Saturday Night Fever

Saw Saturday Night Fever, expecting a Grease-like romp but actually getting a The Outsiders-style harsh look at the desperate lives of kids who hang out in dance halls, their bodies aging and their dreams drying up.  It was a bit of a surprise.

The film follows Travolta, the Dancehall King, who works at a paint shop and dances every Saturday.  He falls in love with a fancy dancy lady who disdains him and his life.  "You're a cliché!  You're nowhere on your way to no place."  She's getting out of there and improving her life, but even she only works in a talent agency and brags constantly about getting movie stars coffee.  Yeah, she's trying to get out of the slums, but she dances the nights away on the weekends too.

Outside of dancing, Travolta hangs out with a gang of tough kids who get into turf wars and get girls pregnant.  There's a theme of people not really having direction - bumbling into marriages or jobs, as though that will bring their lives meaning or give them direction.  It's ultimately pretty sad.

The film is teenage-focused.  It's tough to remember sometimes because Travolta's character claims to be 19, despite Travolta being 23 (and likely only in movie-years) but these are kids, preoccupied by feeling good and looking good.  They're having fun but they're seeing the unfairness of life and slowly recognizing that their dreams are hollow.  But maybe the doomed pursuit of a dream is enough.  They're not going to get fulfilling jobs and they're likely going to get trapped into marriages if they don't die in shootouts first.  So why not just dance?

The film is surprisingly melancholy.  It's not a total bummer.  It dwells in desperation, but there's joy there too.  The film is subtly about a search for meaning in life, and thus is a very adolescent kind of film.  I wish they'd gotten actual teenagers to play these parts, but this is alright too.  You do have tolerate a lot of disco however.  This film loves its dance and musical interludes.

Contagion

Saw Contagion.  I added it to my list of films to watch during the first days of Covid.  It was made in 2011 but eerily echoes what we went through in reality.  The wonky terms "social distancing" and "R-naught" are brought up.  Bodies are tossed into mass graves dug hastily on public land.  It was most interesting to see how the film did and did not predict the future accurately.

The film has an all-star cast.  It tells little intertwining stories spread all over the globe and at all levels of government and medical science.  By bouncing between these stories, we get a sense of what's going on in the world and are also kept rushing along.  We don't get bogged down in the race for the cure but we also don't get too lost in the weeds of the average day-to-day.

The film interestingly overestimates our leadership and underestimates the general public.  Gangs of thugs are seen robbing houses and looting grocery stores.  The army is deployed and crowds of feral, shouting people swarmed them for food.  None of that happened in real life.  In real life there was a run on toilet paper that was left mostly to the groceries to deal with and the leadership, far from deploying the military, largely ignored the virus - saying it was overblown if it was brought up at all.

There's a truly despicable Alex Jones-type character who peddles snake oil to his internet followers and casts doubt upon the well-meaning powers that be.  That's spot on accurate, but I view that man as a kind of avatar of the internet as a whole.  In reality of course, our president was the one pushing a quack remedy (hydroxychloroquine,) and Covid denialism and a refusal to wear masks is now rampant.  The film did completely miss the economic upheaval and of course the quirky Zoom-centric socialization we all indulged in for a while.

The film is fairly chilling, really.  It ends with the virus being repulsed at last and there's some high drama involving the search for the cure, but the scenes that stick with you are the early ones, of a doctor from the CDC trying to set up quarantine only to be interrupted by squashy small-town leaders demanding to know who's going to pay for this, or the finger-pointing over the source of the virus, as though nationalistic face-saving were more important than human lives.  When it originally came out, I suppose the film was ultimately uplifting, but mid-pandemic as we are, it feels sort of comforting and sort of depressing.  Definitely an interesting viewing experience.

Purple Noon

Saw Purple Noon, an early adaptation of the novel Plein Soleil which was more recently adapted into The Talented Mr Ripley.  This film therefore follows Tom Ripley who is sent to Italy to fetch Phillipe, the idle rich son of an American tycoon.  In Italy, Tom copies Phillipe's mannerisms, his way of talking and writing, even wears his clothing.  There's a strong queer undercurrent to all of this of course which is made more explicit in the modern version.  In this version however, all of that is sublimated and Phillipe's girlfriend is made into the goal of Tom's designs.

This film is very understated.  The story works best as a kind of mystery or thriller.  It's fun to watch Tom change identities and swap names and lie and contort and always manage to stay just one inch out of danger.  It was hard for me to follow who he was to different people however.  There were times he told lies or changed clothing and it was clear to me why.  Surely more than one guy has a pin-striped jacket in Rome, right?  Also the backstory is explained through dialog with little preamble.  I was grateful that I kind of knew the story beforehand.

The other drawback of the film is that although Tom is supposed to be a forgettable, chameleon-like, non-entity, he's played by Alain Delon who is one of the most beautiful people to have ever existed.  Tom is supposed to be taken with and fascinated by the "beautiful people" that he encounters through Phillipe.  This dude is so freakin pretty, they look like frogs in comparison.

Anyway, the film showed its age a bit, not only in the elaborate rules of hotels and police, but also in the moral tone of the film which is far less dark and muddy than the modern version.  This is a pity, but whatever.  Mostly I wanted to see this because it had Alain Delon in a queer-coded role, and that it delivered on.

Zathura

Saw Zathura, a strange, space-themed Jumanji rip-off (although to be fair, it's also based on a Chris Van Allsburg book, so "rip-off" is probably too strong a term.) Anyway, I had low hopes going in.  Like Jumanji, I just hoped this would be fun and episodic - the main character kids dealing with each little challenge as their house crumbles around them.  Since this is space-themed, I expected them to ultimately be playing on a little scrap of floorboard, floating in space, perhaps a whimsical lamp to keep them company.

The film is pretty much that.  Each little challenge is dealt with as the next one arrives.  There's a lot of Buck Rogers ray gun iconography, but this is a modern kid-friendly comedy, so everyone has to act laconic and eye-rollingly bored and arch and sarcastic.  This is a little sad, but that's kid's movies for you.  The Zathura game is a great prop however.  The pressed-tin tech looks great and is a neat aesthetic to explore, rather than the by-now-trite clockwork or the carved wood of the original Jumanji.

The central conflict of the film, apart from the whizzing meteors and such, is the rocky relationship between the two brothers, who fight and scream and wish that the other had never been born.  It's fairly sad stuff, more-so for being broadly played.  The older brother is supposed to be a sort of jock bro but he comes off as cruel and aggressive.  The younger boy is clearly the protagonist, and he's supposed to be aggravating, but once again the director can't bring himself to actually make the kid aggravating, so instead everyone else comes off as mean to this poor little moppet.

There's also something near the end that happens that I thought was very weird.  It feels spoiler-y to me so highlight if you're interested: One character turns out to be another one from another dimension or a different timeline or something.  It's fairly confusing to me.  Nothing else that high-concept happens in the movie - it's all Buck Rogers whiz-bang.  I guess the reality-warping game itself could compare, but one thing at a time you know?  It feels like a hat on a hat.

So anyway, the film is exactly what it looks like: an inferior duplicate of Jumanji which was itself not an amazing film.  I have huge nostalgia for it (Jumanji) but that wasn't quite enough to carry me through this film.  It's not terrible and I enjoyed it alright, but it was a little tedious.

Man on Fire (1987)

Saw Man on Fire (1987) which I believe is the original film that the now-more-famous Denzel Washington movie is a remake of.  This original is set in Italy and features a much more John Rambo-ish kind of guy - a long-haired, greying man still heavily rattled from his wartime experience.  Whereas in the modern (2004) version Denzel had a drinking problem, in the 80s, the reality of Vietnam and of course WW2 were fresh enough in the collective memory that merely being in the war was a believable reason that this character would be giving up on life.

Only of course, he gets a second shot of vitality from an adorable, wise-for-her-years moppet who sulks and giggles her way in the main guy's heart.  These scenes are a little more uncomfortable than the 2004 version.  In the recent version they establish Denzel's feelings of care through sports training.  It's a sort of tough love that's not terribly tender.  In this version, the main character is much more fatherly - beatifically smiling and admiring.  They don't establish as well that the girl's real father is absent, and thus the main character feels a lot more like a usurper, or even a predator.  I'm sure it's not meant to come off that way, but I'm just reporting my experience of it here and that was one of discomfort.

Anyway, the film is less action-packed than the modern version.  There's less unstoppable action-hero stuff and more getting shot and wretchedly limping.  But what it lacks in Action it makes up for in style.  There's a lot of weird settings and flourishes.  At one point the cops are showing mugshots to the hero, projecting the images eerily and spectrally against his hospital room's curtains.  A couple of scenes are filmed in swooning slow motion and the when the characters get homicidal, they seem feral, rat-like.

This was an interesting film.  More muted than the original, but more grounded as well, more real.  The hero had more pathos but less power.  It's somewhat dated (that grainy footage) but it's an interesting contrast to the more modern film.

Flushed Away

Saw Flushed Away, a fairly winning Aardman animation film about an anthropomorphized pet rat who is kicked out of his cushy (if solitary) home and flushed down a toilet by a usurper.  There, he finds a bustling rat-themed parody of London, complete with Rolex Big Ben and American rat tourists.  He tries to return to the surface world and to home but along the way (as you might imagine) he learns a few lessons and discovers that maybe the status quo isn't for him any more.

I'll just say a short word about the animation: Aardman is known for their claymation however much of this film is obviously computer generated.  This is fairly off-putting at first because I was expecting warm, thumb-smudged clay and I got shiny, plastic-looking polygons.  You get used to it eventually and I think they either composited claymation with CGI or animated in the little nicks and fingerprints into some models, because I saw some on some characters.  Anyway...

The film is pretty fun - I got the sense that basically everyone was having a good time producing this film.  Ian Mckellen puts in a great, hammy performance as an evil toad and there's a French frog (of course) who has a lot of fun business (and also some not so fun - I loved the physical comedy, I didn't love the nationalistic teasing.)  the central plot of the film revolves around a romance which - okay whatever - but the film keeps zipping along.  I also liked the singing slugs who are the by-now-mandatory, anonymous, musical, marketable, recurring gags.

It's a fun film, not amazing, but definitely not a chore to sit through.  A film that might become a small favorite for someone.

Slither

Saw Slither, a funny horror movie about an alien/demon/monster slug thing that takes over a small town, leaping into people's mouths and turning them into zombies. The film is humorous but not a comedy.  There's moments where you get a rueful chuckle or a 'what the fuck?' kind of laugh.  It's never really in doubt who will win in the end, but it's still satisfying to watch and creepy at parts.

For the most part the film is standard horror movie stuff, with incompetent cops and hysterical ladies, but sometimes it slips into inspired strangeness, such as when the zombies start speaking in unison, or when they encounter a zombie deer.  There's a Violet Beauregarde-alike which is truly terrible and fascinating to behold.  Great stuff!

No film can be all crazy new concepts however, and often we're getting the usual shambling villagers with outstretched arms and screaming women and so on.  All of that's played so by-the-book, it almost feels like camp - but that's just the connective tissue to get the real heart and gristle of the film.  It's a fairly fun and good movie.