by ·Comments Off on 1984 (1984, Michael Radford)

Cool adaptation, with fine visuals by Radford (Il Postino) and the great Roger Deakins (pre-Coens), and a wonderful John Hurt performance. Hurt is not killed at the end (at least not explicitly), and the phrase “Big Brother is watching” never appears. Surprisingly good/subtle musical score by Eurythmics, which the director hated. Hmmm, or is it subtle because we heard the Dominic Muldowney score instead? Watched on netflix, so it’s hard to tell.

Hurt (in The Hit the same year), a government newspaper revisionist, falls for Suzanna Hamilton (of the Sting version of Brimstone & Treacle), dreams of escaping control of the party and finding a place where love is still possible. Richard Burton (of Exorcist II, argh) is on to their plan, and subjects Hurt to torture until he comes to truly love Big Brother. Katy didn’t much like it, putting a damper on the beginning of Dystopia Month.

by ·Comments Off on Super (2011, James Gunn)

“Shut up, crime!”

Rainn Wilson plays sort of a comic-book version of Michael Douglas in Falling Down, pushed to the breaking point by a dissolving marriage and life’s constant irritations. He becomes superpowerless superhero Crimson Bolt, armed mainly with a pipe wrench, and sets out to defeat wife-snatching drug-dealer Kevin Bacon, plus people who butt in line at the movies.

An extremely dark comedy, hilarious and truly horrible, which manages to hold onto its heart through Rainn Wilson’s sheer lovability and the exceptional script. It’s possibly better than Gunn’s great Slither. Can’t compare it to other fake-superhero movies like Special, Defendor and Kick-Ass since I haven’t watched those, but now I’m afraid to. This one set the bar too high. Can you tell I’m excited?

by ·Comments Off on Skin (2008, Anthony Fabian)

An extremely by-the-numbers account of a girl named Sandra born with black skin to white parents and what that means in apartheid-era South Africa. A couple of surreal moments (after a law change, Sandra’s dad Sam Neill proclaims that his daughter is white again) but mostly a straightforward story with oscar-wannabe production (no dice, but won two major awards at the Pan-African festival in L.A.) and no particular interest.

Young Sandra grows into Sophie Okonedo (who had hands-for-feet in Aeon Flux). She and her mom Alice Krige (star of Institute Benjamenta) are the powerhouse actors of the film (that’s not Sam Neill’s fault – he just has to be a bitter ol’ racist, and does a fine job at it). The movie is (of course! apartheid!) full of easy-target racist characters calculated to inflame audience emotion. Surprisingly, Sandra’s older brother becomes one of them late in the film. She gives up on the white life, runs off with a black man (Tony Kgoroge of Invictus) and has two kids, but leaves him after a beating, moves to Jo-burg and gets a factory job. Dad never gets a reconciliation, but mom (with decent old-age makeup) does.

by ·Comments Off on The Hunger Games (2012, Gary Ross)

Just like the book, plus a bunch of good actors (hello, Jennifer Lawrence and Woody Harrelson), minus all depth or feeling, and with the worst camerawork I’ve seen in years. Ross made Pleasantville and his DP shot all the latter-day Clint Eastwood pictures, so what happened here? The soundtrack is nice, anyway.

by ·Comments Off on Battle Royale (2000, Kinji Fukasaku)

Watched with Katy because of the Hunger Games connection. Kind of a not-so-great summer teen-action flick, but it’s still fun and interesting enough to justify rewatching. Also it’s got Beat Takeshi. Has the same-ish final line as teen deathmatch story The Long Walk (not counting all the weird special-edition dream sequences that follow the proper story, like a selection of extended/deleted scenes).

The Battle isn’t televised (even the gov’t overseers don’t have cameras, only microphones inside the kids’ explosive necklaces), and its very existence seems to come as a surprise to the kids, who don’t realize its seriousness until they’ve been in the island-arena for a while. Katy points out that this would make the Battle less of a deterrent than the Hunger Games – more of a personal vendetta by Kitano against his former students.

Mild, oft-injured Nanahara (Tatsuya Fujiwara) and his sweetie Noriko (Aki Maeda of Gamera 3) are the survivors/escapees who head to the inferior sequel. They’re helped by Kawada (Taro Yamamoto), winner of a previous Battle forced to fight again. Fortunately, all teens in movies circa the year 2000 knew how to hack into government systems, so one group concentrates on taking down the surveillance machines, and Kawada figures how to remove the necklaces. The other “transfer student” is friz-haired Kiriyama (Masanobu Ando, the tough one in Big Bang Love), who signed up for the fun of killing people, finally blinded in an explosion set by the hacker group and killed in a machine-gun battle with Kawada.

Among the others: Chigusa (Chiaki Kuriyama of Kill Bill), evil gal Mitsuko (Ko Shibasaki, star of One Missed Call), and Nanahara’s best friend Kuninobu who gets killed by exploding necklace during Kitano’s introductory speech.

by ·Comments Off on A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935, William Dieterle & Max Reinhardt)

Wonderful adaptation, filled with Cocteau-like movie-magic. Introduced at Emory by Rushdie, who calls it “The Dream” for short, and isn’t a huge fan of James Cagney’s performance.

Katy and I already watched the McNutty version from 60-some years later, so I’m familiar with the story. Dark-haired Olivia de Havilland (her film debut, later in Gone With The Wind) is coveted by both Dick Powell (star of Christmas in July and The Tall Target) and Ross Alexander (short career: suicide), while blonde Jean Muir (star of The White Cockatoo) covets Ross. The lovers (particularly Olivia) give it their all, making their segments more welcome than Cagney’s. I noted that Kevin Kline brought “a touch of sadness to his mostly ridiculous comic-relief role,” but Cagney instead brings an entire can of ham. When he’s not wearing a donkey mask, Cagney works with slate-faced Joe Brown (the guy in love with Jack Lemmon at the end of Some Like It Hot) on their play to be performed for The Duke (Ian Hunter of Hitchcock’s The Ring) and his Amazon conquest/bride (Verree Teasdale of The Milky Way).

Interference comes from fairy queen Anita Louise (of Judge Priest, bringing less personality than Michelle Pfeiffer did) and sparkly-costumed elf king Victor Jory (Power of the Press) with his loyal minion, a cackling pre-Andy Hardy Mickey Rooney. The Queen has mini-minions Moth and Pease-Blossom (both sadly unaccounted-for), Cobweb (appeared in a pile of 1950’s westerns, costarring with Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter) and Mustard Seed (Billy Barty, had already been in fifty movies as Mickey Rooney’s brother, would live to appear in such acclaimed 1980’s dwarf-filled fantasy films as Legend, Willow, Masters of the Universe and UHF).

Lost best picture to Mutiny on the Bounty, but cinematographer Hal Mohr was history’s only write-in oscar winner. He later shot Underworld USA, Rancho Notorious and a Tashlin feature. Banned in Germany for being based on the Jew-music of Mendelssohn. Reinhardt had staged the play ten or more times, left nazi germany and staged Midsummer in Hollywood, then hired to make the film alongside cinema vet Dieterle (The Devil & Daniel Webster).

by ·Comments Off on Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010, Werner Herzog)

“the illusion of movement, like frames in an animated film”

Cave drawings from 25k to 40k years ago, during the last ice age, including drawings of extinct animals. The earliest recorded human artworks. Somewhat ecstatic movie, between the cave camerawork and the string/choral music, with notes of Herzogian strangeness (a master perfumer speaks of trying to sniff out hidden caves). The first half suffers from having to use a subpar camera, without the time or equipment needed to set up perfect shots, but the crew gets to return with better stuff later, slowly moving a light source while the camera remains still to expose the rock’s textures. Herzog faithfully edits their two journeys separately instead of just using images from the second trip and pretending like they got it perfect the first time.

Cave sniffer:

Sidetrack interviews with cave explorers, engineers plotting the cave with laser imagery, a historian who demonstrates statuettes, ornaments and musical instruments from the ice age, carved from mammoth tusks. Then an unexpected poetic epilogue about albino alligators in a steamy greenhouse warmed by runoff waters from a nuclear plant.

Herzog in Cinema Scope:

There’s not much room for intentionality. You have one week. You have four hours a day to shoot. You have to build your cameras and then reconfigure your cameras on a 60 centimetre-wide walkway. You’re allowed only three people with you. You’re allowed only three small panels of light. So intentionality is reduced to having to film like crazy and deliver.

Of course there was a very clear idea about why 3-D was necessary, and clear ideas about music. There was a clear idea about not trying to define what things represent… because we do not know. There are a number of hypotheses made by scientists, but what’s construed to be a ceremonial site could just as easily have been the traces of children playing. I think we have to keep possibilities open if we want to understand what can look to us like the sudden awakening of the modern human soul.

DEC 2021: Watched again with Katy, who liked it enough that she’s taking an interest in other Herzog movies – this could be good.

Ode to the Dawn of Man (2011, Werner Herzog)

Also on the DVD, Herzog takes a camera to the recording of the film’s score by really amazing cellist Ernst Reijseger. I could watch this a bunch more times. Probably I should just buy the soundtrack.

by ·Comments Off on The Asthenic Syndrome (1989, Kira Muratova)

After a funeral, Natasha is angry with everyone alive, quits her job and pisses off people in the street. After forty minutes of this, the movie-in-a-movie ends and Olga, its lead actress, comes on stage to complete audience indifference. “I’m already sad and tired from work. I’d like to have fun, listen to some music instead of watching such movies.”

Destructive tendencies in the film-in-a-film:

Narcoleptic Nikolai is in the audience. He’s a schoolteacher along with round, blonde Irina. To be truthful, that’s about all I can be sure of. Plenty else happens in the movie, but I’m not sure to whom, and for what reason. It’s kind of a comedy, but seems to be serious underneath. The title seems appropriate (asthenia: abnormal physical weakness or lack of energy). You could also have called it Everybody Is Unbearable. Very talky, with wall-to-wall chatter in half the scenes, languid in others.

Nikolai:

Irina attempts “strangers in the night”:

Won a prize at Berlin. The distributor calls it an “impressionistic portrait of the USSR reaching the end of its tether.” Senses calls it a “demented masterpiece,” and goes on to note: “it is interesting to note that while the rest of the world celebrated the fall of communism, the reaction of the people actually living under Soviet rule wasn’t as simple; people felt very confused, and their overall behaviour was – and still is – reminiscent of the asthenic syndrome of the film, alternatively violent and repressed. Even though Asthenic Syndrome was made during the period of glasnost, Muratova once again managed to alienate the authorities. It had the dubious honour of being the only film banned during that period.”

J. Rosenbaum:

It’s a film that alternately assaults you and nods off — usually without warning and often when you’re least expecting it. Mean-spirited and assertive one moment, narcoleptic and in complete denial the next, it bears an astonishing resemblance to the disconcerting rhythm of contemporary public life.

D. Auerbach:

If you don’t know that perestroika is seen as the source of millions of deaths stemming from deregulation, corruption, and crime, the melancholy and despair that fill The Asthentic Syndrome seem disconnected from a particular cause: what is Muratova critiquing, exactly? . . . Knowing the context reveals the emotion behind the puzzling surface.

by ·Comments Off on Super 8 (2011, JJ Abrams)

Not an actual movie, but an admirable simulacrum. Abrams imagines a mid-80’s Spielberg adventure, complete with teenage protagonists each with a couple sympathetic personal details, aliens and intrigue (“Do not speak of this or else you and your parents will die,” says Glynn Turman, who was also the first casualty in Spielberg-produced Gremlins), likeably honest small-towners and evil shadowy government conspiracy. That’s actually the thing I liked most about the movie, watching it the same week as the politically shady Contagion. Abrams puts his unique directorial stamp on the material (just kidding – he simply floods it with lens flares).

I found a shot of the kids without lens flare:

Glynn Turman:

Kid named Joe is helping made a zombie movie with friends, who recruit his crush Alice (Elle Fanning, tiny Cate Blanchett in The Benjamin Buttons). With names like Joe, Alice and their buddy Preston, sometimes it seems like this was written as a 1940’s movie then changed at last minute. Joe’s mom died in a factory accident caused indirectly by Alice’s dad, Joe’s dad (Kyle Chandler of Katy’s football show) is the town cop, Charles (the super-8 director) has a thing for Alice – these are our token character details, the Stand By Me half of the big-budget action movie. Seems that a vindictive alien escaped from gov’t captivity when Turman drove his pickup truck onto train tracks causing an outrageously overdone crash, which throws train cars into the air like in a Transformers flick but doesn’t kill Turman or fully destroy his truck. Shadowy gov’t agent Nelec will finish the poor guy off before being dispatched by the alien, who proceeds to loot the area of all wiring, engines and other metal bits to construct a vessel home, finally turning the town water tower into a Katamari Damacy electro-magnet.

Runaway dog map:

The kid’s sentimental locket is Katamari-bound: