Swordfish (2001)

Saw Swordfish on the assumption that it was a dumb computer-hacker movie.  It was dumb, yes, but it turned out to be more of a heist movie.  There's crosses and double-crosses and smirking bad guys and all that jazz.  There is hacking which is a little tangential, but also dumb.

However, the main thing I noticed about this film, was this it was clearly trying to be The Matrix.  It opens with one of those famous rotate-y shots that The Matrix made famous and involves the main character (a hacker) being swallowed into a shadowy netherworld of shell corporations and government secrecy.  In one scene, there is even scrolling ascii characters, but these ones are scrolling sideways (so, you know, a completely original visual.)  Whereas The Matrix is not really set in any place (apart from a city of some kind,) this film is emphatically Los Angeles styled down to a yellow filter over everything.

So okay, but this movie is also very dumb.  In the modern heist-film tradition, it features a lot of trashiness: ladies in tight-fitting outfits lounge around everywhere and, as a particularly egregious example, the main character "auditions" for his role as heist hacker by cracking into a government website while being given a blowjob.  It's pretty crass.

Let me talk a little about the tech before wrapping up: the tech is absolutely nonsense.  They throw around random words which are not complete nonsense, but are unrelated to what's going on.  (eg: "I dropped a logic bomb." "You didn't have time.") There's a sequence where the main character codes for a little while which is gratuitous and heightened.  It's unreal but only because the character is dancing with happiness or rubbing his eyes with dismay.  The emotions are right, but they are more muted: annoyance followed by the satisfaction of seeing a green message appear rather than a red one, then on to the next red message.  It's dumb but I'll forgive it.  Watching someone stare at a screen, typing slowly, waiting for a minute and then grunting would not be compelling cinema.

Okay, so final thoughts: this was a big dumb movie, but I basically expected a big dumb movie.  I think it more or less succeeded in what it set out to do which was to give you, the male viewer, a little titillation and excitement mixed in with your power fantasy.  There's a couple of pointless chase scenes and the main antagonist is frustratingly smug, but if we're going to ding it for containing pointless stuff, well the whole movie is a little pointless, so what do you want?  This is a big dumb movie which is big and dumb.

A Touch of Zen (1971)

Saw A Touch of Zen.  It starts out as a fairly typical samurai movie (actually the genre is wuxia, according to imdb, but I don't know if I will remember this phrase) which makes a sudden and dramatic veer in the last half hour or so of its runtime.

The main character is a painter in a small town.  He lives in an abandoned castle which is said to be haunted.  He is quickly caught up in political machinations, defending the princess of a disgraced clan from the underlings of an evil eunuch (of course.)  There's a recurrent image of a spider web which seems to be initially used to imply the web of deceit which our heroes are caught up in and which is later subverted when the heroes spin a crafty scheme of their own.  I'm not a big action fan, so I'm hardly the target audience, but I found the story to be fairly humdrum.  It's the usual thing: noble heroes, faceless soldiers, a conspiracy slowly crystalizing.  You can probably see the broad outlines coming.

The film is also edited in a confusing way.  Due to the technical limitations of the time, they often cut away just as someone is getting stabbed and then cut back to the bloody aftermath.  But they also cut away for other reasons, sometimes for no reason at all.  Characters will appear and disappear from a fight scene, or will suddenly be in the village or away from it.  We know time is passing, but the film does not hold our hand through this.  We're just suddenly one year later.  I found this very confusing and it made the plot difficult for me to follow, however truth be told I was not trying all that hard.  Anyway, the third act really took me by surprise.

The film is three hours long and, in about the last half hour or so, completely shifts focus, losing track of the princess in a sudden jump-cut.  The painter hunts for her, but we lose track of him too, rediscovering the princess in a show-down with a general, a monk acting as her ally.  This sequence is not directly to do with the main characters, but is a battle with strange, religious, philosophical overtones.  It's all portrayed symbolically, which is to say indirectly, though fades and juxtaposition, downfall coming from mysterious avenues.  I get the sense of a message being communicated.  It's very evocative.

I don't know that the last half hour makes the rest of the film worth it for me, but that ending was very interesting

The Whale

Saw The Whale, a grotesque but uplifting film about a morbidly obese gay man who is facing down his last days, trying to make amends and trying, in his words, to do one good thing.  The film is directed by Darren Aronofsky, who is fond of films about self-destructive characters.  This one features a lot of addictions and simultaneous with that, a lot of empathy and attempts at saving the main character.  All of the characters damage the protagonist in their own ways, even as they try to help him.  Even his nurse friend enables his food addiction, however I don't know if this is helpful or not.  Addiction is a difficult thing.

The film is based on a play and retains many of its theater bones.  Much of the action happens in the main character's living room.  Sometimes he leaves and the other characters remain, to explain backstory to each other.  A nosy Mormon (well not really Mormon but a lawsuit-safe pseudo-Mormon) acts as an impetus for a lot of backstory drops.  The stage setting helps to make the film feel claustrophobic, isolated, trapped within its own body.

The film is terribly sad.  The main character is utterly pathetic, constantly murmuring "I'm sorry." as his exasperated support network shouts at him or begs him to go to a hospital.  In spite of his own self-destructive coping mechanism, he retains a solid core of values that he is willing to die for.  His character is written slightly cattily.  There are many zingers and one-liners.  He has the feel of The Man Who Came To Dinner, but thankfully he's merely played in a sleepy, avuncular way by Brendan Fraser.

There's also many moments when the protagonist is likened to Moby Dick, of the novel by the same name.  He is the white whale for many of the characters: the one monstrous thing that, if they could only fix, if they could only solve, they would have achieved their life's work.  But the monster in the fat protagonist is the same monster that is killing all of us.  Everyone in the film is struggling, all of them quietly self-destructing as they fail to address their own problems and turn inwards, devouring themselves.

It's a sad and tough film.  It has a warm heart, but it is not clear that this is enough.  It reminded me of The Kid Nobody Could Handle, a similarly melancholy story by melancholy author Kurt Vonnegut.  Like this film, it is also about the impossibility and necessity of reaching each other.