by ·Comments Off on Okja (2017, Bong Joon-ho)

Wacky creature-buddy movie that gets dark fast and stays that way, with some bizarre character choices and a variety of clashing tones. I never got on board with the unreal look of the superpigs or the horrible overacting of Jake Gyllenhaal, and it’s the second time in a year that I’ve wondered why Tilda Swinton needed to be playing identical twins. Enjoyable movie when it focuses on the lead girl and her dumbfounding meetings with Paul Dano’s Animal Liberation Front (was ALF supposed to be a joke, or did nobody tell Bong about the cat-eating comedy connection?), and the mixture of Korean and English languages works well, including a good mistranslation plot point. I guess most importantly, the emotional heart of the thing, Mija and Okja rescuing a baby from the superpig death camp, is extremely strong.

Some points that are applicable to these times we live in: the company led by Two Tildas is tricking the public into eating genetically modified superpigs by claiming they’re “all natural” (and the public mightn’t care much either way, cuz they taste so good). The company is using city police as a private security force to brutally beat the law-breaking but nonviolent activists. And we get the plot device where the good guys expose the corporation’s misdeeds by broadcasting their hidden-camera recordings to the horrified public at the end, but in this movie it’s not clear that it makes any difference – the company changes leadership from one looney CEO to another, and the superpig-slaughtering machinery continues uninterrupted.

Cowriter Jon Ronson made Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes, is British, so I suppose he might also have been unaware of Alf.

by ·Comments Off on Splice (2009, Vincenzo Natali)

A pleasantly surprising flick from the guy who made ambitious indies Cube and Nothing, now with wider scope, more ambitious sfx and an oscarrific cast in Adrien Brody (fortunately much better than in Giallo) and Sarah Polley (of No Such Thing). Feels shorter than it was – full of twists and changes, the movie doesn’t slow down to relish its concept, but throws out and leaves behind any number of ideas and directions it could’ve explored as it hurtles forward. I’ve seen complaints about weak screenwriting and plot holes, but I was satisfied. No need to wrap everything up in a neat package.

David Hewlitt, star of Nothing and Cube (and Scanners II: The New Order), and Simona Maicanescu (of Marc Caro’s Dante 01) are company bosses over married couple Brody and Polley, who are rebel genius geneticists fond of splicing things in more scientific/less ridiculous ways than The Human Centipede. Or perhaps Brody is more the rebel and Polley is more the (psychologically disturbed) genius. They split their attention between two cloning projects: publicly “Fred and Ginger,” two creatures that look like leather sacks full of chipmunks, and secretly “Dren,” which looks like Lily Cole with creepy legs, a tail and hidden Wolverine wings. Polley has huge motherhood issues and the human couple are torn between love, disgust, scientific curiosity and fear of being caught over their humanoid beastie (bred from Polley’s own DNA).

image

Finally the movie destroys itself. Ginger turns into a male, and he and Fred kill each other with their poison spikes in front of the shareholders. Stashed in the family barn, Dren seduces Brody (it’s surprisingly easy to seduce Brody) and they make sweet interspecies love. Hewlitt and Brody’s little brother (an actor who’s been made up to look comically similar to Brody) crash the party and both wind up missing or dead at the hands of Dren, who has suddenly turned male like the chipmunk-sack before her. Dren, now looking less like Lily Cole than a terrifying, winged CGI effect, rapes Polley while stabbing Brody to death, the movie making up for any baby-Dren cuteness with a sudden turn towards queasy horror. Nice sequel setup with a pregnant Polley meeting with boss lady Maicanescu is the payoff from all her psycho-mother issues earlier.

Afterwards, went to pick up Katy at Sex & The City 2 and caught the end of that, featuring a closeup of a widescreen TV showing Cary Grant in The Talk of the Town, improperly cropped to fill the screen. S&TC2 has no respect for cinema!