by ·Comments Off on God Bless America (2011, Bobcat Goldthwait)

Of all the loud genre movies I rented this week, this one was the champion. A lot like Super (or a comedy Falling Down), a hilarious piece of wish-fulfillment that turns ever-darker. Joel “Bill’s brother” Murray hates his life (in which everyone calls him “bro”) but mostly hates self-centered airheads on television, so after he’s fired then misdiagnosed with a Joe vs. the Volcano-esque brain-plot-device, he chooses to go on a rampage instead of killing himself, killing a spoiled sweet-16 reality star, then her parents. It gets uncomfortably more similar to Super when Frank unwillingly attracts a teen-girl sidekick (Roxy) whom he keeps calling “Juno”.

Watching this a week after some nut shot up a Batman screening, I was surprised at the scene where Frank and Roxy shoot up an underattended movie matinee because a row of teens wouldn’t shut up and put down their phones (scored to a cover of Bjork’s It’s Oh So Quiet). They kill a republican TV talking-head, a guy who takes up two parking spots and a funeral-protesting cult leader. The media keeps misinterpreting their motives, and the killers grow more comfortable with their motels-and-murders lifestyle, gearing up towards a lovingly-shot slow-motion suicidal massacre on a live American Idol-like show.

Excellent movie, more complicated than it seems.

The AV Club gets it:

It isn’t a funhouse mirror; it’s just a mirror. The debasement on its airwaves isn’t some Ow My Balls-style future Idiocracy, but rather a straightforward reflection of what’s already present… The key point about God Bless America is that it’s extreme but not exaggerated, a dark comedy that indulges — and questions — a violent, misanthropic fantasy about laying waste to the cultural landscape while staying grounded in a recognizable reality. In other words, Goldthwait isn’t doing the satirical equivalent of shooting ducks in a barrel here, though his recreations of televised stupidity do offer a funny twinge of recognition. What interests him more is how we live in that culture, particularly those who are alienated by it.

Writer/director Goldthwait:

I could have made a whiney movie or a documentary about how nasty our culture is, and a couple of other people that may see things the way I do would have liked it. Or I could have made a comedy that was very aggressively saying, “Cram it” to all these people, and that’s what I chose to do.

by ·Comments Off on Pola X (1999, Leos Carax)

Not at all surprised when the end credits told me it’s based on a novel. The novel was Herman Melville’s follow-up to Moby Dick, which according to wikipedia was “a critical and financial disaster… universally condemned for both its morals and its style.” The movie plays like a piece of tragic literature without feeling uncomfortable in its present-day setting. I mean that as a compliment, but it also means the plot, as strange as it initially seems, has a feeling of inevitability. It opens on a rich couple, happy, alive and in love, so I know things won’t end well. Maybe it would be interesting to someday make a movie that opens on a loving couple who manage to stay that way.

Anonymously bestselling author Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu, star of Don’t Touch The Axe) is engaged to marry Lucie, but already a weird incestual vibe is creeping in when he calls his mom “sister” and gets all clingy around her. His best friend Thibault returns from travels, congratulates Pierre on his engagement to their mutual childhood friend Lucie, seems sincere about it. But Pierre is distracted by a stalker, and when he finally catches her, she claims to be his long-lost sister Isabelle, hidden away and raised in Bosnia. So Pierre visits some good places to die: the highway at night, a massive unstable rock, a waterfall, then tells his fiancee and mother that he’s moving to Paris by himself.

Pierre and mother:

Pierre tells Isabelle (Yekaterina Golubeva, sinister stalker in The Intruder): “for the world, you’ll be my wife,” even though nobody in Paris knows who he is so it shouldn’t matter. They immediately run into trouble on both sides of the law, Thibault throws him out, and newly-disillusioned Pierre is having trouble with his follow-up novel. His agent: “The need to spit the world’s sinister truth in its face is as old as the world itself.” Another woman and a little girl travel with them – I was never sure who they were, exactly, but the girl dies after being smacked in the head by a passer-by, and the couple moves again.

Now they’re in a warehouse run by a drums-and-feedback noise conductor and his all-black-clothed orchestra – just the kind of thing people assume goes on in Paris – and now their public/private roles seem reversed, as they sleep together when nobody is looking, but stay in separate beds. Back in the country, Pierre’s distraught mom (Catherine Deneuve, the same year she did Ruiz’s Time Regained) gets on his motorcycle and dies on the highway at night – so it beats the massive rock and the waterfall as the movie’s foreshadowed death monument. Lucie tracks Pierre down and stays with them (“we’ll say you’re my cousin”).

More troubles: Isabelle jumps off the winter ferry trying to die, Pierre publicly identifies himself as the author of the bestselling novel but is called an impostor, nobody wants his new book (“a raving morass that reeks of plagiarism”), Thibault is harassing them, and Pierre is getting shit from his conductor/landlord, whose musicans apparently also double as his private militia. So Pierre grabs some guns, goes into town and blows Thibault’s head off, is packed into the police van as his women both run after him, then Isabelle walks in front of a speeding ambulance.

It struck me as ironic that Pierre is trying to write a great, tortured novel, seeking the ultimate truths, while all his relationships are full of lies. Watched this because I enjoyed the unhinged awesomeness of Carax’s Lovers on the Bridge and his Merde short, and I’m hearing that his new one is bananas. But this was apparently the grimly serious piece between features of transcendent weirdness, despite a blood-soaked dream-sequence or two. I was looking forward to the Dirty Three score, but it’s actually by Scott Walker – what was I thinking of?

Lucie, in happier times:

Senses of Cinema:

If compared to Jean-Luc Godard and later Philippe Garrel in his first works, in Pola X we find a Carax closer to Jacques Rivette – who, not in vain, has declared that for him this is the most beautiful French film of the ’90s. The Rivettian airs can be found, for example, in the importance of the ideas of conspiracy, secrecy and masks; in the shots of large interior spaces like factory buildings and chateaus; and, above all, in the treatment of time: so many meters of film are used to follow the characters’ journeys, living the process with them – at the beginning of the film we follow Pierre all the way from the chateau where he lives to Lucie’s home, including the ferry ride; similarly, at the end of the film Carax spends a lot of time following Pierre’s journey to Thibault.

by ·Comments Off on World on a Wire (1973, Rainer Fassbinder)

Stiller manages a perfectly realistic virtual-reality simulator set in the future so government (and increasingly, industry) can make predictive policies. And about ten minutes into the three and a half-hour movie I realized that Stiller is himself a fictional character inside a virtual reality. I knew this because I’ve seen science fiction before, and the story was seeming familiar – turns out it’s based on the same source novel as The Thirteenth Floor. Fortunately, Stiller figures this out at the halfway point, after obsessing over an erased security chief whom only he can remember, so we’ve got the whole second half (episode – this was a TV miniseries) to deal with this info. More fortunately, there’s no slow grinding of the plot gears as the characters slowly realize something that I already know, because the film is 100% fun to watch, even while being obvious. Fassbinder has found a way to make low-budget, no-effects TV sci-fi look terrific, covering every surface with mirrors and windows and screens (you catch sight of the camera crew pretty often – another fun game), creeping around corners with his Ruizian camera (with sparing use of the requisite 70’s zooms) and playing with perspective. With this and Sam Fuller’s Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street being my only touchstones, I have to assume that mid-70’s German television was amazing.

Stiller (Klaus Lowitsch of Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron), the shortest person in the movie, is taking over the project because his predecessor/father-figure Vollmer has unexpectedly suicided. Vollmer’s daughter Eva, Stiller’s main squeeze, has grown distant, the corporate project head (Stiller’s boss) Siskins is becoming more demanding, and Stiller’s new secretary Fromm (Fassbinder regular Barbara Valentin) is obviously a spy, implanted to keep Stiller abreast of the situation.

Get it?

Stiller gets more impertinent, programs a singing, tap-dancing version of his boss into the simulacrum. He goes on the run after his mid-movie revelation, realizing that Vollmer was killed for finding out the same thing. Eva reappears, says she’s from the real world, that Vollmer never had a daughter until she programmed herself in a few days before, that they have many virtual worlds but this one captured attention for being the only one that created its own sub-virtual-world. And since the real Eva is in love with the virtual Stiller, she helps him escape by swapping psyches with someone outside.

Eva and Stiller trying to pull a Minority Report pose:

I liked the electronic music, daring for 1973, but sometimes the bonkers, intense squeals which occur when Stiller is troubled would make Ash upset. I also like that you can have fully naked women on German television. Don’t know much about Fassbinder, assumed he’s kinda Nick Ray meets Doug Sirk meets Sam Fuller meets Hedwig, based on my decade-ago half-rememberance of watching The Marriage of Maria Braun.

Stiller being told that he’s a fictional character:

Stiller sneaks into a theater while on the run from the law, watches what appears to be based on the last few minutes of Dishonored:

Nashville Scene rightly calls it “a film that feels somehow inevitable in your viewing, a missing link that should have been there all along.”

Another key reference for World on a Wire is Jean-Luc Godard’s own lone foray into sci-fi, 1965’s Alphaville. Much like Godard’s film, World generates a futurescape from the present mostly by judicious selection. Abandoned building sites, freeways and glass skyscrapers, it seems, are forever. (In the final moments of World, Fassbinder completes the homage as Alphaville’s star, Eddie Constantine, makes a cameo appearance.)

Eddie C.:

Film Quarterly:

Despite not actually being an adaptation of a Dick fiction, World on a Wire has more in common with the wry mordancy of Dick’s work than many official Dick adaptations, not least in the way that it shows each of its three nested worlds as being equally drab. We actually see very little of the world “below” (the world inside the Simulacron) and almost nothing of the world “above” (the world one level up from what we first took to be reality). The world below we see only in snatched glimpses of hotel lobbies and inside a lorry driver’s cab. But it is the revelation—or non-revelation—of the world above at the climax of the film that is most startling. Instead of some Gnostic transfiguration, we find ourselves in what looks like a meeting room in some ultra-banal office block. At first, the electronic blinds are down, momentarily holding open the possibility that there will be some marvelous—or at least strange—world to be seen once they are up. But when they do eventually rise, we see only the same grey skies and city- scape.

Vollmer, just before his death:

by ·Comments Off on Into The Abyss (2011, Werner Herzog)

Herzog, whose voice is too rarely heard, listens to the stories of people affected by a stupid double murder in Texas, mostly the victims’ families but also a few unenlightening minutes with the killers themselves. There’s little attempt to question whether these two (one of whom is on death row; the other avoided execution because his dad cried in front of the jury) actually committed the crimes. And there’s little attempt to make polarizing statement regarding the death penalty, until the end when the movie tries to land hard on the anti- side. But I’ve been on the anti side for years, and the movie almost has me convinced that the death penalty is a great thing, because these kids are horrible and have learned nothing, so they might as well be dead. One of the highlights is a long interview with a former death row prison guard, who walks us through the whole procedure before saying he had to quit after too many executions messed with his head. No mercy from Texas. Music by Soul Coughing’s Mark De Gli Antoni.

by ·Comments Off on The Secret World of Arrietty (2010, Hiromasa Yonebayashi)

I didn’t catch the toy Totoro but made some other Ghibli connections. Arrietty stands on the boy’s shoulder like the fox-thing in Nausicaa. She’s a 13-yr-old girl making her first adventure into grown-up life (and making a mess of it) like Kiki’s. Also: too many songs with vocals. Adapted by Miyazaki from a novel that’s been filmed a bunch of times before. The title has been changed, but the miniature people, at least in the English version, are still called Borrowers.

The main rule, strictly obeyed for generations, is never to be seen by humans, but on her first night out to snatch a sugarcube with dad, Arrietty is spotted by a drowsy, sickly boy spending the summer with his aunts or whoever they are: a decent one and a horrible troll woman whose goal in life is to find and destroy the borrowers. So Arrietty’s family packs all their belongings to move away (aided by an awesome feral borrower named Spiller, while the boy tries to find Arrietty and be friends. Probably would’ve been cooler in theaters, but at home I kept finding myself wondering why I’d rented a kids’ movie and wasn’t watching Pola X instead.

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011, Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

Methodical, slowly-building story, from night into morning. Nothing much is happening, as a police chief, prosecutor, doctor and whole crew of cops and diggers drive a suspect (and barely-seen second suspect) from one landscape to another as he tries to recall where it was that he killed and buried his brother. I’m suspicious of the acclaim because I wasn’t a huge fan of Climates (though I liked it, which is easy to forget since Katy vocally hates it), but soon I’m drawn into the atmosphere and have to admit it’s a great movie. But then I interrupt my viewing around the same time the tone of the film changes when they find the body and drive into town, and when I return, the last 45 minutes seemed completely off.

Chief has a short temper, is mad that nobody seems to be able to do his job without shouted instructions. Prosecutor has to pee a lot, asks Doctor a lot of questions. Through his answers, Doctor indirectly reveals that the prosecutor’s wife probably killed herself. Arab is the driver, who married a woman from a nearby town which he seems to hate. Suspect One looks like Vincent Gallo, stays silent for almost the whole movie, except to ask someone to look after his wife, and to cry when a kid in town (dead man’s son – but really his own son, as revealed earlier) throws a rock at his head. An all-male cast except two small non-speaking roles for two pretty young women.

Chief front left, Arab front right:

Music swells up after 17 min and it occurs we haven’t heard any yet, but it was the chief’s ringtone. Mid-search, they break at the town Arab’s wife comes from, eating with the mayor (Ercan Kesal of Three Monkeys, co-writer of Anatolia) and his family. His gorgeous daughter serves everybody by candlelight, and Suspect One has a vision of his dead brother.

When the body is found, Suspect Two blurts out “I’m the one who killed Yasar,” but nobody seems to notice or care. Back in the city, body identification by the widow, then (off-camera but squishy-sounding) autopsy, the doctor staring out the window.

“You can say ‘Once upon a time in Anatolia when I was working out in the sticks, I remember this one night which began like this.’ You can tell it like a fairytale.”

Some cool scenes. Arab is talking to Doctor, the camera behind his head, Doctor not responding, then camera comes around and we see that Arab’s not speaking, but his voice continues. How much did he say, and how much was in his head? After a fight, an apple rolls down a hill and down a stream, probably a glaring metaphor but I just enjoyed watching the apple, flashing back to The Four Times. A few brief, eerie uses of slow motion.

Also, the doctor finds a rock face while taking a pee:

People are keeping secrets for mysterious reasons. I thought it was philosophy in the guise of an investigation movie, but then after they find the body it becomes an investigation movie (usually the other way around).

S. Foundas in Cinema Scope does a good job conveying the atmosphere of the film without getting bogged down in story (what little there is). “In methodically tracing the play-by-play of a seemingly routine police investigation, it is a film of many details but no explanations, a mystery that conjures a sense of the eternal.”

the director, quoted in Time Out:

‘The real story was told to me by a doctor,’ Ceylan says. ‘But yes, the doctor in the film is a little like me in terms of personality. He is a very rational person, but of course that is not enough to deal with life. Life has a metaphysical dimension too. There are questions that you cannot answer with knowledge. The doctor has these questions in his mind. The important thing is that, by the end of the film, we see that he has the ability to feel something for somebody else. That’s the hope for him.’

Reverse Shot:

Infidelity comes to represent the highest, most irrevocable form of betrayal, the most persuasive case for one person’s essential remoteness from another, as well as a fault line between the sexes (2006’s Climates explored similar terrain, coolly anatomizing the aftermath of a breakup). This is just one of many irreconcilable binaries in Ceylan’s films: urban/rural, parents/children, movement/stasis. His characters are more often than not caught in the middle of a protracted process of disillusionment, a long, slow loss of faith in the idea that they can form meaningful or lasting associations even with lovers or family, or that they can escape on a moment’s notice from the lives they’ve made for themselves… These days, thoroughly forlorn depictions of the human condition rarely come outfitted with such strikingly realized environments or such a seamlessly integrated sense of humor — Ceylan’s jokes don’t upset the mood by leavening it, or move the dial toward caricature, but arise naturally from the gaps in communication between the characters.

by ·1 Comment

The sweetest end-of-the-world drama. Likeably lopsided Don McKellar (also writer/director) visits his family (opening nostalgia Christmas presents and having a homey diner) claims that he’s comfortable with his plan to spend the (unexplained but universally accepted) apocalypse in six hours alone in his apartment. Don is really super-depressed over the recent death of his wife, ends up helping an increasingly desperate Sandra Oh, who still thinks she can go shopping and catch taxis in the midst of societal breakdown, attempt to reunite with her intense latter-day boyfriend. This is probably David Cronenberg, a gas company manager who completes his goal to personally phone every customer and thank them for their business, before going home to await Sandra, leaving employee Donna in charge.

Sandra has car trouble:

Don and Sandra get grudging help from Don’s playboy car-collector friend Craig, who is rapidly going through a list of sexual conquests – both acts and partners (Lily, a black woman; Don, who refuses; and their high school French teacher, Genevieve Bujold).

Bujold with Callum Rennie:

Cameo by Pontypool director Bruce McDonald (with the bat)

The midnight hour approaches, but the sun is still up – apparently it hasn’t gone down in weeks. Don’s sister Sarah Polley and her boyfriend attend the final countdown celebration in the middle of town. A nerdy guy named Menzies holds a solo piano concert in an otherwise-unused theater. Cronenberg is shot by marauding youth. His employee Donna, a virgin, is Craig’s final visitor. And Sandra, losing her dream of last-second double-suicide with her beloved, ends up in the arms of Don. It seemed like a generic-indie-looking unexceptional drama in the first ten minutes, but totally hooked me and proved amazingly touching by the end. I can’t stop thinking about it.

Cronenberg gets a taste of his own horror-makeup medicine:

Polley party:

by ·Comments Off on Brainscan (1994, John Flynn)

Not a bad little virtual-reality teen horror movie. Well, okay, it’s quite a bad little virtual-reality teen horror movie, but Trevor and I have sentimental attachment to the stupid thing. So how could we pass up watching the edited-for-television version (“I’m in deep stuff”) at Dolly’s house?

Edward Furlong continued frittering away his Terminator 2 goodwill after Pet Sematary II and before his brief 1998 resurgence, appearing as a troubled (dead mom, metal albums) video gamer who gets a demo disc of an immersive VR experience, a shoddy Existenz starring a punk clown called Trickster. In first-person, Eddy stalks then knifes a sleeping neighbor. His gaming buddy Kyle knows too much, so Ed goes back the next night and wakes up hearing that his friend has died (we don’t watch this part). Next he tries to rebel against Trickster and stop the killing, but Tricky wants Ed to take care of his crush Kimberly. Another killing spree ends with a vigilante neighborhood watch group shooting Kyle’s dad, I think. But Ed wakes up and everyone’s still alive – it was all part of the game experience. So he trashes his room a bit, then hands off the disc to a hated authority figure, and all ends well.

Written by Andrew Walker, who specializes in convoluted serial killer stories (Se7en, Sleepy Hollow, 8mm), mostly pretty tame but with a few scenes that seem like inspirations to later works (Lost Highway, an Aphex Twin video). The actors who played Furlong’s friends Kyle and Kimberly would go on to appear in nothing much, and nothing much, respectively, but the killed dad was in Scanners, which is the movie people always think you’re talking about if you mention Brainscan.

by ·Comments Off on Dr. Plonk (2007, Rolf de Heer)

A silent film in the style of 1907 and shot using a hand-crank camera, with lots (oh, lots) of start-stop disappearance effects, not at all like The Artist or the films of Guy Maddin – more of an anarchic keystone homage.

Bald Dr. Plonk has a bearded deaf/dumb assistant Paulus, a “winsome” wife, and a trick-performing dog (appropriately credited with the others in the opening titles).

Tragic calculations! Triple-checked!

Plonk tells the Prime Minister’s advisors (with hilariously fake facial hair) of his discovery, but they don’t believe him – so he invents a time machine (in about five minutes) to travel into our present and find proof of his theory. Meanwhile, Paulus pads the film by taking the dog for walks as a pretense for hitting on married women in the park. Paulus, deaf and not too smart, is put in charge of time machine operation as Plonk mistakenly travels backwards and is set alight by natives.

Paulus is then sent as a test subject and lands a hippie chick, then Plonk continues his experiments, photographing present-day industrial sites, “so this is what the end looks like.” Train gags, era-specific misunderstandings, a slight bit of stop-motion, and an anti-television joke that would make Tashlin proud.

Plonk’s wife keeps an eye on Paulus:

Plonk can’t seem to bring home his evidence that the future is a wasteland, so he brings the game Prime Minister along to 2007, where they find the present-day PM less approachable. It all ends with a madcap chase in a warehouse between plenty of cops and the surprisingly athletic main cast. The former PM gets to sit in a straightjacket entranced by television, while Plonk…

At first glimpse I thought De Heer made this before Ten Canoes, but no, he made it before TWELVE Canoes, the documentary follow-up.