I’ve seen a few good films the last week or so, and haven’t piped up because they’re generally good–in fact, I enjoyed each of them quite a bit–but there wasn’t much ‘meaty’ to my initial reactions. But what the hell… I’m sitting in Nebraska, and I may as well do a post.
I said Shameless, the BBC series which plots like a soap but feels tonally like a grand piss-taking debauched cartoon, was good before, and I’ll say it again; it bears repeating. Mauer didn’t get into it, but the more Kris and I watched, the funnier we found it and the more of a joy we took in its great actors and generous amoral pleasure in misbehavior.
Kung Fu Panda won’t shatter your world, but it’s more than passably fun. It actually looks like a cartoon, which I really dug–and its energy is equal parts Stephen Chow and Chuck Jones. I wish it was a bit more outrageous or idiosyncratic, but I probably would have dug it even without having been dragged there by the kid. And the animation is often quite gorgeous and stylized.
The underappreciated Amy Heckerling got even less appreciation with her dumped-to-dvd I Could Never Be Your Woman, and it deserves better. Mind you, it is nothing more than a reasonably-good romantic comedy, given a bit more oomph by some decent turns by Michelle Pfeiffer and Jon Lovitz and the unfettered silly joy that is Paul Rudd. (I kept waiting for him to pull out his cougar cologne, made with actual bits of cougar, but while never quite that cartoonish the film lets him riff and be silly, including one excellent spit-take that ought to revive that lost art.) Plus, Heckerling uses the form for some mildly-subversive feminist challenges, both to traditional rom-com conventions and to various elements of child-rearing (by single moms), adolescent girls, and Hollywood. If every fourth joke is a bit of a clunker, you can still count on the fifth to be pretty damn good.
And I think the key to all of these films is their respective, deserved likability. They’re smart films, well-made, with actors who seem to be enjoying themselves, and if not home runs they’re all solid doubles.
The pick of this litter, though, is The Signal. Or at least the first 2/3 of the 3-act film, written/directed by a trio of guys, each section picking up the prior narrative but giving the story a tonal and thematic reframe. (This makes it feel like a really good anthology film, where everyone is riffing together, rather than just a ragtag collection of different styles.) Plot: tvs and cellphones are sending out a signal which makes people homicidal, or… well, it’s not just another raging-zombie film, but runs a nice nuanced riff in that the signal produces a kind of quasi-rationality, where people carefully make decisions to try to kill the people around them. (All of this suggests a sub-surface absurdist take on the impact of the techno-/pop-culture surround of our lives. But the film is, for the most part, happy to let that subtext stay sub.) The film grabbed me in its open, with a poorly-shot bit of backwoods torture, which freezes in one of those strange Orange-background image-turned-to-line-drawing Title Cards we used to see in bad ’70s films… and then it turns out this IS a film, on tv, which quickly turns to the signal, and we enter “Transmission I.” This first section does a very nice job at heightening the sinister eruption of the event, in particular around a husband as he noses around his wife (who’s just returned from cheating on him)… and we’re for a while not sure if he’s “infected” or simply terrifyingly near abusive…. the film exploits some of those great tensions about whether someone has been signalled or is merely “normally” violent. Then Transmission II picks up the story and reimagines it as a kind of black comedy. I really appreciated how the style of shooting changed. The first act does some very fine editing to move us back and forth in time, and shots are framed for maximum suspense–compositions with some figures a bit obscured, something happening in the corner of the frame (out of the corner of our eye). Act II exploits the standing-camera wide-frame, with lots of great reaction shots of three people. I’m bumbling about here, but the film doesn’t just shift tone or story but re-frames, so that we’re seeing the same story but with new eyes. And it’s quite funny, and still pretty unnervingly spooky.
Act III isn’t bad, but it drags, and it’s far less engaging than the first two acts. Still, the film is another in a string of pretty-good horror films I’ve seen in the last few months, and (particularly for the very, very low budget they worked on) it’s also another very well-shot and -edited little number. (After years of suffering through films that both depicted and seemed to have been edited by chainsaw-wielding maniacs, it’s nice to see some real style.)