The Instant Watch Film Society V: The Final Frontier

Thomamelas

This is the fifth incarnation of this thread, and I'm pretty damn proud of the last four. I started out doing this as a place for people to have a soap box to stand out to bring attention films that don't get the love that people think they should. A place where people can take the films they feel passionate about and talk about them. There are more films produced then any human being can see. And lots of them aren't worth seeing. But sometimes there are gems that were well received when they came out and got passed by as film history moved on. Or there are films that just didn't get the right buzz for a wide viewing. Or they came out in a period where seeing them is hard. And on the other hand, we live in an era where our access to media is broad enough to create choice paralysis. We have so many options for viewing films and so many films we can see that can be a problem.

So this thread exists to help people proselytize for the films they love and provide a kind of curated list of films for people to view. A way to deal with the choice paralysis and get exposure to the kind of films one may love but never see. On a personal note this thread has brought me movies I would have never imagined seeing that became films I loved. Like Fresh, Play Time, Upstream Color, Dear Zachery, Young Adult and Spartan among others. To me that's a great thing. When you can take something you love and give that love to others, it's one of the great joys in life.

The rules for the thread:

1. Have your post ready to go by the Tuesday of your week. I have no special reason to pick Tuesday, it just seems like a good day. But seriously if you don't present your film, I will hunt you down. And I will be super annoying. If you can't do it, let me know in advance and I will figure something out.
2. No fucking terrible films. I don't mean films that are so bad they are good. Or bad films that perhaps have cinematic importance. I mean no fucking repeats of The Love Guru, a film with no good qualities at all. I reserve the right to shoot down films. I watch every film posted in the thread. Each and every film. Which means I watched The Love Guru. I'm not repeating that experience.
3. If you want to get in line to present a film, send me a PM with the film.

I've had people express the idea that they are concerned that their film might not but up to standards. Don't worry about. Just express to us why you love the film. None of the films I mentioned above are perfect. Very few movies are.

Current Schedule:

Week 1: Bogart, Witness
Week 2: Thomamelas, Once Upon A Time In The West
Week 3: Atomika, Nightcrawler
Week 4: Gim, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
Week 5: Wash, The Dirties
Week 6: Thomamelas Glengarry, Glen Ross
Week 7: Jacobkosh Tinker Tailor Solider Spy
Week 8: Astaereth eXistenZ
Week 9: Wandering Night Of The Living Dead
Week 10: Elldren, The Naked Gun
Week 11: Shryke Chronicle


Previous Entries:

First Thread:

Week 1: Bogart, Midnight Run
Week 2: Preacher, Spartan
Week 3: Jacobkosh, Blue Velvet
Week 4: Thomamelas, The Searchers
Week 5: Gim, Play Time
Week 6: Ryadic, Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
Week 7: Xenogears of Bore, The Love Guru
Week 8: Elki, Sans Soleil
Week 9: JamesKeenan, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
Week 10: Drez, Show Me Love
Week 11: Fluffy, Our Beloved Flopsy Bunny Friend, Brick
Week 12: Quid, Red Cliff
Week 13: Thanatos, Falling Down

Second Thread:

Week 1: Jacobkosh, Chinatown
Week 2: Thomamelas, Shane
Week 3: Bogart, Sonatine
Week 4: Atomika, The Big Lebowski
Week 5: Amateurhour, Ghostbusters
Week 8: TychoCelchuuu One, Two, Three
Week 9: JoeDizzy Way of the Gun
Week 11: Gim The Red And The White

Third Thread:

Week 1: Jacobkosh Fresh
Week 2: B:L Four Lions
Week 3: Thomamelas Exiled
Week 4: Atomika Young Adult
Week 5: Deaderinred Following
Week 6: Farangu 13 Assassins
Week 7: Bogart Miller's Crossing
Week 8: Robos A Go Go Upstream Colour
Week 9: Wandering Billy Elliot
Week 10: Astaereth The Conversation
Week 11: LoveIsUnity Lost in Translation
Week 12: ihaveachair Time Bandits
Week 13: TehSpectre Miami Connection

Fourth Thread:


Week 1: Bogart Grosse Pointe Blank
Week 2: Wash Double Indemnity
Week 3: Gim The Trial
Week 4: Astaereth Let the Right One In
Week 5: Jacobkosh The Untouchables
Week 6: Thomamelas Who Framed Rodger Rabbit?
Week 7: Atomika Don Jon
Week 8: Thomamelas High Noon
Week 9: Simonwolf Rabbit Proof Fence
Week 10: Stevemarks44 Zodiac
Week 11: Bogart Labyrinth

Some Sample Write Ups:

Fresh By Jacobkosh

Jacobkosh wrote: »

FRESH
1994, directed by Boaz Yakin
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Fresh/524745?trkid=8133737

The early 90s saw the ascent of two parallel and interdependent movements in American film. Independent movies, which had been an occasional flickering flame on the edges of the American film landscape, were becoming “indies” - a fully-viable alternate model of moviemaking, spearheaded by a few visionary producers and distributors taking advantage of new avenues to produce, market and distribute film. And some of the earliest beneficiaries of that were black filmmakers, who found new opportunities to get their voices heard in the fall of American inner cities and the rise of hip-hop as a cultural force.

Boyz in the Hood, Menace II Society, New Jack City, Juice - by 1994 the field of gritty inner-city crime dramas was becoming downright crowded. So it’s not entirely a surprise that Fresh, the debut film by a white Israeli action-movie screenwriter named Boaz Yakin, was lost in the shuffle. There were no cameo appearances by famous rappers and no tie-in songs by Snoop Dogg or Public Enemy; the soundtrack, by Police drummer Stewart Copeland, featured no hip-hop, no lyrics, and was as aggressively minimalist as Philip Glass.

Audiences ignored Fresh, but critics noticed it. That’s how I heard about it - effusive praise from Kansas City Star critic Robert Butler, and Roger Ebert on Siskel & Ebert - but I wouldn't get to see the film until years later on VHS.

It was worth the wait.



Michael (Sean Nelson) is a 12-year-old boy in the ghettos of Brooklyn. He comes from a broken home, but he's a smart kid, a, quiet, hardworking student. Everyone tells him he has a bright future. He saves his money and he takes care of his family. But Michael is also a drug runner, moving huge amounts of crack cocaine and heroin across the city, and in this world, he goes by "Fresh."

Everything that happens in Fresh depends on you, the viewer, understanding Michael and the world he moves through, so the first forty minutes very carefully and patiently show you everything you need to know. Fresh lives and bunks with 11 other children in a shelter run by his aunt. His older sister is beautiful and he loves her, but she is a heroin addict, living with whatever dealer can keep her supplied. His father (Samuel L. Jackson) is an alcoholic living in a tiny camper, but at one point was a national chess contender, and now makes his booze money hustling games in the park. Fresh isn't supposed to see his father, but he visits him anyway, once a week, and learns to play. Fresh goes to school, and his friends there talk about comic books and making money, about breeding fight dogs, about imaginary millionaire relatives - but Fresh doesn't join in very much. He keeps his own counsel, speaking only when he has to, and Nelson's quiet, impassive face invites us to try and get inside his head.



There are two drugs in the ghetto, heroin and crack cocaine, or "base," and two kingpins responsible for them. Corky, the crack dealer, isn't a world away from Avon Barksdale in The Wire; he's a hot-tempered street fighter, and runs a shabby-looking organization from the corners. Esteban, the heroin dealer, runs a largely Hispanic organization; many of his employees are members of his extended family. As played with an unwholesome sort of class by Giancarlo Esposito, Esteban prides himself on the smooth efficiency of his work:

“Smack is the way to go. This is a gentleman’s operation. The clientele is stable and peace-loving, the competition is unconfrontational, and the heat mostly let it slide.”



Both men employ Fresh as a courier, paying him to move weight across the city - as a young boy, he's almost invisible. Both men respect his scrupulous honesty and his discretion, and both promise that he will be an important wheel in their organizations when he's older, while warning him against the promises of the other.



For his part, Fresh is interested in saving his money, getting to school on time, and finding excuses to talk to a pretty girl in his class. But when a schoolyard pickup game escalates into a shooting, and his crush is caught in the crossfire, Fresh finds a new purpose - escape. Seeing how he goes about this supplies the tension of the second half of the movie, as the gears of the plot begin to turn and we realize that these characters are pieces and this world is a chessboard.



If you've seen The Wire, or Boyz in the Hood, or (particularly) Spike Lee's Clockers, the world Fresh lives and moves in will be familiar to you. What sets it apart is its twisty plot and the style with which it is told. Yakin's direction isn't flashy, it doesn't call attention to itself, but he unerringly finds telling details that help us understand a character in a single visual snap, and creates a world that feels one hundred percent tangible. The drone-y, almost avant-garde soundtrack is odd and a bit distancing at first, but after 20 years it's helped to make the movie feel timeless; a few hightop fades and giant cell phones aside, this could be one of a thousand ghettoes somewhere in 2013.

And then there's the acting. Sean Nelson has an incredibly difficult challenge as a child actor and pulls it off wonderfully, creating a character we both sympathize with but also don't fully understand until the very last shot of the movie, and he is supported in this by Samuel L. Jackson - memorable despite being in only a handful of scenes, and without relying on the habits developed over the last 15 years of B-movies - and Giancarlo Esposito's snakey charm.

Take your seat. Set up your pieces. It's time to play Fresh's game - and you'll be glad you did.

Thomamelas

Young Adult by Atomika

Young Adult

Let me first preface this article with the caveats exposing my indifference toward both director Jason Reitman and his frequent collaborator, screenwriter/Williamsburg-Patient-Zero Diablo Cody. They have both developed a polarizing presence in film criticism circles in their relatively short time in the spotlight, and while I can't argue that those grievances are wholly unfounded, it's also true that Reitman and Cody both have a specific and unique voice to offer the cinematic community. Reitman, particularly, I've had various problems with in his three films prior to Young Adult, and the most consistent complaint I've made against him is his proclivity to dress up hoary rehashes with great acting from famous faces paired with a more nuanced aesthetic to disguise what is clearly middlebrow as the thoughtfully highbrow. Now, to put a positive spin on this phenomenon, you could say that he knows how to elevate the thin and trite above its origins (and you'd be right), but I actually think Reitman's real talent is telling stories within the performances of his actors. No matter what you might think of the gravity of his milieu or its detachment from realism, it's clear that Reitman firmly believes that the internal lives of people are the most important thing in a story, and that's something that I could only hope that more directors (I'm looking at you, Zach Snyder and Chris Nolan) would take to heart.

Jason Reitman builds characters. He crafts them. And he lets their actors inhabit them and become them. Then he tells a story about their lives. And what could be better than that?

The Woman-Child in full regalia

This is Mavis Gary. She's a thirty-something single woman living in the city and working as writer of young adult fiction, which is her "dream job," as she's constantly reminded by other people in the film (though we never hear her speak of it so fondly). We open on her being completely miserable and alone in her apartment, where she finds out through the internet that her old high school boyfriend and his wife are holding a party for their new baby. With little forethought and great impulse, she hatches a plan: travel back to her old hometown, seduce her ex, and make a new life with him. This may sound poorly thought-out to begin with, but don't worry . . . . it gets much worse.

The schlub of her dreams

Mavis isn't subtle in her efforts, basically throwing her herself at her ex when she first sees him, and his initial rebuff only strengthens her resolve. However, her pettiness and destructive course is pointed out by an old friend from school, Matt, who pointedly informs Mavis about how shitty she's being for her own personal ends. Matt is a lonely geek who is still crippled after a particularly nasty bit of hazing while still a high school student, so not only does he have to contend with his statural and social challenge (because, well, Patton Oswalt), he's also now physically impaired and almost incapable of having sex. Mavis and Matt form an interesting couple, and in a more traditional dynamic Matt and his weary cut-through-the-bullshit attitude would be the obvious foil for Mavis' oblivious recklessness (and in many ways he is), and their meeting at loggerheads would be the engine that drives the eventual and inevitable epiphany that they are perfect for each other. But this film largely eschews that bit of meet-cute tradition and plays the relationship with much more melancholy and realistic dourness than it might under a different writer and director.

"I'm not joking. My penis has a right angle. Stop laughing."

The traditional narrative arc for these kinds of films almost always end with the girl realizing that the hunk is a pig and the geeky nerd is the real prize, but Young Adult turns those tropes on their heads.

The "Nerd Proves Self to Hot Girl to Win Her Away From Psycho Jock Boyfriend" plot is almost always a fantasy from the POV of the nerd. The theorizing on that says that this exists because most writers are nerds and most nerds did not have hot girlfriends in high school (or any girlfriends, regularly), and while a bit pat in its application, the math on this assertion proves itself for the most part; look at almost any example of this trope and you'll find a poorly-developed female lead that is barely a human being at all, and certainly one devoid of any agency on her own part. She needs the help of the sensitive D&D player to forcefully demonstrate that her dumb, violent, abusive, lecherous boyfriend is bad for her, and when this successfully happens, the nerd will be rewarded with sex from the hot girl. The girl in this scenario is never more than placeholder for motivation and reward for the main character, the heroic nerd, and her will and desires are never considered because A) as a desirable female she obviously will have to have a man, and men will win her sexual affection through alpha-tastic feats of skill. Spelled out like this, it's hopefully easy to see why this trope is negative and harmful and hopefully dying out with the rest of the rape culture; even when it's done well (like, say, The Revenge of the Nerds), it's pretty ick when broken into its elements.

Young Adult subverts this common narrative first and foremost by regendering the scenario, and then making all the stereotypically unlikable players into nice people while making the protagonist a petulant weirdo who (still cleaving to the mores of the tradition) treats people like prizes to be won or discarded. Mavis Gary is petty and mean and empty, but she's also complex and uniquely motivated. And the guy she's trying to win over? He's pretty happy, and is in a healthy and fulfilling relationship with his wife. There's no one to "rescue" here, and everyone acts with their own agency. The people here are real people, not rewards or achievements for objectifying someone. But that's the interesting part about Mavis -- she objectifies everyone. Everyone is a means to some selfish end for her, and she barrels through this narrative arc not too unlike the charismatic nebbish (played by Ben Stiller or Matthew Broderick or Jesse Eisenberg or whothefuckever) would in a middling rom-com. She treats her ex, Buddy, like he's the missing piece that will not just complete her life, but will rebuild it and make it whole and fulfilling, never pausing to ask herself if that's something he even remotely wants (spoiler: it's not, at all). In that way, Young Adult is a mature and more realistic version of a John Hughes movie, with all the horrible outcomes that would surely produce.

from Abercrombie's "Resentful Stepmom" collection

So what's it all about?


Mavis is an unlikable character, and intentionally so, and so her story isn't about rooting for an unlikable person to succeed, but rather rooting for an unlikable person to gain some perspective. In better words, to grow up.

I've never liked that phrase, really. I've always found it condescending to imply that age imparted some kind of innate sense of wisdom once you allowed it to wash over you, accepting the loss of your youth and (largely implied) your energy and optimism and belief that you still control your outcomes. However, there are admittedly aspects of youth that do not survive the transition into adulthood without hamstringing a person in ways that impair their functioning as a self-directed independent human. Everyone knows (or often, unfortunately, IS) someone who is still controlled by holds put on them as a child, either through parental approval or bonds made in grade school or accolades heaped upon early achievement. I personally have a friend who came from a broken and impoverished home and made himself the vice president of a major national corporation by his 30th birthday; he frequently spends his weekends gladhanding in stadium suites with the likes of Drew Brees and Jay-Z, but almost every time I see him he can't help but bring up how cheated he felt by our football coach in high school when he was made second-string linebacker (the guy that was first-string, btw, is entering his eighth year in the NFL this season). So there's my friend; great job, lots of money, great marriage with a kid on the way, hangs out with celebrities, . . . . and yet he can't let the past go, even when it's petty and he's probably in the wrong.

Late in the film, we learn about a big event involving her ex, Buddy, that explains why Mavis can't let the past go, and I've always been torn about that late-coming revelation. I don't like when films withhold information from the audience to build false drama or mystery; it's usually just shitty writing, and quite often I feel like the director has falsely manipulated the audience or wasted their time. However, I also believe that a clever director can make that false manipulation work in favor of the film, forcing the audience to rethink their attitudes toward characters and scenarios once framed in a different context. Does that happen here? I'm not totally sold on it one way or another, to be truthful. In this case, however, a big question is, "Does reframing the context make Mavis a better person?" Honestly, I'm not sure, but what I can attest to is that it makes her a more relatable and understandable person. It provides the audience with empathy, and it colors sadness to everything that came before it. Mavis ceases being an unstoppable rampage of wanton greed and petty destruction and instead becomes a sad and bitter woman facing middle-age alone because she feels that a better life was stolen from her. And maybe she's right.

It's her insistence upon magical thinking, the kind of which romantic comedies and children's stories depend on to make their worlds work, that defines Mavis as an overgrown child and distinguishes her from everyone she knows. In the end, I wouldn't argue that we're supposed to be rooting for her, and I wouldn't even suggest that she's a better person. The journey here isn't an arc of self-discovery, or an arc of overcoming adversity, or an arc of defeating opposition. Mavis' journey is crossing the last bridge to her past simply because it's the only familiar thing she has left. She sticks one hand out, grasping and beckoning for it to take her back, or for it to go forward with her; failing that, her other hand holds a blazing torch, ready to burn the bridge down.

Upstream Color by Robos A Go Go

Just as a disclaimer, I think you should watch the film without reading anything about it first. If you go in ignorant, then you're in a much better position to just let it wash over you and have your own unique emotional experience. Plus, it's only 96 minutes long, so if you don't enjoy it you aren't going to regret the wasted time so much.

It's also a movie I'd recommend to couples, though there are two scenes that might make you uncomfortable without being nightmarish.

Nonetheless, I wouldn't steer anyone away from this movie unless you're the sort of person who always needs to know what's going on in a film. Even then, you could read my post, gain a rough understanding of things, and then give the film a try anyway.

Anyway, hope you dudes like it.

Upstream Color

Two thirds of the way into Upstream Color, there is a scene where the main characters Kris and Jeff snap at each other over whether a childhood memory belongs to her past or his. There’s a strange, threatening undercurrent to the exchange, one that evokes the film’s themes of psychic transference and the loss of self, but it also comes across as realistically petty and mundane. Even outside of science fiction, couples develop running arguments over conflicting memories, and being in a romantic relationship long enough tends to create bonds so intimate that you cannot see where one person’s life ends and the other’s begins. Upstream Color therefore exists on two wavelengths, as a high-concept narrative about psychic phenomena and as an intimate drama about a couple navigating the emotional challenges of their fledgling relationship. Rather than operating at cross-purposes, these two threads coalesce wonderfully as the intrigue of science fiction bleeds into the romance between Kris and Jeff, forcing them and the viewer to examine how unseen forces, both internal and external, have brought them together. In doing so, the film’s science fiction conceits become a lens for exploring the universal questions of human nature and love, topics no less mysterious, terrifying, and awing than any sci-fi conceit.

By design, Upstream Color is a challenge to summarize. Perhaps in response to the close scrutiny given to the plot of director, writer, and actor Shane Carruth’s previous effort, Primer, Upstream Color foregoes exposition entirely and instead loosely links events through dreamy, emotional montages that force the viewer to fill in the blanks. As the audience witnesses the opening scenes of Kris being forced to liquidate her life by an unnamed Thief and his mind-controlling worm, we know nearly as little as she does about the reasons and means of her victimization. However, the story is much more concerned with the aftermath of this event, a trauma that severs Kris from her old life but also strangely connects her to Jeff, whose eager pursuit of her conceals a tortured past of his own. While the two break down their emotional barriers to come together, awkwardly flirting but still hiding the most sensitive parts of themselves, the mind control conceit nearly recedes enough to let them both pick up the pieces of their ruined lives and start anew. That new start is soon threatened, though, when higher powers intrude upon their lives once again to threaten not just their happiness but also their grasp of themselves. It is that this point, when the love story dovetails back into the realm of science fiction, that Upstream Colors’ ability to perplex and fascinate the viewer reaches it apex.

Since Upstream Color centers upon Kris’s relationship with Jeff and sets no higher stakes than their happiness, Amy Seimetz’s and Carruth’s affecting portrayals of their characters are essential to our investment in their story. Seimetz is equal to the task throughout her opening scenes, where she projects starvation and fatigue along with a childlike innocence as she bends to her captor. After he leaves, she sways and writhes in her sleep with the languid flexibility of the worm inside her, then awakens to shock and fear when she discovers the creature growing beneath her skin and struggles to tear it out. She convincingly bears the wounds of that ordeal within her voice and her body throughout the rest of the story, guarding herself against others and her own desires out of fear that the psychotic episode she remembers experiencing will repeat itself.

Carruth’s Jeff therefore faces no small challenge in his courtship of Kris, whose instant attraction to her suitor just makes her less willing to engage him. Jeff’s persistence verges on the aggressive, but Carruth’s portrayal of the character demonstrates a light charm and frank demeanor that make him seem trustworthy rather than threatening. When Kris finally gives into her feelings for him, Jeff’s resilience and reliability furthermore allow him to chip away at her reserves and return her to life, nurturing playfulness in Seimetz’s character that seems new yet natural for her. Revelations about Jeff’s embezzling past, a phantom pregnancy, and the larger forces at work in their lives soon disrupt Kris and Jeff’s happiness, but their bond becomes stronger and more intimate in response. The characters’ agonies are experienced two-fold, with the pain of one being felt equally by the other, and so each trial reinforces the relationship between them. Theirs is a bond so fundamental that separation has become as unthinkable as amputation, and the actors inhabit it so well that we want their love to survive as surely as we want them to survive.

Contrasting the warmth and tenderness of the film’s two leads, Upstream Color’s two remaining main characters display a sinister detachment that distinguish them as the villains of the piece. The Thief, played by Thiago Martins, is shown ineffectually urging a woman to ingest a worm disguised as a party drug, only to then lose patience and force it down Kris’s throat after assaulting her with a stun gun. Martins’ character abuses his power over her without shifting out of his matter-of-fact monotone, betraying the routineness of his crimes and his lack of empathy for his victim. The hold that the Thief has over Kris is wondrous, much like the bond between Kris and Jeff, but its application is so one-sided, crude, and violent that it becomes a violation of the highest order. If Kris and Jeff’s supernatural connection embodies love, then the Thief’s warped, self-serving form of that connection is rape.

Meanwhile, the character of the Sampler, portrayed by Andrew Sensenig, has a similarly alienating presence as he exploits the victims of the Thief for his own curious pleasure as a voyeur and artist. When the Sampler’s speakers begin playing sounds designed to draw worms out of the ground, Kris finds herself drawn to him at the behest of the worm within her, then helplessly watches as the Sampler surgically transplants the worm into a pig. Though Kris is soon released, the Sampler is able to connect with her at his leisure through the pig, which remains psychically connected to Kris through the worm inside of it. The Sampler maintains an entire farm of pigs that possess such connections to other victims of the Thief, and by secretly connecting to each of them he becomes an omnipresent and omniscient figure in the story, aware of everything though unwilling to act upon that knowledge. He’s a God estranged from the human condition, an all-knowing being who experiences the suffering of others but lacks the empathy needed to feel anything himself.

Instead the Sampler uses those experiences as the basis for musical compositions, which replicate and blend sounds like the whirr of copiers and shuffling of envelopes that define a person’s life. The Sampler finds proxies for those sounds in the area around his farm, and Sensenig’s older, intelligent appearance gives scenes of the Sampler gathering and editing recordings a clinical, professional aura. The songs that emerge from such sessions mimic the connections established between the pigs and people like Kris, with each resulting track serving as a gateway into a person’s life. Like the Thief’s connection to his victims, the Sampler’s compositions are transcendent, but that wondrous connection is also perverted by its one-sided nature. Whereas Kris and Jeff share themselves with each other, the Sampler intrudes upon private moments and then regurgitates them as albums that expose his subjects yet reveal nothing of him. The Sampler is not a friend or a lover, but rather a hack plagiarizing the lives of others while contributing nothing himself.

Yet while the Sampler’s connection to Kris and Jeff through the pigs is one-way, the connection between the leads and the pigs themselves is not. While the two lay in bed together half-asleep, their bodies are briefly shown in the Sampler’s farm where the pig from Kris’s operation is known to reside. That connection between her and that pig is elaborated upon during her phantom pregnancy, which mirrors the actual impregnation of the pig by a male pig. As The Sampler drags away the male to steal and kill the mother’s piglets, both Kris and Jeff feel the anguish of the animals as if it was their own, with Kris searching for children she cannot find and Jeff lashing out at his coworkers like a threatened, territorial beast. Those emotions are dictated by events and connections that they cannot fully perceive, much less begin to understand, and yet they are as real to Kris and Jeff as anything occurring in their lives.

It’s even possible that Kris and Jeff’s love for each other, the focal point of the film, emanates from the unseen lives of those two pigs, which are shown meeting and pressing their snouts together long before Kris crosses paths with Jeff. It may seem like a glib explanation for their mysterious attraction, but it feels appropriate for something as fundamental as attraction to be located inside the simple, primal frame of an animal. For their part, Kris and Jeff reconcile with their animal selves rather than rejecting them, and when the pigs have piglets Kris holds one as though it was her own. The source and nature of her maternal feelings, whether internal or external, aren’t important. All that matters is that she’s a mother.

Likewise, the question of why Kris and Jeff love each other is perhaps resolved not with an explanation but with the realization that, if they truly love each other, that is satisfying enough. Regardless of why they feel the way they do, their connection shines compared to the emotional distance of other couples. Furthermore, despite the uncomfortable intimacy of their relationship, it’s that closeness that allows them to experience the empathy for each other that's absent within the exploitive, one-sided connections formed by the Thief and the Sampler. Two thirds of the way into the movie, they bristle over their closeness by arguing about whether a childhood memory belongs to her past or his, but then a whistle is heard and the argument stops. Kris smiles at Jeff, and it’s as though they remember they’re in love again, and as long as that’s true nothing else matters.

Thomamelas

The Searchers by Thomamelas

The Searchers.

There are times in film when an actor transcends mere typecasting to the point where their roles are iconic. Where merely saying their name conjures very specific images, roles, codes and words. John Wayne did this and became the most iconic cowboy of all time. When he was paired with John Ford, viewers knew what kind of film they were in for. Good and Evil will be well defined. The landscape will be beautiful and empty. Civilization will triumph over lawlessness. The two men created a shared mythology that has never been equaled by any other combination. Some have come close. Scorsese and Bobby D would come so very close with crime films. But no one every quite had the magic of the Two Johns. It is with this in mind that audiences went to the movies and saw The Searchers.



It was not the film they were expecting. Ethan isn't a good man. He's not a decent man. John Wayne took all that had he put into the myth of a cowboy and turned it just a little so the light fell differently. The stoicism of the cowboy became nothing more then a lack of humanity. The use of weapons to tame a wild land became nothing more then a nightmare of violence. The creation of civilization was nothing more then wanton destruction. The belief in the superiority of the White Man's culture was little more then racism. All that the two men had held up as good was turned so it's flaws could exposed as evil. Ethan is a little racist at first, not really an issue for the audience at the time. Then he gets a little more racist. And then he achieves a level of racism that even the audiences of the 50's found excessive. But the characters the audience sympathizes with, the ones that play our role as observer aren't much better.

I know that John Wayne isn't an actor that one thinks of when you think great dramatic roles. A number of his films didn't ask a heck of a lot of him. But again, this film isn't those films. Much of the movie revolves around the subtext of Ethan's love for Martha. Something that only shows up in early scenes in the form of touches that linger too long, or looks shared that are too tender to give to a sister in law. Of his anger and rage at her rape mixed in with the hatred and racism already in his heart. Ethan isn't a card board cut out of a character. He's evil and vile but not without his charm. And John Wayne plays the role with a depth that only very good actors can really achieve.




Like many Westerns, it's a story of obsession. Ethan and Martin are seeking a little girl. Martin's adopted sister and Ethan's niece. She's been taken in the raid that left Martin's adopted family wiped out by the Comanche. So the two men set off on a quest to find her. Martin wants to rescue her but Ethan has a different goal for the little girl. To remove the taint of the Indian from her by killing her. The two men develop a relationship, a twisted father and son relationship of admiration and hate. One that builds to an unexpected but unavoidable climax, leaving us with perhaps the most perfect ending in film.



It wasn't the first deconstructionist Western. Not even close. But the two John's had a power that few would ever have. They had brought back the Western with Stagecoach. They created a new shared myth of the west. And then with thunder they broke the myth apart, knowing it's flaws in a way that only a creator can. This is what audiences saw when they sat down to watch The Searchers, and yet few would realize the importance of what they were watching. They would say all that needed to be said about the Western, and all that would be left with was the good-byes. It would be up to men like Leone to invent a new myth of the West.

In the end, this fine movie would be passed over by the critics of it's day. No academy awards, no praise, no nothing. But the film makers of the 70's saw this film, and they saw it for the classic it is. It would influence people like Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Steven Spielberg, John Milius, Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, and George Lucas. Bits of The Searchers ends up in many of the works of the 70's. Taxi Driver takes the theme and transfers it to modern New York. Schrader would make it again in Hardcore. Spielberg would use Devil's Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Milius would talk about how he would always try to put a little bit of The Searchers into each of his films. Godard compared the ending to Ulysses being reunited with Telemachus. Wenders would take bits of it and put it into Paris Texas. And the shot of Luke finding his aunt and uncle's farm destroyed mirrors Martin finding his family's farm destroyed both in story and in visuals. Buddy Holly would take Wayne's signature line from the film and turn it into song. It left an impact on film and culture that lingers among us to this day.

With all of that said, I present to you, The Searchers

Red Cliff by Quid

Were you like me? Were you watching Lord of the Rings and, while finding the epic battles satisfying, finding something missing. Some unexplainable thing that just sort of irked you? Stronger female characters? Tighter story telling? Minorities? No, there was one, all important piece of film making that was absent.

White doves.

So bad ass that it was rated R for sequences of epic warfare, Red Cliff is John Woo's epic war film dramatizing the events immediately leading up to the period of the Three Kingdoms in China. The movie is easily one of the best films to come out of China with top notch acting, special effects, and writing. The last an especially impressive feat given the government's tight control of the movie industry. But even within those confines Woo created a masterpiece that rivals even some of Hollywood's better creations.

Set in the year 208 and based on historical events, the ruling Han Dynasty sends the imperial army, lead by chancellor Cao Cao to quell a rebellion lead by two warlords, Sun Quan and Liu Bei. The film details the strategies throughout the war, from head to head battles, espionage, deception, and the clever use of warfare technology that all culminates in the final battle at the titular Red Cliff. That it should even get that far is all thanks to one man, Zhuge:

In that particular picture Zhuge is deep in thought. That's because he's always deep in thought. If you have a problem, he will solve that shit and do it the entire time showing off his bitchin' crane feather fan. These days the man's name is literally synonymous with wisdom and strategy. As the movie progresses the film makes use of both Zhuge's historically accurate solutions as well as the more popular exaggerated ones, such as when tasked to obtain 100,000 arrows in 10 days on pain of death. Zhuge uses everything from spies to use of weather to help the warlords defeat an army several times their size. But it's not all intrigue and strategy.

Sometimes a guy just runs in and wrecks some shit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPrFwd4aQXA&feature=related

The head on battles in Red Cliff are vivid, spectacularly over the top fights that can are wonderfully choreographed. Anyone who's played Dynasty Warriors will be instantly familiar with the visuals. Military generals roam the fields of battle fighting their way through the rank and files before either falling to the masses or engaging with equally deadly foes.

Assuming, of course, a giant, moving deadly maze of shields doesn't pop up.

Now, the original version released in Asia unfolds over the course of over four and a half hours split in to two parts. Shit was long. "But Quid," I can hear you say "280 minutes is way too long for me to sit and watch a movie." Well good news, buddy. The version available on Netflix for instant watch is the Western release. And even better, this version is widely praised for making the movie more fluid and tightly pulling together the narrative. Having seen the original itself, I personally highly recommend this version over it. Which isn't to say that the Western cut doesn't lose some important scenes. Zhuge's motivation for trying to collect arrows (Death!) is gone, as is the spy, Sun Shangxiang's, interactions with one of the enemy camp's soldiers that helps sympathize the enemy. Overall, though, the film benefits far more from much needed editing.

This movie is not by any means the greatest film I've ever seen. I've seen each version only once even though I've found both enjoyable. It is, however, one of the best recent movies produced by the mainland and a definite must see for anyone interested in their films.

tl;dr

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3qIXQCHf94

[/quote]

Brick by Wash

Brick

Brick is Rian Johnson's first film. He filmed a good chunk of it at his old highschool. That information's not important when you're watching the movie, but it says something about the man who made it.

The movie opens with Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) crouched over the dead body of a girl with a blue bracelet. Soon we find out her name is Emily, and she is his ex-girlfriend and the person he loves. We don't know who killed her. Brendan needs to find out.

The plot isn't original, it's your classic whodunit murder mystery, glued together with all the best noir tropes. You've got your stoic, morally questionable "detective" Brendan, his man behind the scenes and nerdy sidekick, affectionately called Brain (Matt O'Leary), the femme fatale Laura (Nora Zehetner), the dame who set the whole thing into motion, Emily, (Emilie de Ravin), and a mysterious crime boss, the Pin (Lukas Haas). Brendan needs to know who killed Emily, and he's willing to dive deep into the shady criminal element at his highschool to find out.

You'd be surprised at what a detective story can become in a different setting.

It's a little amazing how well old noir tropes lend themselves to a highschool setting. Highschool has always been a test-run for the real world, a tiny cloistered society within a society. You've still got your social elite, your intellectuals, and your criminals. They're all still there, just a lot younger, and a lot out of their depth.

So yeah, it's an old formula. Still, you can't claim this film ain't fresh.

The score, composed by Rian Johnson's brother, is gentle, sad and sweet. The characters, too, are fragile. One thing that sets this aside from other detective stories and neo-noir flicks is that most protagonists are, well, older. Jaded middle-aged detectives who drink too much and have already seen it all are common-place; it's different when you're dealing with people who are, comparatively, innocent. This is a detective story but it's also a story about a kid looking for whoever's responsible for the death of his love. When your jaded old detective takes a beating, or provokes murderers and scoundrels, you expect he has some experience with this, he's been around.

Brendan, our protagonist, is in highschool, and when you watch him slowly, over the course of the film, breakdown physically and emotionally on his quest for justice while dealing with things way above his maturity level, it's heartbreaking. Levitt does a great job.

It's meaningful in a way that Rian Johnson filmed his first movie at his old highschool. He chose a place symbolic of his childhood for his ascension from aspiring filmmaker to filmmaker proper. Brick was his graduation. I think that's pretty cool.

[/quote]

Chinatown by Jacobkosh

CHINATOWN
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Chinatown/374030?trkid=4213507

The cramped, dirty office, lit by sunlight filtered through Venetian blinds. The cigarette smoke coiling lazily through the blades of a ceiling fan. The rumpled trenchcoat and fedora. The mouthy secretary. The mysterious, classy dame. The gumshoe.

Even people who've never watched a private eye movie in their life know the drill. After seventy years the little tics and visual shorthands left over from the great heyday of hardboiled detective fiction still saturate our pop culture, surfacing in everything from kids' cartoons to SNL sketches. They've been done, redone, examined, turned over, refuted, parodied, laughed at, revived - the whole long arc that any really good idea takes as it passes through a thousand hands over the years. That's the thing with good ideas; they're perennial. They keep turning up, and they stay fresh.

So in one sense, you already know Chinatown. But make no mistake - you're in for an experience as fresh, original and bracing as if it had come out yesterday. Chinatown is a movie that's full of good ideas.

Jack Nicholson stars as Jake Gittes (pronounced "gittys"), private eye in Depression-era LA. He's a little different from the private eyes you might be used to. He's not a loner; he employs a large staff of competent professionals to handle the drudge work of tails and photographing. He's not a rumpled, heartbroken Bogart character; Gittes keeps a clean, spacious, modern office, dresses to the nines, and moves through his environment with an easy, extroverted confidence. He's a smart, worldly guy who likes what he does for a living and is pretty sure he's got it all figured out.

Is it a spoiler to say that he doesn't?

It starts, of course, with the dame. A woman calling herself Evelyn Mulwray comes into Gittes' office to hire him to tail her husband Hollis and find proof of his infidelity. Gittes, an old hand at these things, tries several times to turn her away. "Let sleeping dogs lie," he advises. He really seems to believe that it's better that way. Of course, when she pulls out the giant checkbook...

The husband will not strike you as the unfaithful type. He's a much older man, tall and gangly, and seems to lead an incredibly boring life. He gives a lecture at City Hall about the dangers of a new proposed dam - it seems Hollis is the county water commissioner - and then spends the night visiting drainage ditches and dry riverbeds all over town before going to bed in his home at a respectable hour.

Jake is good at his job, though, and..."determined" isn't the right word. It's more businesslike than that. Let's say "persistent." After some clever tricks with a stopwatch and the judicious use of a telephoto lens, Jake does catch the husband with a young woman. The photos create a scandal; the man's name is dragged through the mud, while Jake Gittes gleefully passes his business cards to the press.

And then a woman, a complete stranger, turns up at Jake's office, demanding to know who hired him to follow her poor husband.

Whoops.

That's where Chinatown really kicks off, and the less said about the twisty, complicated plot that ensues, the better. It's a really good plot, a pleasure to follow, with clues that lead seamlessly into a complicated web of corruption and, ultimately, the blackest human evil. As a mystery, Chinatown is almost unparalleled in the craftsmanship of its construction. Raymond Chandler used to joke that whenever he was stuck on a difficult chapter, or had trouble getting his hero to the next stage of the story, he'd have a couple tough guys kick down the door and start shooting. As you watch, notice how rarely that happens in Chinatown. Jake Gittes may not be as noble or incorruptible as the classic private eyes - although he's more noble and incorruptible than he looks - but he's every bit as competent if not more so. He's in every scene of the movie, and the story always moves ahead because of his tenacity and facility at unraveling the maze that's been set before him.

That's why it's all the more distressing that, good as he is, Jake may be up against a problem that even he can't solve. The movie's title is a reference to something the screenwriter, Robert Towne, was told by a former LAPD officer; back in the old days, unsure of how best to deal with the complexities of Chinatown, the police opted to do "as little as possible." It's a sad lesson in pragmatic cynicism that Jake Gittes has learned before, and will learn again in the movie's legendary, eminently quotable "downer" ending.

Largely because of that ending, Chinatown has a formidable reputation as a classic, but I want to emphasize that that doesn't mean it's not fun. It is! There are fights, chases, and menace a'plenty. Jake's journey takes him from a midnight confrontation with a genuinely chilling pair of hired killers -

- to the sunlit portico of the most powerful man in LA -

- to, of course, the bed of a beautiful woman. I think because Chinatown was made in the 1970s and directed by a European, some people blithely assume it is somehow satirizing or deconstructing the hardboiled detective genre. I don't think that's true at all. Chinatown unironically delivers all the pleasures of that kind of story; it just does them really well, with a piercing intelligence, a dash of urbane wit, and a painstaking, craftsmanlike dedication to authenticity and historicity.

The director, Roman Polanski, is a contentious subject. I won't say anything except to note that missing this movie because of him is a huge mistake, and Polanski is only one of the reasons it works so well. The story comes to us courtesy of Robert Towne, who also wrote Bonnie and Clyde and co-wrote The Parallax View, the beautiful photography is by Robert Alonzo, and the music was composed by none other than the great Jerry Goldsmith. For whatever reason, all of these men turned in some of the best work of their careers here.

Let them, and Jake Gittes, take you on a ride to Chinatown. It's unforgettable.

Thomamelas

Ghostbusters by Amateurhour

Ghostbusters....

It's a word that is uttered and carried on the winds from every man, woman and child of that fabled time of hope we called "The 80's..."

I'm going to start off with the facts.

Ghostbusters
Directed by Ivan Reitman
Written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis
Starring... These Guys



From left to right

Harold Ramis - Egon Spengler - The super scientist who has no social skills whatsoever and once tried to drill a hole in his head.
Ernie Hudson - Winston Zeddemore - The only non founding member of the Ghostbusters. Took the job because of the steady paycheck, regrets it often.
Bill Murray - Peter Venkman - Ladies man, pseudo-scientist, and probable sociopath.
Dan Aykroyd - Raymond Stantz - Almost as smart as Egon, good looking, and the Chief Financial Officer, with a thrice upside down house to prove it.

But let's not forget the B-Team who make the ghostbusters day to day operations work.

(note: this picture is from the still very entertaining but highly inferior sequel Ghostbusters 2)



Annie Potts - Janine Melnitz - the only true love interest of Egon, despite any canon depicting otherwise, and the best Goddamn receptionist in the WORLD

Rick Moranis - Louis Tully - Horrible accountant, even worse attorney, and the most boring man alive.

Okay, now that you know who these guys are, let's talk about the film itself.

Ghostbusters was a 1984 SMASH HIT that really set the bar high for non adaptation, non remake movies, especially during the 80's when most of the stuff we see getting rehashed today was still a new and exciting property. It was originally the brain child of two very coked up comedians, Aykroyd, who was, and still is very into the paranormal studies, and John Belushi, who died way to young and would have made a fine addition to this film.

What wouldn't have been fine was the original idea for the film, which would have been titled Ghostsmashers, about time traveling ghost fighters who used wands instead of proton packs and wore SWAT team outfits. Thankfully Ivan Reitman helped fix this in the early stages of studio development and we got the movie we have today.

Throughout the film you'll see common themes of the 80's, from the group of baby boomers with no real clue what to do with their lives, despite being highly ranked in their scientific fields, to the usual 80's level of greed and excess, to less conventional themes like demon worship and Twinkies ©.

Honestly I'm not going to write up some long winded synopsis of this flick. You've probably seen it a dozen times, and there's a HUGE writeup on wikipedia.

Instead I'm going to talk about things in the movie that I thought were fantastic, specific scenes that stand the test of time, and the impact a movie like this has on a young child.

First off, you'll notice I didn't mention Sigourney Weaver in my initial writeup. She plays Dana Barrett and honestly she doesn't do a lot other than act as a plot device when absolutely necessary. She's supposed to be the love interest for Peter but this is a guy that's banging his students as little as three months beforehand, and it's made abundantly clear in the sequel that things don't go so well for the young couple after the events of the first movie. Just to be clear, I LOVE me some Sigourney, but this was not her finest role, despite fantastic acting on her part and being incredibly attractive and tall. It's not even that the role was bad, it was just not needed. It was there to sell date night tickets.

Second, the real unsung hero of this movie is the devious bureaucrat for the Environmental Protection Agency Walter Peck, played by the simply perfect William Atherton whom you may remember as for playing a similar character archetype in the Val Kilmer vehicle Real Genius. He plays a perfect foil to Peter. He's fantastic in almost every scene and even his slight victories, albeit short lived, inevitably end in defeat. He alone managed to shut down the entire Ghost busting operation only to release a veritable hell on Earth moments later.

Ghostbusters wasn't just a financial success at the box office. It was a successful franchise. It spawned two animated series, an entire line of toys and clothes (of which I owned all of them), a less successful but still entertaining sequel, a lifetime of adoration from fans, a bitter feud between the original cast that's supposedly still sour, a planned end to the trilogy in the works, and a career of convention appearances, in costume, by this man who, even though went on to do better things with his career, will still take a photo with you for $20 dressed like this no less than 14 weekends out of the year all across the country.



When I was a child, I WAS a Ghostbuster. I remember wanting to join, and my mother having a fake phonebook page printed up with a listing for the Ghostbusters in it, and giving me the phone as I spoke to Janine Melnitz who told me I could be a junior member (I later found out this was my Aunt, a fact I am still bitter about to this day) as I proceeded to run around the house shooting possibly toxic and unbelievably thick foam pads from my plastic proton pack and imaginary ghosts and very realistic house pets before slinging out my containment trap and springing it on unsuspecting prey.

I hope you enjoy this movie.


Edit: I'm well aware I didn't speak to some other fantastic scenes, but I thought it would be fun for everyone to watch this tomorrow and then we could talk about giant wads of marshmallow goo "money shots" and giant wads of green ecto plasmic goo "money shots" at that point.

Sonatine by Bogart

Sometimes, comedians become gameshow hosts. They're often pretty good at it. And if they're a comedian and they've reached the level of popularity that means they can front a gameshow, they've probably done a movie or two as well, maybe a sitcom. They've dipped their toe into acting, probably leaning heavily on their stand-up persona, but still. Maybe they've directed a couple of episodes of their TV show as well. That's pretty much the career trajectory of Japanese actor, comic, gameshow host, writer and director 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, except instead of making amiable comedies that will delight the whole family, Kitano turned out to be the Japanese equivalent of Robert De Niro, Martin Scorcese and Steven Soderbergh all rolled into one amazing rennaisance man. It is as though Drew Carey wrote, directed and starred in Bad Lieutenant.

He paints as well.

I first became aware of him after seeing his first movie, Violent Cop, of the back of a recommendation from I can't remember where. It's a pretty bleak film, one in which almost everyone ends up dead, and where Kitano's protagonist is a cold, brutal killer cop barely any better than the murderers he's chasing. But all the way through it's completely clear that Kitano draws the eye like few other movie stars. A single long shot of him walking towards the camera is ridiculously absorbing, his arms swinging unevenly as he scurries along. And his face. Lord, his face. Impassive and plain yet extraordinarily interesting, even when, as is often the case, he's looking down or away from the camera. An horrific motorcycle accident that left him with considerable facial damage has made it even more arresting. You may remember him from such movies as Battle Royale, and the fairly terrible Johnny Mnemonic.

Violent Cop gave him a certain amount of foreign critical attention, but it was Sonatine that really made people really sit up and take notice. I should mention that pretty much all the clips are NSFW, and some are spoiler-heavy. Here's the trailer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7chFW_Fhb0

Kitano plays Murakawa, a weary gangster sent to calm the waters between two rival gangster clans in Okinawa. Suspecting a set up, Murakawa finds his suspicions confirmed when he and his men are attacked. The survivors flee to a beach house, and it's here that the movie takes flight. Up till now it's been solid, but hardly unique, gangster movie fare. Once they reach the beach it's like a different movie entirely. The gangsters start playing childish games and playing pranks on each other, relaxing against the gorgeous backdrop of the beach and the blue, blue ocean. Long scenes of nothing more than these guys messing about with fireworks or pretending to be cardboard sumo wrestlers. It's almost idyllic, though when shooting beer cans off each others heads turns into a game of Russian Roulette you start to wonder where all this will end. A sinister undercurrent of violence flows around all this good, clean fun. Here's a justly famed scene where the gang plays on the beach.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA1FE1tnXZQ

Murakawa and his men are eventually drawn back into the gangster conflict from which they have retreated with a sudden, violent shock. Further violence punctuates the movie like a short series of hard slaps, over in a flash, leaving you jolted and nervy. You can see it in the trailer, as a gunfight erupts in an elevator and suddenly BANG BANG BANG in a tiny space and then there are dead bodies everywhere. Then there's the end, with the strangely beautiful sight of a gunfight in almost total darkness, everything lit by muzzle flashes and the constant yellow glare of automatic weapons firing on full auto. Half the action isn't even seen, as the camera looks on from the ground outside up at the windows illuminated by gunfire. It's an amazing choice for a climactic gunfight. Warning, heavy spoilers in this clip, including the end of the movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHywJrs7qN8

It's a truly odd film, part brutal yakuza movie, part leisurely comedy piece, part quiet, contemplative arthouse flick.

Kitano's materpiece, Hana Bi, shares much in common with Sonatine, though it's a quieter film, with better jokes and the single most underplayed bank robbery scene I can remember seeing. Zaitochi is a samurai film with Kitano as the titular lead: a wandering, blind ronin. He's made more yakuza movies (perhaps going to that well too many times), autobiographical movies, lyrical meditations on love and a movie about a deaf surfer. But if you want an introduction to Takeshi Kitano, Sonatine is the best bet. Revenge, honour, betrayal, broad comedy, sudden, shocking violence and that rarest of things in the movies: a genuine sense that the film has left the rails of normal narrative convention and is merrily chugging away to who knows where.

I'll leave you with the bank robbery in Hana Bi:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwRhhcEpmlA

Grosse Pointe Blank by Bogart

The plot's pretty simple. A hitman has a crisis of confidence and attends his high-school reunion. Shenanigans ensue. There you go, there's your blurb. Everything past this point has spoilers, so if you haven't seen it, go do that now. I'll wait. Here's the trailer. No, scratch that, here's the opening scene.

http://youtu.be/-230v_ecAcM

Back? Wasn't that great? I know, right? So funny. And smart. The script has obviously been honed and polished, the casting done with care, the storytelling considered and executed with intelligence. It's an action movie, a romantic comedy, a high school reunion movie, and an existential redemption of a lost soul in one, and what's amazing is that the movie is all of things to a degree of excellence. Martin Q. Blank is a hitman who's lost his taste for a life of contract murder and personal isolation. He's dislocated from his reality, and feels no agency. "It's not me." he repeatedly tells his victims. What he needs is to connect, in that very nineties way, with himself. Before he loses himself and ends up dead. And there's this ten year high school reunion coming up, sooooooooooooooooooooooo.

I said that it was smart. It's smart in obvious ways and it's smart in ways it doesn't have to be but wants to be because this is a movie with some goddamn ambition. Look at the ten second scene where Martin visits his father's grave. He walks up, empties of bottle of whiskey onto the plot and then drops it neck first to the ground. Cut to next scene, and it's never mentioned again. A wealth of information about his upbringing and authority issues in a wordless snippet the movie doesn't drag out or refer back to like a nervous joke-teller wondering if he needs to repeat the bit about it being a giraffe the guy walked into the pub with. You got it, let's move on. Storytelling. Even the title is funny in at least two ways.

How about another scene, much later, during the dance. John Cusack catches up with an old friend who's had a baby and picks him up. The soundtrack flares and suddenly Cusack is looking into the eyes of a baby and is in the throes of what Minnie Driver earlier called Shakabuku: a swift, spiritual kick to the head that alters your reality forever. See, now if you read that in the script you'd roll your eyes and it'd be the first thing you'd cut on grounds off being too corny for words. But it works, because Martin is so well-drawn and Cusack sells the moment sincerely and the movie has earned this moment. It's weird and touching and beautiful and a moment of deep character development that we totally get even though its a guy and a baby looking at each other. It helps that the baby is a pretty good actor. A wordless few seconds, and we understand Cusack has been given all the Shakabuku he can handle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWyuAq5Yq34

Cusack's so good in this it's difficult to imagine anyone else playing the role. A hitman suffering from angst and a loss of faith and enjoyment in his line of work, his only relationships those with a psychiatrist who doesn't want to see him, a secretary who dresses like Sergeant Pepper (the great Joan Cusack) and competitors like Dan Akroyd's psychopathic Grocer. Line after line of quotable dialogue issues with great speed from Cusack's lips in quiet, understated tones. He twitches when his back is to the door and torments Alan Arkin's psychiatrist with appointments in order to work through his existential angst. Pinched lips, an amazingly naturalistic delivery of long, complicated lines, the ability to sit back and let his supporting cast steal scenes. He's brilliant, and reportedly involved in every step of the production, from writing to shooting. How many actors could have resisted a self-knowing smirk as he tells everyone what he does for a living and watches them assume he's joking? He's also a goddamn revelation in the action scenes. Check out this scene, set to Mirror In The Bathroom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0ScNLt2zNc

Holy Christ did you see that bit where he kicks the little guy into the lockers? That looked painful. The little guy is his longtime kickboxing trainer, Benny Urquidez, a well known Bad Mutha Fucka, and that kick left an imprint of the locker dial in Benny's back. Quentin Tarantino was a big fan of this scene, obviously. Note the perfect song. As Guardians of the Galaxy reminded us this year, sometimes stumping up the cash for the rights to use original pop songs in your movie is worth every penny. The 80's hits that pepper the movie are bubblegum buckshot fired from a jukebox gun of discerning taste. Tarantino probably liked this one too. It's the climactic gunfight. Look at all the character work and jokes they fit into it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bc4TpDTwsVE

Hey kids, John Cusack was once unbelievably cool. I don't know what happened in the last decade or so, but seriously: this guy was who discerning film nerds wanted to be back in the 90s. Not least because it would mean we'd run off with Minnie Driver. Smart, funny, earthy, self-assured and possessed of a thrillingly sexy voice, Driver is immensely appealing here, thus doing the hard job of every romantic comedy: being someone the audience believes the hero would love, and can therefore invest in a relationship. Check out the scene where she takes him apart after not having seen him for ten years, or try to, because that clip isn't on YouTube. Or the bit where Blank comes over to her house and gives her an airplane ride because it is adorable.

Every part is cast beautifully and every actor is engaged fully and completely. It really is one of those movies where everything came together. Way before he settled on a career path of shilling vodka out of glass bottles shaped like skulls, Dan Akroyd was an actor, writer and comedian. He was pretty good at all of those things. As Grocer he stretches some acting muscles that pudgy, friendly-looking types like him aren't usually called on to display. He's nervy, ulcerated, intense and twitchy, all the time exuding top-quality malevolence and spite. He's a great bad guy, a surburban looking schmuck turned murderer that contrasts excellently with Cusack's black-clad complicated killer. Jeremy Piven is Cusack's best mate from back in the day and fits a lifetimes worth of resentment into the words HEY JENNY SLATER. Or how about the amount of fun he has with this line.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X06HoBb2e0

Grosse Pointe Blank is a movie I watch all the way to the end whenever I catch it on TV partway through. It repays repeated viewings, and age has not wearied it. The soundtrack remains evergreen, the action convincing and fun, the characters engaging and the script witty. It manages to be grown up, violent, funny and remain sort of nice and comforting. It's kind of sweet that even a hired killer with a certain moral flexibility can find redemption and the love of a good woman.

Thomamelas

Double Indemnity by Wash

Billy Wilder remains one of the greatest filmmakers to have ever lived, and his film Double Indemnity served to better define the noir genre. If you know anything about film noir, even just what you've picked up through the cultural zeitgeist, this is a movie that will feel familiar to you. Behind the narrative, the way that Wilder and John Seitz shot it has established a look for the genre that has been built on for decades. If you find it cliche, remember that this film established a lot of 'em.

When we think of film noir, many of us have an image of a small, smoke filled office, behind which sits a man who can expect a visit any moment now by the femme fatale: the woman who sets off the plot, the dame that ought not to be trifled with. But each time the detective does trifle with her, she's temptation incarnate, and without her we wouldn't have a story.

Succumbing to weakness and trying to overcome it – Billy Wilder's neck of the woods.

When I think of Wilder's work the first word that comes to mind is empathy, a quality I think is really important in a director. You can see Wilder's empathy in the way he treats his characters, particularly when it comes to portraying the ones who are wounded, or weak in the face of temptation. Billy Wilder has always struck me as someone who knows that life's hard and that we can't all be strong all of the time, and there's a certain measure of heroism in the way he presents characters in their moments of weakness – protagonists who are weak men who, in the end, finally stand up for themselves, or at least find their integrity.

It's worth noting that the screenwriter for this picture was Raymond Chandler. Chandler is known as one of the greatest writers of pulp noir, responsible for stories such as The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep, but he's no screenwriter. Double Indemnity became the first screenplay he ever penned, based on a story by John M. Cain, and he did a helluva job. Having pulp author Raymond Chandler working on your noir piece is basically getting the goods straight from the source.

The film I've selected begins with our protagonist entering his office late at night, bleeding, reciting into a dictaphone the details leading up to that moment – the movie is told almost entirely in flashback, with Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) narrating. I'm not going to go into what happens throughout the movie, because before the first seven minutes are up, we're told who he is, what his job is, who's dead, and who got them that way – after that, we get to see it all go down. The whole tale is told by Walter to his co-worker, friend, and mentor Keyes (Edward G. Robinson); it's something of an atonement, even if Walter doesn't pitch it like that. In that way, Walter Neff is another one of Wilder's protagonists who, after falling to weakness, eventually manages to find some of his integrity, even if it might be too late.

It's interesting how a filmmaker so adept at doing comedy is also one of the greatest contributors to the noir genre. I'd say the trick to excelling at both is the ability to approach your characters with compassion, and an equal dose of humour.

“Walter and Phyllis are pulp characters with little psychological depth, and that's the way Billy Wilder wants it. His best films are sardonic comedies, and in this one, Phyllis and Walter play a bad joke on themselves.” - Roger Ebert

Let the Right One In by Astaereth

NOTE: I am going to spoil the hell out of this movie, so go watch it first if you haven't seen it.



"Keep proper distance. Not too close, not too far. Keep distance." - the gym teacher

There are two kinds of great art in film: movies so resolute and powerful in their vision that you are swept helplessly along, and movies whose mysteries remain alluring yet impenetrable long after they have ended. Rarer still are those films which accomplish both at the same time. Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In is one of those. I have seen it at least four times at this point, and I know as little about it as I did when I first watched it. Perhaps less. Not because I do not understand what the movie is doing, and how, and why; but because each viewing makes me less certain of how my own heart responds to its beauty and its horror.

Purely on the basis of this film and the 2011 John Le Carre adaptation "Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy," Alfredson is one of the finest adaptors of literature working today. His methods are the same across both films: dense, intricately plotted narratives that work simultaneously as thrillers and as character studies; a faithfulness to the original text that captures the spirit of the work while refining it down into only the most vital elements; art film techniques of withholding or merely suggesting (rather than underlining) expository information; and a fearsomely strong control of cinematography, production design, and editing designed to express complex thematic relationships.

It's that last that I want to talk about here, because it's the key to understanding how Let the Right One In perfectly controls our emotional response to what would otherwise be a tonally dissonant work. I've been fond in the past of saying that, where the movie's faithful English-language remake, Let Me In, is a horror story with romantic undertones, the original film is a love story with horror undertones. This is imprecise. Let The Right One In is a horror movie which, through the careful use of direction and cinematography, feels like a romance. How is this accomplished?

I can't say I've actually counted, but I suspect that Let the Right One In has fewer distinct kinds of shots than most comparable movies. It has essentially five which it returns to again and again in service of the emotional problem that concerns the film:

1. The long shot, reserved for victims.

As indicated by the quote at the top, LtROI is about the problem of loneliness and isolation, a problem expressed entirely through cinematography. This first category of shot is used for several reasons, depending on context. One set of shots shows Oskar being bullied, a situation that isolates him from both his peers and his parents (he lies to his mother about what he's going through, and doesn't even bring it up with his father); later, Oskar will reverse the visual relationship when he strikes back against them.





That the shot indicates the film distancing itself from victims is reinforced by its use whenever Eli or her caretaker attack. This also serves to (paradoxically) both increase the horror (since you're using your imagination to visualize what's happening way over there at the back of the shot) and decrease our sense of the characters' culpability (since the victim him or herself is de-emphasized, faces hidden, etc, during the attack). We have an intellectual understanding of what they've done, but our emotional understanding of it is compromised. This is part of how the film makes Eli seem like a complicated figure and not simply a monster.




One of the final uses of the shot before the long take in the pool (which uses this as a distancing technique, emphasizing Oskar's importance over the lives of the bullies) is when Eli loses her caretaker. He literally falls away from her, over a cut from what was a connecting shot (see 5) into a telephoto over the shoulder. From lover to victim:




2. The interior shot, showing fractured space.




Why doesn't Oskar go to his mother for help with his bullying? Because he feels isolated and disconnected from her, as indicated by shots like these. They may live in the same apartment but the camera never places them in the same space, using the walls and angles to divide the two.



The same shot is used to a different purpose with Eli's caretaker, when parallel lines of action and emotion are dramatized by the divided spaces within the frame. On the left, the old man contemplates suicide; on the right, three teens we don't know break down the door to rescue their friend. Both sides are in focus, but the left side is closer to us; the result is that, even in an otherwise evenhanded wide shot, our attention and emotional identification is entirely with the would-be killer. This is just one example of the way Oskar and the caretaker are connected throughout the film by the ways in which they are shot and how those shots convey loneliness and isolation from others.

3. Shallow depth of field




Much of the film is either shot with telephoto lenses or using a relatively low f-stop (probably the case with interiors like these) in order to achieve a shallow depth of field that can be manipulated to isolate elements and characters within the frame. In the first shot, Oskar tries to ignore Conny the bully (facing away from him) and embrace his powerlessness while Conny dominates the shot (planting his elbow mock-casually in Oskar's visual space). The focus here is used to prevent the characters from having an actual connection, emphasizing that their relationship is essentially a violent power dynamic and laying the groundwork for us to be pleased when later the tables are more than turned on Conny and his friends. In the second shot, we see how Oskar is generally isolated from his peers. He's a weird, quiet, morbid little kid who finds it difficult to engage in school and especially with others; look at the way he lets his long hair hide his face here. This is the shell his relationship with Eli will eventually draw him out of.




Mirroring Oskar, Eli's caretaker is also isolated from his peers, as in the cafe where he encounters the group of friends Eli will victimize over the course of the film. This scene in particular is a really nice demonstration of Alfredson's visual strategies when it comes to connection; it opens with an exterior shot setting the caretaker apart via the placement of the window (see shot type 4), then the first shot posted above (type 3). Crucially, Alfredson shoots some of the only real ensemble shots in the movie here, allowing these friends to coexist together in one frame with everyone in focus, using them as an example of the closeness that Oskar and the caretaker are seeking. Later in the scene, one of the friends invades the caretaker's space by sitting down at his table, forcing his way into the same focal plane as he tries to build a connection (inviting the caretaker to join them for a drink). The caretaker's response is to refuse to engage (silently drinking his milk, which also breaks the sight line between them, and then leaving).




The caretaker's problem is that he's isolated even from Eli; this is apparent even in their first shot, which pans from an isolated (in frame and in focus) close-up of the caretaker to a similar shot of Eli. They're connected by space and by situation, but they couldn't be farther apart emotionally. Their relationship will disintegrate over the course of the film; as the caretaker has become too old to successfully secure Eli blood, she also becomes unable or unwilling to give him the love that he desires from her, instead turning her attentions to Oskar. This progression is demonstrated throughout the film using these same strategies; the caretaker is usually seen in tight, isolating close-ups within a shallow focal plane, and when he does interact with Eli, typically she is out of focus (as in the scene where she paces in front of him, raging) or both of them are (as in the shot below where Oskar hears them arguing but the pair are just vague silhouettes in the window).

4. Physical divisions




In these shots, generally exteriors, we see the use of architecture to present the idea of individuals trapped by their environment within their own emotional spaces. Oskar from his neighbors, the caretaker from his victims (here, ironically representing the youth that he has lost over the course of his relationship with Eli). Sometimes these divisions are deliberately erected by those who fear connection; the first thing the caretaker does upon moving in is cover up the window, shutting he and Eli off from the community. Eli is always negotiating the level of separation between her and Oskar, trying to hide the secret of her nature, as when she climbs into bed with him but won't let him look at her, or in this shot, which reverses the typical human/vampire threshold interaction:



For Oskar's part, he comes up with ways to communicate through these barriers, most prominently through the use of Morse code to speak to Eli across the literal wall between them:



5. Connecting

On the other side of things, the camera takes careful note of times when characters do manage to connect with one another. Sometimes this is as simple as putting them within the same frame and focal plane; other times, the film deploys one of its rare close-ups. Hands are emphasized as people reach out and touch one another. Here you can see the progression of Eli and Oskar's relationship, which began with the two of them separated within the frame (only one in focus at any given time) but eventually becomes more equal and intimate until, at the end, they share a smile directly across opposing close-ups, each of which begins out of focus but becomes clear as they connect:










The sublime nature of true connection is on display here, the only time so far that Eli and her caretaker are ever together in focus in the frame:



We see how much he truly loves her and desires her love, but the rarity of the gesture is a sad, poignant reminder that their relationship is nearly over. The only other time they're together is when Eli kills him, an act of predation and love all mixed together.

There are, of course, other types of shots in the film, but by using them sparingly Alfredson is able to accomplish a great deal more than he normally would--for example, the sequence of shots the establish all the information we'll need later to comprehend the climactic long take given its limited perspective. Each is made more memorable because the shots stand out from the rest of the film.







(There's no corresponding shot with this last, but it does set up a sound effect--the muffled sound of breaking glass during the pool shot which indicates that Eli, who perhaps came to look one last time at her friend before splitting down, has broken through that barrier in order to directly and violently intervene on Oskar's behalf.)

Another example of a shot used rarely for great effect is this one:



As far as I know it is the only time in the film that Oskar is shot from below; in this moment (after striking back at his bullies) he has achieved a position of personal power for maybe the first time in his life. This is all the more impactful because Oskar has again and again been depowered and decentralized by the camera; our first time seeing him in school, for instance, shows us only the back of his head:



It's not until he takes romantic initiative, learning Morse code so he can teach it to Eli, that we see him from a frontal, more neutral angle in the classroom, head up and interested in something:



Another example is the startlingly happy shot of Oskar riding a snowmobile with his father:



Later, once his father ignores Oskar in favor of his drinking buddy, the close up, lonely shot resurfaces:



Is it any wonder Oskar hitchhikes home to Eli?



All of this is centered around Oskar's perspective, around his loneliness and need for connection. But what about Eli? What does she want? The ambiguity surrounding her character provides the film's central tension. The only thing we know she needs is blood, a desire that drives many of her scenes (and by extension the scenes of her elderly caretaker). Juxtaposed with sweet, tender moments of connection between Eli and Oskar are two horrific subplots. First, Eli's caretaker goes out several times to try and secure her fresh blood; both attempts meet in disaster. Second, Eli herself preys on a local group of friends whose comfortable camaraderie is destroyed in the process. The blood motif spreads throughout these scenes, echoed by the use of the color red elsewhere in the film. Both symbolize suffering, whether it's life drained:



Indecency borne:



Horrible destruction:



Or a reminder of underlying family tensions:



How does Eli prove herself to Oskar? By suffering for him at the threshold of his apartment:



and by causing others to suffer for him at the pool.



Whether you view these instances as horrifying or romantic is largely up to you. But we're primed to accept them as romantic because of the direction and cinematography establishing the characters as lonely and isolated, victims and victimizers, within the cold, wintry atmosphere of Swedish adolescence. One final motif establishes this cold environment in which people seek out one another for comfort and warmth (although Eli is cold, too, isn't she?). Outside of its last shot, Let the Right One In is bracketed by shots of snow falling:



and often pauses to show the snow-covered trees and landscape:



And it's telling that Let Me In made sure to keep the same wintry atmosphere. Why? Because it's important that the movie be set in a cold and lonely place. You need someone to care for in such a place; and someone to care for you. Does Oskar find such a person in Eli, someone who can assuage his loneliness and protect him fiercely if need be? Or does Eli find herself a new caretaker, a young boy warped by suffering into someone who will soon be killing for her?

All of the film's strategies and codes come together in that final shot. We start at the train window (still cold outside, but we're moving), then pan over to Oskar. At first we fear he is alone:



But then we hear morse code being tapped out, and the shot widens enough for us to see the box Oskar is traveling with:



He and Eli are together, separated by their differing natures but still connected enough to pass messages through the intervening walls.

Also in the frame is Oskar's luggage, a bright red bag. Suffering and pain will remain with them, the price of connection, whether it's Oskar's past that he carries with him as baggage or an omen indicating that the cycle of violence will continue on. Either way, Oskar doesn't care. The shot is a medium wide, with a large depth of field; no victim here, no loneliness. He smiles in relief. He's happy. He's finally let someone in. Whether that someone was the right one is up to you.

[/quote]

Thomamelas

DON JON by Atomika

So after seeing this film I read the negative AV Club review from A. A. Dowd and was flabbergasted at how badly he seems to have missed the point entirely. I admit that I don’t readily seek out Dowd’s reviews, nor am I terribly familiar with his tenure as the media editor at Time Out Chicago, but if I didn’t already know that Dowd was a professional and paid member of the 4th Estate, I would have assumed that he was just some punk kid with no experience in criticism (though sadly I admit, the intermittently uninformed and gainfully employed critics are not two mutually exclusive subsets). Regardless, his criticism seemed to solely rest on the notion that the film largely failed because Joseph Gordon-Levitt doesn’t convincingly play a witless douchebag — and Dowd is right in that, actually — but positioning the thesis of your criticism and your valuation of the film’s success on that sole criterion is just about as apt as saying Burger King’s mascot is unsuitable because he doesn’t convincingly convey a realistic portrayal of medieval European nobility. So yes, Gordon-Levitt struggles to convincingly play a sex-crazed guido dumbass simply because he can’t shut down the cogent spark in his eyes; no matter what bad thing he’s doing, he looks too smart to be doing it. It’s a legitimate criticism, but not a legitimate failure of this film, because this film in no way depends on your suspended disbelief in his craven baseness. Would the role have been better played by someone more convincingly himbo-ish, like Channing Tatum or Tom Welling? Yeah, probably. But that’s hardly the point, and completely irrelevant.

pictured: the most understated people in New Jersey

The potential utility of film is multifaceted and infinite; sometimes we make movies that are slow and languid character studies, sometimes we make viscerally-thrilling FX extravaganzas, sometimes we let Kevin Smith tell the same unfunny dick jokes over and over. Don Jon is a film about putting a strong feminist message out into the wild with actors popular enough to ensure this message gets heard by the people who need to hear it, and its players are broad archetypes to ensure that they relate to the lives and experiences of the maximum number of audience members. Don Jon is definitely not a film with a message that I didn’t already believe in — I’m the choir being preached to — and I still found many, many things tor relate to within.

Don Jon is not a romantic comedy, though it needed to be sold as one to get the audience in the door. That kind of bait and switch? I don’t mind. It’s putting the heartworm medication inside a piece of cheese, and certain kinds of people aren’t going to pay money to listen to this kind of message if they knew about it firsthand. Don Jon is also not a film about porn addiction, per se. The film’s trailer campaign wants you to know that the main character’s patronage of pornography is central to the story being told, but it is not a film about the evils of people being sexually excited by watching other people have sex. If you’re looking for that kind of film, I suggest you watch Fireproof shortly before jumping off a cliff and ridding us all of your oppressive puritanism. Sex is good and being aroused by sex is normal and healthy and not something to feel guilty about.

What Don Jon is about, however, is the culture of the patriarchy and the commodifying of sex into something rote and selfish, of which the concept of guilt (here depicted by the many references to Catholicism) is a key player. This is a movie where the patriarchy is defined not just by the oppressive acts of men, but women and institutions as well — anyone who supports the structure without actualizing it and trying to exist outside of it is fair game:

- Jon, our titular protagonist, spends his nights at clubs with his boys hunting out only the choicest pieces of ass, or as he says, “Eights or better.” From the outset of the film we see how Jon and his friends treat the sexual experience as a competitive sport and women are simply the goalposts; his less-charming friend gets chastised for bringing home “twos,” so we get the full spectrum of what sex means to these guys.

- His world is rocked when he successfully wines and dines Barbara, “the Dime,” or a ten-out-of-ten girl. Everything about this woman is stripped down to sexual valuation, and she’s just as responsible for propagating the Patriarchy’s control of her life as anyone else. She’s a woman who has accepted the commodifying of her gender and in turn plays her assets as far as they will take her within that paradigm. She’s young, single, childless, and extremely attractive, and those values in the Patriarchy allow her certain freedoms (which are actually restrictions, but part of the Patriarchy’s game is fooling people into thinking that they can’t do the things they may want to do because of who they are or what gender role they play), such as “I have too high of a sexual value to not exclusively dictate the terms of the sexual dynamic I have with any potential partner,” and “I am desirable to the extent where basic routine tasks are now beneath me,” and “My sexual value allows me to restrict the non-sexual wants and desires of anyone who I allow choose to be my sexual partner.” Which is seventeen different kinds of fucked up, I know, but if you look at it from the perspective of Scarlett Johansson’s character, she has achieved the pinnacle objectives within the Patriarchal system and is thus both entitled to those behaviors and expected to wield them. Anything less would be beneath her status as Most Desirable.

- This oppressive system of sexual gaming is encouraged and perpetuated by two external forces: Jon’s parents and Jon’s church. Jon seeks (and fails to find) the approval of his father (an amazingly brassy performance from Tony Danza), who continues to remind him that he doesn’t recognize his son “as a man,” … until Jon brings home Barbara. That’s all it took, Jon locking down a sexually-appealing mate. Jon’s dad makes extremely sleazy and awkward come-ons to Barbara, making it well apparent that he also finds her sexually attractive, and thus finally enough to express pride in his son. His mother is little better, who is equally as pleased by Barbara’s sexual attractiveness and her acceptance of the Patriarchal dynamic, and in Barbara sees a kindred spirit; Jon’s father even goes so far to say that Barbara reminds him of his own wife, which is understood to be his way of saying that he sees his own wife as a rote value signifying his own success as “a man.” The thing is, Jon’s parents have TERRIBLE relationship; they fight, they scream, they don’t have any common interests, and the wife begrudgingly lives out her life subservient to her thankless husband who is happy to spend his days at home drinking beer in his undershirt watching football. Yet these two poor people believe themselves to be successful in their relationship except for the fact that their son has failed to deliver them a grandchild, despite his being already thirty(ish) and not having a great job. Their entire dynamic is commodifyed into values that they take from each other and their children, and they pass these values on.

see: objects A) the guido beta and the final build

- Jon’s church and his time in confessional with the priest exemplifies the other side of coercion into the Patriarchy, as the Church places negative value on so many aspects of healthy human sexuality, and asks its members to be penitent in absolution for these “sins,” such as kissing, sexual intercourse, and masturbation. Here we see how the Church seeks to monopolize and monetize these activities by placing rules on when they can be done without penalty, who they can be done between, and how often. It’s here that we’re given yet another example of institutions using scores to place value on sexual activity by tacking the penalties of Hail Marys onto untoward behavior, which makes a total of three different ways the film shows sexual behavior being given tangible metric values.


There are so many little touches dotting the landscape that subtly reinforce the message that writer/director/actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt wants to send about systems of sexual oppression. Barbara and Jon attend a birthday party for her niece where five-year-old girls are dressed in pink taffeta tutus and grown-up makeup — their sexually-codified rewards for simply becoming older and thus closer to sexual viability. Jon organizes every aspect of his life through the prism of attracting sexual partners; his fastidiously-kept apartment, his muscle car, his sculpted body, his slicked-back hair, his bartending job — every decision Jon makes about his person is passed through the filter of sexual desirability, and yet its important to notice that until the end Jon through his own volition does nothing to assess his own value as a friend or partner to any potential bedfellow. Jon’s relationship with pornography reinforces his notions that women are objects and sex is a game where you try to maximize your score based on your partner’s appearance and willingness to be sexually exploited Even Jon’s frequent episodes of road rage stem from his constantly being devalued in sexual terms, whether upset with his girlfriend, or his dad’s emasculating missives, or from his own misplaced sense of entitlement and privilege simply for being an attractive alpha male; it’s interesting to see how often Jon casts himself as the wronged victim in his many conflicts, both corporeal and internal.

Spiritual salvation for our protagonist comes in the form of Julianne Moore, a classmate at Jon’s night school, who slowly brings him around to the notion that being into someone can be just as exciting as being in someone. Moore is as good here as she is anywhere, but I find some thematic trouble with her character; for one thing, her seniority over Jon (about 20 years) lends to an idea that her enlightenment in relationships may stem from experience rather than respect and intellectualism. Sure, she’s into tasteful pornography and soulful lovemaking, but the sharp age contrast could make people wonder if her ideas on sex may just be the natural state of things for a single woman in her late-middle age, and that Jon, too, could become that mindfully liberated if he just got a little bit older and wiser. I mean, I didn’t see it that way, but I could understand how some audiences would. As well, Moore’s character being newly widowed and childless connects her to a kind of melancholy and sadness that might mislead people into thinking Jon’s interest in her is due to pity or that her interest in Jon is superficial and just satisfying a need she hasn’t had met in a long time. What I’m getting at is her character’s history and attributes could cause some people to misread what is going on with her character, which is something that wouldn’t have happened if her character would have been just a little younger or not a sad widow. It muddles things, and I think needlessly, because her age and past marital/parental status are fairly irrelevant to the role she plays in Jon’s growth from selfish mook to respectful lover.

"You're laughing, but I'm not kidding. It's thiiiiiis long."

Regardless, the film is wonderful and, more than that, vital to the modern zeitgeist. Gender and sexual equality seems to finally be making a push into the mainstream, and this film stands as the first mass-market push into that dialogue. I hope people go out and see this film, even if they think they’re seeing a different kind of movie. Gordon-Levitt’s first film is stylish and pointed and confident and strong, and I can’t wait to see what he does next behind the camera.

"I don't know about you, but that movie was total horseshit."[/quote]

High Noon by Thomamelas

Oh, to be torn 'twixt love an' duty.
S'posin' I lose my fair-haired beauty.
Look at that big hand move along,
Nearing high noon.

http://youtu.be/SkNu4-sSglY

High Noon is the anti-western. It rejects the Fordian theme of civilization as the force that should triumph over the frontier. That the coming of civilization is the improvement of all. If The Searchers is the dark mirror to the John Wayne Cowboy, then High Noon is the dark mirror of the townsfolk. We see it in the opening moments. As Jack Colby and the rest of Frank Miller's gang ride into town. The reaction of the town folk is silent terror until we get to the saloon where the proprietor proclaims with glee that it's going to be a busy day.

I love this shot. Grace Kelly looking on with a certain sweet innocence while Gary Cooper looks at her lovingly. At the same time we can see the age and weariness around his eyes.

We move to the wedding of Will Kane, the marshal of Hadleyville, to his Quaker bride Amy. The lawman marrying the pacifist, who represents the far end of civilization. Perhaps impractical but driven by ideals. With his marriage it's time for him to give up his badge and give in to her ideal of running a store. But Will Kane is uncomfortable with this. It will leave the town without a lawman for a day. As he takes off his star, he clips it to his holster, the tool of his office. And at this point we learn about Frank Miller. That he is coming back to town that day.

After being rushed out of town Will Kane's sense of duty forces him to return, even as his new wife can not understand why they don't continue to flee. Amy brings more tarnish to the cause of civilization, telling him it's not his problem. To just ignore it. And then she rejects him, tells him she'll leave him. As Kane begins to gather his posse the town rejects him, shows itself to be full of cowards and the corrupt. The Judge gathers his things and calls him foolish then tells two stories of people welcoming tyrants who would kill the legal goverment. We find out his deputy is unfit for the job. He attempts to blackmail his way into the Marshal's position for his help.

The hotel clerk is slimy, gleeful of what's going to happen. Telling Amy that he has a comeuppance coming. The good people of the town, the ones in church debate what they should do only to turn their backs on him. Even his mentor tells him to run. Even when the one man he finds to help him learns it will just be the pair of them, the deputy runs. In the end the only person in town that will stand with him is a child. Only one other person in town even understands why he has to do what he has to do. Helen Ramírez is an outsider, the older, experienced woman who explains to Amy just the kind of man she married. But even she won't stand with Will Kane. He finishes his duty to the town that isn't worthy of it, and he throws his badge into the dirt. A final act of contempt for the townsfolk.

High Noon provoked a strong reaction when it came out and still gets angry reviews written to this day. John Wayne and Howard Hawks hated the message so much he made Rio Bravo as a counter. The review in Pravda condemned it for glorifying the individual. Usually when the film is brought up, people will talk about it as an anti-HUAC film. But it's been adopted and viewed as an anti-Korean War film as well as a film glorifying a call to arms in fighting communism. No matter how you view it, it's a fantastic film. Shot not quite in real time (The events of the film cover 100 minutes or so, the film runs 80.) Zimmerman keeps the tension going.

Zimmerman's use of Gary Cooper is inspired. He carries a weariness not seen in the Fordian Cowboy. He's tired, he's earned his rest but he carries a gravitas that makes you understand why he has to do one last duty. Events move along with him and you can just sense the weight he carries with each rejection of his call for support. But it's not just his performance, the cast around him does an amazing job of building up Frank Miller as an elemental force. A force that one runs and hides from like a tornado. Leading up to the crane shot.

http://youtu.be/3Aqk4I4zmG8

Will Kane is alone, tiny compared to the town around him. And yet he has his duty.

High Noon
[/quote]

knitdan

Oh man oh man oh man

I wish I was better at making with the word things so I could do one


Can't wait for week 2

Jacobkosh

@Thomamelas put me down for Three Days of the Condor!

Pailryder

i love this thread. i too want to participate but my writing skillz can't pay the billz. but i will be an avid supporter and watcher of things!

shryke

I will do one this year, just gotta decide on the film.

Whatever I pick, my goal is to somehow work a reference to necrophilia into the write-up.

Astaereth

Like last year, I'll take a horror film wherever you'd like to slot me in for October. Which horror film, I'm not sure yet...

Bogart

A brief note to say that the first film, my film, will be a couple of days late because I have been unavoidably detained doing important government work and cleaning out the spare room of a whole bunch of crap, so.

Bogart

When I was a kid the internet wasn't around, and it existed as a fuzzy land of make-believe, essentially a cross between Tron and whatever Matthew Broderick was doing in War Games. For film reviews and news you had Empire magazine and, on BBC1 late at night, Barry Norman's Film show. Every year the name of the show would change to keep up with the year (Film '88 begat Film '89 and so on), and from his comfortable chair Norman would pass a stern eye over whatever movies were released that week. He loved cinema and was unfailingly intelligent and informed in his judgements, as close as you could get to a British Roger Ebert. When the 90's rolled around he looked back over the previous decade and pronounced Witness one of the ten best movies of the 80's. It had the most bankable star of the eighties, made a fair bit of money, and was critically acclaimed. Why then does no one really talk about it any more? Is it one of those movies that seems far less impressive now that it did at the time? Has age wearied it, and the years condemned it to be a relic of a bygone era? Flashier, less acclaimed movies beloved by the MTV generation of the time are endlessly repeated and referenced today, cherished by people as an indefinable part of the flavour of their youth. Witness never receives this nostalgic fetishisation, probably because it was a movie aimed at grown-ups, about grown-ups. Have a gander at the trailer, in which the guy who did all the voiceovers did the voiceover.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY3XnCyKAEU

Samuel Lapp goes to Philadelphia with his widowed mother, Rachel, and finds it a place of strangeness and wonder compared to the pastoral Amish community in which he was raised. In a bus station bathroom he sees two men attack and murder a third, and is the only witness. The dead man is an undercover cop, and Internal Affairs officer John Book catches the case (religious overtones abound in the movie: John Book - geddit? - he's also a handy carpenter). Rachel wants nothing to do with the crime, but Book knows he has no case without the witness, and discovers that one of the men Samuel saw is a cop. Pretty soon Ford is shooting at the corrupt cop (Danny Glover, not yet too old for this shit) in a parking lot and coming off second best with a bullet in his side. Book flees with Rachel and Samuel to the Amish community where he hopes they won't be found by what he believes to be a circle of police corruption, and ends up recuperating there from the gunshot wound. The movie then switches gears drastically, becoming a rural love story between Book and Rachel and a movie about doing the right thing in difficult circumstances, doing the acceptable thing and what those choices might cost.

It adheres stringently to the three act structure laid down by Moses when he descended from Mount Hollywood. Philadelphia is the first act, Book among the Amish is the second, and the reckoning at the end is the classic third act climax. And yet for all that it's a very unconventional movie. How many second acts have a mostly wordless seven minute scene about the raising of a barn? How many admit that the love affair between the leads is not only doomed, but never even consummated? Here's that lovely barn raising scene. See how handy Ford is with a hammer and a saw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7kLSk9-TRg

Look how peaceful and lovely everything is in the Amish world. Of course, the movie idealises the community, making them all good and kind and happy. Even Daniel, Ford's rival in Rachel's affections (played by Die Hard bad guy Alexander Godunov), is a decent, friendly guy who schemes not at all. There's the threat that Rachel will be 'shunned' if she carries on shamelessly serving Ford first at dinner and other such hussey-like actions, but it isn't particularly presented as a problem with the Amish so much as a raising of the stakes in their love story. They're humanised as well, though. Eli slaps Book's shoulder when he makes a joke about the cow's teats in good-natured appreciation of a bit of ribaldry, and Daniel winkingly assures his friends that 'it only takes one good ball' to make a baby. The Amish are isolated, and somewhat innocent, but not children to be educated by a civilised man or taught what this Earthman means by 'kissing'. Book slowly integrates with the Amish, helping out, and becomes a surrogate father figure to Samuel while he's there, but one who threatens to broaden his horizons father than his community would like. The scene where Samuel finds his gun demonstrates the gulf between their worlds and the dangers the elder Lapp sees in Book's presence.

Ford received his only Oscar nomination to date for his work here, and it's clear why. You can see the familiar nose-wrinkling rage he shows in all his fight scenes, the same likeable grin, the same display of what Alec Guinness called his 'rangy, languid' qualities that make him seem so easy in motion. But there's a far greater depth of feeling to this character. He's also sensitive and emotionally vulnerable in his love for Rachel. To see him turn these qualities up until they become saccharine, watch Regarding Henry. In Witness, he gets the mix absolutely right, convincing both when he beats hell out of some incredibly unwise punks who decide to hassle a cart of Amish folks, and when he dances like a giddy, lovesick teenager to Wonderful World in the barn. And look at Kelly McGillis' face in this scene as well. They absolutely sell falling in love.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKM0nH6-NnI

He's well matched by Kelly McGillis as Rachel, bred in a closed off world and learning that it might not be enough for her. They prove you can have a powerful, passionate love scene in which everybody keeps their clothes on but abandons themselves to their feelings. Lukas Haas is superb as Samuel, turning in an exemplary performance for a child actor, as natural and unaffected as you could wish for. And hey isn't that Viggo Mortensen in the background looking very Viggo?

Weir's direction is as good as you'd expect from him. How about this fine little wordless bit where Samuel identifies one of the murderers and Ford takes in what this will mean. The incredibly important moment is pared down to a boy looking at a picture, pointing at it, and Harrison Ford noticing and nodding his head in understanding. Storytelling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmdcbtSwX6Q

Lovely. He draws Ford's best performance of all time out of him, handles the child actor about as well as you'd hope, and contrasts the noisy, dark streets of Philly with the open spaces, natural light and soft colours of the Amish community beautifully. It's every bit as stark a contrast as the change from black and white to colour in The Wizard Of Oz. Or how about this tiny bit, from one of my favourite scenes of any Harrison Ford movie. The big moment where you know things are about to get real isn't Ford saying "It's my way", or the guy knocking his hat off. It's the shot from behind the side of the trap where you see Book's hand reach out from inside to grab the frame. You know from just that movement what Book's thinking, and the metric volume of the can of whup-ass that's about to be opened. These kind of small storytelling choices are like catnip to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o07ecRzkLuM

The movie ends appropriately, in tense but restrained violence and then a return to the whole premise of the movie. An evil thing is done in secret, and the only chance it will be brought to light is a witness willing to do the right thing, or forced to do it. At the end of the movie a further evil is threatened and thwarted by an abundance of witnesses who all come running when they fear trouble has descended on their community. I don't think I've ever seen Ford angrier than when he confronts the villain in Witness. There's no attempt to make his victory in any way cool, or slip in an amusing one-liner about taking him in. The film resolutely avoids such winking smarm. Ford is outraged instead of triumphant or sternly satisfied. A simple, decent man who does the right thing is a rare kind of hero these days; we prefer them complicated, compromised and capable of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.

John Book is very much a hero, not an anti-hero, and its very much to Ford's credit that he makes this simple man so compelling. At the end of the movie Book's begrudging acceptance into the community is demonstrated when he's warned to be careful 'out there among those English' when he leaves, and this sentiment feels entirely earned by the character. His decency has been recognised, and while he can't stay, he isn't driven out, and he's given a cheery wave by Daniel as he goes. The Amish return to how they were before Samuel witnessed the crime, changed a little but not much, and Book goes back to Philadelphia alone. But Witness isn't a sad movie, or even a bittersweet one. The ending feels right, just as the ending of Casablanca felt right when Rick said goodbye to Ilsa. Rachel and Book both have lives to live, and they can't live them together, so they part. It's a grown-up love story with a grown-up ending: it wouldn't work, so they leave, and the love story ends.

It's a fantastic movie, every element firing on all cylinders. It's a Hitchcockian thriller that gives way to a star-crossed love story before circling back around to violence again. It also feels like the type of movie that isn't made much any more. A love story and thriller aimed at grown-ups is aiming at a pretty nebulous market. How difficult would it be to keep the whole middle act intact today? How difficult would it be to get the biggest star around to be your lead? Probably easier to pinch off Taken 3 instead.

Witness. They really don't make 'em like that any more.

Bogart

As a capstone, here is the occasionally amusing Witness parody episode of Sledgehammer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioLCAEMXgco

Atomika

Well done, Bogey


One of my favorites

Astaereth

Ford, of course, really was a carpenter before he became an actor. I wonder if he brought that aspect of the character to the film or if it was a happy coincidence.

Weir is one of those really good directos nobody talks about. Maybe because he hasn't had a big movie in over 10 years, or maybe just because he's made manh different kinds of films. But to me all the ones I've seen are all fascinated by the idea of closed off, restrictive community whose social boundaries are disrupted by an outside element--The Truman Show is perhaps the most extreme example, because its society labors under a total lie, but Picnic at Hanging Rock is the best version, a film suffused with sublimated, repressed sexuality. Witness lies somewhere in between. I really should rewatch it, it's been too long.

wandering

@Thomamelas I'll do Night of the Living Dead

wandering

Fail Safe is referred to as the serious version of Dr. Strangelove, and I think you could call Witness the serious version of Sister Act. Same basic premise: character hides out from killers in traditional religious community - except it's a serious drama instead of a wacky comedy.

Atomika

I rewatched Witness for the first time in a while yesterday, and it continues to hold up well -- outside of the curious choice of synth-heavy soundtrack, but hey, this was 1985 and everyone wanted their movie to sound like Vangelis, even if it didn't make any sense.

It interesting in how central the love story is to the film, knowing how doomed and star-crossed this pair is, and Alexander Godunov's spurned suitor comes off as more than a little creepy and stalking, despite ultimately being a good guy who just isn't the one.


Weir is possibly the most underrated director working today, a man who has been nominated for multiple academy awards and has directed lasting, iconic films, and yet somehow he still manages to fly under the radar. His Master & Commander is one of my favorites, but he has more than a handful of classics in his CV.

Astaereth

I didn't want to step on anybody's toes, so I put my Witness review up in the movie thread. It's a good pick, I'm glad @Bogart inspired me to rewatch it.

Atomika

I wanted to remark how true-to-life I found it that Book was ratted out by a stupid old man in town worried that the Amish standing up to bullies was going to hurt local tourism.

I had never thought much of it before, but Amish tourism is pretty gross.

Thirith

Bogart: Bonus points for reminding me of Barry Norman. I loved the show and was overjoyed when we got it on BBC World.

And Peter Weir is definitely underappreciated, but it's difficult to define him as a director. His films *feel* very different, by and large. It's such a shame he never continued Master & Commander.

Thomamelas

Once Upon A Time In The West

Directed by Sergio Leone.

So Once Upon a Time In The West. I've dreaded doing this one for a long time out of fear that I wouldn't do it justice. Every time I come back to this work, I find something new. Some bit of imagery lifted from somewhere else. A bit of foreshadowing subtly done. A tic the actors bring to the characters. It's not my favorite Western. Shane holds a special place in my heart. But if I asked a lot of people to name the greatest Western of all time, most would say Once Upon a Time In The West. And it's kind of a strange answer. It's a very different film then the Dollar's trilogy. It's not even really a Spaghetti Western unless you define Spaghetti Western as a Western made by an Italian. It doesn't fit in that subgenre at all. It has a different perspective on the value of human life. It's lacking the pathos of the Spaghetti Western. The brutality isn't there in the same way we find in Leone's earlier works, or the works of the other Sergios. It's not a static, unchanging area of lawlessness. It has the hopeful tone you find in the works of John Ford.

Once Upon A Time In The West's theme is different. It's the theme of the conflict between civilization and the frontier. One driving forward into the other, creating a place where the worst of both is available. Frank's conflict with Morton, Frank's conflict with Jill showing us Frontier verses civilization. Frank's attempt to move into civilization brought into conflict with Harmonica and Frank's past. Frank, Cheyenne and Harmonica trapped in an endless cycle of violence that only completes itself with death. And if these themes are familiar, they should be. OUATITW is a Fordian Western. It is Leone's attempt to move past the Western in his work by taking what has come before and putting his own spin on it. His own style. And Leone is a stylistic director. It doesn't take most people very long to recognize a Leone film. And that's what gives us the remaining elements of the Spaghetti Western, those parts of the genre that Leone defined by putting his stamp on it. But this isn't the same west of his previous works.

And OUATITW is very much Leone's work while being rooted in the classic westerns that came before it. This film embraces homage in a way that even Taratino would blush at the thought of attempting. Almost everything in this film is a nod to films that came before. Some are well known, like the casting of Henry Fonda. But it goes beyond just that. Whole scenes are lifted from other movies. Details and nods abound. The opening sequence for instance is a nod to High Noon. Three men waiting for a fourth to get off a train. But it goes beyond that. The three men in that scene were supposed to be Eli Wallach, Lee Van Clef and Clint Eastwood. But Eastwood's star is on the rise and he doesn't want to do it. So Leone reworks the script to replace them with Jack Elam, Woody Strode and Al Mulock.

Those three guys aren't accidental castings. All three of them were staples as character actors in Westerns but in particular Woody Strode. Woody Strode was part of John Ford's family of actors. He has a lot of bit parts in Ford films but in 1960, John Ford made him the star of Sergeant Rutledge. Even the gun he carries in this scene is a nod, a mare's leg from Wanted: Dead or Alive TV show. But that gun has an odd modification. The lever has a larger, open hand slot. Something that doesn't appear until a movie prop was modified for the large hands of John Wayne. It gave him the ability to do a signature kind of twirl with it. But he puts it in the hands of Woody Strode. And with it, Woody Strode manages to hit a Leone gunfighter.

The homages continue. Jack Elem had a small role in High Noon. Getting him a place in the opening sequence. Timmy McBain's hunting is a nod to Shane. The funeral scene for the McBains is shot for shot from Shane. The bar scene between Harmonica and Cheyenne is lifted directly out of My Darling Clementine where we first meet Doc Holiday. The final shoot out is lifted from The Last Sunset. The line "How can you trust a man who wears both a belt and suspenders? The man can't even trust his own pants." is from Ace In The Hole. The name Sweetwater and the idea of it being the last stop for water is from King of the Pecos. His use of Monument Valley a nod to every John Ford western. When Cheyenne is turned over to the authorities, he's sent on a train to a modern prison in Yuma, a nod to 3:10 to Yuma. Jill McBain is a nod to Vienna from Johny Guitar. The auction a nod to the elections from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance along with the coats. The whole film is bits and pieces of other westerns put together with a bit of Leone.

But even with all of that, it's a distinctly Leone work. His shots of Monument Valley are dark. The rock formations aren't brightly lit but instead they are cast in shadow. Not stark and beautiful but haunting and forbidding. The stylistic touch of lingering on the actor's faces. His use of the Morricone score. Admitted the film was scored before the script went through so much in the way of major modifications. So we get a more sparse soundtrack. One focused on the character themes. But it gives Leone a chance to work with ambient noise. The long opening scene where Frank's men are gunned down. The use of it at the McBain house to tell us something is wrong. The animals stop making noise as men approach. The silence before Harmonica's flashback. He uses that lack of noise to build tension. All of the Leone trade marks are there but combined with a completely different kind of Western.

Even by Leone standards, we're looking at a film that's rather sparse in terms of dialogue. He uses it sparingly. It's a trait he developed trying to keep costs down. Having to have a film dubbed and redubbed into multiple languages is expensive. So it gave him an aversion to dialogue that plays to his other strengths. Those long shots of people's faces tell us volumes about how they handle stress and tension. It gives the actors room to fill in the characters with little movements. They way they breathe. The way they move. Do they tense up at this moment or are they cool. And there is lots of wonderful examples even just looking at the first 10 minutes. Watching Woody Strode just kind of ignore the water dripping on to him gives him an air of cool that a dozen one liners couldn't. We see Jack Elem tormenting a fly that bothered him. Al Murdock's character is the twitchy, nervous one. Archetypes all of them.

And that extends out to the characters we know about. Harmonica is a cipher. We know his motivation but that's it. In terms of script characterization, all we're given is that he hates Frank. And at the end we learn why but that's really all we know. We can infer he's literate because he knows about the station. He's clever in the Red Harvest kind of mode. But the script doesn't tell us any more about him. But Leone gives Bronson the room to fill it in a lot of detail with his acting. The looks he shares with Cheyenne. The way the two men size each other up with just a few lines of dialogue but a scene filled with flickering eyes and small shifts of expression. The looks he gives Frank. The character has weight not because the script gives it to him but because the actor does. And Leone goes a bit further, adding an almost metaphysical quality to Harmonica. He never walks into a scene. His entrances to a scene are him suddenly appearing. Or being revealed to have been there the whole time. He's more a vengeful ghost, or spirit then a man. And given a theme that fits and matches with it. Haunting and dark but turning into something brighter and warmer. A bit more hopeful.

https://youtu.be/LIgNCD3nzOg


And really all of the characters in the film are the archetype of the Classic western. The man seeing revenge. The charming outlaw. The hooker with a heart of gold. The villainous gunfighter. The corrupt railroad baron. None of whom we know much about but the Leone gives the actors room to give them weight. Each little reveal carefully worked into the tension of the film. And Leone is the master of tension. The film is long, with a run time of just a hair under 3 hours. It's pace is slow. But Leone manages the tension to keep it moving. But the way he juggles tension between the various conflicts keeps the attention of the audience. So all of these scenes where actors can establish character with little looks and glances are part of something more tense. So we learn volumes about the characters and how they fit into the world but with the script providing much less of that when we usually see. The characters have depth but that depth doesn't come from the script, it comes from the actors. Leone uses the silence to speak volumes.

The script while dialogue sparse is full of little hints and foreshadowing. Jill's discovery of the train station playset. Harmonica's theme playing when Frank shoots Timmy McBain. The flying birds and the mention of Jill wearing black symbols of death herald the coming bullets. Harmonica and Frank dress in black and white respectively. The constant references to water. Morton proclaiming he wants to see the water again before he dies. His discussion with Frank about money as a weapon. Jill referencing a hot bath prior to Frank raping her. And that gives us Jill as a figure of rebirth. Once the violence is completed with the gunslinger and the outlaw both dead, Jill is free to recreate both herself and Sweetwater. She controls the water, and with that she has power over the railroads and the ability to bring life from the ground.

So we have a Western directed by an Italian, shot partially in Spain and Italy but also the US. But it's not a Spaghetti Western. We have a director famed for carving out a new niche doing an homage to what came before. We have silence speaking volumes. A director creating a work that is in many ways superficial but one with so many layers and bits of subtle nuance. It's a work full of contradictions. I always feel a bit snobbish and frustrated with people watching the film. Because it's a fantastic film. One that is great if you know nothing about Westerns. But it's also a film that as you learn more about the genre it becomes richer with meaning and nuance. And I dreaded writing this because as I look at it, I realize there is still more for me to learn.

abotkin

Excellent write-up Thomamelas! I just rewatched OUATITW and the Dollars trilogy a few months ago, and enjoyed them thoroughly, but I didn't realize how many references I was missing in OUATITW. This gives me a whole new appreciation for it, which is impressive since I already regarded it quite highly.

Bogart

Unsurprisingly, John Carpenter loves this movie. He's on the DVD commentary track I've got, and is unfailingly intelligent and entertaining. He talks about how he likes to put the Bronson line 'Only at the point of dying' in his movies (like Assault on Precinct 13), and generally about how amazing Leone is. The commentary track has the likes of Christopher Frayling (Leone's biographer) on it as well, and is worth listening to. Carpenter also talks about how Leone managed to make Charles Bronson look beautiful, in his way. A man with a face like a coiled steel hawser and Leone makes him look beautiful.

I like Henry Fonda's story about how he first arrived off the plane from the US wearing brown contacts to look more villainous. Leone instantly told him to take them out, because he wanted the audience to see Fonda's baby blues in his entrance, just after he's murdered a whole family, and recognise that this was very much the avuncular Fonda who was as bad as bad could be.

And of course Morricone's music. The entrance music when Claudia Cardinale arrives in town and the camera sweeps up over the train station and the singing really kicks in is a truly uplifting moment. The guitar heavy harmonica theme that's been carefully made to peter off into breathy notes that mirror the sound of someone dying on screen is an amazing mix of music and image. Cheyenne's bedraggled clip-clop of a theme that stops when he finally does.

It's an incredible movie, the kind of thing you press on friends if they haven't seen it, then find them wanting for not loving as much as you.

Also, Thom mentioned it in [chat] while he was writing this up, but Claudia Cardinale is stupefyingly beautiful in this, and pretty much everything else she did at the time. You blink a little, because it doesn't seem possible. But no, she really did look like that.

Thomamelas

Bogart wrote: »

Unsurprisingly, John Carpenter loves this movie. He's on the DVD commentary track I've got, and is unfailingly intelligent and entertaining. He talks about how he likes to put the Bronson line 'Only at the point of dying' in his movies (like Assault on Precinct 13), and generally about how amazing Leone is. The commentary track has the likes of Christopher Frayling (Leone's biographer) on it as well, and is worth listening to. Carpenter also talks about how Leone managed to make Charles Bronson look beautiful, in his way. A man with a face like a coiled steel hawser and Leone makes him look beautiful.

I like Henry Fonda's story about how he first arrived off the plane from the US wearing brown contacts to look more villainous. Leone instantly told him to take them out, because he wanted the audience to see Fonda's baby blues in his entrance, just after he's murdered a whole family, and recognise that this was very much the avuncular Fonda who was as bad as bad could be.

And of course Morricone's music. The entrance music when Claudia Cardinale arrives in town and the camera sweeps up over the train station and the singing really kicks in is a truly uplifting moment. The guitar heavy harmonica theme that's been carefully made to peter off into breathy notes that mirror the sound of someone dying on screen is an amazing mix of music and image. Cheyenne's bedraggled clip-clop of a theme that stops when he finally does.

It's an incredible movie, the kind of thing you press on friends if they haven't seen it, then find them wanting for not loving as much as you.

Also, Thom mentioned it in [chat] while he was writing this up, but Claudia Cardinale is stupefyingly beautiful in this, and pretty much everything else she did at the time. You blink a little, because it doesn't seem possible. But no, she really did look like that.

She's just one of those women who has a major screen presence. But one of the interesting things about this Morricone score for me, is the memorable bits are really the character themes. I really honestly struggle to remember the other songs because the character themes are pretty strong.

And the Henry Fonda being the villain is one of those things that sadly loses it's shock unless you've seen a lot of his work. Stuff like The Ox-bow Incident which sadly is just not as widely availible as it should be.

https://youtu.be/lljIrAfBzYs

It's one of the films I'm hoping Netflix puts back up because I'd love to do a write up about it.

Astaereth

..still not as good as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

shryke

Astaereth wrote: »

..still not as good as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

I liked For A Few Dollars More better personally.

knitdan

At least it doesn't pretend the Civil War was fought in a desert.

Bogart

BBC had a great documentary series about cinema music a while ago. I've linked to it many times before, but here's the great bit about Morricone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bSvUc2uiMo

Thomamelas

Bogart wrote: »

BBC had a great documentary series about cinema music a while ago. I've linked to it many times before, but here's the great bit about Morricone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bSvUc2uiMo

I think it's fascinating that they grew up together. And I struggle to think of a composer and director that fit so well into this. And in particular, the way that Harmonica's theme is diegetic sound. It draws the soundtrack even further into the film and I think in a way removes some of the artifice of the soundtrack. There is so much silence. So much ambient noise in the film that having Harmonica play his theme gives the soundtrack an anchor that you just don't get to see a lot.

Thirith

Astaereth wrote: »

..still not as good as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

TGTBaTU is great fun and probably more consistently great, but I think Once Upon a Time in the West has the better standout scenes. The beginning and the climactic shootout - I'm not that much into westerns and I wouldn't even say I'm that big a Leone fan, but those sequences in OUaT... are so perfect: it's as if they've always existed and couldn't be done any other way.

Atomika

Sorry for the lateness. Family stuff. But here we go!



NIGHTCRAWLER

Kurt Wagner is often overlooked as a leader of the X-Men, but anyone who read the classic run in the late 80s and early 90s of Excaliber could tell you---


oh jesus no wrong ignore that




NIGHTCRAWLER

I remember reading once that, when it comes to movies, New York gets love letters while Los Angeles gets hate mail. I have a hard time refuting that, and maybe someone else here can provide some counterexamples of paeans to the West Coast's most important metropolitan area, but when I think back, even movies about shitty people doing seedy things in NYC never really seems to hold the city or its culture culpable. Sure, the mafia exists, but that's not ever really held the city's fault, nor is the political corruption, or the poverty, or class inequality, or history of racial tension, or blah blah blah on and on. New York endures, somehow, blameless and aspirational. I lived there, and that feeling of historical transcendence permeates everything there -- it's been there long before you, and will be there long after your gone. It binds the city together. I can walk down the street in my blue and orange jersey and a Wall Street millionaire in a suit will give me a quick nod and a quiet, "Let's go, Mets," before continuing on his way. I can be in Times Square or Astoria or Williamsburg and in this city of eight million people I'll run into people I know just as often as I did living in small towns back in Texas. It's a city with an identity, a collective consciousness, one big gigantic small town, where everyone pulls for the home team and when they say it's the Greatest City on Earth it's only because they mean it with every part of their being.

So what does that make L.A.? Dan Gilroy, in his first directorial effort, says Los Angeles is a festering cesspool of avarice and pretense, where people step on each other's necks just to sell bullshit to the highest bidder. L.A., says Nightcrawler, is the cold black heart deep inside the American Dream. It's the endgame of opportunity without a moral compass, where the laws of human decency do not supersede the endless hunger of the prime demographic. If New York is Vito Corleone saying "Nothing is more important than family," this city is Glengarry/Glen Ross's Blake -- "Nice guy? I don't give a shit. Good father? Fuck you. Go home and play with your kids. You work here, you close."

Lou Bloom knows how to close.

Unless you mean doors, but if you left it open, hey, that's on you.

A lot has been said about Gyllenhaal's performance here, and really, it's just fantastic. He lost weight for the role, and it's really amazing how something like that can affect and inform a character; his wiry frame and sunken eyes exude an intensity and singularity of purpose that's matched by his character's arc, drawing deeper and deeper into his own mad ambition. In other films, someone driven to such ends would be the villain, and though he's utterly villainous the film exonerates him by granting everything he wants in the end; really, what could be a more pointed condemnation of our culture than the unqualified success of Lou Bloom?

As much as I want to go on and on about the wonderful work Gyllenhaal does here (and it's a career best), I want to focus on an aspect of the film that I feel most reviewers of the film missed upon release. Undoubtedly, Nightcrawler is an indictment of our news media culture and its fixation on empty sensationalism and macabre viscera, and on top of that Bloom is a damn interesting character study in the tradition of Travis Bickle and Patrick Bateman. The movie works like gangbusters on both levels, but the more intriguing notion to me is how well Bloom's tear through the world of local news serves as a microcosm of the virulent ideology of anarchocapitalism so prevalent among the upper echelons of our political and economic elite.

"I'm looking for a job. In fact, I've made up my mind to find a career that I can learn and grow into. Who am I? I'm a hard worker. I set high goals and I've been told that I'm persistent. And I'm thinking, television news might just be something that I love as well as something I happen to be good at. Now I know that today's work culture no longer caters to the job loyalty that could be promised to earlier generations. But I believe that good things come to those who work their asses off and that good people who reach the top of the mountain, didn't just fall there. My motto is, 'if you want to win the lottery, you have to make the money to buy a ticket.'"

That's just one of several ready-made speeches Bloom gives to a potential employer early in the film. He's practiced and mannered, a facade, a veneer of what he thinks people want to hear, and I think that's what makes it an interesting exploration of unbridled avarice, because unlike Bateman or Bickle, Bloom is keenly aware of how his true aims would appear to the outside world and so constructs a persona that instead has his prey invite him in instead of forcing him out. He knows his persona is bullshit, and he knows he's selling bullshit, and he doesn't care because his audience and entire industry is beneath his scorn. All that matters is his ascension, and as we see early on with his pitch to the junkyard manager, he doesn't even particularly care what he's doing as long as he's moving up.

The porn scene continues to get ever more niche.

The very first scenes with Bloom we see his true nature. He's a thief, and a liar, and not afraid to hurt innocent people for his own gain. This is his M.O., and we see this cycle evolve and become more complex as he rises higher and higher within the news industry. He lies and embellishes to gain confidence, he lies to his employee about earnings and job requirements, he puts his employee in harm's way over and over again, he debases others simply to leverage them into more success, he removes competition ruthlessly, and all the while continues to spin this grand tale about himself, building on it as he builds his own career in the industry. In the film's finale, just when we think that Bloom has exhausted any shred of moral fiber we might expect of the lowest of us, he does something utterly unspeakable and depraved -- which I won't spoil here.

Bloom is a monster, and if there's such a thing as evil, it is present in him. But ask yourself, is any of his villainous behavior too different than what we blithely tolerate in corporations that drive our economy? McDonald's CEO defends paying his employees less than livable wages. Enron ruined the retirements of thousands of its workers just for a few people to make millions. BP has destroyed an entire coastline and paid a pittance in fines. Each despicable act that Gyllenhaal's character does without thinking twice can be found many times over in industries all over the US, and we have an entire wing of our politics devoted to making sure this doesn't change. Lou Bloom pulls himself by the bootstraps ever step of the way, and then grinds his heel on anyone unfortunate enough to get in the way.



This was my favorite film of all last year, and I could go on about several aspects of it, from the great cinematography to Bloom's sociopathy to the engaging turns in the supporting cast, but I'll save that for another day. Regardless, do yourself a favor and watch a truly compelling deconstruction of the myth of the American Dream.

Astaereth

I don't think Bloom is meant to be an indictment of those at the top of the game--at least, not directly. The problem isn't that McDonald's executives act like Bloom; it's that the actions of those executives and others like them have created a system that rewards the Blooms of the world, and to some extent mandates that us non-Blooms take at least some of our cues from him. If this film is a tragedy, then arguably the person the tragedy is happening to is the woman at the station whom Bloom tempts, manipulates, and compels into not just allowing his rise but to participate in it. Her career is languishing because the news industry requires things of her that she's not willing to do, things Bloom is eager to do, things he encourages her to start doing. Bloom is just a devil, she's the one who falls from grace. What the movie shows us isn't just that sociopathy works; it also shows us how sociopathy becomes the way the game is played by everyone, even those who have to fake it.

wandering

Unreasonably late thoughts on Witness:

-For some reason, when I watched this a year ago, I didn't really dig it, even though I was a fan as a youngster. I don't know what my problem was, because I really liked it this time around and I'm glad it was picked.

-The movie has a little bit of personal resonance for me because my family comes from a Pennsylvania Dutch background - according to the credits the movie was filmed in Lancaster County, which is about an hour from where I spent a decent chunk of my childhood.

-But also I think the movie should have resonance for a lot of people since I'm sure most people at some point have felt torn between the exciting and unfamiliar and dangerous, represented here by Book and the city, and the safe and comfortable, represented by the Amish town

-I like Peter Weir and John Seale's naturalistic lighting, and the contrast between how dark Amish dwellings are at night, and how unnaturally light the police office is:





-I'm often a big fan of synth scores but it really doesn't work here. Far too modern sounding for a movie about a traditional Amish community. It feels totally out of place when its playing over, say, the Amish raising the barn. Luckily the score actually doesn't show up much - a lot of the scenes are music-less. And I think the score actually does work for the scene where the corrupt cops are invading the Amish town - the music's harness and modernness fits in with that part of the movie. Perhaps the score should've gone back and forth between synth music and more traditional music - with the synth representing the English and the traditional music representing the Amish.

-I like that the movie respects the Amish's non-violent point of view. In any other movie, a scene where the hero punches a bully would be played as badass and heroic. Here, not so much. The punch doesn't make anyone happy, and note how the camera lingers on the very bloody bully's face, as if to say: violence is never trivial or cool. By contrast, when the Amish character is just sitting there, taking the bully's abuse, and turning the other cheek - it doesn't come across as weak, but noble. And note how Book's act of violence in that scene is the thing that draws the corrupt cops to him and puts him and the community at risk.

-And note how the violence in the finale is never satisfying, or fun. When Book drowns one of the bad guys in corn, leaving the man gasping for breath and begging for help, it's not a 'fuck yeah' moment - it's horrifying. And then, at the end of the day, it's not violence that stops the big bad - it's the Amish, non-violent, way that wins out instead.

Gim

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
2014, 100 minutes, dir. Ana Lily Amirpour

You don't really watch this movie, you swim around in it.

You swim around in the look of it. The small city of Taft, California (30 miles southwest of Bakersfield) stands in for an Iranian ghost town full of dead ends, frustrations, and one poorly maintained ditch. To help convey the mood, the film was shot in B&W* on an Alexa camera with old Panasonic anamorphic lenses which allowed the film to reference old westerns with their open, empty landscapes as well as the collaborative works of David Lynch and cinematographer Frederick Elmes with odd distortions towards the edges of the frame. The nighttime scenes are the film's best, shrouding the characters' faces in equal parts light and shadow. The way some scenes are lit allow for one of the lead actors, clad iconically in a chādor, to wander in and out of the shadows with ease. Interiors and exteriors look very similar and are almost interchangeable, both given to a hazy, moody atmosphere which the characters almost dance through.

You swim around in the pacing. Moments of action and fast editing are used sparingly. Most of the time this movie either wants to let a moment play out. At its most effective it keeps the viewer in a state of tense confusion, unsure whether they should laugh or cringe.

You swim around in its influences. My first thought while watching this was, "Damn, I'm getting some real strong early Jarmusch vibes here." Indeed, just as Stranger Than Paradise (and Down by Law to some degree) harkens back to neorealism and new wave filmmaking of the late 40s through the early 60s, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night feels like an 80s film that is revisiting the 50s and 60s. The lead actress looks like if Heathers-era Winona Ryder was sent back to star in an early Godard or film. Another nod to Lynch lies in many of the exterior locations which bear a striking resemblance to the industrial urban wastelands of Eraserhead, a world seemingly at work producing steam and pumping oil but not actually occupied with anyone. Sergio Leone hangs over this picture in a few ways as well; several of the confrontations between characters is framed like a gunfight might break out at any moment, one crosscutting montage sequence has a very Morricone guitar-sting score set to it, and a few works that were explicitly given to the cinematographer as visual influences were Wild at Heart, Rumble Fish, and Once Upon a Time in the West.

It's not a perfect movie; the story is kind of whatever, a lot of the acting and dialogue is only okay, and there's one shot that's almost a parody of what an art film would have as a random cutaway. But its combination of humor and tension is wonderful and there are scenes/moments that are dazzling, plus the English and Iranian music is a real delight throughout. I really don't want to even tell you about the plot, I want you to go into it as blind as possible.

Fine folk of D&D, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.


Warning: Movie contains one brief scene of nudity and one scene with implied sexual interaction



*Well, it was shot in a camera profile that was still color but allowed them to grade to B&W in post-production more easily than with a more standard color profile

Wash

directed by Matt Johnson

Found footage films get a lot of guff, and I don't think that's entirely undeserved. Shooting your film in the found footage style has been a decent way of getting around a low-budget, and the gimmick's lent itself well to the horror movie genre, but it's a thing like 3D in the sense that there are enough movies that fail to do it well that the whole thing's often dismissed by people.

This movie shouldn't be dismissed.

Without giving too much away, this is a school shooting movie. It follows our leads Matt and Owen, two highschool film geeks who are bffs that make movies together, alone and unpopular at a school where they are bullied daily. The movie starts with the two friends working on a film for class entitled “The Dirties” where the two of them take out the school gang (school bullies who appear in their movie, unaware that they've been filmed) and ends after one of them decides to make things real.

This film deals with some touchy subject matter and isn't for everyone, but something I appreciated about it was how humanely it tends to treat its leads. It's easy to look at the kind of violence addressed in this movie as sensational and the people who commit that kind of violence as monsters, but this film doesn't do that. We watch a friendship begin to fragment and a young, tormented guy disconnect from reality, and despite the promise of violence to come, you feel for them. You know where the movie is heading and you pray they change course.

The crew's intention seems to have been to make this movie as honest as possible. They shot with cue cards and a written story structure, but no real script or dialogue, using real people when possible in a lot of locations they didn't receive permission to film in, documentary-style on a budget of 10K.

A lot of what you see is fairly genuine. A lot of the people who appear in the movie don't know they're being filmed, and some of the people who are in on the production aren't really actors – Owen, one of the leads, is actually an english teacher, and Matt is played by Matt Johnson, the director and at-the-time Ontario Science Centre employee. Some instances of bullying in the movie are legit – either entirely spontaneous, or partly provoked off-camera, sometimes using methods observed by Owen in his experience as a highschool teacher – and some is partly-staged, where the act itself is fake but the people in the background aren't.

It's also really nice to watch a found-footage dealio where there's an explanation given for why everyone is mic'd all the time, including a scene where Matt barges in on Owen and reminds him to turn his lav on so that the camera could pick them up. There's a third person following Matt and Owen around for a lot of the film, recording everything they're doing, and part of why that ends up working so well for this movie is because at a certain point the camera feels like an extension of what's going on in Matt's head. And that's fantastic – because in Matt's head he's the hero and this is his movie, and it's that growing detachment that's scary.

Something that's fucked up to think about after you've watched this movie:

how easy it was for Matt to do everything he did.

Trailer -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJbR_ase5fY

Thomamelas

Glengarry Glen Ross

Directed by James Foley

Screenplay by David Mamet

Jacobkosh needed an extension so I'm doing a filler movie presentation.

Sometimes with a film you get just the perfect combination of things. You get a cast of actors who are all deeply talented. Guys who all can take a scene and work it just right. Jack Lemon. Al Pacino. Kevin Spacey. Alan Arkin. Ed Harris. Not a single turkey among them. You give them a script of poetry to speak. Listening to David Mamet give a masterclass on the use of profanity of film. Every fuck, every shit, every cunt placed just so. But never too much. And a director who steps back and lets the actors act. Camera movements that focus on the details. He expands out from the stage play which has two sets but he keeps the feeling of claustrophobia. Close in shots. Shots in phone booths. Shots where the weather and environment oppresses. And editing that just makes each shot seem to flow back and forth. Fluid editing that hides in the background. There are no perfect films but Glengarry, Glen Ross is pretty damn fantastic.

None of the men in the film are good men. They are basically pushing shady real estate investments. Every time they do something sympathetic, they turn around and do something assholish. Even their victims aren't sympathetic. But the nature of the script and the direction cause us to sympathize with whoever is being victimized in the scene. The lack of protagonist in the film gives us the ability to shift our sympathies around. It keeps us engaged enough with a group that if we had a single focus would repulse us. And part of that is on the actors. Watching Al Pacino sling bullshit nonsense is hypnotic. It doesn't make a damn bit of sense but his delivery just makes you fixate on him.

And Jack Lemon giving us moments where you can see his soul being crushed again, and again until he has a moment of triumph that leads to hubris and his fall again. That little moment of realization on Kevin Spacey's face when he puts it all together. Or listening to Ed Harris bully his co-worker into joining his scheme. They get these moments that the actors expand to fill the screen. These tight, claustrophobic shots that amplify petty little lives of terrible people into something with gravity.

The worst thing I can say about this movie is that the opening sequence is overly quoted by douchebags who don't get it. And really if that's the worst thing you can say about a film, then it has to be pretty damn good.

Bogart

It's a brilliant movie. Jack Lemmon is incredible in this. You see him disintegrate right in front of you.

Thomamelas

Bogart wrote: »

It's a brilliant movie. Jack Lemmon is incredible in this. You see him disintegrate right in front of you.

And not just once but again and again. Until triumph, then hubris then downfall. And when he shatters for the last time, no one notices.

wandering

Hey, I'm all caught up! Just as long as the next film isn't posted while I'm wri...oh dang it

Anyway one thing I like about a lot of the films so far is that they have popcorn movie elements, but unlike a lot of popcorn movies they have a modicum of respect for the audience's patience and intelligence. I mean these are movies with car chases and shootouts and vampire attacks, etc, but they also have things like...silence. And suspense. John Lasseter says that when a movie executive is watching your film, if there's even a hint of slowness, they'll shout "the audience is going for popcorn! They're going for popcorn!" It's easy to imagine a handwringing executive hating the opening of Once Upon of Time in the West, even though it's completely riveting - "Nothing's happening! Where's the action? The audience is going for popcorn!"

Thoughts on the individual films:

Once Upon a Time in the West: I'm glad a good western was part of the line up because westerns are one of those things I keep telling myself I need to check out. As a kid my dad was responisble for getting me into film but he had this prejudice against westerns - he likes to say "the only good western is Shane" - so there's a big western shaped hole in my film exposure. OUATITW was obviously really good - dripping with atmosphere and suspense, with riveting score by Morricone, and now I have more of a motivation to explore the genre.

Nightcrawler: This got me thinking about the banality of evil. How corporations simulatenously do evil things but don't feel evil - Nestle's killed literally millions of third world babies, but if you peaked in on a Nestle corporate meeting you wouldn't see people in hooded robes chanting sinister incantations (probably) - you'd see powerpoint slides and graphs and banal, professional corpspeak about profits and synergy. Just like how Louis Bloom's sociopathy is masked by banal corpspeak.

...I did find myself feeling a little bit dissatisfied with Nightcrawler's ending. Why? I'm not 100% sure - the climax is exciting and unsettling. But I think maybe I wanted Bloom to have risen higher up in the corporate hierarchy by the end. Bloom obviously has huge ambition, and the film obviously is trying to say something about corporate culture as a whole and not just local news, so why end with him just heading his own small news business? Why not give the film the epic sweep of something like The Godfather or Fight Club and end with Bloom as a big-shot billionaire CEO?

...But then I guess they say you shouldn't critique a film by creating an alternate version of it in your head and comparing the two. So uh nevermind, forget I said anything!

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night: One thing I love is when a film makes you feel like you've been transported to another place, and this one did a good job of that - I liked its Lynchian decaying urban landscape.

...Also: this one had something in common with Witness in that it has a female protagonist that wears traditional religious garb and so when you see them topless it's a little bit of a shock. Like you didn't even conceive of it as an option so you're kind of like "b..boo..boobies?!"

The Dirties: I thought the film did a good job making the leads feel like actual teenagers. It's not like other films where the teenage protagonists are fonts of non-stop witty repartee ...instead these guys are just...dorky. Cringe-inducingly dorky.

...I hated the message at the beginning though: "Out of respect for the victims and their families the footage has not been altered in any way." I audibly groaned and was like, oh fuck off. Sometimes that kind of thing can feel like good fun - I don't mind that Fargo did it - but trying to trick people into thinking a school shooting mockumentary is real just feels like terrible taste.