Saw Ravenous (thanks, Anne!) It was a western/horror about a Donner Party-style disaster which ends in cannibalism. This event is tied to the myth of the Wendigo, an evil spirit of cannibalism. It's sort of reminiscent of some vampire films I've seen, with a powerful enemy circling around our heroes, always smugly and smilingly just out of reach, who must be taken down by a good guy with similar "powers." Nicely, the supernatural aspects of the story are kept in the realm of believability, so no one is jumping 40 feet in the air or bending steel or any such nonsense. The social breakdown associated with cannibalism is also mined here for claustrophobic atmosphere. A good, uncomfortable film.
There's a lot of symbolism on display here, much of it obvious enough that I caught it. The frontiersman's coats are blue on the outside and red on the inside and yet somehow when they're being particularly bloodthirsty, their coat always gets flipped around somehow, showing the red side. Also of course there's a heavy theme of food. We open with one of the characters, a soldier, contemplating a very rare steak and flashing back to old battles, where meat did fly. The final showdown even ends with a person caught in a bear trap, it's metal teeth looking very mouth-like.
Not a bad film but it didn't really grab me. Perhaps if I'd been watching it at the dead of night in the middle of winter it would be more effective. It was very morbid however and frustrating in the way horror films cultivate. Unusually well-grounded in gold-rush era costumes and set but a horror film underneath it all in the end.
May 30, 2016
May 29, 2016
Withnail & I
Saw Withnail & I, a grotty sort of British comedy about two struggling actors who are constantly drunk, constantly penniless, but come from families which are basically too wealthy for them to actually get in any trouble. They flounder around hilariously being unable to even clean dishes without descending into wild, bizarre, drunken soliloquizing and shrieking hysteria. It feels a bit gay to me, this inseparable but dramatic duo, but I think it's supposed to be more of a throwback to the sort of unstated queerness of Laurel and Hardy and so on. They're not gay, just ridiculous.
The film makes its stance in regards to homosexuality much more explicit with the introduction of Morty, a fat old gay man who they sponge off of for a while and who obviously has designs on one of them. The character is florid and pompous, daintily hinting at youthful blowjobs at Harrow and so on. He's absurd and repulsive but also hilarious. The film is a sort of throwback to an older time, filmed in the 80s but featuring nuttiness fueled by drugs and marijuana ala the 60s and featuring a platonic comic duo ala the buddy films of the 40s. The Morty character is a specimen of the by-now extinct aesthetic homosexual, who powders his hair and paints his face and winkingly quotes Oscar Wilde and uses dainty euphemisms for almost everything. It sort of makes sense that this dinosaur of a character should be included in a film which is, itself, an anachronism.
I enjoyed the film but I didn't find it very funny. It was enjoyably manic and frantic and messy though and well worth a look. There's a hint of gayness to it which made it interesting to me so I wonder if it would hold up for someone similarly humorless but who has the misfortune of being straight. It's very frantic and funny though, so check it out maybe.
The film makes its stance in regards to homosexuality much more explicit with the introduction of Morty, a fat old gay man who they sponge off of for a while and who obviously has designs on one of them. The character is florid and pompous, daintily hinting at youthful blowjobs at Harrow and so on. He's absurd and repulsive but also hilarious. The film is a sort of throwback to an older time, filmed in the 80s but featuring nuttiness fueled by drugs and marijuana ala the 60s and featuring a platonic comic duo ala the buddy films of the 40s. The Morty character is a specimen of the by-now extinct aesthetic homosexual, who powders his hair and paints his face and winkingly quotes Oscar Wilde and uses dainty euphemisms for almost everything. It sort of makes sense that this dinosaur of a character should be included in a film which is, itself, an anachronism.
I enjoyed the film but I didn't find it very funny. It was enjoyably manic and frantic and messy though and well worth a look. There's a hint of gayness to it which made it interesting to me so I wonder if it would hold up for someone similarly humorless but who has the misfortune of being straight. It's very frantic and funny though, so check it out maybe.
May 28, 2016
Animal Kingdom
Saw Animal Kingdom, an incredibly tense crime film. It opens with the protagonist, Jay, watching TV with his mother snoozing beside him. Then the paramedics show up because no, his mother is not snoozing, she's dead of an overdose. This sets us up for a film which will pull the rug out from under us, which will not let us relax. After his mother's death, Jay stays with his grandmother and his uncles who are all bank robbers in the grubby, tattoos and guns style. These are not romantic gentlemen robbers, but desperate, angry men with emotional disorders. The film is setting them up to be the animals whose kingdom Jay has entered.
There's a simple animal motif throughout the film, with lions showing up here and there and later, as Jay is beginning to question his own ability to survive in this jungle, even an ironic baby lion wearing a silly little crown. Jay does not want to be king but in this brutal world he must be the strongest if he wants to survive. Really rattling movie. The family members stalk around kitchens and gas stations. Eye contact is far more threatening than raised voices. Everything's very brutal. But even the animalistic family is shown to be as nothing compared to the trained attack dogs of the police and lawyers who are casually and indifferently cruel.
The camera work is great too. We're always recoiling away from Jay's family and sneaking up on Jay himself, stalking him as he feels his family is hunting him. Later in the film, things have become so tense that calm feels ominous. At this point, the camera switches to flat, static shots, with Jay and his family sitting ominously still or perhaps petrified. Good stuff.
There's a simple animal motif throughout the film, with lions showing up here and there and later, as Jay is beginning to question his own ability to survive in this jungle, even an ironic baby lion wearing a silly little crown. Jay does not want to be king but in this brutal world he must be the strongest if he wants to survive. Really rattling movie. The family members stalk around kitchens and gas stations. Eye contact is far more threatening than raised voices. Everything's very brutal. But even the animalistic family is shown to be as nothing compared to the trained attack dogs of the police and lawyers who are casually and indifferently cruel.
The camera work is great too. We're always recoiling away from Jay's family and sneaking up on Jay himself, stalking him as he feels his family is hunting him. Later in the film, things have become so tense that calm feels ominous. At this point, the camera switches to flat, static shots, with Jay and his family sitting ominously still or perhaps petrified. Good stuff.
May 22, 2016
All That Heaven Allows
Saw All That Heaven Allows, a drama from the 50s about a widow who falls in love with a younger man who is her gardener. It's very precious and the gardener is this very clench-jawed attractive man who, despite his unspeakably low birth, is the perfect gentleman, a sort of outdoorsy-type who paints landscapes and pictures of ducks in his spare time. Anyway, this being the 50s, the news of this love affair is greeted in the town (which is of course a small town) with gasps and arched eyebrows. The protagonist woman cannot bear the opprobrium of the town and of even her own children but she cannot be without her backwoods poet. Will she? Won't she?
This film is a sort of morality play about the terrible effects of the scorn of small-minded society which, being a part of, we accept as righteous, even as we intellectually know that it's absurd. Set in opposition to the scandalously young backwoodsman we have television, a tawdry, fake spectacle which symbolizes the kind of dreary living death that awaits respectable old women. Her children and high-society girlfriends are always pushing her to get a TV set and indeed when her children are first introduced, they're framed inside of a mirror, as though on a television set, setting them up as fake, unfeeling, television-type people; antagonists.
This sort of film has been done many times since, the story of a woman falling in love with a man and society not approving. It's been pointed out by others that it's never the other way around, with an older man falling in love with a young woman, but even Hollywood, bastion of fearless truth-telling, has its limits. Curiously (or perhaps not so curiously) these films seem to attract homosexual talent. Off the top of my head, I know Ali: Fear Eats the Soul has a similar plot and was directed by the bisexual director Rainer Fassbinder. This film stars Rock Hudson as the gardener and the sort-of-related Gods and Monsters not only stars Ian McKellen but is about the life of homosexual director James Whale.
Anyway, the film is good social commentary picture, frustrating but ultimately pleasing.
This film is a sort of morality play about the terrible effects of the scorn of small-minded society which, being a part of, we accept as righteous, even as we intellectually know that it's absurd. Set in opposition to the scandalously young backwoodsman we have television, a tawdry, fake spectacle which symbolizes the kind of dreary living death that awaits respectable old women. Her children and high-society girlfriends are always pushing her to get a TV set and indeed when her children are first introduced, they're framed inside of a mirror, as though on a television set, setting them up as fake, unfeeling, television-type people; antagonists.
This sort of film has been done many times since, the story of a woman falling in love with a man and society not approving. It's been pointed out by others that it's never the other way around, with an older man falling in love with a young woman, but even Hollywood, bastion of fearless truth-telling, has its limits. Curiously (or perhaps not so curiously) these films seem to attract homosexual talent. Off the top of my head, I know Ali: Fear Eats the Soul has a similar plot and was directed by the bisexual director Rainer Fassbinder. This film stars Rock Hudson as the gardener and the sort-of-related Gods and Monsters not only stars Ian McKellen but is about the life of homosexual director James Whale.
Anyway, the film is good social commentary picture, frustrating but ultimately pleasing.
May 21, 2016
Tales from the Script
Saw Tales from the Script, a homey little documentary where a bunch of screenwriters talk about their lives working as screenwriters. They're mostly delightful little bookish people who speak with the assured tones of a parent talking about their job. This seems like a great film to show someone who wants to be a screenwriter because they talk in about the grim realities of their jobs. They don't glamorize themselves as starving geniuses, indeed they claim their worst mistakes were made as idealistic youths who approached writing as an art, rather than as a craft. They also don't present themselves as smug insiders who have made it. They talk about how as soon as you make a big movie, all the doors shut all over again and no one wants to see you. And they pepper these lessons with funny anecdotes and wry observations.
They also talk about how big studios have changed. Probably in reaction to the double-whammy of decreased theater attendance and an abundance of new talent struggling at the gates, almost no one can get a script accepted anymore and the scripts that do get accepted have to be based on something (and therefore prepackaged with a fan base) and allow for sequels and franchises. Grim times ahead. This is all about risk minimization and profit maximization and why shouldn't it be? Art is all very well and good, but this is a business. Still sometimes, by accident perhaps, good things are allowed to be made.
I don't really have much to say about this film because, funny anecdotes aside, this seems like a documentary that was genuinely trying to be informative. There's talk of emotional states when starting out, when pitching ideas, how to deal with movies that bomb and how to get your script read and how to deal with actors. Most of this isn't mechanical but philosophical. One distinguished gray-hair keeps repeating that no one intends to ruin your films, they just do, and that when some idiot in a suit tells you a scene isn't exciting, it's because you've failed to make it exciting. There's also advice on when to move on to greener pastures which, for me, for this review, is now.
They also talk about how big studios have changed. Probably in reaction to the double-whammy of decreased theater attendance and an abundance of new talent struggling at the gates, almost no one can get a script accepted anymore and the scripts that do get accepted have to be based on something (and therefore prepackaged with a fan base) and allow for sequels and franchises. Grim times ahead. This is all about risk minimization and profit maximization and why shouldn't it be? Art is all very well and good, but this is a business. Still sometimes, by accident perhaps, good things are allowed to be made.
I don't really have much to say about this film because, funny anecdotes aside, this seems like a documentary that was genuinely trying to be informative. There's talk of emotional states when starting out, when pitching ideas, how to deal with movies that bomb and how to get your script read and how to deal with actors. Most of this isn't mechanical but philosophical. One distinguished gray-hair keeps repeating that no one intends to ruin your films, they just do, and that when some idiot in a suit tells you a scene isn't exciting, it's because you've failed to make it exciting. There's also advice on when to move on to greener pastures which, for me, for this review, is now.
May 15, 2016
Mr. Nobody
Saw Mr. Nobody (thanks, Nick!) It was one of those mind-fuck films that are willfully obscure, the fun being not in the plot or the characters but in the teasing out of what actually happened, the settling of the contradictory stories made significant by the invocation of quantum theory and the chaotic nature of life as symbolized by the butterfly effect. For such a film, it's not easy to say what happened, but here is what I believe happened anyway: we are listening to Nemo, the last man to die in a world where death is a curable condition, talk about his life up to that point. From a young age, we learn, he has always been able to predict the future but in this film's interpretation of physics the future is not yet set. We see all kinds of visual metaphors for this notion: branching and joining train tracks, stories being edited and rewritten, and of course the world "butterfly" sprinkled about everywhere (although if I must be very picky (and I must) the butterfly effect suggests only that the future is very difficult to predict, which is different from being impossible to predict, you know.)
Anyway, we have old Nemo recalling young Nemo predicting his own forking future, personified by three girls who he will wind up married to depending on his choices. As an old man, he keeps waking up from literally dreaming of death. Water is a recurrent symbol for death and destruction but, as a young Nemo angrily tells his mother, he loves water. So, first lesson: sometimes it's kind of a relief to die.
Another lesson: sex scenes are very boring after a while. In one version of his life Nemo is in teenage love with this girl and they fuck like rabbits. I think it's supposed to be sort of a cute and pure expression of love but after a while I began remarking to myself "ah, I see they're at it again." On that note, the acting and filming is alright. The film never lets you follow a life-story long enough to build an emotional connection and no sooner are you getting to know some woman Nemo's shacking up with than you're back in the future, with Nemo is old-man makeup, talking to a man whose Maori tattoos clearly say "PSY." The film is frequently too clever for its own good. I enjoy a good puzzle as much as anyone else but please don't drag in fancy physics concepts as window dressing to your drama because it adds nothing to the drama and frequently films get the physics wrong in some way anyway.
Anyway, the film is not as bad as my spleen-venting in the previous paragraph makes it sound. There's delicious opera and slow motion explosions and calm voices explaining complex ideas to us. It's really a knotty little romp of a film, full of twists and turns. I really enjoyed the film, even as I picked at it a little. It's a good film for inducing spirited discussions.
Anyway, we have old Nemo recalling young Nemo predicting his own forking future, personified by three girls who he will wind up married to depending on his choices. As an old man, he keeps waking up from literally dreaming of death. Water is a recurrent symbol for death and destruction but, as a young Nemo angrily tells his mother, he loves water. So, first lesson: sometimes it's kind of a relief to die.
Another lesson: sex scenes are very boring after a while. In one version of his life Nemo is in teenage love with this girl and they fuck like rabbits. I think it's supposed to be sort of a cute and pure expression of love but after a while I began remarking to myself "ah, I see they're at it again." On that note, the acting and filming is alright. The film never lets you follow a life-story long enough to build an emotional connection and no sooner are you getting to know some woman Nemo's shacking up with than you're back in the future, with Nemo is old-man makeup, talking to a man whose Maori tattoos clearly say "PSY." The film is frequently too clever for its own good. I enjoy a good puzzle as much as anyone else but please don't drag in fancy physics concepts as window dressing to your drama because it adds nothing to the drama and frequently films get the physics wrong in some way anyway.
Anyway, the film is not as bad as my spleen-venting in the previous paragraph makes it sound. There's delicious opera and slow motion explosions and calm voices explaining complex ideas to us. It's really a knotty little romp of a film, full of twists and turns. I really enjoyed the film, even as I picked at it a little. It's a good film for inducing spirited discussions.
May 14, 2016
Human Planet, Episodes 7 and 8
Episode 7 - Rivers
This was a very watery episode. It starts off with this dude net-fishing on a torrential river, swollen by seasonal rains. The narration informs us again and again that this is perilous and extremely dangerous, but this is clearly just this dude's normal life so he, the actual fisherman, is totally nonchalant as he breezes across a tightrope slung over the mighty river in his little blue flip-flops. Anyway, we then skip over to a frozen ice floe which some kids mustwalk down (for six days!) to get to school. It really makes me appreciate the ten-minute drive to school I had as a kid, although perhaps these kids take their education a bit more seriously as a result? We then take a break with Canadians who must break up 2-foot-thick ice before it causes trouble with a nearby bridge. Of course, they just use dynamite, but not before cutting the ice up with some impressive buzz-saws. We then travel to more dusty climes as camel-herders follow elephants to find the easiest access-points to the water table beneath a dried-up riverbed. When the camel-herders return to their village, we see them descend into a Stygian hole which is their village well. Well, well. We then see villagers repairing a thousands-of-years-old mud mosque with a mixture of river-bed mud and fermented rice husks. The kids of the village help and then sling mud at each other with infectious glee. Finally we hit (what was for me) the climax: the perpetually wet, mountain-top land of Meghalaya, where the rains erratically cause flooding, washing away all man-made bridges. So, the people build living root bridges with the roots of the strangler fig. These bridges take more than a single human's life to complete and look like a fucking fantasy illustration. Amazing. Human superpower: craftily farming turtles to turn algae into a more human-accessible food-stuff (ie: turtle meat.)
Episode 8 - Cities
We end in cities, a welcome change for me from the nomads of the desert and veldt. Like the Planet Erath series however, this final episode contains a heavy dose of the moralizing usually hovering just out of frame in a normal episode. We start with a thorough examination fo how humans and animals live together in cities: peregrine falcons hunting pigeons in Dubai, and the Bishnoi women breastfeeding (incredibly adorable) baby gazelles. We also see the dark side, with rats in New York City and bed bugs in London. We are given the sterling example of an experimental city being built in the desert somewhere (I didn't catch it, but probably Dubai) which is self-sustaining, burning waste for energy and harvesting solar energy for their (no-doubt) self-driving electric cars. This is green high-tech which is an uncomfortable fit next to the show's adulation of elephant-powered logging and fig-root bridges and so on. Also in this episode is a cop on a segway, frightening the invading caribou. We also see an urban beekeeper, teaching his quirky, twee clients how to raise bees. We then see an extended sequence of tilt-shifted, fast-motion loading/unloading boats and trucks, as people teem around groceries and so on. I'm reminded of the Mayans. So, can't we all live together, the show asks, us and the animals? It doesn't sound so bad, I guess, so long as I have my computers and my internet.
This was a very watery episode. It starts off with this dude net-fishing on a torrential river, swollen by seasonal rains. The narration informs us again and again that this is perilous and extremely dangerous, but this is clearly just this dude's normal life so he, the actual fisherman, is totally nonchalant as he breezes across a tightrope slung over the mighty river in his little blue flip-flops. Anyway, we then skip over to a frozen ice floe which some kids mustwalk down (for six days!) to get to school. It really makes me appreciate the ten-minute drive to school I had as a kid, although perhaps these kids take their education a bit more seriously as a result? We then take a break with Canadians who must break up 2-foot-thick ice before it causes trouble with a nearby bridge. Of course, they just use dynamite, but not before cutting the ice up with some impressive buzz-saws. We then travel to more dusty climes as camel-herders follow elephants to find the easiest access-points to the water table beneath a dried-up riverbed. When the camel-herders return to their village, we see them descend into a Stygian hole which is their village well. Well, well. We then see villagers repairing a thousands-of-years-old mud mosque with a mixture of river-bed mud and fermented rice husks. The kids of the village help and then sling mud at each other with infectious glee. Finally we hit (what was for me) the climax: the perpetually wet, mountain-top land of Meghalaya, where the rains erratically cause flooding, washing away all man-made bridges. So, the people build living root bridges with the roots of the strangler fig. These bridges take more than a single human's life to complete and look like a fucking fantasy illustration. Amazing. Human superpower: craftily farming turtles to turn algae into a more human-accessible food-stuff (ie: turtle meat.)
Episode 8 - Cities
We end in cities, a welcome change for me from the nomads of the desert and veldt. Like the Planet Erath series however, this final episode contains a heavy dose of the moralizing usually hovering just out of frame in a normal episode. We start with a thorough examination fo how humans and animals live together in cities: peregrine falcons hunting pigeons in Dubai, and the Bishnoi women breastfeeding (incredibly adorable) baby gazelles. We also see the dark side, with rats in New York City and bed bugs in London. We are given the sterling example of an experimental city being built in the desert somewhere (I didn't catch it, but probably Dubai) which is self-sustaining, burning waste for energy and harvesting solar energy for their (no-doubt) self-driving electric cars. This is green high-tech which is an uncomfortable fit next to the show's adulation of elephant-powered logging and fig-root bridges and so on. Also in this episode is a cop on a segway, frightening the invading caribou. We also see an urban beekeeper, teaching his quirky, twee clients how to raise bees. We then see an extended sequence of tilt-shifted, fast-motion loading/unloading boats and trucks, as people teem around groceries and so on. I'm reminded of the Mayans. So, can't we all live together, the show asks, us and the animals? It doesn't sound so bad, I guess, so long as I have my computers and my internet.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)