Swordfish (2001)

Saw Swordfish on the assumption that it was a dumb computer-hacker movie.  It was dumb, yes, but it turned out to be more of a heist movie.  There's crosses and double-crosses and smirking bad guys and all that jazz.  There is hacking which is a little tangential, but also dumb.

However, the main thing I noticed about this film, was this it was clearly trying to be The Matrix.  It opens with one of those famous rotate-y shots that The Matrix made famous and involves the main character (a hacker) being swallowed into a shadowy netherworld of shell corporations and government secrecy.  In one scene, there is even scrolling ascii characters, but these ones are scrolling sideways (so, you know, a completely original visual.)  Whereas The Matrix is not really set in any place (apart from a city of some kind,) this film is emphatically Los Angeles styled down to a yellow filter over everything.

So okay, but this movie is also very dumb.  In the modern heist-film tradition, it features a lot of trashiness: ladies in tight-fitting outfits lounge around everywhere and, as a particularly egregious example, the main character "auditions" for his role as heist hacker by cracking into a government website while being given a blowjob.  It's pretty crass.

Let me talk a little about the tech before wrapping up: the tech is absolutely nonsense.  They throw around random words which are not complete nonsense, but are unrelated to what's going on.  (eg: "I dropped a logic bomb." "You didn't have time.") There's a sequence where the main character codes for a little while which is gratuitous and heightened.  It's unreal but only because the character is dancing with happiness or rubbing his eyes with dismay.  The emotions are right, but they are more muted: annoyance followed by the satisfaction of seeing a green message appear rather than a red one, then on to the next red message.  It's dumb but I'll forgive it.  Watching someone stare at a screen, typing slowly, waiting for a minute and then grunting would not be compelling cinema.

Okay, so final thoughts: this was a big dumb movie, but I basically expected a big dumb movie.  I think it more or less succeeded in what it set out to do which was to give you, the male viewer, a little titillation and excitement mixed in with your power fantasy.  There's a couple of pointless chase scenes and the main antagonist is frustratingly smug, but if we're going to ding it for containing pointless stuff, well the whole movie is a little pointless, so what do you want?  This is a big dumb movie which is big and dumb.

A Touch of Zen (1971)

Saw A Touch of Zen.  It starts out as a fairly typical samurai movie (actually the genre is wuxia, according to imdb, but I don't know if I will remember this phrase) which makes a sudden and dramatic veer in the last half hour or so of its runtime.

The main character is a painter in a small town.  He lives in an abandoned castle which is said to be haunted.  He is quickly caught up in political machinations, defending the princess of a disgraced clan from the underlings of an evil eunuch (of course.)  There's a recurrent image of a spider web which seems to be initially used to imply the web of deceit which our heroes are caught up in and which is later subverted when the heroes spin a crafty scheme of their own.  I'm not a big action fan, so I'm hardly the target audience, but I found the story to be fairly humdrum.  It's the usual thing: noble heroes, faceless soldiers, a conspiracy slowly crystalizing.  You can probably see the broad outlines coming.

The film is also edited in a confusing way.  Due to the technical limitations of the time, they often cut away just as someone is getting stabbed and then cut back to the bloody aftermath.  But they also cut away for other reasons, sometimes for no reason at all.  Characters will appear and disappear from a fight scene, or will suddenly be in the village or away from it.  We know time is passing, but the film does not hold our hand through this.  We're just suddenly one year later.  I found this very confusing and it made the plot difficult for me to follow, however truth be told I was not trying all that hard.  Anyway, the third act really took me by surprise.

The film is three hours long and, in about the last half hour or so, completely shifts focus, losing track of the princess in a sudden jump-cut.  The painter hunts for her, but we lose track of him too, rediscovering the princess in a show-down with a general, a monk acting as her ally.  This sequence is not directly to do with the main characters, but is a battle with strange, religious, philosophical overtones.  It's all portrayed symbolically, which is to say indirectly, though fades and juxtaposition, downfall coming from mysterious avenues.  I get the sense of a message being communicated.  It's very evocative.

I don't know that the last half hour makes the rest of the film worth it for me, but that ending was very interesting

The Whale

Saw The Whale, a grotesque but uplifting film about a morbidly obese gay man who is facing down his last days, trying to make amends and trying, in his words, to do one good thing.  The film is directed by Darren Aronofsky, who is fond of films about self-destructive characters.  This one features a lot of addictions and simultaneous with that, a lot of empathy and attempts at saving the main character.  All of the characters damage the protagonist in their own ways, even as they try to help him.  Even his nurse friend enables his food addiction, however I don't know if this is helpful or not.  Addiction is a difficult thing.

The film is based on a play and retains many of its theater bones.  Much of the action happens in the main character's living room.  Sometimes he leaves and the other characters remain, to explain backstory to each other.  A nosy Mormon (well not really Mormon but a lawsuit-safe pseudo-Mormon) acts as an impetus for a lot of backstory drops.  The stage setting helps to make the film feel claustrophobic, isolated, trapped within its own body.

The film is terribly sad.  The main character is utterly pathetic, constantly murmuring "I'm sorry." as his exasperated support network shouts at him or begs him to go to a hospital.  In spite of his own self-destructive coping mechanism, he retains a solid core of values that he is willing to die for.  His character is written slightly cattily.  There are many zingers and one-liners.  He has the feel of The Man Who Came To Dinner, but thankfully he's merely played in a sleepy, avuncular way by Brendan Fraser.

There's also many moments when the protagonist is likened to Moby Dick, of the novel by the same name.  He is the white whale for many of the characters: the one monstrous thing that, if they could only fix, if they could only solve, they would have achieved their life's work.  But the monster in the fat protagonist is the same monster that is killing all of us.  Everyone in the film is struggling, all of them quietly self-destructing as they fail to address their own problems and turn inwards, devouring themselves.

It's a sad and tough film.  It has a warm heart, but it is not clear that this is enough.  It reminded me of The Kid Nobody Could Handle, a similarly melancholy story by melancholy author Kurt Vonnegut.  Like this film, it is also about the impossibility and necessity of reaching each other.

The Devil Is a Woman (1935)

Saw The Devil Is a Woman, another film based on the same source material as The Obscure Object Of Desire.  Whereas that film frames the war of the sexes as being analogous to class struggle, this one is far more straight-forward.  We have a scheming prostitute vs a dignified and imposing officer.  It's not so much about class as it is about a woman behaving terribly and getting away with everything.  I'm inclined to dislike the prostitute character, but then again the officer is no prize either.  He is goaded beyond endurance, but beyond endurance lies domestic assault apparently.

So it's just a film about terrible people behaving terribly.  Oh dear.  The prostitute is played by Marlene Dietrich, who is always a delight to watch as long as she's being bad.  She's fun in this and interesting to watch but she only seems to have one trick: to stamp her foot and declare that whoever she's trying to manipulate doesn't really lover her.  It's so silly!

The film plays as a black comedy, satirizing the lengths people will go through to torment each other when a relationship goes bad.  There's comic business involving the cops and cackling madams and schemes to bilk the officer out of his money.  The plot is quite bleak but it seems played for laughs.  I am either too sophisticated or not sophisticated enough to laugh, but it's pleasant in its own quaint way.

Tale of Tales (2015)

Saw Tale of Tales, a very fanciful film based on a trio of Italian fairytales.  The film is very pretty, very sumptuous, and full of fairytale strangeness.  It's a sort of deconstruction however unlike Shrek, say, this one is overly serious, almost dour.  A queen is obsessed with keeping an eye on her child.  She is played as controlling and obsessive.  She is not a cypher, but a flawed human being living in a time of magic and miracles.

The film is sensual, full of rich colors and dark shadows.  It's got very little dialogue which helps to underscore the universal, mythic flavor of the stories.  I have to admit that whatever deep themes or allegorical, universal truths the film has to offer up passed me by.  Like fairy tales, this film was very strange, very creative, but that was kind of all.  It had the raw feeling of dreams - something that will stick in your mind, but which may not change how you feel about a thing.  An oblique addition to the conversation.

I enjoyed the movie, but it's very singular.  I wouldn't recommend it except as a vehicle for seeing strange things.  It's very dark but not in a silly, goth-y kind of way.  It's an interesting, pretty film.

Teorema (1968)

Saw Teorema (AKA Theorem).  It was directed by Pier Pasolini, he of the Salo fame.  This film focuses on a middle-class family who welcomes a mysterious male guest into their house.  The maid is fascinated by him, opening the film with a suicide attempt in an effort to attract his notice.  Next, the son of the family finds himself strangely attracted to the smiling guest.  Then the mother, daughter, and even the father are seduced by this man.  He awakens strange, intense passions within them and then leaves the film entirely and leaves the family to deal with the fallout of his visit.

Before the credits, we see cameramen interviewing factory workers, talking to them about political revolution and how the middle class, now free from religion and beginning to free itself from capitalism, must now empathize with the common man.  We establish the film as taking place in the post-modern intellectual sphere we find ourselves in now: the church is corrupt, the government is corrupt, soon even intelligentsia itself will be revealed to be corrupt.  What role can we play now to give our lives meaning?

This film sort of absurdly posits sexual/romantic experiences as a source of meaning.  The free love revolution was close at hand and we spend half of the film watching the various characters deal with their romantic involvement with the mysterious guest.  Some of the family it destroys.  The mother is awoken to the emptiness in her life, but is given nothing to fill that void with.  Then again, others of the family find transcendence and the profoundest sort of meaning as a result.

The film is spare and strange.  It's an art film first, with heightened artificiality.  There's inexplicably silent sequences, clumsy overdubbing, and cuts to some hellish black desert.  (Apparently this film is part of Pasolini's "Mythical" cycle - perhaps this connects to the other films.  Pigsty (of the same cycle) seems to feature this desert in the trailer))  The various seductions are fun in a smutty sort of way, but I was gratified to see the fall-out play out as well.  Many absurdists are content to undermine the middle class by punching below the belt, but I felt this film had somewhat more compassion.  Not only are the hypocrisies of this middle-class family exposed, but then they must live with it.  Interesting.

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

Saw Three Thousand Years of Longing, a fabulous film about a woman who researches storytelling who finds a genuine genie in a bottle while travelling.  The bulk of the film takes place in flashbacks as the genie tells his story of imprisonment and granting wishes.  It's a sumptuous and pretty film.  It reminded me of The Fall (which is one of my favorite films) only somewhat more upbeat.

The point of the film is to see strange, fairy-tale-like scenarios play out with courtesans and generals.  The visuals are eye-popping and, even when we spend some time back in England, near the end of the film, the visuals are still amped, brining us a heightened, fantastical feel.  I was most interested in the dynamic between the woman and the genie.  She's never really sure that he's not some kind of monkey's-paw style ironical granter of wishes.  Very often the wishes that are granted work out badly for the wisher or for the genie or both.

This delightful ambiguity resonates with an internet theory which didn't occur to me but which I think adds spice to the film: that the genie is a figment of the woman's imagination.  There are many connections between the characters in the genie's past and the woman's own life.  Not being able to tell if the genie is really real or not adds some level of magic to the film: that not only could we madden ourselves to the point of believing in magic, but it may benefit us in the end too!

An adorable film.