The Void

Saw The Void, a fairly fun horror movie with Cthulhu-ish overtones.  We start in medias res with a pair of dudes attacking and immolating a screaming man and woman.  The man gets away however and from there we jump to a hospital where the bulk of the action occurs.  On top of the heavyset dudes, there are also robed, hooded cultists.  The film has a bunch of little twists and turns and seeing what happens in half the fun of this film, so I'll say this: the baddies eventually drop some references to things which are "older than time" and there's a lot of tentacles, so suffice it to say that there's something eldritch going on here.

There's a more specific movie-connection that I wanted to point out, but to do so, I'll need to spoil some.  Highlight to read:  I assumed the opening sequence would turn out to be a The Thing-style fake out, with the baddies revealed to be merely beleaguered goodies, and of course the transformations later in the movie are distinctly The Thing-like.  Also they apparently used old-school practical effects for the monster in what I assume to be an homage.

As with many horror films,  I felt that the real monster here was bad communication skills.  At one point something like the following exchange takes place: "There's no way you'll win against those people!"  "Who are those people?"  "How should I know!?"  I wanted to slap that character.  Just tell them what you do know, yeesh.  Total inability to convey information.  In fitting with this irritating theme however is the inscrutable cult, always standing in a mob just out of the light, so ominous and mysterious.  Lovecraft himself was fond of playing with the ambiguity words are capable of and the space between what's written by the narrator and what's understood by the reader.  He was famously vague and obscure about his monsters and used archaic, strange words for them.  Perhaps imprecise and bad communication is not so off-brand after all.  In the spirit of that, I'll add this: that scene where the guy has an axe in his shoulder is amazing.

So, the film is somewhat irritating when the characters are screaming unhelpful things at each other, but it comes to life when we're just watching terrified people inch around a corner, or gaze at some terrible thing.  The point of the film is to show us creepy and spectacular things, and so the characters are always moving ever deeper into the hospital, discovering more and more terrible grotesques.  It's really fun to watch once it gets going, but it takes a bit of shouting to get there.

How to Train Your Dragon 2

Saw How to Train Your Dragon 2, another kid's movie.  I saw the original some time ago, so I've sort of lost track of the details of what happened.  Anyway, it picks up shortly after the first film (I think) with Hiccup now 20 and growing stubble, exploring the known world on dragon-back and being pressured to be more chief-ly because his dad isn't getting any younger.  All this fun comes to an end however on the discovery of a rival chief who is amassing a dragon army and who claims that "he alone" can protect humans from the dragon threat (this film came out in 2014, btw.)

The film is fairly rollicking and more emotional than I'd thought it would be.  There's a lot of family dynamics going on which resonates nicely with a theme of succession and overthrow.  I don't want to give too much away, but the low-stakes "Hiccup, you should be chief now" struggle is mirrored with a similar hierarchy struggle in the dragon world.  Anyway, that's all background stuff.  The film is not one for deep thoughts on human life.

I enjoyed the spectacle of the movie.  I wasn't able to feel clever by picking up on Themes or Messages, but the film is always spectacular to look at.  I have a hard time understanding the film's attitude towards dragons.  They're treated as pets, but also as spirit animals.  Toothless is missing a rear wing just as Hiccup is missing a foot.  But then, what am I supposed to think about the humans being at war with the dragons in the first film?  I don't think they work as a metaphor for anything really - it's just really about fantasy dragons.

But the dragons have some excellently silly character design and there's a ton of disabled representation to be had (at least three characters sport some pretty snazzy prosthetics.)  The film is very nice and winning.  Not terribly funny, but it works well as a fantasy drama, so okay.  The visuals are really what I'm here for and those held up.  Good character and set design and some good plotting too.  Well done, all around.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Saw Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.  It was an enjoyable reboot of the beloved mid-90s film Jumanji.  This time instead of a board game, we have a video game which adds another layer of comedy and interest in the form of high school teenagers suddenly thrust into the bodies of archetypal femmes fatale and adventure heroes.  The film is enjoyable fluff, but had a little too much going on for my taste.

The film plays out as an action comedy.  Dwayne Rocky Johnson gets in some good clowning being a gawky teen suddenly in the body of a wrestler.  Jack Black completely steals the show however as an instagram-obsessed teenage girl suddenly trapped in the body of fat bready man.  Jack Black is the delightfully gay bear that I did not know I need in my life.  He's great.

On top of this Freaky Friday business, there's lingering relationships between the various characters.  One is bullying the other into letting him cheat off of his work.  Another is infatuated with another one.  I thought the cheating subplot was a bit heavier and more fraught than the film did - it just sort of flits by in the film - but it's not really given room to breathe.  On top of the relationship dynamics and the body-swaps, there's a jungle-themed game to explore and video-game mechanics to play with.  It's a lot to cover and we only have a child's attention-span to do it in.

I feel like the film is sort of over-stuffed.  The comedy is good and the action scenes were fun, but I was really more interested in how these teens were going to repair their relationship than I was in returning the jade eye to the jaguar statue.

The film had it moments, but I wish it had like one layer removed.  Cut out the body-swapping, or just embrace the breakfast club stereotypes of the teenagers and don't give them drama, or something.  It was okay, but fluffy and a bit overstuffed.

Kung Fu Panda 3

Saw Kung Fu Panda 3.  This film focused on a supernatural threat in the form of a buffalo who can steal the Chi of his enemies, transforming them into jade puppets of themselves.  Simultaneously to this, the father of Po (the kung fu panda himself!) reappears to take his son back home.

I found the adoption angle the most interesting but they dispense with it fairly quickly.  I'm not adopted, but it feels selfish to me for the long lost father to suddenly come back into the life of an adult stranger who they did not raise, expecting connection and time together.  In this case, the father gave up Po to save him from war, but again: these are now two adults.  I feel the relationship would be cordial at best.  I found the absurd outrage of Po's adoptive goose father both funny and completely understandable.  Anyway, we don't really dig into that.

The film has a theme of understanding ones self.  Po is explicitly told to think about this by his master and saves the day by building on the strengths of his friends.  Again though, the adoption thing makes it difficult.  His biological father teaches him how to "be a panda" but, to get too serious for a moment, this feels weird and bio-truth-y to me.  I feel like Po's already doing a pretty good job of "being a panda" by virtue of just actually being a panda, you know?  What's to learn?  This sort of feels like a boy being taught to "be a man" or some garbage like that.  Ok, but this is probably reading a little too deeply into it.

The film is alright, however I liked the second one better than this one.  There are fewer fight scenes because the antagonist has this almighty power of just being able to be-jade his opponents, so there's not much fight going on.  There's some gorgeous mixtures of 2D and 3D animation during the training sequences that reminded me of the ballet bits in An American in Paris, with its giant fabrics and swaths of color.  The film made me squirm a lot but children's movies often do that to me.  It's on a little weaker footing with its incoherent bouncing between parentage and knowing ones self, but it ends nicely, looks good, and is fairly pleasant, so ok.

Boarding Gate

Saw Boarding Gate, an "erotic thriller" about a woman who works in an import business.  She's breaking up with some high-powered CEO and negotiating with him and her boss for a trip to Beijing to manage a dance club there.  Also she's involved with the drug trade.  This is a complex film.

The film deals in the deep ambiguities of modern multinational global trade, which involves not only furniture and art, but drugs and humans.  People and contacts show up, transfer this protagonist woman to a car and are never seen again.  This murkiness is mirrored in her dying relationship with the CEO.  Their relationship was sex-based and involved power dynamics.  There's an early scene where they talk about her being his slave for some weekend.  She orders him to say the world 'slave' over and over.  Who's really in charge here?

The film is deeply murky and shadowy.  It gets a lot of mileage out of the enigmatic main character just moving about in fabulous hotels, drifting opaquely from a karaoke bar into the docks to swap some plastic bags of white powder.  Again though, is she pulling the heart strings of her lovers or is she in control?  It's an interesting movie, very in love with the complex, shadowy worlds it inhabits and very in love with the fabulously wealthy and legally gray people who live there.

I enjoyed this movie, but I feel it was not really for me.  It's use of power-dynamic-based romances leaves me a bit cold, and although I enjoyed looking into the comfortable but shadowy lives lived on the margins, I didn't wholly believe what I was seeing.  I feel there would be more violence and fewer arch references to favors for friends.  The film is also very interested in this woman's love life, which is not quite as compelling, but serves as a good anchor point.  A decent film.

Kung Fu Panda 2

Saw Kung Fu Panda 2, which picks up where Kung Fu Panda left off: with Po the panda (spoiler alert) joining the kung fu team and becoming the dragon warrior.  In this film, they must take on a peacock who is threatening the kung fu hegemony by introducing gunpowder to China.  It's an interesting idea which has potential to veer off into notions of feudalism giving way to European colonialism but we (probably wisely) ignore all that in favor of contrasting different kinds of absent parents.

Early in the film, Po realizes that he has been adopted by his presumed father (who is a goose) and this sets him wondering what happened to his parents and why they abandoned him.  The antagonist, meanwhile, has horrified his parents with his early psychopathic tendencies.  Both characters have been abandoned, and both have been a little messed up by this.  There's interesting parallels between the two which I enjoyed thinking about, but which don't really enter into the film in a heavy-handed way.

Like the previous film, this one is a Jacky Chan movie at heart.  It's in its element when there's a funny fight scene.  There's a great rickshaw chase scene and some inspired business with a jail cell door.  The film shows flashbacks sometimes using traditional 2d animation, but sometimes using Tibetan shadow puppets which is fabulous.

Unlike the previous film however, this one had some deeper characterization.  Po is still mostly a fat, hungry doof, but in the first one I feel he would not have been doing tai chi on a rock to attain inner peace.  Similarly, we get some hints of vulnerability behind the Tigress's spikey shell.  I feel she's destined to be a love interest by the third film.  We'll see!

So this was an alright film.  I think it's a better made film than the last one, however it was a little less surprising.  I know the characters' shtick now and some of the gags felt compulsory, but I think the franchise learned a little from its previous weaknesses (character, plotting) and built on its strengths (fight scenes.)  Well done.

HyperNormalisation

Saw HyperNormalisation, a political video-essay about a lot things.  It focuses on the loss of a believable vision of the future for the world and the manipulation of perception for the sake of maintaining control.  It was created in 2016, so post-Brexit and post-Trump's election victory, and so came in a potent moment for the western world to understand itself and its current place in the world.  Part history lesson and part philosophy, it presents a coherent interpretation of the world and is therefore to be treated with deep suspicion and hostility.

The film starts its history lesson in the 70s, when 1960s counter-culture was calcifying into drug-worship and communes were transforming into cults.  The soviet union had recently "unthawed" under Khrushchev and western liberals could see clearly the deprivation and bread lines and so forth.  Western liberalism seemed to be in need of a re-think and, this film claims, it retreated from reality into cyberspace (this film, by the way, is chock-full of different factions retreating from reality in various ways.)

That paragraph barely scratches the surface.  The film is fascinating and complex.  It argues that the world has become too complex and too interconnected to be dealt with head-on.  We used to use comforting and ennobling lies to to give us a direction to move in and something to believe in.  Unfortunately, as these lies have been exploded one by one, we are left with nothing but new systems of communication and organization.  There's no system of management or a flatter sort of hierarchy, just people who can talk to more people than ever before.  It's a fascinating, intellectual, cynical, hopeless film that ends just as Trump is coming to power and with a woman weeping with disbelief that Brexit passed.

As with other films that suggest a simple, coherent world view, this one should be treated carefully.  It has the convincing power and barrage of facts and footage to convince you of something which may be a simplification of reality.  It is enough to drive a person into conspiracy theories and into a smug pseudo-understanding of the world.  If you find the ideas presented here compelling, for your own sake and the sake of the people you corner at parties, please follow up with other perspectives and original source material.  This was an interesting movie.  I will not be taking my own advice.

Scanners

Saw Scanners, an early-ish film by Cronenberg.  It's plot is essentially the same as X Men.  A psychic, telekinetic man is picked up by a chemical weapons company and trained in the art of "scanning." From an opening scene where we see a man's head explode, we know there is a rival group of mutants who are using their mutant super-powers to battle this weapons company.  So who's gonna win?

The film is not amazing of course but it's surprisingly effective for its far-out premise.  There's intense psychic battles that involve people glaring at each other and shaking.  The soundtrack does some heavy lifting in evoking an otherworldly feel to the proceedings, but it's still simultaneously silly and interesting.  The film lives in this silly/serious space.  There's intense standoffs and shoot-outs but later on they also use their scanning powers to steal secrets from the "mind" of a computer ("It's just a neural system!")  It's an uneven film.

The bulk of the film is the main character guy trying to figure out what's going on.  What's going on is not well-grounded in characters or even presented as very concrete ideas.  Instead things are kept sort of shadowy and abstract.  In the final showdown, it's difficult to care much about who wins or looses.  The final twist has not much to do with the rest of the film, frankly.  Allegedly the film was being written as it was being filmed and you can sort of tell.  The ending just happens and really the story could have bumbled on for many more hours, revealing double-crosses and secret programs and counter-programs until the cows come home.

The film really exists to deliver sci-fi special effects and psychodrama.  This is done mostly with intense close-ups and soundtrack effects but they are surprisingly effective for that.  The plotting and so on are kind of dashed off in favor of boiling faces and gun-men bursting into flame.  It's an effects movie, but it's interestingly dark and messy-looking for that.  I enjoyed it, but got sort of bored partway through.

Bananas

Saw Bananas, a Woody Allen movie about an American man (Woody) who is swept up into the political shenanigans of a tiny South American banana republic.  This term, Banana Republic, refers to a nation which is being economically exploited by Western powers (in the original coining, the United Fruit Company, now known as Chiquita (but only in certain clubs and only after hours.))  In keeping with this theme, the opening scene has a sportscaster commentating on the assassination of the current leader and interviews with the fascist dictator who is replacing him.  The dictator swears they will squash the rebels.

The movie continues on like this.  It's very goofy and slightly sinister.  The film is not very political (beyond it premise) but is much more interested in absurdity and punch-lines.  Woody Allen smiles and playfully throws his food on himself many times throughout the film.  The comedy is okay, although a little understated at parts.  Some jokes are so broad they're unmissable (J Edgar Hoover shows up disguised as (and played by) a black woman) but others require a little extraction (his girlfriend remarks something about him is "missing …")

It was an alright film.  It's a little dated and a little more absurd than hilarious however.  It kept reminding me of Luis Bunuel's work although perhaps mostly through the film quality.  There's a dinner party scene where musicians mime playing instruments with no explanation.  I suppose the micro-nation is too poor to afford them and I suppose that's sort of funny.  Later on Woody Allen twirls like a ballerina to distract a policeman from his rebel friends.  I don't know if that's even supposed to be funny.  The 70s were a strange time.

I didn't really like this film.  I wasn't annoyed by it or anything, I just felt it lacked polish and dragged.  Apparently a lot of scenes were improvised which explains acts of desperation like the food throwing I mentioned.  There's a lot in it that I technically recognize as funny, but which I didn't laugh at.  Comedy is difficult to translate however and the past is a different country.  They do things differently there.

Kung Fu Panda

Saw Kung Fu Panda, another kid's movie, like the previous one I saw.  This one is funnier and goofier than Over The Moon.  It follows a bumbling fat Panda voiced by Jack Black (which by the way what's he up to these days?) who is named as the fabled Dragon Warrior who will protect the village.  I don't want to give away anything, but this being a kid's movie, you can probably predict the outcome.

The film is not particularly tightly plotted.  It spawned two sequels and a handful of shorts, so I get the sense that lots of fun ideas got left on the writing room whiteboard.  Also, the characters are not great.  They're mostly one-note, including even the central panda.  He's hapless and bumbling, exasperating his kung fu master and embarrassing himself.  Eventually he gets better.  Nuanced it ain't, but it gets the job done.

The strength of the film is in the action sequences.  When the characters are moving so fast they blur, the film is generally in a happy place.  There's a great, traditionally animated opening sequence that evokes the bold colors and strong shapes of Genndy Tartakovsky.  As with the Samurai Jack films, this one also has a great sense of place and world.  The film came out shortly after Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers and so on and is clearly inspired by their extravagant visuals.

So, ultimately the film is kind of a loose collection of funny fight scenes.  Like Jackie Chan's work (who is also in this film,) it's a delivery mechanism for physical comedy and slapstick battles.  In typical early 2000s style, things are not let to be nice and characters are constantly quipping and being low-key obnoxious (thanks, Shrek) but when they shut up and have a nice battle, things fall into place and the film is nice after all.

Over the Moon

Saw Over the Moon, an animated film about a Korean girl whose father is re-marrying.  In a quest to prove that love is immortal, the girl travels to the moon to prove that the mythical moon goddess Chang'e truly exists.  It's very a touching and yet commercial film.  It's not challenging or very illuminating to an adult, but it is delightful and so colorful.

The film brings some fresh (to me) Korean symbolism of chickens and cranes and pangolins to the story.  There's a wonderful K-pop inflected song that the moon goddess has and the Moon festival is a central event in the film.  It's a Disney-style educational pamphlet of Korean mythology.  The film uses the trappings and images of the myth and largely ignores any moral or lesson behind it (ultimately, the original story has is frankly subverted.)

The film opens with a sequence where the protagonist's biological mother sickens and dies which evokes Up's opening gut-punch.  Also like Up, this film deals with moving on and not letting regrets keep you from growing and living.  The film is much more direct than Up was however, and is more clear in its messaging. 

It's also just gorgeously colorful.  I loved the moon city and the adorable, glowing, merging and dividing, delicious-looking creatures there.  Everything sparkles and twinkles and shines.  It's a little cloying, but it's well done and a kid's movie anyway so what do you want?

I enjoyed the film.  In an ideal world, it would maybe be a bit more subtle and artful and coy in its message and ultimate lessons, but of course I'm not exactly the intended audience and such an approach wouldn't be appropriate for children.  It's a good kid's movie.

Possessor

Saw Possessor, a film by Brandon Cronenberg, son of the famous body-horror maestro David Cronenberg.  similarly to his father's work, this film leans on a sci-fi concept which is intriguing in the abstract but messy and harrowing as depicted in this film.  The idea is that in the near future "Possessors" are able to leap into other peoples' bodies and carry out assassinations.  They then kill themselves (ie the host body) and vanish without a trace.  Alas, this film has many traces indeed and we find our Possessor on a final job which she cannot escape.

The film is far more horror than sci fi.  It focuses on gruesome murders and grotesque imagery of the Possessor and possessee melding together and tearing apart.  The film contains both the visceral horror of this imagery and the existential horror of a loss of identity.  Not only is the host of the possessor losing control of their actions, but the possessor herself seems to be losing herself in the host and in the violence of the job.  She is supplied with a small pistol for quick executions but often the deaths are brutal and extremely bloody.

There's some nice meta-level stuff as well of course.  We have a point-of-view shot from the host's eyes, putting us the audience in the role of possessor.  Elsewhere in the film we are following along with the possessor, so are we perhaps possessing her?  Similarly, she studies her victims and repeats things they say like an actress trying to find the right line reading.  But she is an actress.  Is she possessing the role of the possessor?  She also repeats lines to herself when seeing her estranged husband.  She's not sure how to say "darling" and is struggling to control herself.  Who is in control here?

The film is eerie and chilly and dismal.  It ends on a heck of a downer note, with two pools of blood seeming to kiss as they join.  It's haunting and extreme however.  The central struggle of course is the main character trying to kill her host body.  An effective film but not one I think I'll re-see any time soon.

All the President's Men

Saw All the President's Men, a fairly famous political thriller about the Washington Post breaking the Watergate scandal.  This film was made in 1976, a mere two years after Nixon resigned, so this was the prestige retelling of the scandal of the day.  It seems pessimistic for its time, with Woodward and Bernstein hungrily typing away at their typewriters, talk of being bugged, and frightened aides refusing to go on record.  But by today's standards it all seems sadly quaint.

Back in the 60s we had a vision of the government as super-competent, with a plan and a fallback plan for everything.  It had gotten us through the world wars and landed us on the moon.  As Watergate and Vietnam chipped away at our conception of ourselves, our conception shifted until by now we have a conception of the government as bumbling and corrupt; divided, self-serving, and only incidentally helpful.  We have just finished with a president who was far more corrupt than Nixon.  What's a bugged headquarters in comparison to a stormed capitol?

So this film grimly exposes an enviably clean underbelly, but it poses the press as the champions to uncover this dirt and to save us from it.  The film opens with a typewriter key striking a page so loudly, it made me jump.  The film ends with the two journalists hammering away to the sound of cannon fire on the TV.  It's great stuff - posing the press as the weapon to take down corruption.  (Of course though: Fox News was founded in the 90s to prevent exactly this sort of thing from ever happening again so keep in mind, the press itself is perhaps only another tool.)

The film if pretty good.  There's car park meetings and crafty extractions of confirmation and an arc of Woodward slowly learning to trust his gut.  It's very gripping in its own way.  The parts I found most gripping were the parts that troublingly revealed the roots of our current political climate, but those were also the most worrying.  In retrospect, it feels like a horror film that ends with the monster slowly returning from the dead, and slowly sneaking up behind the heroes.

Kajillionaire

Saw Kajillionaire, a delicate and sensitive Maranda July film.  Maranda's whole thing is that she likes sincerity and raw emotions.  Other words for raw are: rough, unprocessed.  The honesty of the emotions in the film are not the same as simplicity.  Often the characters express themselves in bizarre ways or in uncomfortable displays.  In the worst of this, you sometimes feel that the characters need straightjackets immediately.  But at best, it can be sincere and touching and moving.  That's what I felt about this movie: very touched and heart-warmed, but also aware that this is a sort of free-associated fairytale.

The film follows a girl named Old Dolio who is being raised by two grifters.  These are the lowest stakes grifters imaginable though.  They stay until everyone else has left an airplane, for example, to steal the bagged peanuts and inflight magazines.  They talk about items and each other as "tools" to be used.  They are small but they are mercenary and unloving.  Their daughter, Old Dolio, is so unused to touch that she cries in an opening scene, merely when receiving a massage.  In typical July fashion however, she's so sensitive to touch that the masseuse is only hovering her hands above her.  It's both tragic and ridiculous at the same time.

The film is cute and twee.  The grifter parents must return home to mop up pink foam that leaks down from the wall.  Old Dolio herself speaks in a low-pitched, sullen groan, like a cartoon of a teenager.  If you have a desire for realism or even for excitement, this is not the film for you.  This is a film to practice empathy with.  The characters are alien and the world is foreign, but it's our world in a fun-house mirror.  If you try you can recognize something underneath.  Of course it did not do well at the box office.

Cyborg

Saw Cyborg, because I am not immune to the allure of trash.  It's set in the future where a pandemic has ravaged society, leaving only roving gangs of muscly dudes all wearing some kind of gunge outfit.  Jean Claude Van Dame is a "Strider" in this brave new world: someone who escorts city-dwellers out of the city.  The title is a bit of a tease however since Jean Claude is not actually a cyborg.  He's escorting a lady however who is also … not a … cyborg.  They do briefly encounter one woman who is a cyborg and who has medical data on how to fight the disease.  Cyborg!

The film is dumb camp.  It's not totally terrible or unwatchable.  The fight scenes drag on forever unfortunately and Jean Claude finds a flimsy excuse to preform his signature 180 degree split.  He's kind of a small and dainty dude however, so it's hard to really buy him as an action star.  He needs to be kind of sensitive, I feel, and less screamy.  Anyway he screams a lot in this film, to unfortunate effect.

The film is what is appears to be: silly and violent.  It takes itself a little more seriously than I'd expect which was nice.  It was the last film produced by Golan-Globus whose films I've been watching recently (Masters of the Universe, Lifeforce) They don't make great films, it's true, but they are different and very passionate about their strange ideas.  No other studio would throw this much money at this film.

The movie is quite dumb, but after I started glazing over, I enjoyed it more.  It's a low-brain kind of film.  I did enjoy its silliness and its excess and, best of all, I don't know that the film was in on the joke.  A dumb fun movie.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

Saw Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, the sequel to the original Borat film which now follows Borat around Trump's America.  This one has more of a plot this time.  Borat is trying to give his daughter away to someone important in Trump's orbit but learns a little something along the way: that maybe daughters aren't good gifts?

The Borat films produce comedy in two ways: by pushing people to see what they will accept, and how they will fight back, and by getting people to say the quiet part loud by making them think they're among friends.  This second bit produces the most conversation in the public when seeing his movies.  He gets a hardware store owner to talk about gassing Gypsies, and he stays for a while with some Trump supporters who are very kind to him, but who also admit that they are not allowed by law to do what they'd like with Democrats.

Recently however many people have been saying the quiet part loud, possibly because they believe it and possibly because they like the attention and reaction that they get.  This makes the views that people are willing to own less shocking, so this film relies more on the former sort of humor.  I thought the sequence with the bemused Fedex employee sending ridiculous faxes to the "Kazakh government" was pretty funny.  The same with an infinitely patient man getting a haircut via sheep sheers.

There's a sequence where Sasha tries to undo a little of the ironic anti-Semitism he generated/reinforced with the first film, and there's a sequence where he sings at a gun rights rally (which turned fairly ugly - there's behind the scenes footage on youtube) but the political stuff falls a little flat for me.  The reality is both more absurd and less funny than the film makes it out to be.  Yeah, it's shocking that the crowd croons along that they'd like to chop up journalists and inject Fauchi with covid, but half of them are just IRL trolling and the other half is deeply depressing and dismaying, like discovering adults who can't read.

I enjoyed the movie, but I don't really like thinking about it.  The stuff with the daughter is good and straight-forward.  Too absurd to be worrying but absurd enough to be funny.  The political stuff - eh.

Spotlight

Saw Spotlight, a fairly gripping procedural following The Boston globe journalists who broke the story of the Catholic church pedophilia coverup scandal.  The film is thankfully spares us reenactments or hostile parents and centers squarely on the journalists involved.  We meet a few victims, but they are all adults and we talk to their lawyers much more than to them.  The film is understated but still quite powerful.  It's got only a few blow-out scenes where characters yell and stomp around, but the film is still built big.  There's a scene where an old woman just asks for a glass of water and it's such an emotional little moment.

Although the film is dramatic, it's a drama of the back rooms.  Most of the film takes place in the cold-looking basement offices of the reporters.  We follow them as they talk to lawyers and investigate leads, uncovering more and more and playing a game against the clock lest some other newspaper run the story, butcher it, and blow the headlines early.  Much of the film is shot like a police procedural, getting deep into the weeds of public record and butting up against the insidious wall of silence of Bostonian officials who acknowledge that the church has done wrong, but hasten to point out that it's done a lot of good too!

The film is very satisfying.  Although the sex abuse scandal is ongoing, we know how it ends: with giant headlines and a shocked populace.  The film won the Best Picture Oscar and it's not hard to guess why: the film tackles big issues in a reassuring way.  It's unchallenging unless you have great respect or sympathy for the church officials.  There's broader observations to make about the systemic nature of these things (which, the film points out, have been going on since the 80s and possibly earlier than that) but the center-stage story is about the journalists taking down the smug, august, abuse-enabling church.  In scenes where they interview victims, gigantic churches loom in the background, dwarfing our struggling heroes.  But we know they'll win!

Another element which is definitely in the wings but also definitely present is the internet.  The journalists have computers but they never google anything.  They have flip-phones, but also land-lines.  Since the film is set in 2003, this was the very tail end of the pre-internet world.  The investigation into the church is spurred by a need for increased readership, but we know that soon internet news sites of dubious quality would be a much bigger source of trouble.  Indeed, the institution of the newspaper is necessary to support the deep-dive, investigative journalism on display here.  An ad for AOL looms ominously over the Globe headquarters.  This is all in the background however it was fun for me to think about.

I enjoyed the film - although it's mostly shot at news desks and in anonymous-looking meeting rooms, there's a driving and ramping intensity to it.  Incongruously, sometimes weeks go by between the cuts, but then Mark Ruffalo is running between cars, desperate to catch a cab and bring the vital evidence into the office.  It builds to a series of quiet but surprisingly emotional climaxes.  It's a good watch.

Glengarry Glen Ross

Saw Glengarry Glen Ross, a dynamite film with an amazing ensemble cast about low-tier real estate salesmen pitted against each other in a sadistic competition.  It's written by David Mamet and has his signature, lyrical, rat-a-tat-and-another-tat dialogue which is really nice to listen to although not super naturalistic.  Although he only wrote it, this film has Mamet's fingerprints all over it.

Mamet writes mostly about the brutality of modern life.  This is on large display in this film.  The big guys from downtown show up to chew out the protagonists.  They insult them for their low sales numbers and then feed them worthless clients who have no money to buy land with.  They give the best clients to people who sell and the rich get richer and luck determines who rises.  The protagonists work far harder for their commissions and yearn for the days when they'll have it easy with the moneyed clients.  To top it off, their stoic and angry suffering is lionized by each other.  Manipulation and intimidation are strengths and weakness is akin to death.  We are made to feel pity for these angry men as they are squeezed between the dehumanization of bureaucratic capitalism and of toxic masculinity.

The dismal future of these men is on display in the character of Shelly Levine, oldest of the salesmen.  He calls folks up pretending to be VP of some real estate firm and adopts a folksy, old-timey manner of speech which sounds completely phony.  This may have worked once but his schtick is now tired and he reeks of desperation.  His final days will be spend in a desperate, downward spiral and his coworkers kid themselves that they will turn out differently.  The film focuses a lot on him and it is to drive home the cruelty and inhumanity of this foul-mouthed world.

The film is tragedy of course, but it's very brusk about it.  The film blusters along with the characters insulting one another, drinking booze, and trying to cheat clients.  You might feel  a little bit of the characters' pain but it's over so quick and the film hastens to reassure you that it didn't hurt so bad, that's just how it is, get over it.  This under-selling of the tragedy is supposed to make it more poignant, but it almost makes it disappear entirely.  See how popular it is among business-types.

I enjoyed the film but it's troubling and not entirely comfortable.  It's interesting and ambiguous however which makes it great fun to consider and think about.  It deserves its reputation.  A good film.

Masters of the Universe

Saw Masters of the Universe, a ridiculous and campy live-action film adaptation of the Masters of the Universe line of toys - note that the filmmakers didn't have the rights to the cartoon, so there's no consistency with anything you might know about, there's no Prince Adam alias or Orko or battle cat.  So in conclusion, you know, this was some Oscar-bait kino right here.  No - this is some deeply silly trash sci-fi and, in spite of all of that self-indulgent silliness, I didn't really like it.

To start with: the film is set on Earth for the most part for budgetary reasons.  There's a few scenes that take place in Eternia, the alternate universe/home planet of He-Man, and those are great, but they soon give way to 1980s teenage romance nonsense, complete with malls, cars, and flights that have to be caught.  It's like if Star Wars just stopped dead to follow the romance between two unrelated Tatooine-ians.  There's also an insufferable ugly/cute old alien man who can help everyone get back to Eternia, but he's awful.  Just the worst nexus of cloying and gross.

It's not all bad however - the stuff on Eternia is legitimately okay verging on good.  There's stormtroopers and giant halls and robed, pale evil guys - it's clearly trying to rip off Star Wars, but it's a good rip-off.  I can enjoy the high fantasy and strangeness of a space opera and this effectively delivers.  All of the villains stay behind (thank god) on Eternia so there's a steady drip of good imagery.  Similarly, Dolph Lundgren prances about wearing leather straps, so that's sort of nice.

Unfortunately, this really isn't enough to save the film.  The film focuses too much on He-Man et al on 1980s Earth.  There's no fish-out-water fun, just dour heroics chasing MacGuffins and big-haired teens doing who cares what.  There's not even a connection to the larger He-Man-iverse since they only got rights from Hasbro for the toy likenesses.  Just a muddly mess that wound up (partially) killing the studio that produced it.  It would have been more entertaining if I had been more drunk.

High Rise

Saw High Rise, a film based on the book of the same name by J G Ballard.  The idea is that in the near future of the 70s, there is a giant block of apartments with a grocery, a gym, a daycare, and all of the modern necessities.  It's so luxurious and plush, you'd never have to leave!  Alas, the building is a metaphor for class struggle, and soon the lower levels are in full revolt against the upper levels, each holding debauched parties which are indistinguishable from riots and the building descends into a divine state of savagery.

As with other Ballard stories, the premise alone is enough to hook me!  The film delivers on this high-minded self-seriousness.  There's a ton of crazy imagery and tony, arty, sequences in slow motion and in close up.  It's a lot of fun in a kind of over-the-top, operatic kind of way.  The retro-futurism lends it a familiar yet alien feel, and watching society collapse from excess and inequality is sadly timely right now (although this film was made in late 2015.)

The drawbacks of the film are its strengths: the showy, fairy-tale-like imagery and story.  Because it's so fairy-tale-like, it sometimes leaves big plot holes open.  I kept wondering, for example, why they don't just move out?  These omissions are telling however.  This is not actually a story about an apartment building but about our society or our nation.  Why don't we just move, you know?

The film is also sometimes very heavy-handed with its symbolism.  I enjoyed it in its sort of operatic excess, but, like the architect of the building lives in the penthouse suite and dresses only in white.  At one point he hosts a costume party where everyone is dressed as French nobility.  Could the revolution be at hand?  Yes, I think it could.

The film is ultimately a lot of arty, pretty fun.  Once society begins to collapse, the characters slide into a familiar sort of savagery, with the upper floors forming committees to plan raiding parties and abducting the lower levels' wives and the lower levels getting drunk and high.  It's all very fun in a sinister sort of way.  You also get to hear two great covers of S.O.S. by ABBA!

Lifeforce

Saw Lifeforce, a bizarre film about space vampires.  Despite it's wild premise, the film clearly had a lot of effort and money put into it and leans heavily into both sci-fi and vampire conventions.  It's not high art but it's definitely unique and full of exotic imagery and needs to be seen to be believed.

The film opens on astronauts discovering an artificial structure built into Halley's comet.  Inside this, there are three nude, beautiful human beings (one woman and two men) inside of glass force-field coffins.  They are brought aboard the ship and brought to earth where they emerge from the coffins and begin running amok on earth, draining life-force and transforming their bodies.

The film is campy and sleazy.  The two male vampires and disposed of quickly and never seen again.  The woman spends a lot of time nude, wandering about the countryside and seducing men.  There's a lot of erotic dreams the protagonists have involving her and soft-focus psychic visions galore.  Like Species, I feel this film also uses soft-core porn as a marketing hook.  If you enjoy breasts, you get to see quite a few here.  In some scenes there are strategically places cables and shadows, but most of the time everything's on display.

The film isn't just breasts however.  The opening sequence of exploring the alien ship is eerie and beautiful.  The astronauts comment that it looks like a human heart and their breathing is played heavily on the soundtrack.  It's like something out of 2001 A Space Odyssey.  Much later in the film, after the vampires are on earth, the corpses of the dead vomit up blood which forms a blood-statue of the vampire woman.  It's mere spectacle to be sure, but spectacular none the less.

The film is a campy romp.  It's much better than the premise would make it seem (space vampires!) and although it doesn't entirely escape the gutter (lots of boobs) there's definitely some great moments and you will see images that you will see in no other movie.  I think it's the best-made B-movie I've ever seen.

Molly's Game

Saw Molly's Game, a based-on-a-true-story film about a failed Olympic skier who becomes the organizer of a celebrity-studded, high-stakes, poker game.  This is another Sorkin film in my mini-Sorkin-marathon, so it's another rat-a-tat film that celebrates drive, success, and business acumen.  As with his other films, this one is a fun and gripping film, but ultimately resolves a messy, real-life situation with a bit of pat pop-psychology (daddy issues.)  All in all it's a fun movie though.

As with other Sorkin films, the protagonist here is ambitious and business-minded.  Although it's unclear how much money she made off of the game, she dealt with hundreds of millions and hobnobbed with the greatest modern nobility.  Her intelligence is established via an opening voice-over, listing her LSAT scores and her MBA degree.  At one point however, there's a very interesting line that she narrates to us: "I was raised to be a champion. My goal was to win. At what and against whom, those were just details."  This indicates that she is driven but driven to what is acknowledged to be unimportant and unclear.

I wonder how much Sorkin is in on this observation.  His films often study famous, driven people, but what they are driven to is often only self-enrichment.  I feels that the question of "what was it all for?" goes unasked but looms silently and heavily over Sorkin's films.  Often the characters are revealed to have used their awesome drive for misguided ends and we descend into some disappointing-feeling "true" goal they should have striven for (family, children, etc) like it's a family comedy from the 1980s.  The entire rest of the film however is spent watching these brilliant, successful people achieve more fame and glory and money and rattle off dazzling quips with their friends or assistants or whatever.  After this, the endings seem like a coming down to earth, a return to conventional morality and normalcy.

But themes and whatnot aside, the film if good fun to watch.  It's fun seeing drunk rich dudes make crazy bets and pull crazy stunts like bringing a Monet painting as collateral.  We also get to see a smug, grinning Michael Cera stand in for some big-name celebrity at the poker game.  I loved seeing him play a heel - dressing down the other players and insulting Molly.  It's Michael Cera!  The protagonist woman is softened a bit by Jessica Chastain, who plays her with a deceptive, deer-in-the-headlights coyness.

It's a good film with a somewhat weak ending.  The script is tight, themes are present, and there's a nice answer-key delivered at the end, so no one has to feel left out.  The rise to power is fun to watch, even as we know the denouement is coming (the film opens with Molly being prosecuted by the FBI.)  A ripping Sorkin film.