Everything Everywhere All at Once

Saw Everything Everywhere All at Once.  It was a lot to see!  It's about a woman who's life is spinning apart due to a combination of her perfectionism and her struggling business.  She's trying to organize her paperwork for an IRS audit on the eve of Chinese new year.  On top of this, her relationship with her lesbian daughter is strained to the breaking point by the mother's inability to accept her daughter as she is.

And so also (I'm still explaining the premise of the film here,) it turns out that there is a multi-verse of parallel dimensions which are all under assault by some super-powerful monster named Jobu Tupaki (which apparently translates to "pocket gun") which can only be stopped by some version of her (the mother.)  Jobu was once a human whose consciousness was scattered throughout the multi-verse.  Experiencing all possible worlds all at once has driven them mad: if some version of us does all things, it doesn't matter what we do.  If all things happen to some version of us, then it doesn't matter what happens.  Jobu just wants all of this to stop.

The film is gloriously overstuffed.  There's a heavy dose of whimsey and absurdity to the film.  In addition to incredibly absurd parallel universes based off of half-remembered movies, characters jump between universes by making unlikely choices, such as singing Ave Maria or blowing into someone's nose.  The characters (heroes and villains both!) will begin licking walls or singing Ave Maria in order to jump to a parallel universe where they have super-powered pinkies.  The overwhelming parallel universes however are the main weapon of Jobu, the antagonist.  Thus, all the whimsy and silliness takes on a sinister tone.  The childish absurdity of a parallel universe where people evolved to have hotdogs for fingers just serves to underscore the insultingly childish absurdity of our everyday life.

The film's simultaneous mixture of silliness and seriousness reminded me of the work of Don Herzfeld.  It's all sad and funny at the same time.  How much you laugh or cry is all up to you and your mood.  Will you let yourself be swept away by the dizzying kaleidoscope of imagery, or will you ruminate on the existential dread of infinite parallel universes sucking all meaning out of every choice?  Is the absurdity beautiful, or is it just absurd?

I really enjoyed the film.  Not only is there eye-popping imagery (which I am a huge sucker for) but there's parallels between the big and the small: can the mother not only control the chaos unfolding in infinite dimensions but also solve the chaos of her own life?  of her business? of her daughter?  Is it better to try to manage and control it all or to just walk away and escape it all?  The family drama is wonderfully interwoven with the philosophical questions of meaning and purpose.  This was a really good film!

30 Days of Night

Saw 30 Days of Night, a solidly okay movie about a small town in Alaska that is raided by vampires during the height of winter when the sun does not rise for 30 days.  The film was based off of a comic book and the comic book roots still show in the form of unnecessary sub-plots that are briefly alluded to and never discussed again.  In print media, you can sort of pause and ruminate over these threads, but in a movie it's sort of distracting to watch two characters rehash their breakup after fleeing from vampires.

The movie started off very shaky.  The town is sort of softened up by a sleeper agent who cuts telephone wires and power lines and so on.  The main character is the sheriff of the town and we start out with a very abbreviated investigation of the telephone and power-line vandalism.  The film is very disinterested in this angle however, and the reason it's so abbreviated is so we can get to the meat of the film: the siege of the town by the vampires.

Once the siege begins, things get more interesting.  There's some grim and realistic portrayals of what trauma does to people and how folks react.  There's also a palpable sense of dread and fear as the vampires pick off townsfolk one by one.  It's more survival horror or action-horror however, which is not my particular cup of tea, but it was well-done here.

The film uses a lot of close-ups and shaky cams, which is a blessing and a curse.  Some of the close-ups are absolutely lovely.  There's an older woman who is one of the core survivors and every shot of her lined face was gold.  Unfortunately, sometimes the fight scenes are shot in close-up (possibly to save budget?) and it's frustrating to not really know what's going on because all we can see is the sheriff's giant face.  (The sheriff by the way, is played by Josh Hartnett, who is quite attractive, but who does not look a day over 20.  I found it hard to buy him as a grizzled, divorced sheriff.)

One last gripe: the vampires all wear suits and flowing dresses.  Vampires are often analogues for city-folk (pale, clothed in black, exotic hair-cuts and sophistication) but this film makes that reference fairly explicit.  At one point the sheriff rallies everyone by reminding them that they live in Alaska because they're the only ones tough enough to live there (which is not a great reason to live anywhere.)  It feels a little creepy post-2016.

But the film is pretty okay.  It's not amazing and has a rocky start, but it has moments.  The vampire makeup is good, and the vampires seem very creepy.  There's some lovely scenes with the ragged vampires standing in the snow.  There's some nice, grim drama around how far one might be willing to go to survive.  It has its lumps, but you could do worse.  I wouldn't recommend watching it now (there's better films about either vampires or trauma) but if you happen to catch it on TV or at random, you could do worse..

Monsters Vs Aliens (2009)

Saw Monsters Vs Aliens, an animated film about an epic battle between a team of monsters and an alien.  The film has essentially two acts: in the first a woman is exposed to space-based magic which makes her grow to enormous sizes.  She's scooped up by the government and kept in a gigantic holding pen with a few other monsters, all loosely based on 1950s creature-features (the blob, the creature from the black lagoon, the fly.)  Then, in the second act, the alien attacks and the motley crew of monsters have to defend the earth.

So, I didn't really dig this film.  It was supposed to be a comedy, but it wasn't very funny.  It was filmed in the very early days of 3d cinema and you can clearly tell.  In an opening scene, someone's playing a paddle-ball game and paddling the rubber ball directly into the camera.  The film often plays around with sizes.  The giant woman (who is the main character) is sometimes dwarfed by a yet-more-gigantic thing and I suppose that might have been really neat to see in 3d.  On my 2d screen however, it's just sort of arbitrary, like those school-yard fights you'd have about whose imaginary character was more powerful ("My guy has infinity strength!"  "Well mine has infinity plus one!"  etc.)

The film's supposed to be an action comedy but I didn't find the jokes very amusing and I didn't find the action very gripping.  I think it suffers a lot for being on the small screen.  I found the emotional arc of the main character lady much more interesting.  It is this: initially she's a very traditional woman, minimizing herself and her desires for the sake of others in her life, however when she becomes literally huge and powerful, she discovers that she is capable and worthy of regard, and is capable of being more than someone else's support.  Very fulfilling and well-pulled-off.

Apart from that, I'm not sure what else to talk about with this film.  Nothing's very interesting or fun or funny.  It reminded me of Bee Movie, in as much as it feels half-baked and sort of cheap.  I'm sure a ton of work went into this, but the end product is not very good.

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

Saw Two-Lane Blacktop, a spacy, breezy film which is loosely about two guys in a grey car racing against some cravat-ed dude in a yellow car from California to Washington DC.  The film is really about singularity of mind and focus however.  It's like one of those samurai or cowboy films about the purity of mind that comes from a singular focus.  For the samurai it's on sword-fighting; for these dudes, it's racing cars.

The film let me in on what it was thinking by making the race a kind of battle between style and substance.  They in the grey car are the substance: their car is not pretty, but it's fast and they are of one mind.  The diver of the yellow car is style: he lies constantly to the hitchhikers he picks up, he uses drugs to stay awake during their race, and is clueless about how to navigate small-town America.

The race is the engine of the plot, but it's not the main point of the film.  After a few minutes of racing, the grey and yellow teams meet up to discuss routes and to give each other advice on engines.  It's not about the competition: it's about travelling and moving fast and building the best car you can.  Why building the best car you can?  Why not?  If we must invent our own meaning in this world, then a car may as well do.  The driver of the yellow car picks up a hitchhiker who mournfully explains that we all only have like 30 or 40 more years left, so it doesn't matter where he goes.  The driver does not understand him, so the hitchhiker symbolically commits suicide by asking to be let out.

The film is spacy and slow.  Because the main characters are some kind of automotive monks, there's not a lot of dialogue and we spend a lot of time floating down roads, looking under hoods at gas stations, eating burger at a diner.  My personal taste is that there should be more consideration for others in the world.  Single-minded devotion is all well and good, but you eventually have to sacrifice for that single thing, and I just hope it's worth it, although I suspect that it never is (he typed, completing his 1,250th movie review.)

Different from the Others (1919)

Saw Different from the Others, a very early German film which is about the pointless suffering of homosexual men due to blackmailers and societal understanding.  It feels funny to call it a propaganda film, but it has that feel: half educational, half narrative, there's always a learned professor to explain to the shocked audience-inserts that these men are harming no one, and that their love is as valid as anyone's.

The film was silent and I watched it with an ambient album on in the background, full of crashing waves and windy forests.  It made the whole thing much more dismal than it perhaps otherwise would have been.  The gay main characters suffer a lot and although you're supposed to feel pity, it was much more visceral for me than I think it was intended to be.  If I had been alive in 1920s Germany, I for sure would have been blackmailed or just so deeply closeted as to be functionally asexual.

Alas, worse things were to come.  This film was a plea for understanding in 1920.  Twenty years later, the Nazis would take over and do their best to destroy this film, and to destroy histories of gay and trans folks that had been collected in Germany.  Now of course, the reactionaries are claiming transsexuals are a brand new phenomenon.

So this film was pretty sad.  It's in rough shape due to the efforts of the Nazi party, and anyway contains some dated information: they conflated gender and sexual attraction back in those days and theorized that a homosexual was a sort of mild case of transsexuality.  The most main character is a fairly florid and femme violin player which is very interesting to see in silent black-and-white (and is still fairly progressive - I can't think of another film with a sympathetic femme male protagonist (edit: it's been a while.  Does Breakfast on Pluto count?))  The film is sort of an oddity.  It's very clear about its message which gives it a propaganda-ish feel and, unless you're interested in gay history, there's not a ton else to recommend it.  It's interesting as a time capsule and very sad.