Seven Chances (1925)

Saw Seven Chances, a Buster Keaton comedy.  The plot is that in order to cash in on a $1M inheritance, Keaton must marry someone by 7pm that day.  The end of the film is clear before the action even begins: we are told he's been pining for this one woman but can't pluck up the courage to ask her to marry him.  She is offended by his proposal now because she assumes she's just "any" woman who will do.  With this refusal, he goes hunting for another woman, ultimately resorting to newspaper advertising.  The film has three acts: Keaton asking random women to marry him, Keaton being overwhelmed by too many brides, and finally Keaton running a lot.

I enjoyed the film a great deal.  I particularly liked the second act, when he suffers from his own success. There's something deeply funny about Keaton running from an angry mob of dainty, wedding-dress-clad brides.  Just the volume of them is great!  Also, of course Keaton is a master of the dead-pan and of telling stories in little micro-motions and gestures.  There's a great mix of subtle acting and extremely un-subtle stunts.

Alas, the film was made in the 20s and there's some gross-ass black-face we have to deal with.  I also felt like there's something Freudian about the image of a man fleeing from brides.  Generally the women come out on top in this film however.  They are the gatekeepers of their sexuality in this film and poor Keaton spends a lot of time being jeered at by failed partners.

So the film was pretty good.  Weird 20s-politics aside, I thought the film was funny and exciting.  There's all kinds of gags that I rewound to watch again.  Good film!

Pin (1988)

Saw Pin (thanks Lea!)  It was a psychodrama from the 80s about two children (a daughter and son) of a doctor who has an anatomical dummy in his office which he uses to put patients at ease.  He uses ventriloquism to make the dummy "talk."  This is sort of creepy on its own, but within the realm of misguided adult attempts to comfort children.  Alas, this has a profound effect on the son of the doctor, who reaches adulthood, still firmly believing that the dummy can talk.  Over time, the dummy's "personality" takes a more sinister, demanding turn.

Although it came from the 80s, the film has a Hitchcockian, giallo feel to it.  There's pop psychology, and attempts to placate and fool the psychopathic antagonist.  The over-the-top premise is handled seriously and the film wrings some genuine freakiness from the bizarre dummy and the creepy son.  Ultimately, the true horror of the film is about psychological abuse and seeing the damage wrought by the son is something to behold.

There's also something thematic going on with graven images and reproduction.  The son and daughter, perhaps unconsciously, mirror their parents' seating positions and postures.  They are not just the children of their parents, they are becoming their parents in some way.  Similarly, the dummy is called "Pin" which is revealed to be short for Pinocchio, the puppet who wanted to be real.  The doctor father tries to make the puppet into another sort of parent for the children, but as the generational divide collapses, the son takes over that roll.  All very neat!

So the film was solid.  It's obscure for no reason which is very obvious to me.  I guess it was out of step with its time.  It doesn't have a big scary villain that will launch 1,000 sequels and instead uses more 1970s psycho-horror to drive its scares.  It holds up now however.  Go see it!

A Place in the Sun (1951)

Saw A Place in the Sun, a fairly grim but frothy melodrama about a man who is hired to his wealthy uncle's factory.  There, he is ignored by his wealthy relations' family, but he starts to climb the ladder slowly, slowly.  He starts dating one of the other factory workers, in spite of regulations, and he seems to be making a small life when tragedy strikes: he falls in love with one of the women from the world of luxury his uncle inhabits.  Now he's torn between two women: the poor one he's with vs the glamorous dream that's just out of his reach.

The film is about the corrosive effects of the American dream: the lie that capitalism works as a meritocracy.  The film was based on a novel titled An American Tragedy which makes the aims of the story more clear.  The central trouble is that a relationship with this un-glamorous girl he's involved with means a life of poverty and hardship.  She's not as well-dressed as the other woman, but she's sweet and she loves him and cares for him.  In isolation with her, he could be happy.  But how on earth can he be happy when a far more luxurious life of money and power is calling to him, just begging him to abandon his current girl?

And so too with our own lives.  We may not live the most glamorous or comfortable existences, but they could be enough for us, if only we did not have the dream of more always hanging out of our reach.  How can we enjoy what little we have when we know that if only we were a little more cut-throat, if only we were willing to do a little more evil, we could have so much more?

I don't know what the solution to this is.  The main character is meant to represent us and therefore remains sympathetic in spite of it all.  He comes from a religious background which he has abandoned, foreshadowing greater falls from grace to come.  Is a stronger morality then, the proposed solution?  Ironically, the woman who played his religious mother was a communist in real life and would be blacklisted after this film as part of the Red Scare.  She next appeared in Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon in 1970.  Clearly, America was not ready to think about alternative systems just yet.

The film is a bummer, of course.  It's got a lot of glorious melodrama (fainting!  Smoldering close-ups! Silhouettes!) but it ends on a dour note.  It's intended to provoke and to force engagement, so it leaves you unsettled.  It's an interesting film.

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

Saw The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, the American precursor to Japan's Godzilla.  The film was a standard giant-creature special-effects film from the 50s.  I was very surprised however to learn that the first pre-historic monster awoken by atom bomb tests seems to have been filmed in the US, and I kind of suspect that there is nationalist-tinged controversy over this (ala who discovered the number 0 first, or paper, or stuffed cabbage: which brave nation dared to dream of giant nuclear lizards?)

The plot is that a giant lizard is woken by nuclear tests in the north pole.  After a few high-intensity lizard scenes, the meat of the film consists of a scientist trying to prove that his lizard-visions are legit, and trying to prove he's not crazy.  In the style of early Hollywood, the film must also be everything to all people.  So, it has romance, thrills, mystery, lizards.

I didn't really dig the film.  Here were the interesting bits: the lizard was animated by stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen, and although the technique looks simple by modern standards, some scenes really stand out, such as when the lizard attacks a lighthouse.  Also of course, the broader context of post-world-war America coming to grips with its world-ending nuclear capabilities.  Outside of that, there's the novelty of this being the first Godzilla-ish movie.

So, the film was not great, but solidly okay and at lest brief, so it didn't wear out its welcome.  The special effects are pretty good for its time, and the plot is ridiculous.  There are square jaws and army men using peculiar slang and pretty lady-scientists and a big lizard.  What more do you ask from this film?

Bee Movie (2007)

Saw Bee Movie, which opens with the following bit of misinformation: "According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly" (debunked here).  This is only the opening salvo in a virtual avalanche of bee-related misinformation and mis-truths.  Here are 10 more that I quickly identified, in a bulleted list:

1. Bees cannot speak English
2. Bees do not drive little cars in their hive
3. Beehives do not have little roads inside of them for little cars to drive upon
4. Beehives do not have whimsical honey factories, involving buckets, and conveyer belts, and taffy-pulling machines
5. Bees do not collect nectar via a gun called a "nectar collector"
6. A travelling arc does not move up a bee's antennae like a Jacob's ladder when they are electrocuted
7. Bees do not wear little sweaters
8. Bees cannot use an emery board to surf on flushing toilet water
9. When injured, bees do not need an intravenous honey drip
10. There has in fact been no record of a woman in New York dumping her chef boyfriend for a bee ever at all

So, you can see this is not a very realistic movie (and actual bit of bee trivia you wouldn't know from this movie: male bees are for reproduction only, don't leave the queen, and don't have a stinger (so Seinfeld's character is canonically lesbian.))

Ok, moving on to the plot: the main character bee feels oppressed by the nanny state of the hive.  He desires to fly outside of the hive to hunt for nectar (which, again, in real life is not done with a gun) but in the outside world he meets a woman who he talks to, despite bee law being firm about banning this.  The main plot of the story is the romance between the bee and this human woman, intercut with the bee's quest to stop the exploitation of his people by the humans.

The movie is not great.  It's certainly not bad, but very unpolished.  The humans look strange and lumpy, the bees look much better, but there's a strange mix of movie references, and pointless cameos (Ray Liotta voices himself) and strange whimsy.  At one point, they reveal a hive job is to wear a hat with a finger on top to scoop up the last drop of honey, but at another point, the girlfriend's plane explodes when it rams into a cliffside, during the bee's romantic fantasy.  This second joke feels like something out of the sinister humor of Adult Swim, but the former is just whimsical.  Lumpy, uneven.

The plot bumbles along and has its moments but feels over-long, even at 90 minutes.  There's a few moments of odd politics left in there (strong "if people don't need to work, society will collapse" vibes in the final act, plus also the main bee is dissatisfied that everyone enjoys their jobs (???)) and many of the jokes are recognizably joke-shaped, but only inspire an exhalation.

So, DreamWorks went for broke on the marketing budget of this thing, coating the billboards with ads in the hope of gulling a few hopefuls on opening night, and then letting the film sink into obscurity.  Alas, like Shrek before it, the internet caught hold and made those 2016 edits of the film, after it became clear that DreamWorks had no intention of enforcing copyright.  And here we are today.  See it for the memes if you have to (and I had to) because it's not very good on its own.

The Obscure Object Of Desire

Saw The Obscure Object Of Desire, a film by Luis Buñuel, famed absurdist director.  The film is frustrating and sexy, a good culmination of Buñuel's career.  It tells the story of a mutually exploitative, mutually abusive relationship between Mathieu and Conchita.  Mathieu is a wealthy man who falls in love with Conchita, a novice maid who he believes he can have some no-strings fun with.  She out-maneuvers him however, by never succumbing to his advances, but always teasing him, giving him just a taste, never giving him what he really wants.

Neither one of these people are blameless: the girl is quite cruel to this sentimental old man, flagrantly carrying on with boyfriends while pretending to be a shrinking virgin, afraid to have sex with Mathieu.  Then again, Mathieu really has a lot of the cards here: he's got the money and the influence and he's able to wreck some serious damage to her too.  In the manner of a toxic relationship, they are both ambiguously addicted to the other, damaging and enabling in turns.  He keeps coming back either out of sentimentality or to see if she's finally been beaten down enough to let him bed her, and she returns either out of guilt or to feed her ego; to see if she can flirt her way out of this last one.  They are both eagerly participating in this toxic relationship however and both are somewhat to blame.

The film works well as an allegory for class struggle, a frequent theme of Buñuel's work.  The girl is the underclass whom the upper class eagerly seeks to screw over and exploit.  She gallantly exploits right back, stealing and humiliating and celebrating in her successes over the upper class man.  The older Mathieu has all the power and no honorable intentions (at one point he's asked why he doesn't marry her.  Answer: Then I'll be giving up my strongest weapon!) however he is only powerful as a result of his network of servants and frequently he's made pathetic by hold-ups when he's on his own.

Surely the right move for these two is to break up and not see each other again.  In the class struggle reading of this however, this is impossible.  How can the upper class "break up" with the proletariat?  This thought brings coherency to all of the random terrorist bombings and violence depicted in the film: they are trying to break it all up, to tear it all down.

This is a somewhat unpleasant film.  It's interesting to decode, but the characters and the world it depicts are unpleasant.  It's a depiction of life and inter-class struggle under capitalism, and is therefore necessarily unpleasant, but it's unpleasant nonetheless.  Further, the central struggle of whether or not this old guy will get into this pretty lady's pants is tawdry and kind of exploitative in its own right.  Which, maybe there's something there too.

Finally: I was streaming this film and the streaming service kept freezing and buffering, coyly denying me what I wanted.  I felt exploited.

The Lighthouse (2019)

Saw The Lighthouse, a striking black and white film from the same guy who directed The Witch.  As with that film, this one is a supernaturally-tinged psycho-horror about two lighthouse keepers slowly driving each other mad.  In one corner is a quiet but stern Robert Pattinson and in the other corner is hoary sea-dog Willem Defoe.  It's quite the film!

I generally like psychodramas however this one didn't thrill me the way they often do.  It's very glum and serious and keeps us the audience in the dark right up unto the ambiguous ending.  Several times we are shown dreams and visions which may be real.  It's left to us to puzzle and guess at what really happened; how much magic we're willing to indulge in.  The result is frustrating, tantalizing.  I enjoyed the ambiguity, but I also wish I understood more of the characters' insanity or powers.  I wish I knew what was "really" going on.

The central horror of the film in this case is the madness of isolation.  The two men's pasts and their power struggles curdle into mythic fantasies and mad cavorting as they try to stave off madness that roars like the sea storm, right outside their door.

There's a lot going on in this film.  It's drawing a lot from old sea stories of the 1800s, so we get the didactic moralizing, gods and monsters, sublimated homoeroticism.  It all spirals more and more out of hand until frankly murder-suicide begins to seem like a pretty reasonable option.  Kudos all around!