Love Me Tonight (1932)

Saw Love Me Tonight, a cute little pre-code film about a tailor in post-revolutionary France who follows a baron to his country home to collect a bill.  Alas, when he arrives, he's mistaken for a baron himself (wouldn't you know it?) and meets cute with a lovelorn princess.  The film is a musical and cute and stupid and a pleasant pokey way to spend some time.

The film has clearly been heavily edited however.  There's a musical sequence where the tailor sings a love-song to the princess and, after an off-screen dinner with the whole family, the whole household is then singing this song to themselves.  Clearly there was a too-racy-for-1930s reprise!  Alas, this footage is lost to us now.

Anyway, the film is very cute and sweet.  It's full of gentle silliness.  There's a trio of old maids who always move as a unit and who exist only to be scandalized and to run about the mansion shouting "Ooh!  Ooh!"  At one point the nobles test the tailor by making him ride an unmanageable horse.  The horse is kept in a padlocked stable marked "danger!"

The film is not out to make a point or to change hearts.  It's only up to entertain and amuse.  There's a comfy slobs vs snobs rascality to it and a self-aware datedness to the romance.  It's pre-code, so there's a healthy, winking attitude towards sex and romance, and lots of humorously un-coy female desire.

The film was a bit more slight than I was in the mood for, but a solid, charming little film that would probably be suitable for watching with aged relatives.

Masculin Feminin (1966)

Saw Masculin Feminin (1966), a film by Goddard.  It follows a teenaged boy as he gets a job, pursues a girlfriend, and dabbles in politics.  In true Goddardian fashion, the film contains many perverse inconsistencies and incoherencies.  It feels very abrupt and chaotic, both in style and in action.  At one point a man sets himself on fire, only for the camera to stay stubbornly pointed at a brick wall, ignoring the action.  Later, the main character interrupts a movie to lecture the projectionist on aspect ratios.

The film is intentionally ambiguous and vague, containing contradictions and inconsistencies, but I felt it was most concerned with the war of the sexes and how it echoes larger-scale struggles of the day (Vietnam, the cold war.)  The teenage boy main chracter wants peace in Vietnam and the love of his girlfriend.  He's surrounded in the film by the wreckage of other romances: old men reading pornography in public, men cheating on women, men describing being divorced.  Nonetheless, our hero remains idealistic and hopes for a peace and love that looks doomed from the start.

In typical 60s fashion, the women are not treated very well.  I think every single one comes off as shallow, indifferent, cynical, and exploitative.  They are all on contraceptives and birth control and dangle their affection over the heads of men.  The main characters all work in a magazine aimed at teenagers.  They talk at their job about pop-political characters.  Talking about their sales numbers in japan as they read Bob Dylan's lyrics.  The commercialization of The Revolution is already seen here in its infancy.

It reminded me somewhat of Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, which also deals with the commodification of teen rebellion and which is similarly ambiguous and self-contradictory.  This film is a bit older however, a bit more subtitled, and bit drier.  Typical of Goddard, it's a more interesting film to think about and interpret than to watch.

The Walk (2015)

Saw The Walk (2015), a film about a daring high-wire walk between the twin towers shortly before their construction was complete.  This is a story about the incomprehensible beauty and whimsy of spectacular public art like this.  The protagonist, the mastermind behind the walk itself, is demanding and exacting, coming off as a kind of narcissist in his pursuit of this absurd and dangerous event.

The film does not explicitly mention 9/11, but the connection goes without saying.  This is an unwelcomed intrusion of whimsey into a place of business and industry, at the birth of the towers.  The juxtaposition of the terror at the end of them brings an unstated poignance to the act and to the film.  I wonder, as the world moves steady on and on, if that fading poignance will remain in the film.

This film was also shot in 3D.  This choice makes sense for the climactic wire-walk, but on a 2D screen, it seems a little silly.  There's a lot of things poking out at the screen, lots of foreground/background business going on that would have been novel in 2015 (I guess) but which come off as sort of distracting and cheesy now (and in 2D no less!)  The film has a clean and sort of "rendered" look to it, full of saturated colors and sunny skies.  It reminded me of the kind of dark gaudiness of Tim Burton's films.

The film was alright however and plays as a sort of heist film, full of set-backs and sudden lucky breaks.  The actual wire-walk which this heist is in aid of however is more interesting to me in the abstract than in reality which made the film fall a hair flat (for me.)  I felt like the protagonist was very self-involved and somewhat arrogant.  I think I understand the fun of the event, but like the protagonist refers to the wire-walk as a "coup" and berates and harangues other people for not being committed enough.  This kind of dedication to vision and drive are qualities which are very likely necessary to pull off this kind of spectacle, but as a person he seems like someone who's quite a bit too much.

I had previously seen Man on Wire, a 2008 documentary about the same event, and it fell similarly flat for me.  It got great ratings however, so I assume that this is just working on a wavelength I am deaf to.  I guess I am too old to really enjoy whimsey anymore.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife

Saw Ghostbusters: Afterlife.  I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.  It follows the family of the estranged daughter of Egon from the original Ghostbusters films.  Her family is struggling but gets word that their father, Egon, has died leaving them a creepy old farm in the middle of nowhere.  Soon the precocious teens of the family are discovering ghostbusting equipment and having delightfully retro good times.

I was worried, going in, that the film would have learned the lessons of 2016's Ghostbusters reboot too well: it wouldn't dare to change anything and would be a slavish parade of half-remembered kitsch.  There is an inevitable element of that.  We do see the ghostbusters car and their proton packs and their outfits and many many other call-backs, but they keep all of that from feeling forced or from taking over the film too much (the damned tiny stay-puffed marshmallow men completely derail the film however and I hated them.)  The plot device of the kids uncovering the life of their grandfather keeps the whole thing feeling like less of a re-tread than a re-discovery.

The film follows two main tracks.  One for each of the kids: the son of the family is a youngish teenager played by that guy from stranger things who is hungry for love and whose storyline I did not give a damn about.  The other story line revolves around the daughter who is neuro-atypical and is friends with a boy named podcast who is always putting gadgets on his head.  I found her story much more compelling and interesting since she was actually figuring everything out and saving the day.

The film moves us out of the city and into rural America, mirroring a real-life refocus on what the exurbs are up to.  We spend a lot of time uncovering the life of a man regarded by many to be a crazy conspiracy theorist.  Despite the surprisingly multi-racial townsfolk, the film feels somewhat regressive and (non-politically) conservative.  I suppose being a remake, it can't help this too much though.

The Celebration (1998)

Saw The Celebration (1998), one of the first films of the dogme 95 movement.  Since is it a dogme film, it's intentionally under-lit, under-mick-ed, and generally feels like a very well-made indie film.  The plot follows a family reunion happening at a hotel owned by the family patriarch.  Alas, some unfortunate truth bombs are dropped about the recent suicide of the patriarch's daughter (it's exactly what you're thinking.  Spoiler alert: rape and incest)

The plot is entirely involved with the family.  It feels like a modern-day court drama, with a fabulous mansion and servants and cooks and an aging king at the top of it all, a scandal souring his twilight years.  Similarly there are sons and daughters jockeying for succession and the servants take sides, adding an above-stairs-below-stairs element.  It's very clever and economical: producing a lot with very little.

The film is difficult however.  There are comical elements which have lead some reviewers to believe this to be a black comedy, but these jokes are comic relief and the central scandal, although very over-the-top, is taken very seriously.  The family and social dynamics are uncomfortable to say the least and we dwell on them a long time.  There is a moment, near the end, when the main characters are dancing and laughing and a fade-out seems immanent, but the drama lingers on, spoiling even this well-deserved respite.

The film is not as grueling as some of Lars Von Trier's work, say, or Michael Haneke, but Von Trier was the founder of the Dogma 95 movement and his influence can certainly be felt.  The film has an un-flinching quality about it that feels punishing.  That said, it has a relatively happy ending, and is generally nice and dramatic.  I wouldn't recommend it whole-heartedly, but it's not bad if you're interested.

The Mitchells vs. the Machines

Saw The Mitchells vs. the Machines, an animated family comedy about a dysfunctional, quirky-ass family trying to survive a robot apocalypse triggered by a tech company that seems to be an amalgam of Apple and Google.  The film is pretty nice.

The robot revolution plot conflict is fairly secondary to the family's internal tensions however.  The main-est character is the daughter of the family who wants to be a film maker who is very internet-culture-y.  She introduces her dad by comparing him to "that video of a monkey screaming".  And it is the conflict with her dad that drives most of the plot.  While she is a creature of the internet, he is a Ron Swanson-like nature lover.  This nicely echoes the struggle against tech that fuels the main plot of the film.

The film is fairly light-hearted however.  In these modern times when Facebook is being asked to account for global radicalization, this film feels like it could have been (should have been?) more about the harms of technology and the disruption caused by the different ways folks now connect: remotely, oftentimes more shallowly.  Instead however, there are wacky malfunctioning robots who help them out, hilariously ugly pug dogs, and short films that strongly evoke the mad-cap feel of Michel Gondry's movies, or Great the Show or something.

I was actually a little disappointed the film didn't tackle these tech morality issues, but I was also a bit relieved that it was just a goof-fest.  The film seems very anti-tech from its premise, but the style and execution have a very modern, fast, youtube-clip-like feel to them.  It's a bit of a muddle, but I think entertainment is the first priority of this film, so it's all good.  A fun little film!

The Green Knight

Saw The Green Knight, an adaptation of the ancient myth of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  It's a loose adaptation, with added in banditry and prostitutes and such.  Hilariously, when I google for "sir gawain and the green knight movie" one of the suggestions that pops up is "what is the point of The Green Knight movie?"  This, in my opinion, is the wrong sort of question to ask by the way (while we're at it, what's the point of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure? or of Citizen Kane?  What's even the point of anything at all??), but it does indicate that this is the sort of movie you'll want to decode.

Before we dive in here's the plot: on Christmas day, a giant green knight rides in to King Arthur's celebrations and proposes a game: any knight may strike him (the green knight) with an axe, however the green knight will return this blow in one year.  The impetuous Sir Gawain jumps up and cuts the green knight's head off.  Unperturbed, the green knight scoops up his head and ominously shouts "one year!"  So one year later, Sir Gawain must ride off to face what is probably his death.

The film's central theme is the facing down of certain death for reasons of honor.  This is the central conflict of the plot and it is underscored by Sir Gawain's relative youth and uncertainty.  Again and again he shies away from greatness, opening the film in bed shouting "I'm not ready yet!"  Later in the film he claims not to be a knight and at one point literally flinches at the prospect of riding on the shoulders of giants.  He wants to be brave and noble, but cannot overcome himself and worries deeply that he will not be able to face down death.  I wondered if the filmmaker had the modern extended adolescence on his mind.

There's another sub-theme of Christianity vs paganism and witchcraft.  The green knight is made of wood and evokes the Green Man.  He interrupts the Christmas celebration and lives in the "green chapel" which one character claims to mean the entire forest and which turns out to be a ruined church, overtaken with moss.  The image of the virgin Mary is cracked in two but an enchanted green belt is kept until the end.  This tension reinforces the central conflict of facing death: Christianity claims there is an afterlife and nothing to fear from death, but we see no evidence for this in nature and only a vicious fight for survival.  This battle between faith in a divine plan and suspicion of an arbitrary fate must also be playing out in Gawain's mind.

There's also a lot thrown in that's not in the original story and which you might find kind of magical (I did) or just baffling and over the top (which I guess most viewers did.)  There's a fox companion, for example, who may be kind of magical and some serious color-coding in the final moments of the film (blue, I feel, symbolizes something, but I don't know what.)

On that note: the film is gorgeously shot and decorated, looking like a collaboration between Terrence Malick and Tarsem Singh.  The costumes are jarringly modern but also seem heavy, sturdy, medievalesque.  The moments of magic are sometimes surreal and eye-popping, flooding the screen with yellows and reds, and sometimes understated and kept out of focus.  At one point Sir Gawain happens upon a hunter who has taken down a wolf the size of a bear.

I really enjoyed the film.  It's very heavy on the visuals and the themes are not outright handed to you.  It's a good film for watching and thinking over.  It's not exciting, but it is engrossing.  I liked it!

The Cloud-Capped Star

Saw The Cloud-Capped Star, a fairly dismal Indian film about a girl who supports her family of overly-ambitious deadbeats.  Her brother wants to be a musician and so cannot work, her sister is an empty-headed flirt, and her father is an academic past his prime.  They gladly accept her self-sacrifice, initially appreciatively, then depending on it, and ultimately even sabotaging her future, all the better to keep her supporting them.  It is a tragic film, but leavened a bit with moments of wonder.

I can't help but compare this with They Were Expendable.  As with that film, the individual is sublimated for the sake of the collective and initially the woman smilingly reminds her family of their dreams when they feel guilty about taking advantage of her.  However Cloud-Capped Star takes a much more jaundiced view of self-sacrifice.  Their guilt assuaged, her family now thinks nothing of bleeding her dry.  Why should they not take what is given to them?

The film is mostly a kind of misery-porn, however there are several moments of true splendor in the film.  We open, for example, with the main character girl walking beneath the branches of a truly gigantic tree, her small figure dwarfed by the spreading, branching arms of the tree.  Just as she is dwarfed by the tree, so too her family subsumes and swallows her.  Near the end, she contemplates running off into a rainstorm.  She is smiling giddily, as raindrops land on her cheeks, crying her tears for her.  Sublime and poignient.

I enjoyed the film alright.  It did drag a bit and, since the brother is a musician, we get a few lulling songs to break up the film.  This was nice but also contributed to the runtime.  It's not the most uplifting film, but it's pretty in its sadness.

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists

Saw The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, a deliciously silly film by Aardman animations, the team behind the Wallace and Gromit series.  This film followed a pirate captain named Pirate Captain as he tries to win the coveted Pirate of the Year award.  He finally seems to have hit it big when he plunders the boat of one Charles Darwin who is trying to win the Scientist of the Year award himself.

The film is for children and is not directed by Pixar, so it's never very serious.  Everything is either a joke, or a tiny humorous Easter egg.  In one moment, there's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it wanted poster for the pirate Damp Bertie.  It's not a joke per say, but it's just so joyous and silly.  I enjoyed it.

By far the best parts of the film involved the increasingly insane hijinks of Queen Victoria (Queen of England, Enemy of Pirates).  She is portrayed initially as a restrained woman with a burning hatred of pirates, but she increasingly becomes an unhinged avatar of rage.  All of her stuff is just great.

I really enjoyed the film.  It has a lot of warmth and cleverness and silly set pieces.  It's not the most memorable or something you'll want to watch over and over, but it's a solid film and definitely consistently entertaining.  It's the sort of film I want to show to other people.

They Were Expendable

Saw They Were Expendable, a John Ford film (which therefore stars John Wayne) about the beginning of America's involvement with WW2 in the Philippines.  The film was made in 1945, shot just before the end of the war and released after the surrender of the Japanese and the war was basically over.  It's a very pro-America, pro-soldier, rah-rah film and I found all of that sort of dull, but there was a recurrent theme of the individual vs the collective which kept me sort of awake.

The premise is this: Wayne plays the second-in-command on a small fleet of motor torpedo boats.  The higher-ups in the military don't think these boats are of much use and he's eager to either prove them wrong, or to transfer out of this backwaters to somewhere a bit more fertile for his career.  Then Pearl Harbor is attacked and all of that goes out the window.  His draft letter of request to transfer is literally crumpled up and disposed of.  His individual desires are instantly sublimated when the Higher Duty calls and his ambitions are put on the back-burner, so that he can serve.

Cleverly, this happens once more in the film.  As Wayne fights and fights and becomes more and more personally and emotionally invested in the war, ultimately (no spoiler) he must be reminded to pull back in service of the greater wart effort.  Just as his ego and ambition had to be reigned in at the start of the war, so too must his martyrdom and self-sacrifice at the end of the war.  This is foreshadowed by the title: Wayne is initially one of the expendable milieu.  As the war progresses, he must learn that others are similarly expendable.  The individual must bow to the collective, and in more ways than one.

The plot of the film, once it starts going is fairly complex.  I didn't totally understand the full machinations of the military and the main characters.  At a few points, the characters repeat each other's words to each other in an I-told-you-so kind of way.  Alas, I was too sleepy or stupefied to make any kind of connection to what had been told by whom to whom.  I feel the film suffered for my inattention.

In keeping with the theme, the film contains some absolutely gorgeous and lovely close-ups.  There's a love sub-plot which results in some soft-focus adoration of the love interest, but of course the bureaucracy of war cares little about love and the two love-birds are kept forever just out of reach of each other, losing and finding each other.  Again, the individualism so prized in American culture is in conflict with the nationalism which is also so prized in American culture.

The film was well-made and contained this interesting theme to puzzle over, but I didn't really like it.  I don't really like war films.  The modern attitude towards war, post-Vietnam (and definitely post-Afghanistan,) is much more cynical and jaded.  Seeing John Wayne nobly sacrifice his own ambition for the sake of the war machine seems a little naïve.  On top of this, the plot was complex enough to lose me (which is probably more to do with me than the film however, so grain of salt needed here.)  I dunno.  It was a John Ford/Wayne war film.  Good, but not really my cup of tea.

Russian Ark (2002)

Saw Russian Ark (2002), a dreamlike film which seems to be most famous for its technical achievement: that despite being about 1.5 hours long, it was filmed in one continuous shot (!)  Apart from this however, it is interesting and dreamy, and shot in a Russian museum (the Hermitage I think?) which is worth the time itself.

There is not a lot of plot.  The film is narrated by a person who does not know where they are or how they got there.  This feels like some post-modern 4th wall breaking to me.  They could just have a third-person omniscient eye for the camera, as most conventional films do, however they draw attention to the fact that someone is here with a camera but then, perversely, they do not actually explain how they got to be there.  I think this sort of primes us to think outside the box for this film, to accept the sight of Queen Catherine teaching her children how to bow, only to be interrupted by some passing tourists.

We also follow a man in black who the narrator thinks is French.  This man is sarcastic and accuses Russians of having no creativity, no sense of identity, and no culture.  He makes fun of the paintings on display (declaring they stink of formaldehyde) and bullies a blind woman.  He's fairly unpleasant, but more fun to watch than the ghosts (?) of Russia's past.

The film's themes revolve around the continuous thread of history and of our lives.  In this way, the unusual technical achievement of having no cuts in the film reinforces this notion of continuity and flow.  We live our own lives, after all, without the help of an editor.  And the same way, our nations and the society must live continuously, with no breaks or cuts.

The clashing historical periods suggest the past "living" alongside the present (a particularly potent metaphor given that we're filming inside of a museum.)  However the narrator and the French man are usually invisible to the folks from the past, suggesting something ghostly going on.  An afterlife?  A state of being outside of time?

The film is a bit of a drag at parts, particularly during a hypnotic closing dance sequence (and be aware: "hypnotic" is a kind way of saying "monotonous") but it has a dreamy, ethereal, haunting quality to it, which somewhat makes up for this.  This film is perhaps not one of my favorites, but going into it, I was worried it was a one-trick pony (and to be honest, I don't really care about continuous shots) and it is much more than that.

I Vitelloni (1953)

Saw I Vitelloni (1953), a Fellini film about four slackers who bumble through small-town life, initially optimistic about their futures, but increasingly settling down into lives of frustrated mediocrity.  The slacker that film mainly follows is this philandering dude who is forced into a shotgun wedding but who drifts from job to job, woman to woman, surrogate parent to surrogate parent.  The film is intentionally fairly depressing with moments of levity to keep it from being too miserable.  It skewers the idea of middle-class comforts which, for the 50s, may have been fairly edgy.

For me, it was a bit of a slog.  I severely judged the main character dude for upsetting his long-suffering wife again and again.  I wasn't amused by his sleazy shenanigans and that just leaves the growing we're-stuck-here feeling that bogs down all of the other characters as well.

There's a touch of The Graduate in some of the scenes, as the main characters are assigned roles and then condemned for not flourishing in them.  Similar to the The Graduate too the main characters are directionless and vaguely uncomfortable.  This film predates The Graduate however and is black and white and Italian and, as I say, a bit of a slog.  It's sort of hopeful but also sort of bleak.

The Cobweb (1955)

Saw The Cobweb (1955), an incredibly frothy film which actually and seriously revolves around an argument about library drape patterns.  The film is set in one of those spa-like mental hospitals that the Reagan administration killed off, where patients and staff live together in a big mansion with a flock of nurses.  The chief protagonist is the new head doctor who is trying to let the patients self-govern themselves a bit.  There's also an art therapy lady, the doctor's wife, a hysterical but kinda attractive artist patient (John Kerr), and Lillian Gish as the terrifying and formidable head matron.  The head doctor wants to let the artist guy design the drapes, Lillian Gish wants to buy the cheapest drapes possible to mollify the board of trustees, the doctor's wife wants to use some drapes one of her friends once showed her.  This is seriously the central struggle of the film!

Despite the Brady Bunch-level premise, I enjoyed the film a great deal.  It was chock full of delicious melodrama and shouting doctors and crying women and pathetic crazies.  Absolutely delightful.  There was a lot of plot involving people running around, accidentally behind each other's backs, triangulating and misunderstanding what some third party hath wrought.  That sort of business usually annoys and sort of upsets me, however here it felt okay.  This film came off like if Tennessee Williams had written a sitcom.  Lots of confusion and high-falutin language about how sometimes a doctor has to understand that he's also a human being, and sometimes a wife has to understand that her husband is also a doctor.  Fun, frothy, silly stuff!

The film was okay.  I greatly enjoyed it, but I think it's working on a wavelength I am perhaps uniquely attuned to.  It was very much ado about almost nothing and, after the stakes are established, the film follows the main doctor as he sprints from crisis to crisis.  He is also able to perfectly handle all of these crises however (or course!)  I enjoy a good melodrama, but it felt like it could have used a little more pacing or a bit fewer plot threads (the film is 2 hrs and 3 minutes long and feels pretty jam-packed.) I enjoyed this, but I don't expect anyone else to.

An Autumn Afternoon

Saw An Autumn Afternoon, a film by Yasujiro Ozu which is extremely similar (in content anyway) to his earlier Late Spring.  As in that film, this film is about an aging father who is being looked after by his daughter.  As his friends and sons and secretaries start pairing up, he worries that his daughter will become an old maid, looking after him.

With Late Spring, the central conflict was between the aging father wanting what's best for his daughter vs the daughter not wanting to abandon her father.  In this film however, it's less about conflict.  There is that tension, but it's far in the background.  Most of the film follows the father as he hangs out with his drinking buddies, holding parties for old teachers and chatting about their wives.  We meditate more on different kinds of relationships and states of being, in regards to marriage.  Newlyweds, fiancés, an old man with a young wife, an old man with an old maid daughter.

Once again, the recent war is brought up.  The father was a commander in the war, and he states at one point that maybe it was a good thing that they lost after all.  This is a surprising opinion for a commander to have but this attitude mirrors his own desire to find a husband for his daughter.  He will be alone and humbled, yes, but perhaps it is for the best.

The film is quaint and pretty, sentimental and sweet.  The action mostly follows this genially smiling old man as he smiles on the relationships of others and visits old friends.  This is a film almost entirely without conflict.

It's a well-shot and well made film.  I can't say it's the most gripping, but neither is it a bore, and it's not as treacly as some of (say) Kurosawa's films (eg).  It's a sort of unfocused meditation on family growing up and growing apart.  Bittersweet and sentimental.

The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fifth with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France

Saw The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fifth with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France, which is also known as Henry V, but the original name is so splendid and ridiculous and really better captures the spirit of the film.  The film followed King Henry as he ascends the throne, fights the battle of Agincourt, and acquires a wife.

The film opens on a gorgeous miniature of old London.  It's filmed in orangey technicolor and orchestra music is playing and the tiny ships in the harbor even glide around as well zoom in on the Globe Theater.  This is a capital-P Prestige film.  The whole thing is done in actual Shakespearian language, dick-jokes and all.  The film is beautiful and pompous and honestly a bit of a chore.

The film has a couple of interesting things going for it: it was filmed in the 40s as a sort of propaganda film to keep British spirits up during WW2.  The filming of the climactic battle between England and France had to be halted a couple of times due to British vs German dogfights happening overhead.  The action of the film and the play nicely parallels the events at the time of filming.

Also: the film is very pretty.  It's shot to look like the contemporary tapestries depicting the battle, with weird forced perspectives and angled buildings going every which way.  There were scenes where I couldn't tell what was a matte painting and what wasn't but I could tell my eyes were being fucked with in some subtle way.  The film obviously had a lot of money to throw around and many scenes are just gorgeous.  The eerie wrong angles of the castles and such give it a surreal, dreamlike air.

Alas, it is a Shakespeare play after all, and a History play at that.  It's not very gripping and contains some moldy old pious praise of the humble peasant (delivered by King Henry himself - so great is his heart!) Also some dire "comic" relief in the form of bumbling but good-hearted servants and wenches and drunks and so on and so on.

The film has its moments for sure, but this is a fairly dry piece of film for all of its excess.  I hate to say this, but I wish they had contemporized the language a bit, or at least laid off the outrageous accents.  It's not a bad film but, like its original title, it's a bit of a slog and not quite as fun as you'd hope.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

Saw She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), a western directed by John Ford.  I don't like John Ford's films, although they garner a lot of critical acclaim.  It makes it hard to review his films because I dimly suspect a lot of my criticism comes from prejudice or nitpicking.  In my defense, Ford does his part to make this difficult for me by dealing often with unfortunate and badly aged subjects and heroes.

This film follows a cavalry troupe lead by an aging John Wayne, only five days from retirement.  They are in a tricky situation because the Indians have been emboldened by the recent death of General Custer and are on the war path.  Wayne must remove the women-folks from the camp which women folk consist of the Major's wife, a tough lady who has been in the army some time, and their niece who is a pretty woman, first introduced demanding to be allowed to picnic with her beaux, a trust-find kid, only to be stopped by her other beaux, an incredibly rule-bound smart boy who is some kind of army robot and an ex-confederate soldier.

So, we're dealing with a lot here.  Modern perception of the Indian Wars has changed dramatically since the 40s when this film was made.  Ditto the civil war which, as of the 40s, was still being told to us by the letters of Robert E Lee, and which still had the veneer of being about something besides slavery.  So, our heroes are fighters for colonialism and slavery.  How charming.  I want to see the good in this film, but the bad is right there.  It's like watching the Jazz Singer casually applying blackface.

Ditto also this picnicking woman.  She's portrayed as a classy, possibly fussy lady who is assailed and accused of adventuring and of not taking the toll of war seriously.  But ... she's accused of this in dialogue by one of her boyfriends.  There's no indication that that's what's going on in reality, outside of that guy's head.  Unless I missed it.  Did I miss it?  She's the girl everyone loves and she has some strange daddy-fixation on Wayne's character.

Let me just talk about what's good for a moment: the visuals are stunning.  The film takes place in Utah's monument valley and it's gorgeous and breathtaking.  This scenery is goosed considerably by mists and thunderstorms and fires and elaborate lighting.  At one point John Wayne visits his family's grave (not a spoiler, this is establishing back story) and the picnicking lady shows up.  She's standing in front of the subset and half of the image is red and the other half is black and it's stunning and I loved it.  The final scenes are (of course) of someone riding off into the sunset and boy howdy does that sunset weep with color.  The film is unequivocally beautiful.

The plot becomes more sentimental as it plays out, which is typical of Ford.  He makes lovely films with troubling elements that stick in my grim, sour craw, and this is no exception.  I didn't like it, but I dimly feel I missed the point and I also know that this film was straight-up not meant for me, so it is what it is.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Saw Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, a blood-n-booze-fueled 70s western which starts off with a godfather-style man torturing his daughter (in some off-screen way) to reveal the name of the father of her child.  When she finally cries out "Alfredo Garcia" he offers his various goons one million dollars for the head of Alfredo Garcia.  Two of these goons travel around Mexico showing a picture of Alfredo to various people and asking after him and finally they run into a small bar pianist who knows him.  This small time pianist is the real main character of the film and the place where the film starts building character and so forth.

The film drops one big hint early on - the picture of Alfredo very closely resembles the pianist to the point that I thought he was Alfredo.  According to imdb trivia, the actor who played the pianist is actually in the picture, just with prosthetics.  As the pianist decides to chase after Alfredo, it is not just Alfredo's life he's going to deliver to the goons, but his own.  This theme is reinforced by his corvette car being increasingly beat up as the film goes on and progressively more coated with dust and also by his white suit becoming smattered with blood and dirt.

This is a fairly grim film.  The pianist constantly swills alcohol and speaks to Alfredo as if he were in the car - hating him for putting him through this but also reminiscing on their friendship and liking him.  As we can tell from the business with the picture, Alfredo is just another version of him.  This is not personal, it's just business.  He is a man who is confronting the cruelties of a capricious world (or in this case, the godfather-type guy from the beginning.)  He wants this one million dollars because it means a new life, but is he willing to sacrifice his entire current life for that chance?

The film is fairly grim and although I liked the themes and subtexts of the film, I didn't really like it.  It ends on a close-up of an endlessly firing machinegun muzzle.  This intense focusing on (glorification of?) violence is off-putting and after two hours, frankly enough.  It's not a bad film by any means, just very ugly and grim and in love with its ugly grimness.  A good blood-n-guts film, but as usual, I'm a bit too nelly to really dig it.

Song of the Sea (2014)

Saw Song of the Sea, a beautifully animated film by studio Cartoon Saloon who also produced The Secret of Kells.  With the Kells movie, it was similarly gorgeous but I felt it was a little too incoherent - it wasn't clear to me what the production of the book would accomplish or how it would help stop the barbarian hordes.  All that is fixed with Song of the Sea which is perfectly supplied with mirrored characters, a clear theme of loss and the pain of healing, together with wonderful and eerie Irish magical creatures.

The film follows a lighthouse keeper who lives with his son and pregnant wife on a tiny island.  The wife has complications during child birth and produces a mute little girl who the son hates as a symbol of his missing, beloved mother and whose father over-protects, as a symbol of the last piece of his wife he has left.  I don't think it's a spoiler exactly, but after about fifteen minutes of film it becomes clear the mother is a selkie - this sets up the sea and water in general as a powerful symbol of loss and of uncontrolled emotion.

Indeed, control over emotion becomes the central struggle of the film.  The antagonist is revealed to be literally bottling up negative (and positive) emotions to spare everyone the trouble of fully experiencing a painful world.  The scene with the antagonist is also the most compelling both in terms of animation and story.  I was reminded of the various showdowns with Yubaba in Spirited Away in the mixture of grotesque and threatening animation on display.

This film is really good - it looks good, it's funny, it's creepy, it tells a good story, it doesn't even shy away from real emotions - all the good things!  I loved it!

Inside (2021)

Saw Inside (2021), a comedy special from Al Yankovic heir apparent Bo Burnham.  He tackles the isolation and creeping agoraphobia experienced by many of us through the pandemic.  It kicks off undermining the comedy a bit by neurotically asking if we should really even be joking at a time like this, when so much is wrong with the world.  He continues to break the fourth wall throughout the show, including footage of himself setting up shots and rehearsing songs.  It's not altogether funny, but it is interesting to watch.

Bo starts off very conventionally, poking fun at white women's Instagram pages, his own need for attention, and apologizing for being problematic.  We fairly quickly shift gears however into recursive analysis of his own self-analysis in a brilliant reaction-shot sketch. This preemptive self-critique, he explains directly to the camera, is a pointless defense mechanism to stave off external critique (from people like me!)  Several times he zooms the camera into a mirror, letting us see the camera's eye which is always hungrily watching him, often as he looks on haggard, or cries.

The quarantine and lockdowns are hard for all of us, but I imagine doubly so for a performer.  They must perform to an unblinking, un-reacting camera in an empty room.  Bo claims that he used to have panic attacks when performing on stage, and here comes a convenient pandemic to keep him locked inside, not growing but not vulnerable either - a stunted, overgrown hermit crab in his shell, just slowly falling apart from loneliness, the need for approval and attention, and the overwhelming information feed the is the internet.

The show is not that funny but, as Bo points out, it's kind of hard to be both sincere and funny right now.  It reminded me a lot of Tarnation in that it seemed underproduced, sincere, and was kind of harrowing.  The act of filming and sharing this footage taints its honesty though - this is a performance to some extent.

The Sacrifice

Saw The Sacrifice, a film by Tarkovsky.  It's a slow film, full of meditative, minutes-long takes the seems to deal mostly with the nature of faith and sacrifice.  The plot follows a retired actor (or philosopher or something) who lives in a pleasant but small cottage with his wife and some small boy who I think is their grandson.  It is the man's birthday and he at the birthday dinner party, they get news that world war 3 (or some similar calamity) has broken out.  He drunkenly promises god that he will sacrifice everything if he can make things go back to normal.  The son-in-law, a doctor, has a handgun in his doctor's bag.

The film opens with the protagonist telling the young boy about a monk who watered a dead tree for years until it miraculously blossomed.  He professes a belief in the power of ritual and claims that if you repeat an action enough times, something must change.  "It has to."  This sets up the central interest of the film: the irrationality of belief and the equally irrational expectation that it be rewarded in some way.  The film intelligently favors realism and shows that this irrational belief is not purely a good thing, but has real costs to the believer and their loved ones.

Not only religious faith is examined however.  The protagonist explains to the ever-present boy that he has sacrificed his life for the sake of art and philosophy.  He has not truly lived, but merely prepared himself for a life of reflection which is both monastic and worldly.  He is a paralyzed academic, knowing all and doing nothing.  In the intellectual tradition, this is a valuable and admirable life, but it too costs him something.

These dual kinds of faith and sacrifice are subtly referenced and contrasted many times in the film.  The actor complains that much of society is full of this sort of destruction, usually as a result of the fear of death.  He denounces all of civilization as founded on vanity and sin, which he defines to be decadence and unnecessary things.  His house and the rooms inside are extremely spare to the point of looking like sound stages and he's always listening to restrained, subtle Japanese flute music.  This is a very advanced form of taste and culture and affectation and vanity.

The film is very Tarkovsky-ish, filled with slow shots of strange things and with (maybe?) dream sequences involving broken furniture and dripping water.  It's full of ambivalence and intriguing details which don't seem to go anywhere.  The protagonist receives an outdated map of Europe as a present, for example, and their postman seems to fake a heart attack for some reason.  There's a scene where the protagonist's wife must be sedated and as she struggles her dress hitches up, exposing her beautiful legs.

It's a slow and meditative film.  It's not super gripping, however the mystery of what will be sacrificed and how kept me awake.  It's the sort of film that's perfect for a film class: full of intriguing ideas and symbols and themes, ripe for discussion and argument.

Faust (1926)

Saw Faust (1926), directed by F W Murnau.  It was spectacular and bold and unfortunately exhausted my short attention span fairly early.  It follows the famous Faust who sells his soul to semi-demon Mephisto in exchange for knowledge and power.  Mephisto torments him on earth by giving him his every desire, usually an excess of what he wanted or in some way that screws him, monkey-pawing him in some diabolical way to spoil Faust's happiness.

The film has two main acts: everything leading up to the signing of the contract, and then the aftermath.  Up to the contract signing, everything is just eye-popping.  We open on an angel and Mephisto fighting in heaven.  There's a scene where Mephisto appears in the sky above a German village, his spreading cloak symbolizing the plague spreading through the town!  Faust gazes helplessly, his cloud of hair back-lit, an ostrich egg staring forth from a snowy nest of beard and hair.  It's all amazing!  And to say nothing of the special effects!  There's a scene where the contract appears, written in flaming letters.  If it were filmed today, I'd assume computers were involved - I have no idea how they managed it back in 1926!

Alas, once the contract is signed, the film crystalizes a little bit into a doomed romance between Faust and Gretchen.  In some versions of this story, Gretchen is an angel in disguise who saves Faust in the end, but here she's just a lovely lass from his home town.  While they're falling in love, Mephisto engages in some "humorous" business with the town love-potion-lady.  It's all very droll and Greek-theater-style comical servants.  I never found that crap funny and don't here.  I am a grump.

Unfortunately, I feel I failed this film a bit.  It's very well made and packed full of crazy visuals.  The Mephisto character outright steals every scene he's in, but I started falling asleep mid-way through the film.  This always happens to me with silent movies and I'm not sure why.  I think the lack of dialogue makes it harder for me to pay attention or something.  Anyway, this is a fun film to watch, just see it in the morning!

Alice in the Cities

Saw Alice in the Cities, a slow, spacey Wim Wenders film about a journalist who is stuck taking care of a little girl in New York City and Amsterdam.  They are looking for her family and he is trying to finish an article about road-tripping through the US.  The film is slow and subtle and speaking in a language I don't totally understand.

The idea of road-tripping and hunting for the True America is a concept very quintessentially American in the 70s.  That combined with the frequent blues and rock music on the soundtrack make the film feel very American, even though most of the film takes place in Holland.  The protagonist's situation mirrors the girls in many ways: he is displaced and looking for a place to belong, running out of money, and looking for someone to love him.  In saving her he is perhaps saving himself, although the ending makes this interpretation somewhat ambiguous.

The film is very slow though.  It clocks in at 110 minutes but feels much longer.  Much time is spent watching these two meander around New York or Holland, as simple guitar music and synthesizers fill the empty space.  Other recurrent themes are polaroid photos (which Wim Wenders would return to in his other road trip movies) and music and children.  Frequently the little girl gazes longingly at children who know where they belong.

As for the polaroid photos, they provide some fun threads to pull on: the main character complains that they never look like reality.  This is an interesting observation, but goes nowhere that I follow.  Similarly, he rails at the vulgarity of television and radio, but again this sophomoric notion that everything is an ad nowadays is introduced but dropped again, never to be explored.

It reminded me of Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, those films from the 70s about getting lost and being independent and self-indulgent, and looking for belonging, only this time we have a taciturn journalist and a sulky little girl.  I didn't like those movies (I felt the characters were being a bit too selfish and silly) and suspect I did not fully understand them.  As with those, whatever the thought or the mood or whatever that we're exploring in this film is, it's happening on a wavelength I don't operate on.

Breaking the Waves

Saw Breaking the Waves, a reasonably grueling story about an Irish girl named Bess who loves her husband, Jan, with an all-consuming, self-destroying love.  This love is set in opposition with the faith of her community when Jan becomes paralyzed and, in an effort to get Bess to move on from him, urges and then orders her to take a lover.  How can she obey him as her heart desires, if it flies in the face of her personal faith and of the social mores of her community?

The film is in the spirit of Tess of the D'Urbervilles or the Book of Job: a grinding, miserable tragedy in which we watch in awe as the protagonist weathers storm after storm and is slowly failed by all of her support systems.  It is not a fun film, but it is fascinating to watch this poor girl suffer and yet retain her innocence.  Surprisingly, the husband Jan does not come off badly - his actions seem reasonable to me and I could see myself doing similar things.  Her love, I feel, is just too strong - she loves Jan too much: he wants to sacrifice his claim on her body to save her sanity but she is all too glad to dispose of anything as long as she can remain true to him.  There's a scene where he's leaving to work on an oil derrick and she runs off crying, later found banging a loading crane with a piece of rebar, screaming her despair to the sky.  I mean, that's a big reaction, Bess.

There's many revealing and clever scenes in the film.  The first I wanted to bring up is at her wedding, where her grandfather (one of the church elders) watches disapprovingly as Jan's friends drink cans of beer.  One of the friends crushes his empty beer can, so her grandfather crushes a drinking glass in his fist.  He opens his fist to show the bloody scratches and to show that he is willing to follow his narrow rigidity even to self-destruction.

There's another scene where Bess watches a child's film off-screen.  She's watching in open-mouthed delight and Jan is watching her unbelievingly, like he can't believe anyone could be so pure and wholesome as to be transfixed by this movie.  But this is what is winning about Bess: she comes off as possibly crazy, bizarrely and sometimes grotesquely innocent, but in this innocence she finds joy and delight and this joy wavers, but endures even to the final scenes of the film.  It's heartbreaking but in a kind of uplifting way.  Also, I always enjoy a film about obsessions and madness.

This is an early film by Lars Von Trier, so he hadn't quite embraced his trademark sadism fully, and consequently the film ends as happily as it could.  The last scenes feel a bit jarring and a bit unearned, but I'll take any happiness Von Trier lets slip - statements like that are probably what lead to Dancer In The Dark!

The Color of Pomegranates

Saw The Color of Pomegranates, a fairly inscrutable film from Russia, 1969, about the life of the Armenian poet Sayat-Nova.  The twist however is that this film is telling Sayat-Nova's life story as told by his poems.  Thus, it is often striking, beautiful, brutal, haunting, and totally incomprehensible.  Let's explore.

The film follows the poet's life, growing up apparently in a monastery.  He's surrounded by the earthy, simple industry of the monastery and also by the other-worldly, elevated symbolism and ritual of religion.  As he gets older, he discovers women and music, realizing at this point I think that he was not meant to be a monk.  As he gets yet older, he leaves the monastery but seems already world-weary, his poems speaking of the beauty of becoming soil and of the peace of death.

The above story is visually told by oblique and posed and strange imagery.  Mandolins spin above his head as he learns to play music.  Women hold conch shells over their breasts and monks sway back and forth like bells.  Freshly beheaded chickens are pelted at the poet's body.  Blind angels press naan against a headstone.  There is no dialogue, there is no narration.  Only a few of the poets poems, appearing in title cards like a silent film, are there to guide us.  It brings to mind the bizarre hallucinations of Jodorowsky's work, or Un Chien Andalou.  Striking stuff!

The net effect however is a little overwhelming and wearying and wore me down about a third of the way through the film.  The visuals are very intriguing, but I felt the need for a commentary track.  To a simple movie-watcher like myself, I can't fully appreciate this high-concept work and need someone better versed in (perhaps) this poet's work or in Armenian culture to decode it for me.  It's very evocative and not one to shy away from a high concept, but a little too inaccessible for me.  I need a boost!

Edit - the Criterion collection blurb points out that the tableaux in the film resemble religious ikons.  Often they are arranged in sets of three like a triptych.  This elegantly mirrors the religious traditions of the Armenians.  I need to leave this movie criticism/interpretation business up to the pros - woof!

Point Blank (1967)

Saw Point Blank (1967).  I loved it!  It was a late noir, full of grim violence and brittle, crystalline women.  It opens on the protagonist, Walker, waking up in a jail cell.  The film jumps back and forth as he recalls that he got there by being double-crossed in the middle of a heist.  His wife and his friend turned on him.  We get flashbacks of his friend and him rolling around on the floor of a class reunion together.  Then, when Walker finally comes to, the film jumps forward to find Walker on a boat, talking to some bald man, being asked to help the bald man help him, to take down The Organization.  From there Walker kills a lot of people.

The film is just marvelously abstract and strange.  The identity of the bald man, for example, is never fully explained.  Is he a government agent?  A rival gangster?  Death?  Satan?  An angel?  Similarly, there's the intriguing opening, with the main character possibly dying in a jail cell.  Is this his afterlife?  Or is he now trapped in the prison of pointless revenge?  The thematic implications are never fully teased out but are doubly fascinating for what they subliminally suggest.

The film is Lynch-ianly chilly and full of arresting images and otherworldly performances.  It is Hitchcock-ishly posed and choreographed.  It's mostly grim and violent, but stylishly so and in a nice, intriguing way.  It's clever and classy, tipping its hand a few times and letting you know that this is all pointless.  At one point one of the gangsters shouts at Walker "You're a very bad man, Walker, a very destructive man! Why do you run around doing things like this?"  It's just such a deliciously absurd line and so wonderfully undercuts the seriousness of the action.  "A very bad man" indeed!

I didn't think I'd enjoy this film but I really really did.

John Carter

Saw John Carter.  It wasn't bad in the end, but it gets off to a very very rocky start.  We kick off on Mars, where we set up the Martian conflict.  Then we shoot back to earth, New York, in the year 1881, following the titular John Carter.  He then dies and we read his journal, taking us back 13 years earlier, to Arizona (I think) 1868.  THEN we get to Mars where we see John Carter interacting with some aliens and discovering he can jump very high on Mars because of  … bone density?

The start is definitely a mess.  you kind of have to accept all of this as fantasy-land nonsense.  It is sort of sad that the source material apparently did not know that gravity is greater on Mars and that lower gravity does not mean greater strength (you can't break moon-chains just because you can jump high on the moon) but then again, there are also not four-armed green aliens either, so I guess we just kind of need to accept that this is Mars sort of  in name only.

Anyway, once the basic stupidity of the film is established and it gets more into its groove, it improves somewhat and becomes a kind of sand-and-sandals-type film of swashbuckling daring-do and court intrigue.  This latter bit is not so bad, and the main character's arc seems to be transitioning from nihilistic self-interest to being willing to fight and stand up for a worthy cause.  It is unfortunate that his nihilism is established while refusing to help Custer's regiment to keep Arizona safe.  In the original book, I feel this was the obviously just cause that, later on in the book, he would have manfully accepted.  Oh well - that bit is left in the intro and never brought up again, thank goodness.

This was basically a silyl movie.  Once you accept its fundamental silliness, it's much easier to handle, but the very bumpy beginning puts up serious hurdles to anyone's enjoyment.  I've read some defenses online and I get the sense that this film has some relatively half-hearted defenders out there, but for me, this is not worth defending.  It's not terrible in the end, but its too pointlessly convoluted and interested in imaginary politicking to be of much interest to me.

The Big Heat

Saw The Big Heat, a classic noir film that starts off in grand style: a closeup of a gun, a hand grabs it and the hand's owner shoots himself in the head.  His widow shows up and, before calling the cops, calls some gentleman in bed in his mansion.  This kicks off the rollercoaster of events in this brief, taught film.

There film revolves around none of these people in the intro scenes, but around an honest cop who is trying to get to the bottom of this, in spite of corruption at the highest levels.  His happy domestic life is contrasted with the various politicians and gangsters' lives of excess and nightclubs.  Indeed, as the case progresses, it begins to interfere quite heavily in his happy domestic life, causing him to symbolically topple his daughter's toy castle.

There's a lot of strange, unused business around parenthood in this film.  The head gangster has a gigantic painting of his saintly mother over his mantlepiece and a shady bartender at one point claims he was merely calling his mother.  When the squeeze is on, the main character's daughter is sent to hunker with (you guessed it) his parents.  It's not reflected in the plot of the film, but I believe is meant to further contrast the gangsters' corruption (painted facsimile of a mother, using the mother as a cover) against the main character's genuine domestic harmony and (attempted) separation of work and life.  I'm reminded of the film White Heat, where Cagney's gangster character is coded as deviant by his being something of a mama's boy.  At any rate, parents come up a lot here.

Outside of that, I enjoyed the femme fatale who was originally supposed to be Marilyn Monroe but who they swapped out for another actress.  The other actress had the Monroe beautiful mess thing down pat however and seems to be the template upon which Harley Quin and other such bubbly gangster-chicks are based - a sort of manic magical pixie femme fatale.  She's always a delight to watch as she flirts with dangerous men.

The film was alright.  It was very taught and kept humming along, but it contained few surprises. It does contain an awful lot of violence for a Haye's code era film and there's a fair amount of cop corruption (although they all have an un-earned, 3rd-act redemption of course.)  Outside of that, it's a well-made, solid, standard noir.  Well done all around.

Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)

Saw Memories of Underdevelopment, a film set in the recent aftermath of the Cuban socialist revolution.  It follows a wealthy landlord who was able to get his parents and wife out of Cuba but who is not leaving himself.  He stays behind nominally to work on a novel but mostly really to hit on women and reminisce about his past and generally go slowly crazy.

This film is about death and rebirth.  In the glow of the socialist revolution, something new is about to begin. But to make room for the new, something old must die.  Specifically this man's way of life must end.  Returning home from the airport, he finds his caged bird is dead.  His maid tells him about her baptism, how it is a death and a rebirth.  He meditates on the murders carried out for the revolution and how the foot-soldiers were condemned so that society at large could remain morally pure.

The main character is a member of the decadent landlord bourgeois intelligentsia, so despised by the revolutionaries.  He is paralyzed by understanding - of wanting to preserve his way of life and also by despising it and despising himself.  He's a stand-in for the upper class in general however and so his personal life mirrors his increasingly perilous sociopolitical situation.  He starts dating a 16-year old girl who is too naïve to recognize herself as just another hookup.  Like Cuba's new socialism, she is the fresh new thing, and although she is being exploited one last time by the older landlord, she may be the agent of his destruction.

The landlord rolls his eyes at his girlfriend's lack of appreciation of fine art and generally hates her childish naivete, but he himself lasciviously rubs the breasts of Venus in an art book.  Several times his erotic imagination is displayed and used to indict him as shallow, decadent, bored and horny.  When his maid tells him about her baptism, he imagines her wet white dress clinging to her breasts.  He is certainly not naïve and immature, but is his decadence really any better?

The style of the film is very French New Wave, very Fellini.  Lots of men in suits and thick glasses languishing in ennui and smoking in coffee shops, talking politics and philosophy and leering at women.  Unlike those films, the action here is intercut with references to real events in the news which strongly grounds this landlord's struggle in larger events, but which is also fairly daring.  The film is telling us that it is not just commenting on this fictional man, but on the historical events themselves.  Always a tricky business.

The film was fairly interesting however a bit dated and chilly.  It's hard to sustain a portrayal of wealthy decadence without having it become fairly boring after a while.  By the 2/3rds mark I was ready for it to end, but I was pretty well entertained by it up until then.

Le Plaisir

Saw Le Plaisir, a trio of short films directed by Max Ophüls.  All three films are on the theme of romance in conjunction with pleasure.  We start with a creepy film about an old man who disguises himself (with a mask) to look like a young dandy.  We visit him briefly and listen to his wife complain about him.  He was always a womanizer and now, in his old age, uses masks and wigs to continue to harass women.  In his getup, he looks like a serial killer.

The next, and much longer segment, follows a crew of prostitutes as they go to visit the Madame's niece for her first communion.  The setup is a ridiculous joke - whores on holiday for their first communion - but it turns kind of sweet in the end, as the whores sleep on the floors and couches of the niece's family farmhouse, making the family proud with their fancy clothes and weeping at the sermon.  Everyone comes off as a bit silly but mostly happy and mostly alright.  The men in the city celebrate the return of the whores and the farmhouse glows with pride at its fancy relatives.

The last film, we are warned, is more of a tragedy: a painter with a fleeting infatuation with his model.  This one, like the first, has a fairy-tale quality - a sort of timeless simplicity that is old and quaint and yet universal: man chases girl, gets her, and sees he doesn't want her.

There's a narrator walking us through all of these stories with a sort of affected humility.  He begs our pardon several times and apologizes for having "old stories" when we are "so modern".  The film feels like a close adaptation of a book with a strong authorial voice.

Another thing I noticed was that we're very often outside of the houses where the action is taking place.  The camera is always peering through windows and through stairway railings, making us into outsiders peering in at the desire and love on display inside.  The action seems to not be for us, but we are witnessing it anyway.

All this aside, the film was quaint and pokey, dealing with desire and such but in a very chilly, almost cerebral way, prostitutes notwithstanding.  This being the 50s, we of course could not deal frankly with sex and I wonder if this is the sort of boundary-pushing film that would have had un-simulated sex in it nowadays but which is rendered pretty tame in this modern, boundary-pushed time.

A quaint little film.  It's apparently one of Kubrick's favorites, but I can't see why.

Night and Fog

Saw Night and Fog, a fairly heavy film essay about the holocaust that lasts about half an hour but feels much longer.  It contains a lot of archival and newly shot footage of the death camps, with a narrator speaking over it.  At times the narration is ironical and stark, at other times almost despairing of this project, feeling like a DVD commentary:  "we are slowly following these tracks, what do we hope to find?"   "we can show you only the surface of what happened here."  Indeed, the footage and the facts, we are all somewhat familiar with, but the reality was far more harrowing than we can understand or imagine.

The narrator starts the film pointing out the the irony of the banal and common details of the camps.  Some are constructed like garages, we are told, others like stadiums.  Architects and surveyors were involved, everything so dry, so calm.  The banality of evil.  As the film progresses, we are told of the strange make-believe society in the camps - there were hospitals and prisons, bordellos and (in some) even zoos and greenhouses.  As the film goes on, we see fresh, healthy prisoners juxtaposed with skeletal long-timers.  Puzzles and knots of chests and limbs lying in snow and dirt.  It's very upsetting.

The film was apparently made as a commentary on the then-current invasion of Algiers by the French and of course today the message of vigilance against genocide and mass murder is as unfortunately salient as ever.  We have a montage of prison guards, workers, and politicians all denying responsibility.

Soul

Saw Soul, another Pixar film by Pete Docter, creator of Up and Inside Out.  Like those films, this one is a moving film about dealing with life.  Also sort of like those films, this one is sort of a muddle.  The main character is a Jazz musician who is laboring away in obscurity as a teacher.  He dreams of greatness but, on the night of his big break, dies and goes to a sort of glitch-aesthetic afterlife where he runs into an unborn soul and tries to sort of convince it to want to live slash steal its ticket to earth.

The whole thing is a little muddle-y.  I really thought the lesson at the end would be that happiness is where you find it and that being a teacher can be a perfectly satisfying life's goal.  Similarly, that adopting a weary, seen-it-all attitude is a mask for cowardice.  None of these points are made however.

It's a fairly rollicking adventure film really, almost a heist, with bodies and souls and Earth-passes serving as the heisted treasure.  I feel like the real heart of the film comes near the end when the Jazzman has attained his goal and now feels let-down by his success.  He's asks what now and is told, now we keep going.  That moment is the most straight-faced and unambiguous, but also difficult in its simplicity - difficult to act on and obvious on first hearing.  The rest of the film like that too: full of obvious revelations about life that are simple and complex at the same time.  Perhaps they are profound?

Limelight

Saw Limelight, nearly the last film starring and directed by Charles Chaplin.  It's a talky but is full of the sentimental gentility and mugging of old silent films.  It's a very indulgent film - it follows an aging , alcoholic vaudeville comedian, played by Chaplin of course, who happens upon a ballerina mid-suicide-attempt.  Together, they re-forge their artistic sparks and try to make it in the world.

This film is nakedly about Chaplin giving a victory-lap to his greatly successful career.  The central comedian is perpetually beloved and everyone who comes upon him is shocked that he's not working anymore.  Everyone loves him, even his cruel, bullish landlady.  His alcoholism is never that serious or realistic.  The film starts out with the aging comedian lying in bed, listening to beautiful music played by tramps on the street-corner.  Everything's so precious.

That said, it's fun to be swept away by a sentimental film once in a while.  And while the sentiment is omnipresent it's only occasionally cloying.  I enjoyed the movie overall.  The ballerina character has not aged super well however.  She is fairly wooden, even the throws of her failed suicide attempt.  In addition to being a somewhat slight character, she's often sidelined or ignored.  Her pre-show stage-fright is slapped away and her love-life is stage-managed by her fairy godfather, Chaplin.

I'm being really harsh here, and know that this is by no means a bad film.  There's a few bum notes, definitely, but it's a winning film that's slightly creaky, showing its age a bit.  It is like the career of the central comedian, of Charles Chaplin himself - an ouroboros of a film.

Detour

Saw Detour, a strange, pokey old film from 1945.  It's a fairly dismal story of a man who is hitchhiking to visit his girlfriend.  Along the way he runs into Vera, a controlling woman who gains leverage over him and holds him captive.  This happens halfway through the film, but the real meat of the film is this power struggle between Vera and the protagonist.  The film shows it age a bit but has the tight, miserable, gripping pace of a good noir.

The film is strange in many ways.  I postulate that it was first a radio play.  A lot of the film happens in narration and voice-over and via stagey one-sided phone calls.  The characters perform their roles well, but almost in short-hand, like their emotions never really reach their eyes.  The characters are also very un-nuanced.  The main character is Good and Hapless but that's all.  The film is ultimately a sort of fable about the struggles of this man so his blankness kind of plays to the films' favor.

The one exception to all of this is Vera, which is very unusual in a film this old, for a woman to have such a meaty role.  She is calculating and violent and a bit vulnerable and excellent.  She makes half-hopeful passes at the main character in one moment and then sourly threatens him in the next.  Their relationship is driven by her and she drives it right off a cliff.  She's a baddie but she's still powerful and a force of self-destruction to be reckoned with.  Indeed, such a powerful, dominant woman probably only got by the censors because she was a baddie.

Speaking of the censors, they are the cause of the ending which is so utterly implausible, I took it to be a dream sequence.  This film shows its age in a couple of ways (one of them being the Hayes code meddling of the censors) and also in regards the weird, formal acting, but it also contains some magnificently strange expressions (egs: "I didn't have a car, so it was me for the thumb." "... why he must have scads of dough!" I was totally tickled.)

The film is sort of dusty in a few ways but holds up well.  It's unrelentingly miserable but mesmerizingly so.  It's not just a wallow however. It works to build sympathy for the hapless main character and even for Vera in parts.  She's a bad egg, but once perhaps she wasn't so hard-boiled.

Pet Sematary (1989)

Saw Pet Sematary (1989)  It was a film about a couple who move from the city to rural New England for some reason.  Their new house is idyllic save for a nearby road where trucks barrel down the road with pet-murdering speed all day and night.  The film heavily foreshadows what's to come but is a sort of slow burn at first.  In the final half of it however, it kicks into high gear and truly comes alive.  The film is fairly goofy but has its moments.  It was recently remade and I can sort of see why: the special effects are a true hinderance to the film and a lot of the performances are fairly wooden.  Not a great film, but interesting in its own way.

Most horror films derive from real-world tragedy and this is no different.  The central tragedy here is that death comes before we're ready for it.  I'll try to be vague to avoid spoilers, but there's a scene late in the film where a man is cradling a dead body in a cemetery and (officially) nothing supernatural has happened yet.  He just can't let go.  This is pretty nightmarish on its own.  I mean, can you imagine?

The film has a nice, morbid grimness that reminds me of Hellraiser's baroque S&M horrors.  There's a stand-out performance from Fred Gwynne (Mr. Herman Munster himself!) as a folksy neighbor who is the perfect mix of absurd and sincere.  The family mother is also great as a Hitchcock blonde.  Clearly she's a transplant who has yet to take.  She's always over-dressed in smart blazers or flowing silks and there's a perfect scene where he stupid high-heels are sinking into the soil with each step she takes.  Less strong is the protagonist husband who is great at looking preoccupied and brooding but who is quite wooden every time he has to emote.  Then again, it may be the script's fault.  I have yet to see someone pull off the yelled "Nooooooo!" without looking goofy.  There's some iffy child acting as well, but we can only expect so much of children after all.

The film is okay.  There's some very strange acting and some strange, pointless sequences but there's also some great sequences and some ghoulish fun to be had.  It was sort of a wash.

Forbidden Games

Saw Forbidden Games, a French film which is a bit of a bummer.  It follows a young girl in WW2 who is taken in by a family of farmers after her own parents are killed in an air raid while fleeing Paris.  The film is shot from a child's-eye view, revolving mostly around the fast friendship which develops around her and the family's young son.  Their relationship is delicate and courtly and childish and completely ignored by the adults in favor of domestic squabbles and these squabbles themselves are completely overshadowed by the war itself.  Several times bombs light up the sky at night.

The children's adventures and games revolve mostly around death.  The young girl doesn't understand what has happened to her parents and becomes obsessed with the iconography and ceremony of death.  It reminds me of Spirit of the Beehive, but this one is more domestic, almost sit-com-ish in its premises and plot.  There's a very moving sequence where they are carrying many crosses and singing fearfully as a dogfight happens in the sky above them.  They are surrounded by death, drowned out by it.  The adults are carrying on feuds and going to church as though nothing were happening.  In their way, the kids are the only ones who seem to be actually reacting to death, even though their reaction is inappropriate.

The film is fairly sweet at times and seems to be settling into a sit-com groove of small-town romances and misunderstandings, but it ends on a fairly sour note.  It is trying to deal with the realities of lives lost and not just lost as in missing but also as in simply uprooted and misplaced, lost somewhere in transit.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Saw Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a fairly nice teen comedy which follows the lives of six or so teenagers as they navigate high school.  It involves Sean Penn as a stoner and this stoner character seems to be the source of most of this film's appeal, but the film is much more than just his oh-so-goofy misadventures.  The bulk of the film revolves around the kids' relationships and the film takes these relationships seriously.

I particularly liked that the film didn't just follow a group of male teens on some hooting, squawking quest to touch the fabled boob.  There are a few sex scenes but they're fumbling and awkward, more about vulnerability and a sense of having bumbled into something you don't know how to deal with yet.  It feels so much more realistic and reasonable than, say, Risky Business or Project X (which oh my god I just hate that movie, Project X so much.)  And this is in keeping with the rest of the film, this clear-eyed compassion.  This is a kindly film.

The film is very on the side of its teens.  The worst of them I suppose is Brad, who is a little fast-food middle-manager whose position has gone to his head, but even he is humbled and rebuilt again, perhaps now a better man.  There's also a sleazy wheeler-and-dealer type guy who is currently harmless but will probably become a petty drug dealer.  He's fairly obnoxious, but harmless and colorful for now.  Similarly the girls are sweet and nervous, one maybe making up a super dreamy boyfriend who goes to a different school.

I thought the film was sweet.  It's an amiable, comfortable world where these kids are allowed to still be young and uncertain and to make mistakes.  Nothing serious comes of anything.  There's a quite serious bit right in the middle (spoiler: an abortion) but right after, the characters are smiling and talking softly, moving on and healing.  This is a somewhat more realistic, somewhat more kind version of reality that I enjoyed visiting for a while and which was not what I was expecting, given the Teen Sex Comedy Genre.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

Saw The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, a film from the 70s about a man who owns a not-very-hot strip club.  It's desultory and cheap, more the Kit Kat Klub than the Moulin Rouge.  The owner swans around with his girls, being the king of his little tawdry kingdom, mostly in close-shots which leave him looking bored, isolated, his giant face floating in the darkness looking down at his drink, or whatever.  He seems to be in a place of decadence, knowing that his girls only put up with him for the paycheck, but enjoying the simulated attention in any case.  He seems self indulgent and self loathing.

This starts to change when he's forced by gambling debts to murder the titular Chinese bookie.  This bookie is some sort of important person in the underworld and soon the nightclub owner is the subject of assassination attempts and sinister car rides, beatings and threats.  But, critically, the camera zooms out at this point and the nightclub owner comes alive.  As he struggles against the gangsters, he takes more of an interest in the world.  His nightclub picks up, and we can see him talking to people, moving to shots which place him in the middle distance, we see him more embedded in the world.

The film seems to suggest that this guy just needed something to struggle against to wake up and rediscover the thrill of the hustle.  It's sort of unfortunate that some bookie-murder was apparently the panacea that was called for, but I suppose it's more interesting than the more conventional subjects these films use to bring their protagonists back to life (ie: orphans, girlfriends, retarded relatives, talking animals, etc)

There's also a bit at the end where the nightclub owners lectures his girls on the power of fantasy and pretend.  It's a piece which feels very much like the director is talking to us.  Like the nightclub owner, the film director is the king of his little temporary empire.  There will always be bigger fish which he has to duck and deal with, but this little corner is his, and he wants to entertain people.

The film is very 1970s.  It's slow and full of grainy closeups.  Naturalistic dialogue trickles out at a relaxed pace.  The feel of the film is fairly relaxing and mild, in spite of its plot.  It's an interesting film.  Not really a slam dunk of a popcorn film, but not an inaccessible headscratcher either.  It's a nice, sincere little 1970s film.

The Bonfire of the Vanities

Saw The Bonfire of the Vanities, Brian De Palma film based on a book by Tom Wolfe, so expect a cynicism and worship of stockbrokers.  True to form, this film follows a stockbroker who escapes from an attempted mugging by running over one of his would-be assailants.  This blows up into a civil rights matter and the stockbroker's life is destroyed.  The film is solid, but fairly cynical and, well, the stockbroker does come out looking good.

The film was made in 1990 (2 years before even Rodney King) but it has many echoes of modern times.  Today, the millionaire Park Avenue stockbroker would be a much harder sell as the protagonist.  In this film, the black mugger is treated as terrifying, the detour into the South Bronx looks like a trip to hell.  There are cars burning and crazy people screaming into the car windows.  It feels sort of uncomfortable but then again, this is the sort of film where no one comes off well.  The Park Avenue set are portrayed as vapid, artificial, overwhelming, and self-absorbed.  This is somewhat better than how the Bronx-ians come off (which is: monstrous) but it makes their depiction of a piece with the rest of the film.

Anyway, the film is very cynical.  The poor and the rich alike, antagonists and protagonists are all completely self-interested and playing roles to extract the most value for themselves from the situation.  It's a darkly comical premise, but it feels too cartoonish to tip fully into actionable satire.  It's political commentary of the South Park style: everyone is corrupt, so why care?  Just look out for yourself.  And this is a viewpoint, I guess, but it's not very helpful.  It's partly the fault of the source material but also of DePalma.  There's a reason he wanted to shoot this film, after all.

There's also some confusing casting choices.  The film is narrated by Bruce Willis who plays a sleazy, drunken journalist.  The protagonist stockbroker is played by Tom Hanks, who is a hard sell as a stockbroker falling from grace, sweating through his shirt.  The stockbroker's wife however is amazing as a hissing, crystalline Stepford Wife who smilingly informs the stockbroker "I'm leaving you.  Right after this dinner party."  Delicious.

De Palma is a masterful technician however and the camera work is tight and perfect.  He makes excellent use of split screen for one scene to show the behind-the-camera drama at the same time as the televised event.  He also does that double-exposure thing to show the foreground and the background in perfect focus together.  It's great camerawork.

The rest is a little limp though.  The film is definitely not bad.  It's entertaining and dark and wry and a solid way to spend two hours, but it never really dazzled me.  I feel Hudsucker Proxy is a more entertaining wacky satire, Network is better as social commentary, and the Sweet Smell of Success is better for delightfully dark comedy.  This movie is a little of all of those things though, which is pretty good.

Our Hospitality

Saw Our Hospitality, a slightly dusty old Buster Keaton film about a New York man (Keaton) who returns to his ancestral Appalachian home and unwittingly into an ancient feud between his family and the Canfields.  The film is divided into two parts: getting there and then surviving the rivalry.  It's fairly funny in a quaint, pokey kind of way.  I laughed a few times, but only at strange things.

The first half was really great, with lots of gags about how small New York was back then and the horrible oldness and ricketyness of their trains.  There's some great gags with a tiny train following the tracks as they snake around a grazing donkey or over a fallen log.  Looney Tunes level creativity and humor - I liked it.

The second half climaxes in a waterfall rescue that's not very funny of course, but is quite impressive.  Keaton gets a rope around his middle and uses it to swing and be swung by all kinds of objects.  Keaton has this manner of taking a simple encumbrance and milking it for all kinds of bizarre physical humor.  It's so rigorous, it feels almost scientific.

Anyway, an alright film.  Not quite gripping enough to keep my attention all the way through, but perhaps this is more of an indictment of me than of the movie.  Solid flick!

Chelsea Girls

Saw Chelsea Girls, a boring yet enigmatic film directed by Andy Warhol (but really by Paul Morrissey.)  It was originally 6 hours long, however they mercifully cut it down to only 3 hours by cutting the screen in half and playing two films next to each other.  The projectionist was free to switch the audio channel however they wanted.  The version I saw is free on YouTube, so that may be the official sound selection for all I know.  It's a series of about a dozen short films (30 minute or so) starring Andy's drugged-up, indolent friends.

Here's the movie in microcosm: two guys are laying in bed.  One is fairly attractive and wearing only underwear.  They talk for a while and then a woman gets on the bed and straps the attractive guy's wrists together with her belt and winds a scarf around his neck.  He sort of writhes about for a while and it's not clear if he's being strangled or is on drugs or is just bored and playing around or doesn't even want to be there.  This goes on for another 15 minutes.

I can enjoy some delicious ambiguity and I like an attractive guy, but to be left stranded with nothing to entertain me for so long is either malicious or incompetent and I think most likely the latter.  The entire 3 hours is like this.  We see attractive people from the 60s being bored out of their minds and vaguely improvising for the camera.  It's interesting as a sort of time capsule of how theater-types behave when they are as bored as we the audience have become.

There is one moment though, that I was able to latch on to: this guy who is tripping on something strips while telling us very personal details about his relationships.  It's not salacious (the personal details) but more like a therapy session.  He talks about how he loses himself in other people, how he becomes what they want "and then I-" he says as the film cuts him off.  That's a nice bit.  In addition to the emotional baring being mirrored by the flesh baring, he has indeed become what I wanted from the film: something personal and interesting to think about and relate to.  And then, just as with his relationships - he's gone!  Lovely.

It makes me wonder if there's something I missed in the other sequences.  But then it's followed by some dude shooting up heroin and proclaiming himself to be the pope in a braying voice and carrying on with not-very-amusing banter.  This tedium drags on for another half hour before the whole film finally finishes as every other scene did: for no apparent reason.

So, rare glimmers of something interesting all but lost in an arid, self-indulgent wasteland of a movie.

Scorpio Rising

Saw Scorpio Rising, a famously non-pornographic film which is nonetheless impressionistic and  scattered, telling its story through song lyrics and barely glimpsed flashes of homoerotic imagery.  There's not much story but we sort of follow this biker guy who suits up in his leather finery, goes to a party, and then crashes on the way home.  Apparently this was a serendipitous film which the stars aligned for.  The main actor apparently just actually lives like that and The Wild One just happened to be on TV at the time.

The film is quite sinister.  It's hard to tell how much is for effect and for fun, and how much is in earnest.  There's a lot of sexy/threatening leather outfits which are obviously more about excitement than intimidation, but there's also a fair amount of Nazi paraphernalia which might be more of the same, but has certainly not aged well if it is.  Contrasting with this, there's also a fair amount of footage from an old film about the life of Jesus.  The main character mounting a motorcycle is intercut with Jesus mounting a donkey.  The main character lives with disregard for danger, or perhaps self-destructively pursuing it.  His bedroom is decorated with images of James Dean and clippings of motorcycle deaths.  He is too beautiful for this world, or perhaps to wicked for it.

Another thing about this film: it makes liberal use of shmaltzy 60s pop.  It has a very David Lynch-ish feel, showing homoerotic, sadistic hazing rituals with Torture by Kris Jensen playing on the soundtrack.  The songs seem to innocently/sinisterly fawn over the main character, calling him a devil or an angel, a rebel.  It's very slick, very sinister.

Listen to Britain

Saw Listen to Britain, a short propaganda film which opens with a Canadian poet quoting (in his words) a famous American, reinforcing the allied forces here.  This quotation is the last bit of dialogue we hear.  After that the camera bounces, impressionistically, between bombers flying overhead as radios play in living rooms, dancehalls full of singing people while men strap on their helmets in grim, silent, silhouette.  It's very stirring, kind of pokey and old, and sort of nice.

The film reminded me of other experimental, character-free films, such as Man with a Movie Camera or (to a much lesser extent) Meshes of the Afternoon.  This film is only 20 minutes long so it never really drags, but it is also a bit old and pokey.  The version I saw (linked above) had an unfortunately poor sound track, which undermines the impact of the film a bit.  Even with a decent soundtrack however, Roll Out the Barrel does not give the same mood it once did, centuries ago and miles away.

It's an interesting sort of curiosity of a film.  Definitely peaceful and pleasant, but not terribly accessible or gripping.

Pyaasa

Saw Pyaasa, a black and white Hindi movie from 1957.  It was a swooning, sentimental kind of musical drama.  It followed a struggling poet who is sidelined by society and treated with cruelty.  The only folks who will stick by him are street walkers, peddlers, and of course other poets who recognize his genius, but alas whenever it comes to actually giving the poet money, suddenly everyone turns very cruel.

The film is sweet and sentimental.  There's songs about the sad artificiality of prostitution and of lost love.  There's a dream sequence (possibly within a dream sequence?) which is as swooning and ethereal as anything in An American in Paris.  The film is very touching and sweet, a romantic film at its heart.  It does dip into musical absurdity once in a while however.  I couldn't help but roll my eyes every so often when the poet suddenly breaks into song once more, to the amazement and raised eyebrows of the established poets, recognizing their fellow (once more.)

The film is ultimately a sort of bitter fairytale about this poet who is sooo deserving of recognition being cheated and ignored and sneered at at every turn.  The film is so sweet and the poet guy is so pathetic however that it easily avoids being just a wallow in sour grapes.  There's the standard machinery of a musical as well: love triangles, mistaken identities, scheming but loyal servant characters.  It's a very well made, familiar, sweet, sad film.  It's tender and nice and yes a little hokey but I, with my love for melodrama, completely forgave it.

Hellboy (2019)

Saw the 2019 reboot of Hellboy.  It was widely hated and is an inferior movie, but it's fairly spectacular and not that bad.  Let me start with the strengths:  The film feels more serious and is amazing to look at.  There's a lot of visual stuff to see and the apocalyptic climax features surreal, amazing creatures which evoke the majestic weirdness of Wayne Barlowe or Peter Mohrbacher.  Just great stuff.

Okay, let's move on to the bad: the film feels much more gritty.  Gone is any kind of humanity and humor from the series, replaced by frowny-faced growling and CGI-heavy grotesques.  In the Del Toro films, Hellboy is put-upon and weary, but fundamentally an okay guy.  Here, his crustiness curdles into toxic masculinity as his father urges him to "grow a pair."  The sparingly used profanity and irony of the originals becomes so overused that it's unusual for a fairytale monster not to be spewing profanity as Hellboy fights them.  It's very nice to look at, but it's dower and grim.  Also, there's a ton of eye-gouging for some reason.

Also, the morality is way more clear this time.  The film (more or less) follows the plot Del Toro planned on for the third film: Hellboy is forced to choose between humankind and monsterkind in an apocalyptic showdown.  This seems really interesting because it forces a crisis in the metaphor of Hellboy as outsider.  In the original films, he's easily a stand-in for any minority: forced to live in hiding, feared by the public even as he supports them, and given great and unspecified powers.  If he's being forced to choose between them, it feels like a lose-lose situation.  Can't they co-exist?

Here however, all sympathy for the monsters is washed away.  All that is monstrous is hateful and ugly and cruel.  It is obvious what the right choice is.  The only remaining thing to wonder is if Hellboy will turn out to be Good or Evil and which way that will go was obvious from the start.  I think that's where the hatred for this film comes from.  Again, this film is not that bad - I've definitely sat through worse - but this film feels like a betrayal of the Del Toro films.

So, this film is for non-Hellboy fans only, it would seem.  It's entertaining, a bit dower and over-stuffed with lore, but pretty to behold and not terribly challenging.  Alas, it sort of makes a problematic mincemeat of the metaphors Del Toro built up.

Wayne's World

Saw Wayne's World.  It was an SNL spinoff about an affably goofy host of a public access show about nothing much.  The film is mostly about heavy rock worship and guitar fetishism.  It's not super funny and contains a lot of dated pop-culture references, but it does have its moments and is endearing.  There's the classic scene where they bob along to Bohemian Rhapsody, and where they lay there, watching the planes fly by overhead.  It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but these idiots seem like nice people who it would be fun to hang out with for a while.

I don't have a ton of thoughts about this film.  It takes place in the rust-belt shadow of Chicago, where already car manufacturing was falling victim to globalization.  Wayne lives with his parents and spends his time on the public access show which is surely a passion project more than a money maker.  He's teased by his metal-head friends for being a loser but they are all just as much losers themselves.  This is a land of dead ends in which affability and a masculine, defiant attitude counts for a lot.  It's set in the suburbs of Detroit but is based on Mike Myers' hometown in the outskirts of Toronto, another (Canadian) car city.  There's a sinister sense of pointlessness to the film which is kept very far in the background but which is also omnipresent.

So the mood is interesting.  The action proceeds in a meandering way, engaging in some post-modern riffing on Clue (I think) in the end.  Another difficulty the film faces is that the irony and detachment that made rock so appealing is now completely mainstream.  I dunno.  It didn't tickle me, but it was an alright way to spend some time.  A solidly okay movie.