Holy Motors

Saw Holy Motors (thanks, Basil!) It was very confusing. It begins in what is probably a dream sequence. The main character opens a hidden door in his bedroom to find an audience sleeping in front of old, kinetoscope-style shorts of nude men pulling ropes, running, throwing bricks, etc. After an ambiguous fade to black, he leaves his house, enters a limousine, and begins talking stocks and accounts on a cell phone. Ah, we think, he is a high-powered businessman. But then he pulls out a grey wig and is soon in disguise (?) as a bag-lady, mumbling about how she will never die. We continue to watch him don various disguises inside the limousine and preform little vignette-ish performances across Paris, the most bizarre being a wizened leprechaun-like man who abducts a fashion model. I won't ruin any surprises, but it's very strange. Also, there's an awesome intermission musical bit.

The eventual explanation for this madness is (perhaps) when a fat man appears inside the limo and they talk about cameras too small to be seen. The man we are following is an actor, rushing from shoot to shoot. We are now in deep post-modern waters. We already know we cannot trust what we see and now we know perhaps why. There is an interesting sequence where he is reunited with an actress from his past (who is riding in a similar limo.) They talk amid disassembled mannikins, which seem to suggest sex with their positioning. There is suddenly a musical sequence about a child they had together. This musical acts ends abruptly when our hero kicks a mannikin child's head like a soccer ball. They part and the actress begins her scene, as a suicidal air-hostess. Our hero comes upon her dead body on the sidewalk and screams in horror. But wasn't that just an act? Was his reminiscences with her just an act? There was a musical sequence, which would suggest so, but then when did the scene begin? Surely not in the limo. Have we been watching this man through one of the invisible cameras all along? Questions upon questions.

The ending is a barrage of increasing strangeness. I don't want to spoil anything (particularly because my powers of justification completely fail here,) so I'll talk a bit about the mood of the piece. The above may give you the impression that this film is wacky and manic, but it is deliberate and slow. The ending, though absurd, is suffused with sadness. It may be that I'm taking the film too seriously and mistaking tragicomic for plain old tragic, but I think the increasingly weary melancholy of the hero is genuinely affecting. Every little vignette is either sad or grim or both. I wish it had been a bit more upbeat, but as it is it ranks with "Synecdoche, New York" in terms of fascinating, sad, strangeness.

Owning Mahowny

Saw Owning Mahowny. It was a sort of intentionally boring noir. The plot follows Dan Mahowny, a compulsive gambler who happens to work at a bank. Of course he begins working the bank system to cover his bets. He borrows against the credit of various millionaire clients of the bank. The casino he frequents (inexplicably in Atlantic City, whereas he lives in Toronto) is happy to accept his money and courts him with limo rides and free ribs, even promoting a kitchen-worker to Mahowny's personal servant. The film plays Mahowny as a man with absolutely no interests in life at all. He refuses the courting of the casino and is usually shown walking through gray, identical hallways in gray shapeless suits, never sleeping, never eating. He seems uninterested in anything. When we get to the casino, everything is bright light and lush color (well, lush-er color. It's not obvious enough to tip the film's hand) and he adopts this tightly-controlled, profusely sweating demeanor as the loa of his addiction rides him.

The film hits the sensible plot-points of gambling movies: he tells someone to take his winnings and keep them safe from him "no matter what I say" and then demands the money back later, amid veiled threats. His girlfriend finds out about his addiction and is at first frank and hopeful and then despairing in the face of his disinterest in stopping. Soon he's gambling away tens of thousands of dollars per hand of poker and the feds are hot on his tail. None of this is played for high drama though. There's a lot of stunned, frozen silences and blank stares. The one time there is dramatic dialogue (an argument with the girlfriend) it feels canned and phoney. I feel realism is not what the film is after but rather that Lynchian deliberate feel.

There's a sub-theme contrasting his petty gambling with the infinitely more high-stakes gambling of the banks. One of the opening scenes shows the spinning wheel of a bank vault's door while the sound of a roulette wheel plays. One of the executives talks of fleecing a rich client and says "it's a bit of a gamble." There's not enough of this sort of thing to become really condemnatory or anything. It felt more free-associative / exploratory than anything to me. There's also some condemnation heaped on the slimy casino director (who bears a strong and I think purposeful resemblance to Reagan) for bending over backwards to allow Mahowny to lose even more of other people's money at his tables. (This is a thing which actually happens, btw. Gambling addicts are good customers for casinos. They're very catered-to and often given free stuff. This American Life did a bit on it.)

Amores Perros

Saw Amores Perros. It was a sort of grimly stoic movie about various failed romances. The first revolves around two brothers both in love with a woman who is the wife of one of them. The married brother hits his wife and is professionally a petty thief. The unmarried brother is the underdog here, but makes his money via dog-fighting, so he's not exactly a savory fellow either. Also there's this sleazy attitude to the first segment that all that this battered woman really needs is a man who truly loves her (as evinced by his sincere and passionate lust.) I don't buy that the underdog brother would be really all that good for her, but he'd probably be better, so okay.

The next segment is about a married man who leaves his wife to take up with a model who then suddenly gets into a car accident, seriously breaking one leg. When she gets back from the hospital, her dog gets stuck in a crawl-space and so she sits around the house all day, surrounded by photos of herself pre-accident, and thinks about how she's gonna model anymore with one busted leg and listening to her dog skitter and whine under her floorboards (SYMBOLISM!) Needless to say, the romance suffers for it.

The last concerns a homeless-man / gun-for-hire who has a small pack of dogs that follow him around. Much more would give away serious plot points about his story, so I'll leave it at that. Dogs appear in all three stories as a kind of short-hand for human love & decency. It's a nice touch, but man, I really wish they hadn't started off with the dog-fights. There's a lot of dog-fighting and it's always just awful. Appropriately, I feel both brothers are kind of lacking in the milk of human kindness. The film gets much kinder after that first segment though, so hang in there if you can. The film also interleaves all three stories, jumping forward and backward in time. I was more entertained than I should probably let on, merely trying to place the chronology of a scene. The return to the same images and events over and over gives the film a feeling of weight which I'm not sure it earns. A very stylish and initially extremely abrasive film. I stayed up way too late watching this.

Dekalogue

So, we arrive at the end of the Dekalogue. Reading back over my previous entries, I notice I approach the series more as a puzzle to be solved than as a work of art to be enjoyed. Again and again I say I don't understand, I can't see, don't know. I grasp at genius images and Christ-figures. I curse subtitles (hated foe!) and misinterpret commandments. As a purely emotional experience it is melancholy and fairly grim. The moments of joy are almost always alloyed with stoicism and it's not usually clear how to feel about things. As a cerebral exercise, it's rewarding but terribly, sometimes impossibly, challenging (I'm looking at you, False Witness.) Taken together, like chocolate with peanut butter, or peanut butter with chocolate, the clever and the moving parts of the series whirl around each other, sometimes pulling together, sometimes pulling apart, always intersecting and dividing and dazzling.

This dazzle however is mostly postprandial. Don't misunderstand and go in expecting fireworks. Go in expecting riddles. The cleverness of the series lies mostly in what it doesn't do. As I pointed out before, it doesn't condemn, it doesn't go for easy resolutions, and it doesn't go for easy answers (even though the 'answer' to each episode is given away in the titles, preceded by a 'thou shalt.') This series could have been so little but it was so much more instead.

As I've said before, I am essentially a weak man. I prefer visual splendor and histrionics to think-piece puzzles. I'm only human. So I'm afraid that, austere and ingenious though these films were, I won't bring it up when discussing my favorites. Like a cathedral, it's a fascinating and complex place to visit (even for 10 hours,) but a tough one to live in. Approach with caution, but approach, friends, approach.

Dekalog X

Saw Dekalog X, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods. YEAH! Last one!! Woo! Okay, here we go:
This one was about two brothers who discover a gold-mine of rare stamps in their recently-deceased father's apartment. They try to find out how much the stamps are worth and quickly begin hearing amounts in the millions and hundred-thousands casually tossed around. They are soon however dourly reprimanded for even thinking of selling the life's work of their father, and find that the world of high-priced stamp collecting is a (kind of hilariously) cut-throat one. Their windfall is discovered by a deeply unsavory stamp-dealer. Unsettled by his intent interest, the brothers invest in bars on the windows and a colossal black dog. It is darkly hinted that their home-lives are deteriorating as they become more and more consumed by a sort of miserly greed. They even enter into their dead father's passion, reading his notes and seeking out rare specimens. It is of course only a matter of time until they turn on each other, Sierra Madre-style, but in characteristic Dekalog fashion, when this happens it's somehow, curiously, the brothers' most sympathetic moment. Instead of primly shaking our heads at their greed, we are left understanding their sad, sweaty, desperation.

The commandment's influence on the plot is clear: the brothers' lives are kind of destroyed when they enter into this fetishistic consumer-culture, hungrily eying their father's treasures. Their brotherly friendship is even threatened by this greed. Further trouble comes from the avarice of the stamp-dealer. So don't covet, okay? The ending (no spoiler) is uplifting however, and genuinely sweet. A rock song takes us out on a high note, but a complex, bitter-sweet kind of punk-y high note. Not totally happy, and not unhappy. A perfect book-end to the series.

Class of Nuke 'Em High

Saw Class of Nuke 'Em High. I didn't really like it. Unfortunately I think not liking this movie is kind of the intended response for people like me. I can't think of an example of what I didn't like that doesn't sound like some kind of endorsement. It's ugly, weird, and messy, too outrageous and yet somehow not outrageous enough, too much reliance on gross-out gags, tits, and costuming, low-to-no-budget special effects and has a resoundingly stupid plot. So yeah, ok, this film is crazy. Unfortunately, this time 'crazy' does not mean 'exciting' or 'fresh.' Watching this film is kind of like watching a group of little kids play dress-up and make a godawful mess out of a well-furnished room. Yeah sure, wild and crazy and kind of subversive I guess (in a way,) but to what end? I'm not entertained by mere destruction. Even pretend destruction makes me vaguely uncomfortable. So clearly the film is working on me in some way, against my will. I wasn't bored at least. I want to see more Troma films someday. I can't decide if their house style is gloriously, intelligently stupid (and I'm just resisting/not seeing it,) or if it's just plain old regular stupid. Bad films are so complicated.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

Saw Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)(Thanks, Kim!) I liked it okay. The TMNT thing passed me by when I was young, so I'm not coming at this with much loving nostalgia. I found the rubber suits have not aged so well (there's a scene where one turtle sadly says "it's Splinter" that's downright hilarious) and the creepy ninja-sploitation is still creepy. The turtles were surprisingly limber for being encased in rubber though so good show, stuntmen. The turtles are also sufficiently winning, only slightly cringey in their high-fives and tubulars (self-congratulation is one of those things that always looks terrible in movies.) They were never quite action-hero-competent enough for me to ever really hate them. I was kind of annoyed by the humans in the film however. April was too 80s-sassy. I kept feeling ambushed by the worryingly stuffed groin of Casey Jones' sweatpants (look at it!) The less said about the for-some-reason-hanging-around-Arpil son and dad the better. Also, apparently April is completely rich. She can afford rent on a huge apartment and an antique shop (which she never opens, but keeps out of sentiment) and a place in the country (albeit a run down place. What? You think she's made of money?)

So, okay, the film is ridiculous. It's a kid's movie. It's meant to be enjoyed with teddy grahams and too much hi-C, not sneeringly dissected over tea by a bitter grad student. And frankly I enjoyed even its stupidity. My eye-rolls were usually accompanied by groaning laughs, there were weird birth-of-the-turtles interludes (fueled by a radioactive goo marked 'Radioactive',) and delicious 80s excesses. I even got caught up in the characters of the turtles (will Raphael ever conquer his inner demons?) Not a great movie, but a pretty fun one. A lot like the movie Flash Gordon, it invites affectionate mockery. I recommend watching it with a group of only slightly jaded friends.

Edit: just realized, I keep writing 80s when this film was clearly made in 1990. The '80s's stay. I regret nothing.