1959 B-grade sci-fi flick in which invisible aliens from the Moon come to Earth to take it over by inhabiting the bodies of the dead, with a very 1959 sci-fi anti-nukes pro-world peace message.
In a word: amazing!
Best parts:
-After the alien-zombies contact Dr. Pemmer to tell him they're going to kill everyone on the planet unless they surrender and then he gets his daughter's "just friend" to go to the press with this story "This old retired scientist just told me that his dead friend's body walked into his living room and told him he was really a moonman inhabiting a corpse and demanded that we all surrender or they're gonna kill us all!" Instead of the press just ignoring him (like they don't get calls like that a hundred times a day?) every single paper apparently made huge front page stories making fun of the crazy old scientist. I wish the press really operated like that...
-The first disaster was a plane crash, which was portrayed via footage of a plane crashing directly into a gigantic 'X' painted on the side of a hill. Here's a hint: don't paint gigantic white 'X's on the sides of hills. Pilots are irresistibly driven to crash into them.
-Throughout the whole movie there's a voice-over narration which overexplained nearly everything thin the movie. Whenever something happened that wasn't re-explained by the narrator it was almost a surprise. Probably not exclusive to this movie, but quite charming nonetheless.
-The scientists decide that the aliens' only real weapon is their invisibility: that's why they have to take over our dead people and use our weapons against us. Um... seems to me that maybe the fact that they also have spaceships and are capable of "entering a dead body through the pores of the skin" would also count somewhat as weapons. But, then, I'm not a scientist...
-Lots of easy pickings, actually, of hilarious bits in this movie. My absolute favorite part, though, came when the intrepid quartet of humans had trapped an alien in the chamber (labelled above it in big white letters: "CHAMBER"), after the alien threatens them again saying they can't win and resistance is futile and all that, the army guy yells at him over the intercom, "Listen, friend! We're the ones who've trapped you!" I love that he called the alien "friend"! These things flew across space just to take us over and kill us all, but even that can't break the 1950s leading-man veneer of friendly speech! (Of course, GWBush has many times in the past referred to terrorists as "folks" so maybe this isn't that bizarre...)
Really, though, the best part of the whole movie, and this is not something I'm making fun of, was that at the end, when they finally figured out how to make the Invaders visible by shooting them with a sound gun, we're shown a couple of shots of them shooting the sound gun at animated corpses which then crumple to the ground and, after a few seconds, the translucent lumpy bodies of the aliens emerge from their bodies, stumble around a bit, and then collapse into little balls of mush. These shots were almost haunting, since what they actually looked like, aside from the context of the story, were little animations of men suddenly dying, their souls then emerging from their bodies but apparently weighed down by something. Unable to ascend or really go anywhere, the souls just collapse into a pile of glop. Wow.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Saturday, January 26, 2008
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
(along with Bay of Blood)
There's not really any great reason for writing about these two movies together, except that I happened to see them on the same day, and I enjoyed one of them (Bay of Blood significantly more than the other (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), and I'm not exactly sure if I can articulate why. Part of it, of course, is just that I enjoyed the slasher flick more, but I also think it was actually a better movie. Like, I'd recommend Bay of Blood to people as a movie that they actually should watch, whereas The Diving Bell is more just an accomplishment. Well...
Diving Bell is extremely well done right from the beginning. By starting with the waking up of the protagonist, actually inside his head, what he's actually seeing as he wakes up from a coma, you're not really introduced to him as a character but it's more that you, the viewer, are made to be the main character, the person who is waking up from a coma unable to communicate at all with the people you're seeing and hearing. That's the major accomplishment of this movie, and how much it succeeds seems to be pretty much contingent on the extent to which you feel like you've sort of experienced what the main character is experienced. Obviously, that can't literally happen, unless of course you do get "locked-in syndrome," which could happen, but anyway obviously the movie couldn't literally replicate that experience, but I think it does about as good a job as it would be possible for it to do. My thing, though, is that there really is this wall that you end up running into as far as that goes, that it would literally be impossible to accomplish what the movie tries to accomplish, and I always feel like it's more important to acknowledge that limit and to not try to accomplish something that actually breaks that limit. Eventually, the movie got even less interesting as it broke out of its own conceit and started presenting more and more from outside the POV of the main character. Frankly, he just wasn't that interesting of a character, and the only thing that draws you in at is the difficulty of surviving such a situation, so once we're outside that situation and just watching this other person try to live through it, I don't know, I just wasn't all that compelled. Maybe I'm a jerk (which is the other thing; this is one of those movies about which I feel uncomfortable saying things like "the guy wasn't that interesting," and I'm really distrustful of things like that from an aesthetic standpoint). The scrawled font of the credits, though, was incredibly beautiful and absolutely my favorite thing about the movie.
As for Bay of Blood, there were 13 murders in ninety minutes, which is all Mario Bava set out to do. He set up an actual accomplishable goal and then he went out and did it. Okay, that's a little cheap. This movie was just so much fun though. My favorite things about it: (1) how the German chick, the kinda hot redhead who was flouncing around in a dress that didn't fit her and then got naked and jumped in the lake just so we could watch her do it, how she was sooooo much hotter after she got killed, so much so that I'm sure Bava meant it that way, and (2) everything else (the octopus crawling over dead-old-guy's face!). It's basically a whodunnit, except that the "who" is pretty much every character. Even the kids get in on it at the end! I guess this movie is supposed to be what inspired the original Friday 13th, but this is waaaaaaay the fuck better.
A real thing that is so much more interesting about Bay of Blood than Diving Bell, and this is something that I'd say you could pretty fairly chalk up to some kind of storytelling incompetence on Bava's part but I don't care, is the way the characters work in Bava's movie. Diving Bell goes so far out of its way, like pretty much every mainstream indie movie made these days, to have consistent, realistic characters. Obviously, that's not a criticism of Diving Bell in any way. Verisimilitude accomplished. Congrats. Not so in Bay of Blood. Especially the redhaired wife, the daughter of the guy who married the old lady who owned the lake: she's at first horrified by the dead body of her father, and then almost made catatonic by the bodies in the bathtub, but within the matter of a few minutes she's suddenly an absolutely cold calculating psychopath encouraging her husband to murder people and then doing it herself. This transition makes absolutely no sense; it's just not at all how a normal person would ever behave, and especially it's not how you'd ever imagine a person behaving, even a movie psycho character, if you were going for an accurate and indepth portrayal of an actual human psyche. She only behaves that way because it makes the story: we're allowed to believe the movie is a traditional whodunnit longer because she reacts in the normal way you'd expect a potential victim to act, and then, just because the movie wants to turn the tables on us, she suddenly becomes another murderer, and the movie doesn't even bother to try to explain it away or anything. My argument would be that this second thing, Bava's way in this movie, is much more actually interesting than the normal, verisimilitudinous way.
Bay of Blood also has some pretty memorable murders: the machete that bisects the whiney student's face was pretty great, especially as his eyes rolled around while he was writhing on the floor. The best, though, the coup de grace, was the impaling of the copulating coeds, one thrust, all the way through both of them, pinning them to the bed and to each other, the girl on top and her breasts squished against the boy's naked chest. Yeah, I'm sick, but that was effing brilliant.
There's not really any great reason for writing about these two movies together, except that I happened to see them on the same day, and I enjoyed one of them (Bay of Blood significantly more than the other (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), and I'm not exactly sure if I can articulate why. Part of it, of course, is just that I enjoyed the slasher flick more, but I also think it was actually a better movie. Like, I'd recommend Bay of Blood to people as a movie that they actually should watch, whereas The Diving Bell is more just an accomplishment. Well...
Diving Bell is extremely well done right from the beginning. By starting with the waking up of the protagonist, actually inside his head, what he's actually seeing as he wakes up from a coma, you're not really introduced to him as a character but it's more that you, the viewer, are made to be the main character, the person who is waking up from a coma unable to communicate at all with the people you're seeing and hearing. That's the major accomplishment of this movie, and how much it succeeds seems to be pretty much contingent on the extent to which you feel like you've sort of experienced what the main character is experienced. Obviously, that can't literally happen, unless of course you do get "locked-in syndrome," which could happen, but anyway obviously the movie couldn't literally replicate that experience, but I think it does about as good a job as it would be possible for it to do. My thing, though, is that there really is this wall that you end up running into as far as that goes, that it would literally be impossible to accomplish what the movie tries to accomplish, and I always feel like it's more important to acknowledge that limit and to not try to accomplish something that actually breaks that limit. Eventually, the movie got even less interesting as it broke out of its own conceit and started presenting more and more from outside the POV of the main character. Frankly, he just wasn't that interesting of a character, and the only thing that draws you in at is the difficulty of surviving such a situation, so once we're outside that situation and just watching this other person try to live through it, I don't know, I just wasn't all that compelled. Maybe I'm a jerk (which is the other thing; this is one of those movies about which I feel uncomfortable saying things like "the guy wasn't that interesting," and I'm really distrustful of things like that from an aesthetic standpoint). The scrawled font of the credits, though, was incredibly beautiful and absolutely my favorite thing about the movie.
As for Bay of Blood, there were 13 murders in ninety minutes, which is all Mario Bava set out to do. He set up an actual accomplishable goal and then he went out and did it. Okay, that's a little cheap. This movie was just so much fun though. My favorite things about it: (1) how the German chick, the kinda hot redhead who was flouncing around in a dress that didn't fit her and then got naked and jumped in the lake just so we could watch her do it, how she was sooooo much hotter after she got killed, so much so that I'm sure Bava meant it that way, and (2) everything else (the octopus crawling over dead-old-guy's face!). It's basically a whodunnit, except that the "who" is pretty much every character. Even the kids get in on it at the end! I guess this movie is supposed to be what inspired the original Friday 13th, but this is waaaaaaay the fuck better.
A real thing that is so much more interesting about Bay of Blood than Diving Bell, and this is something that I'd say you could pretty fairly chalk up to some kind of storytelling incompetence on Bava's part but I don't care, is the way the characters work in Bava's movie. Diving Bell goes so far out of its way, like pretty much every mainstream indie movie made these days, to have consistent, realistic characters. Obviously, that's not a criticism of Diving Bell in any way. Verisimilitude accomplished. Congrats. Not so in Bay of Blood. Especially the redhaired wife, the daughter of the guy who married the old lady who owned the lake: she's at first horrified by the dead body of her father, and then almost made catatonic by the bodies in the bathtub, but within the matter of a few minutes she's suddenly an absolutely cold calculating psychopath encouraging her husband to murder people and then doing it herself. This transition makes absolutely no sense; it's just not at all how a normal person would ever behave, and especially it's not how you'd ever imagine a person behaving, even a movie psycho character, if you were going for an accurate and indepth portrayal of an actual human psyche. She only behaves that way because it makes the story: we're allowed to believe the movie is a traditional whodunnit longer because she reacts in the normal way you'd expect a potential victim to act, and then, just because the movie wants to turn the tables on us, she suddenly becomes another murderer, and the movie doesn't even bother to try to explain it away or anything. My argument would be that this second thing, Bava's way in this movie, is much more actually interesting than the normal, verisimilitudinous way.
Bay of Blood also has some pretty memorable murders: the machete that bisects the whiney student's face was pretty great, especially as his eyes rolled around while he was writhing on the floor. The best, though, the coup de grace, was the impaling of the copulating coeds, one thrust, all the way through both of them, pinning them to the bed and to each other, the girl on top and her breasts squished against the boy's naked chest. Yeah, I'm sick, but that was effing brilliant.
12:08 East of Bucharest
Romanian movie I got from Netflix a few days after reading a write-up about Romanian cinema in New York Times Magazine... Gosh the internet age is great!
I watched this twice, and liked it even more the second time. It's deceptively tight: that is, the first time through, a lot of stuff that felt loose and kind of random turned out to all be pretty obviously deliberate and productive (plotwise) while watching it the second time. Which impressed me a lot, for whatever reason. Especially when the station owner guy is looking for his Mythology Dictionary, which I'd completely forgot about by the time it got to the show and he started quoting Heraclitus and discussing Plato's cave the first time I watched it.
I especially liked the way the really long take following the car around the town seemed to go on just way too long, so eventually you start wondering why it's going on so long, and then, cut, we're at the beginning of the show. Very nice touch.
The ending also elevated the movie beyond just being the really enjoyable and likeable little comedy it was: when the voice from behind the camera starts talking (I really couldn't figure out if the voice was supposed to be one of the characters in the film or if it was the director), counting down while we watch a streetlight, getting impatient, then counting down again, and it turns on, and the voice says "It's calm and beautiful. Just like my memory of the revolution. It was calm and beautiful." And more silent shots of the streetlights turning on. One of the most perfect endings for a movie that I can think of, even as I wonder exactly what such a claim might mean to people who lived through that revolution (it's my understanding that Romania's revolution and overthrow of Ceausescu was especially violent as far as Eastern Bloc revolutions went, ending with the public execution of Ceausescu and his wife (I'm not checking my facts here, but I don't think I'm far off), so saying it was "calm and beautiful" seems like it might be kind of bold and maybe even a bit antagonistic? My sense is that, I guess cuz I'm always looking for this kind of thing, just as the whole movie was set in this small out of the way town, this description of the revolution as being "calm and beautiful" is meant to describe the actual environment around the speaker at the time of the revolution, emphasizing that this immediate environment around him--the calm and the snow and the beauty--was more real to him than the violent events going on in Bucharest.)
Also, I really thought, at first, the women at the beginning were maids, since they were all so industriously setting about the housework while the men lazily wandered around their apartments waking up. I have no idea, knowing little about actual Romanian culture, if this was intentionally exaggerated for comedic effect or if this was meant to just be a matter-of-fact portrayal of the way most husband and wife households work.
I watched this twice, and liked it even more the second time. It's deceptively tight: that is, the first time through, a lot of stuff that felt loose and kind of random turned out to all be pretty obviously deliberate and productive (plotwise) while watching it the second time. Which impressed me a lot, for whatever reason. Especially when the station owner guy is looking for his Mythology Dictionary, which I'd completely forgot about by the time it got to the show and he started quoting Heraclitus and discussing Plato's cave the first time I watched it.
I especially liked the way the really long take following the car around the town seemed to go on just way too long, so eventually you start wondering why it's going on so long, and then, cut, we're at the beginning of the show. Very nice touch.
The ending also elevated the movie beyond just being the really enjoyable and likeable little comedy it was: when the voice from behind the camera starts talking (I really couldn't figure out if the voice was supposed to be one of the characters in the film or if it was the director), counting down while we watch a streetlight, getting impatient, then counting down again, and it turns on, and the voice says "It's calm and beautiful. Just like my memory of the revolution. It was calm and beautiful." And more silent shots of the streetlights turning on. One of the most perfect endings for a movie that I can think of, even as I wonder exactly what such a claim might mean to people who lived through that revolution (it's my understanding that Romania's revolution and overthrow of Ceausescu was especially violent as far as Eastern Bloc revolutions went, ending with the public execution of Ceausescu and his wife (I'm not checking my facts here, but I don't think I'm far off), so saying it was "calm and beautiful" seems like it might be kind of bold and maybe even a bit antagonistic? My sense is that, I guess cuz I'm always looking for this kind of thing, just as the whole movie was set in this small out of the way town, this description of the revolution as being "calm and beautiful" is meant to describe the actual environment around the speaker at the time of the revolution, emphasizing that this immediate environment around him--the calm and the snow and the beauty--was more real to him than the violent events going on in Bucharest.)
Also, I really thought, at first, the women at the beginning were maids, since they were all so industriously setting about the housework while the men lazily wandered around their apartments waking up. I have no idea, knowing little about actual Romanian culture, if this was intentionally exaggerated for comedic effect or if this was meant to just be a matter-of-fact portrayal of the way most husband and wife households work.
Bay of Blood
(along with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
There's not really any great reason for writing about these two movies together, except that I happened to see them on the same day, and I enjoyed one of them (Bay of Blood significantly more than the other (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), and I'm not exactly sure if I can articulate why. Part of it, of course, is just that I enjoyed the slasher flick more, but I also think it was actually a better movie. Like, I'd recommend Bay of Blood to people as a movie that they actually should watch, whereas The Diving Bell is more just an accomplishment. Well...
Diving Bell is extremely well done right from the beginning. By starting with the waking up of the protagonist, actually inside his head, what he's actually seeing as he wakes up from a coma, you're not really introduced to him as a character but it's more that you, the viewer, are made to be the main character, the person who is waking up from a coma unable to communicate at all with the people you're seeing and hearing. That's the major accomplishment of this movie, and how much it succeeds seems to be pretty much contingent on the extent to which you feel like you've sort of experienced what the main character is experienced. Obviously, that can't literally happen, unless of course you do get "locked-in syndrome," which could happen, but anyway obviously the movie couldn't literally replicate that experience, but I think it does about as good a job as it would be possible for it to do. My thing, though, is that there really is this wall that you end up running into as far as that goes, that it would literally be impossible to accomplish what the movie tries to accomplish, and I always feel like it's more important to acknowledge that limit and to not try to accomplish something that actually breaks that limit. Eventually, the movie got even less interesting as it broke out of its own conceit and started presenting more and more from outside the POV of the main character. Frankly, he just wasn't that interesting of a character, and the only thing that draws you in at is the difficulty of surviving such a situation, so once we're outside that situation and just watching this other person try to live through it, I don't know, I just wasn't all that compelled. Maybe I'm a jerk (which is the other thing; this is one of those movies about which I feel uncomfortable saying things like "the guy wasn't that interesting," and I'm really distrustful of things like that from an aesthetic standpoint). The scrawled font of the credits, though, was incredibly beautiful and absolutely my favorite thing about the movie.
As for Bay of Blood, there were 13 murders in ninety minutes, which is all Mario Bava set out to do. He set up an actual accomplishable goal and then he went out and did it. Okay, that's a little cheap. This movie was just so much fun though. My favorite things about it: (1) how the German chick, the kinda hot redhead who was flouncing around in a dress that didn't fit her and then got naked and jumped in the lake just so we could watch her do it, how she was sooooo much hotter after she got killed, so much so that I'm sure Bava meant it that way, and (2) everything else (the octopus crawling over dead-old-guy's face!). It's basically a whodunnit, except that the "who" is pretty much every character. Even the kids get in on it at the end! I guess this movie is supposed to be what inspired the original Friday 13th, but this is waaaaaaay the fuck better.
A real thing that is so much more interesting about Bay of Blood than Diving Bell, and this is something that I'd say you could pretty fairly chalk up to some kind of storytelling incompetence on Bava's part but I don't care, is the way the characters work in Bava's movie. Diving Bell goes so far out of its way, like pretty much every mainstream indie movie made these days, to have consistent, realistic characters. Obviously, that's not a criticism of Diving Bell in any way. Verisimilitude accomplished. Congrats. Not so in Bay of Blood. Especially the redhaired wife, the daughter of the guy who married the old lady who owned the lake: she's at first horrified by the dead body of her father, and then almost made catatonic by the bodies in the bathtub, but within the matter of a few minutes she's suddenly an absolutely cold calculating psychopath encouraging her husband to murder people and then doing it herself. This transition makes absolutely no sense; it's just not at all how a normal person would ever behave, and especially it's not how you'd ever imagine a person behaving, even a movie psycho character, if you were going for an accurate and indepth portrayal of an actual human psyche. She only behaves that way because it makes the story: we're allowed to believe the movie is a traditional whodunnit longer because she reacts in the normal way you'd expect a potential victim to act, and then, just because the movie wants to turn the tables on us, she suddenly becomes another murderer, and the movie doesn't even bother to try to explain it away or anything. My argument would be that this second thing, Bava's way in this movie, is much more actually interesting than the normal, verisimilitudinous way.
Bay of Blood also has some pretty memorable murders: the machete that bisects the whiney student's face was pretty great, especially as his eyes rolled around while he was writhing on the floor. The best, though, the coup de grace, was the impaling of the copulating coeds, one thrust, all the way through both of them, pinning them to the bed and to each other, the girl on top and her breasts squished against the boy's naked chest. Yeah, I'm sick, but that was effing brilliant.
There's not really any great reason for writing about these two movies together, except that I happened to see them on the same day, and I enjoyed one of them (Bay of Blood significantly more than the other (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), and I'm not exactly sure if I can articulate why. Part of it, of course, is just that I enjoyed the slasher flick more, but I also think it was actually a better movie. Like, I'd recommend Bay of Blood to people as a movie that they actually should watch, whereas The Diving Bell is more just an accomplishment. Well...
Diving Bell is extremely well done right from the beginning. By starting with the waking up of the protagonist, actually inside his head, what he's actually seeing as he wakes up from a coma, you're not really introduced to him as a character but it's more that you, the viewer, are made to be the main character, the person who is waking up from a coma unable to communicate at all with the people you're seeing and hearing. That's the major accomplishment of this movie, and how much it succeeds seems to be pretty much contingent on the extent to which you feel like you've sort of experienced what the main character is experienced. Obviously, that can't literally happen, unless of course you do get "locked-in syndrome," which could happen, but anyway obviously the movie couldn't literally replicate that experience, but I think it does about as good a job as it would be possible for it to do. My thing, though, is that there really is this wall that you end up running into as far as that goes, that it would literally be impossible to accomplish what the movie tries to accomplish, and I always feel like it's more important to acknowledge that limit and to not try to accomplish something that actually breaks that limit. Eventually, the movie got even less interesting as it broke out of its own conceit and started presenting more and more from outside the POV of the main character. Frankly, he just wasn't that interesting of a character, and the only thing that draws you in at is the difficulty of surviving such a situation, so once we're outside that situation and just watching this other person try to live through it, I don't know, I just wasn't all that compelled. Maybe I'm a jerk (which is the other thing; this is one of those movies about which I feel uncomfortable saying things like "the guy wasn't that interesting," and I'm really distrustful of things like that from an aesthetic standpoint). The scrawled font of the credits, though, was incredibly beautiful and absolutely my favorite thing about the movie.
As for Bay of Blood, there were 13 murders in ninety minutes, which is all Mario Bava set out to do. He set up an actual accomplishable goal and then he went out and did it. Okay, that's a little cheap. This movie was just so much fun though. My favorite things about it: (1) how the German chick, the kinda hot redhead who was flouncing around in a dress that didn't fit her and then got naked and jumped in the lake just so we could watch her do it, how she was sooooo much hotter after she got killed, so much so that I'm sure Bava meant it that way, and (2) everything else (the octopus crawling over dead-old-guy's face!). It's basically a whodunnit, except that the "who" is pretty much every character. Even the kids get in on it at the end! I guess this movie is supposed to be what inspired the original Friday 13th, but this is waaaaaaay the fuck better.
A real thing that is so much more interesting about Bay of Blood than Diving Bell, and this is something that I'd say you could pretty fairly chalk up to some kind of storytelling incompetence on Bava's part but I don't care, is the way the characters work in Bava's movie. Diving Bell goes so far out of its way, like pretty much every mainstream indie movie made these days, to have consistent, realistic characters. Obviously, that's not a criticism of Diving Bell in any way. Verisimilitude accomplished. Congrats. Not so in Bay of Blood. Especially the redhaired wife, the daughter of the guy who married the old lady who owned the lake: she's at first horrified by the dead body of her father, and then almost made catatonic by the bodies in the bathtub, but within the matter of a few minutes she's suddenly an absolutely cold calculating psychopath encouraging her husband to murder people and then doing it herself. This transition makes absolutely no sense; it's just not at all how a normal person would ever behave, and especially it's not how you'd ever imagine a person behaving, even a movie psycho character, if you were going for an accurate and indepth portrayal of an actual human psyche. She only behaves that way because it makes the story: we're allowed to believe the movie is a traditional whodunnit longer because she reacts in the normal way you'd expect a potential victim to act, and then, just because the movie wants to turn the tables on us, she suddenly becomes another murderer, and the movie doesn't even bother to try to explain it away or anything. My argument would be that this second thing, Bava's way in this movie, is much more actually interesting than the normal, verisimilitudinous way.
Bay of Blood also has some pretty memorable murders: the machete that bisects the whiney student's face was pretty great, especially as his eyes rolled around while he was writhing on the floor. The best, though, the coup de grace, was the impaling of the copulating coeds, one thrust, all the way through both of them, pinning them to the bed and to each other, the girl on top and her breasts squished against the boy's naked chest. Yeah, I'm sick, but that was effing brilliant.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
The Thin Red Line
So after finding out the put the Siskel & Ebert archives on the internet and needing something to watch while I ate my Subway sandwich, I checked out their discussion of this movie. Siskel said it was the best war movie ever (probably pronounced "finest war film"), Ebert said it wasn't quite that though it was good (he actually said he thought Malick basically just remade Days of Heaven and set it a Guadalcanal, mistaking style for substance). I guess I agree with Siskel.
Unless you forget when this movie was released, it's hard not to compare it, at least a little bit, to Saving Private Ryan. Although I don't think it's possible that it could've been conceived as a response in any way to that film, it does essentially invert the structure of SPR: where Spielberg begins with an extended battle scene, then fills the middle of the film with a picaresque tale of the soldiers on their way to finding Matt Damon, bookended on the other side with another extended battle scene, Malick starts off with the non war stuff, as the main soldier guy isn't even with the rest of the army, having gone AWOL to hang out with natives on some SoPa island, who pretty obviously represent to him at this point the unspoiled natural world (although this is complicated a little bit by his voiceover ruminations about nature being at war with itself and stuff), then there's the leadup to the battle that focuses more on the characters than on the actual leadup to the battle, then we have the big battle for about an hour, then there's the rest of the movie after that when we get back to the soldiers just hanging out, talking about life and stuff. I guess there is again the little battle piece in which daydreamerguy gets killed, but it's really just a skirmish. Anyway, aside from the fact that neither Spielberg nor Malick are actually as interested in their characters as they want to be, Malick doesn't fall quite as deeply into the trap of making war seem pretty awesome despite trying to make an antiwar movie as Spielberg does. (Let me explain that a little bit more: Spielberg is just a little to good at making satisfying blockbusters for his own good with SPR. He wants the movie to show the brutality of war, which he does about as good a job as anyone has, but his instincts as a hugely popular filmmaker require him to also make the war scenes satisfying in the traditional way of making the battles a thrill ride. Malick almost completely avoids this: though it is fairly exciting when John Cusack steps in as action hero and leads the small group of soldiers to take out the bunker, for the most part the huge battle is actually the least interesting part of the film, and what's most interesting about the battle scene itself isn't really the battle but the way the characters act during the battle. It's actually possible while watching Malick's war film to wonder why these guys are even fighting this battle since it's pretty obviously not what any of them want to be doing and because there's an actual world that's been explored and portrayed around them that seems more important in lots of ways than the battle itself. By starting in the middle of a battle already in progress, Spielberg doesn't really allow for that type of questioning. And the final battle is also kind of inevitable, the way SPR's story is structured.) So Malick's film is ultimately more successful as an anti-war film that Spielberg's is. Whether or not it's actually better as just a plain movie, aside from it's message?
Well, I'm a little partial here. Malick makes movies that beautiful in ways that movie made by no one else (except Malick imitators) are, and The Thin Red Line might actually be his best one. But I should watch The New World again before I can really say that for sure. One thing I think this movie has over Days of Heaven is that it's just as beautiful a sound experience as it is a visual experience. Also, for fun, I think I'll read this book...
Unless you forget when this movie was released, it's hard not to compare it, at least a little bit, to Saving Private Ryan. Although I don't think it's possible that it could've been conceived as a response in any way to that film, it does essentially invert the structure of SPR: where Spielberg begins with an extended battle scene, then fills the middle of the film with a picaresque tale of the soldiers on their way to finding Matt Damon, bookended on the other side with another extended battle scene, Malick starts off with the non war stuff, as the main soldier guy isn't even with the rest of the army, having gone AWOL to hang out with natives on some SoPa island, who pretty obviously represent to him at this point the unspoiled natural world (although this is complicated a little bit by his voiceover ruminations about nature being at war with itself and stuff), then there's the leadup to the battle that focuses more on the characters than on the actual leadup to the battle, then we have the big battle for about an hour, then there's the rest of the movie after that when we get back to the soldiers just hanging out, talking about life and stuff. I guess there is again the little battle piece in which daydreamerguy gets killed, but it's really just a skirmish. Anyway, aside from the fact that neither Spielberg nor Malick are actually as interested in their characters as they want to be, Malick doesn't fall quite as deeply into the trap of making war seem pretty awesome despite trying to make an antiwar movie as Spielberg does. (Let me explain that a little bit more: Spielberg is just a little to good at making satisfying blockbusters for his own good with SPR. He wants the movie to show the brutality of war, which he does about as good a job as anyone has, but his instincts as a hugely popular filmmaker require him to also make the war scenes satisfying in the traditional way of making the battles a thrill ride. Malick almost completely avoids this: though it is fairly exciting when John Cusack steps in as action hero and leads the small group of soldiers to take out the bunker, for the most part the huge battle is actually the least interesting part of the film, and what's most interesting about the battle scene itself isn't really the battle but the way the characters act during the battle. It's actually possible while watching Malick's war film to wonder why these guys are even fighting this battle since it's pretty obviously not what any of them want to be doing and because there's an actual world that's been explored and portrayed around them that seems more important in lots of ways than the battle itself. By starting in the middle of a battle already in progress, Spielberg doesn't really allow for that type of questioning. And the final battle is also kind of inevitable, the way SPR's story is structured.) So Malick's film is ultimately more successful as an anti-war film that Spielberg's is. Whether or not it's actually better as just a plain movie, aside from it's message?
Well, I'm a little partial here. Malick makes movies that beautiful in ways that movie made by no one else (except Malick imitators) are, and The Thin Red Line might actually be his best one. But I should watch The New World again before I can really say that for sure. One thing I think this movie has over Days of Heaven is that it's just as beautiful a sound experience as it is a visual experience. Also, for fun, I think I'll read this book...
51 Birch Street
This movie is really, really good. Despite the fact that the music is kind of cloyingly bad, and it's very few interesting shots, and the way it's edited is quite often just as cloyingly sentimental as the music (wait a minute... what does cloyingly even mean? I totally am just using that word because I've seen it used in that exact way as a criticism for other things... whatever...), something about the movie works. Lots of the reviews discuss how incredible it is that the movie gets so much mileage of what is, really, a pretty average story. It's quite incredible that Block's parents stayed together for fifty years, but it's certainly not that out of the ordinary--at least not for people of their generation. Ultimately, I think what gives the movie it's profound emotional heft is that it really is a chronicle of Doug Block setting out to make a real connection with a person (his father) who's always been closed off to him--and succeeding rather remarkably. By the end of the movie, you can sense just how well he's managed to get to know both of his parents, and how he's managed to come to actually understand very deeply these two other human beings. It's not really the story of the marriage of his parents and how they made it work or even his father's largesse that is so satisfying, it's the very genuine connection the he makes with his father (and, I think, even though she's no longer alive, so certainly in a different way but still it's there, with his mother) that leaves you feeling you've just witnessed something pretty profound.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Cloverfield
As a thrill ride, this movie is pretty much a complete success, I guess. Just cuz I'm me, I could quibble about all sorts of things like how they could have had this amazing shot of the monster walking through the city when the characters had pointlessly made their way back into the city and to the top of the building Rob's gf was dying in. That at least would've made their little trek worth it; Beth's impaled-yet-miraculously-spry body on the floor of her apartment did not.
I can practically hear the director or screenwriter or whoever on the commentary track of the DVD saying something like "You go in thinking you're going to watch some big monster movie, but really we wanted to make a movie about love and redemption," and he'll be completely wrong. Nobody watching this movie cared at all about any of the characters; most of the theater groaned/laughed when Beth opened her eyes and she and Rob had their "Of course I came back for you" moment (what the hell happened to that Justin guy, by the way? Did the sheer force of Rob's stunted-growthed love overtake the fabric of the movie's reality and whisk Justin out of existence? Or did he fall out of the building and nobody cared because Beth only took him to the party to make Rob jealous and they're both total narcissists?), so despite all the filmmakers' machinations to try to foreground the 'human' story, ultimately we probably care less about the characters than we do in most traditionally filmed monster flicks. Which, I guess, just goes to show that making people care about characters isn't accomplished by the style of photography, but by the actual writing of the movie.
Also, the giant lice things were dumb. There's already a ginormous monster trashing the city. If you can't get enough horror or spectacle or suspense or whatever out of that then you're not even a good enough writer to be making a monster movie. Congratulations.
I can practically hear the director or screenwriter or whoever on the commentary track of the DVD saying something like "You go in thinking you're going to watch some big monster movie, but really we wanted to make a movie about love and redemption," and he'll be completely wrong. Nobody watching this movie cared at all about any of the characters; most of the theater groaned/laughed when Beth opened her eyes and she and Rob had their "Of course I came back for you" moment (what the hell happened to that Justin guy, by the way? Did the sheer force of Rob's stunted-growthed love overtake the fabric of the movie's reality and whisk Justin out of existence? Or did he fall out of the building and nobody cared because Beth only took him to the party to make Rob jealous and they're both total narcissists?), so despite all the filmmakers' machinations to try to foreground the 'human' story, ultimately we probably care less about the characters than we do in most traditionally filmed monster flicks. Which, I guess, just goes to show that making people care about characters isn't accomplished by the style of photography, but by the actual writing of the movie.
Also, the giant lice things were dumb. There's already a ginormous monster trashing the city. If you can't get enough horror or spectacle or suspense or whatever out of that then you're not even a good enough writer to be making a monster movie. Congratulations.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
The Omega Man
Okay, so I couldn't help comparing this to "I am Legend." What is Hollywood better at doing than they were when this was made (or at least in this movie)? Well, lots of little things. "I Am Legend," or really any modern big-budget film, looks so much more slick than this movie did, and nearly every scene--heck, nearly every camera cut--is highly stimulating. There's so much slack in "The Omega Man." Even the scenes in "I Am Legend" with Smith hanging out with his dog and such don't have the feel of slack that there is in this older film.
Also, Heston didn't look insanely ripped like Smith does. I guess in contemporary movies the hero has to look so much more awesome than most people could ever be. Meanwhile, old Chuck Heston actually has the physique that you'd more expect out of a guy in his position.
Overall, I think the story in "The Omega Man" is more interesting than that of "I Am Legend," but ultimately they're both a little unsatisfying. I like "The Omega Man" better because it's way more interesting for the zombie/enemies to be some kind of weird Luddite cult than to just be CGI's screaming hugemouthed rage.
Also, Heston didn't look insanely ripped like Smith does. I guess in contemporary movies the hero has to look so much more awesome than most people could ever be. Meanwhile, old Chuck Heston actually has the physique that you'd more expect out of a guy in his position.
Overall, I think the story in "The Omega Man" is more interesting than that of "I Am Legend," but ultimately they're both a little unsatisfying. I like "The Omega Man" better because it's way more interesting for the zombie/enemies to be some kind of weird Luddite cult than to just be CGI's screaming hugemouthed rage.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Days of Heaven
I love Malick. So much that I was kind of shocked after watching this to realize that he's only made four films, and that this is the last film of his that I hadn't watched yet. I mean, I kind of already knew that, but somehow the fact just didn't feel right. Anyway, I wish I could see this in a theater someday. Everything anyone says about the cinematography being amazing is true. It is.
It occurs to me as I'm writing this that part of why I felt like I'd watched a lot more Malick than actually exists is because I was forgetting that I've watched a lot of David Gordon Green's films, and his approach to film-making is to try to make more Malick films. I really can't distinguish between their films, I think, except by being aware of who made what. I feel like I should probably back off my Malick worship until I can tell the difference between his stuff and the stuff of his followers (followers? worshippers? acolytes? copiers?).
As I explained to Elliot, I really don't understand why so many people find Malick boring. I mean, I understand that it's because there's not a lot of dialogue and little plot and stuff, but I get kind of exhilarated watching his films cuz they're just wall-to-wall gorgeous. So I don't really understand how people don't respond to that.
More than "The New World," which is the other most recent Malick film I've seen, the plot seemed really tight in this movie, actually. It was really skeletal, but the scenes that advanced the plot did so incredibly efficiently, often with just a half a line of dialogue. In the end, though, I think kind of because of that swiftly moving plot, I felt like it was kind of short. I definitely wanted it to be longer, with more room to breathe. Which probably makes me very weird, I guess.
It occurs to me as I'm writing this that part of why I felt like I'd watched a lot more Malick than actually exists is because I was forgetting that I've watched a lot of David Gordon Green's films, and his approach to film-making is to try to make more Malick films. I really can't distinguish between their films, I think, except by being aware of who made what. I feel like I should probably back off my Malick worship until I can tell the difference between his stuff and the stuff of his followers (followers? worshippers? acolytes? copiers?).
As I explained to Elliot, I really don't understand why so many people find Malick boring. I mean, I understand that it's because there's not a lot of dialogue and little plot and stuff, but I get kind of exhilarated watching his films cuz they're just wall-to-wall gorgeous. So I don't really understand how people don't respond to that.
More than "The New World," which is the other most recent Malick film I've seen, the plot seemed really tight in this movie, actually. It was really skeletal, but the scenes that advanced the plot did so incredibly efficiently, often with just a half a line of dialogue. In the end, though, I think kind of because of that swiftly moving plot, I felt like it was kind of short. I definitely wanted it to be longer, with more room to breathe. Which probably makes me very weird, I guess.
Friday, January 4, 2008
Juno
Funny. Over-written, but then, that was kind of the point. I mean, I liked it, but I couldn't help but notice that the only character in the whole movie who is really criticized is Jason Bateman's, the mid-thirties musician with a case of arrested development (coincidence? hm?) Why is it that in virtually all movies the mid-life guy who's still into horror movies and collecting music is shown to be shallow and maladjusted in the end? Really, Bateman's only sin is not being a famous musician: he's sold out and can only make music for commercials, so it's wrong of him to still be into music and movies the same way a teenager is. Also, Superbad was funnier.
But, whatever. Everyone laughed a lot and had a good time. Can't say that for every movie you see.
But, whatever. Everyone laughed a lot and had a good time. Can't say that for every movie you see.
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