Vivarium

 Saw Vivarium, a film about a young couple who get trapped in a cookie-cutter suburb while house-hunting.  After establishing that they are well and truly trapped in this maze of identical passages, a baby arrives with instructions that if they raise it, they will be released.  The film also opens with a cuckoo bird shoving eggs and nest-mates out of the nest, and being fed at a gigantic size by its surrogate mother, so it's clear what the themes are here.

The film mines a lot of surreal mood and creepiness from the identical houses of the suburban development, and from the bland stand-in décor of these empty homes.  There's impersonal vacuum-sealed food and vaguely indifferent and slightly hostile salesmen.  The film has modern alienation on the mind, and when better to release such a film than during lockdown, when all of our lives have shrunk to the same few hundred square feet, the same one or two people?  To complete the picture, they should have also been able to watch TV.

The film is most interesting in terms of just seeing what happens.  We get a little into the claustrophobia and the toll this takes on their relationship, but it's less a character study than it is an existential struggle to matter in an empty, implacable, prefab world.  I really liked the few arbitrary flickers of defiance they put up as their trap becomes more complete.  The guy takes to digging forever, and although the woman tries to understand the growing child, she also howls at the sky.

Anyway, the film is alright.  The ending delivers some nice visuals as the curtain is pulled aside for just a moment, and there's some great black humor (there's a corpse that's delivered with a receipt!)  but this is the sort of film you can really only see once.  It's fairly bleak and paranoid.  The sun is out and the lawn is green, but they are clearly in a trap that is closing in around them and this is a matter of life and death.  But isn't that how it is for us all?  As we get older, the possibilities become more limited and we slowly settle into our final resting places.  Maybe the suburbs aren't such a bad place to wind up.

Les Vampires

 Saw Les Vampires, a silent French serial film from the 1910s.  It follows a criminal gang known as "the vampires" as they are pursued by a plucky reporter who is foiling their plans and exposing their identities.  The series is extremely silly and fairly entertaining in a somewhat dry, silent-movie-ish way.

The main characters are the journalist and the head of the vampires (known as the Grand Vampire) who changes fairly often (on account of being foiled by the reporter all the time.)  The real heroes of the series however are the side-kicks of the central characters: the evil and seductive Irma Vep and the bumbling Mazamette.  Mazamette is a big-nosed guy who starts off as a gag side-character but who becomes more and more central, getting great mileage simply from his lanky body and giant nose.  Irma Vep is the true star however.  She is captured and recaptured, always surviving and popping up again.  She seems incredibly competent and resilient.  She's also just a huge amount of fun, with the other vampires celebrating her return.  She is introduced dancing on a stage, preceded by a single black title card reading just "Irma Vep." Amazing!

The series itself is a little goofy.  The vampires have these outlandish, elaborate plots to gas and rob all of France's upper crust, to paralyze the journalist with a special perfume, to hypnotize their maids into acts of sabotage.  The journalist foils them, but their power is so grand and their numbers so great, I began to wonder who in Paris was not a vampire by now.  The series is fairly okay and never becomes too tedious however, which is pretty good for me for a silent film, all things considered.

One other little note: I was very disappointed that the woman with black bat wings that shows up everywhere when you image-search "Les Vampires" is not one of the vampires at all, but a ballerina in a completely unrelated performance.

Demonlover

 Saw Demonlover, another film by Olivier Assayas, the guy who directed Boarding Gate.  His obsessions are: luxurious hotels and corporate environments, women in trouble, and the ambiguities between nations, companies, and high-powered executives.  This film hits all three of these marks.  It follows a French woman who is negotiating with a Japanese hentai company for distribution rights which she intends to sell to an American company.  In this mix, there's a man she keeps meeting with who seems to be giving her marching orders.  Later on, she is in trouble.

I liked this film okay, but it definitely has flaws.  Here's what I enjoyed: the film's murky ambiguity.  It's never clear who's manipulating who, who's really in charge, or what anyone's alliances are.  The whole thing is dizzying and shadowy and very nice.  I also liked the frank multiculturalism of the film.  Characters easily switch from French to Japanese to English to Spanish.  Refreshingly, it's not the Chicago company negotiating with the New York office, but France and Japan.  America is present, but is just another country for once.  I also liked the hilarious indifference the characters have towards the hentai.  At one point they are calmly discussing sales figures while the porn is just on in the background, the voice actress just rhythmically squealing away.

So here's what's not so hot: the plot is bananas.  At one point, one of the other executives threatens the main character's life.  They point a gun at her head while she's driving.  Having delivered the threat, they then hop out of the car. She calls them.  They pick up the hone (why?) she asks them to talk to her.  She offers them a ride home (why??) after a bit of talk, they hop back in the car with her (why???) and give her the gun (whyyyy????!?!?!)  I think it's supposed to be jarring and to highlight that all of this is really impersonal theatrics, just business.  But it's completely confusing and silly.

Also, because the central deal revolves around hentai, there's a lot of porn involved and (of course) the protagonist woman is not above using sex to get what she wants.  It's supposed to be titillating, but it's fairly tawdry.  The film is supposed to be confusing and sexy and ambiguous, but it's sometimes difficult to distinguish this from just inept and smutty.

In & Of Itself

Saw In & Of Itself, a film version of a performance-art piece done by magician Derek DelGaudio.  He talks enough about his life that the description of the film usually contains 'biographical' somewhere, but the film is really about identity and labels and how they limit and free people.  There's also some great window-dressing involving fiction and story-telling which is like catnip to me.

The film is just Derek talking on stage for a while and interacting with a set of six objects behind him.  He does a magic trick every so often but mostly he talks about labels and about how we see others and ourselves.  A story about some blind men feeling an elephant is told.  Derek talks in a halting, flatly-affected way, sounding sincere, even as he explains that this is a show and every line was rehearsed.  In the show he generally tries to out-clever his audience, having his cake and eating it too, acknowledging this is artificial to make it seem more real.

This culminates in the final trick of the night, where he does a magic trick (which looks real but which we know is done via some trick) and simultaneously reaffirms the audience's perceptions of itself (which looks staged with shaking hands, celebrity cameos, and silent tears, but which may well be real.)  Derek also plays another narrative trick where he casts himself as an ally of the audience, amusing and delighting them, and simultaneously as an antagonist of them, fooling them, predicting their choices, and using their strong emotions to strengthen his show.

There's a lot of fun topics flying about here and it ultimately is fairly entertaining, if sort of stagy and self-conscious as many modern magic shows are, as they try to outwit and subvert post-modernism.  The line between what's real and not is very blurry and doubly-so since the many audience-shots pick up on well-known celebrities, heightening the feelings of unreality but, like all fiction, we know it's a trick but it manages to delight us anyway.

Wild at Heart

 Saw Wild at Heart, an early Lynch film before Lynch fully embraced his twisty dream-logic method of story-telling.  This film follows two young lovers on the run from the law.  It stars Nicholas Cage and contains a strange mix of Lynch-ian strangeness and Cage-ian grotesques.  There's an early scene where Cage is jumped by a guy with a knife.  He fights off the assailant, pounding his head against the marble floor until his skull is crushed, and then glowering and flaring his nostrils, he points at the woman who was behind the attack.  It's unclear if this is intentionally off-putting and film-y or if this is just how Nick cage is and Lynch is trying to work with him.

The film goes on like that.  It has a lot of Lynch-y strangeness, with voodoo assassins and old men who inexplicably talk like ducks, but through it all is Nick Cage doing an Elvis impression and saying strange mouthfuls like "this here jacket represents a symbol of my individuality, and my belief in personal freedom."  Totally strange.

So, this is an interesting film for sure, but it's not quite as good as Lynch's later work.  This contains a lot of strange experiments that don't make a ton of sense and seem more hap-hazard than deliberate.  There's some nice suburban insanity in the form of the woman who ordered this hit - at one point she paints her entire face in lipstick and vomits in a pink toilet - and some nice on-the-nose symbolism about the protagonists' love being like fire, consuming and destroying them.

I like Lynch's films because of their non-sense.  The mental landscapes of real people are too complex to fit neatly into established Hollywood tropes and so, when we see them in Lynch's films, presented as unique manifestations of his characters' mind's they are jarring, confusing, off-putting, and intense.  Here however, these same fall a bit flat and seem just kind of lurid and goofy and although people's thoughts are those too, it's indistinguishable from just bad film-making.  A minor Lynch film.

Dave Made a Maze

 Saw Dave Made a Maze, a film about an out-of-work artist who creates a cardboard maze in his living room and then gets trapped or lost inside of it.  His long-suffering girlfriend must now rescue him.  It was exactly what it sounds like: a cutesy, silly-yet-sincere, hipster-ish romp surrounding one Sad Boy's feelings.

The fun of the film is seeing the inventive ways the filmmakers can use cardboard, to create giant playing card or origami cranes or nesting, telescoping pillars that encroach upon the protagonists.  It has the feel of a really well-done weekend project.  You get the sense of a lot of hanging out off-screen and a lot of seat-of-the-pants special effects.

The maze itself seems to symbolize Dave's emotional landscape - he is trapped in a fraught and unstable place that cuts him off from the world and threatens his relationship.  His friends come to rescue him but risk getting hurt themselves in the process.  This is not totally explicitly laid out, but seems like a sensible interpretation to me.

Anyway Dave struck me as being kind of self-absorbed which is not totally surprising for a film about someone who makes a film about their own emotional struggles.  His girlfriend is the kind of attractive, chill, eye-rolling girl that seem to the de facto angel-girlfriends these hipster-types imagine themselves with.  I started out feeling like she should really dump this man-child but then again that cardboard maze is really cool, so maybe he's not so bad.

The film is slight and twee.  It's very cute and, as long it's not talking about emotions, it has a lot of silly fun.  It never reaches the surreal heights of, say, Terry Gilliam's work but it does a good job of inhabiting its small, ramshackle, indie-wood niche.

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

Saw How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, the third film in the series.  This time we have a theme of love.  This sort of nicely continues from the themes of the last film: a rise to power.  Now with the power under their belt, Hiccup and his dragon turn their thoughts to coupling up.  The end involves a fairly serious breakup however, which is strange, but these films have always been entertainment vehicles first and treatises on the human condition a distant second.  So, the film is pretty good.

Once again, the dragons are adorable and dog-like and have great silly designs with jutting jaws and goggling eyes.  This film was clearly once projected in 3D as there's a lot of fore-ground/back-ground stuff going on here and things that suddenly get in your face.  There's a lot of flying about however and many scenes that suggest a grand scale and I wonder how well that would have come across in a theater.

Anyway, as with the second film (I've seen the first one so long ago, I don't think I can rely on my memory) I kept expecting the dragons to cohere into a recognizable symbol of like the human spirit or weapons of war or something, but they continued to confound me.  It's really just a film about these Vikings' adventures with dragons.  But it is that very successfully.

It was an enjoyable film and more serious than its first films.  I liked the villain's dead-eyed dourness, even in victory.  Similarly, I just liked hanging out with the characters and seeing what they do next.  A satisfying movie.