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.
Showing posts with label Alone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alone. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Monday, March 31, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, March 28, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, March 21, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, March 17, 2008
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
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...
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...
Monday, March 3, 2008
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!
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!
Sunday, February 17, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
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?
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?
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
Friday, February 1, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Invisible Invaders
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.
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.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)