Que Viva Mexico (1979)

Saw Que Viva Mexico.  This was an attempt by Aleksandrov to finish an unfinished film that Eisenstein was making about the Mexican revolution.  He was unable to complete it due to budgetary constraints and Stalin running out of patience.  I'm sort of annoyed at my movie list that recommended this film however.  It lists this film as having been released in 1932, indicating that it's in fact recommending the original, unfinished, partially lost Eisenstein film!  How am I supposed to lay my eyes on that?

Anyway, this film was a typically gorgeous Eisenstein film where characters with strong motivations, strong jaws, but zero personalities act out the beginnings of the revolution.  It cleverly ties geography to history, moving out of the jungles into the deserts and north, towards towns which are more civilized, but where class struggle is more readily apparent.

Apparently Eisenstein was inspired to shoot the film this way by seeing the great variety of lifestyles and architecture readily available in Mexico.  You can see how right he was: there are stone fortresses, cactus forests, jungles, and those strange agave plants, so huge and alien.  The film is very pretty and contains a lot of striking visuals: a man's face looming over a Mayan pyramid, a man with a gun silhouetted against a door frame.  Eisenstein has a great eye for conveying information and drama purely symbolically.  As I kind of mentioned earlier, he's not the best at creating interpersonal melodrama (of which I am greatly fond) but he's good at creating sweeping historical, political dramas, which made him the ideal director for Communist Russia.

Worth a look!

Beau is Afraid (2023)

Saw Beau is Afrai, a film directed by Ari Aster, of Midsommar and Hereditary fame.  I enjoyed those films a lot, however this one is more inscrutable to me - it's both mostly clear what's going on but is far more confusing as to why, in a broad sense, this is all happening.

The film is billed as a horror/comedy.  I'm generally apt to see the sad things in life, so often in comedies I feel bad for the poor bumbling characters who are being harassed for our amusement.  Likewise in horror, the essentially unpleasant thing in the horror film is often something very prosaic and accessible: loss of a loved one, loss of control over your own life, fear of death, etc.  This film gets its horror from taking normal, unpleasant circumstances and amping them to 11.  Not only have you lost your keys to your apartment, but they have been stolen right out of your keyhole.  Not only that, but this will make you late for a flight to visit your mother who clearly does not believe your story.  Not only that but you live on a street which is packed so full of violent addicts that you have to sprint to your door ahead of them every night. etc etc.  It's very Synecdoche, New York.

I guess from the genre description that it's supposed to be funny and there are indeed a few scenes I laughed at (the main character has his computer monitor destroyed.  He finds it with a shoe bashed through the screen.  He gamely plugs the monitor in and navigates around the shoe.) but there were precious few such moments.  There's a whole set of jokes around the main character's balls that seem incongruous and strange.  Usually, the misery just piles on so hard and so high that I get the sense that you're really supposed to laugh here, but it's all so real and so serious that I find it hard to laugh at so easily.  I mostly just felt bad for the poor main character.  It felt more triggering than silly to me.

The main character has an anxiety problem which leaves him uncertain and quivering through most scenes, uncertain of what to do.  Rather than receiving any sympathy, everyone treats him with suspicion and hostility, either insulting him and blaming him for accidents beyond his control or seizing control over his life and making decisions for him.  We discover that he is entirely dependent on his family and has lead a shadow-life, always cringing from the world.  This supposed to be ridiculous.

One thing I really liked about both Midsommar and Hereditary is that they took fear and horror seriously: being startled by a bang or grossed out by a corpse or a monster or something is not actually that bad.  Corpses can't actually hurt you.  What hurts you is your love for the person that that corpse used to be; the knowledge that one day that corpse will be you.  That's the real thing we feel revulsion for.  Cheap horror focuses on the revulsion, but good horror gets you to feel the loss, the pathos of injury.  I think that in making this film into a comedy, it looses that thing behind the thing - the emotions that make life hard to bear.

I certainly enjoyed watching this film.  It provided a veritable cornucopia of intertwining themes and had strange visuals galore.  I didn't find it scary or funny however, and I suspect this is because Ari Aster and I have wildly different senses of humor.

Cat People (1942)

Saw the original version of Cat People, the one from 1942.  It follows a man who falls quickly in love with some Serbian woman who comes from a small village which is rumored to harbor "cat people" who are cursed to transform into carnivorous cats when they fall in love.  The man assumes his girlfriend is crazy and tries to get her help but, predictably, this is of no avail.

I liked the film!  It's a slow-burn psychodrama, as the girlfriend becomes slowly more menacing.  There's no transformation sequence, but there's a great animated dream interlude involving malevolently loping cats.  There's also a lot of ominous dread mined from the characters simply being freaked out.  We don't need to see the panther to be frightened.  We only need to see the character we care about becoming panicked.

On top of this classy restrained creepiness, there's the rich symbolism of the cat transformation.  It's something that happens after the marriage is consummated, and it originates from a far-off, old land.  The girlfriend fears reverting to some primitive, monstrous state.  It could so easily be read as a metaphor for anxieties around sexual desire, or as an immigrant's shame of their country of origin.  There's a scene where a cat-like lady hostilely greets the girlfriend as a "sister." The girlfriend gasps and turns pale, but refuses to explain.  It's explicitly about being a cat-person, but it could be, implicitly, about many things.  Very good!

The film is old and a little pokey and black and white and some of the acting is a little wacky.  There's nothing too terrible (no blackface!) but it's an old movie, just be aware.  If you can stomach that, then take a look, this is a surprisingly good film!

Don't Worry Darling (2022)

Saw Don't Worry Darling, a film that's got twists and turns so it's a little hard to talk about but the premise is basically this: we follow Alice who is the Barbie-doll, 1960s wife of a suit-and-tie-wearing 1960s businessman.  She lives in a plastic-fantastic housing development where they laze around all day drinking martinis and gossiping.  But it's very clear even from the outset that this is not actually the 1960s.  The characters playfully flip each other off and act in anachronistically casual ways, the wives all go ballet practice where the camera prowls and creeps along, watching the graceful women in their identical leotards, clearly signaling that we are in Stepford Wife territory.

I enjoyed this film okay.  It had a good sense of creeping wrong-ness.  I do wish it had been a little more subtle though.  There's a scene early on where the main character is vacuuming the carpet while that Spooky Scary Skeletons cartoon plays on the TV.  That's good: it's subtle.  The picture-perfect 60s atmosphere is troubled by this Halloween cartoon, subtly mocking the ballet lesson.  It's small, but it's still early in the film.  We're building.  Soon after that however there's a scene where the main character is making eggs and realizes to her confusion that the eggs she bought are all just hollow shells with nothing inside.  This is less good in my opinion.  It's still early in the film.  We shouldn't be breaking reality just yet, should we?  Ah well.

Despite not being the slowest of boils, we spend a lot of time with the protagonist, being unsure what's going on, trying to figure it out.  When the explanation comes, it's still a little confusing, but more or less satisfying and there's some interesting inclusion of some internet sub-culture stuff, but the heart of the film is watching this pretty lady be horrified and confused in a sumptuous, midcentury-modern setting.

It's not the best film, but it entertained me okay.  It reminded me of Vivarium (and of course of The Stepford Wives.)  It's very stylish and clever in parts.  It's a little clumsy in parts too, but we can't have everything.

On the Town (1949)

Saw On the Town, a goofy little musical number about three sailors (Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and someone called Jules Munshin) who get one precious day to experience New York city.  They meet girls, they get chased by cops, they sing that New York New York song.  It's a whole thing.

Generally this movie was a miss for me.  It's very precious and very sweet.  There's some risqué humor, but nothing that wouldn't fly in a high school production.  No one's motivations make a ton of sense beyond them just being in love I guess, but the point of the movie of course is to be a big frivolous musical.  I'm not a big fan of musicals I gotta say, and this one left me a little cold.

Here's what I liked: the dance sequences were lovely.  There's a An American In Paris-style bravura number that recaps the entire film to that point which is beautiful, really some of Gene Kelly's best work.  I always start a Gene Kelly movie being indifferent to his smirks and grins but I always fall in love with him again by the end.  Apparently a tyrannical perfectionist to work with, but he dances a pretty dance.

So anyway, not a winner for me.  It's a little too old and tame.  It has aged a bit, and there are sequences where they dress up as primitive tribespeople which I don't think is offensive to any particular group but felt very cringey to me.  There's some cleverness and a ton of athleticism, but not enough hysterics or visuals for me to really enjoy.  Oh well, here's to the next one!

Flatliners (1990)

Saw the 1990s version of Flatliners.  It was very interesting.  It follows five medical students who hatch a plan to induce death for a brief period before resuscitating themselves to bring back knowledge of the hereafter.  It's a strange combination of gaudy and fascinating.  It's framed as a sort of horror/drama film.  The medical school where they do their experiments is some kind of converted mansion/cathedral/weeping angel statue warehouse.  It's got kind of a Hellraiser or Suspiria style of gothic, sumptuous horror.

There's many scenes that are outright ridiculous.  There's a moment where one of the characters is sitting in a car in an alleyway and slowly the lighting shifts, lighting up fearsome oni masks spray-painted on the walls.  Look out!  There is a skull just over his shoulder!  But there are also many scenes that are surprisingly effective at being creepy.  As the graffiti is lit up, a dog slithers forward, apparently crawling despite broken legs.  It's very worrying.  Similarly, as excitement about the near-death experiments mounts in the group, they begin ghoulishly bidding against each other, bargaining minutes spent in brain-death before being resuscitated, gambling with the decay of their own brains.  It's a great portrait of ambition run to crass recklessness; so ghoulish, so gross!

The film is interesting.  It's grappling with death and life and these very important, profound things.  I was kind of glad that it went the horror route, but the snob in me was disappointed.  Anyone can make death be scary.  The animal in us will always want to live, but we know we will have to die.  Help me to grapple with that, Hollywood!

I was honestly in the mood for a movie like this though: dumb enough to be sensational, smart enough to be tasteful.  There's other things to enjoy: one of the characters is symbolically linked to salvation.  The film cleverly makes him an atheist.  The film is set around Halloween which affords many opportunities for morbid visuals.

This was not a great film, but it was a good film and I enjoyed it a lot.  It both rose to and overcame its premise.

Odd Man Out (1947)

Saw Odd Man Out, an Irish noir film about an IRA member who goes missing/on the lam after a botched robbery.  The film is interesting.  It's got a good sense of the sinister outside of society, where people close their doors and don't want to get involved.  It put me in mind of war films or Holocaust films where the smallest things mean life or death.  In such a domestic setting, women seem to feature more prominently, whether they be betraying the protagonist by calling the police or helping them by patching them up.

The film proceeds like an action-y Hitchcock film until we get about halfway through, when a homeless man and a raving drunk artist show up and the film veers hard into camp.  It's a very strange departure which ties in thematically, but we move from realism into broad, Dickensian fantasy.  Then again, the main antagonist to the film is a handsome cop who carries a walking stick and uses it to tip up people's chins so he can look into their eyes.  Shades of Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds.

Although it also has a hefty helping of weary Irish melancholy, the film is very fun in a lot of ways.  Like war films, there are many near escapes which are always fun to watch.  Once the message of the film is theatrically declaimed, a lot falls into focus, but the ride up to that point is twisty and interesting and strange.