Alice in Wonderland (1903)

Saw Alice in Wonderland (1903) It was mainly a special-effects exposé, devoting an entire fifth of its runtime (of 5 minutes) to size transformations. They are done as well as you'd expect for 1903. The film sticks closely to the book, even depicting some minor scenes not shown in other movies. It shows the scene, for example, when small Alice is attacked by a playful puppy and that she uses a fan to shrink herself just before the pool of tears (which is not shown, alas. The joke here is that she is wet with tears and as she dries herself she shrinks like fabric.) It also specifies that the Duchess is the owner of the Cheshire cat (which she is, in the book.) The Cheshire cat has become more interesting as a free agent and many films ignore his owner. This little fact's inclusion was interesting. The film contains some fanciful costumes (which I felt were sometimes a bit sinister, what with the deteriorated film stock and all, but they never got so bad as for me to be able to take a screenshot) and ancient camera trickery.

Safe

Saw Safe (thanks, Basil!) It was an alright action movie. I don't usually like action movies (so consider 'alright' high praise) and kind of resisted this one. It suffered from a lot of the usual action-tropes, particularly the trope of the world being ruled by an elaborate crimocracy, where lone-wolf super-hero cops/marines/seals are the only real agents of justice. The plot follows a five-year-old girl with a photographic memory who the triads kidnap to use as a sort of human PDA. I thought the triad heads were a bit too evil (why force the girl to watch executions? It just seems unnecessary.) but this is the world the film takes place in. Okay.

Jason Statham, the British Bruce Willis, plays an out-of-work boxer whose life is destroyed by all-powerful Russian mobsters. He takes an interest in the welfare of the girl just as a three-way mob fight breaks out over the information in her head. There are shades of Leon the Professional in a few scenes (though the film thankfully steers clear of any creepy innuendo) and shades of Die Hard in others. Statham makes a sympathetic but competent hero and the girl is cute-as-a-button as little girls in movies always are.

The plot hums along steadily, twisting and turning at all the right times. I was always kept in an amused state of confusion (but then I kind of go out of my way to avoid second-guessing films.) The motivations of Statham's character are interestingly left kind of buried, only really spelled out in an aside near the end. The fight scenes are satisfying without being ludicrous. They were more heist-movie-ish in that they were plot points as much as they were spectacles.

It was interesting how much the film referenced the time in which it was made. Often action films are kind of timeless. The exact politics of the situation is secondary to the sweet-ass gun fights. In this one there is an element of globalism in the multicultural gangs (there are Americans, Russians, and Chinese gangsters. All the super-powers have a mob!) Terrorism is referenced often and the disillusionment of Americans against the anti-terrorist measures taken for our safety is also given voice by our protagonist. Don't get me wrong, the film is not particularly political and could be set in London without much re-writing (it is in fact one of those films emphatically set in New York (one character even shouts "this is New York!")) but it gave me something to contemplate when the gun fights got protracted.

Army of Darkness

Saw Army of Darkness. Army of Darkness is one of those films like Blade Runner where there's apparently a ton of different edits. I saw the one with the back-in-the-store ending. Anyway, I loved this one. They've embraced the batshit premise way past winking camp and into full-blown living cartoon land. Skeleton hands come popping out of the ground to preform eye-poking Three Stooges homages on the protagonist. Breaking free he shakes his fist at them and says "I'll deal with you later!" It's a cartoon! I'm not insulting it by calling it a cartoon either. It knows what it is.

The plot is ludicrous of course but here goes: Ash is sent back in time to the middle ages where he must battle the forces of evil (skeletons and other monsters of latex-kind) for the Necronomicon. With the aid of an industrious blacksmith, Ash now has a robotic hand (replacing the chainsaw one from Evil Dead 2) and later, during the awesome, awesome climax, the smith smiths him the most awesome battle-car ever. That climax is seriously amazing. Pure fun.

Best enjoyed as a fun dumb movie, it is gloriously stupid and completely goofy. It's sometimes a bit too dumb, but then I'm hard on comedy (especially when they have show stopping set-pieces like that car and that final battle.)

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Saw The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, a Lois Bunuel film. It relentlessly attacks Bunuel's old enemy: the upper-middle-class. We follow 3 couples as they try to have dinner together again and again. The first night fails because the hosts have given the guests the wrong date. The next time, the hosts are too busy having sex to entertain. The husbands are meanwhile engaged in a scheme whereby they smuggle cocaine via diplomat. This scheme has brought them attention from the cops and from nebulously defined 'terrorists.'

The couples are made out to be completely hypocritical on every count. They archly sniff at the dangers of marijuana, but they are smuggling cocaine. They smirk at the low-class way their chauffeur drinks a martini while their friends are screwing in the bushes outside. They love the idea of "free love" but only so far as it will get them laid. At one point they dismissively list off all of the popular ideologies of their time (fascism, feminism, religion, peace, etc) implying that they are above all that, but of course revealing that they are merely beneath all that.

On top of all of this is Bunuel's trademark straight-faced absurdity. A maid who looks to be about 20 reveals she is in fact 52. A bishop is for some reason the gardener of one of the couples. We are trapped for several scenes inside of increasingly realistic-seeming dreams (this robs the couples even of a plot!) Indeed dreams and little asides about ghosts are common elements. Perhaps the ghosts and dinners are meant to allude to Macbeth or Hamlet? There's a recurrent image of the sextet striding purposefully down a road which leads nowhere. This is perhaps a straightforward metaphor for Bunuel's conception of the titular bourgeoisie. I see little charm here however and more cantankerous pot shots. Perhaps I've missed this one but, absurdity aside, it all seems a bit done to me. How above it all I am!

Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903)

Saw the 1903 version of Uncle Tom's Cabin. I don't really know the story of Uncle Tom's Cabin. I never had to read it in school and have had to make do with jokes and modern allusions. I gather it's an old book about slavery which is also kind of racist(?) The film is very disjointed and vignette-ish. A woman pleads with Tom to escape. A woman crosses a river on an ice floe. Slaves dance. A girl dies. An estate is sold. Slaves dance. It goes on this way, each scene only loosely connecting to the following ones. Perhaps if I knew the story it would be more comprehensible. Also, not helping matters, is my abysmal copy (feast your eyes on this merry interlude.) I couldn't even tell if anyone was in black face (I'm gonna assume they were.)

On that note, there's definitely some racism going on here (witness the adorable soft-shoe two slave kids preform at the slave-auction) but of course it was 1903 (predating the eradication of racism in America by perhaps as much as 105 years) so what can we expect. It's hard to really discern much of the racism though. It's mainly difficult to tell what's going on. Only a few more of these ancient films to go...

Faust

Saw Faust (thanks, Chris!) It was a film by the Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer. Naturally, I loved it. The protagonist is a man who receives a mysterious flier directing him to an isolated courtyard in his home-city. He goes and discovers the backstage of a theater, all set up for a production of Faust. The character of Faust he at first jokingly and then increasingly naturally begins preforming. There is an unbelievable amount of meta-business going on. Theater, puppetry and stop-motion (not film specifically, but the metaphor easily extends) are all closely linked with the film's version of 'magic.' When Faust sells his soul, it is to a stop-motion version of himself. He soon after dons a wooden puppet head and enters more fully into the play. His first bit of magic is to make a horrible stop-motion golem and, fleeing from stage-hands, he escapes into a hole in the backdrop. He later drowns a court of puppet-royalty with cardboard waves. Between the waves, we see the puppets are truly sinking into actual water.

At one point Faust is establishing in a conversation with Mephistopheles that words are "mightier then we." Fumbling for words, he grabs the script to recall his next line (he is just preforming the play!) The demon assures Faust that he will serve him like a slave. At this moment, the stage-call rings and Faust hurries off like a good servant. It is he who is the slave of the theater and therefore of the demons of unreality.

So, we link the specific artificiality of theater to the other-worldly. It seems, though, that Jan is firmly on the side of the demons. He toys with the viewer more than he instructs or uplifts them, playing tricks and elaborate hall-of-mirrors games. There is much tail-chasing to be done and perhaps a chance at an insight into the magic of film (which would provide salvation from this glorious mess) but I doubt it. I think Jan is far more content being a bewildering and entrancing devil than a moralizing saint. We must, ad-hoc, save ourselves.

Shadow of a Doubt

Saw Shadow of a Doubt, my last Hitchcock for a while. It was very cozy for a Hitchcock film. Usually he deals with grandiloquent, rich cops and robbers who are very fun to watch but not very identifiable as people. This one takes place mainly in a sleepy suburb with a boy, two girls and somnambulist parents. The children shout and talk over each other, the parents smile and shake their heads. It's a simplified and cliche snapshot of a family that wouldn't be far out of place in a John Hughes film. Very cozy.

The eldest daughter, Charlie, seeking some excitement, calls up her namesake uncle (uncle Charlie) who we see is a criminal of some sort. She's creepily introduced to the uncle via a soft-focus lens (usually the cinema short-hand for true love) and soon reveals a repressed but intense attachment to him. For his part, the uncle showers her with gifts but is clearly desperately on the run. Soon some feds come snooping around and the daughter Charlie gets involved and their relationship kind of sours. Now the purpose of the sleepy suburb is revealed. What was once cozy is now claustrophobic. What was paternal becomes patronizing. An appropriate giddy and intense climax finishes off the film.

Of note is the strange justification the uncle gives for his crimes. He victimizes the rich and idle, calling them fat animals, drinking and eating up their lives and the lives of others. This sense of (almost) idealism is echoed in the daughter Charlie: before his arrival she is crankily carping about how Mother always has to do all the housework and nothing's ever going to change. I find it odd that the two Charlies are connected via these different forms of idealism and that feminism is semi-equated with murderous redistribution of wealth (which is an element anyway of communism, the redistribution bit that is.) I think these scary ideas were threatening to audiences of the time, particularly the sort of audience who would go to a crime thriller, a genre notorious for their perfectly ordered worlds and black-n-white morality.

Also, there's an ongoing joke where the father of the family is constantly plotting the prefect murder. He amateurishly plays at what the uncle does for a living!

Edit: also, there's a ton of vampire references that were too subtle for me. Good call, imdb trivia.