landingtree | Entries tagged with films

- and it wasn’t the sort of thing I expected at all. A bit like when someone up the hill put on Akira, which I knew as ‘Maybe an anime of some kind?’ and which caused me to go ‘Holy heck what is happening’ within the first ten seconds.

Jiří Barta’s stop-motion Czech pied piper film from the eighties is wild. All the people and the town are grotesque and characterful, angular like robots or suits of armour: in fact they’re carved from wood. The main things that look organic are the rats. The film starts with slow scenes of people going about their business in Hamlin, with the rats gradually rising around them, eating scraps the town’s greedy rich men throw away.

( Interesting spoilery adaptation choices were made. )

Once again, thoughts on a movie I saw twice, thoroughly spoilery, so recommended only for those who've seen the movie or don't want to. (Also, this skews in the direction of 'Here are some things I didn't like about a movie I liked,' since if I pause to list out positives on this snoozy afternoon, I'll never get around to posting it).

( Spoilery thoughts )

jsthrill sent me this interview about the behind-the-scenes animation, which is super detailed and interesting and makes me remember just how many hands go into a thing like this. Toshiyuki Inoue’s The Boy and the Heron

I am too sleepy to attempt much of a non-spoilers section to this post. This post is growing like coral off of the notes I made on paper after a screening. But: Poor Things, like The Favourite, has Yorgos Lanthimos directing, Tony McNamara writing, and Emma Stone as a lead - really the lead, this time. And they are all doing what they do as well as ever: it is well-designed, uncomfortable, sharp, and funny.

The beginning of the movie was dense with surprises when I first saw it. The second time, all the elements it introduces were old acquaintances: ah yes, hello again perfectly normal [person/animal/place]. I liked it enough to see it a second time in theatres partly because of how expansive it felt the first time; I'm pleased I did, and not just because it helped me gather my thoughts about things that were niggling at me - I had a great time both times - but the whole thing did feel smaller when I knew where it was going.

I notice myself getting very immersed in movies these days; or maybe I mean I've seen a lot of examples of movies aimed directly at the brainstem over the last few years. This, Dune, Across The Spiderverse, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Is spectacle hitting me different? Or am I just forgetting past immersions?

( Complete spoilers commence )

My flatmate Evelyn wanted to return the serve of Malignant, so we just watched Ralph Bakshi's Wizards, and yes, it had the wtf quotient, the inexplicable choices, the high production values in service of a weird vision... I'm glad to have seen Wizards, but hope nothing like it ever comes to exist again.

On the one hand this was genuinely entertaining and provided a nearly continuous experience of being wrongfooted by whatever the hell was happening next, starting from the first moment when a little cartoon globe of the earth appeared spinning on the screen before exploding in a wall of actual fire. Thousands of years after a nuclear war, half of humanity are mutants - generally evil or at least hapless, living in toxic waste areas - and the other half are elves and fairies (who I guess are just as much mutants, but think they're what humans used to be like). To each is born a destined wizard child, one good, one evil. (This is not due to their upbringing, they are, from the get-go, the evilest and the goodest baby that ever lay sneering/giggling in a mother's arms). War must surely ensue. Well, four thousand years later, at any rate, after the evil wizard has regathered himself from their initial clash, fostering his strength and building up his fortress over the centuries, while the good wizard (named Avatar) has... really been enjoying his days on this beautiful flower-filled earth.

The visual style is various and weird. Backgrounds are often footage of shifting cloud or explosions, or incredibly beautiful and detailed drawings of towers and cityscapes, or silhouetted WWII footage.

Much of the film is genuinely and intentionally hilarious, like... the scene where two priests spend five hours ineffectually praying using religious icons from many poorly-remembered faiths before getting all their people killed? Some wild tonal shifts going on here.

( Spoilers and nazi elves )

My flatmate Evelyn and I watched this movie tonight, as recommended by

rachelmanija. Thank you Rachel for this experience, which we both enjoyed! I had read in her post that it was very strange; I read the summary of the early part with a villain who drinks electricity, and that there were further twists. This sure is true! This post is not so much a review (read Rachel's for that) as a list of things that are strange. In fairness, while watching I often hopped up from my chair to stir risotto, so it's entirely possible I missed normal explanations for several of the more batshit ones. Minimal spoilers above the cut.

After someone shouts "He's drinking the electricity" in the intro, and then the villain takes control of all the electrical items in the hospital ward, there is still a bit in the opening credits sequence - surrounded by gruesome medical imagery - where doctors' reports appear on the screen and a pen highlights the words "He appears to be able to control electricity".

In the next spooky object scene, once we've moved to a more sedate haunted-house pace in the present day, the three objects taken control of are a blender (ominous), a fridge (possibly the least ominous appliance to take control of, also, why do electrical powers let you open a fridge door?) and... a sofa cushion. This does have an explanation later, but at the time we looked at each other and said "Okaay, um... Is the cushion electrically warmed?"

The camera loves to swoop from strange angles. There's a wonderful weird shot looking down on the protagonist, Madison, moving through the house from more than a full story above. There are also many other points when a camera is rotating which normally would not be rotating, some also work really well, others are just... there.

Then, suddenly, this isn't a slow sedate haunted house film! There are police on the case!

Detective: "I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you a few questions"
My flatmate Evelyn, who went to fashion school: "I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you a few questions about the horizontal stripes on your shirt"

( spoilers )

[Very belated what-I'm-reading post! I'd half-written this when I moved house a month ago and it got swept away in busyness.]

When I took this off the bookstore shelf (Aha! Unusual Delany!) I didn't know it was a porn novel. But by the end of the proem I did, because it quite deliberately wraps up all the sex the book's going to feature into one symbol and says, “If you don't want to read extended treatments of everything mentioned in these two pages – as to race kink, level of realism, species, and range of fluids – here's your warning.”

It isn't quite true that I read the book despite its being porn rather than because of it, because it was really interesting to read so many sex scenes which couldn't have been less erotic to me if they'd been specifically trying. That will no longer be a selling point if I go on to read a second of Delaney's porn novels. My trajectory started with working out what triggers my gag reflex versus what's just interesting (piss-drinking was in the second category and... I don't want to give examples from the first, but there were many). From there it slowly slid into boredom. The sex scenes are talking backward and forward to each other and being engagingly observed human moments, but they also do rely for pages at a time on the assumption that readers are interested in the sex for its own sake, which after the eighth variation on the specific kinks of the protagonist, was wearing on me. (The first-person narrator never describes his own pleasure or desire, although sometimes quotes himself saying things like, “That feels good.” Which might work to create a natural immersion if the bridge between the sex he's having and his implied feelings about it was intuitive to me; since it wasn't, I felt distanced instead).

The other bit of 'because porn, not despite,' is that I don't often see bodies and sexuality described this much, this well – so, as someone who has both, it was affirming to read, in a 'training a telescope on that branch over there makes me more aware of the branch I'm standing on' kind of way.

If one were reading The Mad Man entirely despite its being porn – well, parts of it would just be dull right from the get go, but there'd still be plenty to find: it's as serious about being a novel as it is about being porn, as well as vice versa. As much as Delany's science fiction, the book rotates the concept of 'normal' until it looks just as strange as everything it claims to exclude. The sex is braided with and mirrored by the protagonist's academic researches into the life of a shooting-star young philosopher, and the extent to which who knows what about the philosopher's sex life, and how comfortable they are with it, has shaped what information about him is available. The protagonist has a lot of sex with homeless men on the streets of New York, just like the philosopher he's researching did; much of it is unprotected, after the arrival of AIDS, and that's a sea change between them.

I like how Delaney puts novels together; the way the meaning of the title modulates as the book goes on, the way the names of the book's sections, seen in the contents page, set up expectations in advance which he can then play on. I knew nothing about the book going in, and one reason I'm not saying more about what happens in it is that it was really fun knowing almost nothing and slowly discovering what the book was; and it's long enough and dense enough that it can be multiple braided things.

A point of discomfort: there are women in and important to this book, but what there isn't, really, is the place of sexism in the systems of the world. It's mostly a book about cis gay sexuality, but sometimes the edges feel uncomfortable, as when a homeless man mentions flashing his penis at a woman on the street as a neutral example of one of his turnons – leaving aside the likelihood that his behavior might read as threatening, let alone that, in context, the reading might be accurate. There are things which make the protagonist say “Hey, stop that,” and things he notes the dubiousness of in passing, but this floats by him like he doesn't notice it, and seems to float by the book, too. (The book's rightly interested in not stating that homeless men are primarily dangerous, or society's primary dangers; the discussion of this particular point is one I can perfectly well have with the little Delany I'm constructing in my head, but I think the book would have been strengthened by putting it on the actual page. I mention it because I've heard, or been alerted to, notes of sexism sounding here and there in several other Delany books, making this one seem louder).

…

The Mad Man was a good match for recent Film Society films – after Only Lovers Left Alive I wandered around the CBD's rain-mirrored backstreets, gave money to a homeless man (who I'm seventy percent sure wouldn't have seemed to be offering me sex if I hadn't been reading The Mad Man – whatever his vague offer meant, I declined), and sat in a bar with a glass of beer and a rugby game in an overhead corner, reading about men pissing on each other while drinking beer in a bar in New York. I'd been experimenting with reading speed; just then my mood combined with the alcohol to let my eyes track once across the page for each beat of the music, which is perhaps ten times faster than my usual, and it made the scene more rather than less vivid. (And makes the section of another Delany novel where a man reads novels in seconds, each at the touch of a hand, more imaginable, since now I have a trajectory to extend in its direction).

And then, because Film Society had been programming love stories, The Mad Man was a good book to have been reading at the beginning of God's Own Country. I don't think I'd otherwise have parsed the naked back of a man vomiting into a toilet as a genre-tag for romance. (Not that the film share kinks with the Delaney, but it does share the matter-of-fact bodiliness common to lovers and sheep farmers: it's a beautiful gay love story which I thoroughly recommend, and, for all the harshness of its landscape, its characters, their failures and losses, it's deeply kind).

I have been meaning all month to write about Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, so that I'll actually have recorded everything I read in June -- the task is getting smaller as I put it off, because my memory of what I wanted to say about it gets vaguer. I liked it a lot!* Space opera. Protagonist Mahit is an ambassador sent by a small independent space station confederacy into Teixcalaan, an immense interplanetary empire. Many inhabitants of Teixcalaan would find it entirely right and proper that when beginning that last sentence I thought I could elide the place names, didn't include the name of Mahit's home (Lsel Station) but found I couldn't really do without the name Teixcalaan -- a name which means 'the city' and 'the empire' and 'the world' and derives from the verb 'to act correctly.'

The core dynamic of the book, and what I find most compelling about it, comes across in the dedication: This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own. Mahit is deeply attached to her home, Lsel Station, but she also loves the poetry of Teixcalaanli high culture -- hence her suitability for ambassadorship -- and it is impossible to love Teixcalaanli poetry without on some level identifying with its pervading assumptions, one of which is that Lsel Stationers are barbarians who should be integrated into the empire at its convenience. The empire tells a story according to which there are no other good stories, and it has centuries' worth of superlative poets, as well as the special effects budget of as many planets as it needs, to back that up with. There's a moment in the book which very much connected with me in which Mahit realises, first, that she's being manipulated, and second, that the manipulation is working regardless.

I really like Mahit, out of her depth but a strong swimmer, navigating a factional politics on which she's been improperly briefed. I like her charming Teixcalaanli companions, about whom the question isn't so much 'Are they trustworthy?' as 'Are they merely as untrustworthy as the situation requires?' The politics passes through complicated and tricky on its way to untenable, and Mahit would very much like to get a night's sleep, but preferably after working out how to deal with the things that are likely to go horribly wrong before she wakes up again, so some icecream will have to do in the mean time...

I read this book because I was halfway through 1491 when

skygiants reviewed it and mentioned that it involved an Aztec-based culture in which human sacrifice wasn't singled out for being exotic and horrifying. And it isn't! That was nice! There isn't enough about the Aztecs specifically in 1491 for me to have much sense of what this book is doing with them, but my feeling is that Teixcalaan's more an empire than it's anything else -- there's a lot of Byzantium in there too, and not just because it's one of the template empires, it's Martine's field of study. The Aztec influence changes the details, the animals that get to be symbolic are hummingbirds, the empire is shaped like a sunburst which is also the shape of its temples... (although no, I think that detail is actually Incan -- unless it's both). But being in the middle of 1491 did change my reading experience more than by making me think, 'Something with Aztecs, nice' -- because as early as A Memory Called Empire's introduction, a character is speculating that there might be something new out there, something poking around the fringes of human space which could pose a meaningful threat to Teixcalaan, and my mind went immediately to, "Oh dear lord, the European-analogues are aliens," and that threat loomed much larger than it otherwise would have done, even as the start of the story pointed mostly in other directions -- a threat which might be a bluff, or might be lengthily deferred... or might land in any given chapter.

The last bit of s.f. involving Aztecs I read was the Flora Segunda series, which I love, and which has a heaped tablespoonful of human sacrifice being exotic and horrifying. I had really been wanting to read a book in which Aztec-analogues were terrible in all the ways empires tend to be terrible, while also getting to be other things. This is a good book for that.

---

In one of Chesterton's Father Brown stories, a man walking through city streets in the rain holding a mirror, tilting it about and spending long periods looking into it as he walked, would be noticed by the titular crime-solving priest. Father Brown would know from the manner of his whimsy that something was eerie, something was wrong; such a man ought to look merry, but that man looked careworn. Father Brown would start to follow him, talking with his friend on the way about the wonderful and terrible meaning of mirrors. The story of Perseus and Medusa would be raised -- monsters that need to be hunted without being looked at -- and then they would round a corner and come upon the mirror smashed, traces of blood on the glass, and a stone statue of the man who'd been carrying it, looking up with an expression of shock. But of course there would be no supernatural element in the mystery's solution: a vengeful sculptor, a plot accounting for the evidence perfectly, less convoluted than it seemed.

In a Borges story I wouldn't dare speculate about what a man walking through city streets in the rain holding a mirror would mean. More than it seemed to, in some way that would keep unfolding throughout the story until the familiar stable world was lost in it.

I was reading Borges earlier in the month, and he led me back to Chesterton. But though I had the both of them in mind, I was only taking the mirror to the second hand shop, because it had been leaning against a wall gathering dust ever since I started sharing a room with the built-in mirror in Charlotte's wardrobe. I've never walked with a mirror before. Unusual angles on trees.

(But now I want to write the Father Brown story, which was not meant to happen).

---

And I am writing this so late at night because there was a nine o'clock screening of Peter Strickland's In Fabric, and Peter Strickland has a sensibility which promotes fizzing energy. Film festival time is one of the happy times of year! The other two things I've seen so far are Apollo 11 (which, stitched together from footage shot at the time, is the strongest statement I've seen of 'We went to the moon! The frickin moon! Humans! We went there!') and Varda by Agnes, a wander through the career of Agnes Varda narrated by herself, which increasingly charmed me as it went along. Agnes Varda was the kind of person who, while shooting a documentary about her life, would meet an interesting couple who collected model trains and make a documentary about them on the side, only not on the side after all, because she'd decide they were far more interesting than her early life; whose eye for people and ways of life was as strong as her visual imagination, so that noticing people picking up discarded fruit and vegetables while a street market was being packed up caused her to make one friend and one three-panel video installation about the sprouting and decay of heart-shaped potatoes. I came out of that and In Fabric feeling more alert to the visual possibilities of the world, looking up at the incoherent architecture of Te Papa museum, and out at the dark harbour, and up at a church and a commercial building... Only, since those last two were after In Fabric, I had more of a sense that I might at any moment be stylishly murdered. Happily, as of the moment of posting, this has not happened.

*with quibbles. I feel pedantic when I say, 'I found some of its description and exposition repetitive'; it's the kind of thing I often want to say, and it's important to the feeling I have while reading a book, but it isn't what the book leaves me with. As a counterexample, I read Ellen Kushner's Thomas the Rhymer this month. That's a book about which I have no quibbles, not a single thing snagged me as I read. It was a good, energetic version of its source ballad, did everything it needed to to make a ballad into a novel, putting in the mortal world the Fairy Queen takes Thomas from, and plot for those years he spends in Elfland, and elves who don't value things as humans do nor think like humans. I don't love it. It doesn't stick with me the way A Memory Called Empire does, though for any randomly-selected minute of reading I was very likely having more fun.

Two days ago we performed the age-old rain-summoning ritual: rearranging the garden irrigation system. Now Wellington is drenched. And the days are shortening again, although I feel this more than usual on account of getting up at six thirty in the morning to get to my ecology lecture. At the rate of twice a week, I find I enjoy this very much. I feel both tireder and more full of life (it feels odd and pleasant that it's now only one thirty), and it means I'm getting up at the same time as Charlotte, which is nice. We'll see if that goes on. Ecology began drably, (a first lecture full of things I might have taken a while to articulate myself, but nothing actually new, nothing surprising -- definition of ecology etc.) but is looking up. The novel refused to develop anything worthwhile all week and then I came up with the right thing to write during this morning's lecture. I am only taking one course! This should not be how it works! Sigh. But the lecture was about advantages and disadvantages of different sampling procedures, which is interesting, and we are actually going across the harbour to Eastbourne beach next week to use some of them on one weed and two desirable natives, after which our lecturer will write up a meta-analysis of the whole class's findings and send it to Wellington City Council for the sixth year in a row. Which is neat. (I need to retrieve my knowledge of what a chi-square test is. There was a lab session for that, but I can absorb statistics in small clear doses and then the rest of the time -- especially in a loud babbling room -- it just doesn't go in).

...

Wellington Film Society screened David Lynch's Mulholland Drive last Monday. Somehow I both had David Lynch confused with David Fincher and the film itself associated in my head with Revolutionary Road, I think because of a reference to oppressive suburbia. These were not accurate expectations! I'm glad they weren't.

(This all... Sort of has spoilers? Sort of. Stop reading if you'd rather know nothing; I was glad to know nothing myself, but I may be unusual in having had no hints whatsoever to begin with other than, 'It is strange').

Mulholland Drive is glorious, but hollow, but too glorious to be hollow: it has a highly-crafted unpredictability which delighted me, full of scenes which start as one thing and become something completely different, or take up something which happened ten minutes ago and make that something completely different, or in some cases, terrifyingly, fulfil exactly the promise they started with. (There was a while when I was sitting there almost flinching away from the screen because I was afraid a character's face was about to change into a corpse's; it didn't, but it perfectly well could have, and the fear was relevant). So I'd be glad to have watched it even if it was a series of completely disconnected scenes -- and it's not, although for a while there I wasn't sure.

The bright and dark faces of Hollywood. Two women with different kinds of apparent innocence, naive newcomer and mysterious amnesiac, and the treatment of women and sexuality in movies (as

leaflemming, who I saw it with, pointed out). The same mood of constrictive unease used to produce horror and comedy by turns. The most startling jump-scare I can remember, occurring directly after a character has described the coming jump-scare accurately. One of the few really hilarious brutally violent assassinations. A shot where the camera watches a doorway across an empty lot where pieces of trash are being blown hither and thither, and then swoops toward the doorway, so that after a moment I saw that the camera had itself been caught by the wind...

And there was a scene I spent thinking, "Are you seriously telling me that the solution to the mystery you've set up is 'You are watching a movie?' Aaargh!"

(t5rrhnjjjjjjjjjjj, agrees the cat. Honestly, the amount of time this cat now spends in her actual owners' house must be approaching the subliminal).

I recovered from the aargh reaction, because that wasn't the whole of what was going on (though it's where my impression of hollowness came from, and it was a good warning to get). I don't think the film is coherent -- though some of it consists of dreams, and it isn't linear, I don't even think it's trying to be coherent on those terms -- but I don't think that's a problem; I also don't know how much coherence is in there, because bits of it have been falling into place in my head for days, and bits of it haven't, many of which must by now fallen out of my head entirely. I want to watch more David Lynch, and if the Film Society were screening Mulholland Drive again next week I'd definitely go.

Edited for footnote: When watching The Prestige I became convinced early on that the two rival conjurers in it were the same man, played by the same actor with different accents and hair, and that his entire life was an elaborate and costly magic trick complete with body doubles. (No comment on most of that, but they are definitely two actors). And before that, I've spent the first quarter of a boxing movie not realising that it had two main characters: brothers gearing up for a major competition who would inevitably both make it to the final round having both won our sympathies. I thought it was one guy with a really convoluted backstory and training regime. And in this movie I spent a long time looking at the characters Betty and Rita going "...you are not the same actress. You have different noses. Do you have different noses? I think you have different noses." I think the evidence is sufficient to conclude that I'm somewhat face-blind.