Some More Films I Watched Recently

It's been a particularly fruitful couple of months for movies-watching so I actually have two posts worth of stuff to get through. Part the first coming atcha'.  

Presented in reverse chronological order of release.

(2020)

When alien invaders capture the Earth's superheroes, their kids must learn to work together to save their parents- and the planet.

Robert Rodriguez has made a name for himself in several genres but particularly in the Kids Action genre. I'd never seen any of them until I had rugrats of my own. This one is a quasi-sequel to The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, which he also directed. I could just have easily covered Spy Kids 4: All The Time in the World for this spot and written practically the same review. Every so often we get rid of Netflix and then add it back for a few months. When we do, I see these two movies an awful lot.  

Great stuff. My kids love it, so I've seen it, I don't know, twelve times? Maybe more? Good ensemble picture, inventive use of CGI, nice performances from all the kids and the adults (among them Shooter McGavin, Christian Slater, Boyd Holbrook, Haley Reinhart, and Priyanka Chopra Jonas), and lots of heart. The political messaging that disfigures so many projects these days is kept at a bare minimum: a tremendous relief as a parent. It's there if you must, but not overwhelming.

(2018)

In a post-apocalyptic world, a family is forced to live in silence while hiding from monsters with ultra-sensitive hearing.

I resisted seeing this one for awhile. I'm kind of over this sort of thing. ("Metaphor" monster.) And yet, I'm not, really. I loved Train to Wusan for example, which merely uses zombies (and the fast-zombies prop, which I am sick of) as an exploration of one guy learning to be a Dad. Or perhaps it's just the price you pay for being a parent. Good or bad. It's a grisly metaphor for that discovery, but it moved me and I appreciated it and admired the way it was put together. It's not horror films with a message that bother me, perhaps, it's just horror films that prioritize message over function. 

And for a good portion of watching A Quiet Place, that's how my brain was processing it. What are these things? Wait, just sound? What? Where do they come from, how does this work, etc. Then somewhere along the way - I think when the mom (Emily Blunt) is having a wordless conversation with her son about the future - I realized what I actually was watching: a representation of the unfathomable grief, loss, rage, helplessness, broken-mind-and-soul, etc. of parents whose son or daughter has died. Everything in this movie is an expression of that. This isn't a film about a family running from sound creatures; it's about parenting (hell, simply existing) after the unfathomable loss of a child. i.e. of course the monsters make no sense, came out of nowhere, turned life upside down, broke the future into pieces that no longer seem to fit or to be put together, and moreover, of course there were rules - of silent suffering, of limited movements without pain/immediate consequence, etc. 

I don't know the situation of anyone who made this movie, whether this is some genuine explication of inexplicable trauma, loss, etc. or just an act of empathy and grace or just the kind of fake authentic experience we sometimes create through art, joining previously incommunicable camps together in a shared experience. It felt authentic, though. Unlike:

(2018)

Five years after an ominous unseen presence drives most of society to suicide, a mother and her two children make a desperate bid to reach safety.

No such sense of actual grief or shared experience animates Bird Box. My friend described it as "another Floor Is Lava" movie, which made me laugh. But yeah: terrible attempts at motivation, characterization, symbolism, etc. Nothing holds or makes sense, and the false hope of the ending is, like pretty much everything from the first scene on, pointless and full of holes.

If the monsters in A Quiet Place defy logistics/ logic, that makes sense; so does the grief of losing a child or a civilization. Bird Box needed similar conceptual covering fire. Instead we get the cinematic equivalent of doomscrolling, never landing on anything sensible. The characters are terrible, the script is anemic, the performances are perfunctory when they're not absurd. Mainly the problem is motivation (the script keeps reminding us why the characters are doing what they're doing, because it's unclear from either structure or performance) and conceptual consistency/ sense. (Is the ending - hey-oh! The Home for the Blind at the end of the river! - supposed to comfort anyone, FFS? It ends on a similar note of "everyone is screwed" as The Thing but blind oblivion is presented as a happy resolution. Weird.

The differences between Bird Box and something like A Quiet Place are very instructive, both for filmmakers and for empathic humans trying to understand their friends' loss(es). Or their own. 

(2017)

A veteran hunter helps an FBI agent investigate the murder of a young woman on a Wyoming Native American reservation.

Here's an intriguing mystery, engaging story, good performances, great scenery, and well-told visually. Ultimately, it's kind of a silly set-up, but the above is all true. 

Its politics are worth remarking upon for the simplicity and sensationalism: this is the sort of thing a certain type of person believes is not just super-realistic and, like, profound, but happening right now. (Unnamed Indian tribe, Department of Energy employees with immunity who get bored so they rape and kill, when they're not RAPING AND KILLING THE PLANET! etc. Young FBI agent who represents a better future nevertheless "doing the work" to learn how not to be white, etc. Caught in a crossfire hurricane, perhaps, but on the right side of history, despite her boss.) 

The film's central premise (boredom in service of the evil Department of Energy and manifest destiny leads white people to rape and murder) could have been a little less ridiculous - at one point, to cover their crime, the bad guys decide to ambush and kill every cop in the reservation, thankfully missing Elizabeth Olson and Jeremy Renner; kind of strange progressive optics, that, but also the sort of plot development that strains credulity - but that would require the whole gamut of oversimplified conclusions to be less ridiculous. 

It's still a very watchable movie; I watched it twice, actually. It's like a very special episode of Law and Order: SVU, one with two or three times the usual budget. A better name for this movie, incidentally, would be Law and Order: Energy Rapists. And Jeremy Renner should just be Hawkeye. It's basically the best and grittiest Hawkeye movie ever made, and that's cool, whatever the hell else I say. 

It's funny to me that they thank the Department of Energy in the end credits. Good sports! I liked the mountain lion motif. (Jeremy Renner's character is tracking some mountain lions who are bothering the reservation. He finds the den just before the big shoot-out scene. The job he's there to do is deferred, in other words, until he cleans up the big white people mess. That'd have been a subtler conclusion than, you know, spelling it out in giant 'H-E-L-P-M-E' letters in blood in the snow.)

(2006)

A black police detective must solve a strange case of a kidnapped boy and deal with a big racial protest.

I kind of liked this one. I left the room at various points, though, so I can't in good faith say I watched it incredibly closely. But it seemed better than I thought it would be, going in. I think this Ebert review, though is fair:

"Freedomland assembles the elements for a superior thriller, but were the instructions lost when the box was opened? It begins with a compelling story about a woman whose car is hijacked with her 4-year-old son inside. It adds racial tension, and the bulldog detective work of a veteran police detective. And then it flies to pieces with unmotivated scenes, inexplicable dialogue, and sudden conclusions which may be correct but arrive from nowhere. The film seems edited none too wisely from a longer version that made more sense. (...) Based on a novel by Richard Price, whose Clockers made a better film. He adapts his story for director Joe Roth as if they know a lot of places in the neighborhood but don't remember how to get from one place to another. Individual scenes feel authentic, but the story tries to build bridges between loose ends."

Probably fair. I've been meaning to both rewatch Clockers and even read it one day. It's a long one. A nice turn from future Avenger Anthony Mackie as Billy, and always nice to see Detective Lester from The Wire (as the intermittent Reverends, who in the words of Ebert, "vents on command to provide filler for the plot." Hey now! That's what Reverends do.)

(1997)

An intellectual billionaire and two other men struggle to band together and survive after getting stranded in the Alaskan wilderness with a blood-thirsty Kodiak Bear hunting them down.

That description is kind of wack. Accurate enough, I suppose. I like that they make it clear it's a Kodiak bear. 

I was a huge David Mamet fan in the 90s - still am, I guess, though there's been a lot he's written since the 90s that I haven't read - and this struck me as the ultimate script: a thoughtful action/ survivor film where the "bear" could be read as a metaphor for anything. For years whenever Mamet (or Lee Tamahori, the director) come up, I start talking The Edge. 

This time around, I disagree with my earlier self: the bear is not some movable feast of metaphor; that was just the will-to-subjective-readings of my younger self. I've seen this thing, I don't know, two dozen times? It never gets old for me. This time, though, maybe I thought this scene or that scene may have been overwritten or the wrong beat emphasized here or there. 

I have a friend who picks this movie apart mercilessly. "No head cover?! How did they tan the hides?!" etc. Understandable, I guess, but I'm perfectly willing to go along for the ride of this one. If I were a football coach I'd give some variation of this speech every goddamn halftime. Whenever I'm confronted with lagging enthusiasm I like to slip into it. "You want to die out here, don't you?"

TAI-PAN
(1986)

Historical fiction set against the backdrop of Hong Kong in its early years of British rule.

That's the broadest-strokes plot description we've seen yet! For our intents and purposes, though, it works just fine.

Not the best adaptation. The novel it's based on is one of my favorites. And it's more or less faithful to it - so what gives? I'm not sure, really. It is not unintelligently transcribed. No one gives a bad performance. It's just that everything seems cosplay-ish and overbroad on screen. Dirk Struan is a larger-than-life character, for sure (any composite of the larger-than-life characters of early Hong Kong colony would have to be) but Bryan Brown - while doing a perfectly good job - seems in every scene to have stepped off a romance novel cover.

As does Janine Turner, although this is true to her character from the book.

The contrast between east/ west, between Janine's character (Shauvin) and Joan Chen's (May May) and Dirk's bridging the two worlds, so poignantly explored in the source material, seems mostly standard love triangle-y here. Or worse, white-savior-y.

As the only adaptation of Tai Pan out there, hey, I'll take it. I hope someone makes a better one, someday, when saner storytelling and commercial sensibilities return to La La Land (if they ever do).

The book has a sequel, Noble House, which isn't as good as Tai Pan, but it was made into a mini-series (with Pierce Brosnan) worth seeing, if only for the sumptuous visuals of Hong Kong before its turnover to the CCP. I wish I'd been able to see it. 

(1986)

A group of young shopping mall employees stay behind for a late night party in one of the stores. When the mall goes on lock-down before they can get out, the robot security system malfunctions, and goes on a killing spree.

Prior to this viewing, I could've swore I saw this before. Hasn't any child of the VHS era seen every slasher flick from the 80s? You'd think so. But apparently I had not seen this before.

Much better than I expected. I doubt it knocks on the door of "great" but its fun in that very specific 80s-slasher-film way. Kelli Maroney of Night of the Comet fame gets another lead, or co-lead. She seems a bit distracted throughout, or not as much of a presence, perhaps, as in Night of the Comet. It shares more than a few castmates with NOTC, actually; perhaps the same casting agency worked on both films. Directed by Jim Wynorski, whose CV reads like some kind of cautionary tale. (An alternate caption for the above would be "What Happened To Your Pants, Young Lady: The Jim Wynorski Story.")

You google contemporary reviews of this movie and they're terrible, whereas retro-reviews all seem to emphasize how much fun it is. Both make sense. There was perhaps a glut of such fare in the 80s, so its more agreeable aspects stand out more now vs. then. I don't know how future generations will sort out our current era, where the "glut" is seven thousand straight-to-streaming movies a week for every platform. Funny: this is what a lot of 80s reviews said of stuff like Chopping Mall, i.e. this direct-to-video market will over-saturate the market, etc. 

But I think any fair evaluation of 80s fare would separate this from lesser efforts. 

(1984)

A family moves to a suburban town only to be coerced into joining a suspicious club.

Whatever campy fun you expect to have with it is pretty much dispensed with in the first scene, kindly available to us via YouTube. (Albeit with commentary.) Actually the whole thing is available on YouTube, or any free streaming service like Pluto or what not. 

It's the subject of more than a few "so bad it's good" retro look-back sort of reviews (like this one) and I don't disagree with anything said in any of them. A film made for friends to come over and laugh with. Never a bad thing, that. 

A bit more pointless, alas, watching by one's self, either in 2021, or in 1984. For Wes Craven (or Susan Lucci or Robert Urich) completists, only. 

(1980)

An unearthly fog rolls into a small coastal town exactly 100 years after a ship mysteriously sank in its waters.

Here's one of those films that was widely considered a failure for many years, then was gradually rediscovered, and now seems to be hailed as a "classic" fairly routinely. I've seen it referred to as one of John Carpenter's best, even. 

Fairly or unfairly, I'm happy that's the case. This time around, however, its clunkier or harder-to-square aspects jumped out at me more. The end definitely drags, and the cross-cutting makes it draggier. (Adrienne Barbeau's character seems menaced by the tower-climbing pirates for what seems like an unfathomable period of time, same with the square-off in the church.) The ending (the very ending) doesn't really work. The Jamie Lee Curtis/ Tom Atkins parts are miscast.

And yet, everything's fine. I have a theory: ambience (like Authority) always wins. You can get a lot of things wrong in a picture, but if you get the ambience right, chances are, you succeeded. And The Fog, fittingly for its title, has plenty of atmosphere. 

There'll be another post soon, but let's end with:

(1958)

American astronauts are drawn by a mysterious force to the planet Venus, which they find to be inhabited only by beautiful women and their despotic queen.

I've often defended movies like this or Fire Maidens from Outer Space or Cat Women of the Moon on their own non-ironic merits, or episodes like "Spock's Brain" as send-ups of these things. And I still do, more or less. I find films like Amazon Women on the Moon more exploitative than the genre they're allegedly sending up, which often is the case actually. Deconstructing or mocking something can create brand new offenses. 

Joe Dante et al, 1987.

This time around what struck me about this one was the blandness of the male cast, the assembly line appropriation of Anne Francis' minidress from Forbidden Planet while leaving most of the style and sensibility of that one behind, and the heroic masturbational fantasy of it all. PG but man, it's all there. All stuff I knew existed in the film, but I had less fun with it all this time. Am I getting old? Less prone to putting on my irony monocle? Or have we just moved on from such things enough at this point that the distance has become too great? It's ironic to end on this having started with We Can Be Heroes. 

Whether my senses are increasingly bludgeoned or it's just the phases of the moon (so to speak), I feel my appreciation, ironic or otherwise, of things like Queen of Outer Space has played out. I'll have to leave the "Spock's Brain" et al defenses to other parties. Like when I listen to Frank Zappa, I can remember what I liked about it and why and how to defend it, but it's like a train card with no rides left on it. Similarly, I'm now post-QOOS. (There's a fun phrase.)

There's one hell of a reboot in here, though, for someone with the right mix of girls, gods, and guns, zazz and zowey. Alan Moore, in other words. Actually, I think he basically rebooted all of this in the text-appendices of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; I need to reread it. He mashed together several pre-actual-moon mission mythos, if memory serves, QOOS among them. 

~

Until next time, friends.