Inherent Vice (2014)

Saw Inherent Vice, an adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name which I just finished reading.  The film was directed by P T Anderson and seems like an examination of the tail end of 60s counter-culture.  There are hippies and G-men and Nixon and talk of the Manson family murders, but there are also murders by speedball and paid informants infiltrating communes.  Paranoia and confusion seem to be the mood, more than love and peace.

The plot of the film is laid out as a mystery, with the main character being a bleary-eyed drugged up private eye, competently and ably chasing down leads and finding out information, but somehow the information never gels.  It just leads to deeper mysteries, connections are made that don't explain anything.  The film is almost perverse in the number of plots that build up and intertwine.  This is not a film for folks who like neat conclusions.  There are none here.

This film seems to be more interested in the various characters and their reaction to the mounting confusion they find themselves in.  There's serene hippy chicks, but there's also increasingly unhinged cops and FBI agents.  At one point a character seethes at the thought of his daughter having sex with one of the other characters.  He's not seething about the sex really though, but about the tacky décor of the hotel rooms they'd use for their trysts.  Weird.

Anyway, this was an okay film.  I preferred P T's other films better: There Will be Blood and Punch-Drunk Love.  This one was very knotty however, which I think is the point, and is satisfyingly ambiguous in its action.  It was okay.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)

Saw Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a film that was supposed to be a sequel to The Valley of the Dolls (1967) (which I have not seen) however the production apparently lost the rights to The Valley of the Dolls or something and now this film (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) opens with a text blurb explaining that this is specifically not a sequel to The Valley of the Dolls and the fact that the characters are all the same is a complete coincidence!!  What a mess.

The background story to this film nicely tees up what a confusing, ramshackle adventure this film is.  It follows a trio of girls in a rock band and their manager, the lead singer's boyfriend, as they travel to Los Angeles to try to make it in Hollywood.  They are instantly swept up into a milieu of lawyers, pornographers, homosexuals, and druggies.  They ping-pong around in brightly-lit and overly decorated apartments, sleeping with each other, smoking weed, and shouting "Far out!" at the drop of a hat.  The film is shot like an inconsequential sex comedy.  But then the ending happens.

The ending of the film elevates this from being a merely forgettable piece of bad art into a stupendous, baffling, monument of bad art!  It changes from being a somewhat raunchy take on Josie and the Pussy Cats to something out of the depths of Gallo Cinema, like Dario Argento took over the film for a few reels.  It's just bananas!  The ending is such a radical gear-shift that the opening credits open on it.  It's the hook that'll keep you watching.  Just nuts!  And the script was written by Roger Ebert!

Apparently on release this film was panned.  It was clearly ahead of its time.  It walked so that other self-aware camp, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show could run.  This is not a film full of poignant drama or deep thoughts.  This is a film where British accents appear and disappear, where parties are hosted by loquacious bisexuals, where old women in fright-wigs say things like "I'd sure like to strap you on!" to the pretty-boy protagonist.  It's mad and strange and stupid and great.  I enjoyed it, and I wish I had been drunk or high with friends when I saw it.

Patema Inverted (2013)

Saw Patema Inverted, a fun and cute anime with the following premise: due to some unspecified scientific experiment, a large amount of physical material (including people) accidentally had their gravity reversed, sending them all flying into the sky.  Centuries later, the remnants of the upside-down people live in a maze-like warren of underground bunkers while the right-side-up folks live on the earth's surface.  The right-side-uppers have deemed the upside-downers to be sinful.  The protagonists are a girl from the upside-down-iverse and a boy from the land of right-side-up.  It's all a little obvious.

So, the rank intolerance of the upside-down/right-side-up feud clearly evokes many differences in the real world.  When the boy and girl first meet, they have a brief argument about which one of them is upside down.  Later, in imposing 1984-style education facilities, the children are taught that upside-downers are immoral, suggesting a parallel with sexuality or to religious intolerance.  One of the leaders talks about how terrible it would be if their blood were to mingle, referencing rhetoric about racial divisions.  It's a broad gesture and encompasses many things.

The film is very cute and fun.  The two kids hug onto each other frequently in order to descend or ascend huge drops.  I'm not sure that the physics is quite right, but maybe.  It does result in them creating a visual metaphor for the theme of the film: that we need to come together and bridge our differences, that opposites can be synergistic rather than antagonistic.

The film is also stealing liberally from early Ghibli films.  The characters are sweet and curious, courageous in a sort of cat-like way, and live in sumptuously detailed surroundings.  It's a good thing to steal from!  The film is relatively slight but very sweet and touching.  I enjoyed it!

The Circus (1928)

Saw The Circus, a Charlie Chaplin film wherein his little tramp character gets sucked into a circus.  This is a little tricky to juggle as the premise of a comedy film because people like to root for the underdog, the screwup, but if he's going to be funny, surely he'll be a success in the circus, and thus not the underdog, no?  So the film has to keep him ground down and spinning around, being funny in spite of the cruel ringmaster who is, of course, the despotic father of the young ingénue.

Despite the tricky premise, the film is the usual Chaplin drollery.  He interacts with policemen.  He does daredevil stunts.  He endlessly spoils a magician's magic tricks.  You will be unsurprised by anything going on on the screen.

From the imdb trivia, the story behind the camera was far more interesting.  Apparently Chaplin was going through a divorce with his child bride, an IRS audit, and his mother's death all at the same time while trying to make a film.  What a nightmare!  I'd be curious to see a documentary about that!

Sorry to Bother You (2018)

Saw Sorry to Bother You, a deliciously absurd political comedy about a guy, Cash, who is trying to make it big in the world.  The film involves unionizing and riots, code switching and selling out.  It feels very of the moment for these tumultuous times.  It's a comedy, so things are kept relatively light and zany, but the bones of the film are pretty serious.

On top of this, the film has a chunky, lo-fi special effects aesthetic.  At one point Cash is doing well and transforming his life.  His cheap cruddy furniture splits into pieces and flies away revealing classier lamps, a big-screen TV unfolding from the shell of his small one.  In another scene, he's in an office building.  You can see some guys in the background struggling with a broken copy machine.  As the scene progresses, the copy machine gets more and more broken until it's just spewing papers into the air like a blizzard.  None of this is acknowledged or foregrounded.  Delightful!

I liked the film!  It produced a ton of crazy imagery and was pretty funny throughout, without dipping into too much cruelty.  My one gripe is that the ending feels a little false.  The film is so grim in its humor that I felt sort of surprised that the film was as upbeat as it finally was.  This is a minor thing though. I guess I wanted a sad ending to soothe my black heart!

Que Viva Mexico (1979)

Saw Que Viva Mexico.  This was an attempt by Aleksandrov to finish an unfinished film that Eisenstein was making about the Mexican revolution.  He was unable to complete it due to budgetary constraints and Stalin running out of patience.  I'm sort of annoyed at my movie list that recommended this film however.  It lists this film as having been released in 1932, indicating that it's in fact recommending the original, unfinished, partially lost Eisenstein film!  How am I supposed to lay my eyes on that?

Anyway, this film was a typically gorgeous Eisenstein film where characters with strong motivations, strong jaws, but zero personalities act out the beginnings of the revolution.  It cleverly ties geography to history, moving out of the jungles into the deserts and north, towards towns which are more civilized, but where class struggle is more readily apparent.

Apparently Eisenstein was inspired to shoot the film this way by seeing the great variety of lifestyles and architecture readily available in Mexico.  You can see how right he was: there are stone fortresses, cactus forests, jungles, and those strange agave plants, so huge and alien.  The film is very pretty and contains a lot of striking visuals: a man's face looming over a Mayan pyramid, a man with a gun silhouetted against a door frame.  Eisenstein has a great eye for conveying information and drama purely symbolically.  As I kind of mentioned earlier, he's not the best at creating interpersonal melodrama (of which I am greatly fond) but he's good at creating sweeping historical, political dramas, which made him the ideal director for Communist Russia.

Worth a look!

Beau is Afraid (2023)

Saw Beau is Afrai, a film directed by Ari Aster, of Midsommar and Hereditary fame.  I enjoyed those films a lot, however this one is more inscrutable to me - it's both mostly clear what's going on but is far more confusing as to why, in a broad sense, this is all happening.

The film is billed as a horror/comedy.  I'm generally apt to see the sad things in life, so often in comedies I feel bad for the poor bumbling characters who are being harassed for our amusement.  Likewise in horror, the essentially unpleasant thing in the horror film is often something very prosaic and accessible: loss of a loved one, loss of control over your own life, fear of death, etc.  This film gets its horror from taking normal, unpleasant circumstances and amping them to 11.  Not only have you lost your keys to your apartment, but they have been stolen right out of your keyhole.  Not only that, but this will make you late for a flight to visit your mother who clearly does not believe your story.  Not only that but you live on a street which is packed so full of violent addicts that you have to sprint to your door ahead of them every night. etc etc.  It's very Synecdoche, New York.

I guess from the genre description that it's supposed to be funny and there are indeed a few scenes I laughed at (the main character has his computer monitor destroyed.  He finds it with a shoe bashed through the screen.  He gamely plugs the monitor in and navigates around the shoe.) but there were precious few such moments.  There's a whole set of jokes around the main character's balls that seem incongruous and strange.  Usually, the misery just piles on so hard and so high that I get the sense that you're really supposed to laugh here, but it's all so real and so serious that I find it hard to laugh at so easily.  I mostly just felt bad for the poor main character.  It felt more triggering than silly to me.

The main character has an anxiety problem which leaves him uncertain and quivering through most scenes, uncertain of what to do.  Rather than receiving any sympathy, everyone treats him with suspicion and hostility, either insulting him and blaming him for accidents beyond his control or seizing control over his life and making decisions for him.  We discover that he is entirely dependent on his family and has lead a shadow-life, always cringing from the world.  This supposed to be ridiculous.

One thing I really liked about both Midsommar and Hereditary is that they took fear and horror seriously: being startled by a bang or grossed out by a corpse or a monster or something is not actually that bad.  Corpses can't actually hurt you.  What hurts you is your love for the person that that corpse used to be; the knowledge that one day that corpse will be you.  That's the real thing we feel revulsion for.  Cheap horror focuses on the revulsion, but good horror gets you to feel the loss, the pathos of injury.  I think that in making this film into a comedy, it looses that thing behind the thing - the emotions that make life hard to bear.

I certainly enjoyed watching this film.  It provided a veritable cornucopia of intertwining themes and had strange visuals galore.  I didn't find it scary or funny however, and I suspect this is because Ari Aster and I have wildly different senses of humor.

Cat People (1942)

Saw the original version of Cat People, the one from 1942.  It follows a man who falls quickly in love with some Serbian woman who comes from a small village which is rumored to harbor "cat people" who are cursed to transform into carnivorous cats when they fall in love.  The man assumes his girlfriend is crazy and tries to get her help but, predictably, this is of no avail.

I liked the film!  It's a slow-burn psychodrama, as the girlfriend becomes slowly more menacing.  There's no transformation sequence, but there's a great animated dream interlude involving malevolently loping cats.  There's also a lot of ominous dread mined from the characters simply being freaked out.  We don't need to see the panther to be frightened.  We only need to see the character we care about becoming panicked.

On top of this classy restrained creepiness, there's the rich symbolism of the cat transformation.  It's something that happens after the marriage is consummated, and it originates from a far-off, old land.  The girlfriend fears reverting to some primitive, monstrous state.  It could so easily be read as a metaphor for anxieties around sexual desire, or as an immigrant's shame of their country of origin.  There's a scene where a cat-like lady hostilely greets the girlfriend as a "sister." The girlfriend gasps and turns pale, but refuses to explain.  It's explicitly about being a cat-person, but it could be, implicitly, about many things.  Very good!

The film is old and a little pokey and black and white and some of the acting is a little wacky.  There's nothing too terrible (no blackface!) but it's an old movie, just be aware.  If you can stomach that, then take a look, this is a surprisingly good film!