The Blood of a Poet (1932)

Saw The Blood of a Poet, a surrealist film directed by Jean Cocteau.  Being a surrealist film, it's kind of hard to describe the plot or to determine what counts as a spoiler, but the premise anyway is that an artist wipes off the mouth of a charcoal sketch only to find that the mouth has somehow transferred to the palm of his hand.  Later on I think he turns into a statue.

The film completely lost me.  It has the creative process and artistry on its mind, but I was too tired and confused to guess at the meanings.  There's many moments where the artist becomes the art or the art comes to malevolent life, and I feel these are straightforward metaphors about creation and about "finishing" a piece (at which point it gains its own sort of "life".)  As I say however, the film contains a lot of stuff and I for sure did not understand it all.  It was fairly brief however, so I didn't have to baffled for too long.

Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)

Saw Bill & Ted Face the Music, a sequel to Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey which I unabashedly loved.  This film is similarly goofy and shaggy-dog, but I gotta admit I didn't like it quite so much as the Bogus Journey.

It's a very fun kind of film, jumping wildly from gag to gag in a way that never gets cloying or tedious but always seems somehow energetic and fresh in an 80s film kind of way.  There's a series of sequences where they visit versions of themselves in the future which are delightfully dumb.  Similarly, this film introduces Bill and Ted's daughters who are (of course) winningly doofy clones of their fathers.  The film is slightly precious but exudes so much good dude energy that I can't bring myself to be critical.

Here are some small gripes: they assemble a musical super-troupe by going backwards in time and recruiting Jimi Hendrix and Mozart and such.  This rang a little false to me because, like, Jimi Hendrix's music was a reaction to and a partial subversion of Mozart's work.  I don't think Mozart would have been delighted and impressed by hearing a subversive remix of his music, he would probably have just felt insulted, or distracted by the electric guitar.  Another thing: the introduction of the daughters (and their large roles in the film) suggests an open door for more sequels which makes the movie seem a tad  artificial, perhaps even corporate.  These are all pet peeves of mine however which I trot out just to have something to say.  Really this was a fun and sweet film.

So, this was a fun film.  I don't know that I'll be recommending it to folks full-throated-ly, but it was a nice capstone on the series.

There's Always Tomorrow (1956)

Saw There's Always Tomorrow, a domestic drama about a man who works at a toy factory.  The film opens on his plans for a romantic birthday dinner with his wife falling through as all of his kids take priority over his life.  He happens to meet an old acquaintance who is played by Barbara Stanwyck so, y'know, this is not just any random lady.  They dine and laugh and the woman showers the man with the attention his family denies him.

This is an interesting film because it was made in the 50s.  Societal expectations of the time cannot be flouted but also patriarchal figures cannot be mocked, so how are we going to deal with this burgeoning scandal?  I won't give the ending away, but it's handled decently.  There's a great showdown in the finale which, although it may not be super believable, is a great source of shouting and women crying and so forth (all of which feeds me.)

The characters all come off more-or-less okay.  The wife of the main character is necessarily very dismissive of any attempt at communication.  I get that this was necessary for the film's plot, but damn that lady is dumb.  When her husband talks about losing a sense of adventure together the wife primly says "Well, a life of adventure sounds very exhausting." and then she reminds him  to come inside and close the balcony door, dear.  Ugh, this lady.

Anyway, the film is fun but somewhat mild.  It has some nice Hitchcockian scenes, where the man and his old coworker laugh and talk, always being overheard at just the wrong moment.  There's some tension there but not a lot.  Similarly, a lot of the film is pretty twee, so we never get into really dark territory.  Similarly, since the film was made in the 50s, there's little chance of getting anything really transgressive (yo but what if they formed a throuple?)  This film is sort of the best of a series of compromises, a middling film that's pleasant but is sort of stopped from being really surprising or exciting.  Ah well.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

Saw Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, a fairly stirring film set in the Planet of the Apes universe.  In case you're somehow unaware, the franchise was kicked off by a Twilight Zone-esque film showing a group of astronauts crash land on a planet ruled by apes where humans are unintelligent livestock animals.  The big twist of the original film was that this is earth after all and that some calamity has occurred which wound us up in this upside-down world.  The prequels (which this film is one of) then work to fill in that gap: how did we get from here to there?

The prequel films have been attempted twice: once in the 70s and now in the 2010s.  They have a tricky central problem to solve: the apes are going up against long odds as they overcome humanity but we know, from the original, that they do it.  How can we start the apes off as an underclass without making their eventual transition to the over-class very troubling?  The original 70s films could not square this circle: they idiotically made the intelligent apes into analogues for black people (being shipped from Africa and employed as maids and all) implying that some kind of race war was coming where the "apes" would rise up and subjugate all us "humans".  Unsurprisingly, the films struggled to cohere.  The modern films have no such trouble.  They draw from the Fallout series of games and from other post-apocalyptic stories. How will a sympathetic and well-meaning pluralistic society wind up subjugating one of its sub-sets?  Why by arrogance, laziness, and greed - the same as today.

The film mostly follows ape society as it begins to crystallize into a feudal state.  It evokes Apocalypto in parts, showing tribal communities being subjugated by a more complex, but also more stratified culture.  It's interesting to see these historical dramas play out, but the film is more interested in how to negotiate sympathy between humans and apes.  Humans are still around and apes are not certain about how to deal with them.  They are capable of great and useful things, but they are also hungry for power themselves.  Can we create a pluralistic society?  The question looms large over our real lives as well.  There's no red/blue analogues, but we are divided, and the players in the different camps regard each other with wary suspicion.

So okay, but did I like it?  Well, the film is solidly alright.  It has the gaudy, CGI-soaked feel of one James Cameron's Avatar films or of the Marvel franchise.  There's pages and pages of IMDB trivia devoted to the novel use of AI in the film's special effects.  You're not going to be very challenged by the film, even as it deals with some interesting topics.  It's an entertaining and pretty film and the emphasis is on those two items: prettiness and entertainment.  It's not bad, but it didn't blow me away.  It's a sort of by-the-numbers big box-office epic.  A sequel is planned, naturally, as there is always more of this story to tell: it has no firm point, so it can go on forever.

I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Saw I Walked with a Zombie, a sort of quaint film about a nurse who comes to work at a small island in Haiti or somewhere where they follow voodoo.  The nurse is supposed to care for the wife of one of the guys who runs the sugar cane plantation on the island.  This wife was once normal but is now shambling and vacant, almost (dare I say) zombie-like.  I didn't realize it, but the film is basically Wuthering Heights.  One of the characters even calls the Heathcliff character Byronic.

Anyway, the setting of the film gives it strong racial/colonial overtones.  I was convinced half-way through that the wife was meant to stand in for the decaying western values transplanted and enforced by the colonial settlers.  Like the wife, a once vivacious force is reduced to sleepwalking along, vacant and useless but venerated by the local rulers.  There's a late-film revelation that implies a more murky interplay with the locals.

Alas, the film doesn't really go in that direction, at least not explicitly.  Instead it's a somewhat more conventional horror film, with stalking black men menacing the main characters.  It's fairly lurid and is pretty entertaining, but also somewhat racist in what I feel is a strident and indifferent way.  In one early exchange a black man is driving the nurse to the manor house.  He speaks of his family being brought to this island in slave galleys. "Well it's certainly a beautiful place they were brought to!" the nurse smilingly says.  "As you say ma'am." the driver responds. "As you say." because what else can you really say to that?

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Saw I Saw the TV Glow, a film about a boy becoming obsessed with a young-adult TV show called The Pink Opaque.  The film is a sort of psychodrama/horror film, about losing oneself, but not in the way you'd think.

The film is most focused on the harmful and helpful parts of fandom.  On the one hand, the TV show gives this boy an escape from his difficult home life, friends, a sense of purpose and belonging, but the film also suggests that this all-consuming obsession may lead to increasingly insular beliefs and ideas about the world, ultimately even sucking the joy out of real life.

The plot of the film makes it seem like Beware the Slenderman, a story about a teenager who falls too deeply into a fictional world, but the fictional TV show within the film is clearly based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other such supernatural-themed teen shows, which have large real-life followings.  Not everyone who watched Buffy became unhealthily obsessed, many found role models that gave them a voice and a way of carrying themselves, a way to command respect when they felt least respected.  Particularly for folks who didn't perfectly fit it: gay men and women, struggling with their place in the world.

The director of this film is queer and I cannot help feeling that their life journey is a strong inspiration of this film.  It helps explain why the central TV show is given such a fair shake: yes this is an all-consuming fantasy, but sometimes you need to start with fantasy to get to reality.  I don't want to be reductive though: the film is not only about gender expression, but about the central struggle of going along and fitting in with the world vs going your own direction, following a lesser-traveled path, even at the cost of your own safety, comfort, and even life.

The film is a slow creep.  It feels more like a coming-of-age film than a horror film.  There's no jump scares, but there is the creeping realization that something deeper and stranger is going on.  The film plays with our expectations and also gives us lots of glorious, creepy imagery.  Special mention: that scene where the main character's father pushes him under the shower.  The main character screams, the soundtrack distorts, and the water is suddenly animated with ugly colored pencils before a smash cut to black.  Splendid!

L.A. Confidential (1997)

Saw L.A. Confidential (1997), a modern noir film with three major protagonists.  The main protagonist is this self-righteous boy-scout of a cop who is determined to do everything by the book.  He opens the film being denied a position in the homicide squad because of his unwillingness to bend the law to get results.  This conflict of justice vs vigilantism becomes the central preoccupation of the film.  As I said: it's a noir film.

The film was alright.  I was able to follow the plot okay which is always nice in a noir.  Sometimes they get so knotty that I completely lose track of who the characters are talking about.  Not so here - it was usually easy to keep track of what the characters know.  I did have a sneaking suspicion that I'd seen this movie before though, so that may be why.

Anyway, the film also spends a lot of time creating and exploding cover stories as different characters try to clear their names.  It made me think of post-modernism, where the narrative is considered to be more important than the reality of a situation.  In these modern times when objective truth is becoming more and more murky, perhaps we're due for a resurgence in noirs?

Anyway, I'm not that interested in the central theme of the film (playing by the rules vs taking the law into one's own hands) and this film did not succeed in hooking me on it either.  It did a good job of keeping me entertained and guessing as the film unfolded however.  It was a decent film.