Dazed and Confused

Saw Dazed and Confused, a Linklater film which eventually settles into a boozy, weedy, drifting sort of film about teenagers trying to stave off boredom in a small town. Unfortunately it starts out in some ghastly and depressing parallel universe where children are publicly beaten by Ben Affleck. The social stratification of high school is reinforced and celebrated with Jocks taunting Nerds as smiling, approving teachers look on. A little old man asks the handsome, paddle-wielding quarterback if he's gonna throw some good ones next season. Kids openly deal pot as 40-year old dudes leer at freshmen girls. It made me want to kill myself.

For some reason films celebrating the halcyon days of youth really depress me. They never reflect anything remotely resembling my experiences. They're a wish fulfillment fantasy for the recently graduated, making the suck of adulthood all the worse by focusing on a glorious near-past that never was. It would be depressing enough to be so wallowingly stuck in the past, so backwards-looking, but to be stuck in a past that never even actually occurred, that makes all of your good times look like shit in comparison? Misery.

Reading about this it seems that Linklater was trying to make an anti-John Hughes film. This film is indeed much less delicate and careful, its high schoolers much more laconic and sarcastic, less earnest and plastic. It is however a lot like American Graffiti, the George Lucas infantilism-fest. Anyway, being a Linklater film, we get some kooky conspiracy theories, some philosophical noodling. After the beating and gleeful humiliation of children ends, we settle into a Heavy Metal Parking Lot style meander which is much nicer. It winds down at last, and ends with the teenagers driving off into the sunset and to an Aerosmith concert, highfiving and laughing, just kids after all. I guess I shouldn't be so wound up in these fictional kids' lives, but the attitude of the universe they inhabit is just so damn depressing.

Also totally random but the main character looks exactly like Winona Ryder.

Night of the Iguana

Saw Night of the Iguana (thanks, Anne!) It was a film based on a Tennessee Williams play, hitting on the favorite Williams themes of love and acceptance being of central, almost holy significance. The protagonist is a disgraced priest, reduced to hosting package tours of Mexico. After a series of misfortunes involving an under-age (ie 20 year old) girl turns the tour group against him, he strands them in a hotel owned by a lady-friend of his, to try and win them back. I was expecting to watch a straightforward, perhaps slightly ham-fisted take on the noble Man vs intolerant and judgemental Society, but the film is little more nuanced than that. The protagonist is associated with the titular iguana; an ugly, repulsive lizard who is in danger of being eaten by the natives, but is still one of God's creatures, as deserving of respect and dignity as anyone.

I thought the protagonist came off a little too blustery. He didn't have the bitter calm of the protagonist in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, and seemed to splutter. His problems always stem from women with the arch-rival being revealed to be a lesbian. The message is sound but the devices used are inelegant. There's also some cabana boys who are always shirtless, dancing, and playing maracas, even when engaged in a fistfight. It felt campy and strange in a goofy, self-aware way, not at all the self-serious melodrama I anticipated. I dunno.

I also found the "underage" 20-year-old girl so annoying. She's supposed to be one of the tools of evil, intolerant society, so she's supposed to be annoying but I guess I got too frustrated. It's kind of a corny old picture, full of pleas for acceptance but also being kind of shitty to the women involved. I'm being a bit harsh but I guess I just sort of missed out on this one.

The Act of Killing

Saw The Act of Killing, an extremely uncomfortable documentary on some of the killers in the Indonesian mass killings of "communists" (AKA ethnic Chinese and political undesirables) in the 60s. The filmmaker somehow inveigled these killers into shooting a bat-shit re-enactment of their crimes. The central killer, Anwar, the one we spend most time with, used to work at a cinema as a young man. He talks about leaving the cinema after a really good film, an Elvis film, of going across the street, still carried in the mood of the film, dancing and singing, of offering a detainee a cigarette, and then carrying him off to kill him. "We were like happily killing, joyfully." Horrifying, ugly, weird stuff.

The film revels in the grotesque absurdity of its premise. One of the killers a disgusting fat man (there's a scene of him brushing his teeth, shirtless, his rolls shaking as toothpaste foam drips down his chin) who is inexplicably always dressed as a woman in the film-within-the-film. At one point Anwar recreates his butchery of a baby, cutting up a teddy bear, mocking the fat man who is playing the baby's father, crawling and mewling nearby. As the film progresses, and as more and more scenes are reenacted, we become sickly aware that Anwar is scarred and haunted by his violent past. He is unable to continue filming at one point, overcome. "Is this what my victims felt like? This fear?" "No," the director says, uncharacteristically breaking silence "they felt much much worse because for them it was real."

It's like The Office meets Shoah. A very strange film which cannot avoid being very self-referential. It's about the filming of an internal film, centering on a man who grew up with movies, who was inspired by the cruelty and barbarism of American gangster films. Many times we catch glimpses of Anwar's soul behind the makeup and fake blood. In a few of the scenes I wondered if he was achieving some sort of cleansing through this. Were we watching him kill and torture himself? The film is haunting and strange, eerie and frightening in a very real way. The pretense is always just a hair's breadth from the truth. Such an unsettling film.

Mary and Max

Saw Mary and Max, a claymation film from Adam Elliot whom you may know from the short Harvie Krumpet. His films are all set in a comically miserable universe, where pets ceaselessly die, everyone has a chronic medical condition, everyone dies unpredictably and tragically and often humorously. At one point we see the Statue of Liberty who in this universe looks like a dumpy, frowning, lunchlady. We are invited to laugh at the grotesqueries of suffering and then we are made to feel the human emotions behind it. The whole opus is summed up in this film as "You are not perfect. You are imperfect. And so am I. All humans are imperfect." Behind the lantern jaws and grey clay, there's a secret beautiful heart beating.

The film is a delight. Funny and absurd for a while, becoming more and more touching as we get to know the people behind the quirks and tics. At one point, a man retires to a life of metal-detecting on the beach. He never finds anything and is swept out to sea by a tidal wave. His metal detector lays on the ground, its red light indicating that there's something metal beneath it. It's pathetic and darkly comic and sort of sweet. He did find something in the end, even at the cost of his life. There's a weird, neat almost-optical-illusion of cruel mockery that is somehow also gentle acceptance, like an old woman who becomes a young lady. It also finishes with an emotional lunge at the jugular that's all but guaranteed to make you cry. A wonderful, touching movie.

Oktyabr

Saw Oktyabr, a propaganda film from the USSR directed by that king of Soviet agitprop, Eisenstein. A few reviews ago I said Eisenstein was more of a choreographer than a director but this doesn't capture the brilliance of his montages which is on display in this film. There's a scene where a peaceful Bolshevik protest is broken up by proletariat counter-protesters and the army. As the guns fire and protesters are trampled underfoot by ugly fat counter-protesters, the film works itself up into a fever-pitch of insanity. It's Eisenstein at the top of his game. He also frequently uses allusions to art in this film. The evil (and kind of weaselly-looking) Russian Emperor will fold his arms and we smash-cut to a statue of Napoleon. An official is shouting at the troops and we cut to the consternated face of a marble baby.

This is, of course, blatant propaganda. The good guys are always handsome and/or cute. The bad guys are fat and decadent, rolling their eyes and laughing at the struggles of our heroes the Bolsheviks, often bespectacled, often with terrible teeth. They show the hell of the provisional government by showing long breadlines but of course we don't get to the famine of the grain shortage. Anyway, if you can leave politics aside, the film is well made and interesting. It drags near the end, when the Emperor's palace has fallen, but there's some confusingly off-message ugliness at that point. Ugly old ladies fight with an attractive guard over a bottle of booze from the cellars. He smashes all of the booze bottles and I don't know if this a good or bad thing.

Anyway, the film is a masterclass in editing and montage. This is a silent film and at one point a machine-gun fires. The film flickers between images of the gun's muzzle and the soldier's grimacing face to evoke the rat-a-tat-tat of the gunfire. Very clever! I also liked the coloring of people's actions through ham-fisted allusions to other images. This film is definitely telling us how to feel, but it lets us puzzle out its message just a bit, and this can trick us into thinking the connections sprang from our minds. Very good (propaganda)

Bowfinger

Saw Bowfinger, a screwball comedy about a bottom-feeding director who tries to con some Hollywood elite into financing his film by claiming he has a big star attached. He then must film his scifi B-film with his protagonist unaware that he's in this film. The whole thing is fairly goofy and low-stakes. The protagonists of the film are all idiots and schemers, none of them particularly sympathetic (apart from some illegal immigrants who are essentially character-less.) I didn't really care if these jerks succeeded in their film. I had faith that, even if they failed, it would be amusing and entertaining. A lo-stakes little goofball movie.

Secretary

Saw Secretary, a sort of Fifty Shades of Grey-style story about a submissive little woman discovering the joys of BDSM. Unlike Fifty Shades of Grey however, this film is less sexually explicit and less creepily consent-ignoring. There's risky fun games they play, where the boss will push the secretary's boundaries, but you never get the sense that the secretary is anything but enthusiastic. That's my take on it anyway. There's very little BDSM in my life and I don't really know if I'm looking at a good relationship or not. It's very intense anyway.

The film is very delighted with its own taboo-pushing. There are voice-over monologues that serve no purpose beyond confronting the viewer with the whole "yeah, I like it when he spanks me. Problem?" thing. Also of course these monologues serve to reassure the nervous viewer (and I am nothing if not a nervous viewer) that this is all enthusiastic on both sides. Indeed, there's even a sequence in the end where the secretary (the sub) must win back the boss (the dom) in an epic endurance test. He's kind of freaked out about the relationship too, you know. Anyway, its during this sequence that the film unpacks a ton of cultural hangups about pain and the relationship of pain with pleasure. It's great. A stern woman urges the secretary to read up on her feminist literature, as though a woman's right to be treated with respect was in opposition to this woman's desires to be humiliated. A blast of good intellect in the middle of a steamy, silly movie.

The movie is sexy and goofy, the secretary moaning breathily "I'm your... secretary!" as she's being spanked. There's some strange connection drawn between self-harm and BDSM but I think BDSM is portrayed as a healthy way for this woman to handle her self-harming tendencies by putting them in hands of someone else whom she trusts not to actually hurt her. It's possible to read too much into this connection but I think it's realistically specific to this situation. The problem is one of representation. This BDSM relationship wouldn't need to thread so many needles of respectability and consent and feminist-approval and so on if there were only more BDSM relationships portrayed in films/TV shows. Not that I personally care, mind you, I just won't disagree if I see an article condemning this relationship even though I personally found it not objectionable. Bleh. What a paragraph.

Dark Star

Saw Dark Star, a dismal sort of scifi comedy directed by John Carpenter as a film student. The film follows a small crew of astronauts who are blowing up 'rogue' planets with unstable orbits. They've been in space for decades and have become sort of hostile towards each other and utterly bored with their work. Their ship is falling apart beneath them from a compounding lack of repairs. The film has many silly parts (there's a show-stopping sequence where a bomb's AI must be reasoned out of exploding) but the best parts are the parts John Carpenter would later base his career on: the mounting claustrophobic frustration of being trapped, of being about to die.

The film was shot in the 70s and has this chunky, plastic aesthetic, as though the ship were designed by Nintendo or Atari. The crew-members are humorously grumpy with each other. At one point one is going outside of the ship to do repairs. He announces this on the intercom and his crew-mates say "just tell us when something important comes up" and turn off his radio. Their utter disinterest is played abruptly, like a punchline. I didn't find it particularly funny, but it's interesting from both a scifi perspective and from a Carpenter perspective. Clunky but interesting.

Wake in Fright

Saw Wake in Fright, a spacey, anxious sort of Australian film about a prissy little schoolteacher in a backwoods community. He stops off in a slightly larger backwater town and gets stuck there after losing all of his money in a night of drunken debauchery. From there it's a sort of low-key horror as he keeps missing train night after night, stuck in a hung-over haze, waking up on floors of saloons after nights of drinking and shooting stiff in the clothing he passed out in. All of this may sound like a rousing good time, but schoolteacher is a fairly dainty, mincing dude and it's clear that all of this bacchanalia is destroying him in some way.

The film begins his entrapment with the town sheriff buying him drinks in a pub. There's young, shirtless guys hanging about, some in black wife-beaters, and the sheriff leans very close over the schoolteacher, lighting his cigarette. The protagonist is all-but-explicitly gay and it feels very much like the sheriff is hitting on him in this scene. In later scenes he's menaced by angry drunk men. It's never clear if their roughhousing is going to descend into rape or murder or if the townsfolk will just keep him liquored up and watch this dainty man self-destruct.

The film treats the schoolteacher's adventures as a sort of growth experience. Ultimately the schoolteacher relaxes and becoming, perhaps, more of a man. This film was made in the 70s, so I'm not sure that the schoolteachers' supposed to actually be gay. Perhaps he's just kind of effete but straight after all. The character is played by Gary Bond who was gay in real life and like I said there seems to be some homoeroticism in the film. Perhaps I'm just seeing what I want see? Anyway the events of this film looked horrifying to me. It's played loosely and ominously, full of grumbly sounds and sudden jump-cuts, but ultimately with an arid, aimless feel. Scenes go on forever as you watch a man, stuck in place, fall apart. Not as glum as I make it sound, but no chuckle-fest either.

The Kid

Saw The Kid, a Charlie Chaplain film. In this one the Little Tramp finds a baby and, after trying to fob it off to nannies and policemen, raises it as his own. The baby matures into the titular Kid and they have cute little adventures together. This one promises the audience it will be a bit more sad than Chaplain's other films, but I noted no such bonus sadness. The film is very of its era, noodling along cutely and episodically until it abruptly ends happily ever after. There's a scene with angels which I thought was cute however it happens five minutes from the end of the film by which point I was sort of anticipating it being over already.

Not much to say about this one except that it's in the public domain and is very available, however the quality varies wildly. The Amazon prime version which I watched is actually missing the top 10% of the screen yet the version on youtube is missing about 15 minutes of footage, god only knows what. I wish there were a government body that would preserve art that had fallen into the public domain. There must be a best version somewhere. Let's put it on a website, let it stream for free, and let culture benefit from the available art, okay? Whatever. Cute noodley little film.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Saw Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the John Hughes movie about the kid who just happens to live in John Hughes's childhood house and sleep in John Hughes's childhood bedroom who has an amazing day when he skips school. This movie had been almost entirely spoiled for me before I saw it by think-pieces analyzing the film. It's a feel-good film for teenagers with the giant flashing message of "carpe diem." Its message gets a bit muddied by Ferris taking advantage of nearly everyone he comes into contact with. Like a trickster god, sometimes this is for their own good (as with his sickly friend, Cameron) but often they're worse for tangling with him (see the effete waiter who dares to try to bounce Ferris from a swanky restaurant, or indeed the evil vice-principal who vilely expects kids to go to school.)

Ferris's manipulations of his parents and disrespect for other peoples' wishes frankly annoyed me. Okay, Cameron perhaps comes out of the film better, but even he is put into a catatonic stupor for a bit of the film. Ferris is played by the human puppy-dog Matthew Broderick, so I could never got all that mad at him but he's clearly the Mary Sue, the self-insert of John Hughes, who can do no wrong and whom everyone loves and oh boy does he know it. He is the Golden Child of the family.

I most identified with Ferris's eye-rolling sister, Jeanie, the scapegoat. She's called a "little asshole" by the spacey but lovable school secretary, her parents are quick to rebuke her, quick to praise Ferris. There's also a bunch of scenes of Jeanie's mounting frustration with how beloved Ferris is (which scenes are I guess played for laughs?) But this film has a message, even for Jeanies like me: "You oughta spend a little more time dealing with yourself and a little less time worrying about what your brother does." Which... okay, fair point. There are people like Ferris around in the world, who just keep cheating their way to the top, who smile as they spite you, but as long as I'm happy with myself, I don't need to "fix" those people, just get the hell away from them. This piece of perfectly mollifying advice comes from a drugged-up Charlie Sheen and is unfortunately delivered immediately after a bit of negging that ultimately sends Jeanie head-over-heels for this wonderful stranger. Yuck. The sexism of the 80s rears its ugly head once again.

So, okay. I did not like this film, but it's a perfectly good, perfectly fun movie. I have to admit, the film had essentially been ruined for me beforehand by a bunch of think-pieces about how Ferris' attitude mirrors that of the 80s Baby Boomers, how Jeanie is the spiteful Millennials, forever jilted out of their own bit of fun. This film promulgates a point of view and, like any point of view, it will clash with others who have different perspectives. I hardly came to this film with a fresh mind anyway, so feel free, lovers of this film, to completely disregard my thoughts. In the words of the Charlie-Sheen druggy truth-teller: "... It's just an opinion."