The Witches (2020)

Saw The Witches (2020), an adaptation of the Roald Dahl story which follows a young boy and his grandmother battling a secret society of witches who plot to transform all children everywhere into mice.  I wanted to see this film because I had fond memories of the 90s adaptation and wanted to see how this film's deep south setting would inform and inflect the film.  I guess I had forgotten however and deeply strange and paranoid the premise of the film is.  The final result is mostly harmless kiddy fare, but there are barely-hidden undercurrents which play uncomfortably in these modern, conspiracy-haunted times.

The chief protagonist, the Grand High Witch, is played extremely broadly as a CGI cartoon evil monster, hissing and belching out her lines.  We are told that witches such as she are not human at all but demons in female form.  The witches appear to be wealthy, single, white, and bent on destroying humanity for seemingly no reason.  In the 90s, I think this may have already had unfortunate associations, however in modern days, as the political right associates more and more with godliness, they cast their political enemies as satanic, demonic, child predators.  Although the film is (I guess) trying to be a fun little romp, it felt deeply sad and depressing to see this lovely, sensible grandmother earnestly telling her wide-eyed grandson about demons in female form.

The film is directed by Robert Zemeckis who is known for interesting visual effects (Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit) and for what it's worth the setting is used to great effect.  The trees and beaches and the hotel itself looks just gorgeous and the main characters are well-drawn.  The film opens with a sequence showing the grandmother melting her grandson's trauma and welcoming him into her life.  To me, this magic is far more impressive than merely turning someone into a mouse, and the witches themselves and their magic feels like a paranoid delusion taken too seriously by comparison.  They (the witches) are wacky and cartoony, neither scary nor amusing, but sort of off-putting and strange, like a nightmare someone else had.  I didn't like one.

Love Streams (1984)

Saw Love Streams (1984), a film I started off hating but which grew on me as it went on.  It revolves around a brother/sister duo, Robert and Sarah, who both have complex relationships to love and sex.  Robert is a creep who buys a whole house-full of prostitutes for a weekend.  He drunkenly steals a lounge singer's car and flirts with the singer's mother.  He's a hideous drunk from the depths of the 70s.  Sarah meanwhile is a woman with a big heart who is pathetically obsessed with her ex-husband and daughter who she seems to have smothered with affection and neediness and who she is lost without.

The film opens with Robert boozing and whoring and working his shaggy charms on ladies, and I thought this was going to be a another one of those films that lionizes this pickup-artist, celebrating him with faint condemnation, ala The Wolf of Wall Street or Scarface.  The film takes a turn however, showing Robert abandoning a newly discovered biological son to go whoring and stumbling down hotel hallways, stumbling into walls.  He's an alcoholic and probably a sexaholic as well.

Similarly, Sarah is played by Gena Rowlands, at first appearing to be a somewhat controlling woman who is hurt by a messy divorce but ultimately descending into a reprise of her character in A Woman Under the Influence.  She relies upon all of the men in her life, including taxi drivers and bellhops, to take care of her, using their squashy sensibility to balance her obsessions and manias.  

The film is fascinatingly strange.  It starts out as a standard 70s lionization of independence and excess but contains wild stylistic choices and plot points.  It feels like a satire that was taken seriously.  There's lines that are goofy one their faces but which are delivered with great seriousness, brittle and sincere.  I wouldn't recommend the film as a crowd pleaser; it's very complex and strange.  I enjoyed the film for its strangeness however, for what it made me think.  There's a scene where a pit bull turns into a nude man.  Seeing this, Robert erupts into gales of laughter, shouting "who the fuck are you?" and that's amazing and strange and delightful.

Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers

Saw Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers, a film in the vein of Who Framed Roger Rabbit which follows the (fictional) cartoon chipmunk actors behind the hit(?) 1980s TV series of the same name.  One of the duo, Chip, has moved on with his life, becoming an insurance salesman.  Dale continues to hang on to fading glory, getting a "3D operation" in a desperate bid to stay relevant and marketable.  The film is much more on the side of Dale however, both in spirit and in execution.

The film is a fairly straightforward nostalgia cash-in.  It features the same old homey characters re-treading the mystery-thriller formula of the TV show.  There's some funny jokes involving well-known cartoon characters behaving out character, but nothing your sarcastic friends couldn't come up with.  It has a made-for-TV feel to it: the characters are un-nuanced, the plot is straightforward.

But, it's good for what it is.  The film attempts to cash in on 80s nostalgia in a self-aware way and it more-or-less does just that in an acceptable way.  It's not a film I think I'll re-watch, but it's a film I wanted to see once, which I think is all it's trying for.  Not a classic, but a pleasant waste of time.

Encanto

Saw Encanto, a cute Disney movie about a family of demi-gods who live in some secluded mountain village, keeping everything together with their magical powers.  The protagonist is a girl who seems to have no magical power at all (or does she???)  Although this is the premise of the film, the conflict comes in the form of toxic family dynamics.  Although everything seems joyous and whimsical on the surface, the family is a roiling mass of repression, perfectionism, and constraint.  The final showdown is more about healing than triumphing, which was nice.

This film reminded me a lot of Tangled.  In keeping with more modern, post-Ghibli movies, this film has no antagonist unlike in Tangled which has a very accessible depiction of a pathological narcissist.  In Encanto, there's a matriarch figure, but she is not Mother Gothel and even admits to her own faults in the denouement (which, I snark, is far more unbelievable than mere super-strength or super-hearing).  This is nice and gives anyone struggling in a toxic family dynamic hope for the future, but I feel like it's a lesson miss-applied.

In Spirited Away there's an evil witch who turns out to not be truly irredeemable, but to have a family and clear, non-vindictive priorities.  This choice was hailed at the time as sophisticated and true to life.  In Encanto, the matriarch admits her faults and all is made whole again.  But this is not true to life.  I don't have the numbers or the lived experience, but it does not feel believable to me that a harmful family dynamic can be recognized and solved so directly.  The process requires space and an acknowledgement that some people will not change.  I mean, right?  To change oneself is a tall order but to change a group dynamic seems nigh-on impossible!

But I'm picking nits here.  My gripe above is that it could perhaps be better.  This film is no slouch as it is.  It's a slickly produced and packaged song and dance which is thrilling and heartwarming with fun, loud musical numbers and fun jokes.  The sad bits are sad and the fun bits are fun!  The film wraps up a bit too perfectly for me, but it's a fun ride!

The Lady From Shanghai (1947)

Saw The Lady From Shanghai and oh boy how I loved it!  It was a fairly classy noir film written, acted, and directed by Orson Welles.  It follows a Irish sailor who saves a pretty, rich woman from being raped and she, in return, hires him on to the crew of her husband's yacht.  From there, they discover that he has a criminal past and he begins to be pulled into their webs of semi-serious games, as they taunt each other and threaten divorce and humiliation and murder.

The film is fairly by-the-numbers with rich old men and beautiful broads, hats and guns.  The engine that drives much of the film for me is to see how innocent the pretty wife is.  Is she the naive bait being dangled by her sinister husband?  Or is she the true Svengali, pulling everyone's strings?  But all of this is beside the point for me.  I just loved the excesses of the noir genre on display here.  At one point the wife mumbles a song to the camera as her face fills the screen.  There's hideously ugly old women who scream and point at the gunman, a courthouse scene with a befuddled judge, and there's even a climactic shootout in a fun-house hall of mirrors that has to be seen to be believed!

If the behind-the-scenes trivia is to be believed, the film was fit so firmly into the noir mold by studio execs.  Indeed, the film doesn't achieve the levels of restraints and polish of, say, The Magnificent Ambersons (or Citizen Kane of course, for that matter) but I appreciated the simplicity of the results.  This film isn't interested in subverting or reinventing anything.  It's interested in digging so deeply into the noir groove that it strikes gold.

Vox Lux (2018)

Saw Vox Lux, a film about a pop star's childhood and rise to fame.  Once the rise is established and just starts to begin, we quickly skip directly to the denouement: the staggering, drugged, drunken, weeping mess she has become in adulthood (ie: 31)  I watched the film hoping for some glorious over-the-top pop numbers and theatrics, maybe some delicious melodrama, but unfortunately the film felt more tawdry and kind of sad than glitzy or dramatic.  It was more tabloid and less music video.  Maybe I've become old, or maybe the film just had something else on its mind.

The film is fairly dismal and dour.  Everyone is dressed in rhinestones and leather, but they are all miserable and concerned and sad.  The film opens with a narration by the deep, dry voice of Willem Dafoe, telling us in true-crime tones about the girl's childhood.  She's catapulted to fame after she sings a song during a memorial service in the 90s and later on, during her rise to fame, 9/11 coincides with another pivotal life moment.  Finally, in the present day of 2018, some terrorists wear masks styled after one of her music videos.  The arc of the main character's life mirrors the evolution of modern American fears.

The end of the movie provided the best payoff for me, where it's revealed (spoilers here.  Highlight to see) she sold her soul to the devil.  This brings a lot of the film into coherency but makes the parallel with real, post-9/11 history confusing and muddy.  What's the parallel?  It feels muddy and muddled and kind of in poor taste.

I don't know.  This film disappointed m.  This may be my fault for judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree, but I went in hoping for hysterics and hopefully some catchy tunes, but left with dour, pessimistic meditations on America's continued descent mirrored by the dissipation of this pop star.  A grim, taught little film.

The Dead (1987)

Saw The Dead, a film based on the James Joyce short story of the same name (which I know I have read but which I do not remember.)  The film depicts a family party hosted by spinster aunts sometime in the early 1900s (I suppose.)  Like a visit to grandma's house, the film is fairly slow and tame and quaint, but also touching and strangely poignant too.

The film's most main characters are a husband and wife who are both sensible and pleasant people.  They get along well, but there's a foreshadowed undercurrent of tension between them though.  The wife is strangely intent when a guest recites a poem about a woman breaking a man's heart, and there's a few scenes where the husband seems oblivious or cold to the wife.  What's going on between them is explored more at the end, so I won't spoil it here.

As you might guess from the name, the theme of the film is death and memento mori.  The spinster aunts are nearing death and are precious in their fragility.  They reminisce over dead singers and there's talk of monks who sleep in their own coffins to keep the certainty of death near by.  The closing of the film has a long monologue about the dead and us the living.

The film is very soothing, very stultifying.  It's slow and quaint in a kind of BBC Charles Dickens kind of way.  It's really like a visit to gandma's.  It's not a blast and it's not the most fun you might have, but you feel better for having watched it and you feel lighter as a result.  It was a sweet little film.