Month: October 2007

Rather than a sneaky, smirky post on this under my Halloween thread, Hubert Sauper’s documentary Darwin’s Nightmare deserves its own focus. Ostensibly the title comes from the ecological fuck-up extraordinaire in Lake Victoria, where the introduction of the Nile Perch–while economically a boon–has been an environmental disaster, decimating other fish species. But, as noted, these fish created a booming fish export industry in the surrounding cities and villages… Continue reading Other kinds of horror

This is a classic martial arts movie from 1978, though I had never seen it. A remastered version with some good extras was just released by the Weinstein brothers’ Dragon Dynasty label and Netflix has it, though there was a long wait. Starring Gordon Liu in his prime, and opening with the ShawScope logo, you can see why Tarantino wanted to recreate some of its feel in Kill Bill.

In any case, it is very good. The plot line has a young rebel going to a Shaolin temple to learn kung fu in order to fight off the tartar hordes who have invaded China. 35 chambers teach elements of the art of kung fu, each more advanced than the one before (again, the scene in which the Bride is trained — by Godon Liu — in KB vol 2 explicitly harks back to this part of the movie). The 36th chamber involves a dispute over whether Buddhist monks should be training the masses to fight the invaders. Good, old-fashioned martial arts scenes with no wires and remarkably little cutting. Recommended.

A really fine film. Rolf de Heer (who did the very, very, very different Bad Boy Bubby) here works with Peter Djigirr and the people of Ramingining to shape a story that recounts a distant cultural past and evokes a distant storytelling tradition. The film has two frames: as the camera languorously pans over and through remote Arnhem land in northern Australia, a narrator talks to us of his ancestors and of stories told; we eventually come upon a group of men, making canoes to hunt geese, one of whom begins to tell his younger brother a tale of misplaced love in the distant past; the ‘central’ story is that tale told, in the tale told. (And even in that told, when characters imagine or hypothesize about what has happened or might happen, we get enactments–stories unfolding within the story, within a story.) The film moves back and forth, playing with our expectations (the narrator laughing at our impatience). Continue reading Ten Canoes

There are plenty of worthy movies out there, and there are plenty that fit comfortably in the “enjoyable crap” category. But more and more, I find myself appreciating movies that fail — often in a big way — but have something important going for them. These are not truly great movies, with a minor flaw in them. They are fundamentally flawed, but somewhere within them there is a germ of a good idea, or just one fine scene, one performance, one moment that rescues it from obscurity and makes it compelling. There was an earlier thread of movies we are ashamed we had not watched or had not enjoyed. Here is a category of movie to be ashamed that one liked, but to still see something worthwhile in the whole enterprise.

So my first candidate is Falling Down, with Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Tuesday Weld, and Frederic Forrest. It’s a crude vigilante movie that asks us to applaud a domestic terrorist, that tugs shamelessly at our heartstrings, that gives us explosions as well as a child’s tears, that caricatures the people “D-Fens” kills (or causes to die). Worthless. Exploitative. And yet… I just watched it again on HBO and it captures something about middle class alienation that we rarely see. There are a handful of scenes that, for me, rescue the movie. The Douglas character sitting in traffic at the beginning (the heat and insect buzzing remind me of the train station scene in Once Upon A Time in America), the black character holding up the handwritten sign saying he is “not economically viable”, Douglas watching home movies of his ex-wife and child and seeing his own anger and the fear in their faces, Duvall’s early tender scenes on the phone with Weld. There are too many wrong decisions to make it a decent movie, but enough good ones to make it memorable.

So–as the month proceeds, I’m committed to seeing some horror films. The following three sort of fit the generic bill, but alas while most clearly intra-genre two of the films also failed to bring the noise.

1408 is well-shot and lovingly attuned to genre tradition. It’s also about as much fun as staying in a hotel room. A jaded hack writer kicking out quasi-travelogues of the supernatural (John Cusack, using his sad and grim faces mostly, instead of his other two options–the blank or the smiley) goes into one “evil fucking room” and haunting ensues. In the story by Stephen King, it’s pretty stripped down; I don’t recall a backstory which gives a rationale (sort of) for the writer’s jadedness (this is NOT a spoiler–the requisite dead kid) which did give the film its small bit of emotional juice but also drained out what remained of my pleasure in the film. Why didn’t this work? Again, I liked the turn to the traditional–no torture scenes, just ghosts and evil spaces. But I was never spooked in the least, and mostly I was bored. I kind of blame Cusack… and maybe it’s unfair, but damn he seemed more impassive than jaded. Everything seemed tamped down, controlled.

Black Sheep wants to be uncontrolled, the opposite of tamped down–revved up, Peter-Jackson-crazed with gore and the slapstick potential of extreme horror. But the film suffers from a very similar ailment as the above: while utterly loony in its premise (genetic sheep turned killer, also somehow able to transfer sheep-ness into humans bitten so that we get a few transformations), and in love with endless shots of sheep munching happily on piles of innards or grabbing and stretching bits of rubbery flesh farther than you ever thought biologically possible, the film was also boring. It was so utterly conventional in its enactment of its strange premise that the helium seeped out and instead we get a pretty tedious straightforward horror film, saved only slightly by a relative competence in its execution, a lack of pretension, and some decent enough acting. I enjoyed the trailer more than the film, though.

Black Book probably deserves another thread. I thought about sticking it under our thread on Soderbergh’s Good German, because this film seems a far more effective embodiment of classic war-time Hollywood narrative married to a bleaker, more cynical critique of those films’ romanticism. I watched, and quite enjoyed–Paul Verhoeven updates this WWII melodrama, infusing it with a vicious sense of human nature (and occasional flashes of ironic situational humor) and an intriguing willingness to play the horrors of that war (somewhat explicitly addressed) as fodder for thrilling suspense. I was very taken by the lead Carice van Houten, who is fearless and enthralling in her performance–capturing exactly that sense of the ’40s heroine in her semi-hardboiled yet earnest attitude. Sebastian Koch (from Lives of Others) is also quite good. I guess what drew me in, besides the strong acting and excellent pacing and suspenseful story, is that I kept thinking that it seemed a rather glib way to tell the story, and the film seemed self-conscious of its own glib repression or exploitation. . . and yet it’s not ironic or winking in form (which we might say of Soderbergh’s film). Not really horror, but occasionally horrifying, and–like many reviewers I cautiously toss this word out–entertaining.

Yeah. Since we’re talking politics in the ‘seventies threads, here’s a fine little piece of genre entertainment with its tongue in cheek, heart on sleeve, and hand on Mao’s little red book, from 1971. Opening with a quote from the Chairman about the necessity of violence in a revolution, Duck plays sincerely and with silly abandon (often at the same time) with the mythologies of the bandit and the revolutionary. Continue reading Duck, You Sucker