BlackBerry (2023)

Saw BlackBerry (2023), a docudrama about the creation of the first smartphone to really make it big.  It's billed as a comedy and contains many comical element, but it's in the manner of the Silicon Valley show: it's zippy and fast-paced, but much of it is just how tech business works as far as I understand it.  There are man-child nerd-bros hanging out and eating pizza and working on diabolical tech problems, and then there's the sharks in suits stalking the halls, trying to negotiate deals and pitch products.  It's very fun to watch.

So, I liked the film.  The conversations between the nerds are very true to life, both the dumbfounded incomprehension of meeting someone who is not familiar with Star Wars and also the techno-babble brain-storming sessions ("Ok, so we can't shrink the data, what if we spread it out instead") There's also a major character who is the spirit of goof-off tech start-up culture.  He's scrappy and probably won't amount to much (I mean, ordinarily, in a company that didn't get a docudrama made about it) but he's not there to get rich, he's there to play with tech.  He becomes the moral compass of the film, even as he remains an irrelevant, slightly self-important doof.  I have met this guy dozens of times.

The film is not uproariously hilarious.  I watched the trailer and it contains most of the best jokes, but watching the boardroom shenanigans is tremendous fun.  90% of the film is watching our heroes rise to power and fortune and that's just lovely.  As we all know, BlackBerry's are no longer the ubiquitous smart-phone, so we know this story has to end on a long slow decline, but the rise is fun to watch and the character are lovely.  A fun film!

All That Jazz (1979)

Saw All That Jazz (1979), a movie-movie about a stage and movie director near the end of his life, facing down his own irrelevancy and crumbling health.  The film is very kaleidoscopic, voice-overs and background conversations and serious meanings behind frivolous smiles are all layered on top each other.  The effect is initially bewildering, however once you get into the groove of the film, it serves to get us into the bewildered mind of the protagonist, how he's tormented by his own artificiality and regrets, how he keeps a happy face on it all which he himself sometime despises.  There's a scene late in the film where he says "I hate showbusiness." and another character responds "You love show business."

I didn't love the film.  It's good, but I liked Confessions of a Dangerous Mind better, and saw it first.  The film is also apparently inspired by 8½, by Fellini, which I've also seen.  Unlike those films, this one has more of a smeary, soft-focus look, ala Terry Guilliam's movies (I'm thinking about Time Bandits here) it also has the intentionally tawdry feel of Cabaret which was directed by the same director and which I enjoyed.  This one was interesting and had some good thoughts about self-destruction vs self-sacrifice, and about the dual artificiality and sincerity of showbusiness, I just wasn't in the mood I guess.

Heart of a Dog (2015)

Saw Heart of a Dog (2015), a documentary directed by Laurie Anderson about the death of her dog.  It's a looping, discursive film however, which touches on 9/11, dreams, memories, many deaths, and on her dog's short-lived musical career.  It's terribly poignant and yet sometimes oddly funny.  It grabbed my attention in the first anecdote, when Laurie is describing her mother's death.  As Laurie narrates to us, her mother seemed to believe that she was at a party of some kind with animals, as she was drying.  "Thank you for having me." Laurie says, and you cannot tell if she is talking on behalf of her mother or on behalf of herself and perhaps it is both.

The film is very sad, naturally, but is a good meditation on loss.  It's composited together from a bunch of random shots of her dog, of her neighborhood, of old home movies.  It's narrated by Laurie in a clear, precise tone, weaving together disparate threads of western and eastern philosophy, casually saying funny, tragic things.

It's a heartbreaking film, but in a gentle, soothing way, like talking to an understanding therapist about loss, or like reminiscing over memories of dead friends.  Sad but nice, not melancholy, but wistful.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)

Saw Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), a character study about Arthur, an overgrown lad who works in a factory of some kind in the miserable brick tenement houses of post-war England.  His surroundings are grim and cramped, full of spying neighbors and drunken brawls.  Arthur drinks heavily and carries on with women, trying to wring as much short-term happiness out of his life as he can.  He's not a bad guy, but he is irresponsible and will cause a lot of unhappiness.

Arthur opens the film with an internal monologue sneering at the factory workers and at his boss.  "Don't let the bastards grind you down." he thinks "I'd like to see someone try to grind me down." We know that it doesn't work like that of course.  It's not someone who grinds you down, it's everyone; it's just life that wears you out and shrinks your dreams until they are as tawdry as merely wanting a new television set.  Arthur is rebellious, pugnacious, lashing out at whoever looks like authority, even if that person is also a put-upon victim, even when he is defending senseless vandalism.  He's deeply selfish in a proto-70s way, but young enough that I felt bad for him.  He hasn't yet accepted that he's doomed.

This film contains seeds of the staunch individualism championed in films of the 70s: the loner who resists society, who defends their freedom even as it costs them their friends and family.  Those films always frustrate me because it seems so unnecessary and cruel: the protagonists are always lost and somewhat joyless in their quest to discover themselves, the society they're rejecting seems so harmless and normal, what's their problem?  In this film however Arthur seems full of devilish glee as he skates from one disaster to another, and the society he's in looks realistically hopeless.

Another thing this film gets right is that they added another character to serve as contrast: a workmate who is easy-going and agreeable, sheep-like accepting of his fate.  This character is given dignity and even respect in the end.  He's not shown as the victor (he's clearly taken advantage of many times in the film) but he's left as an alternative: much easier, much more boring, but available to those who don't want to struggle.  It's an interesting film.

The Outsider: the story of Harry Partch (2002)

Saw The Outsider: the story of Harry Partch (2002), a brief documentary about an avantgarde musician, Harry Partch, who drew inspiration from Greek and primitive, pre-twelve-note-scale music.  He spent some time as a hobo in his youth, and also drew inspiration from the accents and intonations of people as they whined or celebrated or bragged.  He created giant, whimsical instruments that sound utterly alien, prehistoric.  The film talks about him in fond terms before leaving him alone.  Harry worried, in his later life, that he would become a strange curio, fossilized like other composers before him.  I think he had a canny understanding of how the world works.

Blow Out (1981)

Saw Blow Out (1981), a Brian De Palma twist on Blow Up by Antonioni.  In Blow Up, a photographer accidentally takes a photo of an assassination.  In this film, Blow Out, an audio engineer records some tape which proves that an accident was actually a murder.  The film is uneven, at turns lurid and crass, but sometimes fleetingly sublime.

The protagonist is played by John Travolta who acts like an overgrown teenager.  The script he's given forces him to claim that he was always an AV geek, a science nerd.  I get the impression he's supposed to be a nebbish guy swept up in bigger events, or a nervous, driven kind of guy, as in The Conversation, but he's played with Travolta's easy cool-guy charm and it's a strange sell for me.  The scene is completely stolen by a small-time blackmailer for me anyway.  I loved that horrible little guy!

The film involves a lot of prostitutes, blackmail, borderline-pornographic horror films, a lot of sleazy tawdry stuff.  From De Palma's other films, I get the sense that this is his jam, like Tarantino: he loves glittery trash.  But there's sequences in the film that also evoke Hitchcock.  There's a scene near the climax where a woman is hauled up some stairs.  We just see the woman and her attacker, and the big broad side on the stairs lit up with flashing lights.  It's very classy, very restrained, and then, shortly after, the camera revolves around the main characters as fireworks go off overhead, a surreal and wonderous image that evokes the indulgences or Baz Luhrmann.  There are sequences that are wooden and dull or silly, but others that are taught or quiet or well-observed.  An uneven film.  I should see more of De Palma, to see if I like him or not.

Reefer Madness (1931)

Saw Reefer Madness (1931), the original film that all the musicals and whatnot were based on.  It was very campy.  It follows a small group of teenagers who fall in with a Bad Crowd.  That is: smokers of the terrible drug spelled marihuana.  The teenagers begin smoking the evil stuff and react in the typical manner of the dope fiend: hilarious laughing, close-ups of swiveling eyeballs, writhing and gibbering, also murder.

The film is so over the top, so full of pearl-clutching horror and completely inaccurate portrayals of weed smoking that you can't help but lapse into the same old-timey cadence.  It's hilarious!  The film invites a lot of participation and, at one hour long, feels like a good appetizer to a party, but the subject is very overwrought.  It ends with several deaths and some very hysterical dames.  The plot is very grim in a morality tale kind of way, so I felt bad making fun of it in my head, but once the terrible tale is fully told, it's a joy to imitate, to froth at the mouth at something so relatively tame.  I can see why this film became a cult classic.  I imagine it's not even that fun to watch high, it's just fun to play along with the film, to be aghast at teenagers, necking (necking!) while demonic, jolly piano music plays!