What Else

Brandon, how many of those 2004/2005 movies do you own on DVD? I’ll borrow whatever you have. I don’t have too many comments since I haven’t seen most of the films. I will say that I agree that Napoleon Dynamite is over-quoted, but a guy at work the other day was filling out an internal application and said, “what should I put for skills?” and my immediate response was, “Nunchuck skills…” I’ll try to defend Saw sometime, but I need to see it again. I appreciate Gibson’s Passion because it’s a singular auteur’s passion movie. No, we don’t get a clear atonement message, but that’s not what this is about and what we do get is still a reflection of truth and obviously important to Gibson. I hadn’t thought about the connection between Undertow and Night of the Hunter, but I hadn’t seen Hunter at the time either. I’ve got mixed feelings about Undertow. Like so many of the movies I listed in my “decade” post, I need to see it again and don't really feel comfortable having listed it at all except that I remember certain images vividly that argue for its worth. I’m looking forward to Kill Bill Vol. 2. I do think that Vol. 1 is exactly right for what it is, I just don’t care about what it is. I could use a little bit more long-winded comic book philosophy with my martial arts.

I’m going to put up the Stalker essay soon, but it’s full of spoilers, so you need to see the film before you read it. I’ll bring it in for you some time this week.

On to some of what I’ve been watching…

Star Trek: Generations is from the same year as Wong’s Ashes of Time. Ashes of Time might be a masterpiece. Star Trek: Generations is dumb fun. It is a foolish fanboy’s dream come true. Sometimes a geek needs to geek out.

We get Kirk and Picard in the same frame.

And it’s not a camera trick.

The scenes with both Kirk and Picard are a lot of fun, but also jarring. Here, juxtaposed with one another, are the two living embodiments of the vast difference in style and attitude of The Original Series and The Next Generation. Fans of both series should be happy, but I think that plenty of fans of both were probably disappointed. It made me happy.

Data’s “Oh Shit!” exclamation is priceless, the culmination of the entire series, and the payoff for every fan that slogged his or her way through all 8 seasons of TNG.

The story of Generations is only so-so, but I do appreciate the slower pace of the film compared to this year’s hyperactive Star Trek reboot. To risk sounding like the fans in the Onion news report, it’s just nice to watch action unfold clearly instead of being bombarded by frenetic editing.

I submit Just Pals as evidence that John Ford perfectly understood visual storytelling as early as 1920. Ford is one of the few silent directors to make the leap to sound film successfully and have a long career. It’s obvious that his films are richer for his experience with silents. Just Pals is, 90 years later, about as good a film as I can find to demonstrate to others why I’m enthralled by movies. To paraphrase Jonathan’s comments about Stalker on BGG, if you don’t like Just Pals, I’m not even sure we can begin to have a conversation.

Chaplin’s The Kid is six reels of cinematic joy. No doubt. There are specific thrills of pantomime that we’ve mostly lost over the last half century. We are fortunate that many of the best silent films remain. In The Kid, I think that it’s true what’s been said, that it’s the only film in which Chaplin has a co-star. Little Jackie Coogan does his best to out-act the Tramp every chance he can get.

I got paid to see District 9, which is always a good deal, but I left a bit disappointed. I’d heard all of the positive buzz about the film, but I was still expecting to dislike it because of the pseudo-doc gimmick. I wasn’t expecting to like it as much as I did, but, like I said, I ended up not caring in the end. After I did get sucked in and start enjoying it all, I was eventually let down by the film’s devolution into bad action movie moments (“I’ll never leave you, buddy”) combined with instances of over-the-top gore and an incredibly excessive dropping of f-bombs. These elements aren’t bad in themselves, but their use seemed jarring here and at odds with the established offbeat tone. It’s too bad because this film could have been developed well with older children and a thoughtful family audience in mind.

District 9 may have been the best big dumb summer blockbuster to come along this year. It has its fun moments, but it needs to be stressed that the film remains big and dumb. We shouldn’t praise a film for simply not being as dumb as Transformers 2.

Blast of Silence is bold and fearless. Stop reading this, forget everything else, track down a copy, and watch it now. I mean it.

Screw it. You didn’t do it. You kept on reading this. If you’re still reading, I’ll go ahead and dare you not to fall in love with the film based on the opening shot/sounds/voiceover narration alone. The next 76 minutes only pile on more to admire. There’s not a single misstep.

Overlooked and unappreciated in its own time, I’m glad of its recent rediscovery and Criterion release. I’m no noir expert, but Blast of Silence seems to be the culmination and summation of every ‘noir’ impulse that came before it. Blast of Silence is the end of noir.

If our culture were a fair and just one, this film would be shown 24 hours a day, every day, for the weeks leading up to Christmas, while A Christmas Story is condemned to obscurity.

Touchez pas au Grisbi is a good gangster film. I know that I prefer a certain type of gangster film over others. For example, I like The Roaring Twenties over Scarface. I love In Bruges and mostly dismiss Goodfellas. Grisbi is a good example of what it is that I prefer. I prefer gangster films that explore codes of honor apart from the common law. Many modern gangster films do well to stress that there is no honor among thieves and that the lifestyle is primarily selfish because these men don’t believe in anything, but I tire of watching men who don’t believe in anything other than self-advancement. I don’t need to watch bad men doing bad things, but watching bad men trying to do good things gets me every time. I enjoyed Grisbi because it’s about friendship and sacrifice, about things worth valuing in any context, especially if they’re harder to express once a certain lifestyle has been chosen.

There are plentiful horrors to be found in Horrors of Spider Island, but if I began to trash the dubbing, the acting, the editing, or the cinematography, I couldn’t begin to explain how enjoyable all of these bad elements are. There’s some kind of shocking thrill to be experienced by a movie that insists on being this bad.

Spider Island is basically an exploitation picture. If it had been made ten years later, everyone in the film would have been naked. I watched the film as part of the giant “sci-fi” boxed set that my mother bought for me last Christmas, but there is no good science fiction premise here at all. Films like this are the reason that MST3K exists (and I’ve read that there’s a great episode featuring this film).

Tarantino is a geek savant. In an interview on the Reservoir Dogs DVD, Tarantino acknowledges that if there is such a thing as gifts from a god, then God has given him the gift of having great dialogue come easily to him. I can only agree. Reservoir Dogs is still pretty audacious, but it lacks something. I’m not sure what. It feels disposable in the same way that the pulp crime novels that it’s modeled after feel disposable to me. I always enjoy them while reading/viewing, but don’t feel the need to return repeatedly.

I get the feeling that it’s unpopular to compare Tarantino to Godard, but the two are identical in at least one regard. Both men make films as acts of film criticism.

Toy Story 1 and 2 are great in 3D. This double feature is/was the movie event of the year and anyone who missed out, well, they missed out.

Woody Allen’s Manhattan is about what I expected it to be. I don’t really care about Allen’s sexual hang-ups, but I admire his emphasis on the importance of place.

Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac is that rare piece of art that treats adultery as the evil that it is while recognizing the honest emotions involved. [“He is like a bird rushing into a snare, not knowing that it will cost him his life.” --proverbs 7:23]. It is well that some filmmakers are wise enough to turn to truer sources of information than their own hearts. The Arthur legends are deep wells to draw from. Lancelot du Lac is seated in counsel with Lady Wisdom while Allen’s Manhattan is the ravings and wild tumblings of a misguided fool trying to find his own way.

Coming soon, a belated Videodrome post and some thoughts on Boetticher Westerns.