The Brood

Here's a horror film that's purely character driven. It's late and I wake up early, and it always bothers me when I have to make concessions of that sort but life is what it is and I can only say a little. The Brood is the product of clearly a different era, but you can't deny that every single scene comes from the drives of the characters. Frank is driven to solve the mystery and protect his child, and everything he does is to that end (though leaving her with her heavy-drinking grandmother early on seems strange, I guess it's better the known evil of boozy grandma to the unknown evil of crazy mom beating her). Hal the doctor is driven to cure those who are sick, though he uses extremely unconventional methods to do so. And at the heart of both stories is understanding Nola, whose every desire and fear is being translated into a literal child-sized monster. Everything, every strange and creepy event or crisis or turn in the story, can be traced back to these three characters. Every action is motivated, and every motivation is consistent and clear. Sometimes the underlying psychologies of the characters are a little too on-the-nose, a little too direct, I admit, but so be it. That's part of the creepy tone of the story. Her most basic urges are becoming manifest. That's what it's about.

Excellent work with child actors and with putting children in the scenes, "witnessing" the violence and horror, too. A bit of nice casting combined with some red-eyed makeup and fake tears and you really believe her both as a traumatized child and a child under attack. The film wouldn't have worked if it had shied away from the children's suffering or fears, or if the children hadn't been in real peril. That's all I have tonight. Like I said, it's late, and in all honesty I hadn't intended to watch this whole film tonight, but I got caught up in the tight pacing and short running time, and just kept watching.

The Strangers

On recommendation I finally watched this, as an example of a recent "smart" horror film, with characters, and plot points that matter, and a concern for story as well as for scares. I have to concede that this fits that bill pretty perfectly. It's also right in the wheelhouse for the kind of thing I'm doing, and to top that off, first time writer-director Bryan Bertino wrote the script (then called The Faces) and was a quarter-finalist for the Nicholl Fellowship before selling it to Universal. His first film was a horror because he felt he could connect to his audience by scaring them (according to Wikipedia). Right in my wheelhouse, indeed.

The exercise in setting up some reasonably complicated and emotional relationships between the two leads proves a point I think a couple of friends were trying to make to me about horror the other day: it's a genre about things happening to the characters (with, therefore, pretty passive protagonists and very active antagonists or antagonistic forces), and even with all that set-up you end up disregarding most of it as you enter act two. I don't think it has to be quite as sharp a cut between character development and scary stuff happening as The Strangers has, but even with such a hard line separation I was happier having it all there than having none or having sloppy, lazy characterization fill twenty minutes.

The containedness is good, and gives me something to look at and think about. It's not quite how I want to deal with it, in terms of the threat or the reaction to the threat, but it's thoughtful and it works. I'd definitely like to see if I can find a script for this out there, maybe the Nicholls draft even, something before there was a shooting script. The use of handheld actually worked here, even though it was shakier than average. Something about a wide shot of a room, a girl alone, something out there, that all seems heightened by an unmoving but shaky camera. Static shots rendered handheld. Not like I've never seen it done before, but where I might have dismissed it, here I have to admit it helped the scene's tension.

It's hard not to compare this to Ils, but it actually holds up pretty well, and overall maybe better. For my money I found the masks a little off-putting and not-scary, though I enjoyed the man's mask ("enjoyed" meaning "was slightly unsettled/frightened by") and I enjoyed the blankness of not seeing their faces (though I can't help but wonder about the choice to never show us their faces at all, even when our characters see them in broad daylight... I don't hate the choice, but it felt stilted). But the killers themselves seemed pretty good. It sure has its share of miraculous timing, which is kind of a headache for a script-obsessed writer like me, but there were enough scary moments and enough thought given to the sequence of events and characters that I was willing to forgive. Plus, Ils lost a lot of its terror as soon as you figure out that the killers are a) easily tricked and fallible, and b) menacing children, nothing more; the masked invaders in The Strangers are a decidedly more adult, controlled breed of killer. It's not just their masks that hide their feelings. Their every movement is lethargic, as though half-asleep, they're more a menace that moves like molasses somewhere between methodical and maniacal (partially accidental alliteration! how about that!). In the end, they have two brilliantly telling lines, outlining a frightening M.O. for us without any heavy exposition. The first, in response to Kristen's demands of "Why are you doing this to us?" they respond merely, "Because you were home." Second, as they drive away in their beat-up pickup truck, stopping even to take a religious pamphlet from some young Mormon (?) missionaries, the girl (Dollface) says, "It'll be easier next time." This is (like, yes, Wikipedia points out) a proto-Manson family, calculatedly learning how to torment and kill. There's something plausible about this, unfortunately, which keeps the story a little scarier than a lot of supernatural horror stories. This kind of a creeper is a lot more likely to come breaking through your window at night than a tentacle monster or a fanged beast, or the walking dead, or a man from inside your dreams. These people are out there.

Frozen

I've been researching horror and "contained thriller" story ideas for a while now, and in a lot of ways Frozen is just what I'm looking to do, so I knew I'd have to see it. I had no idea, however, just how unpleasant an experience this was going to be.

The characters were unlikable in a really incredible way. I mean, it's a horror-ish film (pleasantly, and for a change, there was nothing supernatural, just man vs. bad situation and vs. savage nature) and I sometimes think they try to give you unlikable characters so you can have fun watching them suffer and die. I haven't seen it, to be honest, but I suspect this might be the Paris Hilton-in-House of Wax Effect. But this was different. These weren't characters I wanted to see suffer and die (nor did I get the impression I was supposed to); these were just three unbearably banal people. They look like and for the most part talk like Bros, but they have dialogue like discount knock-off Kevin Smith characters. On so many levels the dialogue tries too hard -- it tries too hard to remind us of the peril, to tell us what the character is feeling, to provide backstory and development through clichés and generic pop nostalgia, and to charm with references to Lucky Charms and obscure Star Wars monsters.

The problem is, Frozen doesn't try in a lot of places where it needs to. The shots, the editing, and the pacing never seem to know what do with themselves, so I'm probably equally tense from frustration that this experience isn't visceral enough as from anything seen on screen, even when the stuff on screen is fairly gruesome. (I had an almost identical reaction to the should-be-horrific early parts of Awake.)

Plus, it doesn't seem to care to keep track of the perils it inflicts on its three semi-characters. There's a lot of talk of frostbite, and we see some reasonably gross (to think about; not terribly convincing looking but that's okay) frostbite-caused badness; there's a lot of talk of needing to pee as well, and the girl even wets herself. I kept expecting all these things to accumulate into some kind of super gross-out climax, but none of them amount to anything. She peels all the skin off her bare right hand, but when she needs it, she uses it with seemingly no problem. Much is made of Joe's gloves being cut through by the "razor sharp" cable as he climbs across to the pole, but apart from some blood in the snow it doesn't come up again. Most notable of all, though, is (SPOILER) when Dan becomes wolf dinner, I know that Joe was trying to be nice and didn't want Parker to see, but we want to see it. At least a little bit. Tease us. It's gruesome when you tease us. It's boring when I'm watching two not-amazing actors cry at each other for two minutes while the score does a thing. And then? And then Dan's body is just... gone. They never even show us the aftermath. The next morning it's gone -- dragged off? no bloody trail? When Parker finally lands in what has to be the exact same spot, the snow is clean and clear. I mean, ignoring how confused I was when she passed through the bloody remains of Joe because I thought that might have been Dan, it would have been a great visceral reminder of everything they've been through if some part of the body was there off camera right or something. (I think at one point early on we see a perfectly clean hand sticking out of the snow, unmoving. That's our aftermath shot.)

So Frozen toys with graphic dismal slow death but it opts out of actually showing you anything or resolving its many sub-crises along the way. It puts three people I couldn't find less interesting in a ski lift and fills their interminable wait with conversations that mean nothing, go nowhere, and are totally artificial. It lacks sensationalism but it also lacks realism. It lacks supernatural terror but it also doesn't really sink its teeth into natural terror. On the one hand, I think to myself, maybe if I react this poorly to most similarly-styled contemporary horror films I should rethink attempting the genre. On the other hand, if the bar for writing is this low, maybe writing a smarter-than-average one is going to be easier than I thought.

I totally wanted to make some kind of bunny slope analogy there, but it's 1 AM and this movie didn't garner the kind of goodwill that encourages clever quips, to be honest. It's an energy-sucking movie. It gave me a lot to think about, because it is a contained thriller after all, but too much of it was unpleasant, and not all of its unpleasantness was the intentional horror-movie kind.

Is all of this arrogant? I know it's arrogant, but what do you want? It just doesn't feel like Adam Green put any thought into the reality of his story here. It doesn't probe very deep externally into the film's world or internally into these cardboard characters. It just doesn't feel like it's trying very hard. At the very least, I hope nobody will ever say that of my works. "What a lazy film."

羅生門 (Rashomon)

I've been reading about Kurosawa all week, so it was only a matter of time before I started watching his films again. Amazing that this has been my first complete Kurosawa film all year. Obviously the story here is pretty well known, but it was a joy to think about this untraditional narrative from a script standpoint and not just what it means in a grand sense. The order of the events, the details of each lie, fall in a precise order to maximize suspense. In each telling, for example, we know that the samurai is killed, but with each telling the how and why is drawn out with several twists along the way. In the medium's (the samurai's own) telling it appears that Tajomaru is going to kill him at the behest of the cruel, taunting wife, but Tajomaru (in that telling) proves honorable, offering to kill the wicked wife if the samurai just gives the word. In the woodcutter's telling, the protacted amateur sword fight between the two men leaves Tajomaru swordless and the samurai still armed, leaving us to wonder how possibly the tables will turn; followed by the samurai's sword being lodged in a tree trunk at a precarious angle (blade out), teasing the audience that it might even be purely an accident that befalls him. Plus, some details conveniently match up, like Tajomaru's chucking his sword into the bushes to kill the samurai, which occurs both in Tajomaru's own and the woodcutter's versions.

Moreover, it's smart of the story to have each suspect accuse themselves -- confess essentially -- of/to the same crime. Had the wife accused Tajomaru, or Tajomaru claimed the samurai had committed suicide, it would have looked like self-preservation, the most obvious (and understandable) kind of lie there is. Instead we are left to wonder why any of the three would lie to take responsibility. Fortunately the characters are developed enough that we can infer at least possible motives (Tajomaru for the glory, for his pride and reputation; the wife to save face and/or as an expression of her guilt and shame for any collusion, implicit or explicit; and the samurai to save his wife's neck and/or out of shame for his own desire in the moment to do so).

The story is famous for not telling you what happens, and it's difficult to not want to work out some kind of mental graph, a sudoku puzzle of which parts are true and which lies and get to the bottom of this. I'm reasonably sure there is no such solution. But where a lot of scholars and film historians (that is to say, bloggers I've been reading lately) seem to claim that the story's contribution to cinema is to trick us, to leave us back where we started and to prove that no answer is possible, I think Kurosawa may have been a little more holistic than that. I think the answer here is that everybody's right, to a degree, and that truth isn't the same as fact. I like to look at this and not see three or four liars, but three or four imperfect, self-aggrandizing interpretations. Everybody is looking at what happened and telling you the version they want to be true, partially as a series of conscious selections (lies) and partially as a simply skewed set of memories (misremembering), because that's the way everyone's memories are. Memory is hardly infallible, and memory is the primary source of knowledge, especially in this particular story. Therefore, what chance does knowledge have? Truth is barely even a reflection of fact -- more like its echo. A dim, distorted impression that once bounced against actual fact, but that's it.

Okay I got kind of esoteric there. I have been watching Bergman and Kurosawa, after all. What do you expect?

Ansiktet (The Magician)

This is really a delight to watch, because the themes and philosophical questions come into light early, but the rest of the story is a dense and complicated riddle. What is truth? What is its value? What is magic, or faith in magic? Does it have value, even as a sham? Does the faith people put in a thing give it its true power, and which is more valuable: the faith of the magician or the faith of his audience? Go ahead and replace "magician" with literally any role where one asks for the faith of others.

But The Magician doesn't offer up answers quite as readily as it does questions, partially because it's cleverly playing both sides of the fence. Is there magic, or supernatural forces, or God? Do ghosts haunt us? Do Granny's witch's spells and potions do anything? Does Vogler have any power about him at all? The answer seemed to me to be both yes and no, to all of these questions. (I'm no Bergman scholar, but I know he was obsessed with, among other things, religious faith, and I suspect in some form or other he was a firm believer himself. No matter! Let it never be said he was afraid to dabble in skepticism.)

The best I can say is, this plays out like The Prestige crossed with The Rules of the Game, starring a traveling sideshow act of snake oil salesmen, and taking place in rural Sweden circa 1846. The delineation between the house staff and the upper-crust, and how each is scammed in their own ways, says a lot about the world of the story, the nature of faith and hope, and how it breaks down along class lines. There were many, many great confrontations, monologues, and turnarounds throughout. (I could do better than to point out it "says a lot" or "there were great bits," but this is just a recording of preliminary reactions, and much of it will take more time to digest.) The bit with the fictional love potions -- a collision of cynicism and idealism where both sides colluded to believe, and therefore to produce the supposed effect, was fantastic; both con-man and mark were culpable, as it is with fantasies and faith. For me personally, the actor who is not a ghost but is, who believes he is dying but isn't, who is more successful and convincing as a specter than he ever was as a thespian, was perhaps my favorite embodiment of the questions the film was asking, and there was something haunting in "mute" Volger's way of letting the actor take center stage. The antagonism between Doctors Vergerus and Volger was intense, and sharp, and fascinating -- and only slightly distracting because Gunnar Björnstrand looked shockingly like Kevin Kline with chin scruff in this.

So many layers, and I'm sure I didn't even scratch the surface on my first viewing. This is one disc I'm likely to check out the (Criterion) special features on.

(NOTE: Interestingly, after checking out some of them, I learn that The Magician is seen as a parable about the creative process, about film- and play-directing, about performance, and the relationship between a fickle audience and even fickler critics and the artist himself. All that's super interesting and totally there now that I see it, but I stand by my assessment as well, vis-a-vis faith and magic and truth.)

좋은 놈, 나쁜 놈, 이상한 놈 (Joheun nom nabbeun nom isanghan nom / The Good The Bad The Weird)

I'm actually glad I just watched Leone's full trilogy before this, because although the characters are pretty clearly (though pretty loosely) based on the titular Good, Bad, and Ugly, scenes are stolen/homaged out of Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More as well. For most of the film, it felt more like the title should have been "The Good, The Bad, The Weird, The Gang, The Other Gang, and the Japanese Army." So many forces were chasing after this one map it got a little Mad, Mad, Mad World-esque. In fact, they play pretty loose with how each group keeps its eyes on the prize, and you just sort of accepted that in this cartoony world the three title characters/heroes were unkillable no matter what happened (the same is true in an Indiana Jones movie; I think this may differentiate action films from action-adventure, and I don't mean this as a complaint). The story is all an action-set-piece delivery system, and it doesn't disappoint in that regard.

The epic chase across the endless desert at the end was ridiculous and fun, and summed up the whole movie perfectly. It was largely impossible to tell who is doing what, exactly, or who is who's main antagonist, but Yoon Tae-goo (the Weird) has the map and is always somehow in the lead. Park Chang-yi (the Bad) looks like Vampire The Masquerade (Jen called it; she's right) and gets hilariously petulant when something gets in his way. And Park Do-won (the Good) is kind of a pretty-boy Korean Clint Eastwood, who apparently just wants to kill this mysterious guy who killed five guys, even though everybody racks up death tolls in the double digits every time a gun is fired. I think I missed something. Anyway he's a bad-ass, too, and likes his rifle.

So it's a mess, but it's interesting to look at the weird culture mash-up on display, and it's entertaining as hell. The only reason the story doesn't collapse under its own circuitous, convoluted weight (mixaphorically speaking) is the same reason that last mega-chase scene worked: it never slows down, and everybody just keeps barreling ahead at a breakneck pace. So long as everything's in motion, you don't have time to stop and think, and the ride stays fun.

Hunger

It's disturbing to think that the events depicted in this movie happened within my lifetime, that these kind of atrocities were committed against people not fifty or a hundred years ago but less than thirty. And that many or most of the people who did these terrible things are probably still alive today. But of course, this isn't a blog about historical monstrosities, so I'll talk about what I thought of the film. But because it's late and I'm neglecting my lady friend, I'll be brief.

The long meditative takes and realist approach to the story really work for the story. It's hard to look back on the scenes preceding the punishing end, in which our protagonist (of sorts, who only becomes our protagonist at roughly an hour in) starves himself to death in scenes that frankly make The Machinist seem cheap and gimmicky (there the emaciated human form was done with significantly less gravitas and to less evocative effect), but the best parts of the film for me were all the scenes leading up to this. The first two-thirds of Hunger embody the old tenet of "show don't tell" in a beautiful, kind of Malick-ish way, and makes the long, single-take back-and-forth with the prison chaplain so much more impactful and shocking. After sixty minutes of quietly, stubbornly suffering souls and head-butting confrontations, you suddenly feel like you're in the middle of a sharp-tongued Irish play, which begins light and gets heavy (as Irish plays tend to do).

Maybe it's that I'm a dramatist at heart but it was that sequence that hit me the hardest and stuck with me as the most beautiful and telling. Not for what was being said, but for how it was being said, and what it felt like to come across such a kinetically charged, nearly motionless scene in the middle of all these tense, quiet moments. It also reminded me for obvious reasons of Bronson, but again done with more impact and gravity. In short, this is one of those hard-to-watch movies that's incredibly worth it; every wordless scene was powerful; the torrent of words in the middle were powerful; the visceral slow decline to death at the end was powerful. I don't know much about the politics, and it's certainly a one-sided story (though I suspect it's hard to justify the other side on this one), but as a story and a film it's harrowing in all the right ways, and a true pleasure.

Monsters

In certain circles, this movie is all the hype. It was made for $15,000 with a crew of two, it's a science fiction post-invasion (sort of) movie shot for next to nothing that wowed people at South by Southwest and supposedly is getting released in theaters later this month. (A link at the bottom will allow you to "rent" it from amazon.com and watch it now, which is what I did.) It's handheld, shaky, with a tight focus and lots of composited creatures in the backgrounds of wide shots, and it's hard not to compare it on a certain level to District 9. The two plots are pretty different but they share similar views of humanity and morality.

On the one hand, this is really enervating, at least as much so as One Too Many Mornings was, or the short that Blomkamp made before District 9, or for that matter Primer or El Mariachi or Slacker, because it shows what you can do with very little money, a little ingenuity and a good premise or story. Rumor has it Timur Bekmambetov is already producing some new epic science fiction film Gareth Edwards is writing and directing. Just think of that! You make a clever, deceptively simple film and you show off that you can frame a shot, write a scene, and direct some actors. You show you can handle action without overdoing it, you can handle romance without overdoing it, and you can keep the pace moving fairly well, and before your little feature film (made for less than the cost of a new car) hits theaters you're scoring deals and could maybe make a second, incredibly bigger film. That's how it can be done. That's inspiring.

On the other hand, as much as I marvel at its economical storytelling and low overhead, Monsters definitely leaves you wanting more. It feels a tad rushed in terms of events, and just a touch more languid than necessary in terms of pacing. It never feels boring, but some of the meditative moments in the jungle and before they leave Mexico felt a wee bit like scene-padding. I wouldn't have a problem with this except the film has roughly twelve or so scenes, that's it. The trek through the Infected Zone took two nights by my count, and one of those was spent wandering on foot and sleeping atop a Chichen Itza-styled pyramid. How did they move so quickly? Why did they move so quickly? The scenes that are there feel lived-in, thought-out, and real. But where the movie kind of shows its budget is in its limited scope of time. Honestly, I just wanted more story. Like, twice as much.

But otherwise, what I'm given, I'm pretty pleased with. As I implied above, the acting, the cinematography, the dialogue, the pacing, the action, the romantic chemistry even... it all works. The themes take a little while to get going, but by the end I'm pretty satisfied, and in fact they're so beautifully understated that I don't mind. Also, it's got (idealized) Lovecraft monsters, tentacles in the fog. When this does come to theaters, I think I'd like to go see it -- not all chunky and compressed and chugging on my computer monitor -- and see if it all holds up on the big screen.

Seen as an Amazon.com "Pre-Theatrical Rental."

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)

Okay, I lied. This truly is the best of the trilogy. With each film, Leone expands in all the right ways. For one, the budget goes up considerably, as does the polish and production value; but more than that, the characters multiply and deepen, the world gets bigger, the plot more complicated (in an interesting way), and the themes become more nuanced. By the time we get to this, the most famous of the three, everything seems to be working together, a perfect storm of a film. The damn thing is three solid hours long, and although it feels it, you're never bored at all.

In fact, the three hours seem almost perfectly broken into equal-sized acts. The first hour is spent building the three characters, particularly the relationship between Blondie (the Good) and Tuco (the Ugly), with the ever-looming spectre of Angel Eyes (the Bad) homing in slowly on a load of money. At the one-hour mark, Blondie and Tuco stumble upon Bill Carson and each learn half the information needed to find the treasure. Act Two is spent bumbling through a mission, the confederates, the yankees, and eventually teaming up with Angel Eyes and his gang. At the two-hour mark, the showdown in the ghost town equalizes the three and sets them up for the final chase to the cemetery. Act Three is spent crossing the final thresholds and squaring off one-on-one-on-one in a fascinating if awfully convenient standoff to end all standoffs.

It's such a film about sides and shifting loyalties! You've got a constant backdrop of the end of the civil war, and the characters bounce between both sides, impersonating with little difficulty whichever side is likely to help their cause. Then you've got Blondie and Angel Eyes, explicitly demarcated for us as "Good" and "Bad" respectively, even though both are fairly underhanded throughout (but it's never ambiguous: Blondie is definitely the compassionate one, Angel Eyes the ice-cold murderer), and this obviously leaves Tuco, our Ugly, as the wildcard, the middle, the shifter. Tuco bounces easily between being as backstabbing and devious as Angel Eyes or as warm and amiable as Blondie (which, for this world, is remarkably warm and amiable, actually), and this has a double effect. First, it makes him the key to the whole story, because shifting allegiances and constantly choosing sides is what the story hinges on in so many ways. It also makes him the most interesting to watch, as he is the most dynamic, unpredictable character of the three. (Eli Wallach is really the star here, if you ask me, stealing every scene he's in.)

The climax of the film hinges on the fact that Tuco has more or less sided with Blondie throughout, that he was never really as bad as Bad, he never really allied with Angel Eyes after all, and since it was a pull for power between two (not three) sides, since this was a tug-of-war between Good and Bad, having Ugly side with Good tipped the scales. In a film all about shifting allegiances, it has to all come down to who the wildcard sides with.

The story deals so well with the absurdity of right and wrong, the brutal pointlessness of war, the fundamental lack of difference between "good" and "evil" as opposing forces, and the soul-wearying effect war has on a culture, not to mention comments on class, desperation, friendship, religion, family, and community as well. It's so rich. Too layered for me to do it justice here, that's for sure. I've heard somewhere or other that Leone's masterpiece is supposed to be Once Upon a Time in the West, but it's hard to imagine a film better than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for revisionist 60s westerns (spaghetti or no). Then again, I said something similar about For A Few Dollars More pretty recently, so.

Only one way to find out.

Catfish *

Everything I'm about to say will be rife with spoilers. This is a movie that, if you can, you should see without having anything ruined for you. The problem is, even me saying that is enough to ruin the surprises of the film for any intelligent moviegoer, because if you know a movie has a surprise you can't not look for it, even when you try not to. This is how the movie was spoiled for me (and so was Awake and so was, way back when, The Sixth Sense and in a more explicit way so was I'm Still Here) -- by a good friend saying something along the lines of, "I can't really tell you about this film without spoiling it. It involves people meeting on Facebook. You should go see it, unspoiled." He meant well. But the damage was done.

Anyway, going in with that in mind I had the same experience I had when I saw Herzog's Grizzly Man the day after watching Zak Penn's mockumentary Incident at Loch Ness starring Werner Herzog as himself. It made me so skeptical of the film's veracity that I never trusted anything said or done. I was convinced the whole thing was a hoax, or a Paranormal Activity-style drama, and so I kept looking for clues about what was real or not. As it happens, Aimee Gonzales -- the face of the fake Megan Faccio -- was in attendance at the screening I saw, and offered an impromptu Q&A afterward. (She lives in Vancouver, WA, and I can't help but wonder if she comes to town and does a lot of these, if she hung out all day, or if I got lucky by seeing the primetime 7:20 showing on a Friday night.) Hearing some more outside-the-film details from her, including details of a filmed but unused ending in which she and her husband are flown to New York to meet with Nev for an excruciatingly awkward and mixed-emotions first encounter, made me accept more of the veracity of the claim. Angela, the master of so many Facebook sockpuppets, gets painted as a slightly less sympathetic character in Aimee's eyes, which is not surprising, all things considered.

But as to the film itself (as fascinating as the actual story is, I ought to judge Catfish as the film it is and not the story it's based on), I have to say I was really impressed. I mean, the seams of a budgetless documentary shot on point-and-shoots and cellphones certainly shows, but the narrative structure and control of story throughout is grand, including several scenes, interviews, and monologues edited in such a way as to weave layers of visual meaning and build complicated themes out of what could have just been a straightforward this-then-this-then-this story. (Just watch one of the last scenes, in which husband Vince gives a strange bit of wisdom which gives the film its title.)

Further, the sequence when they go to what is supposedly Megan's farmhouse in the middle of the night and discover it empty (abandoned? I was confused about the existence of the penny postcards in the mailbox otherwise... that part felt somewhat staged to me) was incredibly tense, almost horror-movie suspenseful. From a narrative standpoint, the protagonist Nev makes bold choices throughout, has several moments of weakness and self-doubt around halfway through (which he overcomes), and grows and changes as a person from his ordeal. He begins the story a handsome hero, goes on a life-changing journey, and comes home to find that the world doesn't seem the same as when he left -- he's no longer happy to be filmed, he no longer enjoys the packages from Angela, even though he knows the "truth" now. So, tight editing, smart storytelling, bold filmmaking, fascinating protagonists and a hero's journey structure. It almost feels too perfect somehow. Even after listening to Aimee Gonzales it just doesn't quite sit right.

I like this story a lot, and if it's all (or mostly) true they're incredibly lucky to have caught it all and incredibly smart and skilled to put it together the way they did. If the whole thing or sufficient amounts of it are fabricated to tell a story about shifting identities, paranoia, and facing the emotional perils of trusting the digital world so readily, then they've done a very good job of that, as well. Either way, this is a good film.

It's also, by coincidence, the first documentary I've watched all year.

Seen at Regal Lloyd Center Cinemas.

One Too Many Mornings

A personal note: director and co-writer Michael Mohan sent (or had his e-signature at the bottom of) my first congratulatory You're-A-Finalist email from the Sundance Institute, as well as the rejection email which inevitably followed. Plus, he's a friend of my good friend Dave. Although I've never met the man or corresponded with him personally, I feel a weird sort of... not kinship, but acquaintance with him. He's also just made his first incredibly indie, self-distributed feature debut, and everything about this feels like the kind of thing I could do if I really devoted myself to it. So it's inspirational and it's the project of a friend-once-removed; my point is, I went in really wanting One Too Many Mornings to be great, and really worried about if I'd like it or not.

I did like it. I liked it a lot.

It's got a great raw first-film energy. It's sleek and economical and never wastes your time, and the characters have a lived-in rhythm, a way of talking to each other that feels realistic, if not always real. The two main characters never bore me, even when they frustrate me to no end, and their relationship evolves organically. The shots are good looking and the editing and structure is tight. This is a good model for a successful first film. In fact, I have some filmmaker friends I'm going to have to show this to for that very reason. It's not flawless -- some scenes and a couple of the actors and actresses aren't quite convincing -- but it's never enough to bring the movie down. It contributes to that kind of rawness for me.

More than once I felt a scene had to surely be over by now, but it lingered, and another layer was revealed or another unexpected turn (even if just an unexpected gag) would arise and keep the story chugging, and the wait would be worth it. Occasionally that would lend to a sort of feeling of artificial rhythm; I have to admit it comes off as very self-consciously cut from indie-film cloth. And in this case I truly mean that as a compliment: it lives up to what those words should mean. The only other film made in the last couple of years I can think of to say that about that I've seen is Kabluey.

I hope this film succeeds, because I think it deserves to and because it renews my hope in the idea of an indie film being a good indie film. Either way, I bet this isn't Mohan's last film, and that's kind of exciting, because I know a guy who knows that guy. Plus he one time gave me really encouraging and then slightly disappointing (but not surprising) news about my first feature script. In so many ways, Mike Mohan keeps giving me hope. So of course I'm rooting for him.

Le Cercle Rouge

It's funny that I've seen Le Samourai so many times and yet this was the first time I'd finally sat and watched more than half an hour of this. They're both such steady-handed procedurals, telling almost matter-of-fact stories about cops and robbers chasing each other. Only where Le Samourai was about balancing a smart cop versus a smart crook, Le Cercle Rouge feels more novelistic, sprawling. It's not that it's got a huge cast or anything, but everybody feels like they've got their own stories and their own trajectories here.

The big set-piece heist is fun, more for its tension than its ingenuity at this point. I wanted more conflict between the robbers, particularly Corey and Vogel, who barely knew each other but became instantly best friends at barely the slightest push. I appreciate a good honor-among-thieves story, but moments when a little mistrust would have suited the story were artfully sidestepped without a thought, it seemed. Especially considering how little each man knew about the other, it didn't quite ring true for me, though I get why it had to be for the narrative.

The theme that everybody is a little bit crook was a little overstated for my taste, though I did enjoy that the cops had to pretend to be crooks at the end to catch them, and that two "good guys" (the prison guard, Jansen the sharpshooter) were more like honorable "bad guys," and how noble the criminals seemed, or remorseful of being cornered into snitching. Like the cops are the ones forcing the crooks to betray each other, the cops are the ones who spread corruption while the crooks are constantly struggling against it, trying to stay honorable. That was all strong, but the explicit speeches on the subject from the chief of police never worked for me.

This felt like Le Samourai crossed with a Russian novel, in a good way. Still, I think I actually prefer the stripped down, spartan storytelling of Samourai more. But the story here is rich, so maybe that'll change on future viewings.

Dawn of the Dead

This movie oscillates between pretty good and pretty awful, across the board. Sometimes the acting is great (Sarah Polley! Ving Rhames! Matt Frewer!) and sometimes not so great (wasn't taken with any of the security guards, and a couple of the generic non-Polley ladies). Sometimes the music is great, but often the music is egregious, loud, and awkwardly shoehorned. Sometimes the pacing is great, but other times Snyder cuts from tragic moment to comic-action moment so sharply (notably, killing Frewer's character and cutting straight into the "everybody loves the mall" montage [one of the only callbacks to Romero's version] without pausing to catch our breath). Sometimes the action is good, and the horror scary, but other times the action is hokey or flat, the horror the same. I don't know why Zack Snyder thinks a slow-motion cartridge hitting the ground and wobbling is so important, but he cuts to those a lot in the middle of fast-paced scenes.

Mostly, I guess I liked this movie. The characters were distinct enough to be interesting but not deep enough to really care about. I wasn't bored, but I was frustrated a couple of times. Then again, I was amused or engaged more often than not, and that's something. I guess the obvious thing is that Snyder changed the zombies, made them fast and savage. It doesn't change much, really, plotwise, except that it adds urgency to the chases and such, but it shifts the tone and theme of the story quite a bit. The slow monsters provide a sense of dread -- it's much more agonizing when you are unable to outrun something methodical but relentless. The fast zombies just make the end of the world so fast, so sudden, that you can't really take it all in, which I think cheapens the impact. When everything collapses so fast there's no time to take stock of the losses. Of course that's the point here, as this Dawn of the Dead is meant to be funner, upbeat and exciting, whereas the humor and fun in the 1978 one is blacker, more gallows-humor, more meditative.

Anyway, it was interesting, and it may have been enough to kick me down a path. I've been waffling for a long time, not committing to this horror/thriller story idea, and maybe something in here knocked something loose for me. It's time for me to do like a Zack Snyder character would do: stop overthinking things, just pick a direction and run.

Awake

Boy, I remember when this came out in 2007 and I read just the first paragraph of Roger Ebert's review which advised, "Do not believe anything you hear about Awake, do not talk to anyone about it, and above all do not even glance at the poster or ads, which criminally reveal a crucial plot twist." And so I closed the browser, I avoided posters and trailers, and I promised myself I'd see the movie. I missed it in theaters, then I forgot about it on DVD. It crawled so slowly up my Netflix queue that when it arrived, I'd forgotten at first what it was -- only that it starred Hayden Christensen and I was supposed to avoid any spoilers.

And so finally, about three years later, I sit and watch the film, remembering that maybe it's a little scary -- I know the movie's about surgery and anaesthesia and the film is called Awake and so... put two and two together. Anyway, I hope it will kickstart me toward writing. I'm prepared for twists that will ruin the movie. I can at least say the spoilers remained unspoiled (there's a much prettier poster of the movie I wanted to use for this entry, but to my shock the overly long tagline right there on the movie poster spoils the final twist in a series of twists). But what I wasn't prepared for was how god-awful amateur bad this movie is.

The story is okay, and the premise (without twists) should actually be enough to make me squirm in abject terror. From an opening crawl of text you know that the story is about a man who is rendered paralyzed but otherwise is perfectly alert, awake, and sensate during a heart transplant operation. Yes, they saw open Anakin Skywalker and clamp open his chest and he can feel every moment of it, but cannot move or act. That should be goddamn fucking terrifying. The performances are so flat and even-keel that it only registers as slightly squeamish. The twenty minutes of preposterous writing and acting that precede the actual surgery don't help. Zero thought was given to what the life of a young billionaire might be like. Too much effort was put into weird areas. For example, as far as I can tell, his megacorporation is swallowing up other companies at a rate or two or three a week, but we're supposed to like him because he keeps talking on the phone about all the jobs he's creating; but we're never actually given any real idea of what Clay wants or needs, aside from the fact that his fiancée wants him to tell his mother about her, and his mother seems to have some hold on him, only she really doesn't. Or something.

Anyway, the whole story is about Clay Beresford, Jr., who is laid out on an operating room table unable to act while feeling horrendous pain and hearing some things he'd rather not be hearing. Meanwhile he's the object of a tug-of-war between his hot young lover and his rich milfy mother, and in both relationships he struggles because he is unable to act. As the story goes and the mysteries and situations get more complicated, as bad people reveal themselves and their motives become known, all of the drama unfolds while our protagonist is laid out, unable to act.

Honestly, I have to say, it's a no-brainer why this script doesn't work. It's the world's most passive protagonist, by definition. It makes for an interesting challenge, at least, to tell this story with nothing but deadweight at its center (and poor Hayden Christensen, I keep wanting him to do another role on par with Shattered Glass, but this was definitely not it; he's as much deadweight as an actor as Clay is deadweight as a character). But if you ask me, Joby Harold doesn't get us there. I liked the wandering out-of-body bits and the structure was interesting (despite the überpassive protag) but nothing in the script rings true, not the relationships, the medical details, the procedure, the motivation for the schemes or the schemes themselves. Each heightened emotion clocks in way too low and forced, and for all of the nice photography it never really felt in aid of anything, just pretty.

I know Ebert gushes about the film, and it's not even that I disagree with his points so much as, I couldn't overlook what he overlooked. The movie lost me from the beginning and then just trudged along, one eyerolling scene after another, never rising above. I'll admit I didn't see the twists coming, so that's something, but a story still need strong characters and(/or) a sharply focused theme or throughline to string all those twists on.

If I don't care which direction things are going, why am I going to care if you take me for a sudden right-angle turn?

Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More)

Compared to the roughness around the edges of A Fistful of Dollars, this film feels much more the work of a skilled director working with a crack team. The photography is crisper, the performances feel more assured, the characters more fleshed out, and the story and dialogue (while a little hurky-jerky in terms of motivation) feels light years ahead to me. Fistful is a movie you can appreciate with a caveat. For A Few Dollars More pretty much doesn't need one.

My one criticism is, the story feels needlessly complicated at times, and is a little too willing to indulge in novelistic side-stories. It takes its time getting into the heart of the action, as well. But many moments stand out, and many images and scenes feel iconic, which makes the slow pace worthwhile. There's even some nice dramatic moments from Lee van Cleef and the actor playing El Indio.

It's been a long time since I've seen all of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and obviously I'll be watching it again, soon, to complete the trilogy, but so far I might like this one best. The world feels the right kind of lived-in and historied, and there seems to be a good balance between darker and lighter moments. Again, if the pacing weren't quite so full of fits and starts, and maybe if they'd cut the movie by about twenty minutes runtime, I'd call it nearly a perfect spaghetti western. As it is, and based on memory, this might be my favorite of the Man With the No Name films.

The Social Network *

It's funny to think that Fincher has now done for a social networking webpage what he'd previously done for one of America's most famous serial killers: told its story through a detail-heavy, exposition-rich series of intercutting narratives and charmingly charmless characters. I'm inclined to say it's funny to think that it works, but maybe it's not; maybe of course it works. Either way, it does work.

The trick is really that all the Sorkiny dialogue and cool montages are all set dressing to the real story, which is the complicated friendship between Mark, Eduardo, and interloper Sean. The legal assistant at the end was right: Mark's not an asshole -- though I'm not sure if I'd call it "trying so hard to be" so much as "having a low-level case of Asperger's" -- and he's a difficult character because he's a believably difficult person. He reminds me of an exaggerated version of myself, or of many of my more computer-geeky or engineering-student friends. Actually, he reminds me also of Graysmith from Zodiac, which is maybe telling. I wanted to try and relate these two characters to previous Fincher characters, like maybe John Doe from Seven or the nameless protagonist from Fight Club (maybe the daughter in Panic Room? almost certainly Michael Douglas's modern-day Scrooge in The Game), but it feels a bit like a stretch, and while I suspect there's some of the same DNA in all of these characters, it would take a more in-depth examination than a here-are-my-initial-thoughts-after-seeing-a-film blog to pull that all together. Okay, yes, I'm copping out, totally. It's late and cut me some slack.

Anyway, this was an impressive piece of filmmaking because it tells a complicated story with a lot of seemingly boring details without being a boring story, and it does it in a way that illuminates some tricky, nuanced, challenging characters. I couldn't give a rat's ass about the veracity of this story, because it's a story, and I'd rather have truth about humans than facts about specific people, and The Social Network has that, plenty.

Seen at Pioneer Place's Regal Cinema.

An American Tail

Watching this as an adult is a curious experience. I didn't realize how many times I must have watched this as a child, but it was a movie whose dialogue rhythms felt so familiar to me it was like an old song. I've had this experience a couple of times before, most notably with the first Star Wars movie. There were lines in this that I realized I'd heard a million times, knew the sound of, but hadn't understood the words. I'd been too young. It's like hearing a song you grew up on and suddenly realizing what the lyrics are about.

There's not much to say about the story of An American Tail. It's a kid's movie from an era when kid's movies were allowed to be a little darker emotionally but were expected to be even more simplistic narratively -- a trade off, I guess. Like revisiting Pinocchio or The Secret of NIMH, it's marvelous to see how varied the world can be, how legitimately frightening at times, and the songs mostly hold up better than I expected (I'm not generally a fan of musicals, as the pace of them is always a mess, but I can appreciate good songs from a musical). Each and every character (even Fievel) is fairly one-note, but they're distinct and interesting and everybody is given something to do, and something different to want, which is nice. Story wise, it feels a little like it was cutdown from something at least twice as long -- and in particular it shies away from action sequences in a way that's decidedly different from now; nowadays we'd cut short the fun and games or character moments to squeeze in more action, but I think animating chase and fight scenes was a lot harder and more expensive in the days of drawing shit by hand.

Overall it's not great, and I can't not look at it through the rose-colored lenses of my youth, when I loved the everloving shit out of it, but it's also most definitely not terrible, at all. It holds up as well as I'd hoped, and not much more than that.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

As soon as I heard that David Lynch was executive producing a not-quite-murder-mystery film by Werner Herzog I knew I had to see this. Reports that Michael Shannon was basically channeling Klaus Kinski didn't hurt either. Five minutes into the film, this felt like everything I suspected it would feel like. Herzog's daffy madman-poet approach to filmmaking coupled with Lynch's stagey, distancing line readings and something-dark-under-the-surface suburban milieus, plus Brad Dourif and Grace Zabriskie cameos. But the further in I went, the less in love I was.

There's definitely something interesting and bizarre and watchable here, and the story of what seems to me like a schizophrenic man being consumed by his bent worldview and possible hallucinations is certainly ripe for a Herzog-Lynch team effort. The problem I think lies almost entirely in the script, which goes to pains to lay out a forced structure that feels artificial almost to the point of parody. On the one hand (and especially when viewed as a pairing with Herzog's other film this same year, Bad Lieutenant) this parodic approach might seem intentional, but where it felt so easy and jabbing in Bad Lieutenant here it feels stilted and, frankly, a little boring. The more Chloë Sevigny and Udo Kier's characters doled out conveniently portioned pieces of exposition and backstory on Willem Dafoe's cop the less interested in the story I was.

Actually, the more I think about the layout and the characters -- like the obvious and pointless cuts in location that accompany each return to the interviews in progress, or Michael Seña as the over-eager partner who keeps trying to enact movie clichés about hostage situations -- I'm certain it's meant to be the hostage-movie formula turned upside down. But it doesn't change the fact that the structure became so tinny and artificial that I was frustrated more than engaged. Bad Lieutenant made cop clichés feel loose and wild, fun; My Son, My Son makes them feel stiff, like an overstarched shirt.

Still, the performances are pretty great, and the Herzogian moments many (and the Lynchian ones, too), and that all makes it worth seeing, without question. That it's loosely based on real events is interesting. (Wikipedia has some interesting details about Herzog and screenwriter Herbert Golder meeting with the man Brad McCullum is based on.) But my first impression is that it's more of a curiosity than a great film. Who knows. I do have the sense this one'll stay with me for a while, and I liked Bad Lieutenant significantly more the second time I watched it. Maybe when I return someday and watch it again, I'll fall in love.

Le Temp du Loup (Time of the Wolf)

By post-apocalyptic-movie standards of the day, Time of the Wolf must have seemed so bleak and dire, even "realistic." But now that The Road has come along and outbleaked Haneke, I can instead look at this as more of a sociological character study, a look at groups of people and how they interact in a crisis and in the ensuing chaos and reordering -- which The Road definitely isn't.

I admit that I've only seen a handful of Michael Haneke films -- and neither version of Funny Games -- but his view of humanity never seems quite as hopeless as I expect it to. There's always some struggle forward, some semblance of decency or community, even if it starts to feel futile at times. I think he's less interested in long-term nihilism like declaring humanity a lost cause or that cruelty and suffering are eternal so much as he is exploring the ramifications of cruelty. His films depict terrible actions as sudden, quick bursts of violence, and then the story continues through the ripples that follow. His stories are counterpoint to the consequence-free violence and savagery of most films. Humans are resilient; they can bounce back from almost anything, no matter how horrific -- but it takes time, and we're never the same as before.

I want to go on with details and examples, but the truth is I'll be late for work if I try. So instead, if you're reading this, just go watch this or other Haneke films and see for yourself. That is to say, in the words of LeVar Burton, "Don't take my word for it!"

Chinatown

This is one of those movies I know so well and love so much (and I know I'm not alone), I have almost nothing to say about it. Truth be told, I put this on while I put away my laundry, thinking I'd be interrupted long before it was over, but a delay in plans allowed me to finish it. Can't argue with the chance to sit through a classic.

Everything here moves so smart, with not a single wasted frame of picture or word of dialogue, it's no wonder they use this as the example of a "perfect" screenplay or a "perfect" film production. The themes are tight, the characters are so interesting, and the story works so well -- I want to say the plot lacks a single hole or inconsistency, but you know what? there may be many (I was always unclear why Ida Sessions knew about the obituary names, for example). Even if there are copious plot holes, though, it feels intuitively right. It feels consistent. It's even got totally reasonable red-herring rabbit holes for Jake to fall down, so the final twist doesn't feel like a cheat.

What do you want me to say? I absolutely fucking love this movie. There are a number of movies I can tell you why I love, but I can't be objective about. Movies like Chinatown, Dr. Strangelove, Blade Runner. These are examples of my top-tier movies, movies I'm mostly willing to just love without bias. Sometimes I wish I had more of them.

La Planète Sauvage (Fantastic Planet)

It's hard to think of a more surreal, alien approach to a story about aliens than this. It opens in media res on a silent, terrified human holding an infant and racing away from nightmarish, dangerous things (animals? plants? geometric oddities?) on an endless plain. She thinks she finds safety in the high ground, but a massive blue finger prods her roughly back down the hill. She races up again, looking to be safe, but the finger prods her once more. This continues, a sort of inverse Sisyphus, until the finger grows bored. It lifts the woman into the air, high high into the air, and drops her. She tumbles and dies. The baby is alone and scared. We pull back to reveal the hand belongs to a strange blue creature (a Traag) that looks like Dr. Manhattan bred with a humanoid fish. The story then shifts perspective to these massive, psychic mysterious creatures, and a child named Tiwa who adopts the baby. We watch for a while as she dresses it up in preposterous humiliating outfits, but the baby is a tiny pet, no bigger than a hamster. The baby doesn't know any other way of life.

Traag time moves slower than Om (homme, or human) time, which gives the story a really novel arc as Terr (the baby, whose name is apparently short for terrible but also evokes the word Terre, the French word for Earth) grows into a boy and eventually a man, while Tiwa and the other Traags don't age much at all. In typical future-dystopian fashion Terr escapes and lives among the wild Oms (living in the park!), and his unique skills (knowledge and education) first cause strife within the group but eventually turn the tides and help them win the war. Of course, things are much, much stranger than that when you watch it.

Apart from a surprisingly abrupt conclusion (and some cheating narration throughout which is mostly forgivable), Fantastic Planet is an inspired story. It belongs in the same camp as classic science fiction like Dune and Solaris. It's maybe the smarter, artsier cousin of Planet of the Apes or The Matrix. I'd actually have liked to see them go further with many aspects (I had this same reaction to another kindred spirit: TRON) but overall, I'm totally impressed.

I could go on about the animation style and the music -- both feel dated but perfectly suited to the piece -- but I feel I've run on long enough. Suffice to say it's a great film, maybe a genius one. If you've never seen Fantastic Planet but you like science fiction -- I mean real science fiction, not just robots and aliens being used as a delivery system for explosions and chase scenes -- I think you owe it to yourself to see this film.

Cat People

Although I watched this for its reputation of remaining scary without "showing the monster," what actually struck me was the characterization. They're all sympathetic, not flat at all (though a bit hokey), especially poor tortured Irena, consumed by passions and a fear of those passions -- so irresistible to men that even her shrink turns into a creep who must have her, but unable to love for fear of devouring anyone she loves -- whether out of an uncontrollable impulse toward violence or a monstrous jealousy, it's a little unclear. The whole movie she keeps telling people the truth, but nobody will believe her. In fact this debate consumes the story so much that much of the tension comes not from waiting for someone to die but from wondering if maybe she is crazy after all, and maybe she keeps letting that leopard at the zoo out instead. Plenty of clues cleverly point to that, leaving both possibilities -- that she's a Serbian cat-woman, or that she's a looney with a stolen key to the leopard cages -- perfectly feasible right up to the final moments of the film.

I've no doubt some pretty intricate theories can be pulled from this film -- anthropological, gender studies, metaphors about married life and jealousy and fidelity -- but I was actually watching for more surface reasons. I wanted to see tension and horror; I wanted to see character arcs. I was given both. Some things when watching felt a little aw-shucks and movie-real (as opposed to real-real, I guess?), but upon reflection they worked for the story pretty well.

Great photography, nice pacing, decent story. Not terribly scary (but I bet it was for its time) and not terribly deep (but not so shallow as to feel like a B-movie). It did everything it aimed for, and smartly. Very little to complain about, actually. Nice work, Tourneur & Lewton!

I'm Still Here *

It's difficult to say if I'd have viewed this the same way if I'd seen it before Casey Affleck admitted it was all fiction. Not to brag (is this even brag-worthy?) but I never doubted for a second if it was real or not. The moment Joaquin Phoenix started showing up in public looking like the lead singer from the Eels with Casey Affleck smirkingly chasing him with a camera, it seemed like a self-indulgent film project being shot in public. How could it be anything else? And while it turns out that self-indulgence is naturally one of the main themes here, an even bigger one is complacency and voyeurism. "JP" turns in on himself and disappears into his own navel, and we loyally follow him in.

It's a sneaky film about celebrity culture. About the boundlessness and ennui of being a celebrity and the cold excitement of vultures who surround celebrities. At no point in the story does anybody ever once say, "Hey, dude, I think you're making a mistake," let alone, "Hey man, are you all right?" Not his assistants, not his friends, not other actors and celebrities, not the media who eagerly report on his seeming descent into madness, and not the fans or internet public who relish the chance to tear him apart. One of the most telling scenes is when he finally gets up to rap in a club in Miami. The experience is fascinating in an outsider-art way, but the rapping is obviously sloppy, and his performance seems to come through a drug haze. He's angry, slurring, mumbling lyrics about how hard it is to have everything. Most of the audience laughs or stands in shock -- but almost everybody has a cellphone or point-and-shoot camera trained on him. Then Joaquin loses it to a heckler, leaps off stage and gets in a fight with him. This isn't staged (it may be planned, but it's diving into a live crowd), and as the two brawl and beefy security dudes sweep in to stop the ordeal, the entire crowd turns to the fight, cameras still pointed at the action. It's a celebrity beating someone up, a would-be-rapper totally out of control, but the tone of the audience is exactly the same as before. Now the action's over here instead of over there. They still have "oh my god" smiles on their faces, thrilled to be capturing this. These people are not actors. There's only one (known) actor in the room here, but the telling performance comes from everyone around him, caught in the undertow.

The only reason I wonder if my experience would change if it were still claiming veracity is because a good deal of watching I'm Still Here gets devoted to an unconscious guessing game of who's in on it and who's being fooled. I guess that's part of the point: with celebrity culture you never know who takes you at your word and who just glad-hands you and plays the yes-man -- but I found that aspect of watching and wondering a little exhausting.

The editing and photography was occasionally bland or workmanlike (after all, it's "cinema verité") but was at least as often surprising and evocative. The closing moments -- the entire end sequence of traveling to Hawaii (?) to see his father -- was beautiful and telling. Overall I went in with low expectations and came out thoughtful and moved, despite the raucous Borat-style antics throughout. Which I guess is as good a mark of success as any.

Seen at the Hollywood Theater.

The Jacket

This is a curious film. I don't know the actual story of its production (I may look into it after writing this, or I may just leave my assumptions alone), but it feels like one of those movies that barely got made. The story concept is generally strong, but the grandfather-paradox-heavy patness smacks of young screenwriter to me (ahem). The performances are a little uneven but generally good, and the cast is certainly great, but the dialogue and characterizations (particularly motivation) are a little too easy, glib, or unnatural. The photography is a little too flashy, especially when it leans uncomfortably on high-contrast extreme close-ups of the lips or eyes of Adrian Brody, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Kris Kristofferson. For me, the editing consistently drew attention to itself, which as they say defines bad editing ("the invisible art"). But it's not like this is a bad movie, at all. Just a very calculated movie. A very designed, constructed, anti-naturalistic one.

The Jacket reminds me of The Butterfly Effect or The Machinist or maybe a Natali film like Splice or Cube (that's the second time I've been reminded of Cube recently). It's dark, high-concept, stylized in a sort of generic way, and the story never quite gels, never quite earns plausibility, but feels somewhat worth watching anyway. It's a good movie that doesn't seem to have any idea how to be (or maybe any hope of being) a great movie.

Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars)

It's interesting to note that in this, the film that made Clint Eastwood, the actor looks just a little too pretty-boy to be believed as the badass stranger he's meant to play. Because he went on to embody this archetype so absolutely over the next two decades, there's a kind of cognitive dissonance in watching him here. It's like watching a man in an ill-fitting suit, even though you've seen that man in the very same suit dozens of times and you know it's a perfect fit.

A cursory glance through Wikipedia tells me that this was Leone's first spaghetti western, and that it was early in the genre's life, which makes sense. Like Eastwood it feels like the genre and the director are both finding their footing here. It's a little rough around the edges, but it's definitely got something. I wonder how we'd view Fistful if it hadn't been followed by For a Few Dollars More and of course, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, among so many others. If Leone and Eastwood hadn't gone on to be the defining names of this type of storytelling. Taken on its own merits, it's a western remake of Yojimbo (itself an adaptation of Hammett's Red Harvest, such an awesome road from mobsters to samurais to the old west), and it's got a lot going for it but it's also clearly a b-movie in a b-movie genre; it doesn't quite transcend. It's impossible for me not to see this through the eyes of someone who's seen later, greater works in the genre, not to mention who's acutely familiar with the source materials that led us here. Trying to view it as a stand-alone piece, I think it's fine, but that's about it.

Also, this film influenced more than just the stylistic choices of Leone's later films and spaghetti westerns in general. Eastwood would later direct two films of his own, High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider, about a stranger who rides into a corrupt town, fights the forces that be with cold brutality and shifting allegiances, and then rides back out at the end. In fact, if memory serves, he remains nameless in both films and they're implied sequels to The Man With No Name. More to the point, though, I found both of them to be stronger films than A Fistful of Dollars, definitely the work of a man with a firm grip who'd found his voice and his style. But I guess it all started here.

Devil *

Right off the bat I could tell two things about Devil, before we've even met our characters. The first thing I could tell came from the disorienting, slightly thrilling title sequence photography, which consisted of helicopter shots of (what I assume was) Philadelphia upside down! The shots were really effective, in that I felt affected by them, but I couldn't tell you to what end, and the more of them they showed me the more I couldn't help but try and find meaning in them. It's an upside-down world? We already live in an underworld of sorts? Going down is not as safe as it seems? Yeah, nothing. So the first thing I knew was, this movie was going to occasionally do something because it was cool or evocative or pretty or disorienting without really giving much thought to what that really meant. This was not a surgically precise film, it was a sledgehammer. This was not the tightly controlled sniper picking off a very specific target, it was a shotgun blast.

The second thing I could tell came from the voiceover, which would come back throughout. In general, common wisdom in screenwriting is, voiceover is bad. Voiceover is awful. Voiceover is, as they say, the devil. It's lazy writing, often telegraphing or shorthanding more complicated things and rushing the story to the audience in the least engaging way possible: by outright telling them. There is a reason lectures are so poorly attended; writers please take note that if you are going to just tell me stuff, it had better be really amazing stuff. Many films have made use of voiceover narration to prove it can be done wisely. Wings of Desire, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Fight Club, The Informant!, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, off the top of my head, all use it in unique and worthwhile ways. Devil tries to. Devil fails. The voiceover continually updates us on a preposterously specific and relevant "series" of bedtime stories, folklore of the devil that's so concrete and exact that all other accounts of the devil should hereby be dismissed as hogwash, because they don't involve five people in a room together with one of them being an impostor; they don't happen out in public, which is clearly how the devil would pull his tricks (and does, if you believe Rodriguez's mother [or grandmother's?] stories). The voiceover also telegraphs events in a way meant to be suspense-building but in fact neutralizes any chance of surprise throughout. Comments like "Also he kills bystanders trying to help" and "He always makes sure a loved one comes to see the last death, to 'make us doubt everything' " really kill any chance for the movie to surprise me.

Whenever we would cut to the drama inside the elevator, or at least inside the building, I was passingly engaged in the characters, though hoping for more. But I would check out at best, groan at worst, whenever we hit a new chapter mark and the latino security guard's voiceover would kick in with some weird little gem that was way, way too exact to be in "every story" his crazy mom/grandmom would tell him at night (how boring for this kid to hear variations on such a rigid formula! it'd be like watching a whole lot of romcoms or action movies or contained thrillers back to back! oh wait...). So the movie for me moved in mildly aggravating fits and starts.

Somewhere in there is an interesting story, but it would have to have the devil premise (which is the whole point, unfortunately) completely exorcised. Even a supernatural killer would be okay, but it can't be Satan please. Focus on the characters and the drama and not on the cliff's-notes narration and you might find something worth filming. The dialogue and acting and containedness of it all reminded me of Cube, which also flirted with being a better movie than it was, but actually came a lot closer. In the end, Devil was short enough that I don't regret seeing it, but it was neither scary enough, engaging enough, or intelligent enough to justify itself for me, as-is. M. Night stories are just too obvious, too blunt, and collapse too easily under even the slightest of scrutiny. This is no exception.

But man, it feels like it's been a while since I watched a movie.

Seen at Century 16 Eastport.

Bad Lieutenant

This was interesting to watch immediately after the Herzog film. For one, I think there's a little more remake going on that they admit. Although the primary crime and the third act are definitely different, and the central themes are clearly more spiritual in Ferrara's and more moralistic in Herzog's, the stories share an awful lot of similarities, like the sexual abuse of authority, the gambling-himself-into-a-hole subplot (and the requisite sympathetic bookie) and the twisted way the title character can't let go of his case.

As I said earlier, the new one feels like it riffs on the same themes but tells a different story. Cage's Bad Lieutenant and Keitel's Bad Lieutenant are both self-destructive, brutal monsters of men, both driven by a weird anti-hero's moral principles (almost a noir-hero's sense of right and wrong taken to telling extremes). But where Cage's character seems to be reptilian in nature, an aggressive walking id trying to stay one step ahead of the terrible wake he leaves behind him, Keitel's character's is haunted by a sickening loss of faith and a repentant respect for and guilt from his religion. I'm not sure which is simpler, but they're drastically different.

(One quick tangential note, thrown here in the middle because I had no way to connect it to the other comparisons I've made here: Nicolas Cage's slowly-deteriorating voice and body language reminded me increasingly of Woody Harrelson's Larry Flynt, in a way that I always chalked up to heavy pain-killer use distorting one's ability to speak. Nonetheless both times I was reminded of it. Here, Harvey Keitel's character reminded me a ton of his role in the other film he did in 1992: Mr. White from Reservoir Dogs. They are both mean-spirited quasi-good-guys who kill and steal and cheat but have strong moral backbones, and they both break down into sobs in almost exactly the same way. It's almost disappointing, because the two characters lose a bit of distinction when placed side by side, and both movies came out the same year, so. Yeah. Anyway. Just something I thought of, comparing the heroes of these two movies to other well-known characters.)

The end of this one, the first Bad Lieutenant, stands in contrast as well. In Port of Call Nicolas Cage's hero (McDonagh) pushes past some threshold of immorality and comes out miraculously, impossibly clean -- and ready to start the pushing all over again. In Ferrara's film, Harvey Keitel's nameless hero comes off to me as more furious at the world, daunted by its miracles, and lost when confronted with grace. He's a man who expects the savage, merciless law of the jungle to prevail, and crumples when he has to face greater powers than himself, forces of good and forgiveness. Or that's what this atheist pulled from the Catholic-heavy imagery. Maybe someone more spiritual can do more with that. In the "original," he is "redeemed" by helping the rapists escape, and then he is released from further sin by murder. In the "not-remake," if he is "redeemed" it is by discovering the cold, morality-free nature of nature, and committing enough "evils" that eventually something came up "good," and he is pointedly not released from further sin at all. In fact, it is implied he stands on the cusp of beginning again, though this is left open to interpretation.

Although both are pretty good films, story-wise there's no question which I'm a bigger fan of. Moral righteousness in the face of a Catholic ideal of guilt and baptism vs. moral ambiguity in the face of a capricious and arbitrary world? Yeah. Sorry, Mr. Ferrara. You made a great movie, and a brilliant character study, but put me on Team Herzog.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans

I liked this when I saw it last year in theaters, even more than I thought I was going to. Nicolas Cage gives not just a typically batshit performance; he gives a surprisingly nuanced batshit performance. He gives us a character that actually evolves and develops throughout the story, and it's fascinating to watch.

The script is fun as hell, too. I admit to not yet having seen Abel Ferrara's original (edit: Now I have), but I know this isn't a remake at all. It feels -- and this is clearly wild speculation -- more like riffing on a theme than any kind of homage or remake. And to that end, this story about a "bad cop" who keeps pushing further is great. There's so much tension in watching someone pulled tighter and tighter and waiting for everything to snap, explode, collapse.

But the story here is smart. The moral world of Port of Call is complex and unnavigable. Even the good cops play loose and dirty with the law. The authority doesn't really get involved, and the worst punishment seems to involve being kicked out of the game -- and even that is shockingly temporary. The deeper into depravity Terrence McDonagh goes, the more he drags along those loved ones foolish enough to tether to him. Eventually he pushes well past the limits we even expect him to, until he seems to break miraculously though some kind of membrane and come out not just clean, but having yanked his entire world inside out with him. The bad guys get caught and/or killed, his loved ones have become a (clean?) "family," and he himself has been promoted from Bad Lieutenant to Captain.

At the end, we have two perfect codas: first, we see Terrence back on the prowl for preppie kids with easily snatched drugs and girlfriends, proving he hasn't changed his ways at all, and the cycle will continue itself; second, we see Terrence lost in a drug-haze in a hotel room, encountering Chavez, the felon whose life he saved in the prologue. It was the act of saving this man's life that transformed him -- it permanently damaged his spine and put him on pain pills (making him Bad) but also won him a promotion and the reputation of a hero (making him a Lieutenant). So this encounter at the end is a major moment -- will (or even can) Terrence be saved by the man he wrecked his own already-questionable life saving? The answer at the end is as obtuse and enervating as the iguana shots during the stake-out: it's Terrence and Chavez, sitting together against an aquarium wall. Chavez looks spaced-out, possibly bored. Terrence looks like... is he about to laugh? What is going on in his mind? Then -- "Ha!" -- a single half-chuckle, like he's about to tell you what's so funny, and then that cut to black. That's all you get.

It's morally ambiguous, but more aggressively so than films usually get, and madman poet Werner Herzog is a perfect match for the material. A lot of elements that feel like they wouldn't work really work. It's a strange movie -- what Herzog film isn't? -- and I'm glad it exists.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World *

The actual watching of the movie has parts that move too fast and others that move too slow as it rushes excitedly to squeeze as much of a six-book story as it can into its two hour running time. The beginning especially feels a little manic, and I kept thinking, "If audiences don't know this story or these characters, won't they feel a little alienated by how rapidly we're breezing through characterizations and introductions?" But remembering the movie, the choppy rhythm and subplot onslaught smooths down and registers just fine, and I left the theater pretty happy with it, over all.

I know the books, having just finished the series last week (and delaying seeing the film -- sorry box office numbers -- until I had), so I can't say. The internet's calling this the Movie Of This Generation, comparing it to Fight Club. The epithet may be generous but it's certainly not totally without cause. It says a lot in its style and attitude, just like Fight Club did about the 90s, and it does so in a fun and original and vaguely zeitgeist-y way.

They did a pretty good job of keeping all that story in there, of making the manic video-game-fighting/punk-love/comic-geek thing come alive and keeping the heart-on-your-sleeve/idiot-in-love/dealing-with-your-demons themes front and center. The casting worked really well. On that note, I've got to admit I'm pretty burnt out on Michael Cera -- I like his onscreen personality but it's just the one onscreen personality and I can only take that so many times in a row -- but he mostly didn't disappoint here, except for playing some of the high-emotion scenes a little too deadpan (as usual). Actually, I'd say that, much like how I declared Kung Fu Hustle the end of the kung-fu genre (it's all the standard elements of the genre, times 100, blown to beautifully absurd extremes), so too should Scott Pilgrim be the end of the Michael Cera persona for the same reasons. Time to close a chapter, redefine yourself, and move on. Please, Mr. Cera.

My one major complaint about this film, though, which I can't leave without expounding on, is the end. In terms of being a manic 16-bit video-game love story with a face-paced tongue-in-cheek action ending, it ends well, but compared to the book I was pretty let down. See, in the comic series, up until Book 6, I considered the series cute, fun, and amusing. Light, fluffy, but with a lot of elements thrown together that really played well off each other and spoke to our generation. I didn't love it, but I totally liked it, and I saw the appeal. But then in Book 6, I suddenly got really excited, really into it, the end was such a big thematic climax, bringing in elements and plotlines I hadn't even paid much attention to, evolving characters and making the whole video-game-fight stuff and subspace-travel stuff into metaphors for how we all deal with crazy love, especially young crazy love. Book 6 really won me, and almost all of Book 6 felt rewritten (and rewritten well, but definitely not up to the original) for the film. All I can say is, hey everybody who loved this movie? Go read the books. Worth it!

Seen at the Regal Lloyd Cinema.

Sidenote: distressingly, this has been my longest dry spell between movies. It's been a hell of a month.

Zodiac

Definitely watched for research, as I'm about to try and tell a very procedural, very visually dry short story about puzzle solving and code-breaking, but man, Zodiac is a film that never disappoints. It's not that the case isn't interesting, because it obviously and totally is, but if I were to sit and tell you how much data this film needs to work, and how many years and protagonists and loose ends and paperwork you were going to have to sit through -- not to mention revisiting all that paperwork years-of-movie-time and hours-of-screen-time later -- you would probably tell me it sounds like a boring (or again, at least dry) documentary and not very dramatic. And yet, you're not bored for even a minute watching it.

I think one of the tricks that keeps so much information working -- aside from a stellar cast of more character actors than you can shake a stick at -- is the economy of the storytelling. Entire locations, scenes, weeks of someone's life take place in a single shot, lasting as few as 5 seconds of screentime, and in each scene people are doing things (the reporter team of Avery-Graysmith seem to be always drinking or discussing drinking; the cop team of Armstrong-Toschi seem to be always eating or discussing food -- am I reading too deeply to suggest that they are ingesting clues and data in totally different ways, and that each needs the other to be fruitful and survive/solve the case? in fact when Graysmith starts working with Toschi he repeatedly has to buy him meals in order to gain his cooperation and trust), but the entire scene, location and everything, is over in three or four lines of dialogue, tops. Then we move on to the next clue. There's very little to distract you (that isn't meant to distract you), but at the same time the characters and world all feel lived in, inhabited. Many moments end just as a character-related moment is about to begin. For example, at the theater, after Graysmith awkwardly fails to connect with Toschi, we slowly fade out while Melanie is just walking into frame and up to Graysmith. We get a real sense that the character drama is unfolding just outside the bounds of what we're being shown, which keeps the story from feeling dry and bare-bones, keeps the sense of a reality and a timeline while letting us focus on the meat of the story, on the mystery and the clues. Partner shorthand and quirky details (animal crackers; Aqua Velvas) keep the banter from being stale. Brilliant actors breathe life into their necessarily-few scenes. In short, everything works just right in this film, moves just exactly as it would have to for Zodiac not to be a boring info-dump of a movie.

On a more personal, less critical-eye note, it's frustrating that Fincher went from top of his game (The Game, Seven, Fight Club, The Panic Room, Zodiac) to Benjamin Button, an uncanny-valley point-by-point rip off of the already terrible Forrest Grump storyline that left me not just cold, but itchy to get out of a theater and never deal with it again. Rewatching this, it's good enough that I'm almost tempted to try Button one more time... but even the thought of it is unpleasant, so I guess that probably won't happen for a long while. Very excited for The Social Network, though. That feels like a very Zodiac story waiting to unfold.

Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö / The Match Factory Girl

Following the order of the "Proletariat Trilogy" (only a trilogy in a thematic sense, thankfully), this one builds on the tone of the last two to be sure. The main difference that I see, the thing that separates this from its predecessors, is that Iris (the match factory girl in question) is the only main character in any of the three stories not already hardened by a certain kind of hopeless acceptance (read: surrender). She's still vulnerable, soft, and more to the point victimizable, because she's still full of hope and dreams. Part of what made Shadows in Paradise and Ariel interesting to me was the nonchalant hopelessness of the world, the way the characters had already given up trying, and took things like doors of opportunity opening up only to slam shut in their faces (in both case, due to untimely deaths) as part-and-parcel of what the universe had to offer. Notably in Shadows, within the first ten minutes, Nikander's friend and would-be benefactor says, "I'm not going to die behind the wheel." Nikander asks him, "Then where?" and without the slightest hint of irony or hesitation, he declares, "Behind a desk." There's no hope of avoiding misery and frustration and isolation. There's just choosing what you do in the meantime and how you go out. I think the reason Nikander and Kasurinen are able to find love is because they've accepted this, and so have the women they meet, and the romances are hilariously cold, straightforward, and gloomy. More like two people embracing so as not to freeze to death (so quickly) than two people hoping for any kind of joy from one another.

Iris, though, she hopes for something more. She's young, naive, and believes in love, and for that we watch her get punished by the world. What saves this from being an endlessly cruel story is her third-act turnaround, her (SPOILER) transformation (by failed suicide-by-auto?) from innocent starry-eyed wallflower into black comedy murderess. There's no question this one ups the blackness and the comedy from the last two. And it works, and it's funny -- and it's so streamlined, at 68 minutes long, that it couldn't possibly overstay its welcome. Plus, it helped me think out some "solitary humorous-pathetic" moments for the script I'm working on. Yet personally, I think my favorite of the three lies somewhere between Shadows and Ariel, somewhere closer to humor-from-hopelessness rather than humor-from-the-world's-cruelty. But I still love all three, and don't understand why nobody else knows of this guy. He falls into the same category as Teshigahara and Hong Sang-soo and many others, foreign filmmakers who are underrated (here), all tough to sell people on, but so rewarding once you bother. I guess I'll just keep pushing.

Red Road

I put it on for the voyeurism and the infiltrating-another's-world angles, basically for act one's and act two's hooks, respectively, as they kind of feel like they make this film exist in the fuzzy space between the short script I'm putting together and the feature I've been working on lately. But of course Red Road isn't a film you watch casually, and once you sink into that world, well it's just like Jackie and her pain: the only way out is through.

The immersiveness of the world is one thing, but what really pulls you in is the character herself, with so much history and conflicted, confused feelings -- the primary mystery of the story is why she's doing what she's doing, and as she solves smaller mysteries (like why Clyde is doing what he's doing) we work to piece together her backstory. This works so well because the character's obtuse motivation isn't just some dramatic trick of withholding vital information for the sake of a twist; it's reflective of her own state. She doesn't know what her intentions are with Clyde, and seems to flirt with every possible emotional response within each scene. Keeping the backstory from us puts us more in her shoes. If you told us up front the nature of her interest in Clyde (and it's not like there aren't enough clues we can't get the gist of it pretty quick) we'd be busy moralizing and putting our own emotional desires ahead of hers. Since we're unsure just how she knows him or just what he's done to her, we wonder how far she's able, or willing, or even justified, to go -- just as she is wondering herself. Of course it also gives us a nice third-act reveal, as with any good mystery it all comes together at the end, and Jackie's catharsis feels genuine and earned, most likely because it isn't easy or cut-and-dry. She punishes him, cleverly and savagely, and then she forgives him, and then she reaches out to him. And tellingly, he does the same to her, in small ways, before they wander away from each other and back to their worlds -- he to his estranged daughter and petty crime and poverty, she to her authoritarian dayjob and ghosts and loving in-laws, impatiently waiting for her to finally begin the mourning process.

I wanted to say more about style and tone, as I'm kind of watching films with that in mind, and this one has a lot to chew on, but I pretty much filled up my quota and then some talking about the characters and drama -- and since that's where my heart really lies, I'll just let it be that Red Road is a film with both stylistic whizbang (haven't seen use of awkward video this good since 28 Days Later) and dramatic punch, but like it often does, the content trumped the style. Hard to complain about that.