Village of the Damned

It's funny because even though I really liked the 1960 version of this, I also imagined it could be remade a little darker, a little tenser, and with more in-depth characterization. Watching John Carpenter's 1995 version is like a cautionary tale to remakes. It has a bigger-name cast (Christopher Reeve! Mark Hamill! the woman from Crocodile Dundee! uh, Kirstie Alley!) and sharper effects (the eyes are never weirdly off-center), and it's got a more tense ticking-clock climax (literally), but overall it feels a lot more clunky, forced, and staged. Whatever magic made the original move smoothly and feel like a steady downhill slope into creepy land has been sucked out of this version.

The truth is, John Carpenter films tend to be group-protagonist stories about what happens next, and almost never about who it's happening to. I like stories to be about the who at least as much as the what, and Village is, I think, a story that wants more than most to be about individual characters. Mark Hamill's preacher who turns sniper is one example of a great dramatic evolution that wasn't given much due. But even more than that, this version spends too long spinning plates in the middle. The kids do their glowy-eye-thing and force people to do things against their will, and they do it first as retribution and then ultimately as self-preservation, and yet people keep pissing them off in basically the same ways (an accident, a taunt, a threat) and they react in basically the same way (glowy eyes, offender hurts or kills themselves in whatever way is both most convenient and suited to the nature of the offense). Once or twice this is scary, but then it keeps happening, and we don't even get a quick-cut shorthand version; each time we watch the full sequence with the glowy-eyes, the music, the zooms, the struggle not to off yourself, and finally bang, suicide. The repetition feels a little exhaustive and doesn't help keep the suspense up.

I would still like to see a version that exploits how the children take for granted that they can read your thoughts and that you are trying to stop them. All encounters needn't end in death: they could simply mind-warp you into defusing bombs or unloading guns when you tried something, and any conspiracy against them, they would know about and be able to circumvent. Then more time could be spent in the uncomfortable position of interacting with them, exploring the hivemindedness of them, and facing the unstoppable threat of someone who can control you if they have to and knows your every thought. In both versions, the scenes of the one "trusted" man trying to get through to them -- to simultaneously educate them and learn about them -- are the best scenes. It'd be easy to keep the dread up while building on those, I'd think. Neither version quite goes this direction, but both touch on it. (A common theme in my critiques: "Hey, this movie started to go in this interesting direction but it had something else on its mind and went elsewhere instead. I want to see a version that goes in that other direction instead.")

In the end, this is not a bad film, but it's definitely inferior to the 1960s version, and there's just no getting around it. But it feels definitively Carpenterian; in fact it's easy to see this as the final part in a loose trilogy that includes The Fog and The Thing -- though I do like The Thing quite a bit more than the other two.

Village of the Damned

I've been mildly obsessed with John Wyndham lately, who seems to have such a methodical and clinical approach to depicting creepy, subversive invasions, so I finally sat and watched the first of a couple of adaptations of The Midwich Cuckoos. It plays out like a smart b-movie, with a ton of exposition but a patient, steady hand telling an interesting story. Even the leaps of logic that get us to the "truth" of the matter leave most everything pleasantly ambiguous, which I always find more frightening and more believable than spelling it all out. What was the children's end-goal, exactly, beyond survival and propagation? And did they know about intelligent life in outer space or not? How exactly did the mass blackout facilitate the impregnation of all the village's women? I'm asking these questions precisely because they remain unanswered, and I am thankful for that level of obtuseness in the story. Overexplaining ruins a good mystery, and if there's no mystery there's no drama.

Technically the movie relies on some stoic acting from children (pretty easy), some creepy music (check), and an optical effect to make the eyes glow white. Occasionally the optical effect doesn't quite line up, and it's invariably creepier for the subtly misplaced shapes. A similar effect showed up occasionally on the original Star Trek series, and I always felt the same Uncanny Valley freakiness whenever the overlaid effect wasn't perfectly lined up with the original image.

I've got very little to say about this. It's good, in a "Twilight Zone" way, and it's sparse in a way that leaves little to complain about. It wraps up a little quickly, and the choice of making the main character a hopelessly optimistic professor seemingly incapable of doing wrong is an interesting one (even when people die from his hubris, he owns it immediately with that Wyndham clinicalness). But overall, it worked even better than I expected, and now my only question is do I watch the sequel or the remake next? Either way it'll be another night. It's late and I'm sleepy.

Varjoja paratiisissa (Shadows in Paradise)

There's a scene late in Shadows in Paradise when our hero Nikander, having won and lost his ferociously tepid love Ilona, where he's back at his night job translating English recordings into Finnish (or at least that's what I think he's doing). The snippet we catch goes as follows: "I was pretty well through with the subject. I'd probably considered it from most of its various angles, including the one that certain injuries or imperfections are a subject of merriment while remaining quite serious for the person possessing them. It's funny. It's very funny. And it's a lot of fun too, to be in love. Do you think so?" It's a strange monologue, and when he tries to play it back he finds it unbearable. He cannot face the lines, and he leaves his job abruptly, work unfinished. These lines are so awkwardly spot-on about this beautifully awkward story that they are jarring, confrontational, and yet they read like so many opaque lines of stereo instructions that you're not sure if you even got the meaning right. Maybe you imagined that it summed up the movie, but it felt like it did.

The tone here is just so delicate. I've never felt more invited to laugh at deadpan sadsacks as when watching an Aki Kaurismäki film, but it's never all that funny. What I didn't remember, and now find amazingly obvious, is how proto-Jarmuschian this is, reminding me of Ghost Dog, Broken Flowers, Limits of Control, and of course the similarly titled Stranger Than Paradise. Everything from little details like her portable stereo and the way they smoke to the general tone to the sedate way things never really boil over, and of course the more-bleak-than-black sense of humor. It's all very like where Jim Jarmusch would go, and curiously (but separately?) this film feels amazingly like a solution to a problem of tone and pacing to one of my scripts (The World of Missing Persons, only so noted in case I come back wondering). It's matter-of-fact and slice-of-life but with a tinge of absurdism. I really like it, even though on a certain level it seems (absurdly) like I'm watching cinema's first Aspergers romance. I'll have to revisit this one in the future when I get back to that script. Between Kaurismäki and Roy Andersson (Songs of the Second Floor and You, the Living), it seems like I'm constantly being inspired for my own films by contemporary Scandinavian cinema. Like I said, bleak-comic absurdism. I wonder what else is out there.

For now, sorry if my thoughts are all over the place. I had to crawl out of bed to write this, and now I'm going back to it. What are you gonna do?

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

I knew it.

This is not a movie to watch as a critical adult. It's the only movie I can think of where the threat is a planet-destroying, energy-sucking alien monster and yet the stakes are this low (even the animated real Transformers: the Movie had higher stakes). Among other things, this film paints whale biologists as the most gullible, trusting people ever. It takes literally two lines of dialogue while they wait for their pizza for Kirk to convince Gillian he's from the future. Don't get me wrong: this isn't a bad movie, it's just a weak plot. The movie is about character, and here more than anywhere else yet (maybe the beginning of III), the full ensemble of the Enterprise crew gets its due. Sulu, Scotty, Chekov, Uhura and Bones finally have brief but distinct objectives and stories. After playing these same characters for 25 years, they've earned it.

But I'm viewing this as part of a trilogy, that's the deal here. And so, to recap:

The Wrath of Khan is the story of Admiral Kirk, a captain without a ship, unable to accept his age and position, and Spock making the ultimate (albeit logical) sacrifice to save his friends. It ends with Spock dead, Kirk bereft, and the ship limping home.

The Search For Spock is the story of Kirk, a listless man who has lost his soul, and the impossible ridiculous journey to get it back by breaking laws, disobeying orders, committing treasonous crimes and hitting control-Z on Spock's sacrifice. It ends with Kirk forced to give up what he thought was the most important thing in his world -- his ship -- for his friends and his own survival, and with Spock returned to life, a confused and newborn soul inhabiting an adult Vulcan body.

The Voyage Home is the story of Kirk, his soul restored (if the themes of III are to be taken literally and carried over) becoming again a man with a mission: save the planet from a strange alien visitor through time travel, as Spock learns how to be "human" through life lessons like cursing, lying, and valuing a friend's life more than mere logic would allow. Spock's soul matures and Kirk plays Casanova and cowboy. It ends with them returning home in a Klingon ship, saving the day (of course), and Spock insisting on standing trial alongside his friends (despite being absent and therefore innocent of all charges). Because they saved the planet they are exonerated of all charges except one, and Kirk alone stands to be punished. His punishment is a nice moment of reversal, in that it results in a demotion and the return of Kirk to the captain's chair -- of a brand new Enterprise no less (which, by my count, was commissioned and built in under three months! I don't know, is that fast or is it just me?).

As a trilogy, I think it works. The story goes: Kirk has taken a desk job and is miserable. He feels he is losing his ship (the Enterprise), his sense of purpose (a mission), and his best friend (Spock). He is lost -- half a man at best. As the trilogy proceeds, he literally loses all three of these things: his best friend (Spock dies), his sense of purpose (they won't let him go back to Genesis; they won't give him a ship to command), and his ship (the Enterprise is destroyed to beat the Klingons). He fights to bring back his best friend -- arguably the least likely of the three to recover -- and then, through other, mostly unrelated Herculean tasks (though honestly, like I said, the losses in III and the heroics in IV both play out way too easily for my tastes) he is rewarded with the recovery of his other two losses: a new ship, a continued mission/sense of purpose. The trilogy ends triumphant. And all is well in the universe.

(That is until Spock's crazy brother brainwashes the crew and steals the ship and takes them to meet God, who it turns out is an impostor alien who wants a starship and has lightning bolts for eyes. But I think everyone everywhere, fans and non-fans alike, have agreed to pretend Star Trek V simply doesn't exist. So let us never speak of that again.)

Volver

I don't speak Spanish, but online translators tell me volver translates alternately as return, go back, come back, and turn around. When Raimunda is singing "Volver, volver," the subtitles tell me it means "Come back, come back." The revolving windmills outside their village is a repeating visual motif. My point is, this movie isn't being subtle with its theme of returning, of things coming back.

But boy, it's being layered with that theme, isn't it? Everybody's got secrets, everybody's lying about the present (or recent past), and everybody's distant pasts seem like inexhaustible mysteries. Never dull for a moment, with characters so... human! If Hollywood wrote women like this, I think we'd have a very different cinematic landscape.

Videodrome

I have to admit, there's something all-over-the-place about this story that makes it feel unfocused and B-movie-ish, but it's got strange intricate layers and it's beautiful and acid-dreamy and fun to return to anyway.