The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged)

Sa The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) (thanks, Chris!) It was a recording of a live production of the play by the same name, in which three dudes reenact all of Shakespeare's plays in the most frantic, high-energy manner, prefacing each one with a small discussion of the play or a bit of fire eating. It's very fast-paced and ridiculous. The jokes are not particularly witty but they are delivered at high volume, so it's jolly fun anyway. The actors look like they're having a whale of a time and the audience is all slightly nervous smiles.

The audience, by the way, is interacted with to within an inch of its life. It must be a hell of show to see live though, of course, not one you want to sit too near the front for. For the most part the audience was game, even merrily booing a lame joke near the end. It felt very high-school-y to me. The jokes are broad and topical, they acknowledge the more obscure plays but hand-wave them away as boring. But to be frank they are mostly boring, and broad and simple as the jokes in this show are, it's entertaining. Like a good loaf of bread, it's unpretentious but enjoyable. In keeping with my memories of high-school performances however, I found myself cringing through a lot of it. Every so often the audience shots show someone stonily playing along and I felt sympathy. It's mostly entertaining with a hint of direness in parts.

May

Saw May, a dark comedy about a quirky girl named May. She sews her own clothes and, due to a lazy eye, never had many friends as a child. She collects dolls and works at an animal hospital. So clearly she's caring, quirky, kind of arts-n-craftsy and single. This film came out in early the 2000s, a time rich with quirky comedies about quirky boys and girls falling in unconventional but oh so a-dork-able love. In this film however, May is clearly extremely, violently, dangerous. She stares at the world through a tight-lipped smile, complementing people's body parts in creepy ways ("I like your hands!") and telling "hilarious" stories about a dog's intestines falling out. She's the dark shadow of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

I really dug the film. All of the characters are these annoyingly precious alternative kooks, who love horror movies and who have café-style booths in their homes. They view May as another kook, ready to be mined for memorable experiences and sex and home-made clothing. They're not wrong, it's just they didn't expect it to be this different. The concept is just great.

The film is lacking in many areas aside from the concept however. Many moments feel very forced and there's a hot lesbian co-worker who's always hitting on May in a whiny, baby-girl sort of way. It felt kind of gross to me. Also there's some business with May volunteering a school for the blind that's thematic in many ways (how kooky!) but is clearly not thought out very well. Adults don't actually let fragile delicate crazy flowers around disabled children. All that said, the scenes involving May are always great and the scene where she finally snaps pretty much saves the movie for me. So the film's lumpy in parts with a couple limp scenes and confusing performances but it's atmospheric and moody and has such a great idea that I enjoyed it anyway.

Ghosts of the Civil Dead

Saw Ghosts of the Civil Dead, an Australian prison film. It opens on a slow credit sequence on a black background set to a soundtrack of thrumming industrial noises and an atonal, high-pitched singing. It feels a lot like a horror film and, in some ways, it is. The film is set in some near-future in a high-tech prison, full of cameras, monochrome color schemes and soothing, female voices making announcements. The prison ecosystem is stark but not barren, with drug dealers peddling their wares, intellectuals studying away, their cells lines with books, and a new guy entering the system. We are told beforehand that this will end up with the prison in full lock-down, so some shit's going to go down and that, as with many prison movies, the arbitrary rules of life in the prison function as a sardonic mirror to the arbitrary rules that make up human society.

So, the horror in this film is the growing power of the prison-industrial complex. The prisoners are treated worse and worse and we watch as their existence becomes more and more harrowing and stark. The futuristic bright colors and oppressive surveillance works well with the prison story, of being controlled more and more. The film is unsettling and troubling, looking somehow both filthy and spotlessly blank. The story it tells is a nervy descent into paranoia and conspiracy. Very interesting.

This has the feel of what I think of as a serious horror film. It's not aiming for a quick scare, with goblin or a murder or what have you, but it's going for the lingering unease, instilling cynicism and doubt. It's an effective film and fairly entertaining, for what it is. A grim but compelling film.

My Night at Maud's

Saw My Night at Maud's, a fairly intellectual French film from the 60s about a devout Catholic man who sleeps over at a divorced woman's (Maud's) house. This occurs within the context of a mini-crisis of faith the man is going through. Early in the film, he and a philosophy professor friend discuss Pascal's wager. This thought-experiment becomes a theme for the rest of the film. The protagonist doesn't like Pascal's argument because, he feels, it's too chilly and philosophical. Pascal, he notes was incapable of enjoying good food, a luxury, the protagonist feels, which God himself has given to man. But why then is he so shy about hopping into bed with the merry divorcée? She clearly is trying to seduce him, but he goes on about a pure and holy ideal woman whom he will someday find and marry. An opening sermon about the virgin Mary sets up this dual, Madonna/whore theme.

The film is extremely dry, dealing in its coy 60s way with one man's pseudo-betrayal of an imaginary woman. The philosophy professor friend, the protagonist, and Maud talk in rings around each other, saying things like "You really shock me" in a monotone and smoking. There's also a bit of retrograde gender relations going on, typical of the 60s. The philosophy professor praises the divorcée, saying she has none of the bourgeois clinginess so typical of women. Right okay buddy, so long as you have condoms, I guess. It's not too bad though, just typical.

I found this film very tiresome and dry. Perhaps I would have dug it more if I were more awake or cared more about this dude's moral dilemmas, or if I were younger and more willing to work to understand the inner lives of the characters. There's some great and subtle acting on display here, but I just couldn't get into it. Approach with caution.

Bus 174

Saw Bus 174, a documentary about a hostage situation on a bus in Rio De Janeiro in 2000. The film uses this situation to explore the motivations of the gunman, Sandro, and by extension to examine the plight homeless children of Rio De Janeiro. As the events of the day unfold, we interview the survivors, the police, the family of Sandro, but not Sandro himself in an omission which becomes more and more alarming. The sympathy of the film is clearly with Sandro. We hear that he had an alcoholic father, a mother who was murdered at random before his eyes, had been in and out of prisons, and had watched his friends being gunned down by cops who would rather the homeless children be dead than help them.

The film is pretty rough to watch. It shines lights on problems that are overwhelmingly difficult, that have no easy solutions. Due to weak crowd control, we are told, the media was allowed to get right up to the bus full of hostages. A sociologist tells us that the greatest difficulty of the homeless kids is that they are ignored and treated as if they were invisible. The survivors tell us Sandro loved the cameras, they made him feel important. Yes, he would most likely die, but perhaps after a life of being ignored and beaten, it was better to go out in a blaze of attention than to die at the hands of bored teenagers in a few years time.

The film is very effecting and delves deep into these problems. It exposes systemic problems with underfunded police and overcrowded jails, cycles of violence aided by a chain of corrupt politicians reaching, the film hints, even to gubernatorial levels. An interesting and emotionally punchy documentary.

Birdman

Saw Birdman (thanks Nina!) It was a fun, fast, messy back-stage drama which, like all good back-stage dramas, hits uncomfortably close to home for the people involved (or at least as far as we audience know.) The film stars Michael Keaton, playing Riggan, a more-or-less washed-up actor known for a distinctly Batman-like fictional superhero, Birdman. Riggan is trying to re-establish himself as a serious actor by preforming in a Broadway adaptation of a Raymond Carver story. This seems like a promising start, but we discover that the play was self-written and financed by Riggan, so it's clearly not going that well. The film tantalizes us with the question of if Riggan will ever escape the superhero ghetto or, indeed, if he even has any art inside of himself at all and in any case what is this all for? If it's just to be loved, then shouldn't he concentrate more on his family?

This struggle by itself is not the sort of thing that puts butts in seats or (or perhaps 'and therefore') which wins Oscars. So, to sweeten the deal, Riggan is also given magical telekinetic powers which may or may not be totally real and also we shoot the whole thing in continuous takes. The continuous takes I can take or leave (I mostly don't even notice that it's one take unless I'm actually distracted by some swooping take) but I am immensely grateful for the magical realism (yes, I admit it, I'm human too.) The soul of the film though is clearly in the struggle to create art.

We a variety of voices tearing Riggan apart: a hot-shot True Artist played by Ed Norton who is universally respected but treats everyone like shit, aided and abetted by an ice-queen critic who sneers at Riggan's attempt for legitimacy. Against these two is the growly voice of Birdman, whispering in his head that he should ditch all these critics whose respect he will never earn and head back to Hollywood where everyone loves him, so long (we discover) as he'll drop everything to sign an autograph. Also in this mix is his daughter, a sad girl who is vaguely disgusted by everything.

This mixture of obvious fiction with obvious non-fiction reminds me of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (another film I enjoyed greatly.) It's a trick I've seen before but it's a very good trick. A very thematically meaty film which is even entertaining on a purely visual level. Good show!

Immortals

Saw Immortals, a turgid Tarsem Singh film loosely based on Greek mythology in the style of Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans. It came out in the historical epic boom of the 2000s, when it seemed no one could get enough of sun, sandals, straps, and pectorals. It was a jolly for time for gay guys. This film takes the whole thing much further, reveling in gaudy gold lamé, blood reds, and marble whites. The film is gorgeous and beautiful, full of slow motion, CGI-enhanced fights, bizarre architecture, and nary a shirt to be seen on any male! Appropriately enough, the imdb trivia is mostly about workout routines and waxing procedures.

The film is a total romp and, being a romp, has to be embraced to be enjoyed properly. Unfortunately however I resisted it every step of the way. It was just too full of morbid posturing and growly speeches delivered One.... Word... At... A... Time. I couldn't take it. There's also a running theme of lineages and bloodlines and such which is kind of gross. Various characters in the movie keep saying that to live well is best, but then there's all of this proto-fascist talk of achieving immortality through dying in battle. At one point Theseus rallies the troops to battle, crying "Fight for those who bore you! Fight for your children! Fight for your future! Fight for your name to survive! Fight! For immortality!" Kill yourself to live forever? What is this talk? And anyway, what happened to living well? That evokes peace and comfort to me, not laying righteous waste to your enemies (which you assuredly have, right?)

I don't know if I've just gotten old and grumpy or what, but it was too ridiculous and dumb for me to take. It's a beautiful film with just toe-curlingly embarrassing speeches about honor and immortality and whatnot. Not even the torsos could save this one for me.

A Face in the Crowd

Saw A Face in the Crowd, a film by Elia Kazan, director of such quote-laden 50s-era hyperdrama as On the Waterfront (You don't understand I coulda been a contenda!) and A Streetcar Named Desire (Stelaaaaaa!) This film deals with the ever-green issue of the cynical bilking of the American public. We begin with Marsha, a local radio reporter, interviewing a charismatic if loud-mouthed drifter, probably named Larry but nicknamed Lonesome Rhodes. The public likes him, so he gets a permanent spot on the radio station, singing songs and talking in a folksy way about his (completely fictional) hometown of Riddle Nebraska and talking of the virtues of home, church, and motherhood. He is big-city cynicism coming out of nowhere from the streets of small towns.

There have been many real-world echoes of the fictional Rhodes. Apparently he was based on Lyndon Johnson, but Rhodes has been brought up in relation to Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Donald Trump. Of course the comparisons don't stop there. The film was originally made to skewer the advertising industry of the time, cynically exploiting the public to push mattresses and miracle cures and even literal bums who know how to tell the audience what it wants to hear. This is a frustrating film.

This is a film that wants to make you uncomfortable and, despite its mandatory happy ending, left me feeling rattled and apathetic. It wants you to be more suspicious of the messages we're sent by public persons and institutions, but to do so constantly is exhausting. Better to do as I do and stop your ears and close your eyes and to think about mathematics and movies.

El Verdugo

Saw El Verdugo, a Spanish black comedy about a young undertaker who marries the daughter of an aging executioner. To keep their government-assisted housing, the undertaker must take over the family business of execution. The film mines comedy form the undertaker's horror of killing someone, from their extreme cheapness, and from from the general societal horror of death. There's nothing really crazy (I don't think you ever even see a dead body) but it's funny in parts and very original. I enjoyed it, even as I thought it was a bit silly.

For some reason it's absolutely beloved by Spain. There may be some drama which was undersold by my cut-rate subtitles, or it may have something to do with the censorship laws still in place at the time. I wonder if there's a thematic echo of censorship in the way that no one can stand the profession, just because it deals with the ultimate human experience.

The funniest idea the film deals with is how the undertaker is more-or-less strong-armed into the executioner job. The film has the feel of a crime movie, with the protagonist trying desperately to avoid the consequences of his shenanigans, only to have to pay the ultimate price in the end. This is always contrasted with the actual prisoner who will actually die, making the protagonist's horrors seem utterly ridiculous, real though they are. A clever film. A bit dusty with age, but still sly, goofy, and fairly morbid, like a kindly, aging executioner.