Saturday, November 30, 2013

Watched: Only God Forgives

I have actually watched several compelling, interesting, engaging and/or funny movies lately and have also had a couple of interesting adventures in Hungary and elsewhere (I went to Belgium for the weekend, you know, no big deal) and yet today I am in a strange mood and want to dedicate an entire post to making fun of Nicolas Winding Refn. What can I say? The heart wants what it wants.


 (whisper) art...

 ...art....



 Art....

Art.


 ART.

 ART.



 ART!
 ART!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAART!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Refn still has my grudging respect as an aesthete, but not much more. In the past I'd always excused his exclusion (or damning portrayal) of women from his films since I figured, hey, if he wants to focus solely on the interiority of the lives of men, it's not like there's a lack of those films, but what the hell? It's his movie. But honestly this movie was so slow, so painstakingly composed to be a never-ending series of tableau vivantes (art) and splashes of color (art!) and as always, flashes of brutal, abrupt violence (ART!!), that I paused it about an hour in to go get a snack and watch something else and had to force myself to come back to it. I'm not saying it's not a beautiful movie, no one could ever deny Refn of having that gift. But otherwise... this is just so alternatively shocking-for-shock's-sake, boring, and ridiculously stupid that I can't recommend watching it. Not even for the Gosling fans; he barely speaks and his face gets pummeled into the image of rotten tomato about 2/3 of the way through.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Reading: The Brothers Karamazov

What comfort is it to me that there are none 
guilty and that cause follows effect simply and 
directly, and that I know it? — I must have justice, 
or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some 
remote infinite time and space, but here on earth, 
and that I could see myself. I have believed in it. I 
want to see it, and if I am dead by then, let me rise 
again, for if it all happens without me, it will be too 
unfair. Surely I haven’t suffered simply that I, my 
crimes and my sufferings, may manure the soil of 
the future harmony for somebody else. I want to 
see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the 
lion and the victim rise up and embrace his 
murderer. I want to be there when everyone 
suddenly understands what it has all been for. 

--Ivan Fyodorovitch Karamazov, Book 5, Chapter 4: The Rebellion


This book is really great and also is kicking my ass.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Watched: The Piano

I feel like for about a decade after it was made (and maybe still so, although it's not as commonly referenced anymore) this movie was the punching bag, the go-to scapegoat of anyone who wanted to discuss pretension or precociousness in the indie film industry. But, I don't know, I still really enjoy it. I think it's a weird, sideways approach to your typical costume drama-romance and it's beautifully made. I'm not apologizing for liking this one. I just do.








Watched: Thor

Mindless, beautiful entertainment.










Sunday, November 17, 2013

Watched: Spring Breakers

I've never seen any of Harmony Korine's movies before, and as I started watching this I began to wonder if this was really the right place to start or not. Honestly, if they're all like this I don't know that I'll be rushing to watch more. It's not that it wasn't entertaining. It was. But the story, about a group of college girls willing to do anything to escape the tedium of their lives and go on vacation, and to go even farther while on said vacation in the name of experience, left me feeling hollow and kind of depressed. It's not poorly made (but although I understand the relevance and intention of setting what felt like a ten-minute montage to Skrillex I kind of wish he had not), and although it is overwhelmingly shallow, I think it also says something that is not entirely untrue about my generation, and the one coming up behind mine. Not really a bad movie, can't complain about flaws in its construction, and yet not one that I will ever willingly watch again. Shrug.











Watched: Dark City

A pretty great fantasy (sci-fi?) noir style mystery. This one kind of feels like a group project David Fincher, Darren Aronofsky, Vencenzo Natali, and Richard Kelly all had to make together, with the assignment being something like, "A man wakes up in a hotel bathtub, and follows a string of clues to discover his identity while being pursued by a shadowy enemy." This would be the result of that assignment. Except Alex Proyas made it. He did the great The Crow, waaaay back in the mid-90's, which actually makes sense since this movie has a very similar atmosphere happening, but then he also did that Nicholas Cage garbage, Knowing, and I, Robot, whose existence is about the only thing I have to remark on. It exists. It looks like a movie, it sounds like a movie. Meh.


But Dark City is pretty great; the cast is clearly enjoying their noir archetypes, the cinematography is pretty, and the reveal of what's going on at the end is a so far beyond believable or plausible that it becomes a "just go with it" kind of ending. I'm okay with that.







Monday, November 11, 2013

Watched: Dark Star

Dark Star is a pretty interesting film, considering the time it was made. It came after 2001 and clearly played on the idea of ennui in space seen there, but it was also the predecessor to Star Wars and Alien in important and interesting ways. (All of the following was learned thanks to the beauty of Wikipedia). So Dark Star came out 3 years before the first Star Wars and was the first movie to show the stars rushing by as streaks in a tunnel-like way while traveling at "superliminal velocity" (warp speed, to Star Trek nerds). Its second act, in which the goofiest and perhaps least psychologically disturbed crew member fights an alien that is literally a beach ball with claws, was the inspiration for Dark Star co-screenwriter Dan O'Bannon's Alien. 


The other screenwriter and director of Dark Star is John Carpenter, who is obviously much more famous for  his horror film, Halloween. But this was his first film as director and you can already see here his ease and skill with using tension to draw out a story or heighten its themes. Although I've seen Escape from New York (and will someday, when I'm probably very drunk, convince myself to watch Escape from LA), I'm a little embarrassed by how many John Carpenter movies I haven't seen, which are on my list: Starman, Christine, The Thing (saw the remake, meh?), The Fog, Assault on Precinct 13, and Big Trouble in Little China (I KNOW, I'M SORRY). Might be time for a marathon. I did, however, recently watch 2010's The Ward and I can safely say that even that that movie was by and large one predictable insane asylum horror trope after another, Carpenter remains to this day extremely good at wringing the tension out of a scene.

But still, this is particularly impressive in a movie with a $60,000 budget where the supposed protagonist (who is, honestly, not even particularly likable) is fighting against a clawed beach ball and the threat of falling down an elevator shaft. This brings me to another odd detail of this film- its plot structure. So in the first sequence, we see a short video showing a US government employee of some sort send a transmission to the crew of Dark Star telling them their request for additional safety materials has been denied, although everyone on Earth is mourning for their lost captain. We learn that they've been traveling out through space for 20 years, eradicating potentially unstable planets. From Wikipedia, "The ship's crew consists of Lt. Doolittle, Sgt. Pinback, Boiler, and Talby. Commander Powell, their superior officer, was killed by a faulty rear seat panel, but remains on board the ship in a state of cryogenic suspension. The crew perform their jobs in a state of abject boredom as the tedium of their task has driven them around the bend, with only each other, an increasing number of (sometimes comical) systems malfunctions (for example, an explosion in a storage bay has destroyed the ship's entire supply of toilet paper) and the soft-spoken ship's computer for company."

So then we see Pinback goofing around until the ship tells him he must feed the beach ballien he has adopted (under the misguided idea that they need a mascot) and what follows is about 20 minutes of tense chase scene around the ship as the ballien escapes and Pinback is forced to climb around, without any safety net, inside an elevator shaft, to try and catch it. It ends bizarrely when he finally reaches freedom and retrieves the tranquilizer dart gun, which promptly pops the ballien and kills it.


Then we move onto the third part of the film in which we come to understand how truly bored and psychologically unwell each member is. One of my favorite parts of this was a reel of video diary entries that Pinback has kept, starting from the beginning of their mission, when he is trying to get someone to listen to his confession that he is not, in fact, Pinback, but a janitor who was mistaken for him at the last second and that he should not be here, to the intervening years of  surly drunkenness and acceptance, to his more current suspicions that his co-workers do not, in fact, like, appreciate, or even listen to him. Supposedly Carpenter and O'Bannon consider this film to be a dark comedy which, if so, I'd say it is VERY dark indeed. The crew's general apathy leads to their eventual downfall in the final sequence, in which they prepare a bomb for a new planet they've found but then are unable to use the hyperdrive to escape its blast. Although they almost convince the bomb not to explode by teaching it Cartesian philosophy (I know I am myself but cannot be certain of any external factors), it ultimately decides if it can't trust anything then it must complete its one task. So the end, in which Doolittle, who we've learned was a surfer back home and longs to surf again, uses a piece of ship debris to surf down into the planet's atmosphere, seems to me to be another cue taken from Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove). 


Anyway, I don't know why I felt compelled to explain so much of the plot except that it was sort of a different way of making a movie from what I've seen, mostly because the movie is steeped in very dark ideas about the evils of monotony and the ways in which men might lose their mind and yet there is this comical, tense, ridiculous high-wire chase sequence right in the middle of this. And also some darkly comic interactions littered throughout the other two acts.


One more thing: I saw Gravity this weekend and although a friend suggested it had a lot of references and influences from 2001, I also thought I saw a lot of Dark Star in it. Basically, if you watch sci-fi a lot and want to feel like a smarty-pants give this film a shot because after you watch it you'll start seeing its influences everywhere. It's only like an hour and change long. Totally worth it.




 The infamous ballien.

 Really, a surprisingly tense sequence.



 Teaching the bomb philosophy.