politically motivated. The Italian, nascent Sicilian, and English governments are all involved, as are the fractious guerrillas and even the Mafia. It's a knotty puzzle.

Unfortunately the film assumes a lot of familiarity with the events surrounding Salvatore's death and does not do much explaining for mouth-breathers like me. This leaves the film a bit flat for me. It's like seeing the drawing-room revelation/explanation scene at end of the mystery without seeing the rest of the mystery. All explanation and no justification. This may be my fault. I saw this when I was kind of sleepy and distracted. Perhaps, with greater attention, all of those scenes from the past and from the future would have laid bare the conspiracy that is then exploded. I don't know.

In any case, the film is beautiful to look at. Shot in stark black and white, there are several scenes that shine with a painterly composition. Check these out. The film is extremely well crafted but unfortunately relates to events which I know nothing about and was too lazy to follow. A well-constructed film for, perhaps, a more alert person.

Dark Days

Saw Dark Days, a documentary about homeless people living underground in New York City. The documentary begins as you might expect, marveling first at the fact that they live like this at all and then at the fact that they have some meager amenities (electricity, heat, and even, once upon a time, running water.) We then get to know them and their lives a bit. The filmmaker draws them out on how they make a living, how they cope with having no home. Drug use is rampant and some of the drug users tell stories of their past, their guilt over their perceived sins fueling their addictions.

The film is not as dismal as it might seem. There's obvious unpleasant metaphors to make (the underground being a retreat from society, an embrace of the primordial and caveman-like, a descent into decomposing soil) but the film contents itself to straight documentation. The homeless folks are optimistic about their situation, with a pugnacious pride in themselves and in their living situations. One younger one, Tommy, says he is not homeless because he has a home. Other hobos show off their dogs and cats, to keep people and rats away respectively. They paint their huts and clean their clothing and sniff at each other for leaving out pans for rats to walk over. They have little but they have something. There's plenty of gross moments (at one point one of them is happily talking about the cleanliness of the food outside of a kosher butcher, as he stuffs hand-fulls of beef into a plastic shopping bag) but they are not the point of the film.

We end on a merciful high note, with the homeless being evicted but also being moved into section 8 housing. They are all nearly drunk with joy as they paint and decorate and plan for the future of their wonderful homes. An often emotional but not so bad look into a dark netherworld.

Edit: oh my god, the director was apparently an underground-homeless person as well. You'd never know. It's shot and edited in a top-notch professional manner. Amazing.

Frozen

Saw Frozen (thanks, Chris!) I liked it. It was huge for a while so you're probably all familiar with the film, but in case you missed out (or are an Internet historian from the far future) the story is this: Elsa and Anna are young sisters who are left in charge of some vaguely Nordic kingdom. Elsa has awesome ice magic powers but for some damn fool reason must hide them away from the the world. Anna is unaware of her sister's powers (because of the hiding and all) and misses her awesome older sister who used to have so much ice-and-snow related fun with her. After a nasty incident at a ball where her powers get out of hand, Elsa flees (in what may be a rage) into the icy mountains to make a giant pointy ice castle and curse the kingdom with (presumably) eternal winter.

Anyone approaching this story cold would assume Elsa is the villain. She's got terrifying snowman guards, is a witch, and has awesome destructive powers. Instead though, she's only escaping into the mountains to protect the village from herself, and is really distraught about her powers which seem to be more a manifestation of her moods than of her will.

I'm pretty damn sure that this is Disney doing its best to make a feminist film. It was written and (co-)directed by a woman. It stars two female protagonists and the romance is relegated to a side-story. It doesn't want to have evil queens and wicked stepmothers, so it makes Elsa completely sympathetic, shifting responsibility for the story's conflict onto the shoulders of the male characters (notice Elsa's father teaches her to repress her emotions in order to control them.) Not that all of the men are evil either. This is Disney. It needs to walk the fine line of being progressive but not preachy and without suggesting anything so gauche as that there might be something wrong with the status quo. Allegedly, this film's story was being worked on for more than a decade. What we get in the end is this really well-crafted and fairly ambiguous film. It's an unconventional film from a studio which owns (and partially even defines) the concept of conventional entertainment.

The film is very enjoyable. It is a big-budget Disney film after all, so almost everything in it is perfect. My only minor complaint is that I wish Elsa hadn't been such a wimp. At one point she's imprisoned and breaks out, her tumultuous emotions summoning an ice-storm that blankets the town in a thick blizzard of fog and hail. In the middle of all of this, she's pathetically dithering about on a frozen lake, clutching her sides like a crazy woman. She should be soaring in the clouds like a terrible and vengeful god! But of course then she sort of would be the bad guy, huh?

Anyway, the film is great. Not as progressive as one might like (it has been suggested, for instance, that Elsa is a crypto-lesbian. Why not just make her an actual lesbian or, better yet, make Anna be queer? The answer of course is that that would be ~~alienating!!~~) but certainly more progressive than one might expect from Disney (who has yet to have any gay characters at all, now that I think about it.) A good film.

Human Planet, Episodes 3 and 4

Episode 3 - Arctic
This episode is about tribes living up on the arctic circle. There aren't many people living up there, so we spend a lot of time shuttling between two tribes and we even make a pit-stop in decadent modern society where northern Manitobans keep a neighborhood watch against polar bears. As a damning indication of their wimpy modernity, they do not kill the bears, but merely scoop them up and deposit them a few kilometers away, as you might do with a troublesome raccoon. Degenerates. Anyway, back in real rugged nature, natives talk about their beloved sledge dogs and herd reindeer. The sledge dogs are adorable and lovely and are also apparently the legacy of one native dude to his family. In another land (greenland) they hunt Auks with little butterfly nets. The camera indistinctly shows a native man doing something deft with his fingers to render the birds flightless. I would have liked to see if he was killing them outright or perhaps merely tearing off a wing. Anyway these Auks are made into a fermented meat gum which apparently tastes like very strong Gorgonzola. I'd love a piece. We also see the sledge-dog-owners hunting narwhal which is high in vitamin C. This gives us a rousing story of the camera-crew being rescued from an ice floe after the ice-peninsula they were on started drifting away. Human superpower: the ability to claim to enjoy foul, fermented bird-meat.

Episode 4 - Jungle
We wander the jungles of Africa and South America, watching kids eat horrifying tarantulas. Protein is scarce here, not vitamin C, so we must eat what insectoid decomposers we can find here on the forest floor. We stop by a tribe of folks who have gone pet-crazy, adopting pigs, lizards, and monkeys as pets and pseudo-children. This leads us to the bizarre sight of a woman breastfeeding a baby monkey which is far more hard-core than most American naturalists, I suppose. Anyway, we're then off to the tribes which hunt the birds of paradise, their beautiful feathers adorning the headdresses of important men. Another male beauty display is shown. We then very briefly visit a tribe who takes their music from the forest. It sounds enchanting and wonderful. I wish we'd spent more time there, but we are off to an even better prize: a treehouse built 40 feet up. We see the construction of the house and we visit a bit with the natives who built it. This episode had a lot of fun treasures (after the horrifying intro of lusty spider-devouring) and also contains a rare acknowledgement that the native peoples are perhaps a bit mean to animals (but not very, we are assured.) Human superpower: crazy tree-climbing by all involved, one time while being industriously stung by bees.

The Train

Saw The Train, a film about a daring heist, saving the art treasures of France from the hands of those wicked, wicked Nazis. The paintings are being transported by train and it's up to the plucky French resistance to save them in the nick of time, just before the allies liberate France. The film apparently began life as a meditation on why the French were so willing to sacrifice many lives to save these paintings, but a re-write soon took care of that snooze-fest. It is now an action film, full of excitement and last-minute successes and maddening failures. The result is incredibly gripping and exciting.

I, in my infinite pretension, would have preferred the original film, but there are traces of the original for the interested viewer. Several times the protagonist's mission, to save the art even at the cost of human lives, is challenged and almost always these challenges are delivered by the Nazi antagonist, a refined but perhaps decadent art-appreciator. He's almost a sympathetic figure at first but of course we are only let to see his soft underbelly so that his later brutality may be made all the more grotesque.

So, original film aside, this was a very exciting and good film. It uses the dark coal dust of the train yard to great effect, the protagonist's teeth shining out of the darkness in a clenched grimace. The tense chase and sabotage scenes are as good as anything that Hitchcock ever shot. The film never really becomes more than a beautiful waste of time, I feel, but it's reaching so points for effort. A nice, tight, exciting film with little glimmers, here and there, of a brilliant work of art.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Saw Crimes and Misdemeanors, a Woody Allen film that alternates between the story of an ophthalmologist with an uncooperative mistress he's trying to ditch and another, totally separate film, following Woody Allen some guy named Clifford who is a frustrated documentary filmmaker who wants to make dense, complex, My Dinner With Andre-style think-fests but of course can't make a living off of that. The two stories are thematically held together by a theme of (in)fidelity and by a similar friction between the way these two protagonists wish their lives had gone vs how they actually shook out, both themes Woody has no doubt pondered many a time.

The film is fairly restrained. It's witty, urbane, and very dry. It has blink-and-you-miss-it references to James Joyce's filthy love-letters and to the trial of nuclear spy Ethel Rosenberg. The moral dilemma at its center is compelling and is really hit out of the park in one scene, but is also fairly dry. I was never really at the edge of my seat. It's clearly very clever but I have to admit I didn't really find it that entertaining. I mean, it's not bad in a dinner-party kind of way, but it lacks serious tension. The dry smolder of the ophthalmologist's story is great but undercut by Woody Allen doing the Woody Allen show and creepily hanging out with his teenage niece and making all these oh-so-clever allusions and witty observations of upper-crust dickery. That's fine and all, but these two separate movies fail to be more than the sum of their parts.

It didn't surprise me however. I knew coming in that I wasn't in the mood it, that it would be clever and sophisticated and like the most charming intellectual you ever met, but that it would have nary a shock. There were a few dynamite scenes with the ophthalmologist, but then we'd inevitably sink back into a repeat of Manhattan or Annie Hall. Both good movies, sure, but ones I've seen already. I feel like if he'd stuck to the ophthalmologist story and kept his self-insert character out, it might have been a shorter but better film.

God's Country

Saw God's Country, a provocatively named but sleepy film about the farming village of Glencoe Minnesota. The film starts off talking to an old woman in a bonnet that extends about two feet in front of her face. She's tending flowers and says she doesn't care much for the big city, all the while grinning and chuckling with embarrassment. It's an adorable introduction to the town. Yes, it is a small conservative town, but there's a stoicism here, a zen calm. Differences are not approved of, but they are tolerated.

The film explores the town by a kind of random walk. We discover that the parents of an anti-Vietnam War protester live in town. We drop in and find that the protester's mother sits on the local town council. She also writes plays. Here's the leading man of her most recent play. He inseminates cows for a living. The film continues in this meandering way. The subjects are given freedom to talk, often revealingly, about their lives and aspirations. They're never drawn out into embarrassing admissions of racism or sexism. In a six-years-later coda, we get some nice crazy-talk about the Jews who rule the banking system, but for the most part, we are gazing into the navel of middle-America, Everytown USA. They are charming and warm people. Not as progressive as we'd perhaps like, but they claim to live and let live, so alright.

This meandering zen is interrupted a bit by that six-years-later epilogue. In addition to the antisemitism appearing seemingly out of nowhere, there's economic angst thick in the air, hints at the coming diploma-bubble, and finally a dour speech about how Americans must abandon this path of senseless greed they're on, delivered by a white-haired lawyer. His stern face freezes and the credits roll over it. I mean, okay I agree, but wow film, way to get preachy all of a sudden. Perhaps the filmmaker himself had grown a bit and was less interested in capturing an abstract America, and more interested in the troubled waters below the deceptively calm surface. It feels like another documentary suddenly burst through.

Anyway, that incongruity aside, the film is lovely and bucolic. It's a bit of a lie, as the epilogue reveals, but it's a pretty lie and that's sometimes the best we can hope for from films, even documentaries.

Transcendence

Saw Transcendence (thanks, Amanda!) It was a ripping adventure about the singularity (or, as the film calls it, transcendence (not sure why. Copyright issues??)) The idea, for the uninitiated, is that AI will someday equal human intelligence and will then exceed human intelligence and will then, by virtue of improving its very self, will begin a run-away progression unto unbounded intelligence and therefore power. In this film this idea is bound up with the notion of a simulation of a human mind in a machine. These are not very intimately connected ideas but are both lots of fun to think about. Consider, for example, if somehow a perfect duplicate were made of your brain. In what sense would the copy be you? It would remember all of your memories and would certainly claim to be you, but it's over there on a computer screen perhaps while you're still here, looking out from behind your eyes. Would you experience feelings from both copy and original? Unlikely, but then what happens if I shoot you, the original? Do you live on in any sense?

By means of these questions, nerds and computer scientists wade merrily into the waters of theology. Wonderfully enough, in this film there are blatant religious references. Once nano-technology is under the control of the film's AI, the lame are made to walk and the blind to see. Indeed, depending on how you answer the questions in the above paragraph, you could argue even that the dead are brought back to life. There's also some cute names flying around. The AI is named William (frequently shortened to "Will") and his wife is named Evelyn (Eve). As with theology however, I turn a doubtful eye on these speculations. They are beautiful ideas, but I have been disappointed too often by beautiful ideas and will now only believe it when I see it. Speaking of beautiful ideas that don't pan out: Wired magazine is prominently displayed in this film.

I'm being kind of mean in this review I guess, but let me be clear: I did enjoy this movie. It's essentially a thriller built on top of grand ideas and so you can mull over the fun ideas during the talky bits and be dazzled by the gunshots and espionage later on. Like The Matrix, it leaves you something to think about but is not an inaccessible, arty think-piece. All of my snark and grumbling above is directed at the idea of The Singularity which I've heard far too much starry-eyed talk about already. The pleasure of this film, for me, came from watching the super-intelligent AI building and discovering and creating things. The most compelling thing about the film is just seeing what the AI will do next and breathlessly waiting to see how that turns out. Are we approaching utopia or dystopia? This is a vastly fun film which unfortunately induced me to rant to my long-suffering boyfriend about Moore's law.

A Dangerous Method

Saw A Dangerous Method, a film by Cronenberg about the relationship between Freud and Jung. The film is mostly a straightforward period drama. It does deal with scientific theories as opposed to matrimonial intrigue but it still has an air of restraint which is both a product of the times and an appropriate nod to the psychological theories of the time with regards to repression and the dangers of. Also appropriate: the film reduces everything to sex.

The focus is mostly on Jung and his affair with a hysterical patient turned friend turned lover. She, the hysterical, goes on to become a psychologist and Jung says that perhaps all psychologists are slightly crazy. The film goes through some efforts to point out the madness of Jung, who is clearly deeply repressed (in the Freudian sense) and also believes that he is psychic in some small way. The film also makes Freud unpleasant (if not crazy) in his continual analysis of Jung and everyone else he comes into contact with. The first scenes with Freud seem like almost like an oily con artist gulling a new mark.

The social attitudes of the characters are quite modern. They rail at some length, for example, against monogamy and religion. Of course, as the affair demonstrates, these arguments are sort of self-serving and may be more rationalization than anything. There's another patient/doctor named Otto who is an out-and-out sex maniac. He explains that he only wants to be a doctor so that he can seduce his patients. Jung is horrified by this, but Otto counters that professionalism is only another sort of repression, right?

An interesting film, much more to do with Jung's bedmates than anything, but restrained and subtle the way that The Godfather is for example. I'm also not seeing much Cronenberg here alas. He's probably just exploring an interest that isn't body horror, but I was looking forward to perhaps a dream sequence or something. The film is restrained but compelling.