by ·Comments Off on The Cabin in the Woods (2012, Drew Goddard)

This is one of my favorite things – I went back and watched it again, to be positive. Goddard (wrote Cloverfield, worked on Lost and Buffy) and producer Whedon (who is having a big month) manage to make it seem easy, blending horror and comedy, movie and meta-movie more excitingly than Scream did, forming a sort of horror-movie construction-kit. It gradually reveals its scheme while telling us why this is all necessary, and when the stock characters realize that they’re stock characters and break out of the model, they knowingly and misanthropically unleash Lovecraftian armageddon.

The Virgin: Kristen Connolly

L-R:
The Scholar: Jesse Williams of Grey’s Anatomy
The Athlete: Chris “Thor” Hemsworth
The Slut: yellow power ranger Anna Hutchison
The Fool: Fran Kranz of Whedon’s Dollhouse

Not pictured: Richard Jenkins and West Wing star Bradley Whitford push the buttons manipulating our stock characters to their doom. Brian White (IMDB specifies that he’s their 34th Brian White) is the new guy, Amy Acker (also Dollhouse) runs the chem department, and an uncredited Sigourney Weaver runs the whole show.

Writer/director Goddard:

The truth is, this movie does comment on a horror movie, but that wasn’t our goal. We wanted to comment more on who we are and what part horror plays in us as a people. If you keep that in your sights the whole time, it’s easier to find the balance, because then your movie is just becoming about commenting on the human condition and not worrying too much about, “What is this saying about the genre or the films?” It’s much more just, “What are we saying in general?” That’s the sort of thing you have to hold firm to.

July 2024: Watched again. Catching up with the cast… Final Girl Kristen Connolly was in Ben Affleck cuck drama Deep Water. Chris “Dementus” Hemsworth didn’t get any major roles until recently. Since Much Ado, Fran(z) was in Bloodsucking Bastards and The Dark Tower. Wolf girl Anna Hutchison was in an alien invasion thing with a lesser Hemsworth and a Nick Cage vengeance movie just called Vengeance. The Scholar is a Grey’s Anatomy lifer who played a ghost in the Jacob’s Ladder remake Goddard made Bad Times at the El Royale, and cowriter Joss Whedon was cancelled for being toxic then his final film was erased by Snyderverse fans

by ·Comments Off on Auteur Shorts in April

The Wholly Family (2011, Terry Gilliam)

A rich tourist couple in Naples argue amongst themselves while their son swipes a masked statuette from a street vendor. That night after the boy is sent to bed without dinner, it comes to life and an army of masked Italians taunt him with food he’s never quite able to eat (plus the heads of his parents). The family has a happy reunion in the morning, but they’ve become figures at the street vendor’s stand.

Very good little movie, with masks out of Dr. Parnassus, doll-parts out of Tideland and who knows what else.

The Discipline of D.E. (1978, Gus Van Sant)

This has been one of my favorite short stories for years (it’s by William Burroughs from Exterminator) and despite the movie’s ranking on J. Rosenbaum’s list of favorite films, I figured a satisfactory adaptation would be near-impossible. It’s fun, but really just reading the story aloud and illustrating on film.

Carrots & Peas (1969, Hollis Frampton)

A taster of the new Criterion set – I also rewatched parts of Zorns Lemma (thanks for adding chapter stops) and played the great commentary track on Lemon. Stop-motion carrots, cross-fade, stop-motion peas. Color filters, reversals and other craziness. Then around the one-minute mark it becomes a still life, barely changing for the next four. Meanwhile a lecture plays in reverse on the soundtrack. Some fiddling in quicktime reveals that it’s a fitness lesson of some sort.

The Town (1944, Josef von Sternberg)

An advertisement for small-town USA, filmed in Madison, Indiana. Boring, flavorless little industrial film – no reason at all to ever watch this, besides to see the depths to which the once-glorious Sternberg had fallen.

Turen til squashland (1967, Lars von Trier)

Holy cow, an animated romp with happy bunnies. One is kidnapped, so the hot dog man and other two bunnies ride a friendly whale to the kidnappers’ castle, where the missing bunny rides down its water spew.

Revolution (1967, Peter Greenaway)

A grim-looking leftist march of young men, not seemingly shot in any organized way, but edited to the Beatles’ Revolution, which is kind of funny since it’s got a lyric about “carrying pictures of Chairman Mao,” and some marchers carry anti-capitalist posters.

by ·Comments Off on The Saga of Anatahan (1954, Josef von Sternberg)

“The change from a human being with dignity to a helpless worm takes but a second.”

Completely unexpected movie from Sternberg, his final film as writer/producer/director (and now narrator and credited cinematographer). Made in Kyoto with a Japanese cast and crew, speaking their own language. Instead of dubbing or subtitling their dialogue, Sternberg adds voiceover (returning to the flowery poetic style of his earliest film The Salvation Hunters) to explain and comment on the action, removing dialogue from the list of things that may distract viewers from his lighting and camerawork, which here seems less extreme and artificial than in some of the Dietrich pictures.

But he still loves to use shadow-patterns from nets and leaves:

P. Demonsablon in Cahiers: “He wrote the commentary and it is his own voice that speaks to us for an hour and a half over the images, not in order to clarify the dialogue, but to comment on the actions, thus introducing a shift between the spectacle and the reflection on it.”

Near the end of WWII, an army ship is bombed and the survivors wash up on the abandoned island of Anatahan, “halfway between Japan and New Guinea”. They set to figuring out survival tactics and soon meet the island’s two inhabitants: Keiko (the “queen bee” in the titles) and the man they think to be her husband, Kusakabe.

I liked Kusakabe best:

After military order breaks down, the ship’s captain mans their single machine gun alone, but after a U.S. warship passes by, announcing the war’s end and looking for island inhabitants to surrender, the men smell a trap and hire their captain back to lead them. He stays behind during the final rescue, “I will never go back to a defeated Japan.”

Years go by, WWII ends, and no enemy or rescue comes. It’s all based on a true story – the single woman on the island causing jealous murders, the survivors fighting over homemade coconut wine, the final rescue accomplished when the government contacted the survivors’ families and had them write letters to their men, insisting that the war had ended and they should surrender and come home.

balding Kuroda has no family, so Keiko wrote his letter:

“How could we know that we had brought the enemy with us in our own bodies, an enemy that would attack without notice?” There’s often an anthropological tone to the voiceover, but it’s never racially condescending, all about human behavior and the results of organized, military society being gradually replaced by instinct and greed.

Yananuma and Nishio, first to find the guns:

Kusakabe’s killer, Yoshiri:

A couple years into their stay on the island some men come across a crashed plane containing two guns and a pile of bullets. From then on, whoever held the guns held the power. Meanwhile Keiko, who was never actually married to Kusakabe, “goes into circulation.” A few men are killed over her, as power continues to change hands, until Kusakabe is dispatched by a guy with a sailor hat and neptune fork. Keiko has had enough, shoots the neptune fellow herself then throws the guns into the ocean. She eventually flags down a passing ship and escapes before the others.

Near the start, arms raised in celebration:

Near the end, arms raised in surrender:

Amazing ending – Keiko secretly watches at the airport as the men return, seeing them walk down the runway one by one, the living followed by the ghosts of the dead.

Producer Kazuo Takimura would follow up with the Samurai trilogy, and Keiko was Akemi Negishi, later of Kurosawa’s Lower Depths and Red Beard.

Sternberg:

My best film – and my most unsuccessful one… it is most probably an error to assume that human beings will pay admission to inspect their own mistakes rather than the mistakes of others.
…
Two interpreters were needed, one to translate into Japanese what I had said, and the other to translate back into English what the first translator was saying so that I could check whether my meaning had been correctly transmitted… To make certain that my ideas were being transferred correctly, I engaged an artist to draw pictures of each scene as we proceeded. I also made a graphic chart of the emotional involvements of each player, so that all of them could clearly see the kind of emotion required and the degree to which it was to be used.
…
Half of my crew had been trained as kamikazes, and the other half had been guerrilla fighters in the Philippines, though this had not prepared them for the ordeal of working with me.

by ·Comments Off on Thor (2011, Kenneth Branagh)

I can’t pretend we watched this for any reason other than to prep for the much-more-highly-anticipated Avengers movie. We haven’t yet stooped to renting Captain America, though. Totally entertaining, an overall better flick than Iron Man 2.

Scandinavian god-prince Thor (Chris Hemsworth of Cabin in the Woods) with his four friends (including Tadanobu Asano, the crazy slit-mouthed star of Ichi the Killer) and prankster brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston of The Deep Blue Sea) piss off the ice creatures from another world, so Thor’s dad Sir Anthony Hopkins tells Idris Elba to banish Thor to Earth without his powers or hammer. Sam Jackson’s SHIELD quarantines the hammer while Thor proves irresistible (initially loutish, but learns earth-manners quickly) to storm-chaser Natalie Portman. She hangs out with comic-relief Kat Dennings (Norah of the Infinite Playlist) and science-buddy Stellan Skarsgard, who is fortunately Scandinavian and so knows what Thor is about. When Loki turns traitor, Thor manages to revive the hammer and save his homeland, leaving Portman lonely back on earth until the sequel (since I don’t think she’s in Avengers).

by ·Comments Off on Craig Baldwin: Living Cinema

Baldwin, director of one of my favorite 1990’s movies, Tribulation 99, and the great, more recent Mock Up on Mu, visited film-culturally-deficient Atlanta with a greatest-hits program of mostly montage/found-footage films (none made by himself, but some distributed on his label) streamed from laptops and DVDs. Baldwin seems as energetic and knowledgable in person as you’d expect from his films – overall an excellent program. Fortunately I took a photo of the chalkboard listing titles/creators and was able to find many of them online to watch again.

Urine Man (2000, Greta Snider)
Short doc starring a homeless conspiracy theorist who promotes drinking one’s own urine.

Assassination in Dreamland (2011, David Sherman)
Discussion of McKinley’s assassination at the pan-american expo, an event dominated by Edison’s new inventions (light bulb, x-ray) and documented by his movie camera. Sherman mixes different Edison company films to tell his story, which ends with the assassin executed in Edison company’s electric chair.

Way Fare (2009, Sylvia Schedelbauer)
Montage of footage inherited from a photographer. Mostly I remember the praying mantis from the beginning. More quietly paced than the others.

We Edit Life (2002, People Like Us)
Totally groovy, PLU remixing graphics and film clips the same way she does classic records in her music. Oriented around “new” technology of the 70’s, computer-generated music and picture, the dream of robots.

Altair (1995, Lewis Klahr)
Another pensive one, made from composited magazine cutouts. I loved the couple dancing inside a pitcher of orange beverage. Youtube uploader describes: “color-noir culled from late-40’s pages of Cosmopolitan, which induces a sense of claustrophobia and dread through its use of Stravinsky’s The Firebird.”

The LSD No-No (2009, James Blagden)
Dock Ellis’s voice, recorded off NPR in 2008, telling about his post-baseball career as a drug counselor. No of course not, he’s telling about the infamous LSD no-hitter. Music, sfx and original animation make this a hilarious little film, which I’ve gotta remember to show Katy.

The S From Hell (2010, Rodney Ascher)
I can’t put it better than its creator did: “a short documentary-cum-horror film about the scariest corporate symbol in history.” He edits stories about the traumatic logo with re-enactments of dreams and other fun graphic bits. I dug the use of footage from Halloween III. Can’t wait for his full-length treatment of The Shining conspiracy-theories.

Bigger Better (2004, Ton Meijdam)
America/corporate-power music video starring smiling Fuhrer Bill Gates. This has such a nice look to it. I kinda feel bad that it puts one of the world’s biggest philanthropists in a nazi uniform. Might I suggest Steve Jobs?

Walt Disney’s Taxi Driver (2011, Bryan Boyce)
Scenes from Taxi Driver with Disney elements added in. DeNiro’s Mickey ears looked too computery in you-talkin-to-me scene, but taking Cybill to a double feature of Lady & The Tramp and Steamboat Willie at the porno theater looked great.

Lord of the Rings (2003, Jino Choi, excerpt)
Scenes from LOTR subtitled to illustrate its political context, with Sauron representing Empire. After Dock Ellis, this is the one I most wanted to show Katy, but it’s not available online.

No Business (2007, Negativland)
Fun and creative music video about stealing music.

Hitler on SOPA (anonymous)
More Downfall meme. Not as good as the one about the limited availability of Kraftwerk tickets, but still golden.

Uso Justo (2005, Coleman Miller, excerpt)
Hilarious, self-aware experimental found-footage film, characters from soap operas coming to realize that they’re in a montage. The whole 20-some-minute work is available online (at the moment).

Not Too Much Remember (2003, Tony Gault)
Felt long compared to the others, but internet says it’s only 11 minutes. Conspiracy theories about the CIA and drugs, as imagined by a disturbed interview subject.

J. Skow:

Most of the footage comes from educational films dating from the 50’s and 60’s, concerning psychological experiments and mind control. The loose, narrative, structure is centered on a psychiatrist’s interview with a man named Richard. Richard is the subject of scientific experiments with LSD administered by the CIA. Throughout the interview footage from other films with similar experiments on children, and other cinereous that can be possibly interpreted as his life as a child, are spliced in. Collectively, the new arrangement of footage makes for an eerie tone that contradicts it original intention of the educational pieces.

A Movie (1958, Bruce Conner) / A Movie (2010, Jen Proctor)
I mostly watched Bruce’s. The synch was good and remaking a classic experimental montage film is a fun idea, though trying to watch two movies at once left me with little memory of either.

by ·Comments Off on Silent Running (1972, Douglas Trumbull)

One of the first movies in ages that we’ve tried to watch with people over, ending as usual in failure. I knew it would be sci-fi with an environmentalism theme, but wasn’t prepared for the woeful hippie Joan Baez songs. Pretty good story/ending/character with pretty good physical action and pre-Star Wars model work, with a couple of exceptional elements. First, obviously, Bruce Dern is wonderful and gets better in the second half when he has nobody but himself and his robot drones to act against. Then there’s the drones – they worried me because I couldn’t figure them out. They’re not shaped correctly to have an actor inside, their robotic parts are truly 1970’s-robotic-looking (simple and slow), but their leg movements looked too natural to not be human. I wouldn’t have guessed there were amputee actors inside. Effects whiz Trumbull brings some of his 2001: A Space Odyssey expertise to a sequence where Dern pilots the ship through Saturn’s rings to escape detection – otherwise it’s mostly bunches of boxes painted silver in front of a starfield.

Two “drones” in foreground, with greenhouse-pod behind:

No explanation is given, but Earth sends commands for the deep-space (why didn’t they stay in orbit?) stations that hold the last of the dystopian planet’s plants and wild animals to detonate their greenhouse pods and return home. Three fun-lovin’ astronaut dudes wheel off in their rovers with suitcases full of nukes to complete the task, but Dern loses his cool, kills one of ’em with a shovel (his leg is hurt in the scuffle) and lets the others explode in a doomed greenhouse, then escapes past Saturn (“killing” one of his three drones, which gives him and the other drones more distress than the human deaths do). Interestingly, the submarine-style radio/radar silence of the title is never directly addressed in dialogue or on computer screens – it’s just inferred that Dern is making his escape, leaving the authorities to believe that his ship was destroyed. I’d give Trumbull and his writers (two of whom would later write The Deer Hunter, the other would become a major TV procedural-show writer/producer) credit for letting the audience add interpretation instead of overexplaining everything, but other evidence (like the blatant, subtext-killing Baez songs, the oversentimental but otherwise extremely simple robots and Dern’s confusing leg-injury subplot) would indicate bungled storytelling instead.

There’s not much suspense left after Dern has killed off his fellow astronauts. The movie tries to make us care when he’s joyriding his dune-buggy and injures a robot, and tries to make us believe that a botanist wouldn’t realize that plants need sunlight. But really it’s all build-up to the last five minutes, when he’s located and about to be “rescued”. He sets the sole working robot to the task of watching over the last garden dome, then jettisons it to safety and sets nukes to blow himself (and his rescuers?) into space-junk.

Part of the same financing program to let young filmmakers run wild on low-budget pictures, along with American Graffiti and The Last Movie. Sounds like a program they should’ve continued. Music by PDQ Bach under his real name.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 10

Hellraiser: Revelations (2011, Victor Garcia)
This is not a real Hellraiser movie, so I don’t feel bad about not watching it properly. Jay Gillespie (of 2001 Maniacs) is intimidating his family, poorly. Same old box and chains, but two pinheads, one of them puffy-cheeked with a crap monster-voice. Man, the script and this fake-ass pinhead are so terrible. Victor Garcia’s suffering will be legendary – though honestly, it’s still better than the fan-made Hellraiser Prophecy.

Sleeping Beauty (2011, Julia Leigh)
Well-dressed woman Clara (Rachael Blake of The Prisoner remake) looks concerned about carsick Beauty (Emily Browning of that shame of a Lemony Snicket movie). Whoa, full nudity. Now beauty is in a room with white-haired man, who drinks special tea, goes to bed with her, and possibly wakes up dead. Claudia has a hard time waking Beauty, who screams a bunch, then another shot of her sleeping next to that guy. WTF? It’s a shame when movies don’t work in Last Ten Minute doses, yet also don’t look good enough to watch all the way through.

The Conspirator (2010, Robert Redford)
James McAvoy, forgetting that he’s in a period piece, is being told by evil Kevin Kline that justice matters less than restoring order. Wicked guards take innocent, bonnetted Robin Wright off to be hanged, to the screaming protests of Evan Rachel Wood. Civil War is over, “peace at last” says somebody or other. Is Robert Redford for or against the death penalty? I can’t tell (haha, just kidding). I’m sorry I didn’t see Stephen Root.

The Skulls (2000, Rob Cohen)
Coach proposes a toast, but chubby-cheeked Joshua Jackson (formerly a Mighty Duck) barges into the secret society with a rule book in his hands and reads them rule 119b, line 15. Busted! Now Paul “2 Furious” Walker has to duel with him, but shoots Coach instead. Hmm, Jackson says that he and Walker are soulmates. Which one was supposed to be GW Bush? The studio made two sequels to this, but its director moved on to bigger things (The Mummy 3, a Rammstein video) and the writer to possibly worse things (Ghost Ship, Quarantine 2).

Quarantine 2 (2011, John Pogue)
Jenny is beat up by a CG-ass zombie before her little brother wastes it. Fire! No need for night-vision goggles anymore. I thought this movie took place on an airplane. Anyway she turns into a zombie and the kid escapes.

Paranormal Activity 2 (2010, Tod Williams)
More fake-footage fun. The maid says that a cross and olive oil might help. Are these flashbacks? The bad jumpcut editing can’t be explained by the found-footage conceit. Some woman in bed is really a monster. A ghost hurled a dead guy into the camera, startling Mike.

The Passion of the Christ (2004, Mel Gibson)
Damn, poor Jim Caviezel, who had a promising career with Thin Red Line and Frequency, but hasn’t been in anything good since, is in a sorry state, and is speaking some damn language I’ve never heard. Crazy CG raindrop unleashes a horse-startling, stairway-splitting earthquake. Guard pokes an unreasonably bloody hole into the dead Caviezel. A vampire shrieks in the desert? Did Netflix screw me like they did with Body Snatchers and stitch in a clip from a different movie? Some woman (Monica Bellucci?) stares accusingly at us. But holy shit, Jesus has risen with revenge in his eyes.

by ·Comments Off on The Lathe of Heaven (1980, Fred Barzyk & David Loxton)

“When I say the word Antwerp, you are going to have an effective dream about overpopulation.”

Opens with skinny Bruce Davison (xenophobic senator in X-Men, the original Willard) as George Orr, dreaming an atomic bomb. Takes himself into a psychotherapy clinic because he keeps having “effective” dreams which change reality – and history, so that nobody else remembers the original reality. Instead of focusing on the bomb, he tells them (via b/w flashback) how when he was a kid he kissed his Aunt Ethel, then out of embarrassment, wished her into the cornfield. No, he actually dreamed that she had never lived with him, and died far off in a car crash.

Orr’s case draws the attention of Dr. Haber (Kevin Conway, reminiscent of Oliver Reed), who hooks him up to dream-monitoring machines. It’s not clear if Haber can remember the shifting realities but he seems to believe in Orr’s effective dreams, and starts suggesting topics for him to dream about. He starts with just about the most dangerous subject you can suggest to someone with massive powers to alter reality: overpopulation.

Unsurprisingly, when Orr wakes up, there are considerably fewer people on earth thanks to the plague he dreamed up. Further experiments result in war with aliens, then peace with aliens (earth being colonized), all races being turned gray (no more racism!), not to mention Haber moving from a small office into the massive “Haber Institute”.

Not a bad alien, considering this was PBS’s first original movie:

Davison is nervous and unhappy for most of the movie, but adopts this carefree stance around the psychiatrist, making the exciteable Haber seem like the crazy one by proximity. And Davison turns out happier, hooks up with his lawyer (Margaret Avery, oscar-winning for The Color Purple) while Haber loses his mind trying to fix the world’s problems.

Haber with Avery:

Ursula says in interview that she was skeptical of the book’s filmic possibilities because “nothing happens in it”. On Haber: “He’s not evil. He means well all the way through the book. But he’s doing it wrong.” … “Of course this was a daoist book … Daoism says you do things by not doing things, and all attempt to do and to set things right and make things happen eventually backfires”

Remade with James Caan in the 2000’s. Not many of Le Guin’s stories have made it to the screen – just this and a couple recent adaptations of her dragons-and-sorcerors Earthsea stories. One of the screenwriters went on to create the celebrated hit series Murphy Brown; the other created Porky’s II. The co-directors had previously collaborated on a version of Vonnegut’s Between Time and Timbuktu.

by ·Comments Off on 12 Monkeys (1995, Terry Gilliam)

Haven’t seen this in a long time. Love the Vertigo and La Jetee references, and the Vertigo-via-La Jetee references. Katy was pleasantly surprised that Brad Pitt used to have energy. With such a perfect script, I’m surprised the writers haven’t done anything except a Kurt Russell actioner since.

Where Are They Now: Madeline Stowe hasn’t been in movies since 2003, is starring in a new show Katy watches. Chris Plummer (Brad’s dad the famous biologist) came back to play Dr. Parnassus. His plague-unleashing assistant David Morse was in Drive Angry 3D last year. Jon Seda (Bruce’s ever-present fellow prisoner from the future who hands him a civil war pistol in the airport) is in Treme. And Bruce Willis has an upcoming movie called Looper, in which he travels from the future and his past-self sees him (almost) die.

Gilliam:

I loved the idea of trying to make people consider the thought that to save the world five billion people might die. . . . But now you know that the world demands that things change. The word “culling” comes to mind. There’s going to be a culling of human beings soon. I don’t know what it will be. David’s thing was that a plague will do it. War? Famine? These things, the old favourites, are always there. Basically, I think there are too many people. And it’s not just that there are too many people; there are too many people who all want all these things that we have. That’s the problem. It’s Malthusian: there’s population and resources and, when they hit imbalance, look out boys and girls!