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.