Uncut Gems

Saw Uncut Gems, a surprising film starring Adam Sandler as an adrenaline junkie gem dealer.  The central MacGuffin of the film is an uncut opal gem the size of a Nerf football.  He kicks off the movie by lending this to a basketball player who leaves his ring as collateral.  Sandler immediately pawns this collateral for money to place a sports bet.  On the way, he's ceaselessly jabbering away into his cellphone and dodging debtors.  He frantically lies to and evades and begs his business partners and mistresses and children in a mad panic attack of plate spinning.  The film is a sustained, mad rush to keep one step ahead of bankruptcy, divorce, and physical punishment.

The film is kind of the dark inverse of one of those "greed is good" kind of films.  I was reminded a lot of Wolf of Wall Street in how the character is always a few seconds away from destruction of one kind or another.  Unlike that film however, this guy is constantly and clearly in the throws of desperation.  He runs a tiny, hole-in-the-wall diamond shop and shows up with a black eye screaming into his phone that he's good for the money it's on its way any second now he'll have it right now in his hand goddamn it!  It's as if Michael Scott became involved in the mob.  It's not funny really, but more like one of those near-death videos.  He owns property in Long Island and Manhattan but his life really doesn't look so good.  He looks like he's going to keel over from a massive heart attack at any moment.

The film is mostly a character study of this man for whom the hustle and the chase has consumed his every waking moment.  There's some light, late-film critique of global capitalist exploitation (specifically in the gem trade) and I feel like that's the ideological heart of the film: that this man is the reality of raw, brutal capitalism.  It's a desperate struggle generated and perpetuated by giddy, desperate, slippery guys like this who have it all but don't have a moment to enjoy anything.

That said, mostly the film is a character study about this guy and what makes him tick.  He's a fascinating subject to watch jump and writhe for a while, but you get the sense that, like his motor-mouthed ducking of the collection men, this can go on forever, indefinitely drawn out and prolonged until you give in in disgust.

Suicide Squad

Saw Suicide Squad, another not very good movie.  Here was the main problem with it: incoherency.  It's part of the DC film universe and follows the assembly and deployment of a rag-tag group of not-very-villainous villains who are the only folks capable of taking out a Big Baddie (it's never explained why the conventional superheroes can't help, but I guess they can't.)

So the film has a problem to solve: how to introduce and motivate these six or so characters and introduce the baddies and the puppet-master who runs the operation without making the film 4 hours long?  Well, the way the film solves this is by mashing things together and leaving it to us to unscramble the mess in our heads.  It's like Godard's Breathless - all the connective tissue is taken out, leaving us with voice-overs and infographics.  It's all fairly fluffy and fun but nothing is allowed to breathe.  Important beats of characterization have to compete with each other and with special effects.  Of course all of the posing and one-liner-ing is left in, so there's just a ton of unearned, ain't-I-cute and ain't-I-bad-ass dumbness that mostly falls flat.

The power couple of the movie are Harley and the Joker.  Jared Leto's Joker is terrible, as you all know.  He plays the Joker as just kind of drunk and flirty which like okay I guess but you have to actually show him doing something evil at some point.  There's a scene where he intimidates and murders a random thus who, alas, is far more threatening than Leto ever is.  I guess I could see him as a Charles Manson type, but he's playing it here with grills and tattoos and the second-hand, imitation swagger of a white suburban teenager trying to look tough and this all is not really that intimidating.  Bleh.  Harley is the real winner of this film.  She's not perfect, but she's head and shoulders above anyone else here and genuinely entertaining.

The film is quite dumb though.  It's the Joel Schumacher movies of our time.  It embraces the camp and fun of the comics, but it also tries to keep the dour seriousness that fans seem to like.  The result is a self-serious mess with tons of self-conscious, comic-book-tier posing and mystique-building and all sorts of puffed-up, inflated, self-aggrandizing nonsense.  Not the worst movie I've seen but would not recommend.

Starchaser: The Legend of Orin

Saw Starchaser: The Legend of Orin.  It was an animated film which was mostly a campy good time.  It ripped off Star Wars a lot and had some seriously rapey bits (it was made in the 80s) but mostly silly, self-serious space opera.

It follows Orin, who belongs to a race of enslaved crystal-miners who are ruled by evil robots and told never to "dig up".  After finding a sword hilt which projects a Call To Adventure, Orin digs up and discovers the surface world is not a blasted hell-scape as he had been led to believe.  He teams up with a suspiciously Han Solo-like mercenary and a suspiciously Princess Leia-like daughter of some crystal tycoon and tries to free his people.

There's also a suspiciously C3PO-like femme-bot who is the subject of the rapey bits: they abduct her much to her robo-dismay, reprogram her via an access panel in her butt to be more compliant, and attempt to sell her into slavery!  Her entire arc is heinous and makes the film quite awkward in a Jazz Singer kind of way.  It's so much more shocking now than it was intended to be and it's jarring to see the characters just kind of accept all this.  Why does this robot have feminine features anyway?  Why does she have mammaries?

Anyway, that aside, the film has the soothingly nonsensical and nostalgic feel of an NES game.  Robots and aliens and mutants jostle past each other in a colorful parade as items are gathered and pits are jumped.  The protagonist is attractive and floppy-haired, the side characters are funny (I liked the ship computer) and the film involves a lot of suspiciously Star-Wars-like derring-do.  It's not exactly a hidden gem, but involves some strangely dated and adult stuff which reminds me strongly of Ralph Bakshi's work.  It's inconsequential nonsense and it's reasonably entertaining as well (I mean except for that stuff with the femme-bot, good lord.)

A Wrinkle in Time

Saw A Wrinkle in Time, a film based on the novel by the same name about time and space travel enabled by fourth-dimensional magical nonsense.  It wasn't a great movie (or, if I'm being honest, even a good movie,) but I feel very protective of it.  It has a lot working against it.

First of all, children's entertainment is a harsh land.  People are unwilling to wink at flaws the way they are with action films or comedies.  There's less acknowledgement of subjective likes and dislikes.  Also, this is a film aimed at girls and historically anything marketed to young girls becomes a punchline (see Justin Bieber, Twilight.)  Again, people are unwilling to just accept how trivial girl-world problems seem.  Furthermore, this is a film aimed at black girls, of which I can name virtually no others (does Beasts of the Southern Wilds count?)  So this film fills a void and I want to like it, but mostly I just wish it had been better.

But okay, so let's talk about what was wrong with it.  The fourth-dimensional magical nonsense is introduced by the main-character's genius father to a crowd of laughing foreign dignitaries.  He claims that by using your brain, you should be able to "fold" space to instantly travel across the cosmos.  This definitely deserves laughter and derision.  What is this assembly anyway?  It's like a TED talk, but somehow even more unhinged.  Furthermore, this time-bending magic brings the attention of three magical women known as "The Misses" who remind me of the crystal gems from Steven Universe, but they're so twee and so cringey.  One speaks only in famous quotations (such as "Daaaang! -- Tucker, American" which is not even an accurate quote.)  Another is introduced inexplicably in the main characters' house, playing with decorations and flouncing about like she isn't a home intruder who is liable to be shot.  The third is Oprah Winfrey, whose character is always gigantic, towering over the other characters like a mountain.  There's a scene where the main characters stroke her gigantic face.  It's strange.

The ultimate message of the film is that our flaws also make us who we are, so be kind to yourselves and love and forgive others anyway.  I understand that black girls face a lot of opposition in America, as they become black women, and this might be a helpful message to hear.  After all, it's not like they have an abundance of support, statistically speaking, to draw on.  At least they can be their own champion.  But this is hard to convey in a sympathetic way.  People like to see characters improve and get better and stronger.  It's difficult to make someone accepting their flaws look inspiring without making it look like those flaws themselves are being celebrated.  Which, like, they are being celebrated in a way; not as aspirational attributes but as just human foibles.  It's a tough tightrope to walk and, the world being what it is, most of the crowd is rooting for failure.

So, I have emotions about this movie.  I enjoyed the visuals but hated the performances.  The film felt a bit limp but then it's not really meant for me.  I don't think it deserves its abysmal score on imdb/rotten tomatoes, but it is flawed.  I guess I'm sort of willing to overlook the flaws, but most folks (and maybe  most sensible folks) will not.

Coming 2 America

Saw Coming 2 America, a mostly winning and funny sequel to the 1988 film of nearly the same name (Coming To America.)  It follows the main character from the first film, the Prince of Zamunda, trying to find and reconnect with his illegitimate son who is now heir to the throne.  This film is a sort of reverse of the first one - whereas they are both fish-out-of-water comedies, in the first film the prince is an African prince in Queens and this time it's a boy from Queens in the fictional land of Zamunda.  In addition to the fish-out-of-water hijinks, there's also many many many callbacks to the previous film.

I enjoyed the movie alright, and laughed at several times.  I also liked the overnight rags-to-riches story of the son who is scooped up from unemployment lines into palatial excess.  It was some nice, vicarious wish-fulfillment.  Also the son looks very cute after the palace make-over.  Leslie Jones is also brought on board for some old-fashioned, scheming, opportunistic, poor-lady business.  It's all pretty funny.

I'm generally harsh on comedies.  In order to work properly, they have to be a little glib, and I want to think out this glibness and to point out any harmful clichés it perpetuates, but that sort of harshes the vibe.  It was not a particularly profound movie and had a bit too many references to the old movie for me (even including a digitally de-aged Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall) but it was funny and solid entertainment.  I don't think it made a big impression on me, but it was a good waste of two hours.

Pee-wee's Big Holiday

Saw Pee-wee's Big Holiday, a campy movie that was dumb but fun-dumb in its own dumb way.  It was about the grey-suited man-child Pee-wee and his adventures trying to get to New York city to attend the birthday of his friend, actual real-life famous actor, Joe Manganiello.  The film is weirdly childish in a self-aware kind of way that winks, but never actually tips over into anything bawdy or even anything very mean.  It's a padded world where you wake up via elaborate Rube Goldberg machine.

But the subtext is there.  When Pee-wee first meets Joe Manganiello, they both squeal over their favorite kind of candy and Joe takes Pee-wee on a ride on his motorcycle, Pee-wee clutching him close.  It's a weird half-homoromantic, half-childish moment that resurfaces in dream sequences, where Pee-wee imagines the great New York birthday party, with them jousting on piñatas, or blowing out candles on a cake.  It's very innocent but at the same time unusual and it's not clear exactly why Pee-wee the man-child is attracted to Joe.  It's the most blatant hat-tip to the kitsch of the film, and even that's kept ambiguous.

The movie is okay in a kind of overblown way, like Speed Racer (but a bit more subdued than that film.)  Since Pee-wee is always travelling, there's always some new cartoon human to entertain us.  He meets up with joke-shop salesmen and tough gangster molls, Amish farmers and a snake museum that has no snakes.  It's fairly light, cheesy fun and has the decency not to overstay its welcome.  A nice light little dumb film.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Saw Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, an extended music video of covers of the album of the same name by The Beatles, covered by The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton.  It was not good.

The film is a fairly tedious and intentionally goofy frame story about Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and their magical instruments and how their hometown was ruined by mean Mr Mustard.  You can see the song list being queued up as soon as you hear the names.  Frampton's girlfriend is named Strawberry Fields.  It's mostly on the nose, uninspired, and tedious.  More than one of the songs is incongruously covered by aging celebrities doing spoken-word covers.  When it's not that though, it's disco-ified versions of the songs, with synth-y bleep-bloops and pitch-adjusted vocals.

The film is strange collision of the late 60s with the late 70s.  The flowing psychedelia of the 60s is replaced by the robotic synths of the 70s.  We get the worst of both worlds, with lyrics not making much sense and buzz-saw whines and beeps playing over it.  Sometimes they'll go Joni Mitchell Blue and do something sincere which is better, but the synth music inevitably sneaks back in.  The worst song cover is probably Steve Martin doing a zany cover of Maxwell's Silver Hammer, a song which is clearly about a serial killer, but is here inexplicably applied to a plastic surgeon.

The plot of the film is about a small-town band who makes it big and is chewed up by the big record companies, as their town is chewed up by crass modernism.  The film is at war with itself.  If the homey old past is so great, why are we needlessly updating the music?  Several times the pursuit of money is vilified, but the band's manager (a good guy, I think) is literally rolling in cash at one point.  There's a rival band of black women (Lucy and The Diamonds) who they wind up kind of dating?  Or friends with?  It's a mess.  There is a cover of Got to Get You Into My Life by Earth Wind and Fire however which was fairly alright.

This was not a good film.  It's the worse version of Across the Universe which is pretty hated to begin with (although I liked it okay.)  It allegedly began the death of the musical careers of The Bee Gees and was subject to multiple attempted pull-outs by various leads.  This was a film no one wanted to be in except old established actors who had done worse for a paycheck.

Vivarium

 Saw Vivarium, a film about a young couple who get trapped in a cookie-cutter suburb while house-hunting.  After establishing that they are well and truly trapped in this maze of identical passages, a baby arrives with instructions that if they raise it, they will be released.  The film also opens with a cuckoo bird shoving eggs and nest-mates out of the nest, and being fed at a gigantic size by its surrogate mother, so it's clear what the themes are here.

The film mines a lot of surreal mood and creepiness from the identical houses of the suburban development, and from the bland stand-in décor of these empty homes.  There's impersonal vacuum-sealed food and vaguely indifferent and slightly hostile salesmen.  The film has modern alienation on the mind, and when better to release such a film than during lockdown, when all of our lives have shrunk to the same few hundred square feet, the same one or two people?  To complete the picture, they should have also been able to watch TV.

The film is most interesting in terms of just seeing what happens.  We get a little into the claustrophobia and the toll this takes on their relationship, but it's less a character study than it is an existential struggle to matter in an empty, implacable, prefab world.  I really liked the few arbitrary flickers of defiance they put up as their trap becomes more complete.  The guy takes to digging forever, and although the woman tries to understand the growing child, she also howls at the sky.

Anyway, the film is alright.  The ending delivers some nice visuals as the curtain is pulled aside for just a moment, and there's some great black humor (there's a corpse that's delivered with a receipt!)  but this is the sort of film you can really only see once.  It's fairly bleak and paranoid.  The sun is out and the lawn is green, but they are clearly in a trap that is closing in around them and this is a matter of life and death.  But isn't that how it is for us all?  As we get older, the possibilities become more limited and we slowly settle into our final resting places.  Maybe the suburbs aren't such a bad place to wind up.

Les Vampires

 Saw Les Vampires, a silent French serial film from the 1910s.  It follows a criminal gang known as "the vampires" as they are pursued by a plucky reporter who is foiling their plans and exposing their identities.  The series is extremely silly and fairly entertaining in a somewhat dry, silent-movie-ish way.

The main characters are the journalist and the head of the vampires (known as the Grand Vampire) who changes fairly often (on account of being foiled by the reporter all the time.)  The real heroes of the series however are the side-kicks of the central characters: the evil and seductive Irma Vep and the bumbling Mazamette.  Mazamette is a big-nosed guy who starts off as a gag side-character but who becomes more and more central, getting great mileage simply from his lanky body and giant nose.  Irma Vep is the true star however.  She is captured and recaptured, always surviving and popping up again.  She seems incredibly competent and resilient.  She's also just a huge amount of fun, with the other vampires celebrating her return.  She is introduced dancing on a stage, preceded by a single black title card reading just "Irma Vep." Amazing!

The series itself is a little goofy.  The vampires have these outlandish, elaborate plots to gas and rob all of France's upper crust, to paralyze the journalist with a special perfume, to hypnotize their maids into acts of sabotage.  The journalist foils them, but their power is so grand and their numbers so great, I began to wonder who in Paris was not a vampire by now.  The series is fairly okay and never becomes too tedious however, which is pretty good for me for a silent film, all things considered.

One other little note: I was very disappointed that the woman with black bat wings that shows up everywhere when you image-search "Les Vampires" is not one of the vampires at all, but a ballerina in a completely unrelated performance.

Demonlover

 Saw Demonlover, another film by Olivier Assayas, the guy who directed Boarding Gate.  His obsessions are: luxurious hotels and corporate environments, women in trouble, and the ambiguities between nations, companies, and high-powered executives.  This film hits all three of these marks.  It follows a French woman who is negotiating with a Japanese hentai company for distribution rights which she intends to sell to an American company.  In this mix, there's a man she keeps meeting with who seems to be giving her marching orders.  Later on, she is in trouble.

I liked this film okay, but it definitely has flaws.  Here's what I enjoyed: the film's murky ambiguity.  It's never clear who's manipulating who, who's really in charge, or what anyone's alliances are.  The whole thing is dizzying and shadowy and very nice.  I also liked the frank multiculturalism of the film.  Characters easily switch from French to Japanese to English to Spanish.  Refreshingly, it's not the Chicago company negotiating with the New York office, but France and Japan.  America is present, but is just another country for once.  I also liked the hilarious indifference the characters have towards the hentai.  At one point they are calmly discussing sales figures while the porn is just on in the background, the voice actress just rhythmically squealing away.

So here's what's not so hot: the plot is bananas.  At one point, one of the other executives threatens the main character's life.  They point a gun at her head while she's driving.  Having delivered the threat, they then hop out of the car. She calls them.  They pick up the hone (why?) she asks them to talk to her.  She offers them a ride home (why??) after a bit of talk, they hop back in the car with her (why???) and give her the gun (whyyyy????!?!?!)  I think it's supposed to be jarring and to highlight that all of this is really impersonal theatrics, just business.  But it's completely confusing and silly.

Also, because the central deal revolves around hentai, there's a lot of porn involved and (of course) the protagonist woman is not above using sex to get what she wants.  It's supposed to be titillating, but it's fairly tawdry.  The film is supposed to be confusing and sexy and ambiguous, but it's sometimes difficult to distinguish this from just inept and smutty.