kennelco film diary

(2006) dir. Paddy Breathnach
viewed: 04/12/08

This low-end slasher film set in the rural woods of Ireland, amidst a group of backbacking, “shroom”-eating American college students is really pretty lame.  The whole nubile dunderheads getting picked off one-by-one by some threatening killer, a genre whose rebirth has seen a moderate pick-up in the last few years, has come back, but without anything new to add, nor even offering the qualities of their progenitors in the 1980′s.

For this one, knowing that it came and went from theaters pretty quickly, I hadn’t high hopes.  But the novelty of the kids all being high on hallucinogens while they get picked off offered the possibility of something new or novel.  Sadly, though, the “shroom-vision” and the killer’s perspective looks pretty goddam bad.  No matter how decent a notion could be, handed to the wrong creative team it doesn’t have a chance.

It has no flavor whatsoever of genuine Ireland.  Even the Irish guide to the kids has an English accent, explained away by his education in an English public school.  There are backwoods weirdos, Gaelic versions of inbred rednecks, but they hardly speak.  I wonder if this was even filmed in the country.

And for the stock characters, the girls are a little more interesting than the boys, one of whom looks like a poor man’s Jason Mewes of director Kevin Smith’s “Jay and Silent Bob”.  Who knew that anyone actually cultivated that look than Jason Mewes himself?

Anyways, this is not really worth the time, not even for those who might see this just to fill out their checklist of the genre.  But if you are a genre checklist type, then you’ve probably already seen it anyways.

(2005) dir. Michael Bay
viewed: 04/12/08

I can’t tell you why exactly…other than the fact that a big time action film starring Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor, both of whom I like, simply appealed to me.  Maybe it didn’t appeal enough to see it up til now, but it typically would catch my eye at the video store.  Finally, the day has come.

It’s Michael Bay, so you know it will be loud.  You know there’ll be explosions and all kinds of stuff just simply going boom BOOM BOOM!!! 

Oddly, I found it kind of entertaining.  Actually, from the get-go, I was enjoying its silliness and je ne sais qua.

It’s genetic research, cloning, morality against the government and the corporations.  Science gone mad!  With greed.

Oddly, when it was first marketed, I thought it was going to be more of a modern, poor man’s Logan’s Run (1976).  At first, in the film, the future seems to be all about jumpsuits and supercrazy state-controlled identity and activity, with a lot of social commentary on the world of privelege.

But the film isn’t particularly deep.  It has a good car chase sequence that was probably pretty good on the big screen.  I enjoyed it more than Bay’s more recent Transformers (2007), though arguably the more recent film had better out and out effects, bigger and more sparkling as eye candy.

This is the kind of film in which you don’t need to think too much.  Just enjoy it.

McGregor did his part, managing his charm and likeability with material of whatever quality.  Just flash that smile, Ewan, we’ll forgive a lot.  As for Johansson, she’s appealing.  As the childish clones, the film offers some of its most amusing moments…

I don’t know.  Just check the brain at the door.

(1924) dir. Buster Keaton
viewed: 04/12/08 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

I’ve been digging Buster Keaton a lot since viewing his masterpiece, The General (1927), and so when I saw that the Club Foot Orchestra was playing a live accompaniment to the film as part of the SF Jazz Festival, I quickly ordered tickets and signed up for it.

The orchestra tuned up and played live with a Felix the Cat cartoon, Felix Woos Whoopee (1928), another brilliant masterpiece of surrealistic animation by the tremendous Otto Messmer.  It also gave a good sense of the character of the original composition that the group would play.  It was a brilliant way to see these films.

Sherlock, Jr., which I had seen in a literature class a couple of years back, is a genius film.  In the introduction by the representative of the Club Foot Orchestra, he commented that this is the best of Keaton’s work, even though The General gets “more ink”.  Well, I won’t dispute that purported notion, but actually, The General is a far more ambitious film, more narrative.  Sherlock, Jr. is purely hilarious, filled with clever stunts, outrageously striking, and is a very modernist work in its play with narrative.

I won’t try to capture what has probably seen far more in depth and interesting criticism over many, many years, but it is so inventive in its breaking with the narrative when Keaton climbs into the film screen and finds himself (via a dream) in the narrative of the movie, transposed with the characters from his life.  There is a sequence that plays actively with setting and film genre in which the backgrounds change his situation every couple of seconds.

Keaton is tremendous in the big and the small.  I was struck again how influenced Jackie Chan has been by his work.  The film is endlessly inventive, turning gags from happenstance, choreographing the madness into a lively and suprising dance.

I can’t say how much I enjoyed this experience.  The best of the best.  And they were playing with both The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922), two of the major exemplars of German Expressionist cinema.  I kind of wish I’d stayed for those two as well.  Brilliant stuff.

(2007) dir. David Wain
viewed: 04/12/08

My weakness for Winona Ryder films hasn’t led me to too many dark places, most recently The Darwin Awards (2006).  This film, a comedy structured around 10 little tales based on the ten commandments, wasn’t something I would have sought out without her attached to it.  The fact that her major addition to the film is a sequence in which she falls madly in love with an inanimate ventriloquist’s dummy and has a sex scene with said dummy…well, this is the stuff that keeps the internet alive, isn’t it?

The film got pretty badly panned,…deservedly so, it seems.  Still, I found several things that I chuckled about and am still chuckling about, which is unusual for me.  But, you know, it wasn’t something that I would recommend exactly.  Also, the film features Gretchen Mol, who is quite cute, too.  And Famke Janssen.

Eh.

(1963) dir. Federico Fellini
viewed: 04/07/08

I often note that no matter how many films a film fan, student, scholar, or cineaste has seen, there are going to be huge gaps in the list of major films or major filmmakers’ works that one has seen.  Federico Fellini has been one of my major blind spots in my litany of the major filmmakers of the 20th century whose work I have seen so little of.  Up until this point, I’d only seen three, The Clowns (1970) (which is pretty anomolous I gather), I Vitelloni (1953), and La Dolce Vita (1960).  While La Dolce Vita is one of his major works, I think I was unaware of his early style (Italian neorealism) versus his later surrealistic style that seems to have developed starting with this film.  When someone says that something is “like a Fellini film”, they usually mean the bizarre, the dwarfs, the clowns, the weird stuff.  I don’t think I’d ever seen one that met that criteria.

From the opening sequence, in a traffic jam in a tunnel, which evolves into a fantasy sequence of escape and floating in air, I realized that I was finally seeing what equates more to the typical consideration of Fellini and his work.  That said, the film still maitains a realism that contrasts back with the fantasy sequences, which is a singular part of the film’s workings.  8½ is a film about a filmmaker’s mid-life crisis, in his work, in his marriage, in his religion, and his culture.  The breaking with the narrative, the sequences of internal fantasy, memories that eventually give way to the creation of the film, the dance of all that is part of Fellini’s ego, his self, his world.

It’s a very mid-20th century vision.  Very Jungian, very modernistic, still steeped in the Catholocism and the beginnings of therapy and self-analysis, rife with a sexism that also is open to not quite feminism, but something. 

The film has been so influential that many films and filmmakers come to mind throughout the unreeling of it.  There is a brilliance, the novelty of its time, the breakthrough creatively that a film about the suffocation of “writer’s block”, the breaking the wall between life and the creative process, and the psychosis of the director’s world, the world of filmmaking.

The funny thing, too, for me, is that 8½ almost was one of the first “art films” that I ever saw.  It played on HBO or something back when I was an early teen, and I remember being intrigued by it, as I was beginning to develop an interest in “film”, in exploring stuff that I have not been familiar with.  Strangely enough, more than 20 years later, I finally get to see it.  I consider what my reaction would have been at the time, what influence it might have had on me.  It’s interesting.

It finally came up for me as part of my broken “numbers” films, watching movies whose titles began with a numeral, rather than a word.  This little whim of a festival brought it to the top of my queue, even though in the end, I didn’t watch all the number films in a row.  Well, for whatever reasons I finally got to see it, I am grateful.  And I am now more interested in seeing others of his films, including the documentary that came out a few years back about him called Fellini: I’m a Born Liar (2002).  If you haven’t seen it, it truly earns its mark in the filmmaking of the 20th century.

(2002) dir. Olivier Assayas
viewed: 04/06/08

I had rented this movie a few years back and never got around to seeing it.  Director Olivier Assayas came to my attention back in 1996 with his film Irma Vep, an unusual self-reflexive film about the re-making of Louis Feuillade’s silent serial Les Vampires (1915) with Maggie Cheung running around the rooftops of Paris in a catsuit (Me-yow!).  And Assayas has a new film that just came out that I am interested in called Boarding Gate (2007).  This was the second of four movies that I rented, hoping to gorge myself on a variety of sci fi.

This film is not science fiction.  It’s a thriller, about corporate espionage, Japanese Anime, the internet and sex slavery.  The film starts out in the coporate arena, with the gorgeous Connie Nielsen drugging a co-worker and initiating her kidnap and the theft of corporate secrets.  Even with this event, Demonlover begins in the more traditional world of corporate battles, boardrooms, pampered trips to Japan, and then begins a quick descent into the madness and extremity of murder, sex slavery, and bondage.

It’s hard to say exactly what Assayas is getting at.  His gaze at sexualized anime is one of titilation but also criticism.  The naked girls who have no pubic hair getting raped by monsters and mayhem, what does it signify?  And then, the American business side, who seems tied in with everyone in the deepest of depths (there are double crossers and double agents if you will), there is the site itself “demonlover.com” in which, with serious security, a user can virtually torture a real person (kind of like that weird site a few years ago where you could virtually “hunt” with a real gun on the other end).

The commentary seems more clear at the end, when a teenage American boy, with his father’s credit card in hand, is the one coming up with X-men-inspired tortures for the faceless victim.  The separation of the real and the unreal, or the connection between the sexualized fantasies and the fictions, the lies…

Uh, I don’t know.  It’s interesting for the most part.  Toward the end, I was thinking that David Lynch could handle this material much better.  Maybe he has.  The message here is muddled.  Or maybe just muddy.  Or perhaps that is Assayas’s comment on the nature of morality, that it is muddled and muddy.  Who knows?

(2001) dir. Mamoru Oshii
viewed: 04/06/08

After breaking up my “numbers” movie marathon, I’ve been sort of trying to figure out what I felt like doing…for quite a long time…couple of days.  On a whim, at the video store, I grabbed four science fiction/fantasy films, varying greatly from locale and background, with the idea that I’d sit and watch them all consecutively.  And I decided to watch them in alphabetical order.

So, Avalon was first.  I don’t even recall hearing about this movie before.  I stumbled on it at the video store, fitting with my theme.  The only notable thing of recognition was that it was directed by Mamoru Oshii, whose 1995 anime Ghost in the Shell was one of the popular high points of the form.  Apparently, he’d directed quite a few notable anime, but other than that I was not familiar with him.

The film is kind of interesting.  Shot mostly in a golden yellow sepia, set in a somewhat Matrix (1999)-like universe, a dark city, apparently Warsaw, but one muted by the color pallette, the film is about an underground world of illegal video game playing, in which some people are professionals.  The gorgeous Malgorzata Foremniak is the dark heroine, a loner “warrior” whose entire world revolves around the game, Avalon.

Avalon is a fighting game, with tanks and helicopters and shooting.  It could be any number of those first-person shooting games, and sometimes the camera attempts to emulate the perspective of those games.  The narrative is less explicated than in the average film, leaving huge ellipses of knowledge and understanding, occasionally making you really wonder what this is all supposed to represent.

Foremniak’s character, Ash, is bent on achieving the highest level of the game before anyone else, at any risk, the largest of which leaves players “real world” bodies in a state of stupor and vegetation.  She is seeking an old teammate who has been lost in the mysterious depths of the game.

Just when I was really wondering where it was going, the film does take an interesting turn, one in which its primary point of question is most pointedly evoked: which of these worlds is truly reality? 

The film is not brilliant.  It’s brutally slow at times.  And when it comes down to the points of narrative description, details explaining situations, the pressing of the ideas are just inelegant.  Which is a shame.  It’s got some interesting aspects, in its unexplained worlds of reality, the open spaces in which you just have to wonder about what is going on.  And the usage of Warsaw, the space, is interesting, especially from a Japanese-produced science fiction “thriller”…or is that “thinker”?

(1964) dir. Ishirô Honda
viewed: 04/04/08

My kids have come to really enjoy Godzilla flicks.  Particularly, my son, though my daughter goes in and out of how interested she is.  This one I selected, another of my personal favorites of memory.  Ghidrah, or Ghidorah in a more accurate translation, was the be-all-end-all of Godzilla villains, and now, looking online through the history of the films, I see that was not just my perception, but technically accurate.  I think I also liked this one simply because it also featured Rodan and Mothra.  The more the merrier.

Actually, this is a pretty good one.  Felix was a bit disappointed (as he often is) with the long preamble to the battle sequences.  To his point, the story is a bit odd.  A princess from a Himalayan country, due to be assassinated by her own people, escapes her plane (presumably by jumping into the sea sans parachute) while under the influence of Martian mind control (or is she really channelling her true Martian geneology?)  She tries to warn the people of Japan (and the world) that great disasters are coming, coming in the form of giant monsters.

Of course, Mothra (who is in larval stage here) is the intelligent and kind monster of the bunch, the only one that people can communicate with.  And it takes Mothra’s intervention in the battle between Godzilla and Rodan to convince them (through Monster dialogue) that they should team up to beat Ghidrah.

There is some goofy intrigue with the shady assassins who look like they stepped out of a Japanese stage version of Guys and Dolls.  And it’s a bit strange telling the cops from the scientists.

Ah, but there is good action.  And Godzilla is converted to heroism.  But where does Ghidrah go when he is chased off?  He’s not killed.  He just flies away.  But to where?  And then why do Rodan and Godzilla just hang out afterwards as Mothra heads back into the sunset to his island of peace?

I guess you’re not supposed to ask these questions.  Of course, we are watching the dubbed versions, so some subtleties and nuances are no doubt lost.

Ah, but Felix is now asking for “All Monsters are Destroyed”, which will turn out to be Destroy All Monsters (1968), which was another favorite of mine, one that I caught at the Godzillafest at the Castro a couple of years back. 

So, stay tuned.