Three Films Make A Post: Where Will You be When Disaster Strikes?

Benedetta (2021): This much lauded bit of middling nunsploitation just goes to remind me how little I think of most of the films of Paul Verhoeven. Sure, I’ll always have time for Flesh & Blood, The 4th Man and Robocop, but the rest of the director’s career is the progressive version of edgelord crap. This one is mired in the sort of conscious camp that just makes me want to punch something, mostly working its spleen on Christian iconography for the easy Christian baiting points, and showing no actual heart or imagination whatsoever. Don’t get me wrong, Verhoeven does have humungous technical chops – he’s just never using them for anything beyond being the guy at parties who is sneering at everything without ever having come by his cynicism the hard way, by actually understanding the things and people he hates. Why critics continue to lap this stuff up is beyond me.

Tenet (2020): On the other hand, I do think this – one of Christopher Nolan’s lesser reviewed films – is pretty damn great, taking a crazy idea, throwing a bunch of money at it and pretending to make a perfectly straightforward super spy blockbuster. Just that it’s one where the film’s basic tenet leads to fight and action choreography that runs counter to all the rules and regulations of the genre while at the same time trying its utmost to look as if all of this were perfectly par for the course. Which becomes particularly disorienting the more movies of this type you’ve seen and enjoyed.

The plot structure is just as palindromic as the film’s title, equally grounded in the film’s science fictional set-up, and enabling more of the philosophical and formal ambiguities most of Nolan’s films have, if you only care to look at them from the right angle.

That the film also works as a pretty fine super spy movie, if one with a rather confusing plot on first look, just adds to the particular delight I got from this movie.

The Bubble (2022): This mix of Hollywood blockbuster production satire with an ensemble including Karen Gillan and David Duchovny, and Corona pandemic comedy is apparently a rather devise movie. By all rights, I should hate this thing, what with it indulging in my least favourite genre, the film about filmmaking, and being directed by Judd Apatow, whose body of work usually makes me nearly as cranky as that of Verhoeven.

The problem is, I’m rather defenceless against a film which is in turns very funny not just as a Hollywood satire but also as one on modern times and mores, and just plain weird in a peculiarly personal way, and that’s populated by a cast who surf between modes and tones perfectly.

If I were in a nit-picky mood, I’d probably say the film could use to lose twenty minutes or so of its two hours plus running time, but then, even that feels like part of one of the film’s jokes.

Three Films Make A Post: When 400,000 men couldn't get home, home came for them.

Dunkirk (2017): Of the couple of reviews that don’t heap praise on Christopher Nolan’s somewhat different war film – a genre that’s not generally about retreat even if it is set against war as such – the ones that don’t complain about its lack of diversity - which I understand but personally don’t find relevant as a criterion for the quality of a film as a film - criticize its sentimentality. That one, I really don’t get, for if the film has one stark and obvious virtue to me apart from an incredible realization on a technical level, it is how much it avoids sentimentality in its treatment of material that could all too easily fall into that trap. Instead, it explores the humanity of defeat and humanity in defeat in a manner I find deeply compassionate, using Nolan’s huge technical acumen to get to a very human core of emotions the characters don’t ever precisely state because they cannot be precisely stated but only demonstrated. Which the film does as well as any film I’d care to mention.

Alice in Earnestland (2014): Where I find the core of Nolan’s film pretty easy to grasp and understand, I have a bit more trouble with Ahn Gook-jin’s dark comedy. It does fit nicely into the large number of contemporary South Korean films about class divisions and the shittiness of being one of the working poor, but having watched it, I’m not terribly sure what it is trying to say about this. The quirky structure it shares with many a film from Korea doesn’t make an attempt to understand what this one’s actually about on more than a plot level more difficult too. Some of the film’s weirdness and humour is certainly attractive, and some of it unattractive in a highly entertaining way bordering on splatstick (not to be confused with slapstick); I’m just not confident it adds up to much beyond that.


The Shop Around the Corner (1940): And here’s the point where I unmask as a total barbarian, for I do not prefer Ernst Lubitsch’s original version of the “a couple who hate each other in real life are unknowingly in love in letters” set-up to its later versions. It’s not just because I would have preferred the later movies’ emphasis on the romantic parts of the tale (though I certainly would) in this first version, too, I also don’t find the depiction of the social aquarium of the titular shop it puts in the romance’s place all that riveting. Of course, there are moments where the film delights with precise insight and a good joke or three, but there’s also a lot of restating of things the film has said just a couple of scenes before, and some truly obnoxious character work by William Tracy. Add to that the tragic fact that I’m not actually very fond of James Stewart in this stage of his career, and you might understand why I don’t find this classic all that classic.

In short: Interstellar (2014)

Not to sound like the head of the Christopher Nolan Appreciation Society (again), but then, if the guy continues to direct films I really rather massively appreciate, I hardly have a choice, or do I?

Anyway, a few notes on all the things I loved about this particular example for the fact you can indeed make a high budget mainstream Hollywood SF movie that is neither desperately stupid nor full of dishonest bathos (*cough* Gravity *cough*). Not that Interstellar is afraid of writing its feelings big; it does however put a lot of effort into coming by them the honest way, which is to say, by actually building the characters and themes these emotions spring from with great care, and consequently to great effect.

For my tastes, Interstellar is one among a rather small number of earnest-minded big SF movies that also manage to get the balance right between visionary aspirations, a sober view of the way the universe works, and a deeply human(ist) yearning for humanity to be or become more than just mere cogs in a mechanist system. And although this sort of thing of course always threatens to dissolve into an aspirational speech on how great humanity is because it is capable of love (this is after all a film that posits love as a transcendent force as real and built into the universe itself as gravity), the film doesn’t forget that its humanity also is a highly destructive force, at best straining to follow those impulses that transcend the evolutionary struggle for survival. It’s just not all there is; and – even though I’m philosophically a wee bit more pessimistic about humanity as such or love’s grand place in the universe outside the human heart – I really prefer this to the Cold Equations we use as an excuse not to become any better than we are.

That the film is as convincing as it is does of course also have a lot to do with some excellent and nuanced performances, with Jessica Chastain’s grown-up Murph and Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper being able to carry the film’s more problematic scenes through their difficulties. It’s also difficult to praise Nolan’s direction too much, I think. The organic way the plot’s emphasis shifts from Cooper’s plotline to Murph’s, mirroring the film’s thoughts about the connection between the big Out There and the Down Here, using the parallels between their parts of the plot until they unite again in the best way possible. It’s all excellent stuff.

And of course, it’s pretty needless to even mention the quality of the effects, or Hans Zimmer’s score, and so on, because in these more technical aspects, mainstream Hollywood is always dependable. Yet even in the times of the intelligent superhero movie, it’s still not quite often enough that these technical powers stand in service of a film actually worth the effort and the huge amounts of money thrown at it as to not mention this at all.

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In short: The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

After watching the final film of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, I've worked through various pieces of criticism about it, and I have to agree with about fifty percent of it. So yes, I agree this is a perhaps overlong, often overreaching and internally conflicted film. However, I actually think these things aren't bugs here, they are features; indeed they are for me what makes this a great film.

The thing with the film's overreaching, the way it wants to be about three or four films at once (one of them even a superhero version of A Tale of Two Cities) really comes down to what you expect of your multi-multi-million dollar movies: a tight, slick product, or an actual creative endeavour that sometimes won't be able to fulfil everything it tries, but that makes up for the moments - in this case about twenty percent of the time - when it fails with a willingness to go to interesting, sometimes even surprising, places between the spectacle and loud melodrama the blockbuster business affords. In other words, if we as an audience want our mainstream entertainment to take risks, we also have to accept that not everything in it will work out perfectly and slickly, that there will be roughness, but also honest excitement and actual ideas when things work out, which is what happens in about eighty percent of the movie.

The Dark Knight Rises is a film full of conflicting impulses in its narrative, its politics, its emotions, even its concept of heroism; despite being a superhero movie, it's a film lacking moral certainty (especially in the few moments when it pretends to have it). Things here are messy, and clear-cut answers are not to be found; this is about striving and asking questions, and questioning answers which for my tastes fits the character of Batman much better than making him a barrel-chested 70s love god and international adventurer or a grim and gritty psychopath. It's these cracks and the breaks in the film's structure and meaning that truly make the film work for me, its imperfections working as a reflection of the messiness of reality as well as the messiness of dreams.

Despite the remaining prevalence of Michael Baysian crap, it's a pretty exciting time for blockbuster cinema right now, when movies as different and great in their own ways like this or The Avengers can be made and will be watched by millions, movies that have no problems with pushing all the spectacle buttons while still being ambitious and aggressively non-dumb.

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Three Films Make A Post: Father and Son Related By Blood!!! Everyone's Blood!!

Inception (2010): Somehow, we have managed to arrive in The Future, a strange place where major Hollywood studios throw money at really pretty great directors like Christopher Nolan to make Philip K. Dick adaptations not based on an actual book by the author that still really feel a lot like Dick. It's quite unlike The Past, when major Hollywood studios threw money at directors to make Philip K. Dick adaptations based on actual books by the author that didn't have the slightest idea of what Dick's books were all about (and yes, I do count Blade Runner among the latter, which is a triumph of production design, but not much of an adaptation of the book it purports to be based on, what with it completely ignoring anything but the simplest among the questions the book asks).

I for one greet this bright future, even though I wasn't as confused by the film as many mainstream film critics seem to have been. Is it really that difficult to follow a clearly told, mostly linear story?

Child's Eye (2010): Some travelling young non-entities from Hong Kong find themselves trapped in Thailand during the red shirt protests. Stranded in a cheap, dark hotel, the group is soon confronted with the local female ghost and a dog-faced boy, and the dark secret of the hotel's owner.

The Pang Brothers are a sad case. While all of their films show a pair of directors perfectly able to apply their slick technical chops in interesting and visually arresting ways, most of these films are too conventional at heart to be memorable. This one is really no exception, even though (or because?) it is in 3D. There are a lot of really pretty pictures to gawp at, but not much is going on with them. Characters are uninteresting, the plot is about as fascinating as a slide show about your parents' holiday in Buxtehude, the timely historical background is wasted as a mere impediment to the protagonists running away, and there's no thematic depth or interesting subtext worth half a brain cell. To make matters even worse, the shocks are just not working at all, which leaves the audience with a film that's professionally boring and as vapidly pretty as its lead actors.

G-9 (2006): How little of interest there is about the Pang Brothers' film shows even more when I compare it to this fifteen minute ganime (which is a word that can be used for many types of non-traditional Japanese animation, but in this case means "narrated ink-drawings") by the (somewhat inescapable on this blog these days) Keita Amemiya. It's really a just a small trifle mixing elements of new wave SF with a bit of monster bashing and a sense of melancholy given expression more through the mood of the drawings and the simplicity of (barely) animation style than anything more concrete. Yet even so, it's much more human than anything that can be found in Child's Eye.

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