Dark Star

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

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

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

Aliens

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

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

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

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

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

Explorers

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

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

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

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

Vertigo

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

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

My five favorite things:

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

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

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

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

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

There Will Be Blood

There were so many amazing things about this film that it's kind of a shame the final fifteen minutes had to happen. I guess there needed to be some kind of final confrontation between DDL and preacher-guy, at least from the standpoint of narrative and story arc and everything, I mean that it "needed" a "climax" to properly follow the rules of movie-story, but the scene kind of fell victim to that old Great Acting = screaming idea, and the only redeeming thing about the final scene was that there was, indeed, blood.

I suppose, since PTA aspires so much to be Robert Altman, that, like his hero, you just have to take the good with the bad. There was even some of that in Punch Drunk Love, when PTA let Phillip Seymour Hoffman go nuts with his little scream/acting bug.

Enough complaining, though; this movie was incredible right from the start. It was at least ten minutes in before there was any dialogue, and it would be pretty hard to convince me that the opening wasn't a pretty direct reference to 2001, with all the origins-of-man symbolism that might entail. The pan up to the hills with Jonny's score climaxing in a long martian-chord drone, and the score's subsequent descent as the camera pans back down, that whole little shot was easily one of the best bits of film I've ever seen. Worth the price of admission alone.

And it might even have been out done by the well explosion sequence: the way it comes out of nowhere, the totally arrhythmic beating and hammering that gradually finds its way into an insistent pounding not unlike a heartbeat, with the long takes of so many men running around frantically, and the oil geyser burning bright orange against a deep blue sky. I wish I could watch that scene over and over again. It was incredible.

Jonny Greenwood's score is incredible, and PTA is proving with this movie and PDL that he knows how to use scores better than almost anyone else out there, with the possible exception of that guy who made Huckabees, whatever his name is, which I should be able to remember but I can't.

No discussion of this movie should exclude a mention of Paul Dano. DDL was great, of course, but he kind of always is, and he's kind of always great in the exact same way. Paul Dano, though; wow. He might be the best American actor to hit the scene since Johnny Depp. His performance in Little Miss Sunshine was probably the most overlooked thing about the movie, and probably because of the fact that he wasn't speaking for most of the movie. Here he has no shortage of lines, and he should get some kind of Oscar recognition just for completely holding his own in every scene he shares with DDL. I'm really looking forward to watching this kid's career.

Happy Birthday, Wanda June

8/9/07 The Castro, by myself, 5:15pm

1) I'm really glad I got to see this. Hopefully it gets a DVD release. I wasn't even aware Vonnegut had ever penned a screenplay.

2) In the vein of Edward Albee-like theater of the absurd, with more straight comedy so it's nowhere near as oppress...(read more)ive as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Vonnegut lets the gags take over, and while he does the tension between Penelope Ryan and the returned Harold Ryan is significantly more compelling than during the final twenty minutes, when the gags mostly drop and it focuses in on Harold and Penelope. The final climactic condemnation of Harold Ryan--"You're a clown! That's what you are! A clown!"--kind of misses whatever mark it was aiming for, since up until that point, everyone in the movie is a clown except for Penelope.

3) Wanda June's monologue is the most inspired thing in the whole movie. "Don't feel bad about killing someone, because they're in Heaven now and they're happy you killed them." Sort of the opposite of the running South Park gag where everyone who is dead is in Hell--which always seemed to be a dig at the Evangelical belief that everyone who isn't born again is going to Hell--here the joke seems to be more about the very idea of an afterlife at all, or at least the idea that moving on to an afterlife is just like moving to a new place you can only get to by dying.

4) William Hickey was hilarious as Looseleaf Harper. Too bad it looks like he mostly had small roles in movies around this time. Never heard of him before.

5) The other funniest thing in the movie was the at once obvious and subtle joke when the Baron stands outside the bar in Heaven and takes a leak, followed by a cut to Harold and his son standing on a balcony, where it suddenly starts to rain.

City Lights

(7/9/07, castro theater w/Ell&Erin, 7:00p)

1) This movie is just good and fun and happy and beautiful

2) The ending is perfect, and it would make a good example if one were making an argument for the relevance of silent films. No amount of dialogue could have made that ending any better or ...(read more)more perfectly executed. All he needed to do was smile shyly. Reminds me of the likewise perfect ending of Before Sunset: it's all in the way Julie Delpy dances and Ethan Hawke smiles. And, of course, the fadeout.

3) Interesting how the drunk driving scenes are played up for light laughs. I can't imagine anything but the crassest of contemporary comedies using drunk driving in that way.

4) I love the early twentieth century faith and hope in science demonstrated by the blindness cure. Of course science will cure blindness! And then the blind person will be happier and more prosperous! (or maybe some of the prosperousness had to do with the thousand dollars the tramp gave her... also, I think the newspaper said the procedure was free for poor people, so I'm not exactly sure why she needed the money for it...)

5)Easily the greatest boxing scene ever filmed.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

(written 8/23/07, 11:14pm)

2nd time.

The opening shot of this movie is, I think, better than anything else that follows it, but not because the rest isn't really good. The opening shot is one of the most pure examples of that thing that I mostly only find in Herzog movies that I rarely find anywhere else. There are some other good examples of it throughout the movie, but the opening shot presents it without any connection to anything else, so it's not diluted in any way by the narrative around it.

Could a whole film be made of nothing but these moments? To what extent is "Fata Morgana" an example of that? I don't know... I need to watch "Fata Morgana" again...

The German title is kind of amazing, but I guess "The Enigma" is really a better title. Hard to say, though. I like the way the German title works on a more purely poetic level, I'd say. Or, at least, an associative level. It's not just a name for the movie but adds something to the meaning of it. (meaning? ugh...)

The weird flattened shots that are maybe supposed to be through Kaspar's eyes are also good examples of that Herzogian thing; also, the scene with the blind guy playing the piano, and that amazing little song he sings. I wish I knew if it was really a song.

Even though the penultimate scene with the doctors satisfying their perverse curiosity by taking Kaspar's body apart and dissecting his brain is an obvious Romantic argument by Herzog against the dispassion of science and I probably wouldn't agree with him about it exactly, the scene works in exactly the way he wants it to. Those scientists are fucking dicks. Put Kaspar back together!

Another example of pre-Lynching Lynch: the scene when Kaspar runs back to the doctor after being stabbed, with his arms in the weird position the whole time he's running and his mouth open in a silent scream (is it silent? I definitely remember expecting it to be silent, but now that I think about it he may have actually been making some nows when he ran on screen, just not a normal "OHMYGODIVEBEENSTABBED" noise.) Bruno S. pulls it off exactly.

Overall, though, I just can't buy into Herzog's argument that Kaspar is somehow "smarter" than the nineteenth-century intellectual straw men Herzog surrounds him with. It's a definite example of Herzog getting in his own way. Sure, there were many problems with nineteenth-century thought, but trying to make it like someone who just has pure thought, undiluted by society, will naturally turn into a person who says things that make more sense or are more amusing to a twentieth-century audience is kind of silly. Things we think now will seem kind of dull to people in a hundred years; not necessarily because they are dull, but because that's just how these things work.

Also, like The Elephant Man or many other movies, this is an example of allowing the audience to congratulate itself for being morally superior to "humanity," by presenting an intriguing character who is obviously misunderstood by the cretins around him. The audience gets to feel good about itself for understanding in a way none of the other characters in the film do, and it's not because the film has opened up a way into the character in such an effective way, but just because that's how the film's set up. In The Elephant Man and, I think, most examples of this type of thing, it's tolerance for the grotesque or, more generally, "tolerance" in general, that the audience gets to feel good about. Here, it's more along the lines of seeing through the superficialities of intellectual thought. I just can't trust that type of thing unless the film has tried equally as hard to make the other viewpoint as understandable, but I'm not sure if that could really be done.

Aguirre, though, doesn't fall into this habit of forcing the audience into identification with some character. The audience most likely does identify the most with the dark-haired chick in Aguirre, but she's not really a major character. Anyway, it's not like Herzog isn't capable of making a movie in such a way that doesn't try to make the audience feel good about itself, but that's obvious how much of Kaspar Hauser works.

Which is sort of like something I remember thinking about while watching it this time: that this is one of the few Herzog movies where part of what is so fascinating about the movie is the psychology of the protagonist. In that way, I suppose, the film kind of has to try to make the audience identify with Kaspar, so that the opening up of his mind can be as fascinating as Herzog wanted it to be. But in the end I guess I have to say I prefer the more Herzogian stuff in other Herzog movies. Need a better way of describing that...

Aguirre the Wrath of God

(written 8/23/2007, 10:51)

2nd time. The first time I saw this was on my 25th birthday, and I wrote a poem out of it. At the time, it was maybe the second or third Herzog movie I'd seen, and I was still trying to figure him out. I definitely had not decided he does things in his films that are completely different from the way most movies work, and seem in some ways more related to poetry than to novels. Although generally there's still an overall narrative around them, I'm referring mostly to isolated scenes in Herzog movies, whose power is not at all taken from the narrative of the movie, but are just perfect images or bits of film or whatever exactly you call them...

Before the movie, they ran a preview for "Le Doulos," during which some annoying guy behind me clapped loudly when the name of the lead actor (who was also the lead in Breathless) was shown. Same guy clapped really loudly when the words "Directed by Werner Herzog" were on screen. Yeah, I get it, you've seen Breathless... you know who Werner Herzog is (although, really, why the hell would be be attending a double feature of Herzog movies if you didn't at least know who he is?)... Shut up!

The movie definitely seemed a lot slower the first time I saw it. I was surprised to find out this time that it's actually only slightly under two hours long. It felt far tighter, this time. Also, definitely a different translation, which confused me at first, because the first line of my poem, "In the morning I read mass, then we descended through the mountain pass," was taken from the subtitles, and this time it was translated as "In the morning I read mass, then we descended through the clouds." Frankly, I like the second translation better, but no idea if it's more accurate or anything.

I had this distinct memory of Klaus Kinski hunching his way across the screen, and in the middle of his crossing turning his face out toward the camera so his blue eyes shone, but that never happened. I must have invented it. It would've been a cool shot, though, in a very Herzogian way.

I still think one of the most interesting things about this movie is how I feel just much fear (not exactly fear, but some kind of anxiety) for the actors on the rafts as I do for the characters, if not more. This doesn't seem like a mistake on Herzog's part, but rather kind of the point. You just can't fully surrender yourself to the idea that these are sixteenth or seventeenth century soldiers because it's obvious that the people on the rafts really seem to be in danger, and because they danger seems real and not "real," we direct our anxiety to the actors and film crews instead of the characters and their situations. The only other examples of this I can think of come from Herzog movies, for the most part. Although it's exactly what I found so amazing about the car chase scene in Tarrantino's half of Grindhouse: the whole part when the stunt-chick's on the hood of the car, she appears to be in real actual danger as a person not just as a character, which makes the whole thing so much more thrilling, or actually thrilling in a completely different way, than even the most exceptionally choreographed action/chase/stunt scene in most films. We never really worry about Matt Damon in The Bourne Ultimatum; we only worry about Jason Bourne. Is it ethically okay for Herzog to do this? I certainly would not want to appear in one of his movies.

There are so many incredible scenes in this movie. The horse scene. Aguirre chasing the monkeys around the dying raft. The tiny jungle creature baby (a sloth?) The boat in the tree. (Did Herzog plan the boat in the tree, or did he find it? Either way, it's a supremely poetic shot.)

Also one of the few Herzog films where I think the dialogue lives up the movie Herzog has shot around it.

I really had not been expecting this movie to be as good as it was before I watched it the second time. Right now, I'm practically vibrating with how great this movie is. Absolutely worthy of that word. I think I had a hint of that after watching it the first time, but it was a little bit outside at the time of my realm of understanding of movies.