Three Films Make A Post: Reap what you sow.

I Want to Go Home (2017): This sixty minute documentary by Wesley Leon Aroozoo about Yasuo Takamatsu, a man whose wife was swept away in Japan’s 2011 tsunami, and who is still diving nearly every week in the coastal town where he lost her in hopes to find her body is a quietly moving, respectful attempt at looking at the greater impact of the tsunami on Japanese society by focussing on the experiences of one man. Its treatment of Takamtsu is delicate, respecting the distances the man wants to keep yet still portraying some of the depth of his grief. There’s a quiet, gracious kindness on display throughout the film – by Takamatsu as well as Aroozoo – I found deeply moving.

What to Do with the Dead Kaiju? (2022): Despite a basic idea that seems readymade for clever satire or original meta-science-fiction, this tokusatsu comedy by Satoshi Miki suffers from a bad case of not knowing what it wants to be. It shifts between broadest comedy, slightly subtler stuff, and misguidedly shot earnestness in awkward ways I’d call amateurish coming from an inexperienced director, but can’t explain from someone who is as good at this sort of thing as Miki often is. Most of the time, the whole thing comes over as a bad attempt at shooting a parody of Shin Godzilla for idiots, which is just a sad waste of a good idea.

Petite Maman (2021): This shortish feature by the great Céline Sciamma is a rather wonderful bit of fantasy, as filmed by a director steeped in the French arthouse tradition who is always turning the visual language of it around to fit her own ideas and interests. Here, she takes on the experience of childhood, specifically a girl’s experience of childhood, putting the feelings of wonder, awkwardness, sadness, and confusion into patiently staged scenes that manage to be beautiful as well as meaningful.

It’s also a portrayal of the connections between mothers and daughters, distance and closeness, and as quietly touching a film as I’ve seen.

In short: Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)

I didn’t at all expect to like Jim Jarmusch’s vampire movie, much less be as delighted by it as I turned out to be, because the fantastic generally seems to bring out the worst in Jarmusch, the old-mannish cultural critique, and the use of metaphors that only ever are metaphors but never feel real as part of the world of a film.

None of these things actually apply here, the cultural critique is wry, the metaphors work on the level of the film’s reality too, and most of what sometimes feels pretentious about Jarmusch’s work is charming and seems perfectly placed in context of a film that follows various ideas of romance, examines diverse concepts of bohemianism and love, digs up echoes of drug culture, and makes a lot of wry jokes about it all; well, expect for the love but then Jarmusch, like me, seems to be the kind of romantic who doesn’t find love very funny - but sometimes life-saving.

Visually, this might be the most attractive Jarmusch film I’ve seen, dominated by a sense of fluid movement, the camera dancing to the film’s (impeccable) soundtrack, and colours of intense expressivity and beauty that belie the idea a film only taking place by night couldn’t make this kind of use of colours, particularly in the times of the orange and teal filters.There’s a sense of romantic poetry about it all, though not the po-faced kind (the film dutifully makes fun of Byron and Shelley) but the one that can and will laugh about itself from time to time. This being a Jarmusch film, there’s not much of a plot – though there’s so much going on on every other level I’m not sure who would mind the absence – and there’s time for the film to just swerve off into various directions and talk about various ideas and things its director/writer is interested in. Though, I would argue, these seeming detours actually belong into the particular argument about the importance of art and science the film also makes, and the film and the argument would be much weakened without them.

Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston are pretty fantastic here, Swinton really playing on the otherworldliness of her looks and her very individual kind of beauty without the cliché using her instead of the other way round; there’s also a nice ironic juxtaposition in the fact she’s actually the more down to earth of our central vampire couple.

And as if all that weren’t enough to make at least me all kinds of happy, John Hurt plays Christopher Marlowe, who is a vampire, and alive, and…but that would be telling what is rather more usefully experienced.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,german movies,greek movies,in short,fantasy,arthouse,jim jarmusch,tilda swinton,tom hiddleston,john hurt

In short: Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

I find two types of films the most difficult to write about. The first one are films so mediocre in all aspects they leave me with the feeling they don't exist as anything else than as artefacts created to fill otherwise empty spots in DVD stores or TV schedules; these movies aren't painful to not write about.

The second type, on the other hand, are films like Peter Strickland's utterly brilliant Berberian Sound Studio that leave me a little exhausted by their sheer aesthetic perfection. Here, the only way to write appropriately about a film is to describe every noise on the soundtrack, every edit, every movement on screen in the most meticulous detail possible. Proceeding thusly, one does of course only produce a long, tedious piece that could never even hope to explain or reproduce the aesthetic richness of the experience of actually watching the movie. So that's not a thing to do either.

Therefore, the only out left - apart from ignoring a film much too wonderful to ignore - for me is to pretend being a professional movie critic. That song goes a little something like this:  "Berberian Sound Studio - Brilliant acting, brilliant soundtrack, brilliant sound design, brilliant direction. 10 out of 10! Watch if you have even the slightest bit of love for Italian genre movies of the 70s, hauntology, films that don't slavishly adhere to the most simple narrative structures, intelligent weirdness, critique for genre tendencies that still loves the genre it critiques or just plain great cinema!"

Gosh, I sound just like Entertainment Weekly if they'd let people with actual taste write for them.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,peter strickland,horror,art house,toby jones,fatma mohamed,in short

Three Films Make A Post: DOLL DWARFS versus the CRUSHING GIANT BEASTS!

Amer (2009): Amer is a film I suspect I should admire quite a bit more than I do, seeing as it works as a visual and (in part) thematic homage to the style of Dario Argento in his prime, with a bit of Mario Bava and the giallo at large thrown in. Alas, the film is so heavily metaphorical and so incessantly technically perfect that it becomes tiresome to watch pretty fast.

All its visual beauty and technical accomplishment is put to work to overwhelm the audience with as many symbols for sexual awakening and repression as the directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani could squeeze into ninety minutes of running time, but an unrelenting barrage of pretty symbols is all their film ever is. There's really no good reason for this to be any longer than thirty minutes, which - incidentally - was about the point in the proceedings when my interest turned into impatience, because I had already understood what the film was trying to say and didn't need any further repetitions.

Vampire (1979): Speaking of tiresome, this US TV movie written by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll (both better known for their cop shows, and not showing much of a feel for horror here) does come to mind, too. Half mumbling cop character actors spitting out mock-naturalistic dialogue of the type beloved by professional TV critics and no one else, half a series of melodramatic declamations, the film goes through a lot of the suspected vampire movie motions without ever finding an original or just entertaining angle. I'm also a bit confused by its attempt to cast Richard Lynch of all people as a seductive vampire, but what do I know?

Garo: Kiba The Dark Knight Gaiden (2011): Finishing the trilogy of films I didn't much care for is this spin-off detailing the background of the big bad of the generally excellent tokusatu show Garo. Kiba suffers from the usual problem of gaiden (side-story) films in that it details things that were left vague in the show its spinning off from for a reason and doesn't do anything else of interest.

It's the sort of thing that only exists so that fans of the show can watch it, nod sagely and later start a message board flame war over some of its minor details, but isn't out to provide any actual entertainment, insight or a narrative that's interesting in itself.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: belgian movies,french movies,american movies,japanese movies,american tv,arthouse,horror,tokusatsu,richard lynch,keita amemiya

Sticenik (1973)

A young man (who will later turn out to be) named Michael flees in panic through the countryside, slowly followed by a strange figure wearing a cape. Let's call the latter "The Man" from now on. Ooh, symbolism.

Michael manages to escape to a large building, and right into the arms of a psychiatrist. Looks like the young man has stumbled into a clinic for milder cases of mental illness. The psychiatrist decides to take care of Michael for a time. Though the Man stops his pursuit once his victim has reached the clinic, the psychiatrist still catches a look of the strange pursuer and realizes that something is going on that's not quite right.

Nonetheless, talking with the young man makes it clear to the psychiatrist that his guest is in dire need of more than just physical shelter, and that his clinic is not prepared to help a man like him. But, before the psychiatrist can get Michael someplace else, he will have to win the young man's trust.

Michael's stay isn't quiet, though. There is something about the young man and his fears that disturbs the other patients terribly, as if his nightmares were somehow dripping into theirs, but that's not even the strangest thing about the situation. The Man hasn't give up on his pursuit, it seems, and starts to appear outside the clinic, or even on its roof, willing to use violence against people getting in his way. Later on, the Man accosts the psychiatrist when he is walking down a lonely country road and tries to convince the doctor that he is Michael's guardian, and has every right to get his hands on him, but the obvious strangeness surrounding the Man does seem to make his words rather difficult to believe.

Finally, the psychiatrist makes a decision. It never becomes quite clear if he decides to give Michael to the Man or just to transfer him into a more fitting clinic for his case as he says (who treats supernatural pursuit anyway?). In the end, the nature of the psychiatrist's decision will not be important at all, because Michael makes one all his own.

Yugoslavian (Serbian) director Djordje Kadijevic has quite a few films treating models of the literary fantastic in a very particular way in his filmography. Some of these films, like Sticenik, have fortunately found the interest of fansubbers, who are doing everyone interested in the cinema of the fantastic quite a favour.

Sticenik is based on a short story by Serbian Jewish writer Filip David, and achieves a strange, dream-like, yet precise mood of the inevitable. The film utilizes black and white pictures to reach a point (and a mood) lying somewhere between the type of Gothic achievable on a TV budget in Yugoslavia in 1973 and the clear symbolism of the more daring part of Eastern European arthouse cinema.

I find the work of directors like Kadijevic, whose ideas of what fantasy cinema is for and how it is to be made are very different from those of Western (and inevitably more commercial) directors, as fascinating as it is difficult to write about. Sure, I could give you an interpretative rundown, giving my opinion on what the Man symbolizes and what the rocking chair in the garden is a metaphor for, but this approach to writing about film (or any art at all) isn't for me, because it sells the actual experience of watching a movie short and turns movies into crossword puzzles with one clear solution that I'll tell you about to demonstrate my intelligence, leaving you with little reason to actually watch the damn things on your own other than to disagree with me or praise my awesomeness.

Some things are better experienced than explained, so I'll just leave you with my recommendation for Sticenik as a film that perfectly makes everything that is good and interesting about Eastern European fantastic literature as I know it come alive, and that's well worth seeking out.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: yugoslavian movies,reviews,djordje kadijevic,arthouse,horror

Three Films Make A Post: Some Things Shouldn't Be Disturbed…

No Such Thing (2001): Hal Hartley's movies are always problematic. On one hand, the man has a fantastic, personal sense of visual poetry and the ability to let actors shine doing non-naturalistic, yet deeply human feeling acting (just look at how fantastic, glowing Sarah Polley is here and compare with her performance in Splice!). On the other hand, he is a purveyor of the sort of clichéd and hackneyed culture (and worse media) critique certain art house directors (see also the insufferable Wim Wenders) confuse with depth. In No Such Things both sides of Hartley collide with a vengeance, but the director's better nature wins out for long enough stretches that I don't regret having watched the film. Still, thinking about what Hartley could accomplish if he'd apply his talents to the exploration of more interesting ideas than he usually does makes me a little bit sad.

 

Salt (2010): This is an ultra slick, competent and theoretically extremely entertaining big costly Hollywood spy action movie that has a plot as ridiculously unbelievable as any Bond movie with Roger Moore (just more complicated), although it's trying its hardest to pretend it's as clever and down to earth as a Bourne movie (and what does it say about Hollywood spy movies that the Bourne movies are as down to earth as they come?).

So far, so fun. Unfortunately, Salt is also a morally bankrupt hymn to the idea that the end justifies the means (quite unlike the Bourne movies who have a moral backbone) as probably befits a film coming from a country with government sanctioned torture. Which sort of ruins the fun. Completely.

 

Shutter Island (2010): Following the line of mediocre films Martin Scorsese had churned out this century, I had mostly given up on the director. Turns out that I was like one of those guys hating on Bob Dylan during the 80s - not wrong, but way too pessimistic.

Shutter Island is quite brilliant - a film that takes a preposterous plot (especially once the final reveal comes around) and makes it work through a peculiar combination of a sense of history (public and personal) and Scorsese's own private brand of operatic artificiality. It should be ridiculous, and yet it's pretty damn great.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,hal hartley,phillip noyce,martin scorsese,spies,arthouse,thriller,sarah polley,angelina jolie,leonardo dicaprio,in short

In short: Valhalla Rising (2009)

It's the early Middle Ages, in Scotland. A mute, one-eyed man - called, if called at all "One Eye" - (Mads Mikkelsen) has been the captive of a small clan of people prone to sitting around staring into the emptiness of the Highlands for years. They use his disturbing prowess at fighting in ritual fights against other clans, but treat the man at best as a very dangerous animal. A boy (Maarten Stevenson) of the clan helps One Eye escape his chains, giving him the opportunity to slaughter his captors quite effectively.

Afterwards, One Eye and the boy wander through the hills until they meet a small group of violently minded Christians who are, as they say, on their way to the Holy Land. The man and the boy join the group, and soon find themselves on a ship bound wherever their hosts think that Holy Land might be. One Eye is given to visions with an undertone of doom, so he doesn't seem at all surprised when their ship gets stuck in an unnatural fog bank that envelopes the vessel for days on end. Some of his companions soon think that One Eye is cursed and leading them all into hell, but the man is not the sort of person one wins a violent encounter with.

After a long time, the fog lifts, and the group finds itself in a place that might be America, or hell. Obviously, danger awaits, most of it of a more spiritual nature, but there are also arrows.

An audience expecting Nicolas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising to be the movie equivalent to Viking Metal (not that there's anything wrong with that for me, mind you) will probably be disappointed by the film, as will friends of films with obvious and "realistic" (whatever that means) plotting that make themselves so clear their contents might as well be just read about instead of experienced.

Refn's film is quite unlike that sort of movie. It's more of a very violent art house film that shows enticing possibilities for more than one interpretation of its meaning, but isn't willing to play the meaning-reducing game of allegory. Which doesn't mean that there aren't elements of allegory to be found here - it would need a certain type of IMDB reviewer to miss the religious connotations - but that only seeing the allegorical possibilities would close one's view on other aspects of the film, and very possibly the part of the movie going experience that is about seeing and feeling. Large parts of the movie add up to more than mere allegory and make use of the fact that everything we see on screen can be a metaphor and something concrete in the reality of the film at once, leaving the viewer to decide on the film's meaning instead of shoving it in her face.

Much of the Valhalla Rising plays in the spaces between what's real and what's metaphorical, and I think it will work best for an audience going into it with a very open mind, willing to confront the tension between the film's gritty violence, the awe-inspiring bleakness of its locations and its indifference towards the expectation of how narrative or acting are supposed to be done on screen.

I for my part found Valhalla utterly fascinating, and Refn's insistence on making a movie that's not too readily accessible without being hermetic admirable.

 

Technorati-Tags: danish movies,british movies,in short,nicolas winding refn,drama,arthouse

Dead Girl Walking (2004)

Japanese schoolgirl Yuri (Ayaka Maeda) one day finds her heart stopping and the world around her turning from colour to black and white. The doctor her family calls pronounces her dead, yet she's still thinking, talking and walking around like everybody else.

At first, her family just finds her state rather inconvenient, but as soon as Yuri starts to rot and stink (as dead people do), they decide to stop the nuisance by burning her. That's what you do with dead people after all. The scene turns accidentally bloody.

Yuri flees from home to walk around forlornly, from time to time shedding body parts and thinking if formaldehyde wouldn't be of use in her state.

While she wanders around, she meets and is rejected by her former classmates, has to flee a rude gardener and is shortly displayed in a surreal circus.

Dead Girl Walking is a short film based on a manga by the obsessive horror mangaka and director Hideshi Hino, who also delivers a very hokey introduction. It's part of a series of such films, all of them shot on digital video for very little money. As always, I'm not entirely sure if these films were done for the video market or TV; it doesn't matter much anyway.

This episode was directed by my secret Japanese horror director crush Koji Shiraishi (who directed the good Ju-Rei, the excellent Noroi & A Slit-Mouthed Woman aka Carved, the less excellent Grotesque and a bunch of other films I really want to see on subtitled DVDs right now) and is as good as this crushee had hoped for.

It might feel more like a metaphorical little art film using horror tropes than a pure horror film, but since its basic metaphor describes the horrors of growing up, it still ends up being quite horrifying if one is responsive to these special horrors.

The film is all about the fear of rejection (by family, friends, random strangers), the feeling of being a freak and the loss of the will to live that made being a teenager so much fun for many of us. Shiraishi is using the living dead angle to show the terror of the situation more clearly. Interestingly, he also chose to break the nightmarishness of his material up through the use of black humor (mostly based on the loss of body parts), showing acceptance of the silliness that lies buried under his film's view of teenage life and the general drama of its premise.

This laughter is not necessarily a liberating one - it is much too knowing for that. Still, it is laughter, and without it the film's final, weird moment of hope would just seem campy. With the laughter in mind, I'm just about willing to accept it.

Stylistically, the film mixes obvious influences of early David Lynch (the terrifying, nightmarish black and white absurdity of Eraserhead), Carnival of Souls and expressionist silent movies, just with even less money to spend. The silent movie influence is especially strong thanks to the soundtrack's synthesizer version of "typical" silent movie music (I'll spare you a digression on why "typical" silent movie music isn't in fact typical for silent movies but for modern interpretation of them) and the title cards that show us Yuri's thoughts, not to speak of some very fine uses of shadow and weirdly angled sets.

Some viewers may find the bluntness of Shiraishi's use of all these elements and the obviousness of his symbols somewhat off-putting, but I don't have this kind of qualms. A symbol that is so cryptic that nobody not reading the artist's mind can understand it does of course have its own charms and uses; Shiraishi seems more interested in communicating what he means than in making communication impossible (very un-Lynch of him, I know), or in making the difficulty of communication the theme of his film.

My tastes run - as they so often do - in both directions at once, so I'm satisfied, as long as a film does what it is trying to do well. Dead Girl Walking does do it well.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,horror,koji shiraishi,reviews,art house

Habit (1997)

Sam (Larry Fessenden) is going through a hard time: His father first disappeared, then died, he is a borderline alcoholic and his girlfriend Liza (Heather Woodbury) has left him for a kind of trial separation.

When he meets Anna (Meredith Snaider) at a Halloween party it is lust on first sight. Anna likes to be mysterious. She does not talk much about her past nor her present. Actually, there is not much she and Sam do talk about. Instead they have sex.

Which would certainly a nice thing for Sam, if not for Anna's special kink: she bites Sam and sucks his blood. At first this just feeds Sam's obsession with Anna even more, but when his health and his grip on reality slowly deteriorate and his friends start to look at him funny, he gets strange ideas about this lover who hates garlic, does not eat and is never around during daylight.

The problem with obsessions is that it is hard to get rid of them.

 

Larry Fessenden is an interesting case. A true independent filmmaker with a very personal style and very individual themes, he has made his home inside the horror genre while using the aesthetics of independent filmmaking that have come down from John Cassavates. As it goes with artists who trade in bastardized forms, Fessenden tends to sit between the chairs. He's too much of a horror filmer for parts of the art house crowd and too much of an art house director for some horror fans. He does not seem to care much, though.

Habit is a kind of remake of a film he made fifteen years earlier, made basically with the same core cast. I'd like to compare the two films, but I haven't seen the earlier version, so I'll just go with the theory that Fessenden must have had a reason to film it again.

Fessenden's decision to play the lead role himself suggests an auto-biographic reading of the film's story about addiction, obsession and self-destruction (and it seemed quite obvious to me that Anna is exactly what Sam is looking for - his own special way of an easy way out).

I wouldn't be impressed if the vampirism in the film only worked as a metaphor - a trap art house directors using non-realist elements step into all too often - but the supernatural here is metaphor and fictional reality at once, making for a fascinating and balanced way to look at a very imbalanced life.

Visually, Habit is a beautiful example of the classic hand-camera and guerilla location shooting style, which is a very effective way to give everything a semblance of reality.

Hyper-realism is a style the acting goes for too. This and the 1982 version are the only movie acting credits for most of the actors (with Fessenden himself as a big exception), yet a certain amateurishness in the performances just helps to keep up the film's mood. Well, if you ignore Aaron Beall whose reading of Sam's best friend Nick is false all the way through.

What is most fascinating about the film for me is something completely different though. It is Fessenden's eye for the little gestures of his characters that makes the film more than a nice little distraction, as well as the story he does not tell, yet that is barely visible in the cracks and crevices of what we are shown.

 

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