I recently watched "Black Moon" from Turner Classic Movies' Louis Malle marathon, and could hardly believe that I was really watching it. Something this insane has to be a hallucination. Maybe I'm not far off; as it turns out, Louis Malle was trying to make a movie based on a dream. I wonder if this is the movie Steven Soderbergh was talking about in "Waking Life," the movie that was "a dream within a dream." If so, Billy Wilder was right: He lost two and a half million dollars.
"Black Moon" is practically Zardozian. I haven't seen "Zardoz," the John Boorman fiasco with Sean Connery running around in a red diaper and containing a stone head declaring penises to be evil, but from what I've heard, it's a very well-shot movie that makes no sense whatsoever. "Black Moon" certainly fits that description as well. As Albert Walker put it in his recap of "Zardoz," a movie like this is frustrating because you can tell there's some intelligence, skill and talent behind the camera, but it doesn't matter because you can't tell what the hell is going on.
The story, or what there is of it: A woman named Lily is running away from something. There seems to be a war going on between men and women, but it only matters in a few scenes. (That's a real shame; I can imagine a really vicious satire of misogyny and rabid feminism in the idea of a war between men and women.) She eventually comes upon a house where she finds an old lady who can't or won't get out of bed, and her apparent children, a brother and a sister, who are both silent and named Lily.
That's just the plot. The film is full of images, many of them making no sense. Telling you some of the stuff that happens seems cheap, but I'll do it anyway: Naked kids appear and reappear frequently, usually leading around animals. The daughter of the old woman breast-feeds her, and later, the main character does the same. There's an extended sequence where the main character chases around a unicorn. At one point, she steps on some flowers, which wail in pain. That's right--wailing flowers. For a while, I thought that was a pun on Wayland Flowers.
The movie just keeps going through these weird images, one after another. As I mentioned before, it seems Louis Malle was trying to make a dream-like movie. If so, it doesn't seem to achieve a dream-like feel; it feels like they're trying to make it realistic. On reflection, it feels like a dream (especially in that "did-that-really-happen?" way), but it doesn't succeed while you're watching the movie.
Some people try to defend this movie somehow. They claim it's allegorical. The thing is, if it's an allegory, it's not clear what it's an allegory for. War? Growing up? Crazy glueing-gerbils-together? As Roger Ebert said, if you have to ask what it symbolized, it didn't. The idea of the movie being like a dream is slightly more apt, though it still doesn't answer many of the questions it brings up.
Don't think that I was miserable when I was watching it, though. I wasn't, really. It made me laugh a few times (certainly not the film's intention). In fact, if they hadn't been so clearly trying to make a dramatic art film, it could've been successful as a satire of artsy films and their pretentious meaninglessness. I was almost sad to have to delete it from my DVR; if I could've taped it, it would've made a great joke to play on people, or even better, a recap for the Agony Booth.
Indeed, the movie is almost crazy-lovable instead of crazy-annoying. How can you hate a movie where such random crap happens without the slightest explanation? Well, quite simply, it feels like they're not thinking about it. It's a waste of talent, but if you were forwarned that it was crazy and that you should view it as such, it would probably make for a fun, almost Monty Python-esque time.
This movie is not available on DVD. There may be a snowball's chance in hell that it would get some kind of release from the Criterion Collection (it even has the Janus Films logo before it). If they do release it, I can only wonder how they'll try to justify it on the back of the box.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Memoirs of a Geisha
"Memoirs of a Geisha" is a movie about looking pretty. The story, of course, is about geisha, women who sell their virginity to the highest bidder. (But they're not prostitutes.) The women put on beautiful make-up and do beautiful dances. The movie is like that, too. The cinematography is stunning, and the women are beautiful. Underneath the cinematography and the women, however, is an overlong, unneccessarily cruel film.
The movie begins with the main character and her sister being sold to someone who, in turn, sells them to different women to be raised as housekeepers/geisha. One of the geisha at our main character's place takes an instant dislike to her, and does terrible things to her, such as forcing her to paint on an expensive dress, resulting in a beating. One day, the main character (I'll be damned if I have to look up what everybody's names are) runs away and contacts her sister, and they plan to run away. When she gets back, she finds the geisha having sex with a man, which is strictly forbidden. (But they're not prostitutes.) As a result, the house is locked up and she never sees her sister again.
Later, a chairman for an unknown company helps the main character by buying her a treat. (For some reason, the chairman is never given a name. It seems to be a rule that a movie that thinks it's better than it is will keep names from the audience just to frustrate us.) This proves to be a pivotal moment in her life: She decides to repay him by becoming a geisha, and trying to become his geisha, despite his dislike of them.
"Memoirs" is, like the 2000 charmer "Chocolat," an example of what I call a 'fauxrin film.' They're movies about far-off countries, produced with local actors in stories that seem specialized to their locales. But they're not foreign films, because they're produced by American studios, made in American English, for American audiences. In fact, "Memoirs" manages to screw up the fauxrin feel by getting Chinese actresses for a Japanese story, and by producing the film on a soundstage in America. There's something odd about the idea of trying to transport audiences to another culture while filming in their own. Nonetheless, I really can't criticize those decisions; there are reasons for them, after all.
What I can criticize is the story. Now, I don't doubt that geishas were bought from poor farmers. I don't doubt that they were put through misery. I don't doubt that any of that kind of thing would happen. Realistically, the miserable parts of the film makes sense.
But the misery isn't the point. The movie isn't intended to be a realistic portrayal of the lives of geisha; it's intended to be a romantic look at geisha-hood. In fact, one gets the feeling that the misery is there to accentuate the (implausible) happy ending; the main character and the audience go through misery just to make the final images shinier. It's a tacky ploy to manipulate the audience into going "aww, how sweet."
The movie is beautiful. There's no doubt about that; spending so much money, it would be difficult to get an ugly film out of it. But there's nothing underneath the surface that drives the film.
The movie begins with the main character and her sister being sold to someone who, in turn, sells them to different women to be raised as housekeepers/geisha. One of the geisha at our main character's place takes an instant dislike to her, and does terrible things to her, such as forcing her to paint on an expensive dress, resulting in a beating. One day, the main character (I'll be damned if I have to look up what everybody's names are) runs away and contacts her sister, and they plan to run away. When she gets back, she finds the geisha having sex with a man, which is strictly forbidden. (But they're not prostitutes.) As a result, the house is locked up and she never sees her sister again.
Later, a chairman for an unknown company helps the main character by buying her a treat. (For some reason, the chairman is never given a name. It seems to be a rule that a movie that thinks it's better than it is will keep names from the audience just to frustrate us.) This proves to be a pivotal moment in her life: She decides to repay him by becoming a geisha, and trying to become his geisha, despite his dislike of them.
"Memoirs" is, like the 2000 charmer "Chocolat," an example of what I call a 'fauxrin film.' They're movies about far-off countries, produced with local actors in stories that seem specialized to their locales. But they're not foreign films, because they're produced by American studios, made in American English, for American audiences. In fact, "Memoirs" manages to screw up the fauxrin feel by getting Chinese actresses for a Japanese story, and by producing the film on a soundstage in America. There's something odd about the idea of trying to transport audiences to another culture while filming in their own. Nonetheless, I really can't criticize those decisions; there are reasons for them, after all.
What I can criticize is the story. Now, I don't doubt that geishas were bought from poor farmers. I don't doubt that they were put through misery. I don't doubt that any of that kind of thing would happen. Realistically, the miserable parts of the film makes sense.
But the misery isn't the point. The movie isn't intended to be a realistic portrayal of the lives of geisha; it's intended to be a romantic look at geisha-hood. In fact, one gets the feeling that the misery is there to accentuate the (implausible) happy ending; the main character and the audience go through misery just to make the final images shinier. It's a tacky ploy to manipulate the audience into going "aww, how sweet."
The movie is beautiful. There's no doubt about that; spending so much money, it would be difficult to get an ugly film out of it. But there's nothing underneath the surface that drives the film.
Vampyr: Der Traum Des Allan Grey
"Vampyr" may not be a complete classic to me, but if so, the fault isn't entirely with the people who made the movie. Rather, it's with the people who presented the film on Turner Classic Movies.
The story, as far as I could figure it out: Allan Grey stops to stay with a family, and encounters a vampire. Well, okay, I don't really know if there's more or less to the story, as it was incredibly confusing at times. The story is not the real point of the film, however; the images are.
Some of the images in this movie are incredible. A man shovels dirt, but the dirt comes towards his shovel instead of flying away. Shadows move around that seem to have no apparent source. The main character briefly turns into a ghost and finds his own body in a coffin. The movie has so many brilliant images that it's worth seeing for them alone.
The director, Carl Theodor Dreyer, seems to have planned the movie out as a silent film, then found himself making it with sound. There is little dialogue, much of it unimportant to the plot. (More on this later.) Much of the soundtrack is musical, with sound effects here and there. There are apparent cutaways to text to explain parts of the plot. It's ironic that his previous film, "The Passion of Joan of Arc," ended up a talkie without sound while this film has sound but is essentially silent at heart.
So if I like the images so much that I can overlook the odd, unexplainable story, why am I not so happy with the film? Quite simply, the presentation is terrible. There's a border around the edges of the screen, which is distracting. The text intertitles don't quite match the print's scratchiness; they're too clean. (This is a problem with lots of not-quite-restored silent movies; the prints are so scratched that it feels like the uber-clean titles have come in from another universe. Is it really that hard to simulate scratches on text?) White dots appear frequently on the screen. The dialogue is muffled and difficult to hear, although really, if it's in another language, I really shouldn't be complaining.
Worst of all, however, are the subtitles. All the text (in English, anyway) is done in an ugly Olde English font that is difficult to read, albeit not impossible. But what really pushes it from bad to horrendous is that the subtitles have black bars underneath them, obscuring the lower third (and sometimes, the lower half) of the screen. Apparently, it's not bad enough that you can't see at least 10% of the frame due to the border; now they have to cut off thirty to fifty percent more. In a mixed blessing, much of the unimportant dialogue is left unsubtitled, so when they're saying "Va! Va!" to each other, you don't have to deal with the black bars. But when a plot point comes up, prepare to be annoyed.
Apparently, the Image DVD of "Vampyr" has the same exact problems. The image is scratchy, the text is rendered in terrible fonts and with black-bars underneath, and the image is cropped. The Criterion Collection has apparently found some decent-looking clips from the movie that don't suffer from those issues and used them in a documentary on Dreyer. (I haven't seen it; the images are on DVD Beaver.) Would it be too much to ask for Criterion or somebody to get to work restoring this movie, cleaning up as much of the scratches and dots as they can, using a clean, Arial-type font for subtitles, and making the sound non-horrendous? A movie like this deserves a good, clean look and feel, and the current presentation is simply a crime.
The story, as far as I could figure it out: Allan Grey stops to stay with a family, and encounters a vampire. Well, okay, I don't really know if there's more or less to the story, as it was incredibly confusing at times. The story is not the real point of the film, however; the images are.
Some of the images in this movie are incredible. A man shovels dirt, but the dirt comes towards his shovel instead of flying away. Shadows move around that seem to have no apparent source. The main character briefly turns into a ghost and finds his own body in a coffin. The movie has so many brilliant images that it's worth seeing for them alone.
The director, Carl Theodor Dreyer, seems to have planned the movie out as a silent film, then found himself making it with sound. There is little dialogue, much of it unimportant to the plot. (More on this later.) Much of the soundtrack is musical, with sound effects here and there. There are apparent cutaways to text to explain parts of the plot. It's ironic that his previous film, "The Passion of Joan of Arc," ended up a talkie without sound while this film has sound but is essentially silent at heart.
So if I like the images so much that I can overlook the odd, unexplainable story, why am I not so happy with the film? Quite simply, the presentation is terrible. There's a border around the edges of the screen, which is distracting. The text intertitles don't quite match the print's scratchiness; they're too clean. (This is a problem with lots of not-quite-restored silent movies; the prints are so scratched that it feels like the uber-clean titles have come in from another universe. Is it really that hard to simulate scratches on text?) White dots appear frequently on the screen. The dialogue is muffled and difficult to hear, although really, if it's in another language, I really shouldn't be complaining.
Worst of all, however, are the subtitles. All the text (in English, anyway) is done in an ugly Olde English font that is difficult to read, albeit not impossible. But what really pushes it from bad to horrendous is that the subtitles have black bars underneath them, obscuring the lower third (and sometimes, the lower half) of the screen. Apparently, it's not bad enough that you can't see at least 10% of the frame due to the border; now they have to cut off thirty to fifty percent more. In a mixed blessing, much of the unimportant dialogue is left unsubtitled, so when they're saying "Va! Va!" to each other, you don't have to deal with the black bars. But when a plot point comes up, prepare to be annoyed.
Apparently, the Image DVD of "Vampyr" has the same exact problems. The image is scratchy, the text is rendered in terrible fonts and with black-bars underneath, and the image is cropped. The Criterion Collection has apparently found some decent-looking clips from the movie that don't suffer from those issues and used them in a documentary on Dreyer. (I haven't seen it; the images are on DVD Beaver.) Would it be too much to ask for Criterion or somebody to get to work restoring this movie, cleaning up as much of the scratches and dots as they can, using a clean, Arial-type font for subtitles, and making the sound non-horrendous? A movie like this deserves a good, clean look and feel, and the current presentation is simply a crime.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Natural Born Killers
Easily one of the most controversial films ever, "Natural Born Killers" isn't an easy film to classify. Is it a good movie? In the sense that I kind of enjoyed watching it, yeah, I guess it's good; I enjoy films with the kind of overt stylization you see here. But I can't say it's a really successful film.
The plot, which I think everybody can start to guess at from the title, involves two serial killers named Mickey and Mallory Knox. After abusive childhoods for both of them that end with their parents' deaths, the two of them go on a killing spree across Route 666. Meanwhile, the news media seemingly condemns them, but that doesn't seem to get into most people's heads: Everybody seems to love the Knoxes, from three boys who declare them the best thing to happen to mass murder since Manson to kids in Japan, London and France who just love them. Tabloid TV host Wayne Gale, meanwhile... well, he's mainly important for later in the film, when he's interviewing Mickey (but not Mallory, for some reason) on live TV after the Super Bowl.
As you may have guessed, it's a satire. Unlike most "satires" nowadays, which seem to consist of trying to shock an audience without really saying anything about the subject matter, "Natural Born Killers" at least seems to have a point: We do tend to pay enough attention to murder and death in the media that we're only a few steps away from idolizing the killers. The thing is, that point is made early on in the film--maybe thirty minutes in. So what's left?
Strangely enough, we get to spend quite a bit of time with Mickey and Mallory. This is odd on several levels--not only because this is supposedly a satire of the media, but because for a movie that condemns the media for idolizing killers, it seems to be doing something close to that. Maybe it's not outright idolizing them--anybody who isn't already crazy enough to start killing is likely to see Mickey and Mallory as evil. But the movie doesn't seem to condemn them for what they've done--even after they supposedly swear off killing anybody who doesn't deserve it, they don't seem to have much of a problem killing anyone who gets in their way.
That's just the two of them. The other main characters in the film also seem to be crazy, and they're the ones who are cast in a negative light. McCluskey (the prison warden who has them locked up in the second half of the film), Wayne Gale (the reporter for "American Maniacs"), Jack Scagnetti (the policeman who catches Mickey and Mallory)--they all seem to be reprehensible maniacs who are just as bad, if not worse, than Mickey and Mallory. Is that another point of the film--that the ones who "protect" us from the maniacs are just as bad as them? I'm not sure. The way I interpreted it was that everybody in the movie who got more than ten minutes of screentime was a psychopath. Maybe that's the point of the film--we're all psychopaths. To hell with it--you could play this game all day. The movie is, as a forum acquaintance of mine once put it, a cinematic Rorschach test--no matter what you see, the filmmakers see their points in it.
Now let's move on to how the film is shot and edited. As I mentioned earlier, it's super-stylized: Many scenes are in both black-and-white and color, with continually changing film stock. Some scenes are shot on videotape (Mallory's life at home is shot as a sitcom, with Rodney Dangerfield getting laughs from a laugh track at his abusive speech). There are various points in the film where we get cutaways to things that barely seem to be connected to the scene in question--in a scene where Mickey and Mallory are stuck in the desert, we get cuts to jumpy time-lapse photography of clouds and dead animals. (We even see Mickey's face distort like he's had a picture taken of him after he watched the videotape from "The Ring.") A lot of the movie seems to be shot at a Dutch angle--the camera is tilted 45 degrees, much like "Battlefield Earth." (Well, at least it kind of makes sense here.) There are quickly-cut bits of "demons" (which, when you pause and look at them, look less like demons and more like people making silly faces at the camera). There are pieces of other movies thrown in, from "Frankenstein" to "Night of the Lepus." I could go on and on about this.
The overt stylization is fun to watch, but what exactly does it mean? It makes sense in very few movies. In "Requiem for a Dream," for example, it resembled the state of mind of the addicts. In "Run Lola Run," it didn't make sense at first (though I still loved the film), but now that I think about it, it also resembles the state of mind of the characters who have to think fast about their situation. Here, I guess it's supposed to resemble the state of mind of an insane person. Yet it's not just applied to scenes with Mickey and Mallory; it's applied to scenes where other characters are shown, and even applied to scenes on TV. I guess it's another instance of the Cinematic Rorschach Test--the idea that everybody is a psychopath. (Well, really, I think it's not so much that as it is that Oliver Stone was high most of the time when he made this film. But never mind that.)
In the end, I guess the movie's a mixed success. If you're looking for a well-thought out idea, it's not successful. But if you want to sit back and have the movie flow into you, it works.
The plot, which I think everybody can start to guess at from the title, involves two serial killers named Mickey and Mallory Knox. After abusive childhoods for both of them that end with their parents' deaths, the two of them go on a killing spree across Route 666. Meanwhile, the news media seemingly condemns them, but that doesn't seem to get into most people's heads: Everybody seems to love the Knoxes, from three boys who declare them the best thing to happen to mass murder since Manson to kids in Japan, London and France who just love them. Tabloid TV host Wayne Gale, meanwhile... well, he's mainly important for later in the film, when he's interviewing Mickey (but not Mallory, for some reason) on live TV after the Super Bowl.
As you may have guessed, it's a satire. Unlike most "satires" nowadays, which seem to consist of trying to shock an audience without really saying anything about the subject matter, "Natural Born Killers" at least seems to have a point: We do tend to pay enough attention to murder and death in the media that we're only a few steps away from idolizing the killers. The thing is, that point is made early on in the film--maybe thirty minutes in. So what's left?
Strangely enough, we get to spend quite a bit of time with Mickey and Mallory. This is odd on several levels--not only because this is supposedly a satire of the media, but because for a movie that condemns the media for idolizing killers, it seems to be doing something close to that. Maybe it's not outright idolizing them--anybody who isn't already crazy enough to start killing is likely to see Mickey and Mallory as evil. But the movie doesn't seem to condemn them for what they've done--even after they supposedly swear off killing anybody who doesn't deserve it, they don't seem to have much of a problem killing anyone who gets in their way.
That's just the two of them. The other main characters in the film also seem to be crazy, and they're the ones who are cast in a negative light. McCluskey (the prison warden who has them locked up in the second half of the film), Wayne Gale (the reporter for "American Maniacs"), Jack Scagnetti (the policeman who catches Mickey and Mallory)--they all seem to be reprehensible maniacs who are just as bad, if not worse, than Mickey and Mallory. Is that another point of the film--that the ones who "protect" us from the maniacs are just as bad as them? I'm not sure. The way I interpreted it was that everybody in the movie who got more than ten minutes of screentime was a psychopath. Maybe that's the point of the film--we're all psychopaths. To hell with it--you could play this game all day. The movie is, as a forum acquaintance of mine once put it, a cinematic Rorschach test--no matter what you see, the filmmakers see their points in it.
Now let's move on to how the film is shot and edited. As I mentioned earlier, it's super-stylized: Many scenes are in both black-and-white and color, with continually changing film stock. Some scenes are shot on videotape (Mallory's life at home is shot as a sitcom, with Rodney Dangerfield getting laughs from a laugh track at his abusive speech). There are various points in the film where we get cutaways to things that barely seem to be connected to the scene in question--in a scene where Mickey and Mallory are stuck in the desert, we get cuts to jumpy time-lapse photography of clouds and dead animals. (We even see Mickey's face distort like he's had a picture taken of him after he watched the videotape from "The Ring.") A lot of the movie seems to be shot at a Dutch angle--the camera is tilted 45 degrees, much like "Battlefield Earth." (Well, at least it kind of makes sense here.) There are quickly-cut bits of "demons" (which, when you pause and look at them, look less like demons and more like people making silly faces at the camera). There are pieces of other movies thrown in, from "Frankenstein" to "Night of the Lepus." I could go on and on about this.
The overt stylization is fun to watch, but what exactly does it mean? It makes sense in very few movies. In "Requiem for a Dream," for example, it resembled the state of mind of the addicts. In "Run Lola Run," it didn't make sense at first (though I still loved the film), but now that I think about it, it also resembles the state of mind of the characters who have to think fast about their situation. Here, I guess it's supposed to resemble the state of mind of an insane person. Yet it's not just applied to scenes with Mickey and Mallory; it's applied to scenes where other characters are shown, and even applied to scenes on TV. I guess it's another instance of the Cinematic Rorschach Test--the idea that everybody is a psychopath. (Well, really, I think it's not so much that as it is that Oliver Stone was high most of the time when he made this film. But never mind that.)
In the end, I guess the movie's a mixed success. If you're looking for a well-thought out idea, it's not successful. But if you want to sit back and have the movie flow into you, it works.
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