Dune (2021)

Saw Dune (2021) (the secret part one of this new film franchise) it was really good!  It's too bad I saw it on my dinky little TV screen because it's a very grand film, full of epic megastructures and shots of nature's mighty beauty and epic, wailing music.  It's appropriate for this epic story of interstellar political intrigue and maybe-religious drama.

The film has that modern realistic sci-fi look that's so popular now.  There's a lot of austere, blank structures in earth-tones with tiny little humans to give a sense of scale.  It's a sort of brutalism for sci-fi.  As is fitting for the source material, everything is done in a slow, deliberate, almost ceremonial way.  It reminded me of Drawing Restraint 9 in that way.  (Thankfully, this film is a bit more briskly paced than that one though.)

One last thought: the spaceships clearly resemble dragonflies which are aquatic creatures in their first stage of life.  As adults, they fly, so in order to transition from water-breathing to air-breathing, dragonflies must pull their adult body out of their juvenile body, tearing out their aquatic lungs.  This is likely unrelated but ties in well with the story's theme of rebirth and cataclysmic growth.

Wild Things (1998)

Saw Wild Things, a tawdry, sexy, mystery thriller about a guidance counselor and two girls under his care.  The movie opens with shots of gators and caiman in the everglades swamp.  We then cut to a highschool assembly, laying the groundwork for a film with many predators in it.  The film really gets going after about 15 minutes when one of the girls accuses the counselor of raping her.  Now, it's relatively clear that she's probably lying just from the tone of the film: 90s movies about actual rape don't bill themselves as a sexy, flirty thriller, but there's many many twists in the film.  During the credits sequence, we even get further hole-filling and plot twisting.  It's a little ridiculous.

I didn't really think the film was about very much.  It was an interesting mystery/procedural in the vein of like Brick or Purple Noon but it becomes almost an SNL parody of itself by the end.  There's just a cavalcade of last-minute revelations and secret alliances, it's all a bit much.  Very sexy film if you happen to be into boobs (not so much otherwise) and pretty fun until the final silliness.

Sing 2

Saw Sing 2.  Oh my god it was ridiculous.  It's not very good but in a campy, minions-style way: the whole thing is so ephemeral, it's harmless.  It has all the dumb entertainment of a reality TV show but with the rapid rhythm of a scripted cartoon.  It's a film that lives for the unrealistic bliss of catharsis achieved in the middle of a musical act: the audience singing and clapping along, the klieg lights glaring, and the main characters maybe learning a little something about themselves.  So silly!  I was sort of interested by the idea of an act within a piece of media: you can see the stage scaffolding (and the klieg lights) and somehow it makes it more realistic, this visual clutter of artificial behind-the-scenes.  Very strange!  It's all a cartoon anyway, why not make it just a fantasy, like they do in (I dunno) the climax of Madagascar 3?  I have opinions about funny-animal cartoons.

The Bad Guys

Saw The Bad Guys.  It was an adorable animal heist which was clearly inspired in the nicest ways by the Lupin the 3rd cartoons.  It was fun and jokey and consistently amusing.  It never really hit the dizzying emotional punches of golden era Pixar or anything, but it was good silly business.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Saw Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.  It was really good!  The usually fearless Puss is down to his last life (out of nine) and for the first time must contend with mortality.  Surprising topic for a children's movie!  There's also a really great depiction of a panic attack.  As he comes out of it, you could hear the little noises of Puss's jaw unclenching.  It's so visceral and intimate.  It's great!

There's also a wonderful therapy dog played by Harvey Guillén who is a delight!

The Princess and the Pirate

 Saw The Princess and the Pirate, a Bob Hope comedy.  It was okay but very old-fashioned, full of dated but tame humor involving people hiding in bedrooms and such.  It was clearly for Bob Hope fans and didn't really hold up outside of the Bob Hope fandom.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Saw Everything Everywhere All at Once.  It was a lot to see!  It's about a woman who's life is spinning apart due to a combination of her perfectionism and her struggling business.  She's trying to organize her paperwork for an IRS audit on the eve of Chinese new year.  On top of this, her relationship with her lesbian daughter is strained to the breaking point by the mother's inability to accept her daughter as she is.

And so also (I'm still explaining the premise of the film here,) it turns out that there is a multi-verse of parallel dimensions which are all under assault by some super-powerful monster named Jobu Tupaki (which apparently translates to "pocket gun") which can only be stopped by some version of her (the mother.)  Jobu was once a human whose consciousness was scattered throughout the multi-verse.  Experiencing all possible worlds all at once has driven them mad: if some version of us does all things, it doesn't matter what we do.  If all things happen to some version of us, then it doesn't matter what happens.  Jobu just wants all of this to stop.

The film is gloriously overstuffed.  There's a heavy dose of whimsey and absurdity to the film.  In addition to incredibly absurd parallel universes based off of half-remembered movies, characters jump between universes by making unlikely choices, such as singing Ave Maria or blowing into someone's nose.  The characters (heroes and villains both!) will begin licking walls or singing Ave Maria in order to jump to a parallel universe where they have super-powered pinkies.  The overwhelming parallel universes however are the main weapon of Jobu, the antagonist.  Thus, all the whimsy and silliness takes on a sinister tone.  The childish absurdity of a parallel universe where people evolved to have hotdogs for fingers just serves to underscore the insultingly childish absurdity of our everyday life.

The film's simultaneous mixture of silliness and seriousness reminded me of the work of Don Herzfeld.  It's all sad and funny at the same time.  How much you laugh or cry is all up to you and your mood.  Will you let yourself be swept away by the dizzying kaleidoscope of imagery, or will you ruminate on the existential dread of infinite parallel universes sucking all meaning out of every choice?  Is the absurdity beautiful, or is it just absurd?

I really enjoyed the film.  Not only is there eye-popping imagery (which I am a huge sucker for) but there's parallels between the big and the small: can the mother not only control the chaos unfolding in infinite dimensions but also solve the chaos of her own life?  of her business? of her daughter?  Is it better to try to manage and control it all or to just walk away and escape it all?  The family drama is wonderfully interwoven with the philosophical questions of meaning and purpose.  This was a really good film!