Trouble the Water

Saw Trouble the Water, a documentary which follows Kimberly Roberts and her husband as they try to survive hurricane Katrina. We start off meeting her at the superdome where a red cross volunteer is wearily telling her to keep the front area clear. There is no one else in the front area which is giant and desolate. This sets the tone of the film. Poor black people are treated as criminals and nuisances by the very agencies set up to protect and help them. This documentary is not really about Katrina, Kimberly Roberts is too great a woman, too powerful a personality to let a disaster define her. But the hurricane and its apathetic aftermath loom large.

The film has a strong current of anger and frustration running through it, contrasting clips of Kimberly watching the storm gathering, wistfully wishing she could afford a car, with clips of then-president Bush smiling and basking in waves of applause. As the levees burst and people are stranded, reporter Julie Chen tells us what this means for the price of gas at the pump. The indifference for the suffering of these poor people is palpable. That said, this is an angering, yes, but also an uplifting film.

As Kimberly's neighborhood sinks under water, her brother and her husband ferry children and sick old women over to their attic, where they have blankets and food and water. Kimberly's husband later marvels at how it brought people together, that even his most hated enemies helped save his family's life that day. For many we speak to it's a fresh start which poor folks have precious few of. In the end of the film, when the water recedes and new housing is being built, we feel they'll be okay. There's a parting shot at a tourism-bureau woman who smilingly proclaims that most tourists don't like to be reminded of disaster all the time, and that the picturesque French quarter is all back to normal, just in time for Mardi Gras! We feel these people, who have nothing but each other, will do alright, not because of the smiling apathy of Red Cross and FEMA and the Federal Government, but in spite of them.

The Lego Movie

Saw The Lego Movie ( thanks, Chris!) It was an animated film about the story-less, character-less raw building material toy Legos. So any film about this stuff has to first deal with the the medium. It can't be entirely about the animation medium but it has to focus on the fact that, hey, these are Legos! The film introduces a non-entity lego-person initially who lives in a harsh, authoritarian society ruled over by the evil Lord/President Business. Incessant techno pop plays over the radio, declaring everything to be awesome, especially when you work as a team!!

I was puzzled because it's a very brave and strange choice to make the anthem of the film be the oppressive propaganda of a police-state. Later on the protagonist is criticized for being boring and uncreative but lo, his non-creativity saves the day in the end. So what's this film saying? Fortunately the film is rescued from this seeming conformity-celebration by a last-act reveal which shows that the film was actually criticizing the elitism of the other characters. That the protagonist is not a robot, just unused to self expression, to be nurtured more than criticized. In the end, he and his friends save the day, truly a part of a team of individual voices and expressions! So, kudos on the nice little message. You had me going there for a second, movie.

The film was written and directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller who have also produced many lesser-known gems. They created the surprisingly hilarious Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and the lesser-known but also hilarious Clone High. It's great to see them getting the breakout success they deserve. Their humor is mostly absurdist and rambling, characters talking themselves into strange places and delighting in bad acronyms ("TAKOS! The S is silent!") Their skills as writers come through here as well, deftly defying expectations and playfully batting around our notions of what a nice story should look like. The ending is a bit of a cop-out I feel (he just talks him into submission? C'mon...) but the ending is almost perfunctory. The real fun all along has been bumbling and wandering our way to the ending. That we can end on a coherent note is just icing on the cake.

Human Planet, Episodes 5 and 6

Episode 5 - Mountains
This was a surprisingly gruesome episode. It starts off fairly light, with a Mongolian tribe stealing a golden eagle chick from its nest so that they can raise it to hunt for them. The chick looks strangely smug and pleased with itself in most of the close ups, but I guess that's just how Golden Eagles are. It also never shuts the fuck up and is constantly chirping (Warning: that's a direct link to a sound file. Side note: wikipedia really is a marvelous resource.) I don't know how the tribesmen put up with that all day long. Anyway, we then move to a tropical mountaintop where the villagers are waging an eternal war with the neighboring endangered monkeys who are constantly stealing their crops. Much entertaining frustration with the flea-bags is had. We then begin the gruesome part of the show, as we follow sulfur miners who must inhale gaseous sulfuric acid to do their job. We see their deformed backs, hear them talk of the gas stinging their eyes and lungs, and hear they are payed $5/basket-load of sulfur. We then we see some men catching giant fruit bats and devouring them. The bats scream like pigs before they are killed. We take a small break from this to visit the alps and watch a ranger set off a controlled avalanche. This is introduced delightfully with a helicopter shot revealing an observatory on the mountain peak. I'd love to know how those scientists live/work/commute. Anyway, we then return to gore with an eye-surgeon visiting a remote mountain village. We see the eye surgery preformed before our eyes. The ensuing celebration of the old woman (who's eyes we were working on) when she can see again is delightful, but the surgery is gross. We then see a Buddhist sky-burial preformed. This requires the butchery of the human corpse for the sake of the vultures. Mercifully this happens off-screen but wow, who knew the mountains contained such horror-stories? An unusually gross episode. Perhaps I should start listing the incongruously gross moment of the episode? Human superpower: making the blind to see for free (with the help of charities.)

Episode 6 - Grasslands
We return to normalcy with this episode. We start with an African tribe just straight-up stealing meat from a pride of lions. We keep seeing close-ups of the lions eying the tribesmen and the camera, so it's pretty scary. We then hunt kudu but encounter a leopard, much to our horror. We hit a slightly gross bit with a fisherman who hunts water snakes. his kids twine the dead snakes around their wrists and one boy gigglingly says "look, look! He's biting me!" Weird, but nothing compared to the funeral adventures of the previous episode. Anyway, we then explore some cool human/animal symbiosis with honeyguides which are a sort of bird which cooperates with humans to steal honey from the honest bees. We continue the symbiosis theme with much talk about how oats and rice are really just grasses that we selectively bread the hell out of. Of course birds also want our delicious grains and one bunch of African dudes are shown killing nesting birds with literal dynamite to protect their crops. The narrator dryly notes that these birds are pests. We then transition talk of higher orders of life which we have bread and live off of: horses (thought we were going for cattle? Psyche!) We see the Mongolians herding horses and milking them. The horse-milk is made into airag which is a disgusting-sounding alcoholic yogurt (which I thought was called kumis (perhaps related??)) We then finally get to cattle and see the sarong-wearing, gun-toting, cattle-warriors of Ethiopia. They have a traditional inter-tribe battle that involves the men hitting each other with 2-meter-long sticks. It seems harmless but we see some seriously bloodied men sitting about. We close on the modern marvels of technology as we watch two Australian men in helicopters round up 5,000 cattle in 5 days, a job which used to take weeks and dozens of men. I was wondering how automate-able the harvester tractors were. Truly, we live in interesting times. Human superpower: utter indifference in the face of snakebites.

The Last Detail

Saw The Last Detail, a 1970s film about two navy officers bringing a puppy-eyed cadet to military prison. His sad little crime, we learn, was merely stealing $40 out of a charity box. The puppy-eyed cadet is glum and miserable but also passive and cooperative so, soon enough, the officers start feeling feelings for the boy and try to show him one last good time before he's sent off to jail. The film is about the relationship between the three men as the officers come to see themselves as big-brothers to their woebegone prisoner. Seeing as the film is about male emotions in the 70s, it's a sort of mystery story. The film progresses in it's shaggy-dog, 70s way, ambling from event to event, obliquely and slyly revealing their true emotions.

This film was thematically similar to One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, which also stars Jack Nicholson. Both films are fundamentally about people struggling against oppressive systems which are metaphors for society. This film is a bit more subtle and direct however, using the military bureaucracy as a stand-in for the world at large, instead of Nurse Ratchet.

This is a fairly typical 70s film. The lighting and sound are ambient, the dialogue raw and natural, the emotions muted and secret. The film's subject is man being swallowed up by a system larger than himself, but these films would vanish in the face of the summer blockbuster, which ruled the 80s. Not a bad film. Very much a product of it's time, but a good product at that.

Lola Montès

Saw Lola Montès, a film about the life of a socialite dancer Lola Montès. We begin with her as the star attraction of a circus. She dances and poses as the ringmaster cracks his whip. They are re-telling the story of her life, she the most scandalous woman on earth. We recalls love affairs with the composer Liszt, with captains and artists and even with royalty. The central engine of the film then is the mystery of what happened to her. How did she end up in sequins as a literal parade of acrobatic lovers dance by her? The film is a feminist tragedy, following a woman who lived as she liked and took advantage of men in a time when society did not permit such things.

The story of Lola's life is a bit tame by today's standards. There are only implied sex scenes and her love affairs are shocking but only for the time. I did particularly enjoy her casual fling with a college student and also her encounter with a composer's wife. It sounds salacious but much is implied and everything is off-screen. Also of course there's the inevitable circus waiting for her at the end.

In contrast, the circus is amazing and grotesque. Ushers in red suits and face-masks wander the audience, collecting quarters in cups fashioned after Lola's head. Dwarfs and clowns play out her life in a grotesque mockery. Throughout it she sits in the center, looking furious and humiliated, the femme fatal whose great crime was to live a remarkable life.

this film is a bit of a downer, but the sad story is made bearable by the over-the-top visuals and story-telling. It's mostly a romp for the eyes. It has a sad ending, but this is almost in keeping with the lurid, carnival-esque feel of the film. It reminded me a lot of Moulin Rouge(!), but a bit less self-aware and a bit less obviously goofy.

Sweetgrass

Saw Sweetgrass, a documentary about the doings of a sheep farm. We begin with a hypnotic scene of sheep being endlessly shorn of their winter coats. One after another, the sheep are rolled into position and the shearer's clippers produce a coat of wool from them. Then, alien-headed and groaning, they're sent back out to pasture and the next sheep is loaded into position. Nothing much is happening, but we're seeing how it's really done. More than the technique, we feel the endless Zen calm of it. We then explore the disgusting mysteries of birth and death in the lambing season. This again is a warts-and-all depiction of the event. One orphaned lamb is rubbed into the afterbirth of a ewe who gave birth to one lamb only. Hopefully she can be fooled into thinking she had twins. Disgusting and amazing.

We then pivot into the herding part of the film, where the sheep are taken to graze in the mountains. This is the first time we hear the humans speaking and they are a taciturn and placid bunch. Their frustration is a source of simple comedy as they swear at the stove, the sheep, at each other, at their horses and dogs. At one point the sheep sneak up into rocky hills which it will be tricky to extract them from. The herders unleash a torrent of profanity, calling the sheep cocksuckers, motherfuckers, and sneaky whores. Later in the film the ranchers hunt bears which are picking off stray sheep.

This sounds interesting and it is of course, but it's terribly slow and frankly dull. If I were more alert, I would call it hypnotic, but as it is I was struggling to stay awake. It's a sort of a wall-paper film, good to have in the background and talk over. It's too slow and contemplative to give one's whole attention to. Perhaps if I'd been in a more creative mindset I could have drawn some philosophy out of it. I don't know, perhaps the farmers can be regarded as animal, as being noble brutes as the sheep and dogs are. A serene and sleepy film with moments of hilarious swearing.

The World's End

Saw The World's End (thanks Paul!) It was a rollicking Nick Frost/Simon Pegg film from the so-called Cornetto trilogy (I always read the imdb trivia about a film and oh boy do they ever want you to know that this is called "The Cornetto Trilogy") This time we are introduced to the protagonist, Gary King, on the happiest day of his life which unfortunately happened when he was 17. From this halcyon time, his whole life has been slowly amounting to not very much. His "gang" of four friends have moved on to jobs which require suits, one of them becoming some kind of CEO, another retiring at an early age to pursue fitness, living the modern-millennium dream of compassionate wealth. Only Gary has remained fixed in place.

Most of the film, however, is devoted to a sinister (and extremely well-done) alien plot to take over the world by means of gentrification. This is a physical (and punchable) manifestation of the protagonist's frustration with the way his life has gone. While all others have prospered, he has remained drunk and idle, with no visible means of income, apart from, presumably, his parents. How can this be? A conspiracy is the only answer. The film has this facet (and others) to notice for clever people like you and me, but for everyone else (and for you and me as well) there's rat-a-tat-tat jokes, uproarious action scenes, and a script that starts out fast-paced and accelerates to a mad sprint. It's the whole package.

I really really liked the sobering-up and dealing with issues the film does shortly before the end. It's gratifying to see an action/comedy film actually address the emotional state of the protagonist. Gary is a deeply flawed human being. He kicks a lot of ass, but the film does not let this alone redeem him. He has to face his demons to do that. Can you imagine an Arnold Schwarzenegger character doing that? Also, of course, this soul-baring happens during a fight sequence. This is interesting and might be due to an insulting assumption that the sort of person who goes to see and action/comedy isn't interested in feelings, or it may be a subtle skewering of the difficulty men have talking to each other about their emotions. In any case, this is a good, smart film which even evil, stupid people can enjoy.

Mirror Mirror

Saw Mirror Mirror, a fancifully costumed version of the Snow White story. It's a very confusing film. The costumes are absolutely amazing, as is anything created by Eiko Ishioka and the sets are also grand and spectacular. The magic mirror, in this version, is a portal to some Nordic hut which resembles a raven in flight. At one point the evil queen uses giant, magical puppets to attack our heroes. The puppets are animated slithering like snakes and scampering like spiders. It's a creepy scene, but only with the sound off because for some stupid fucking reason the puppets are constantly jabbering away through this battle in herp-a-derp voices, shouting "Wuh-oh" and "I seeee you!"

And therein lies the fundamental problem with this film. It really feels like someone strong-armed the film into being a kid-friendly comedy half-way through production. Initially I did like the snarking of the evil queen and hoped for something interesting when she quipped that this was "her story." The director, Tarsem Singh, did produce The Fall which is a much better film and which contains some interesting thoughts on who exactly owns a story. Alas this film contains no such thoughts. There's hints and whispers of it though. At one point snow White goes off to nobly save the prince, proclaiming that she won't be like those other fairy-tale princesses. How progressive. In another scene, she sword fights with the prince who keeps laughingly disarming her and slapping her ass. I wonder if that played well for the test audiences so clearly sneered at in the other scene.

I feel like this film would have been a lot better if it had taken itself a little more seriously and had not forced some incongruous comedy into the story. Note the final scenes in particular, where the evil queen dies. Everyone on screen is aghast and confused by the magical death of the queen, but the soundtrack is filled with cheering noises, coming seemingly from nowhere. The cheering then abruptly stops, as though someone had thrown a switch, before the big-finish, Bollywood-style, dance ending. Why the clearly fake cheering? Was it just incompetence? Or some kind of post-modern statement? Handled properly, it might have been pretty cool (on a stylistic level at least) but instead comes off as slap-dash and confusing.

I think this film is trying really hard to be stylish and look cool, but it's very hard to be cool and stylish and also be a clown. I wish it had stuck to self-important style. It risks becoming campy, but camp is better than lame jokes and mugging. It attempted to bulk itself up with buffoonery and just winds up looking stupid. Every joke is painful, every plot twist is telegraphed, and every gorgeous dress and elegant suit is undercut by the characters remarking that they sure look stupid in this getup. A film totally destroyed by compromise.

Edit: this came out at the same time as Snow White and the Huntsman. In the grand tradition of Hollywood, this is probably the far-inferior film from another studio trying to imitate the subject but not the substance of an actually decent film.