In & Of Itself

Saw In & Of Itself, a film version of a performance-art piece done by magician Derek DelGaudio.  He talks enough about his life that the description of the film usually contains 'biographical' somewhere, but the film is really about identity and labels and how they limit and free people.  There's also some great window-dressing involving fiction and story-telling which is like catnip to me.

The film is just Derek talking on stage for a while and interacting with a set of six objects behind him.  He does a magic trick every so often but mostly he talks about labels and about how we see others and ourselves.  A story about some blind men feeling an elephant is told.  Derek talks in a halting, flatly-affected way, sounding sincere, even as he explains that this is a show and every line was rehearsed.  In the show he generally tries to out-clever his audience, having his cake and eating it too, acknowledging this is artificial to make it seem more real.

This culminates in the final trick of the night, where he does a magic trick (which looks real but which we know is done via some trick) and simultaneously reaffirms the audience's perceptions of itself (which looks staged with shaking hands, celebrity cameos, and silent tears, but which may well be real.)  Derek also plays another narrative trick where he casts himself as an ally of the audience, amusing and delighting them, and simultaneously as an antagonist of them, fooling them, predicting their choices, and using their strong emotions to strengthen his show.

There's a lot of fun topics flying about here and it ultimately is fairly entertaining, if sort of stagy and self-conscious as many modern magic shows are, as they try to outwit and subvert post-modernism.  The line between what's real and not is very blurry and doubly-so since the many audience-shots pick up on well-known celebrities, heightening the feelings of unreality but, like all fiction, we know it's a trick but it manages to delight us anyway.

Wild at Heart

 Saw Wild at Heart, an early Lynch film before Lynch fully embraced his twisty dream-logic method of story-telling.  This film follows two young lovers on the run from the law.  It stars Nicholas Cage and contains a strange mix of Lynch-ian strangeness and Cage-ian grotesques.  There's an early scene where Cage is jumped by a guy with a knife.  He fights off the assailant, pounding his head against the marble floor until his skull is crushed, and then glowering and flaring his nostrils, he points at the woman who was behind the attack.  It's unclear if this is intentionally off-putting and film-y or if this is just how Nick cage is and Lynch is trying to work with him.

The film goes on like that.  It has a lot of Lynch-y strangeness, with voodoo assassins and old men who inexplicably talk like ducks, but through it all is Nick Cage doing an Elvis impression and saying strange mouthfuls like "this here jacket represents a symbol of my individuality, and my belief in personal freedom."  Totally strange.

So, this is an interesting film for sure, but it's not quite as good as Lynch's later work.  This contains a lot of strange experiments that don't make a ton of sense and seem more hap-hazard than deliberate.  There's some nice suburban insanity in the form of the woman who ordered this hit - at one point she paints her entire face in lipstick and vomits in a pink toilet - and some nice on-the-nose symbolism about the protagonists' love being like fire, consuming and destroying them.

I like Lynch's films because of their non-sense.  The mental landscapes of real people are too complex to fit neatly into established Hollywood tropes and so, when we see them in Lynch's films, presented as unique manifestations of his characters' mind's they are jarring, confusing, off-putting, and intense.  Here however, these same fall a bit flat and seem just kind of lurid and goofy and although people's thoughts are those too, it's indistinguishable from just bad film-making.  A minor Lynch film.

Dave Made a Maze

 Saw Dave Made a Maze, a film about an out-of-work artist who creates a cardboard maze in his living room and then gets trapped or lost inside of it.  His long-suffering girlfriend must now rescue him.  It was exactly what it sounds like: a cutesy, silly-yet-sincere, hipster-ish romp surrounding one Sad Boy's feelings.

The fun of the film is seeing the inventive ways the filmmakers can use cardboard, to create giant playing card or origami cranes or nesting, telescoping pillars that encroach upon the protagonists.  It has the feel of a really well-done weekend project.  You get the sense of a lot of hanging out off-screen and a lot of seat-of-the-pants special effects.

The maze itself seems to symbolize Dave's emotional landscape - he is trapped in a fraught and unstable place that cuts him off from the world and threatens his relationship.  His friends come to rescue him but risk getting hurt themselves in the process.  This is not totally explicitly laid out, but seems like a sensible interpretation to me.

Anyway Dave struck me as being kind of self-absorbed which is not totally surprising for a film about someone who makes a film about their own emotional struggles.  His girlfriend is the kind of attractive, chill, eye-rolling girl that seem to the de facto angel-girlfriends these hipster-types imagine themselves with.  I started out feeling like she should really dump this man-child but then again that cardboard maze is really cool, so maybe he's not so bad.

The film is slight and twee.  It's very cute and, as long it's not talking about emotions, it has a lot of silly fun.  It never reaches the surreal heights of, say, Terry Gilliam's work but it does a good job of inhabiting its small, ramshackle, indie-wood niche.

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

Saw How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, the third film in the series.  This time we have a theme of love.  This sort of nicely continues from the themes of the last film: a rise to power.  Now with the power under their belt, Hiccup and his dragon turn their thoughts to coupling up.  The end involves a fairly serious breakup however, which is strange, but these films have always been entertainment vehicles first and treatises on the human condition a distant second.  So, the film is pretty good.

Once again, the dragons are adorable and dog-like and have great silly designs with jutting jaws and goggling eyes.  This film was clearly once projected in 3D as there's a lot of fore-ground/back-ground stuff going on here and things that suddenly get in your face.  There's a lot of flying about however and many scenes that suggest a grand scale and I wonder how well that would have come across in a theater.

Anyway, as with the second film (I've seen the first one so long ago, I don't think I can rely on my memory) I kept expecting the dragons to cohere into a recognizable symbol of like the human spirit or weapons of war or something, but they continued to confound me.  It's really just a film about these Vikings' adventures with dragons.  But it is that very successfully.

It was an enjoyable film and more serious than its first films.  I liked the villain's dead-eyed dourness, even in victory.  Similarly, I just liked hanging out with the characters and seeing what they do next.  A satisfying movie.

The Void

Saw The Void, a fairly fun horror movie with Cthulhu-ish overtones.  We start in medias res with a pair of dudes attacking and immolating a screaming man and woman.  The man gets away however and from there we jump to a hospital where the bulk of the action occurs.  On top of the heavyset dudes, there are also robed, hooded cultists.  The film has a bunch of little twists and turns and seeing what happens in half the fun of this film, so I'll say this: the baddies eventually drop some references to things which are "older than time" and there's a lot of tentacles, so suffice it to say that there's something eldritch going on here.

There's a more specific movie-connection that I wanted to point out, but to do so, I'll need to spoil some.  Highlight to read:  I assumed the opening sequence would turn out to be a The Thing-style fake out, with the baddies revealed to be merely beleaguered goodies, and of course the transformations later in the movie are distinctly The Thing-like.  Also they apparently used old-school practical effects for the monster in what I assume to be an homage.

As with many horror films,  I felt that the real monster here was bad communication skills.  At one point something like the following exchange takes place: "There's no way you'll win against those people!"  "Who are those people?"  "How should I know!?"  I wanted to slap that character.  Just tell them what you do know, yeesh.  Total inability to convey information.  In fitting with this irritating theme however is the inscrutable cult, always standing in a mob just out of the light, so ominous and mysterious.  Lovecraft himself was fond of playing with the ambiguity words are capable of and the space between what's written by the narrator and what's understood by the reader.  He was famously vague and obscure about his monsters and used archaic, strange words for them.  Perhaps imprecise and bad communication is not so off-brand after all.  In the spirit of that, I'll add this: that scene where the guy has an axe in his shoulder is amazing.

So, the film is somewhat irritating when the characters are screaming unhelpful things at each other, but it comes to life when we're just watching terrified people inch around a corner, or gaze at some terrible thing.  The point of the film is to show us creepy and spectacular things, and so the characters are always moving ever deeper into the hospital, discovering more and more terrible grotesques.  It's really fun to watch once it gets going, but it takes a bit of shouting to get there.

How to Train Your Dragon 2

Saw How to Train Your Dragon 2, another kid's movie.  I saw the original some time ago, so I've sort of lost track of the details of what happened.  Anyway, it picks up shortly after the first film (I think) with Hiccup now 20 and growing stubble, exploring the known world on dragon-back and being pressured to be more chief-ly because his dad isn't getting any younger.  All this fun comes to an end however on the discovery of a rival chief who is amassing a dragon army and who claims that "he alone" can protect humans from the dragon threat (this film came out in 2014, btw.)

The film is fairly rollicking and more emotional than I'd thought it would be.  There's a lot of family dynamics going on which resonates nicely with a theme of succession and overthrow.  I don't want to give too much away, but the low-stakes "Hiccup, you should be chief now" struggle is mirrored with a similar hierarchy struggle in the dragon world.  Anyway, that's all background stuff.  The film is not one for deep thoughts on human life.

I enjoyed the spectacle of the movie.  I wasn't able to feel clever by picking up on Themes or Messages, but the film is always spectacular to look at.  I have a hard time understanding the film's attitude towards dragons.  They're treated as pets, but also as spirit animals.  Toothless is missing a rear wing just as Hiccup is missing a foot.  But then, what am I supposed to think about the humans being at war with the dragons in the first film?  I don't think they work as a metaphor for anything really - it's just really about fantasy dragons.

But the dragons have some excellently silly character design and there's a ton of disabled representation to be had (at least three characters sport some pretty snazzy prosthetics.)  The film is very nice and winning.  Not terribly funny, but it works well as a fantasy drama, so okay.  The visuals are really what I'm here for and those held up.  Good character and set design and some good plotting too.  Well done, all around.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Saw Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.  It was an enjoyable reboot of the beloved mid-90s film Jumanji.  This time instead of a board game, we have a video game which adds another layer of comedy and interest in the form of high school teenagers suddenly thrust into the bodies of archetypal femmes fatale and adventure heroes.  The film is enjoyable fluff, but had a little too much going on for my taste.

The film plays out as an action comedy.  Dwayne Rocky Johnson gets in some good clowning being a gawky teen suddenly in the body of a wrestler.  Jack Black completely steals the show however as an instagram-obsessed teenage girl suddenly trapped in the body of fat bready man.  Jack Black is the delightfully gay bear that I did not know I need in my life.  He's great.

On top of this Freaky Friday business, there's lingering relationships between the various characters.  One is bullying the other into letting him cheat off of his work.  Another is infatuated with another one.  I thought the cheating subplot was a bit heavier and more fraught than the film did - it just sort of flits by in the film - but it's not really given room to breathe.  On top of the relationship dynamics and the body-swaps, there's a jungle-themed game to explore and video-game mechanics to play with.  It's a lot to cover and we only have a child's attention-span to do it in.

I feel like the film is sort of over-stuffed.  The comedy is good and the action scenes were fun, but I was really more interested in how these teens were going to repair their relationship than I was in returning the jade eye to the jaguar statue.

The film had it moments, but I wish it had like one layer removed.  Cut out the body-swapping, or just embrace the breakfast club stereotypes of the teenagers and don't give them drama, or something.  It was okay, but fluffy and a bit overstuffed.