In & Of Itself

Saw In & Of Itself, a film version of a performance-art piece done by magician Derek DelGaudio.  He talks enough about his life that the description of the film usually contains 'biographical' somewhere, but the film is really about identity and labels and how they limit and free people.  There's also some great window-dressing involving fiction and story-telling which is like catnip to me.

The film is just Derek talking on stage for a while and interacting with a set of six objects behind him.  He does a magic trick every so often but mostly he talks about labels and about how we see others and ourselves.  A story about some blind men feeling an elephant is told.  Derek talks in a halting, flatly-affected way, sounding sincere, even as he explains that this is a show and every line was rehearsed.  In the show he generally tries to out-clever his audience, having his cake and eating it too, acknowledging this is artificial to make it seem more real.

This culminates in the final trick of the night, where he does a magic trick (which looks real but which we know is done via some trick) and simultaneously reaffirms the audience's perceptions of itself (which looks staged with shaking hands, celebrity cameos, and silent tears, but which may well be real.)  Derek also plays another narrative trick where he casts himself as an ally of the audience, amusing and delighting them, and simultaneously as an antagonist of them, fooling them, predicting their choices, and using their strong emotions to strengthen his show.

There's a lot of fun topics flying about here and it ultimately is fairly entertaining, if sort of stagy and self-conscious as many modern magic shows are, as they try to outwit and subvert post-modernism.  The line between what's real and not is very blurry and doubly-so since the many audience-shots pick up on well-known celebrities, heightening the feelings of unreality but, like all fiction, we know it's a trick but it manages to delight us anyway.

Wild at Heart

 Saw Wild at Heart, an early Lynch film before Lynch fully embraced his twisty dream-logic method of story-telling.  This film follows two young lovers on the run from the law.  It stars Nicholas Cage and contains a strange mix of Lynch-ian strangeness and Cage-ian grotesques.  There's an early scene where Cage is jumped by a guy with a knife.  He fights off the assailant, pounding his head against the marble floor until his skull is crushed, and then glowering and flaring his nostrils, he points at the woman who was behind the attack.  It's unclear if this is intentionally off-putting and film-y or if this is just how Nick cage is and Lynch is trying to work with him.

The film goes on like that.  It has a lot of Lynch-y strangeness, with voodoo assassins and old men who inexplicably talk like ducks, but through it all is Nick Cage doing an Elvis impression and saying strange mouthfuls like "this here jacket represents a symbol of my individuality, and my belief in personal freedom."  Totally strange.

So, this is an interesting film for sure, but it's not quite as good as Lynch's later work.  This contains a lot of strange experiments that don't make a ton of sense and seem more hap-hazard than deliberate.  There's some nice suburban insanity in the form of the woman who ordered this hit - at one point she paints her entire face in lipstick and vomits in a pink toilet - and some nice on-the-nose symbolism about the protagonists' love being like fire, consuming and destroying them.

I like Lynch's films because of their non-sense.  The mental landscapes of real people are too complex to fit neatly into established Hollywood tropes and so, when we see them in Lynch's films, presented as unique manifestations of his characters' mind's they are jarring, confusing, off-putting, and intense.  Here however, these same fall a bit flat and seem just kind of lurid and goofy and although people's thoughts are those too, it's indistinguishable from just bad film-making.  A minor Lynch film.

Dave Made a Maze

 Saw Dave Made a Maze, a film about an out-of-work artist who creates a cardboard maze in his living room and then gets trapped or lost inside of it.  His long-suffering girlfriend must now rescue him.  It was exactly what it sounds like: a cutesy, silly-yet-sincere, hipster-ish romp surrounding one Sad Boy's feelings.

The fun of the film is seeing the inventive ways the filmmakers can use cardboard, to create giant playing card or origami cranes or nesting, telescoping pillars that encroach upon the protagonists.  It has the feel of a really well-done weekend project.  You get the sense of a lot of hanging out off-screen and a lot of seat-of-the-pants special effects.

The maze itself seems to symbolize Dave's emotional landscape - he is trapped in a fraught and unstable place that cuts him off from the world and threatens his relationship.  His friends come to rescue him but risk getting hurt themselves in the process.  This is not totally explicitly laid out, but seems like a sensible interpretation to me.

Anyway Dave struck me as being kind of self-absorbed which is not totally surprising for a film about someone who makes a film about their own emotional struggles.  His girlfriend is the kind of attractive, chill, eye-rolling girl that seem to the de facto angel-girlfriends these hipster-types imagine themselves with.  I started out feeling like she should really dump this man-child but then again that cardboard maze is really cool, so maybe he's not so bad.

The film is slight and twee.  It's very cute and, as long it's not talking about emotions, it has a lot of silly fun.  It never reaches the surreal heights of, say, Terry Gilliam's work but it does a good job of inhabiting its small, ramshackle, indie-wood niche.

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

Saw How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, the third film in the series.  This time we have a theme of love.  This sort of nicely continues from the themes of the last film: a rise to power.  Now with the power under their belt, Hiccup and his dragon turn their thoughts to coupling up.  The end involves a fairly serious breakup however, which is strange, but these films have always been entertainment vehicles first and treatises on the human condition a distant second.  So, the film is pretty good.

Once again, the dragons are adorable and dog-like and have great silly designs with jutting jaws and goggling eyes.  This film was clearly once projected in 3D as there's a lot of fore-ground/back-ground stuff going on here and things that suddenly get in your face.  There's a lot of flying about however and many scenes that suggest a grand scale and I wonder how well that would have come across in a theater.

Anyway, as with the second film (I've seen the first one so long ago, I don't think I can rely on my memory) I kept expecting the dragons to cohere into a recognizable symbol of like the human spirit or weapons of war or something, but they continued to confound me.  It's really just a film about these Vikings' adventures with dragons.  But it is that very successfully.

It was an enjoyable film and more serious than its first films.  I liked the villain's dead-eyed dourness, even in victory.  Similarly, I just liked hanging out with the characters and seeing what they do next.  A satisfying movie.