Three Films Make A Post: Once the pigs tasted blood... No one could control their hunger!!

The Farthest (2017): I had heard great things about Emer Reynolds’s documentary about the Voyager mission. Actually having seen it, I find myself mostly annoyed by it. In theory, there’s an incredible richness of material in here, interviews with a bunch of intelligent and important women and men who were involved in one of the great achievements of human history, but what the film does with this is pretty pitiful. Because its assumed audience are apparently idiots who can’t follow a thought that’s longer than ten words, it turns these highly intelligent people into talking heads out of a shitty “TV’s Stupidest Awards” show, dispensing sound bites instead of thoughts. Add pretty pictures, a cloying soundtrack, and a nearly desperate drive to entertain instead of to enlighten, and you have your award-winning documentary right there.

Proof (2005): As John Madden’s adaptation of David Auburn’s play proves, you can make things more accessible without making them painfully stupid. Madden also mostly manages to turn the stage play into a movie while neither ignoring the roots of the piece nor having the visual elements be pure, functionless flim-flam. This features Gwyneth Paltrow (before her unfortunate contemporary career turn into hawking crap to the gullible), Jake Gyllenhaal, and Anthony Hopkins (actually acting instead of doing the shtick he has frequently fallen back on after Silence of the Lambs) at their best, working through the film’s complicated emotional and intellectual turns, bringing its thoughts about family, mental illness, “Great Men” and their daughters, and quite a bit more to life. Sure, from time to time things are a bit mid-brow, please give us an Oscar, Hollywood (there’s an inadvertently hilarious montage full of chin-stroking mathematicians you gotta see to believe), Madden can’t get away from completely even in his best movies (let’s not speak about that thing with Nicholas Cage), but the film’s stretching far inside of these genre structures.


Summer Wars aka サマーウォーズ (2009): Because I am apparently a curmudgeon today, turns out I’m also not quite as fond of this anime by Mamoru Hosoda about a traditional, if crazy, Japanese family saving the world as the rest of said world apparently is. It’s not that the animation isn’t beautiful, or the character design doesn’t breathe warmth and love for these characters, nor am I complaining about a lack of clever ideas. It’s just that this thing is so incessantly emotionally manipulative, doing its damndest to squeeze the last possible tear drop out of its audience that it rubs me all wrong, nearly becoming a satire of the things it praises by the pure power of laying everything on so thick and then ladling tears and good cheer on top. Honestly, I felt slightly nauseated by it.

Three Films Make A Post: What was once in the deep is now in the shallows

Terra Formars (2016): When he isn’t making fantastic remakes of classic samurai films, or doing some really off-beat movie that harkens back to his really wild times as a director, Takashi Miike somehow finds time in his insane schedule to direct stuff like this big budget adaptation of a popular anime and manga series. Because this is Miike, the thing absolutely feels like a live action manga, so except acting so broad you could fit Gamera through it, absurd hair, special effects that really don’t care if they look “realistic” or not, a plot that manages to be straightforward and linear yet also difficult to parse to anyone who has no idea what this Terra Formars business is about (like me), insane moments of gore, kitsch, a Kane Kosugi cameo, Rinko Kikuchi, insect super powers, and a tone so chipper it becomes absurd. It all comes together – as far as this stuff even can come together – into the sort of film I can  joyfully let wash over me, be pleasantly entertained and only mildly freaked out, and love Miike for making this sort of pop art nonsense in between more serious, and (even) more weird and personal stuff, treating all these different types of filmmaking with the same vigour.

Hard Eight (1996): Paul Thomas Anderson’s Reno-set debut feature length film is a gambling movie, a film about guilt, a film about lies, a film about people who are all a lot more dysfunctional than they seem at first look, and a film about people trying to live in the backwaters of Americana,so it’s basically laying the foundation for every film Anderson made after. This one’s a comparatively small movie, concentrating on a handful of characters – played wonderfully by Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow and Samuel L. Jackson, and a few moments in their lives. While he knows how to organize large swathes of characters, Anderson has always been just as good at more intimate portrays of the lost and the lonely, so there’s great richness, depth and texture to these characters and their relations as well as to the unglamorous (Reno is basically Las Vegas without the pretence of class, right?) places they inhabit.


Les glaneurs et la glaneuse aka The Gleaners and I (2000): It is educational to compare great Nouvelle Vague director Agnès Varda’s late career documentaries with those of her lesser peer (sorry, Godard admirers, I’m half joking) Jean Luc Godard. Where Godard’s documentary work is formal and abstract, Varda’s philosophical approach concentrates on the personal and the concrete, treating ideas through their connection to people and seeking truth(s) about the large in the small. Consequently, this digitally shot – often playful in the best of ways - documentary about gleaners and gleaning (very much in the sense of people who pick what is left), their connection to art and the role of the artist – particularly Varda - as gleaner is full of a warm interest for the experience of people – particularly the poor, the destitute and the somewhat damaged who aren’t usually allowed to speak for themselves (even the people honestly fighting for their rights prefer to speak about them and rather prefer to treat them as abstracts).

Three Films Make A Post: They were created to save mankind. Something went wrong.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004): It’s taken me a good decade to learn to appreciate Kerry Conran’s only feature film. And now I’m thinking “what the hell is wrong with me and why has it been taking me so long”? Of course, in that decade, I consumed a very fair share of the pulps, serials, and comics this is an updated homage to, and gained a bit more knowledge about the people who built the wall this particular ball is bounced off of. Though, honestly, even before that, I should have appreciated the detail-rich production design and costuming, the love and care taken with a peculiar yet effective visual aesthetic, the sure-handed way Conran handles his one-note (but the right one) characters, the fact that – unlike in many a film of this type – Gwyneth Paltrow’s reporter character Polly Perkins actually gets to do stuff beyond looking pretty and being a love interest (although she handles that part rather excellently too), the expert pacing of the one damn and awesome thing after another plot, and so on, and so forth. Seriously, what is wrong with me?

The Nightmare (2015): If you’re looking for an actual documentary about sleep paralysis and the people suffering from it, Rodney Ascher’s documentary won’t be for you, because it basically handwaves away the actual science, concentrates on its mostly cheesy re-enactments of the sufferers’ hallucinations, and ends up with a lot of rambling about Jesus, aliens, and demons, and never makes even the tiniest sceptical or critical gesture towards even the greatest bullshit story. Perhaps, if one doesn’t get quite as annoyed by the film and its approach, one might be mildly creeped out by the archetypal nightmare imagery, but honestly, there are quite a few films admitting they are fiction that are much better at that,

Hangar 10 (2014): I found myself positively surprised by Daniel Simpson’s POV horror film of the UFO persuasion, which makes use of the UK’s favourite UFO incident. It even makes good use of it, actually hinting at various bits of the mythology concerned during the course of the film instead of just waving its hands and screaming UFOs. Like with a lot of POV horror films, there are some moments of mild tedium around the end of the first act but the film actually escalates things from there nicely, going through various POV horror greatest hits but avoiding the most annoying ones and ending in a handful of effectively creepy scenes quite its own.

There’s an actual visual pay-off in this one, too. Add to that Simpson’s ability to frame atmospheric and effective shots while keeping in hand-held consumer camera mode, a decent cast, effectively creepy sound design and subtract the sort of automatic hatred many people have evolved towards the POV form, and you actually have a clever and effective little piece of low budget horror.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,british movies,adventure,sf,pulp,documentary,woo woo,horror,kerry conran,jude law,gwyneth paltrow,rodney ascher,daniel simpson

Three Films Make A Post: Heavy metal goes medieval

Iron Man 3 (2013): If someone had told me ten years ago that a few years later, some of the best non-stupid blockbuster movies around would be a series of interlocked Marvel superhero movies produced by Disney, I'd laughed him off, but there you have it. Shane Black's Iron Man 3 is a very fine example of its species, hitting all the mandatory Hollywood blockbuster beats with relish and talent, but adding some intelligent twists to certain parts of the formula without trying to completely deconstruct it. It's a film absolutely impossible for me to dislike, seeing as it - as most of the other Marvel movies - is the kind of pop high budget cinema the blockbuster concept should be ideal for; of course, far too often, we get Michael Bay movies or whatever that Green Lantern thing was even supposed to be instead. Happily, there's a difference between "far too often", and "always".

The Midnight Meat Train (2008): With hindsight, you can see this Clive Barker adaptation as director Ryuhei Kitamura's first step away from his old show-off direction ways towards tighter and moodier approaches to filmmaking. About half of Midnight Meat Train is a pretty swell tale of big city paranoia told in ways that often remind me more of 70s horror cinema than of video clips. The film's second half is a bit of a mess, though. Particularly the murders see Kitamura fall into his old direction pattern featuring too much CGI and braggart editing and camerawork distracting from what should be gritty and unpleasant. The film also suffers from a script that doesn't quite seem to know how to sell the film's supernatural aspect, nor how to make Bradley Cooper's increasing obsession with the true heart of the City believable. Neither Kitamura, never much one for actual humans on screen, nor Cooper himself seem to know either.

In fact, in true Kitamura style, most of the performances (except Leslie Bibb's lamely doomed girlfriend Maya) are rather drab, leaving as Midnight Meat Train a film lacking an emotional core.

Sleeping Dogs (1977): Believe it or not, before Roger Donaldson went to Hollywood, he made some fine movies in his native New Zealand. Case in point is this pretty bitter, very 70s sort-of thriller about Sam Neill trying his best not to get involved in or against a new and improved fascist New Zealand but ending crushed by the wheels of history anyway. The film does avoid heroic, mostly even defiant gestures like the plague and instead shows flawed incompetents like you or me as they stumble through a world that suddenly has turned nasty on them, with no way out and no control at all regarding their own fates. Not even violence does change much.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,new zealand movies,in short,superheroes,action,horror,sf,thriller,shane black,robert downey jr,gwyneth paltrow,ryuhei kitamura,bradley cooper,leslie bibb,roger donaldson,sam neill