we like to watch

Has anyone heard of these discs? 2 discs, 16 short films from a pretty impressive range of European directors–not new stuff, but culled from bignames’ prior efforts. Just finished disc 1, which had a bleak and funny bit of corrosive stoic fury very much like the the director’s longer Songs from the Second Floor (Sweden’s Roy Andersson), the excellent Wasp by Andrea Arnold and equally fantastic Gasman by Lynne Ramsay, a very entertaining New-Wave parody by Toby Macdonald (who?), an old Svankmajer short, and then some stuff veering from forgettable whimsy to utter crap (Christopher Nolan’s ridiculous little Doodlebug). Disc 2 has films by Ridley Scott and Anders Thomas Jensen that I want to see, as well as the previously-discussed and excellent Six Shooter.

We (or maybe mostly I) have talked about Takashi Miike before (here, among other places), and let it be said: even at his goriest, and by god he can be gory, he’s among the most astonishing–and astonishingly sloppy–stylists working. His Western goes in the greater pile. It begins on a soundstage so resolutely, beautifully drawn and shot in such high-contrast saturated colors that when you see Quentin Tarantino putting on a lousy Southern drawl, then a Japanese actor accosting him in an almost-phonetically-pronounced English, and then later have Tarantino intone phrases from an alleged story of a Japanese temple in an English mimicking that strange Japanese-inflected pronunciation… well, let’s say the artifice is not mere surface ploy but is emphatically and for this viewer wonderfully central.

The story is a neat mash-up template of various generic influences both Western and Japanese (one of the characters even jokes that the protagonist shouldn’t try getting all Yojimbo), and there are some great lovely gun battles, and a few tricky technical games (one lovely bit when a man jumps out of his second-story window onto his horse) — all in all, not a movie to watch to sink into the plot but a movie which delights in–and produces the delight of–genre and aesthetic form. I REALLY enjoyed this.

Easily the best film I’ve ever seen about a marsupial, Executive Koala is a film noir about a driven Japanese junior exec (in a pickle factory), whose wife disappeared three years ago and whose recent lover has turned up dead — and he’s the suspect. And he seems to have things buried in his memory. And he’s a human-sized koala bear. Most of his colleagues are humans, except for the rabbit, and one frog who works at the local convenience store. There are secret Korean martial arts in this film, and a short interlude in musical theater (about Exec Koala’s childhood town and upbringing). There are also shady psychotherapists and discussions of kimchi and this was way too straight to be camp but way too strange to be straight.

God damn I love Japanese pop culture.

Following Mark’s lead, obliquely, I recalled a film celebrated in Z Channel that I’d always meant to see. I dutifully stuck Stuart Cooper’s Overlord onto my queue, and with equal diligence forgot entirely about it, ’til Mark’s recent post … and dug it out, moved it up–and here we are.

It’s worth seeing. In brief, Cooper tells the story of one soldier off to boot camp in preparation for the D-Day invasion, but he tells it in and out of time, with dreamlike flashforwards and -backs, sequences that seem half-dream or disconnected memory, interwoven with archival footage–particularly many stunning sequences of planes strafing, bombing, or just ominously dragging a shadow over bucolic landscapes. It’s a compact Thin Red Line, as dreamily philosophical as Malick with half the gas, at a third the length; its impact on Spielberg seems evident, as well, as at a fraction of the cost Cooper captures the terrifying moments before and at landfall in Normandy. Maybe that’s unfair, but since aside from Z I’d never heard of the film, and it only recently got the Criterion treatment, it seems crucial to trace its impact on those later acclaimed films.

And like those films, Cooper’s war is gorgeous. Here’s the thing that got me posting– Continue reading Art (of) War

Although the events depicted occurred thirty years ago, Gus Van Sant’s Milk feels culturally fresh and politically relevant—a new film for a new American order about a community organizer preaching for hope and change. Milk is a bio-pic but it avoids many if not all of the genre’s pitfalls by focusing on an eight-year period in Harvey Milk’s life, specifically narrowing in on the anxieties and community tensions surrounding the controversial 1978 vote for the Briggs Initiative, otherwise known as Proposition 6, a law that, if passed, would ban gays and lesbians and anyone who openly supported GLBT rights from teaching in the California public schools. This, if you are old enough to remember, was one of orange juice fascist Anita Bryant’s (the Ur-Sarah Palin but also one of the first celebrity voices of the nascent American culture wars) efforts to rid America of degenerates in order to “Save Our Children” from the “homosexual agenda.” Now there’s a bio-pic worth making, but I’ll leave that to John Waters. Continue reading MILK