101st post

Well, I posted on here a hundred times, and I'm not entirely satisfied with the results, so I'm going to retire this blog. ("retire this blog..." Is that even a meaningful thing to say?) The main purpose was that I wanted to get myself to write more about movies I was watching, since I was watching a lot of movies. I haven't been watching all that many movies lately... and then when I have watched movies that I've thought of things I might want to write about them (or other things besides movies), I've not got around to it, partly because I felt like "what's the point?" when I'd watched so many and skipped writing about them. There was something that felt productive about this for a while, and I think I want to try to get back at that, but in a more focused way. I do, eventually, want to have a career as a professor, a central aspect of which will be doing scholarly work--and I like that idea because I do like doing that, but I also think that in order to get better at things like that it would help to make writing about things I read/watch/listen to something that I do often. And seriously. But I won't be doing that here. Maybe, non-existent readers, it will be at this address.

Body of Lies

Someone could probably very easily make some kind of Orientalist reading of this movie. Actually, probably a lot of them. Like, how there's supposed to be this contrast between the way American intelligence operates and the way Oriental intelligence operates, where the Jordanian intelligence is controlled by one man, a guy who's almost a prince or royalty for all practical purposes, whereas American intelligence is run by normal guys, who have to run their whole thing literally while unpacking their kids from the mini-van for a soccer game. I think in the movie that whole "normal family" thing was supposed to highlight how this is all just a job for the Americans, their essentially employees or something... And I think, in some kind of vague sense, therefore "democratic," like how we are. Except, of course, Leo and Crowe seem to pretty much be doing whatever they want, beholden to nobody. I'm not sure if the movie was aware of that or not. I think not, but I might just not be giving it enough credit.

But, whatever, I don't feel like doing that. It was fun, and really the only thing that had me conflicted is that by using a "real" setting I'm pretty sure somebody thought they were making some kind of noble point. Which is too bad. Cuz that would be a hopelessly idiotic thing to think.

The only real problem, formally, was the end: Why have such an unrealistic ending when you could just as easily have given the audience an ending that was tonally identical but not factually problematic? I mean, you can't just quit being a super-deep spy by saying, "I quit" and then going to buy some at an outdoor market. Leo could have just as easily talked about quitting, and, like, meant it (Acting!) and everything, and done it all for the hot Jordanian nurse lady, and it would've been just as satisfying. Whatever.

Videodrome

A resounding yes. For some reason I've never completely trusted Cronenberg, and I don't know if Videodrome has totally convinced me about him... But I kind of can't believe I've never seen this movie before, or even heard very much about it. I had this weird feeling through most of the first half, a feeling that I don't recall every having before, but it was something like regret at never having seen this before. Strong regret. Like I wished I'd watched this on VHS back when I was in high school and used to stay up late watching movies on my little white TV/VCR. Strange...

Here's something solid: unlike most movies that rely on bending the 'reality' of the narrative, there's not any clear real/hallucination divide here. I love that. Also, James Woods sometimes grows a giant vagina in his stomach.

But then, I think why I can't completely trust Cronenberg is that despite all his grossness he still seems very much "high art" to me. Like he thinks he is and is committed to being high art. I can't say exactly why. But I just think that. Maybe it's cuz he's British. Is he British? I think he's British. Oh, never mind, I guess he's Canadian. Still, I bet he's very expensively educated and is proud of that fact and has spent his whole life almost exclusively around other expensively educated people. For some reason, I just don't think I like him, even though his movies are...

Well, this movie is seriously fucking good.

Sleepaway Camp

The most interesting thing about Sleepaway Camp, as I'm sure anyone who's seen it would agree, is the ending. But a lot of how effective the ending is has to do with the rest of the movie, and especially the tone. There's not a lot of sudden violence, even in the most directly presented murder scene--the sexy/snotty counselor getting stabbed in the shower. Instead, the movie mostly opts for a kind of subdued ambient feel, beginning with the slow tracking shots across the empty playgrounds, and most memorably (in my mind) the really excellently well done long shot of all the kids arriving at the camp, the huge pan from left, across the three buses, with the kids streaming across the shot as it pans right and down into the camp, the loud camp-director guy standing in the middle and shouting--but even here obviously not "acting," at least in any competent sense. The "classical" score adds to this part of the tone.

I'm not sure what to make of the bad acting as far as how it serves to help the movie--and maybe it just doesn't. No one has a boring performance, though. There are no flat line readings. But pretty much nobody here is in any sense a "good" actor. Certainly that works for the kids, who are all appropriately aged, and so their inability to actually act always reminds us that these are obviously real teenagers, quite often behaving exactly how "real" teenagers would behave at a camp like this. It's probably less effective, though, with the older "actors," who all seem to be at least trying to "act" in a way that only makes the viewer aware of how bad they are at acting. Sometimes it's quite funny, this way, but I don't think it really adds to the movie the way the non-performances of the kids and most of the counselors does.

And I think it's important that the campers are all real kids because this is a summer camp slasher movie, and it is very obviously a summer camp slasher movie, by which I mean that is not trying to be anything else (which seems important to me), and the viewer is likely (almost certainly) aware of certain expectations for this type of film--which almost certainly include sex being had by the campers, and of course nudity. But here, because the performers are kids, the viewers expectation of this, and more especially the viewers obligatory desire for this, is thwarted--nobody actually wants to (want to) see real naked teenagers. So the movie sets up a little bit of disgust for the viewer to direct toward him/herself, since we're trained to want the voyeuristic thrill of nudity in movies like this, but we're constantly being reminded that this would be a genuinely perverse desire in the case of this film.

So there's already this seed of frustration and disgust throughout the movie--which, I should add, is quite often actually really well done, especially the "good old summer camp" scenes with the boys horsing around, playing baseball, etc, but when it veers back into the set forms of slasher movie the viewer can't help but be a little uncomfortable about it. And then there's the big "shock" at the end, which is genuinely pretty shocking--but I think the most shocking thing about it is that it is suddenly so absolutely tasteless. There's at once this "shock" of the narrative "twist" that's completely dwarfed by the shock of how blatantly tasteless the actual reveal itself is. ... I'm not quite sure exactly how to express this. I think it's extremely interesting that the shock you feel at the end of the movie is really more about feeling disgusted at the movie itself, not actually a shock within the narrative of the movie. And that it's very specifically disgust at the tastelessness of it. But it's somehow not, I think, "anger" or anything like that being felt toward the fimmakers. You don't think they're jerks, or monsters, or something. Maybe crude... But it seems so intentional, and not sophomoric, so it's not even being let down by them. ... I think it's incredibly effective, and I think it's interesting that they're using this provoked reaction of disgust toward the movie itself as a way to slam home the ending... And of course there's also probably something about how the ending is finally nudity, but it's shocking male/ambiguous nudity that you don't get to enjoy at all. ... But it's not emotion the way you normally expect to feel emotion in watching a movie--it's not at all cathartic. It's not an emotional response directed toward or even projected from within the narrative of the movie, which is I think how emotion almost always works in movies. It instead provokes an emotional response in you, the viewer, directed not inside the movie but at the movie itself. ((And I think part of what's been interesting me so much about horror movies lately is that horror movies often are looking to provoke something more like this kind of emotional response, a response of viewer at movie rather than viewer within movie, or a kind of actual physiological response that isn't purely emotional, but I think that even in horror movies it's often still tied to the narrative of the movie, and it's nearly always perfectly cathartic, even at it's most tasteless.))

Pick Up on South Street

The McCarthy-era would've been an especially shitty time to live in this country. This movie had a decent thing going until everyone suddenly freaked out about the Commies, and suddenly fighting the Commies makes everyone (even the sleaze-ball abusive pickpocket the heroine inexplicably falls in love with) into a hero. Thelma Ritter's performance as Moe is pretty outstanding, on kind of a different level from all the other actors in the film. And I suppose Candy's love for Skip McCoy was supposed to be redemptive or something, but it seemed symptomatic of an abused woman who goes from one abuser to another. The movie was extremely well shot, though, with some really tight action. I just didn't buy the rosy, "We got those commies!" ending.

Forbidden Planet

Okay, so Leslie Nielsen looked weird when he was younger. Some people only get better looking with age, and I guess he is one of them. The movie itself was actually better than I thought it'd be, with a lot of really interesting-looking special effects that I assume must have been absolutely top-notch for the time it was made. Much like many modern sci-fi flicks, all the attention to the special effects obviously came at the expense of attention to everything else: script, acting, etc. There was a pretty (accidentally) hilarious attempt at comic relief by way of a subplot involving the ship cook and his love of Kansas City bourbon, but it was somewhat undermined by fact that the actor playing the cook seemed pretty bored by the whole thing, too. I guess they must've been trying to treat the spaceship crew the way they'd treat the crew of a navy boat in old movies or something. All the "romantic" interactions seemed bizarre, largely as a result of their exaggeratedly forced enactment of gender stereotypes of the day. There's also the whole fact that apparently Nielsen's character is supposed to be perceived as heroic and wonderful when he's actually a grade-A dick constantly trying to "subtly" advance himself, performing some pretty blatant cock-blocking by ordering his second-in-command to stay behind while he goes to grab some nookie with Morbius's daughter (which, hilariously, number two gushingly congratulates him for, saying, "She got the right man!"). The only confusing part about it was I couldn't tell if we were supposed to not realize how much a dick he was, or if that was all supposed to be part of why we thought he was heroic, or if the writer's didn't notice/care that he was such a dick...

Best line: "We're all monsters in our subconscious! That's why we have laws and religion!" said by Leslie Nielsen through gritted teeth as he tries to choke Morbius into unconsciousness.

Transsiberian

On my way out of the movie theater, I concocted a highly complex response to this movie, and then I voiced it to my companion, "It was good enough." I stand by that claim. Woody Harrelson is pretty delightful as that relentlessly upbeat brand of meathead, although, like always, he's still Woody Harrelson (which, as far as I'm concerned, is a reason to like him). Actually, the four main characters are all kind of stereotypes, and Harrelson was the only actor who sort of transcended his, although, like I said, I think that's mainly because even when he's shooting really hard at embodying a stereotype, he's still Woody Harrelson.

The only really impressive thing about the movie, though, is they how subtle they are about Kate Mara's character, "Abby." It's just a couple of throwaway lines here and there that didn't even register for me until well after I'd the movie was over, but after piecing a few things together, it's possible that her character is actually the most in control character in the entire movie, aside from that little slip up of being captured and tortured. I'm also not sure, at this point, how much Emily Mortimer's character "Jessie" comes to understand about Abby. There's actually about three different ways you can read their final scene together, and I'm not at all sure which is the most likely. What I like the most about this whole mystery is that it's not at all made the focal point of the climax. So, there's that.

Hellboy II, The Dark Knight, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

That screenplay isn't so bad that it really ruins anything, but it definitely is the weakest part of the movie. The strongest? The special effects! And I don't mean the way they were awesome in T2 or anything. All the mythical creatures throughout the whole movie were great, even good enough that they pretty much justify the movie. I don't know anything about how they were done, but Del Toro pretty much know what he's doing when it comes to this. I found myself thinking, "This guy should've directed the new Star Wars movies," mainly because he manages a bunch of creatures with as much charm as any I've seen since the original Mos Eisley cantina band, and all of that stuff was mainly what distracted from the thinness of the plots in the original Star Wars films. Also, Ron Perelman is pretty much perfect as Hellboy.

And there was just enough weirdness to the story that it stayed interesting, at least. It was totally baffling how the main baddy kept just appearing in random places, like suddenly on the roof of a building that Hellboy had scaled, but the unabashed lack of concern for plausibility w/r/t the dude's whereabouts almost ended up giving him some kind of vaguely symbolic function that made it forgivable (obviously, the fact that he delivered the most heavy-handed little speech to Hellboy about "they'll never accept you" and whatever helped in this respect). And the way nobody seemed overly concerned with the agents getting pretty brutally killed by the little magic termites at the beginning placed the film in a pretty different moral universe than we're used to seeing in big action/superhero movies.

I've never read the comic book, so I don't know to what extent this is just because of the comic book, but this seemed by far the least comic-book-movie-like of the big summer comic book movies.

The Dark Knight

Not much point in mentioning that this movie was good. I do think it's interesting that the Nola's have managed to make two insanely good comic book adaptations by taking exactly the opposite tactic of everyone else making comic book adaptions--by dialing up the (perceived) realism, even to the point of letting Batman stand in the middle of a brightly lit interrogation room and not framing him to look like anything other than a guy standing there in a bizarre suit. And it's always nice to see a big budget movie that's taken obvious care with the cinematography. It's just all so... stately, and huge, and crisp. The shot from the mayor's office (I think that was it) with the view of Gotham was one of the most beautifully photographed scenes I remember seeing in a contemporary movie.

Oh, and now people who loved the movie are getting mad that people are pointing out how much of the movie mirrors the administrations responses to the war on terror. Um, really, you didn't notice? I thought it was pretty obvious and obviously intentional, and kind of a little heavy-handed. The whole total surveillance part was the dumbest part of the movie, I thought, and seemed like it was only there as some kind of a bid for topical relevance. And I thought it was a little weak the way they let themselves off of the hook by having Morgan Freeman take his big principled stand that really amounted to, "well, okay... just this once," which is ultimately not much of a principled stance. Cuz, of course, Batman does use the total surveillance to catch the Joker, and it's the only way he could've caught him, and we're supposed to believe that just because he has it self-destruct that he's "aware" of the questionable morality of it? Why not just accept the fact that the Batman you've created isn't exactly a hero to be admired? That's kind of why he's so much more interesting as a character than almost all other comic book heroes in adaptation are.

Iron Man

Quite a ways on the other side of the "pure fun" spectrum from the Batman movie. Ultimately, the movie seemed like not too much more than a setup for something else, and it's small ambition served it quite well. It was good to see the amount of work Favreau let get done by his actors, though. They're really what pull the movie along. Downey's charm is through the roof, and he and Paltrow really make the sexual tension sing, which is pretty impressive considering the not-much they had to work with scriptwise. And Jeff Bridges is just fucking scary. Why doesn't he get to do cool stuff like this more often?

The weakest part of the movie is it's own rather clumsy bid for topical relevance. Super heroes only make sense when they're fighting super-villains. When Iron Man decides to try to take on terrorism, it just doesn't make much sense, because ultimately the problem is not one that can be handled with just better and more powerful weapons. The scene when Iron Man lands in the town and there's a brief break in the fighting while all the baddies have their hostages held in front of him, I was actually kind of excited for a second because I thought I saw some kind of realization of exactly that futility coming, but then he happened to have exactly the right super-powerful weapon. Oh, well. It got around to its super-villian eventually, and then it made more sense again.

The Incredible Hulk

Nothing in this movie made any sense. It was terrible. I never understood why people hated Ang Lee's Hulk so much. It was certainly way the fuck better than this piece of garbage. I'm just not even going to bother listing off everything that was wrong with it, but while I was watching, I found myself grumpily thinking things like, "WTF? Why is it suddenly raining?"

Wall-E

Before I went, my dad told me, "It's pretty boring. Nobody talks for like the first half of it." Conversely, most reviews mentioned this exact thing as a positive, as if the movie was very experimental for doing so and successful in its experimentalism. Then later while I was driving through Wyoming this guy on NPR was talking about how they made us connect to the robot by giving him toddler-like features, with big eyes and head, short stubby arms and legs, fat torso. I thought that was all old news, like who doesn't know about those tricks? Anyway, the movie, like all Pixar movies I've seen, was thoroughly enjoyable. I especially liked the no talking parts, which felt, far from being experimental, like a throwback to Charlie Chaplin, where the humor and delight is all in the movements alone, and the fact that they were able to accomplish this in animation seems worth celebrating to me. The robots all seemed more likeable and quirky and ultimately human than the actual humans, but of course that was on purpose. My favorite robot was the little scrubber robot, and his burst of excitement, like a giant blocky exclamation point, when he jumped off the path of the little line laid out for him. Utterly delightful.

Jurassic Park

I have no idea how many times I watched this when I was a kid, but I realized while watching it I pretty much had every line memorized. I knew exactly what everyone was going to say before they said it. Of course, that's also a function of the screenplay being little more than a collection of phrases. Nobody is even close to being a character, which wouldn't be a bad thing except that the screenplay obvious thinks that it's doing a lot of things to establish characters. Basically, it's just a downright awful screenplay. I'm not even going to get into it; it's just terrible on every level.

Which is kind of too bad, because Spielberg really was at one of his peaks when he directed this. The fluid way the whole first half of the movie flows from scene to scene is really well done, and as close to being subtle as probably would be possible in a blockbuster about dinosaurs. And once it gets down to business with the monsters, the action scenes are still seriously scary. I mean, I actually felt my heartbeat elevate. And despite the fact that none of the main characters ever actually gets killed or eaten, unlike in the new Indiana Jones movie, there is a serious feeling of danger--you actually feel like the main characters are genuinely having their lives threatened. Frankly, after reading the screenplay, Spielberg should've just cut all the dialogue and decided to revive the silent film. The dialogue is so bad it actually ruins the tension a number of times.

My only other complaint about the movie is that it's a little too efficient. I guess this was before it was okay to stretch a movie very much longer than two hours, but I really think the movie could've used some more time on the island before everything went to shit. I guess that's why the score goes nuts when they first see the Brachiosaurs: Spielberg was trying to milk every possible bit of emotion out of that scene because it was the only scene in which he got to really show the wonder of the island. I just don't think it quite worked, or I mean it doesn't quite manage to make up for the fact that it's the only scene like that.

Kung Fu Panda

Something about watching kids' movies makes you, an adult person (or at least, me), watch them even more closely for the moral message, because somehow it just feels like ultimately the point of a kids' movie is it's moral message. Maybe it's because I don't really think kids are complex enough to handle a movie without a clear moral message--although I think this reveals a certain bias on my part (that I'm a little uncomfortable about being aware of) toward judging movies based on their moral message. On that level, I guess Kung Fu Panda is fine. I saw the big reveal of what the Dragon Warrior scroll was going to be coming from pretty much the second it was set up as the ultimate prize. And from a critical perspective, I'm a little curious about the fact that after getting it Po is suddenly able actually do incredible Kung Fu. And I'm a little wary about how much this movie (and, I can't help it, "movies like this," whatever that actually means) just gloss over the amount of actual hard work required to become very good at some skill. But, whatever. This movie was probably the most genuinely fun kids' movie I've seen since Spy Kids (I'd count Pixar, but Pixar movies always go for the heartstrings at some point, and I've decided arbitrarily that is grounds to exclude them from this short list). Jack Black and a lot of the visual gags are really really funny, and the action sequences are just delightful. And it's really hard not to be completely won over by a movie when, during the climactic battle, there's a little girl behind you screaming "Go Panda! Go Panda! Go Panda!"

True Stories

For about ten or so years there, David Byrne was pretty amazing. He still manages to pull off some pretty great stuff (see "Empire" from Grown Backwards) although he never has and never will match the consistency of his output from then. True Stories is almost like "The Big Country" from More Songs about Buildings and Food turned hilarious and stretched out into a feature length movie. It pulls off the same feat of being trenchantly of "the blandness of middle America" while at the same time being just as critical of the reflexive nature that criticism has for coastal people (he pulls this off, I think, by having the song/movie be from the perspective of a narrator who is obviously not from the place he's describing (and I think, though I may be projecting my actual knowledge of Byrne onto this, just as obviously from one of the coasts) and having that narrator adopt a faux-naive tone--or he seems to at once know more than he's letting on and not to know nearly as much as a he thinks he knows), but the movie/song isn't just critical. Both manage to also be kind of celebratory of the very differences they exploit to lay their criticisms. Also, they're very funny and moving. Byrne was just kind of brilliant.

Indiana Jones

Crystal Skull & Raiders of the Lost Ark

Harrison Ford is old. I used to have fantasies, back when I watched The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles every week and Harrison Ford (i.e., Han Solo/Indiana Jones) pretty much defined the masculine ideal for me, back when I first heard there were plans to make another Indiana Jones movie even though Ford would obviously be to old, that they'd make it a different kind of Indy movie, like where Jones is now an old tenured professor, way way smart and cunning and everything but just not able to keep up with all the kinetic action of his younger self, who either has to guide some younger hotshot through some ordeal or has to actually outwit instead of out-athleticize his nemesis. Instead, Crystal Skull is just one giant piece of denial of age. None of the people involved in the original are still up for this sort of thing, and yet here they are trying to do it all over again, in precisely the same way, except this time Jones actually marries the hot Ravenwood chick, happy to take on the full responsibilities of adulthood only about forty years too late, rather than leading her on and leaving her so he can have a new blond bombshell in the next flick. Crystal Skull is fun enough while you're watching it, so its not as complete a failure as the Star Wars prequels, but there's not really much at all to admire about it.

Rewatching Raiders for the first time in I-have-no-idea-how-long, I was surprised at how much there is actually to like about how it's done. It's just a flimsy a fantasy as it should be, but Spielberg really knew how to put together a movie back then, and Harrison Ford actually had the charisma to pull off his non-character. One thing I noticed: just like the original Star Wars, a lot of the strength of the story here is how it is constantly subtly implying a back story that's never quite articulated, so the viewer gets to supply a backdrop that's just as operatic as he or she wants it to be. With Star Wars, that backstory is really what captured my little imagination, even more than the story of the films themselves; they always felt to me like the final conclusion of this huge, impossibly morally complex and sweepingly dramatic, decades-long story that was never actually presented to me. Then when Lucas did decide to present that, I felt betrayed, literally feeling like, watching Revenge of the Sith, "That's not how it happened!" With Raiders, that back story is not as much the point, but it is what allows us to flesh out Jones as a character--since there's not really a whole lot of character development going on here. And how could there be? Like a full fourth of the movie is taken up with that over-the-top chase scene, then there's the opening action set piece, the fight in the bar, the fight in the streets of Cairo, etc. etc. Really, the only time in this movie Harrison Ford is anything more than a stunt man with a few lines are the scenes at the university, and all we learn about here is that he's smart and sassy and likeable. It's the off-hand references to his past, the way characters are all people he's known before and has a history with, that allow us to buy him as a real person. At least a little bit.

Of course, even still, he's not a real person at all. One of his defining lines early in the movie is when he tells Marcus he doesn't believe in "superstitious mumbo-jumbo" or something like that, w/r/t the Ark's power. Of course, at the end of the film he is presented with proof of exactly that, the type of thing--I mean, we're talking actual experiential proof of the existence and power of God, here--that would through a thinking atheist like Jones into, at the very least, a bit of personal crisis. But he's not even phased. He's just happy to get out of it alive with this hot lady from his past. So maybe in the next couple of movies he's more willing to believe that weird things happen sometimes, but he's certainly not a man who's come as close as anyone ever to seeing the face of God and surviving. He experiences all of this religious mythology (and now pseudo-new-age alien stuff) pretty much the same way we, the audience, do--as little more than excuses for some spectacularness.

So why is Crystal Skulls so much less satisfying than Raiders? First of all, I think some of it is all the CGI action pieces. In Raiders, as spectacular as it was, there was still at least something of a sense of real danger, and I have to assume that at least some of that was because they were limited to filming things that a stunt man partly had to actually do. Shia LeBouf swinging through the trees like Tarzan isn't even plausible the way that everything Jones does in Raiders is at least plausible. Plus, when the opening sequence concludes with Jones being blasted a few thousand feet inside of a refrigerator that he promptly stumbles out of, not even dazed, we know we're in a world in which Jones is now essentially indestructible. But the other thing, I think, is that Spielberg and Lucas tried to put some character development into this movie--which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, I think, except it's so shallow. In Raiders we accept that Jones is essentially impervious to character development, so it doesn't really bother us when none of it happens. Here, Jones is treated as more of a character, who's supposed to learn things and, you know, develop, which he kind of does by marrying Ravenwood at the end and kind of trying to suddenly develop fatherly feelings for LeBouf--except that this is the same Jones who, as I mentioned above, survived the presence of the Lord and now has just learned about the existence of trans-dimensional beings, and all he can think about is belatedly doing the right thing by his woman? By trying to give Jones a little depth and failing so spectacularly at it, Spielberg and Lucas force us to notice how kinda dumb and shallow Jones is as a character, and he's instantly a lot harder to love the way we love the unabashedly shallow Jones from Raiders.

Thieves' Highway

The DVD for this movie contains a ridiculously charming ten-minute interview with Jules Dassin. I watched the interview before the movie, which was maybe a mistake if I wanted to have an "unbiased" viewing or something, but it was hard not to like this movie after watching that.

The Naked City was really good, but a lot of that had to do, I think, with its central gimmick being so interesting. With Thieves' Highway, there's nothing like that that could end up being seen as a weakness. It's just a good movie, with the exception of a few scenes that seemed a little superfluous; and here the interview especially helped because it explained why those scenes ended up in the movie in the first place.

Richard Conte plays Nick Garcos, the son of a California truck driver who has just returned home at the beginning of the movie. He finds out his dad's legs were lost in a trucking accident, probably because he got screwed by a San Francisco produce mogul named Figlia. Nick vows revenge, hooks with another trucker, buys a bunch of apples and trucks them north to San Francisco, where not really everything works out quite as he'd hoped. I was thinking for a minute how it was interesting that the movie has a very noir setup, but in place of the usual criminal underworld the action all takes place in the cut-throat world of produce shipping, but then I realized that, of course, that was the point. Apparently Dassin didn't get blacklisted for nothing (I mean the whole blacklist thing was stupid, but Dassin's got his communist heart emblazoned proudly on his sleeve here). The ordinary capitalist system that leads to you finding your fruit in the supermarket is here shown to be just as underhanded and bluntly evil as the criminal underworld, full of double-crosses, exploitation, and outright physical intimidation and violence.

Which is what made the tacked climactic scenes so interesting. I mean, they just don't work if your trying to evaluate the movie from a purely aesthetic sense, since they're just not done as well as the rest of the movie and they're thematically so different. But when the cop's head is suddenly full frame and he's yelling directly at you, the viewer, "You shouldn't take the law into your own hands! That's our job!" well, that's actually really interesting, I think. It's like... well, I can't think of any really good things to say that it's like, but it's kind of awesome. It was obviously an attempt by the studio to try to undo the "damage" the rest of the movie might have done, but by making the point so clumsily and overbearingly it kind of just goes further toward undermining traditional ideas of authority. I really was annoyed when the scene happened while watching the movie, but thinking back on it I actually think it makes the movie loads better.

Also, just like in The Naked City, the villain is ultimately more compelling than any of the heroes, for whatever reason, although it's not quite so pronounced here. And the prostitute with a heart of gold gives him a run for his money. If a filmmaker wanted to see how to do subtly sexy, s/he could do worse than to watch the initial scene when she takes Nick back to her room, and when she turns away from the camera to reveal that the top buttons on the back of her blouse are undone. I've seen whole movies that were based around trying to be sexy that didn't even come close to matching that one scene.

Dark Star

Okay, if someone had said to me "John Carpenter is a great filmmaker," I would have accepted it. I mean, the guy pretty much invented the American '80s psyscho/slasher horror movie with Halloween in 1978, and on top of that he made The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13 & Escape from New York, and I'd have accepted those as enough evidence. I might not have made the argument myself. I'd have accepted, sure, but ultimately I'd have thought that he was in some important way a pretty limited filmmaker.

Dark Star is the type of movie I wouldn't have thought he was capable of--or probably more accurately, interested in--making. The movie is basically a small, slo, subtle movie a group of four guys alone on a tiny spaceship who shoot around the galaxy in search of planets to blow up. They're searching for planets with irregularities in their orbits that they blow up in order to prevent the future possibility of the planets careening off their orbits and, I guess, becoming dangerous. That's really all the explanation there is in the movie of the overall setup. Sure it's a sci-fi flick, but it's also a comedy, and the type of comedy that I guess I'd have to call existential. That said, it's also ridiculously entertaining. Nearly every scene is hilarious, and they're all funny in different ways. There's the obviously Douglas Adams influenced climax with the talking bomb that is persuaded not to explode through the use of "phenomonology", the long slapstick sequence of trying to feed the alien (hilariously just a beach ball with clawed feet), the sequence of Pinback's video confessional/journal, the conversation where Pinback explains that he's not really an astronaut but just happened to be wearing the wrong suit when the spaceship left along with the absolutely bored reactions of the other crew members, and then the brilliantly boring sequences of the three astronauts sitting together in the control room and nodding their heads to the countdown. Of any John Carpenter movie I've seen, Dark Star easily has the best screenplay for him to work with.

I think what surprised me most about this movie as John Carpenter movie was that it doesn't ever rely on anything sensational. Not that I ever think the sensational in any of his other movies is a weakness, because part of what made him so good was how all-out sensational he went, but it's particularly impressive to see him handle something so thoroughly non-sensational so deftly.

Aliens

Confession: I've hated this movie for a long time. The reason was based on some kind of resentment for Aliens not being as good a movie as Alien. But, when I saw that Aliens was the middle part of a triple feature, between Explorers and Dark Star (a movie I knew absolutely nothing about), I was sold.

I still think Aliens is nowhere near as good as its predecessor, but it's kind of a pointless observation because Aliens is not interested in being the same kind of movie much at all. Aliens just wants to be an action movie, flat-out. sci-fi action, sure, but mainly action. It might have been one of the reasons that science fiction has become mostly just a sub-genre of action movies, but it does it so well that it's hard to blame everyone from trying to copy it. (It certainly looks easier to copy than something like Alien, although I'm not sure that's true.)

The thing that really did disappoint me about the movie this time, though, was that it really looked like it was shot for TV. The framing was pretty much all set up to be easily cut in half of a square set, and so many frickin' closeups! I have no idea if the foreknowledge of the video market actually had anything to do with why it was shot this way (although it seems likely enough), but in any case I was bored enough with so much of the cinematography that I started hypothesizing reasons for why it looked that way.

What it especially excelled at, though, and probably a lot of why it was so popular, was essentially the movie version of a splash page. Watching this with a lively audience really hammered it home to me: there are so many places where the movie basically pauses for you to look at how awesome something is and for you to scream out in acknowledgment of the awesomeness. And that is just fun.

Also, I was a little put off at first by Bill Paxton gung-ho dumbass character, especially after getting so used to him on Big Love, but his performance grew on me pretty strongly after a while. He pretty much took the loudmouth dumbass as far as it could go. He was pretty much the incarnation of that archetype in this movie.

Explorers

I honestly have no idea how many times I've seen Explorers, but it actually may have only been once before last Friday. I remember going through a period where I was obsessively trying to find it to watch it again, but this was pre-Netflix, and for whatever reason I never tried to buy it off Amazon or something.

Regardless, I'm pretty sure that the last time I saw it I was like eight or nine, but I still remembered so much of it. Kind of amazing. I don't think I can think of a single other movie that I remember so much of that I watched that long ago. Watching this movie might have been the first time I ever self-identified as a nerd in a positive way. That's probably a lot to do with how well I remembered it.

And I did remember that the whole trip to meet the aliens was pretty freaky because the aliens were so frickin' weird and completely unlike what I would've expected the aliens to be like, and I definitely remember how uncomfortably sexual the female alien was, arousing all sorts of disturbing and conflicted feelings in my little pre-pubescent boner. I wasn't really prepared, though, for how genuinely great that whole sequence actually is! Whoever edited all the video for that section deserves some pretty serious kudos.

And then there's the whole pointless/pointlessly disturbing subplot with the old helicopter pilot. I think as a kid it might've made some kind of sense to me and I would've been very empathetic toward that guy--which might actually speak to how well Joe Dante knows kids, I guess--but as an adult, that guy was way beyond sad and not at all empathetic. He was frickin' creepy, especially the way he manhandles poor Ethan Hawke in his driveway. No way should that guy be flying helicopters!

The Naked City

The main gimmick of this movie is the narrator, who maintains his kind of breathy 1950's "Aw shucks" attitude throughout the whole film, even while the story is at its darkest noir moments. It really holds up pretty well as a device, giving the movie a tone that I don't think I've seen in any other movie. The closest thing I could think of would be the scenes from Natural Born Killers with the laugh-track and Rodney Dangerfield, but this is so so much better than that. I think Stone was pretty much mocking the sit-com tone in those scenes (it's been such a long time since I saw that movie), but I don't think Dassin was strictly going after satire with the voice-over in this movie.

The only other Dassin movie I've seen before this was Rififi, which is one of the most amazing movies I've ever seen. I was expecting some kind of flair here, after I realized it was the same director, but there's really not a whole lot in this movie. That's probably necessary. I think if too much of it had looked like a really well-shot movie, it would've undermined the thing it had going with the voice-over guy. I do, though, wonder if it was intentional that the most compelling actor in the whole movie doesn't show up until the end: the killer. He actually managed to convince me they'd somehow got the wrong guy, despite the obvious impossibility of that.

And what was up with Niles's smokin' hot housewife?! Was she supposed to represent some kind of extremely subtle critique of late-forties societal sexism (because structurally she doesn't occupy a position that's supposed to be sexualized on the screen, but, seriously, she sure made me feel sexualized...)?

Ultimately, though I did want the actual noir part of the story to be darker and more intriguing. The actual plot itself just wasn't up to par with the device built around it. Also, I think the photography of the city was supposed to be impressive, but I don't think I know enough about the context or about the way cities were normally photographed in movies at the time, because I didn't see a whole lot that I felt impressed by, other than the final chase scene and the killer's ascension of the bridge tower.

Vertigo

It was pretty awesome to get to see this at the Castro. I should've known, I think, that this was filmed in San Francisco, but I didn't. I guess that made me enjoy it even more, since I was watching it at my favorite place in the whole city.

Hitchcock fuckin' knew how to make movies. It's as simple as that. And this one is probably about as perfect as they get.

My five favorite things:

1. The opening shot, with the extreme closeup of the ladder rung, the city all blurry behind it, and then the fairly quick pull out until it's just a small part of the overall shot, and then the criminal guy, the least important person in the whole movie, is the first guy we see.

2. The animation in the dream sequence. It surprised me, but it was beautiful.

3. The opening credits. I didn't get to watch the whole of 'em, but what I did see was astonishing. Possibly the best title sequence ever. No joke.

4. Midge literally painting herself into the position of object of desire, since no way would James Stewart ever actually do that himself. This was all really transparent Freudian stuff, but done so well that all you can do is just applaud it.

5. The whole introductory sequence of Madeline/Carlotta. That should be studied in school the way they make you study the Odyssey.

Conquest

I want to say something more than that was ultimately kind of boring. But this movie frankly had no reason to be as boring as it was, so I'm kind of mad at how boring they managed to make it. The music was almost worth it, though. Hard to beat late-seventies synth stuff, especially when it's trying to sound all mysterious. But with some really great beats in there, as well, almost like whoever made the score had been sent back in time from the mid-nineties to show the fools some beats. I bet whoever did the score here hated Vangelis.

Oh, and the glowing bow with its light arrows. Well, okay, so it was actually lame, but it looked fookin' grand! So much prettier done this way than it would've turned out done by some discount CGI time, which is what would happen if this movie were made these days. I just like the fluidity of light they got with the old method of drawing right on the frame (I think that's how they did it...). Likewise, the black arrows from the... um... well, apparently the two dudes got attacked by some kind of plant? That hummed and shot hundreds of arrows of pure darkness right above their heads? Really pretty great to watch, though.

Okay, I take it back, this movie did pull some things off. How, though, did they manage to get Monty Python's Flying Circus to lend them all their hermit/cavemen to populate the countryside?

Rarely does it bother me when a plot is completely stupid. In fact, I generally would say, at least with a movie like this, that the stupider the better. But I did find myself wondering if whoever wrote this movie actually thought the plot was not stupid. Because it was absolutely moronic. And it wasn't even fully realized moronicness. It was just like this half-assed moronic idea that I hope they were making up as they shot, because if they thought about it at all then they deserve to have their brains gnawed out of their severed heads by a naked chick wearing a bronze chick-mask over her head, which was actually about the coolest idea in the whole movie.

Alucarda

I felt like it probably would have helped me enjoy this movie a little more to have had some kind of stake in the Catholic Church. Which is not to say at all that I didn't enjoy it, but that the movie was really serious in a way that most movies this ridiculous are not serious, and ultimately I don't think the serious aspect of it really got to me.

I mean, I really did appreciate the way all this really fucked up iconography from was being manipulated, cuz I think stuff like that is pretty interesting. And as far as pure blood and gore and satanism and nudity: totally satisfactory. Another thing about all that: with almost all horror movies that contain nudity it is really obviously there as fulfillment of the purported viewer's desire. That is especially the case with exploitation films. In Alucarda, though, I think Moctezuma was trying to do something more with the nudity. What exactly that was, I'm not really sure. But it didn't seem to just be an answer to the demand of the audience that the chicks' clothes get removed.

Oh! And the scenes with the nuns and the priests flagellating themselves were pretty frickin' rad. And the little switcharoo the movie manages, where it seems really obvious that we're supposed to be go along with how totally messed up and evil the church leaders are, that there's this free/subversive aspect to the satanic girls and it's evil that the church leaders are trying to oppress that and only couching it in terms of good vs. evil, but then as soon as the burned chick's body came back to life and priest guy has to hack away at it with a giant machete, and suddenly you realize you have no actual choice but to side with him.

Finally, I'm sad the chick who played Alucarda was apparently not in much else. She was totally compelling in a way that I think is pretty rare in cinema, in that she wasn't necessarily attractive and you didn't (or at least I didn't) want to be around her or whatever, but I just wanted to keep watching her. She really wasn't even a good actress, I think. She was just compelling in a very real way.

The Majorettes

Well, it satisfied my desire to watch a slasher flick. Really bad acting, although not atrociously so. Oddly enough, though, actually a pretty good screenplay, and well done cinematography throughout. I'm not sure if I've actually ever seen a small non-suburban town shot so well, and there were a few moments of actually kinda exciting framing, especially the marching band scene. And the typeface of the opening titles made me really happy, as well. I wasn't expecting all that.

Maybe in a different mood I would've been more pleasantly surprised when about 2/3 of the way through it suddenly turned into a Rambo style action flick, complete with shirtless gun-toting guy, but really I just didn't want it to stray from the crazy-psych-with-a-knife-randomly-murdering-majorettes theme. Oh, well. I'm glad I watched it anyway.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

It's hard after watching 12:08 East of Bucharest, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and now this--it's hard not to assume that Romanians are just built for making movies, or something. All of these movies--made by different people--are so good, and so good for a lot of the same reasons.

I put off watching this movie for a long time, clogging up my Netflix account pretty badly, mainly because of it's length (two and a half hours) and how bleak I assumed it'd be. I mean, did I really want to sit down and watch two and a half hours of a guy dying? Awesome... I finally put the movie in but started out by only giving it half my attention, I think kind of as a way to prevent myself from becoming overly attached to the character, but by the time an hour had gone by it had my full focus. It's done with much less of a flourish, ultimately, than 4 Months was, but it's no less perfectly crafted. Where are these Romanian directors finding all these amazing actors? They're all so good at seeming like their not acting--I don't mean just that they're good at playing their characters, but that they really don't even seem to be putting on a performance ever. Part of that, I'm sure, is a trick of directing. I wonder if it helps that I don't speak Romanian? Maybe they'd sound a bit more like amateur line readings if I spoke the language? Don't know.

I wound up thinking this movie is a lot like Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, both because of the obvious thematic similarity, but also in the way story not only worked in spite of the climax being the first thing you know about, but actually made use of that fact throughout the telling/showing of the story. Although, the movie seems nowhere near as semi-biblically fatalistic as GM's novel. We don't sense that some external power is pushing everything toward the climax of Mr. Lazarescu's death, rather that... I don't know how to finish that sentence. It's certainly a failure of a system, but it's also just the way minor everyday dramas can end up taking up yr whole existence and prevent you from really weighing properly the importance of what's happening around you.

Doomsday

I really wanted to like this movie. And in the end, I think, I did. Sure, the whole thing is just a series of blatant rip-offs of Escape from New York, The Lord of the Rings(?), and The Road Warrior, in that order, and nothing new is brought to the table w/r/t any of them, but at least they chose the right movies.

I liked that this movie was really in love with its gore, and wanted you to enjoy it as well: it was never trying to gross you out or make you feel bad about it. And, and, and... really, there is a lot here to like, if you like these kinds of movies.

But: wtf was up with the music? The only times the music in this movie succeeded at all were the parts when it was blatantly copying John Carpenter's score from Escape from New York, and it wasn't doing that enough. But what made them think the appropriate music for the cannibal carnival scene should sound like Huey Lewis and the News with more distortion? Really, the music was about the only really horribly wrong step in this movie. Also, the movies this movie was sourcing everything from had waaaaaaaay the fuck better cinematography, and I couldn't help but be disappointed after just about every pointless cut. What's the point of having two chicks have a swordfight when you don't even get to see the fight because there's a .66 second time limit between cuts? The blinking of the severed head that the fight culminated in, though, (nearly) made up for it.

I'd like this movie to become a hit just so it could maybe lead to more ridiculous movies like it with a real passion for ridiculous movies, but I don't think that's gonna happen... too bad.

10,000 BC

At least this movie manages to be kinda funny, albeit completely without charm or likability.

What, though, is the point of calling it 10,000 BC and sort of pretending that it's taking place in the ancient past on our planet, when nothing about it makes any sense if you assume it is supposed to have anything to do with the past of our planet (the holes are innumerable, so I won't even bother...). This movie is really just a Fantasy movie, but by calling it 10,000 BC and then having the climax take place at the pyramids, it's like a really clumsy way of avoiding being just a fantasy movie. I guess then they're hoping to get people to come who wouldn't go to something that is obviously a fantasy movie. Except, even then, I'm not sure the people making this movie even realized that they've just made a really bad and generic fantasy movie...

It's kind of amazing, though, to see how bad Hollywood can be at making bad movies. They overdo the seriousness through the whole movie and as a result bleed out every possibility there was for a charming ridiculousness. How can you make a movie called 10,000 BC and not realize that the one thing the movie actually has to have is some charm? I guess they used it all up on the title...

The Other Boleyn Girl

So so so so so so fucking stupid.

I don't really know why I went to this movie, actually. But it sure sucked. Everything, literally every single thing, about this movie was bad.

Storywise, on a scene-by-scene basis, it was basically the equivalent of a two-year-old telling you a story: "This happened and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened," with not really any sense of meaningful connections between events beyond chronological. Then, they way it was photographed was completely sloppy and inconsistent. Sometimes, at completely random moments, the camera would be still and characters placed in such a way that it was like they were acting out a tableau; other times, at completely random moments, the camera would whoosh around with that sweeping "historical" whooping you see sometimes; once the camera even came down from the clouds onto a castle scene--again, randomly, for no apparent reason, and completely jarringly since nothing like that had ever happened in the movie before or after, and it wasn't like the scene called for some kind of "god's-eye-view" any more or less than other scenes. Seriously, the people who made this movie just had no fucking clue what they were doing.

The one thing that was potentially cool in the movie was the scene when Princess Amidala wakes up in the middle of the night, lifts up her covers and then pulls this absolutely ghastly horrified face--and it's only cool if you just ignore the context around that scene, which I did, for my own amusement. Other than that, the movie, which already was playing it pretty loose with history from what I understand (and, normally, that type of thing wouldn't bother me, except that with how crappy the script was the only reason I could think of for this movie to justify its own existence would be its portrayal of history, and they didn't even get that part right) totally missed an opportunity for a pretty great scene, when Amidala and that attractive british kid from that shitty Beatles musical thing, brother and sister here, were gonna do it to save Amidala from having to tell the king she'd lost the baby, and then they chickened out--absolutely the movie should have had the scene where british fellow's crying and Amidala's crying and they're faking sex, so for that one moment the actors on the screen would be acting out exactly what it feels like to sit through the movie: having crying sex with your sister.

So many stupid and clumsy things:

-The Boleyn's mother is not really a character but is obviously a mouthpiece for a contemporary semi-feminist critique of the society of the day--semi-feminist because the things she rails against or just so obviously evil according to our standards, so it's only feminist insofar as the idea that it's bad for men to whore out their daughters for political gain is feminist.

-I actually laughed out loud toward the end, when the movie goes into that mode where there are static shots of characters along with words at the bottom of the screen explaining what happened to them, and there's a shot of The Hulk (King Henry) brooding at an empty table, and it says, "Henry's decision to split from the Catholic Church changed the face of England forever." AAAAhahahaha!

Be Kind Rewind

(3/12/08)

My favorite thing about Be Kind Rewind, and I oddly enough haven't seen this mentioned in any reviews, is how much it actually manages to feel like the type of movie you might have randomly picked up from an old video store, the way that wandering around in a well-stocked video store always made it feel like there were just an infinite number of movies out there and if you were in the right kind of mood you could just pick up some movie because it had an interesting box, and it didn't really matter if it was good or not, it was just that sort-of discovery... or something... Anyway, because video stores really only thrived like that for a certain time period, and because when I was in high school their back catalogue consisted largely of movies from the mid-eighties to the early-nineties, the type of movie that I associate with that video-store discovery is from that time period, and not exactly indie but low-profile enough that I hadn't really heard of it. Somehow, this movie was a really well-done evocation of that. From the not especially well-thought-out characters who make perfect sense within the logic of the movie but who absolutely could not exist outside of it, the one bit of "spectacular" special fx (when Jack Black is zapped by electricity from the power station), etc. Which is not to say that it's like a B-movie by any means, but still that a lot of the charm of this movie is in its sloppiness, or maybe casualness.

And of course there's the pure joy of some of the visual hijinx of Gondry, like the the perfectly camouflaged suits of Black and Mos Def when they're breaking into the power station, and the cardboard gangster cars in the homemade bio of the jazz legend guy.

Let's see... I also really enjoyed that the "villain" in this movie is nothing more than the manager of a local DVD store, who seems to have some unexplained history with the heroes, a history that isn't explored at all or even explicitly commented on in any way. Again, I guess, it was just a charming sort of sloppiness. Not the same sloppiness of a good B-flick, not the same annoying sloppiness of something like that shitty Boleyn Girl movie...

No Country for Old Men

I went to this again to try to get 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days out of my head. To no avail. Nevertheless, I at once was more impressed by this movie the second time and didn't enjoy it quite as much. I was more impressed, I think, because the first I watched I had the book so freshly in my mind so I was mostly trying to compare scenes to the book (which I believe it compared favorably in virtually every respect). I enjoyed it less just because 4 Months kind of changed the size of the scale.

Javier Bordem and Tommy Lee Jones, especially, were way more impressive to me this time. The first time I thought Javier pretty much let his haircut do his acting for him, but, no. He nailed the part. And he totally inhabited that haircut. That one shot, basically at the beginning of the movie, like the clamactic scene of the prologue it was I'd say, where the Coens' really go for their only flourish of the movie, with the camera slowly spinning down from above while Javier makes probably the creepiest face anyone with a normal face has ever made, some sort of inexplicable combination of... shit... I dunno... evil joy, menace, anger... it's both completely unrecognizable as a facial expression and perfectly transparently expressive, the only indication ever of any kind of interiority on Chigurh's part.

Anyway, the movie's also a lot funnier the second time. Especially Tommy Lee Jones's ultra dry line readings. Best actor worthy? I mean, I guess if you're not gonna even nominate Casey Affleck for either of his incredible part this year (see Gone Baby Gone, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), which I guess obviously you're not since Best Actor is an old man's award, then... OK.

* * * * *
(3/12/08)

It's occurred to me that I maybe shouldn't be giving the Coens too much credit w/r/t a certain aspect of this movie. When I first saw this I was comparing a lot of it to the book, and the most significant part of what I thought they changed seemed to be the speech the old uncle gives Sheriff about how there's always been evil the world. I saw that speech as being something of a rebuttal to the book's having never made that gesture, and letting Sheriff get away with a lot of unexamined assumptions about how much worse the world is now than it was. So, what I was thinking yesterday or the other day is that this rebuttal, that, "No, actually, the world has been full of evil all along," isn't that much more useful of an ideological stance. Mainly because, there's the specific part in the book at least where Sheriff mentions some survey done of school kids in the forties and then repeated at a time approximately contemporary to whenever this movie's supposed to take place, the difference between the answers being really telling: the survey asked what their primary worries were, and in the forties one it was grades, the opposite sex, whatever; in the contemporary one it was guns, crime, drugs. Obviously, there's a lot of room for holes and drawing conclusions from just that brief a description of the survey, but the major point is still valid, and can't really be explained away by "well, the world's always been full of evil." And what that answer really does is push just as strongly against an actual analysis of the situation as does the original idea from the book that world is just going straight to hell. There are actual causes for the changes in the answers to that survey, and those reasons are material and have causes of their own and are a part of reality that can actually be effected by public policy and other things. Just saying that "the world's going to hell" or "no, there's always been evil," both of those ideas just make that downturn (or some other better word) a fundamental part of reality, not something that can be changed by actual people living in the world. And so they're both bad ideas, I'd say.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

One of the best movies I've ever seen. Everything the movie tries to do it does perfectly.

It's almost too bad that Mungiu chose to center the movie around an abortion, since abortion is one of those things that is just an "issue" and that is almost impossible for people to actually talk about in any truthful way because it's so hard to see past the "issue." It's not "almost too bad" because it's in any way a flaw of the movie; in fact, among the many many amazing things about the movie is the fact that it is a movie about an abortion--and the trouble that surrounds having an abortion in a place that it's illegal--that actually manages to not be about "the issue" of abortion (that is to say, the characters and the plot and stuff never once come even close to becoming allegorical). It's just too bad that because the movie is about an abortion, so many people will probably end up not seeing it or not being able to see past the abortion issue to the actual movie. It's one of the most incredible movies ever made by human people.

I'm still kind of in awe right now.

* * *
(next day)

I had the same type of feeling after seeing this movie that I first identified after reading Endgame by Beckett, which is that the subject matter of the movie is really pretty depressing, and the whole move makes you feel very tense (Robin said, "I just need a drink!" while we were on the bus after the movie, and a random other bus passenger then said, "Did you just see that 4 Months movie, too?"), but despite that and what most of the reviews I've read have referred to as the "bleakness" of the movie, I left feeling totally exhilarated, and that exhilaration was just about how incredibly made the movie is. It's like this exhilaration about the sheer amazingness of human creation, and when it's this good it really trumps any level of bad shit (ie, existential angst, trying to obtain an abortion in Ceausescu's Romania). I mean I feel like it actually completely overcomes it. In some way. Or something. I don't know. This movie is just frickin' good, though. I'm still thinking about how perfect random shots were, and there really wasn't a single one that wasn't perfect. God. Wow. Shit.

* * *

I just got a new high score in Jetman! 2479! While I was playing, I was thinking about this movie and how a lot of other movies that I would group into a "like this one" category, largely based on the really long takes, which isn't really an especially useful category, but I was thinking that a lot of movies that I would group into a "like this one" category, like movies by David Gordon Green and Lost in Translation and Cuaron's movies, that a lot of the complaints about these movies is how "nothing ever happens," in them, or how they generally also avoid a tight plot, seemingly as a part of their adherence to greater realism or something. Which I would sort of agree with although it's not really a "complaint" in my book. But one of the things that was so incredible about this movie was how it was a "like this one" movie (duh!) that also was super tightly plotted. The plot was done so well because it never felt like the plot was driving the movie along, but it was definitely very tightly plotted. Reviews say almost Hitchcockianly so, which just makes me realize I need to watch more Hitchcock.

And also about the absence of music, which never felt like a device at all, it just seemed like it didn't need music, and I had this idea that most other movies that don't use music totally use it as a device although I can't really think of any good examples except No Country for Old Men, and not that that's bad to use no-music as a device, but that it's impressive to use it not as a device. Although maybe it still is. Anyway, that scene of blondie sitting at the chair and not saying anything, after the dude left, that went on for quite a long time, that scene would have been absolutely ruined by music. (Rififi, of course, used the abscence of a score to incredible effect, although that was only for part of the movie. That may be the only example I can think of that used it so effectively.)

Then I started thinking about how I totally set a new high score in my Jetman game and that I did it while thinking about this movie so I should totally blog about it. Then I tried to not think about that but instead to think about this movie some more, but it didn't work. Then I lost.

SF Indie Fest

Sleepwalking through the Mekong

Sleepwalking is a pretty amazing documentary. It's main thrill is from watching something as cliched as "the power of music to bring people together" actually happening in a way that doesn't seem really forced at all. I guess that aspect of it works mainly because the interviews with the band members make them seem really likeable and down to Earth. You get the impression that the just went on this trip essentially on a lark and they're just as wide-eyed about the level of connection they're able to achieve with the Cambodian people, just by playing their music. It's such a common thing to believe in for the type of people who like to believe in that sort of thing, and this film captures it actually happening without any ponderous ruminations on "the power of music to bring people together." Yeah, I liked it.

Also, aside from all that feel good stuff, the film is just incredibly well shot. There's some (especially) amazing shots of dusk and night in Cambodia that are absolutely beautiful.

The New Grass

This little doc was good enough to make me interested in checking out both the bands featured in it at some point, which I guess is probably the main point of it, so, kudos.

La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo

There are some really good ideas behind this film, but that's the best thing you can say for it. The problem is that a lot of the good ideas didn't actually make it into the film. I suppose it could succeed as something to show in a class about revolutionary Marxism, because ultimately what we get here is a movie that really needs every bit of external support to hold it up. Which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but there's no reason for none of that external stuff to actually be folded into the movie. If the conceit is that it's a "found" video of these women in this prison, just extend the conceit to include the idea (or fact or something...) that whoever found the footage actually turned it into a watchable movie. I feel a little bit uncomfortable about this criticism because I feel pretty sympathetic toward the idea that a film (or anything) doesn't need to be self-contained, but in this case the exclusion of that stuff from the actual film itself doesn't add anything to it's effectiveness, and actually kind of prevents the movie from being watchable. I mean, I was fucking bored out of my skull through most of this, and I never get bored watching movies. And, sure, I even agree that boring isn't necessarily bad, but in this case it is.

Cave Flower

Harmless.

Actually, there were a couple of really great things about this short: the first being the way the girl is reintroduced when she gets on the subway with shyguy: just that quick flash of red first through the window and then as she walks in front of the camera, and shyguy's reaction. It's impressive the level of control of the colors that the little shock of red sticks out so much that you know immediately it's her. Then shyguy's little fantasy dream shot on eight millimeter, with the footage of boating around and the shots of trees and stuff, all of that was very excellent. The whole romanticizing of the squatting life? Meh. (This part especially seems gross to me, considering the fact that in the post-viewing Q&A the director and actress both said they were pretty horrified being in squatting-guy's room to see the squalor and the used needles everywhere... even contact with and disgust of actual squatting apparently isn't enough to break through upper-middle class romantic notions of the freedom of absolute poverty...) The whole "quirky" meet cute where shyguy gets up the nerve to ask red girl for a date? Yuck.

I have to admit, though, the little touch of having her write the credits on a pad when she's supposed to be writing her number was pretty charming. Although I was a little disappointed to discover that's what she was writing after she began by writing "Cable: Youngblood" which immediately made me think the movie was suddenly veering into some completely unexpected place of geekdom. Alas.

(2/24)

Tarkan Vs. The Vikings

How do you make it look like a dog is climbing a stone wall? Tilt the camera sideways! How do you make sound effects for arrows? Have your foley peeps make loud unvocalized "whick whick" noises! How do you make it look like underwater footage filmed in a pool is actually the ocean? Um... why would you need to do that? They're already under water! I guess you could kind of half-assedly wave some green shit in front of the camera, to heighten the "illusion," but, really, they're already under water! That's really all that matters! What if the shot you took of a guy walking out from the fortress to a boat to greet the king's just returned daughter turns out to be too long? Just speed up the whole shot!

Such are the technical innovations of Turkish Pop Cinema as presented in Tarkan Vs. the Vikings. Frankly, this part of the double-bill wasn't nearly as amazing as The Deathless Devil, but it was still quite enjoyable. But whereas Devil seems to have taken the technical limitations of Turkish cinema and somehow managed to use them to create a movie of almost pure kinetic energy, Tarkan only manages to be incredibly charming. Of particular note:

-The costumes! I think they were supposed to look like they were wearing animal furs or something, but it looks like they actually just slaughtered a nation of muppets and are wearing their skins around. The absolute best touches were the fuzzy shields, which were shields that inexplicably had a ring of day-glo shag around the edges. I guess so the vikings could use their shields as pillows during long nights of pillaging? Or for that point in the day when they all just take a nap at once on their boats, leaving the door wide open for their oarmen slaves to kill them all and escape... although, of course, the oarmen only took advantage of that opportunity when Tarkan was there...

-Of course, the Octopus! I love that they didn't bother even trying to disguise the fact that it was just a some giant rubbery inflatable thing. It was never really clear, when various characters were fighting the octopus, if they were winning or not. Especially the scene when the giant fights the octopus, the first of the obviously-in-a-pool shots, where from the underwater shots it was obvious that his head was above the water and he was just kind of floating near the surface while the octopus sank slowly down, which looked like he'd vanquished the monster, but the reaction shots of the other characters--and the fact that the giant never appears again and the monster does--make it clear that the shots were supposed to depict the giant being killed and eaten by the octopus. I have to say, though, that even though it never stops looking completely ridiculous, there is still something very subliminally menacing about the shots of people just standing there screaming in agony while the octopus's tentacles limply hang on their bodies--as if what the octopus is actually doing to them is so terrible that it can't really be depicted, or something...

-The dogs! Both named Kurt, apparently. Maybe that's the Turkish word for dog? Obviously they had trouble getting the dogs to do exactly what they wanted, so they just kind of let the dog do whatever it wanted and we figure out what it's supposed to be doing based on the reactions of the human actors. They couldn't even get enough shots of the dog barking, apparently, so they just played barking noises over shots of the dog standing there obviously not barking.

So, yeah, at best this movie is enjoyably silly. The only part that really matched Devil for kind of insane success totally in spite of itself were the orgy scenes, which were just far more chaotic and actually orgy-like than anything you'd see in "competent" movies, probably because their tactic for filming an orgy was to just have a bunch of actors all pretty much have an actual orgy. Likewise the chaotic final battle scenes, which, of course, were pretty much mixed in with the orgy scenes. I don't know if I've ever seen scenes shot with such a total embracing of the chaos they were trying to film. Obviously whatever was happening was pretty much out of the control of the director and the camera people. Another thing just occurs to me about these scenes, which is that in almost all other movies I can think of, which the possible exception of Clockwork Orange, because scenes like this are supposed to be obviously morally contemptible they're filmed toward that end, but throughout the whole three hours of Turkish Pop Cinema you have on this disc, it's totally clear at all times that every aspect of what's being presented is supposed to be a cathartic joy for the (presumed entirely male) audience. So the orgy scenes, or the scene where Lotus inexplicably does a striptease for Tarkan before she's going to kill him, these are all presented without any hint of moral conflict: they're absolutely there to be enjoyed by the audience. The audience is not supposed to wonder if these things are possibly bad or prurient or something: they obviously are in reality, but the whole point of the movie is expression of how fun they are when removed from reality. I don't really know a lot about Turkish culture and how different it is from American culture, but I'm sure there must have been tons of moral posturing by the types prone to that sort of thing in Turkey, but nevertheless, part of what is ultimately so exciting about these films is that the people who made them obviously had no such qualms, or even the slightest inkling toward them. The heroes are the good guys just because that's their function in the movie, and the villains are evil just because that's their function in the movie, and once that's established they don't feel really any need to prove it or show why. It's kind of at once very stupid, but also refreshing in that it doesn't presume an audience that needs to be taught those lessons for some reason. I guess, maybe, if the movies are just by default disreputable, they don't have to try to pretend that they're not?

Great World of Sound

Elliot said he wouldn't be my friend if I didn't like this movie, and we seem to still be friends, so I guess that answers that question.

I did, though, think, "And here, of all places, I've stumbled across a perfect example case for an argument against trying to make characters wholly believable. Main character guy, the skinny white guy, whatever his name was, (Martin, IMDB tells me) is, I think, supposed to be kind of blank so we, the audience, can feel like we're experiencing the movie from his POV, but he's also supposed to be a fully realized "character," possibly the only real one in the movie. He stares meaningfully into the middle distance in that way that fully realized characters do when they're experiencing crises of consciousness or when they're suffering because their girlfriends don't understand them. He is quirky but not too weird. Etc. Anyway, I believed that he was realistic enough that I couldn't figure out for the whole movie why he hadn't just left this job immediately. It was so obviously a total scam, and the only way I could figure out that he didn't notice as soon as that Shank guy started talking what an absolutely illegal scam this company was is that he must have some sort of mental problem in which he can't really pay much attention to stuff that's happening around him and maybe when total scams present themselves he's busy watching those crazy leprechaun/zebras that keep growing out of the ceiling. Really, the only reason that he keeps the job is because the movie requires that he keep the job in order to get to it's gimmick: the music audition stuff. Which there should've been more of. More music; less Martin and his black "friend" trying to talk them into signing. Showing them do it once or twice outside of the key plot ones would've been enough. So what I meant way back up there at the beginning was that if Martin was not such a total cipher and was instead allowed to be as less-than-three-dimensional as every other actor's character in the movie was, it just would've worked better, and I wouldn't have kept wondering why he was being such an idiot. But, of course, it would've been possible for Martin to be a totally believable character who was just too stupid to catch on to what a total scam everything around him was. Yeah, that would also have worked. But then the filmmakers would've been asking the audience to inhabit a dimmer fellow than themselves, which just isn't really done (and maybe it's impossible?) and they seemed to want us to inhabit the main character so we would feel more strongly the moral dilemma he finds himself in. And that was the thing I liked least about the movie. Because, really, what moral dilemma? That it's bad to scam people? I learned that one already. There was almost no point during the movie at which I thought I couldn't have made a better decision than Martin did; and by "I" here I mean actually not myself but pretty much every person I know." But I was kind of just being a jerk. So what if everything that was really good about this movie was not the main character or his life? He's forgettable enough. Just ignore him and enjoy what's left, which is a lot.

* * *

Still trying to figure out a way to articulate my argument about main-character-guy: I do think a lot of what I find so problematic about him is that the movie makers work so hard at making him a realistic character, but his situation just isn't really consistent with him being realistic. Because he's doing something that's so obviously morally bad, and since the audience is supposed to at once like him and feel that he shares a basic moral set with them, the result is that he has to spend a lot of time in the movie being obviously introspectively tortured about the whole thing. This pops up in the meaningful blank staring that he does at various points as well as in his inability to communicate with his girlfriend: he's so conflicted about what he's doing that he can't focus on communicating with her properly, or something like that. But, again, the problem with all of that is that it doesn't really make any sense, given the presentation we're shown by the GWS folks, that he would ever go along with this in the first place. Contrast to a movie like Bay of Blood where the wife/daughter character is once shown being absolutely horrified by death and murder and then in subsequent scenes she is not at all those things and becomes the most rationally evil character in the movie, killing and encouraging her husband to kill purely for her own financial gain. Of course, the fact that her inconsistencies are not addressed and are ignored as if they don't exist makes the movie a "bad" movie, but, for me, it's just so much more interesting than all the work GWS goes through trying to resolve main-character-guy's inconsistencies. My argument is that the movie would be served better by taking that "bad" movie approach, that is, by having him apparently go along with the scheme in full force through most of the movie, and then having him, at the point of the movie where he needs to be morally superior to the GWS people, suddenly be so.

Rambo

The opening credits say "A Film by Sylvester Stallone," and I know we're not speaking the same language. This movie is brutal, far more brutal than I expected going in. The violence is kinetic, with blood and whatever else is inside of people exploding out of them visibly and with such velocity that it all disappears, a mist, into the air in seconds.

At least, that's about all I remember of this movie and it just ended about half an hour ago. There also were some slow parts when Sylvester Stallone's face kind of sat there on the screen looking like he must have suffered a stroke (did he? I don't remember hearing about that...) at some point in the past, and once he said, "Fuck the world," and I think maybe he meant it. Later it appears that Stallone has stopped trying to portray a human character at all and has instead decided to portray some kind of Tyrannosaurus, or perhaps he's upset he didn't get to play Kong and that dweeby Andy Serkis guy did so he's showing Peter Jackson where he went wrong? Of course, King Kong was a far more expressive and sympathetic character than John Rambo is.

Right after the climactic battle (I saw this band play a while ago called "Health" who basically stood around on stage and screamed and hit their instruments with as much demonstrative force as they could manage; the battle scenes in this movie were pretty much the movie equivalent of that) the blonde actress lady looks up at Rambo from among the dead bodies and cries, but not really as part of the story I don't think, like not that she was crying because she just witnessed a disgusting bloodbath after being trapped in a cage for several weeks and presumably raped a lot of times, it seemed as if she were crying along with us, the audience, as some kind of final giving up to John Rambo, as if he'd just spent ninety minutes screaming in our faces that we say "Uncle" and we finally did even though we weren't really sure why he came up to and started doing that in the first place. Obviously, this time it was because I paid the man $9.50 to do it. But still...

And what of using a real-life human rights atrocity as the stage for this movie? Is Stallone trying to raise awareness? It seemed kind of cheap to me, because ultimately the movie isn't about actually ending the genocide of the Karen people, it's just about how missionaries shouldn't go in there because they'll get killed and raped, and then a bunch of annoyed macho dudes will have to go and kill a bunch of people to save them (and in the final moments of the film apparently Rambo has come home to where his dad lives (comically, the mailbox says "R. Rambo," which I couldn't help but pronounce in my head), so any character development that happens certainly doesn't involve Rambo learning to become conscious of the world around him and of his ability to have an effect on the bad things that are happening but instead of him learning to be an ordinary American who wants to reconcile with his parents). The Karen people were pretty much just props, fodder for the games of the bad guys so we wouldn't feel at all conflicted when John Rambo tears their throats out with his bare hands or cuts open their bellies so their intestines fly out of them while they roll down hills. Sure, it's cathartic after watching the brutal shit they were doing, but Rambo and his mercenary compatriots (not friends; Rambo can't have friends) didn't stick around to try save the Karen girls who were getting gang raped. They only cared about saving the blond missionary girl and her missionary friends. Although, really, they didn't care about saving them that much either, I don't think. Rambo has this flashback where he decides that he's just a killer, so I think ultimately he's using the blond girl as a convenient excuse to kill a bunch of people, is the point. I guess you kind of have to give Stallone credit for making a mainstream Hollywood movie with this bleak of a basic view of the world, if you feel like you should give people credit for things like that.

I stuck around for most of the closing credits, just to see if Stallone actually walked all the way down that dirt road to that farm house, and he kind of did; at the end he turned away from the farm house and disappeared behind a tree. I was wondering first of all if that really was Stallone who made that walk or if they hired a guy to do it. Also, that in some way the fact that he's walking down the dirt road to his dad's house after being gone for over twenty years, twenty years of absolutely no contact, that the walk leading up to that reunion was in it's own (less violent) way just as dramatic a thing as anything else portrayed in the movie, but that we're so disinterested in any actual human part of Rambo that the actual scene of that happening is just used as the flat backdrop for the final credits to roll over. Maybe Rambo 5 will be John Rambo taking care of his father as his mind and body deteriorate but he refuses to leave his isolated farm? And they learn to love each other again or something?

Die Hard 4 was certainly much more fun than this, but I have a feeling I'm going to remember the sheer visceral feeling of being at this movie way more than I remember that one.

I remember pretending to be Rambo when I was a kid a lot, but I don't know if I actually remember ever seeing any of the Rambo movies. Say what you will about Stallone, but he's portrayed (and in the case of Rocky, actually created) two characters whose names have entered the ordinary lexicon of Americans. "Rambo" is in the fucking OED, which is more than you could say for John McClane.

***

The ending credit scene is actually kind of ambivalently poetic if you imagine that as Rambo is making the slow walk down the gravel road to the country house nestled in the country hills of rural America the names scrolling up beside him, such as "Karen Naked Girl" along with the names of all the actors who played the kids who get asploded that its like those names are an actual manifestation of Rambo's conscience or of some aspect of his consciousness, reminding him of what he left behind in Burma in order to fulfill his self-centered desire to see "what's changed" back in America.

The Deathless Devil

1. A brief attempt at justification for my thinking, while watching this, that it was kind of a triumph Jarry-an theater, at least according to Alfred Jarry's "Of the Futility of the 'Theatrical' in the Theatre," an essay I'd just read for my class:

Jarry:

The public only understood, or looked as if they understood, the tragedies and comedies of ancient Greece because they were based on universally known fables which, anyway, were explained over and over again in every play and, as often as not, hinted at by a character in the prologue.

Just like almost any comic book movie, this movie largely relies on the audience's familiarity with certain tropes, "universally known fables," in order for them to understand that characters. There is no explanation of the characters, they are simply: Scientist. Scientist's daughter. Hero. Mad scientist. Robot. Etc. You already know what's going to happen, essentially, before watching more than five minutes of the movie. The thrill is simply in watching it happen; not even in watching how it happens, since that's largely a given as well. Literally it is just about watching it happen.

Jarry:

The actor should use a mask to envelop his head, thus replacing it by the effigy of the CHARACTER. His mask should not follow the masks in the Greek theatre in betokening simply tears or laughter, but should indicate the nature of the character: the Miser, the Waverer, the covetous Man accumulating crimes....
[...]the eternal nature of the character is embodied in the mask.

Much like the last paragraph, this film accomplishes this largely because of the fact that it's so recognizably modeled after comic book tropes. Aside from Copperhead, of course, none of the characters wear a mask, but they may as well, really. Every character in the movie is given away completely by their face and their facial hair. The good men all have no facial hair, unless their old and distinguished in which case they may have a mustache. The bad guys all have facial hair. Etc. Likewise, nobody really has changing expressions. They sometimes convey emotions although they're all very basic emotions that are communicated more through the soundtrack and the way their faces are shot than by any actual facial contortions of the actors.

More Jarry:

They are simple expressions, and therefore universal.

This is the most Jarry-an aspect of the movie. There is not any attempt to convey actual human emotions, but rather every emotion portrayed is basic and universal. We do not have to wonder how a certain character might convey or deal with a certain emotion. They all convey emotions in exactly the same way, and, again, they're all conveyed mostly through sound cues and camera angles rather than through any actual "acting" on the part of the actors.

Well, enough of that. This movie is incredible. The soundtrack, for starters. All of the music seems to be stolen from mainstream American movies and thrown together without a lot of concern for consistency or anything, and mostly they are just clips of the most exciting bits of music, one leading directly into the next with no transitions or breaks. Add to that the exaggerated sound effects, especially from the fight scenes. The sounds for punching in this movie are amazing! They're just like this kind of explosion of random harsh-sounding noise, somewhat reminiscent of punch-sounds from other "better" movies, but in no way actually reminiscent of the sounds of real punching, and they sound like they've been turned up way to loud for the sound equipment, the sound of going all the way into the red. And really it is a result of trying to replicate an already faked sound but trying to outdo it.

And the movie just punches right along. There's so much plot in this movie, so many (completely expected) twists to go through, but it's only ninety minutes because the movie never bothers to slow down to give the actors a chance to try to actually portray characters or anything. It's just: exposition (always brief and concise), action, twist, expostion, action, twist, etc. I honestly don't remember ever seeing a single movie zip along as quickly and as excitingly as this movie. It was way more like an amusement park ride than, say, Cloverfield or even any slasher film, just because the movie isn't interest in engaging any emotions beyond excitement.

The "comic relief" guy who dresses up as Sherlock Holmes and feels like Dorf has just invaded the movie... the pointless sex scene... the Robot! Jesus, the Robot was incredible! Like, the ultimate slow crappy robot of all slow crappy robots, and everyone reacts to it as if it were the most horrible thing they've ever seen. No acknowledgment at all that it is slow and so immobile that it couldn't actually catch anyone. And their horror is so extreme!

And then there's the end, where the hero guy walks off balancing comic relief guy on his head! Just absolutely bizarre and nonsensical, but one of the most delightful things you'll ever see on film, possibly because of how bizarre and nonsensical it is.

I'm willing to acknowledge that a lot of what is so interesting about this movie is that it's a very rare example of an idiom that I've never been exposed to but that is very obviously a reaction to an idiom I very much am, so it inevitably seems fresh and exciting and new. But I don't care. This is flat-out one of the most exciting movies I've ever seen.

The Orphanage

Sooooooooooooooo scary! Seriously, I haven't been anywhere close to this scared from a movie since The Others, and even that movie wasn't all that scary so much as it just made me tingly when there was the big reveal and I realized what was going on. Like The Others, a lot of what's so effective about this movie is its commitment to atmosphere. I wonder, also, if a part of the reason is that it ultimately only had one big scary scene? Most of the movie was just buildup to this scene, either establishing the atmosphere or whatever, and even though I guess other scenes might be considered scary, there definitely is that one scene that made the guy in the theater behind me go, "AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH HOOOOOOOOOLLLLLYYYYYYYSHIT!" I appreciated that guy a lot. I almost wonder if he was paid by the movie people to be there, except that I went to this at a late night showing on a random Saturday night well after it'd been out for several weeks, so I can't imagine they would actually have paid someone to be there to do that. I don't know why I actually bothered to refute that idea...

Aside from the whole commitment to that one absolute scary scene being the reason for that scene's total scariness, the other theory I concocted for why it works is that it's such a primally scary scene: alone in a dark house at night, wide open room behind you, if you're at all ever scared of the dark like I am sometimes you've swung your head around and expected there to be a ghost behind you. Well, that actually is what happens here. Kudos for tying in the childhood game they're playing at the beginning as well, which I thought was totally creepy when they were doing at first anyway, before they were little ghost children. But, god, they did it perfectly. She turns around and there is a fucking ghost child!

I didn't get the gore with the old lady, really, though. It seemed like the one thing that really kind of broke away from the atmosphere of the movie. She got nailed by the bus, which was a total cheap shock just like they pulled in that Final Destination movie, fine, it was cheap but whatever... But then why the flash of her destroyed face? They cover it up first and you get just the vaguest hint that her face has been mangled by the fact that mouth-to-mouth guy has blood all over his face, that seemed bad enough and really, to me, kept with the way the movie was playing with your imagination a lot. But then the cloth gets pulled away and we get to see the really great work some make-up artist or set-design person or somebody did creating this gruesome smashed face, and we make a little "oh gross" gurgle, and then we wonder why we had to just see that. The only thing I could think of was that they were trying to unsettle us in a different way, like throwing in a body blow after a long series of precise jabs just to throw off our defenses a little (I don't know anything about boxing). All it did for me was make me think for a brief moment that the movie was going to go somewhere way more gruesome than I expected it to, which felt like kind of a let down. I'm glad I wasn't let down in the end.

Some people might think the weird fake smiley ending with the husband looking up and smiling at what might be ghost of his wife entering the room was a little cheesy, and it was, but I didn't think it took anything away and it was just denouement anyway. Plus, it was totally the police counselor showing up all happy that his wife was dead, not his wife's ghost. I'm sure of it.