French Cancan (1954)

Saw French Cancan, a pretty cream-puff of a film about the creation of the famous Moulin Rouge theater.  The film is a typical sort of show-biz film about sexy primadonnas sleeping their way to jewels and fame, pretty ingenues being inducted into the scene, wealthy backers who suddenly pull funding, or grant funding, causing sudden tonal gearshifts as the production is doomed or rescued, respectively.  Also typical of the genre, I thought the most interesting lens was to examine fantasy and exploitation.

The most main character is the theater manager who conceives of and creates the Moulin Rouge: it's supposed to be a middle-class sort of burlesque hall.  A place where people can look at pretty, sexy ladies for a reasonable price.  It's supposed to evoke the fantasy of wealth and sophistication enjoyed in gentlemen's clubs, but to be financially accessible to the general public.  It's not luxury but the illusion of luxury that's being sold.

Similarly, the manager recruits a new starlet by essentially seducing her, both with his own charms and with the charms of the theater: attention, praise, lofty but vague promises about great art and immortality.  Contrast this new girl's eager excitement with the aging prima-donna's hunt for security.  The fantasy is an easy sell, but it comes at the cost of comfort and conventionality.

Now: is anyone being exploited?  Is the manager tricking this new girl or is she running forth eyes open?  She is eager to be on stage but the manager and the audiences are fickle: they always want the new thing, they quickly discard the old favorite.  The warmth of the applause is wonderful, but the silence after the applause dies is always waiting to return.  In all of this fantasy, surely someone is being lied to.

On top of all of this, the Paris of this film is a sanitized, picturesque one, shot on a sound-stage, lit by technicolor, populated by charming characters.  The new girl's home is in a spacious laundry, with a little man outside, painting pictures of the Seine in the background.  It is all painted faces and rented clothes, a hair's-breadth away from prostitution.

The film is dated and a little quaint, but fun.  It's a theme I like thinking about anyway.

Ironweed (1987)

Saw Ironweed, a beautiful bummer of a film about an alcoholic bum living in skid row in Albany, NY.  The film is very pretty to look at.  It has the fuzzy colors and dim lighting of a Rembrandt painting.  It's set in the 30s and contains many gorgeously weathered faces.  There are weird characters and nice observations, but I have a hard time tackling the film.  I have a hard time of telling what, apart from sadness, was the film about?

Now, films don't have to have a message to them to be good, and sad films have a place: they force us to confront uncomfortable topics and to feel bad for people we may otherwise just dismiss.  This film explores the main characters' life, flitting through his childhood and exploring his present-day misery.  We learn early on that he's wracked by guilt over the death of his son and the film may just be that this man's hell is of his own creation, however the events are more ambiguous than that.  some childhood sexual abuse is implied, and he is literally haunted by his past.  It may be of his own making, but it is not clear that this is his own choice.

Meryl Streep steals the film in a supporting role as another drunk homeless lady.  Her performance is (as always) perfect and simultaneously sympathetic, believable, and repellent.  Her past is more obscure however and we only get hints of some past life on the stage.  At one point she drunkenly screams about her mother and sister who she refers to as thieves.  Is she too wallowing in self-pity?  What about Tom Waits' character, who is dying from cancer but who is too bemused, distracted, or crazy to be bothered by that fact?

The film is beautiful and sad, austere and spare.  I liked how small but dense everything was.  The characters have a full on physical fight, melt-down, and reconciliation within the space of about 10 minutes and within the physical space of an alley-way.  It had a stagey feeling of confinement and containment to its scenes.  It was also gorgeously shot in muted, warm, period-picture browns and blacks.

It's a film that feels ambiguous to me, but maybe I just haven't found the key to it yet, or am misreading it: looking for something that isn't there.  It's a pretty and sad film, and I'm not sure what it is beyond that.

Fate (2016)

Saw Fate, a film about time-travel.  It follows a young attractive physicist who is trying to prevent his fiancé from dying via time-travel.  I think it was trying to be like Primer, a low-budget but cerebral puzzle of a film, however the filmmakers didn't quite have the puzzle-making instincts and just made a really dumb movie instead.

Now, the film is not atrocious or like obviously incompetently made.  It's not The Room, however it's not well thought-out and is kind of obvious all of the time.  The most glaring example of this is the time travel mechanism itself.  In time travel stories, they need some way to deal with the "grandfather paradox": what if I go back in time and shoot my own grandfather when he was young?  Shouldn't I pop out of existence?  But then wouldn't my grandfather remain un-shot?  so, time travel movies pick one of two resolutions to this: either my grandfather is shot and events progress in a sort of parallel-universe where I was never born, however the "me" from the alternate universe where I was born continues to exist (and can sometimes even return to my home universe to see that my grandfather remains un-shot there,) or the film decides that there's only one universe and that although I may intend to go back in time to shoot my grandfather, I must have been prevented in some way because if I weren't then I wouldn't exist hence paradox.

Films that make the first choice are usually more unrealistic day-dreams about unintended consequences; that killing baby Hitler unleashes an even worse mega-Hitler.  Films of the second type are usually more grounded films about accepting reality: you can't change the past, so better to spend your energy on the present.  This film seems to lean towards the latter category, with the physicist's wise, avuncular, wheelchair-bound mentor frequently telling the physicist to move on and to accept Fate, but then this thing happens: the physicist goes back in time, is hit by a car, shows up in modern time with a limp and is told: "next time avoid the car, then you won't have been hit and will not have a limp."  This puts the film in neither category:  if the character can make himself be un-hit by a car, will he still remember it?  If his brain does, why doesn't his bones?  It seems like we really can prevent the fiance from being killed.  Why then is the mentor being such a dick about it?  This film is really about moving on from an un-winnable situation, but the mechanics of the film's time-travel don't support that world-view.  Why would they do this?

I feel this is sort of a nerdy nit-pick, but this sort of half-baked thinking is endemic in the film.  There's shadowy government agents who seem to be trying to prevent time-travel from happening, but why, no one knows.  They also seem to be funding the physicist's time travel research however which is counter-intuitive and never really explained.  The whole film is both very obvious and arbitrary.  It's clear what we're meant to feel, but the facts of the film don't justify the emotional reaction.

Also: at one point the main character is mourning about his fiancé.  He sadly looks at the coffee table to see Time magazine and Travel magazine serendipitously line up to form the words "Time Travel"!  This doesn't support any point I'm making, it was just so dumb that I want to tell people about it.

This was not a good film.  It was clumsy and inelegant and not entertainingly campy or strange.  Watch it with friends and booze.

Seven Chances (1925)

Saw Seven Chances, a Buster Keaton comedy.  The plot is that in order to cash in on a $1M inheritance, Keaton must marry someone by 7pm that day.  The end of the film is clear before the action even begins: we are told he's been pining for this one woman but can't pluck up the courage to ask her to marry him.  She is offended by his proposal now because she assumes she's just "any" woman who will do.  With this refusal, he goes hunting for another woman, ultimately resorting to newspaper advertising.  The film has three acts: Keaton asking random women to marry him, Keaton being overwhelmed by too many brides, and finally Keaton running a lot.

I enjoyed the film a great deal.  I particularly liked the second act, when he suffers from his own success. There's something deeply funny about Keaton running from an angry mob of dainty, wedding-dress-clad brides.  Just the volume of them is great!  Also, of course Keaton is a master of the dead-pan and of telling stories in little micro-motions and gestures.  There's a great mix of subtle acting and extremely un-subtle stunts.

Alas, the film was made in the 20s and there's some gross-ass black-face we have to deal with.  I also felt like there's something Freudian about the image of a man fleeing from brides.  Generally the women come out on top in this film however.  They are the gatekeepers of their sexuality in this film and poor Keaton spends a lot of time being jeered at by failed partners.

So the film was pretty good.  Weird 20s-politics aside, I thought the film was funny and exciting.  There's all kinds of gags that I rewound to watch again.  Good film!

Pin (1988)

Saw Pin (thanks Lea!)  It was a psychodrama from the 80s about two children (a daughter and son) of a doctor who has an anatomical dummy in his office which he uses to put patients at ease.  He uses ventriloquism to make the dummy "talk."  This is sort of creepy on its own, but within the realm of misguided adult attempts to comfort children.  Alas, this has a profound effect on the son of the doctor, who reaches adulthood, still firmly believing that the dummy can talk.  Over time, the dummy's "personality" takes a more sinister, demanding turn.

Although it came from the 80s, the film has a Hitchcockian, giallo feel to it.  There's pop psychology, and attempts to placate and fool the psychopathic antagonist.  The over-the-top premise is handled seriously and the film wrings some genuine freakiness from the bizarre dummy and the creepy son.  Ultimately, the true horror of the film is about psychological abuse and seeing the damage wrought by the son is something to behold.

There's also something thematic going on with graven images and reproduction.  The son and daughter, perhaps unconsciously, mirror their parents' seating positions and postures.  They are not just the children of their parents, they are becoming their parents in some way.  Similarly, the dummy is called "Pin" which is revealed to be short for Pinocchio, the puppet who wanted to be real.  The doctor father tries to make the puppet into another sort of parent for the children, but as the generational divide collapses, the son takes over that roll.  All very neat!

So the film was solid.  It's obscure for no reason which is very obvious to me.  I guess it was out of step with its time.  It doesn't have a big scary villain that will launch 1,000 sequels and instead uses more 1970s psycho-horror to drive its scares.  It holds up now however.  Go see it!

A Place in the Sun (1951)

Saw A Place in the Sun, a fairly grim but frothy melodrama about a man who is hired to his wealthy uncle's factory.  There, he is ignored by his wealthy relations' family, but he starts to climb the ladder slowly, slowly.  He starts dating one of the other factory workers, in spite of regulations, and he seems to be making a small life when tragedy strikes: he falls in love with one of the women from the world of luxury his uncle inhabits.  Now he's torn between two women: the poor one he's with vs the glamorous dream that's just out of his reach.

The film is about the corrosive effects of the American dream: the lie that capitalism works as a meritocracy.  The film was based on a novel titled An American Tragedy which makes the aims of the story more clear.  The central trouble is that a relationship with this un-glamorous girl he's involved with means a life of poverty and hardship.  She's not as well-dressed as the other woman, but she's sweet and she loves him and cares for him.  In isolation with her, he could be happy.  But how on earth can he be happy when a far more luxurious life of money and power is calling to him, just begging him to abandon his current girl?

And so too with our own lives.  We may not live the most glamorous or comfortable existences, but they could be enough for us, if only we did not have the dream of more always hanging out of our reach.  How can we enjoy what little we have when we know that if only we were a little more cut-throat, if only we were willing to do a little more evil, we could have so much more?

I don't know what the solution to this is.  The main character is meant to represent us and therefore remains sympathetic in spite of it all.  He comes from a religious background which he has abandoned, foreshadowing greater falls from grace to come.  Is a stronger morality then, the proposed solution?  Ironically, the woman who played his religious mother was a communist in real life and would be blacklisted after this film as part of the Red Scare.  She next appeared in Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon in 1970.  Clearly, America was not ready to think about alternative systems just yet.

The film is a bummer, of course.  It's got a lot of glorious melodrama (fainting!  Smoldering close-ups! Silhouettes!) but it ends on a dour note.  It's intended to provoke and to force engagement, so it leaves you unsettled.  It's an interesting film.

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

Saw The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, the American precursor to Japan's Godzilla.  The film was a standard giant-creature special-effects film from the 50s.  I was very surprised however to learn that the first pre-historic monster awoken by atom bomb tests seems to have been filmed in the US, and I kind of suspect that there is nationalist-tinged controversy over this (ala who discovered the number 0 first, or paper, or stuffed cabbage: which brave nation dared to dream of giant nuclear lizards?)

The plot is that a giant lizard is woken by nuclear tests in the north pole.  After a few high-intensity lizard scenes, the meat of the film consists of a scientist trying to prove that his lizard-visions are legit, and trying to prove he's not crazy.  In the style of early Hollywood, the film must also be everything to all people.  So, it has romance, thrills, mystery, lizards.

I didn't really dig the film.  Here were the interesting bits: the lizard was animated by stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen, and although the technique looks simple by modern standards, some scenes really stand out, such as when the lizard attacks a lighthouse.  Also of course, the broader context of post-world-war America coming to grips with its world-ending nuclear capabilities.  Outside of that, there's the novelty of this being the first Godzilla-ish movie.

So, the film was not great, but solidly okay and at lest brief, so it didn't wear out its welcome.  The special effects are pretty good for its time, and the plot is ridiculous.  There are square jaws and army men using peculiar slang and pretty lady-scientists and a big lizard.  What more do you ask from this film?

Bee Movie (2007)

Saw Bee Movie, which opens with the following bit of misinformation: "According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly" (debunked here).  This is only the opening salvo in a virtual avalanche of bee-related misinformation and mis-truths.  Here are 10 more that I quickly identified, in a bulleted list:

1. Bees cannot speak English
2. Bees do not drive little cars in their hive
3. Beehives do not have little roads inside of them for little cars to drive upon
4. Beehives do not have whimsical honey factories, involving buckets, and conveyer belts, and taffy-pulling machines
5. Bees do not collect nectar via a gun called a "nectar collector"
6. A travelling arc does not move up a bee's antennae like a Jacob's ladder when they are electrocuted
7. Bees do not wear little sweaters
8. Bees cannot use an emery board to surf on flushing toilet water
9. When injured, bees do not need an intravenous honey drip
10. There has in fact been no record of a woman in New York dumping her chef boyfriend for a bee ever at all

So, you can see this is not a very realistic movie (and actual bit of bee trivia you wouldn't know from this movie: male bees are for reproduction only, don't leave the queen, and don't have a stinger (so Seinfeld's character is canonically lesbian.))

Ok, moving on to the plot: the main character bee feels oppressed by the nanny state of the hive.  He desires to fly outside of the hive to hunt for nectar (which, again, in real life is not done with a gun) but in the outside world he meets a woman who he talks to, despite bee law being firm about banning this.  The main plot of the story is the romance between the bee and this human woman, intercut with the bee's quest to stop the exploitation of his people by the humans.

The movie is not great.  It's certainly not bad, but very unpolished.  The humans look strange and lumpy, the bees look much better, but there's a strange mix of movie references, and pointless cameos (Ray Liotta voices himself) and strange whimsy.  At one point, they reveal a hive job is to wear a hat with a finger on top to scoop up the last drop of honey, but at another point, the girlfriend's plane explodes when it rams into a cliffside, during the bee's romantic fantasy.  This second joke feels like something out of the sinister humor of Adult Swim, but the former is just whimsical.  Lumpy, uneven.

The plot bumbles along and has its moments but feels over-long, even at 90 minutes.  There's a few moments of odd politics left in there (strong "if people don't need to work, society will collapse" vibes in the final act, plus also the main bee is dissatisfied that everyone enjoys their jobs (???)) and many of the jokes are recognizably joke-shaped, but only inspire an exhalation.

So, DreamWorks went for broke on the marketing budget of this thing, coating the billboards with ads in the hope of gulling a few hopefuls on opening night, and then letting the film sink into obscurity.  Alas, like Shrek before it, the internet caught hold and made those 2016 edits of the film, after it became clear that DreamWorks had no intention of enforcing copyright.  And here we are today.  See it for the memes if you have to (and I had to) because it's not very good on its own.