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Post by TheNewMads on Aug 16, 2011 7:55:16 GMT -5
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)
a deeply misantropic film, which i thought was basically appropriate. on the other hand, i remember hearing about the original series of films from the 70s having kinda racialist overtones, which i never saw, but there seemed to be some moments in this new movie that made me wonder. i don't want to get too specific because i'm not sure it's not my imagination, in which case i'll be stoking controversy needlessly. my old film professor will almost certainly have written a review of it so i'ma check it out and see what she said, sussing out racialist overtones is her stock in trade.
it had very odd pacing. the scenes were very short and seemed strung together and disconnected, esp. in the beginning. there was no transition or flow. i think because the movie didn't really have any subplots, other than the one with the researcher's father having alzheimer's, which is more like a branch of the main plot. it makes the thing feel like its only raison dett is to be a showcase for the CGI. and that's my final gripe, the CGI in this movie is SO OVERRATED. yes, it's very detailed. my problem is the physics. the motions do not look at ALL natural. when the apes are climbing hand over hand, they seem to essentially go in a frenetic straight line. you don't get any sense of conservation of momentum, you don't feel their weight drop down, you don't see their arms strain as they lift it back up again. when they jump onto a car, the car doesn't wobble on its suspension. really? a 300-pound ape lands on a car and it doesn't even move? i'm gonna have to call no way on that one, and it's an odd oversight for a team that seems to have paid an incredible amount of attention to making this thing look real. if you can't afford to mock up the cars to shake through some propwork, just cheat and have the camera shake as the apes land. usually i don't like shakicam but in that context, it's a totally legit style. but no, there's none of that physics, and that makes the apes feel like they've just been very lovingly drawn on top of the background image, like they're just elaborate negative scratches.
and before you say that's just an element of CGI, i actaully thought the 1998 godzilla -- an abysmal movie overall -- did a pretty good job of making godzilla look not only big, but HEAVY. this movie almost totally missed that.
having done nothing but gripe about it, i thought it was overall a pretty good movie. i'da probably given it a 6. mainly because it's very thematic, it levels a cultural critique that's really relevant right now, which i read as being about scientific endeavor and its relationship to this notion of the "posthuman," exploring some of the positive and negative aspects of that. the movie borrows from the "pandora's box" style theme effectively, and it's engaging to watch it play those themes out.
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Post by TheNewMads on Aug 20, 2011 13:15:44 GMT -5
Antichrist (2009)This movie appears to be an answer to the question, What would a women's studies splatter movie look like? We open with a highly stylized, black-and-white, relentlessly slo-mo full-insertion sex scene (Von Trier wanted to get that NC-17 rating in the bag early on, it seems). As the two lovemakers wrangle, their child determinedly defenestrates into a snowy courtyard, teddy bear in tow, and dies. The grief-stricken couple struggles to come to grips with their guilt and sorrow, and when this doesn't work, they repair to a cabin in the woods that "She" is having nightmares about. "He" (going after the feel of parable, Von Trier opts to give neither of his principals a proper name), being a therapist, unwisely chooses to enact a treatment program on his distraught wife, which leads them both into a downward spiral of confused self-reflection. This all transpires over an emerging substrate of portents and bizarre happenings. Their woodsy cabin is showered with a rain of acorns. "He" catches frequent sight of miscarrying deer, snarling coyotes, and rotting birds, sights suffused with an air of hallucination. "She" grows more and more frenetic and volatile before suddenly seeming to be cured of all her mental anguish. Turns out, though, this is just the calm before the storm, and she, snapping, tortures her husband abysmally (and preposterously), leading to a fight for survival in the woods that consumes the movie's second hour.  Von Trier strikes me as a film scholar who's somehow, accidentally, found himself in the position of film maker. Exhibit A is his preoccupation with psychotherapy. This is an obsession of movie theorists and critics, but mostly because they see themselves as charged with recovering the authorial intent of directors. Moviemakers themselves seem to care more about the art of the human mind than the science, and so Freudian methods and precepts interest them less. An exception is Hitchcock, of course, and "Antichrist" seems to owe a bit of a debt to "Spellbound." But Von Trier's universe, unlike Hitchcock's, doesn't allow for the comforting psychoanalytic concept of the therapeutic breakthrough. A classical Freudian, Hitchcock transmits, in "Spellbound," a belief that if an analysand's core childhood trauma can be uncovered, the patient can approach something like a "cure." The more cynical/pomo Von Trier allows for nothing of the kind, and in fact takes pains to make this disavowal explicit by giving "She" an apparent breakthrough that's actually a breakdown. Hitchcock's world is one of singular and formative trauma. Von Trier's is one of proliferating and multiple primal scenes, of people who are always, already, and incurably damaged. On the other hand, it might be a mistake to read "Antichrist" as a referendum on classical psychoanalysis since Von Trier deliberately makes this experiment a non-scientific one: as a therapist, as any undergrad psych minor will tell you, you do not diddle your patient, or you have a maze of transference and counter-transference to look forward to. One gets the impression "He" and "She"'s blithe disregard for this cardinal rule has much to do with the horrors that ensue. Never mind that much of "She"'s subliminal psychosis has to do with a women's studies thesis (largely kept secret from her husband) the gist of which seems to have been that Woman, throughout the centuries, has incorporated much of the horror of Patriarchy into the essence of her being. Like "He," who cannot draw a dispassionate line between his therapeutic profession and his personal life, "She" seems to have absorbed this notion into her emotional self, and for both, the consequences are tragic. This is another major theme of "Antichrist," the inability of the professionally gifted to isolate their professions from their personal lives, and it's probably not a coincidence that Von Trier is rumored to have suffered from a debilitating clinical depression throughout the making of "Antichrist." His characters' inability to separate the professional and personal plainly has an echo in his own. But that's why artists are who they are. It's why Van Gogh died with just one ear. "Antichrist" is visually beautiful, but the narrative is messy. Von Trier seems unsure whether he wants to work in a multi-act structure or a binary one, for instance; the movie's explicitly divided into six acts with graffitiish title cards, but the mood of the film seems to shift irrespective of this structure. To me it felt like two movies, one prefacing "She"'s faux breakthrough and favoring the genre of psychodrama, the other pursuing an ironized version of the traditional splatter film. The second half feels more like a failure than the first; you get a sense Von Trier is captivated with mounting a critique of the traditional "Friday the 13th"-style slasher by reversing the genders and having the woman, rather than the man, enact a consuming misandry on the male target of her frustration and fury. Somehow this part comes off false to me. The specific nature of the wounds "She" inflicts is inventive but implausible (in splatter movies, the forensics of specific wounds is always key). Though Charlotte Gainesbourg turns in a strong performance, to me, Willem Dafoe often seems lost, as though he's gamely turning in a performance but is -- understandably -- unsure what the movie he's acting in is about. You'd think Dafoe's iffy thespianism would redown more to the first half than the second, where his job is mainly to crawl around and act like he's in pain, but I found that this is exactly where he lost me; his character's coherence degrades throughout the film as I get a growing sense Dafoe lacks an understanding of subtext, and it's exactly when his character's emotional trajectory hits its zenith that these flaws become most pronounced. Essentially, "Antichrist" is a movie that doesn't so much unspool as unravel, but Von Trier's eye, or someone on his crew's, is undeniably brilliant, so Antichrist is an engaging movie to watch fail because of its undeniable visual beauty and its relentless, sincere emotional darkness. I associate Von Trier with two other very sophisticated moviemakers who take grief and violence as their core themes, and whose films share a common feel of thoughtful brutality -- Michael Haneke and Catherine Breillat, are who I have in mind here -- and of the three, I'd give Breillat the trophy for formal intelligence, but Von Trier definitely takes the gold for visual loveliness. If you're like me, and I hope for your sake you're not, what will most haunt you about "Antichrist" is the prologue, and the look of naive, mysterious serenity on that little boy's face as he falls with his teddy bear in thousand-frame-per-second slow motion toward his inevitable death. Von Trier, depressed? You don't say. 
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Post by TheNewMads on Oct 22, 2011 10:23:45 GMT -5
Best Worst Movie (2009)
Really quite good! A documentary about a reunion of the cast and crew (well, the cast, mostly) of "Troll 2," a random late 80s "horror" movie about vegetarian goblins who torment an out-of-town family. Apparently, Troll 2 has become a legend in the bad-movie-lover set (a fact i didn't know) and was even the #1 worst movie of all time on imdb for a time. (last i checked, the worst movie on imdb was some paris hilton vehicle that's unlikely to become a cult classic.)
the movie mostly explores the characters who played in Troll 2, including the charismatic dentist-slash-bodybuilder father; the mother, who's gone on to become an agoraphobe; the italian director who, misinterpreting Troll 2's sleeper status, thinks himself an auteur, etc. When not doing this, the movie speculates as to what the reason might be for "Troll 2"'s success, with theories varying from its thoroughly unironic earnestness to the idea that, from a technical point of view, it's a film that literally gets everything wrong. (This is an honor i think should be reserved for "(500) Days of Summer," but i digress.) I found it interesting that the consensus seemed to be that no one was quite sure what "Troll 2" did to earn its notoriety, but whatever it was, the movie must have done it very consistently. Well, if it was so consistent, wouldn't it be more obvious? I actually think the movie might not have anything particularly special about it and the lion's share of its success comes from the fact that that "Oh my go-o-o-o-od" clip went viral on Youtube back in the day. This isn't really a possibility the movie entertains.
I also felt the movie missed some of the real stories by focusing too much on George Hardy, the dentist and charismatic lead. Hardy's a striking presence, to be sure, but -- and i don't mean this cruelly, i think he'd agree -- not a man of any particular depth or nuance, yet the moviemakers choose to do most everything through his POV. I actually thought the most interesting stories came in the extras, when Michael Stephenson (the director) interviews some of the bit players. "I've mostly frittered away my life," says the actor who played Grandpa, talking about how his acting career never paid off and how, in his late days, he has no family to comfort him. But then he adds with an odd serenity, "What else is there to do but fritter away one's life, really?" Don Packard, who plays the sinister drugstore owner, is confessional about his history of anxiety, depression, drug use and drifting, and the people, mostly women, he used along the way to assuage his neuroses. "Overall, I think I've done more harm than good," he admits.
Those are the two moments that stick with me the most and they were in the extras, not in the proper film. I went in to "Best Worst Movie" thinking, how could you possibly make a full-length feature about something like Troll 2? By the time I got to the end of both the feature and the hour-plus of extended interviews, I got the impression there was still quite a bit of the story of Troll 2 that "Best Bad" hadn't managed to tell. But, you know, people being the complicated things they are, maybe every movie’s like that.
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Post by TheNewMads on Feb 20, 2012 16:04:09 GMT -5
The Eagle Has Landed (1976) If the flagrant anti-Nazi bias of most World War II movies has always rankled you, then this one's for you. Late in the war, Hitler orders a feasibility study on the idea of kidnapping Winston Churchill and using him as a bargaining chip to coax a negotiated peace from the Allies. A cadre of "good Germans," led by an eyepatched Robert Duvall, while researching this harebrained idea, discover that Churchill is actually traveling to a small out-of-way English town on vacation. Rather than complete the study they decide to go ahead and parachute in, masquerading as Polish troops on exercise. Once there, they discover that kidnapping Churchill might actually be more feasible than they'd originally thought. Anyone expecting "Force 10 From Navarone" is likely to be disappointed by this movie, since the first half is all spycraft and subplot, precious little action. But you do get to enjoy several A-list actors delivering a well-written story. I'd say Michael Caine is best as the conflicted Nazi colonel who abhors the germans' treatment of the Jews and hopes that kidnapping Churchill will bring an early end to the war. Donald Sutherland does well as an Irish separatist who collaborates with the Nazis out of hatred for the British crown. (His accent is a bit Lucky-Charmsish, though, and seems to slip in and out from time to time.) JENNY AGUTTER!!!!1 is great in a small but important role as Sutherland's conflicted lover. (Sadly, her talent's a bit wasted, as usual: their affair feels hasty and it's not entirely clear what they see in each other. But they both work with what they've got.) There's also some connections for misties and B-movie fans: Treat Williams in an early role as an earnest American Army captain who happens to be stationed near the village and finds himself swept up in the intrigue. Larry Hagman chews up the scenery as a glory-seeking Yank colonel begging to be fragged. Donald Pleasence, almost unrecognizable in beady specs and reichstache, gives us a surprisingly jovial Himmler and the movie itself is directed by the same auteur who helmed "Marooned," something i didn't even know when I got it.  "Eagle" is very "meta," not just in the references by the characters to the absurdity of its premise (they frequently scoff at the idea of kidnapping Churchill and seem as amazed as the audience when it starts looking like it might work) and then of course, there's the matter of the title, which was probably even more striking seven years after Apollo 11 than it is today. I read it as an alternative history having a little fun:
they're ultimately unsuccessful in nabbing Churchill, which of course is in accord with our true history so i'm not sure if it's a spoiler. what i took from the title is that if the operation, code-named "Eagle," had been successful, 25 years later Neil Armstrong would have had to think of something else to say when setting foot on the moon, since the phrase "The Eagle Has Landed" would have already been in the history books to refer to the Churchill abduction that ended the war.
Incidentally, at the very end, the Michael Caine character ends up shooting Churchill, but -- whew! what a relief, we find out it's a body double. this doesn't work on at least three levels: 1. We buy that Caine is a "good german" because he doesn't want to murder Churchill, which would only encourage england to continue all-out war, but to take him alive, to encourage the english to settle. so shooting churchill is out of character. 2. Why are the english sending body doubles for churchill hither and yon if they have no reason to think there's an assassination plot against him? and 3. one of the english guys comments later that the body double plays the role to the end, which foregrounds the fact that there's really no reason to: Caine and Churchill are surrounded by english troops at the time and it's just a matter of waiting five seconds until they arrive to arrest Caine. There was no reason for him not to blurt out that he was a body double in the hopes of delaying Caine long enough for the english to arrive. So... ending didn't make a whole lot of sense.
a bit over-long, hagman was pretty weak (if funny) and the romance between Sutherland and Agutter was surprisingly chemistry-less (Brooke Adams and Sutherland do a lot better a couple years later in the magnificent '78 "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" remake) and it took me a couple of tries to get into it, but this movie was a lot of fun, enough that i wound up buying the novel, which, amazingly, is still in print. i'd give it three Iron Crosses out of four... Incidentally, the DVD transfer is pretty average. There are a ton of scratches on the print and the screen is tiny, for some reason. you can actually watch the whole movie on youtube, and you'll immediately see what i mean if you do. And there are virtually no extras. 
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Post by Mod City on Feb 21, 2012 22:00:07 GMT -5
Best Worst Movie (2009) Really quite good! A documentary about a reunion of the cast and crew (well, the cast, mostly) of "Troll 2," a random late 80s "horror" movie about vegetarian goblins who torment an out-of-town family. Apparently, Troll 2 has become a legend in the bad-movie-lover set (a fact i didn't know) and was even the #1 worst movie of all time on imdb for a time. (last i checked, the worst movie on imdb was some paris hilton vehicle that's unlikely to become a cult classic.) Couldn't tell by your post if you knew or not but the Rifftrax boys have given this the treatment. www.rifftrax.com/rifftrax/troll-2Yeah, it's something else. Up there with Manos and The Room, but I think it's at least third on my list of "my god that's terrible." That doc sounds really good, actually. It's been a while since I've seen the movie but I'll see if I can find this. |
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Post by TheNewMads on Aug 8, 2012 13:21:29 GMT -5
Rocket Attack: USA (1958/1961)
It’s Rocket Attack… USA! USA! USA!
An Eisenhowerian white guy reads us the encyclopedia entry on Sputnik as we’re treated to lots of dazzling FX shots of bleeping satellites. At a top-secret Pentagon meeting of something called the “Central Intelligence Group”—I guess the assistance of the CIA isn’t going to be gratefully acknowledged at the end of this thing—a dolorous fellow with an associate’s degree in military defense explains the threat posed by Sputnik in not overly complicated terms. Despairing over their satellite gap and expecting an unprovoked ICBM attack on New York, the army brass proposes not only redoubling their effort to launch their own satellite, but also slipping an agent across the Iron Curtain under cover of night to keep an eye on the Reds.
Once in country, John, our manly spy, makes his way to Moscow to contact an American sympathizer, Tanya, who’s been getting intelligence from a boozy general with a loose tongue. First, however, he must sit through 1958’s answer to hardcore porn and a kinder, safer fire-eating routine, two acts that together clock in at roughly twice the length of a Neil Peart drum solo.
At last he gets Tanya alone, where he learns she’s managed to pick the philandering general’s brain handily. That’s the good news. The bad news is she’s only been able to accomplish this at the price of her own virtue. John, considerate and understanding soul that he is, discusses Tanya’s sacrifice only in the most delicate of terms and though you’d think she’d be weary of getting pawed at, she succumbs to his debonair advances. Meanwhile, back in Washington, freedom-loving military minds despair over how our politicians would rather spend money on frivolities like food than more important things like instruments of mass death.
As Tanya and John worm their way into the Russian psyche, nerdy guys in warehouses try to design and test a working ICBM. In a third thread we peep inside the Kremlin to learn that, lo and behold, the Ruskies are planning an attack on New York, making the Pentagon’s guess an uncannily fortunate one.
It’s looking grim for the good guys as the Americans fumble their missile test. This nixing deterrence as an option, the Yanks opt for sabotage. A British agent tells John that Tanya’s snuck off to the secret Russian missile base and after a few twists and turns she, the Brit, and John all end up there, even though they all insisted they’d be better off alone. Will they succeed in sabotaging the missile? If so, will they escape? If not, how will the basically disarmed Americans respond? You could stay tuned to learn the answers to these exciting questions, but my guess is you’ll be folding laundry or playing with your dog by this point rather than watching this damn thing.
As so often happens with Mill Creek movies, there’s some intrigue with regard to when Rocket Attack: USA was made. Its official release date is 1961 but the date on its credits is 1958. This delay must have been pretty disastrous for the movie. See, in ’58 Americans were pretty spooked; it was commonly thought, and not without reason, that the Russians were wresting the initiative in the arms race. By ’61, though, the panic over Sputnik had largely settled down. The US now had satellites and ICBMs of its own and the technological contest had shifted into the arena of manned space travel. US -Soviet relations were hardly peachy and the prospect of nuclear annihilation was still plenty real. On the other hand, the specific problem Rocket Attack: USA wrings its hands over had largely been solved.
The movie’s main value is as an attempt to wrangle with the concepts of deterrence and Mutually Assured Destruction that were later to make us all so alternately skeptical and miserable. It was popular to refer to those Cold War concepts as “doctrines,” but this seems like far too high-falutin’ language; these principles are more counterintuitive than complex. Deterrence held that each side in this pseudo-conflict needed to amass enormous stockpiles of doomsday weapons to discourage the other side from doing the same. Mutually Assured Destruction held that any nuclear aggression needed to be answered with an unbridled response. This allegedly discouraged either side from striking first, but if one did, it would be incumbent on the other to pointlessly retaliate. Otherwise the MAD doctrine, the one the first side had just discredited, wouldn’t be seen as credible. You can see how much sense this made.
Anyway, Rocket Attack: USA was uniquely situated to explore the Cold War’s loopy logic and thereby beat out later classics like Dr. Strangelove, Failsafe and On the Beach. Too bad the movie’s just too goddamned horrid to accomplish any of this. In fact, Rocket Attack is so bloody awful it’s caused me to rethink the political paranoia films of the era in general. Here’s what I mean. I’ve always doubted the received wisdom that in the classic alien invasion movies—Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, It Came From Outer Space, and the like—the invaders are stand-ins for the Soviet collectivist hordes. If someone wanted to make an anti-communist movie, why not just make an anti-communist movie? Why the unnecessary intermediary of space aliens?
Well, Rocket Attack: USA suggests a couple reasons I’d not thought of. For one thing, the movie makes its agenda far too obvious to be convincing. You’re so plainly being manipulated into thinking that nothing could be more important than throwing money at ABM research in a panic that you’re tempted to root for the Russians just to be contrarian. Funny thing is, not only was ABM technology unworkable in 1961, it’s still unworkable today, fifty years later.
Another reason to use little green men for your red-baiting is that it adds an element of transcendent mystery and lowbrow fun. This movie lacks both, its phenomenal dreariness being summed up in Monica Davis’s joyless performance as Tanya. Her character’s plainly written as sad and stoic. She can scarcely endure being the piggish general’s reluctant lover but soldiers on for the distant cause of freedom. In execution, though, she just comes off indifferent. At times she stops acting altogether in favor of reciting, as though she’d literally memorized her lines just a moment before and planned on forgetting them right after the scene was done.
The movie’s whole mood is like this. The one time it nearly musters legitimate tension—when the Russians are prepping their rocket and we’re about to learn whether Tanya and John’s attempt at sabotage worked—the makers manage to make the moderately engaging scene unwatchable by slathering it in ten straight minutes of blaring alarm sirens and grating beep-beep noises.
Like Atomic Brain, Rocket Attack scarcely rates as a movie at all with its 68-minute running time, but, also like Atomic Brain, Rocket Attack can’t fill even this without larding itself up with fluff.
In short, this film was so unnecessary that its own creators didn’t even seem that keen on making it. More’s the pity. A decent chronicle of American society in the brief period between Sputnik and America’s answer to it would have been a useful addition to the movie canon, but Rocket Attack falls so short of this that, really, the film might as well not exist at all.
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