Movie Mythos

Movie Mythos #87: New Maritimes Issue

2010-10-31T18:46:00.000-07:00

Joe and I drove out to Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where the esteemed Andy Brown, publisher of Conundrum Press and editor of this issue, now resides. After having sold Conundrum Towers in Montreal, Mr. Brown moved his offices to the new Conundrum Estates and Nature Reserve on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, where we met to discuss the Movie Mythos Top Ten Maritime Movies.

Due to the stifling July heat, we decided to adjourn to the Conundrum Cottage by the oceanside, where salty breezes would cool our brains for thinking. I asked the interns (mostly locals, fishpants and all, said Mr. Brown) what Maritime films they could recommend. The interns took a break from making lobster rolls and rappûre/rappie pie, an Acadian delight of gelatinous grated potatoes and meat, which I first sampled as a French Camp student at Ste-Anne University nearby. Some classics of Canadian cinema came up immediately: Margaret’s Museum, New Waterford Girl, The Hanging Garden. There followed a lively discussion of Anne of Green Gables and CODCO, and how these have shaped our national identity. Finally, we wracked our brains to come up with more recent examples of Maritime cinema, and came up with some of playwright Daniel MacIvor’s work, including Wilby Wonderful and Marion Bridge.

A hard day’s work concluded, the interns then took us crab-fishing off the dock. The lazy late afternoon stretched into the evening as we played Hearts, before a kitchen party erupted, everyone drinking Screech, jigging and playing fiddles and spoons. No, this last part was not actually true. There were, however, many rounds of Farewell to Nova Scotia (sung mostly by Joe) as we left in the morning.

The Movie Mythos Top Ten Maritime Movies:

Anne of Green Gables (1985) – Kevin Sullivan. Sure, roll your eyes. Anne is amongst the most recognizable kitsch icons of Canadiana, along with Mounties and lumberjacks. Prince Edward Island is a top tourist destination, thanks to her. But when I was young and romantic, I read and re-read the original stories a thousand times over. I thought the movie was a lovely rendition, Megan Follows as Anne was perfect, Colleen Dewhurst and Richard Farnsworth as the Cuthberts were inimitable.

The Hanging Garden (1997) - Thom Fitzgerald. You can’t go home again, especially when you’ve hung your troubled, fat, teen-aged self in the garden and gone off to be a gay man in the city. Ashley MacIsaac shows up playing the fiddle, who else?

New Waterford Girl (1999) – Allan Moyle. The best thing about this quirky Cape Breton small town coming of age comedy is the wonderful Liane Balaban in her first acting role. Not the only good thing though! Nicholas “Da Vinci” Campbell and Mary Walsh are also great. Themes include teen pregnancy, the strangeness of people “from away,” and wanting to get away.

Margaret’s Museum (1995) – Mort Ransen. Based on Sheldon Currie’s book The Glace Bay Miners Museum, with lots of Maritime signifiers, from the coal mining town where it is set, to the abundance of Gaelic music and dialect, bagpipes and booze.

The Shipping News (2001) - Lasse Hallström. There was a time when I would have been excited about seeing a movie by Lasse Hallström, director of the wonderful My Life as a Dog, but working in Hollywood for the last twenty years has done him a disservice. The Shipping News, though greeted with mixed reviews when it came out, warranted a spot on the list as one of the few Hollywood films set in Newfoundland (based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Annie Proulx). Maritime signifiers here include seal flipper pie and the sea, the sea, the raging stormy sea.

The Bay Boy (1984) – Daniel Petrie. A Catholic boy in small-town Nova Scotia, whose mother wants him to be a priest, wrestles with religion, girls, murder, and molestation by the local priest. An early coming-of-age Canadian classic with Keifer Sutherland, Liv Ullmann and Peter Donat.

Codco (1988-1992). A CBC television series that was on at the same time as The Kids in the Hall, which at the time I liked better than Codco, but my roommates, all of whom hailed from Nova Scotia, thought Codco was hilarious. I admit, I didn’t get the Newfie humour a lot of the time. But Cathy Jones and Mary Walsh would go on to do This Hour Has 22 Minutes, which in turn has spawned a Rick Mercer empire (Monday Report, Made in Canada, Talking to Americans…). Mercer was also in Secret Nation with Jones and Walsh (both of whom are also empires), a movie positing a conspiracy around the referendum that saw Newfoundland join Canada. Codco and The Kids in the Hall would meet at last in the short-lived series set in Newfoundland, Hatching, Matching and Dispatching, with Walsh and Mark McKinney.

The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood (1986) – Andy Jones and Michael Jones. The Codco gang before they were Codco, with all their trademark gags and humour, about a bureaucrat who becomes the first ruler of the People's Republic of Newfoundland.

Wilby Wonderful (2004) – Daniel MacIvor. A brilliant playwright, actor, and director who also wrote Marion Bridge, MacIvor leads a who’s who cast of Canadians here with Paul Gross, Maury Chaykin (may he Rest in Peace), Sandra Oh, Callum Keith Rennie, Ellen Page…

Crackie (2009) – Sherry White. Just last year, the latest Maritime film made its rounds through the film festival circuit, garnering great reviews. Crackie is about a young girl and her single mother, living in a gritty small-town of hardship in Newfoundland. Tough and poetic at the same time. Look for it at your local video store, though probably filed under “Foreign Films” as ironically, many Canadian works tend to be.

Altogether now! Farewell to Nova Scotia, the sea-bound coast/Let your mountains dark and dreary be/For when I am far away on the briny ocean tossed/Will you ever heave a sigh or a wish for me?

Movie Mythos #86: The Drinking Issue

2010-08-24T17:35:00.000-07:00

I thought I’d already done a drinking and writing column, but I guess my memory is shot by the booze. The column I’d been thinking of ran in Matrix 76, Robert Allen’s memorial issue, but it was really more of a writers-in-movies column, though indeed, many of these involved drink. Alcoholism is an unfortunate occupational hazard when one is a writer. Or is it the other way around? Being a writer would certainly be an unfortunate occupation for a drunk. Ha ha! This romantic cliché is most famously embodied in Barfly, written by Charles Bukowski and directed by Barbet Schroeder.

Barton Fink, besides being one of my favourite films, is on this list for the character of W.P. Mayhew, based on William Faulkner, who Howard Hawks invited to Hollywood to write screenplays, and who believed that alcohol helped him to write.

From Hollywood, we move to Las Vegas, where people go to drink themselves to death, or at least Nick Cage (playing a screenwriter) does in Leaving Las Vegas. The more carnival-esque side to booze in Vegas (plus everything else you can imagine) is explored by Johnny Depp’s rendition of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but though it’s directed by Terry Gilliam, nothing captures crazy like the book.

Then there’s the old classic, The Lost Weekend, which follows an unsuccessful writer’s four day bender, tracing through flashback all the destruction wrought by the bottle.
The last of the writerly drunk movies on this list is Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker. Are writers the most prone to drink? Why aren’t there as many movies about alcoholic artists or accountants?

Well, for a change in pace, we have a couple of comedies next. The Big Lebowski, the second entry here from the Coen Brothers, features Jeff Bridges as The Dude, who drinks White Russians throughout. Some friends and I once had a Big Lebowski party where everyone had to drink a White Russian everytime The Dude did. A dangerous game! White Russians (kahlua, vodka and milk) go down eeeeeasy, then hit you in the head. We also had Cosmopolitans (vodka, triple sec, lime and cranberry juice) while watching Sex and the City, and contemplated drinking straight vodka while watching North by Northwest. However, in that movie, James Stewart is forced to drink a whole bottle of booze by spies, who try to kill him by then letting him drive drunk. Maybe not the best drinking game movie!

James Stewart surfaces again in Harvey, where he plays an alcoholic who makes friends with a giant pink rabbit that only he can see. A screwball comedy!

Then there are the amazing, hilarious series of Drunken Master kung-fu flicks, starring Jackie Chan, whose character actually fights better while drunk. If you haven’t seen these classics, you gotta go check them out!

And finally, the last entry on the list is Cocktail. Cheesy Tom Cruise! “Flair” bartending action that spawned an 80s fad! The tagline: “When he pours, he reigns.”

The Matrix Movie Mythos List of Drinking Movies:

Barfly (1987) – Barbet Schroeder
Barton Fink (1991) – The Coen Brothers
Leaving Las Vegas (1995) –Mike Figgis
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) – Terry Gilliam
The Lost Weekend (1945) – Billy Wilder
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) – Alan Rudolph
The Big Lebowski (1998) – The Coen Brothers
Harvey (1950) – Henry Koster
Drunken Master (1978) – Woo-ping Yuen, and The Legend of Drunken Master (1994) – Chia-Liang Lu. Both starring Jackie Chan.
Cocktail (1988) – Roger Donaldson

Movie Mythos #85: The New Feminism

2010-03-09T19:50:00.000-08:00

The Old Feminism came up with some pretty good slogans. “The Personal is Political,” for instance, still works pretty well! But when the subject of feminism came up in an art history class that I was teaching, I posed this question to my students, most of whom were freshly out of high school: Do you call yourself a feminist? In each class of 30, only one or two students ever said yes, and even then, hesitantly.

However! Though this perfectly informal and scientifically un-rigorous survey might dismay the Old Feminists, fear not. The New Feminism only rarely calls itself the “F” word, because so many issues intersect, not only gender. The personal is now more political than ever, and whatever you call it, Feminism is still needed more than ever. After all, we haven’t even achieved something as basic as equal pay for equal work, never mind the restructuring of whole value systems.

It’s even worse at the movies. In a recent article on the lack of movies made by and for women in Hollywood, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis pointed out the sad statistics: “Only three women have been nominated as directors by the Academy in 81 years: Lina Wertmüller for “Seven Beauties” in 1976; Jane Campion for “The Piano” in 1993; and Sofia Coppola for “Lost in Translation” in 2003. None won. “ (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/movies/13dargis.html?_r=3&ref=movies)

This year, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is up for a lot of awards in the Industry, some say probably even for that coveted Oscar (maybe even won it, by the time this column runs). The fact is, women such as Bigelow are very rare. She can make a "guy flick", rather than a "chick flick." Dargis points out that Bigelow’s success is important in breaking stereotypes, so that women might someday direct films other than rom-coms.

However, the New Feminism isn’t trying to be one of the guys. It’s not so interested in playing by Hollywood rules, trying to get deals, money, Academy Awards. Women directors tend to work outside the system, for the most part. They work in different media, often video, which, because of its accessibility, allows greater expression and control. Video artists often take more risks than filmmakers, and are able to be far more personal (and thus, political). It must be noted that there are a far greater number of video artists who are women. In terms of form, then, it’s video art and not filmmaking that represents the New Feminism (whether we call it that, or not).

The Matrix List of New Feminist Movies:

Jane Campion’s early films are tough and strange, like Sweetie, or melancholy and exuberant, like Angel at My Table. There’s The Piano, sensual and disturbing, and her latest, the gentler Bright Star. Campion is one of the few women directors who does great work both in and out of the system (though most often, she’s better out).
Mira Nair’s early films, Salaam Bombay! Mississippi Masala, and Monsoon Wedding, were wonderful. The Namesake, adapted from the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, had great reviews. But her latest is a Hollywood biopic about Amelia Earhart that frankly doesn’t look very good (Hollywood destroys!).
Claire Denis is associated with the New French Extremism because her films are very, very intense. Trouble Every Day is my favourite film by Denis, starring Vincent Gallo and Beatrice Dalle as science lab guinea pigs inflicted with a disease that makes them crave sex and human blood.
Sally Potter’s Orlando was a wonderful adaptation of the Virginia Woolf classic. Tango Lessons was insightful, personal look into gender roles in Tango and life.
Agnès Varda is one of the few women associated with the French New Wave, and her film Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7) is regarded as one of the classics of French cinema, but I think her later works just get better and better. In her documentary The Gleaners and I, she embraces video as an intimate medium and uses it to interrogate her own life, her memories, her preoccupations.
Dorris Dorrie‘s Men was one of the first German films I ever saw, back in 1995. It was funny and moving and full of heart. She has also embraced video for her later works, which are still funny and moving and full of heart.
Shirin Neshat – Beginning with her work in installation, Neshat’s stunning epic film loops often explore the great gender divide, especially in Islamic societies. She recently directed her first feature film, Women Without Men, which is currently making the rounds on the film festival circuit.
Alanis Obomsawin made Kahnesatake: 270 Years of Resistance, for which she’s perhaps the most well known. But Obomsawin has been making films with the NFB for almost 40 years! She recently won the Governor General's Performing Arts Awards Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award.
Miranda July’s first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, is quirky and disturbing as hell. She also writes quirky stories and does performance art, often about quirky obsessions and heartbreak. Her participatory website, learningtoloveyoumore.com, with artist Harrell Fletcher, is pretty neat.
Midi Onodera has been making films and videos for over twenty years. In 2008, she made a tiny movie every single day, and posted them on her website. In 2009, she scaled back to produce a tiny movie every single week. These are still on her website at http://www.midionodera.com. For 2010, she aims to produce a Baker’s Dozen. And there are so many other women media artists that I want to include: Sylvie Laliberté, Helen Lee, Monique Moumblow… check them out at http://www.fringeonline.ca/

Matrix #84

2009-11-26T19:40:00.000-08:00

Happy When It Rains

I moved to Vancouver when I was fresh out of high school, and lived there for the next seven years. I never got tired of the rain. Or maybe I’m just romanticizing it, because I would probably get tired of the rain now. But back then I was a wannabe Goth girl, though not as morbid or as made-up. I wore only black and I was happy when it rained. And it’s the rain, of course, that is a huge part of Movie-Mythic Vancouver.

The Movie-Mythic City exists as a collection of moods, ideas and images found in cinematic history and the collective imagination. New York might be the most mythic of these cities, figuring as its own character in iconic films from Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, to Wes Anderson. For Vancouver, it seems to be the rain that comes up most often. The never-ending drizzle, the grey skies, and the gloom have become part of its character as portrayed on the screen, perhaps most famously in setting the mood for The X-Files, which, like so many things shot in Vancouver, was not actually set there.

The fact is, although dubbed Hollywood North, Vancouver has mostly lent its famed weather to television and movies that didn’t want Vancouver to be in them. But Vancouver often sticks out, anyways. How can it not? Most ridiculously, in Jackie Chan’s Rumble in the Bronx, Vancouver can’t be mistaken! Who ever thought Vancouver could pass for the Bronx? It clearly doesn’t. There’s a scene with a hovercraft on the beach, the mountains in the background… heck, if that’s the Bronx, it sure is a beautiful place.

One of the first American TV shows to shoot in Vancouver to save a buck was 21 Jump Street, the teenage cop show that launched Johnny Depp’s career. Though supposedly set in a fictitious American state, the opening titles gave away its true Vancouver location as the Skytrain and the Hastings bus were seen in the opening titles (always a source of pride to Vancouverites).

Since then, the list where Vancouver has stood in for Anytown, USA, has grown and grown, including such venerable TV programs as MacGyver, Smallville, and of course, The X-Files. And in the movies, Vancouver has quietly appeared in Hollywood gems as X2: X-Men United, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, and currently, Twilight: New Moon.

But when it came down to making my Vancouver movie list, I wanted to include shows that were actually set in Vancouver. Hard Core Logo came to mind immediately for movies, and not much else. So then I had to do some digging!

Out of necessity, I widened my scope to include television shows, which are an especially important part in reflecting Vancouver’s character. Da Vinci’s Inquest, one of the CBC’s most popular shows ever, is really Vancouver. But there are also little-seen independent films that, although not widely available, have certainly added to Vancouver’s onscreen mythos. Most of these on the final list are, of course, Canadian, because if we don’t set our stories where we live, who else will?

So finally, here’s the Matrix Top Ten List of Movie-Mythic Vancouver:

Hard Core Logo (1996) – Bruce McDonald captures Vancouver’s punk rock scene the way I remember it (perhaps I’m romanticizing again).

Da Vinci's Inquest (1998-2005) – One of the best crime dramas ever, based loosely on real-life Vancouver coroner and then later, mayor, Larry Campbell.

The Grey Fox (1982) – This historical drama by Phillip Borsos about a genteel stagecoach robber who decides to go to British Columbia to become a train robber. Notable mostly for the wonderful Richard Farnsworth.

Unnatural & Accidental (2006) – by Carl Bessai, based on the play by Marie Clements.
Based on the real life murders by alcohol poisoning of 10 Native-Canadian women on Vancouver’s East Side, a subject also tackled in Da Vinci’s Inquest.

Everything’s Gone Green (2006) – by Paul Fox, screenplay by Douglas Coupland.
Love him or hate him, Mr. Coupland has contributed much to developing the character (caricature) of Vancouver. Everything’s Gone Green was the first movie that he’d written, and is one of the most “Vancouver” movies ever made! And if that wasn’t enough, you could then watch all 13 episodes of jPod, adapted from Coupland’s novel and made into a CBC television series, which ran one season (available to view on the website!).

The Beachcombers (1972-1994) – The Beachcombers on the CBC had a run of 22 years, the longest running Canadian TV drama in Canadian history. It wasn’t technically set in Vancouver, but about 40 minutes north by ferry. But whenever I go out to the Vancouver Airport, I see logs jammed up in the Fraser River delta and I think of this show.

Better Than Chocolate (1999) – Anne Wheeler’s lesbian love-story fairy-tale.

Double Happiness (1994) – One of the first movies I ever saw that starred an Asian-Canadian woman (Sandra Oh), and even more importantly, was written and directed by an Asian-Canadian woman (Mina Shum).

Robson Arms (2005-2008) – A wacky comedy with a who’s who of Canadian TV stars (including my fav, Dave Foley), and set in the West End, one of the most densely populated areas of Vancouver. Naturally, it’s all about neighbours!

The X-Files (1993-2002) – I couldn’t resist finishing off with The X-Files because, although not set in Vancouver, it’s become part of the myth of Vancouver in a way that other more generic shows have not. In the last seasons, when the production moved to sunny LA, some wondered whether they would be able to strike the right mood without all the rain.

2 Days in Paris / Two Lovers

2009-09-21T07:42:00.000-07:00

I'd read a review of 2 Days in Paris, Julie Delpy's directorial debut, which described it as being rather Woody Allen-like, and it really is an apt description. I know Delpy mostly from starring in Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, which I happen to think are two of the most romantic movies of all time, so it was great to see her onscreen again. She strikes me as eccentric and kooky but down-to-earth at the same time. Her boyfriend in the film (played by Adam Goldberg) reminds me of so many neurotic people that I know, so it was kind of fun to watch him blunder his way around. The movie ranges from cringe-inducing to neurotic and messed up, but kind of sweet and decent, too. I really liked it, but when we lent the film to a friend, who admittedly has the opposite taste in movies than we do, he said he had to turn it off after fifteen minutes because he found the characters too whiny. A chacun son cinema!

The same friend recommended Two Lovers by James Gray to us, and so logically it would follow that we wouldn't like it. Actually, Joe thought it was just okay (though he was under the impression it was going to be a RomCom and it wasn’t), but I found it surprising and not too affected. I was surprised when the Joaquin Phoenix character, who seems a bit like Marty, a guy who lives with his parents and seems socially awkward, goes out to clubs and breaks with the best of them. Well, I guess that was the main surprise… besides the fact that the film paces itself out beautifully, takes its time with it. Gwyneth Paltrow gives more depth in her bad-girl portrayal than I’ve seen in some time. Isabella Rossellini, who is always wonderful, plays Joaquin’s mother wonderfully. The scenes are quiet and well-observed. Both these films ended up being paired well together in very opposite yet kind of complimentary ways. Nice!

Happy-Go-Lucky / The Wrestler / The Fountain

2009-09-15T11:12:00.000-07:00

I'd heard way too often that Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler was a pretty good film, which is the perfect way to ruin a film with high expectations. For example, Joe and I started watching Happy-Go-Lucky, Mike Leigh's latest, which we’d also heard was a good film. After ½ an hour, we decided not to continue. We found ourselves rather annoyed by the main characters, especially Sally Hawkins with her continuous cackle. Same as with the whimsical music that kept popping in. I may return to it, however, as I’ve heard that the beginning of the film is a bit of a misstep for Leigh, and I'm a fan of his earlier works.

The Wrestler, in spite of all my preconceptions, surprised me. It struck a good balance between gritty realism and Hollywood storytelling. It seemed heartfelt, and its excellent script was not too maudlin when it had so many opportunities to be. Mickey Rourke is great as an excellent ex-wrestler trying to make a come-back after a heart attack takes him out of commission. And we get a peek into behind the scenes of the world of professional wrestling, which seems way stranger than anything I could dream up, like stapling one's opponent with real staples. Whoa! Director Darren Aronofsky seems to be back on track after his strange and fantastical flop, The Fountain.

We actually hadn't seen The Fountain prior to seeing The Wrestler – well, not more than twenty minutes before giving up on it – but we were so impressed with Aronofsky’s latest that we thought we'd give it another shot. I can't say I regret doing so, if only because I haven't seen anything so outlandish in quite some time, but it was really, really, really, um, strange. Not in a good way. New-Agey and sentimental and poorly acted. I'm glad that The Wrestler followed, because I might have written Aronofsky off, otherwise.

Moon

2009-09-08T10:43:00.000-07:00

The first thing I noticed about Moon is that for a science-fiction film, the set is very human. The machines looked used and duct-taped together, and have sticky notes posted to them with instructions like "kick me". The living quarters are a comfortable mess. It's so much more realistic than those super art-designed classics that we all know and love, and which are often alluded to in the movie. For instance, the computer named Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey) is calm and soft-voiced, but it isn't evil or malicious, though of course you expect it to be. Sam Rockwell gives a brilliant, understated yet anguished performance as a man who's about to finish a three year solitary mining contract on the far side of the moon. Clearly, three years of solitude is too much for a man! Duncan Jones has made a really wonderful film... with no hyperbole, Moon was the best new movie I'd seen in quite a while, a quiet, humanist sci-fi tale.

Bloody Sunday

2009-08-26T09:56:00.000-07:00

Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday was a revelation in docudrama. It's riveting, gritty, chilling, sickening, but not in the least bit exploitative or overdone. In 1972, during a pro-I.R.A. civil-rights march in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, 27 unarmed civilian protesters were gunned down by the British Army, and 13 killed. Though Greengrass is obviously on the side of the Irish-Catholic demonstrators, he presents two contrasting points of view throughout the film. We see the protestors, ordinary Irish folk, lead by Ivan Cooper, their member of Parliament (a wonderful performance, full of gravity, by James Nesbitt); and we see the under-trained soldiers in British Army preparing for the confrontation, their anxiety, their disdain for the Irish “hooligans” and their confusion going in. The events are presented simply but deftly, building with tense emotion to the imminent clash.

The camera is handheld, but most importantly, not too hand-held, avoiding the jerky motion-sickness-inducing motions of The Blair Witch Project but lending the aesthetics of documentary film. And there is no music throughout, just dense soundscape and overlapping dialogue. Bravo! There is nothing I hate more than inappropriate or overdone music.

Until the end, anyways, when it faded to black and the credits started to roll. Oh no, I thought, there’s going to be a U2 song now. And there was! It took me a moment to realize that the song was, what else, Sunday, Bloody Sunday, and then I remembered that I used to love this song when I was a teenager and was really into U2. But now, I have trouble taking U2 seriously after they became ironic rock stars, then at some point, seemed to lose the irony.

But that's such a trivial digression. Bloody Sunday reminded me of every civil rights movement in history, of Kent State, Tianenman Square. It's an amazing feat of filmmaking, and having seen it, I might reconsider seeing United 93, Greengrass’s portrayal of the events of 9/11 and the plane that didn’t reach its target (though I’m still not convinced of the necessity of that film's existence). Bloody Sunday, however, is a completely necessary film, an outrage, a challenge, an impassioned shout for justice. See it!

The Cove

2009-08-15T20:02:00.000-07:00

One of the most talked about documentaries on the film circuit this year opened in theatres this week, and having found ourselves with a rare afternoon off, Joe and I of course went to go see The Cove, a documentary about a small, carefully-guarded lagoon in Japan, where over 20,000 dolphins are killed every year. The press about this film has been overwhelmingly positive and I have to add my voice to the accolades, and my most sincere urging to go see it. It’s not only an activist film, but a taut, harrowing thriller. It teems with passion, and rarely did I feel that it was showboating or soapboxing.

Joe, a staunch vegetarian, ranted afterwards about people who are horrified that anyone could eat a dolphin, but who are happy to eat cows or pigs, to which I had no reply, since I might be counted as one of those people. And sure, I could see his point, being a lapsed vegetarian myself (but oh, the bacon...!). On the way home from the theatre, I had a craving for a Vietnamese salad roll with shrimp and sliced cold pig (why not call it what it is?), which I got at a great little take-out place on Jean-Talon Blvd. It was delicious! But I recognize that I should at least be extremely picky about the animals that I do eat on occasion, which I mostly am. What constitutes “extremely picky” would constitute a whole other discussion, rather than a simple digression. But I digress... I hope this doesn’t distract from the issue at hand!

Most people I’ve spoken to don’t want to see this film. I, too, had hesitations. I could imagine the horror of a dolphin slaughter perfectly well, and didn’t want to have to see it.
However, I can say that The Cove is not needlessly violent, and there is only the one main slaughter scene, the crux of the movie. The Cove is more about the efforts of Ric O’Barry (Flipper’s trainer-turned-activist) and the filmmakers to expose the secret slaughter, and the espionage aspects of the narrative certainly are tense, but it's great storytelling as well. By the time the slaughter is finally captured, we are well-prepared for it, and on the side of O’Barry and the film team. The Cove is really well-made and passionate documentary, and needs to be seen.

The Black Book; Stepbrothers; The Cell

2009-07-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

Recently, I wrote about Paul Verhoeven and the need to possibly re-evaluate my views on his work. I haven’t rented Showgirls yet but we did see The Black Book, Verhoeven’s most recent film from 2006. The Black Book is, as with most Verhoeven movies, an exercise in extremes. It encompasses the best and the worst of Verhoeven’s impluses towards pulpy melodrama and excess.

The Black Book is a cartoon, basically. It reminded me of war comics, though of a particulary trashy sort. Though the characters suffer some awful and horrific things, I wasn’t as moved as I would have been had they been any semblance of a human being, a real person, and not the cartoony symbols that they were. But that’s focusing on the wrong things, really. Paul Verhoeven is not into subtley, veracity, or any kind of restraint. He is not into “real.” It would be as if I expected Sgt. Rock or Superman comics to thoughtfully and conscientiously portray a war. That isn’t to say comics can’t do this. Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus is the best and most obvious example.

I guess, however, that I’d expected more; perhaps that’s where I went wrong. Never expect anything from Verhoeven but extreme and explicit trash! I might have liked it more, then. But I got higher expectations since this was a return to his home country, his first film in Dutch since The 4th Man, which was an intriguing, stylish thriller, and a lot of fun. I had hoped it would be more like that! It wasn’t. It was more like Total Recall and Showgirls at once, with lots of tits and violent bloodshed and a vat of shit dumped on our heroine for good measure. Gross!

But in spite of these crass moments - some would say, because of them - The Black Book never bores. It races along its twisty, turny way at breakneck speed, tragedy after tragedy occuring with nary a pause for reflection, so that it feels like the characters are not psychologically affected by any of it. That’s how I felt, too: mostly unaffected by all the suffering. It’s just entertainment! But, well, did I already mention that the film is set during the Holocaust? It seems maybe too irreverent to speak of The Holocaust in terms of trashy entertainment. Just a thought.

So in the end, do I still feel that Verhoeven needs re-evaluation? He’s managed to convince me that his films aren’t necessarily worth writing off, but I’m not sure that I like them all that much.

And here’s a brief run-down on some of the other movies we’ve seen recently.

Stepbrothers. A horrible movie. Joe is the Will Ferrell fan; I think he’s great on SNL, but not really much else. Anchorman was pretty good, and my four-year-old son loves Elf. Usually, Ferrell often provides the only really funny bits in each of his movies, and two or three funny bits per movie, at best. Some, like Old School, have only one (I’m streeeeaking, I’m streeeeeeeaking!). Stepbrothers sucked all the way through, but got worse and worse to the end, plus oddly and inappropriately violent for a comedy. I don’t even know why we watched the whole thing. Really, run away from it as fast as you can.

The Cell. This was kind of like playing catch-up with movies I’d meant to see and had put off. But after seeing Tarsem Singh’s more recent and absolutely lovely The Fall, we wanted to right that oversight. Again, the art direction and cinematography are both breath-taking and surreal. But the plot was completely unoriginal, very Silence of the Lambs, right down to the last-minute race against time to save the latest victim, and so, the film failed overall to impress me much, beyond the visuals. But in the realm of the visual, Tarsem (as he’s now known as) does a great job with his highly inventive and imaginative settings.

Dear Zachary

2009-07-21T09:43:00.000-07:00

Joe saw the trailer for Dear Zachary and immediately wanted to see it. He says that I saw the trailer with him, but I swear, I have zero memory of it. Has he mis-remembered, or am I really getting that senile? In any case, we finished watching it last night; it was at once horrifying, gripping, and overwhelmingly sad.

Dear Zachary by Kurt Kuenne is “about the 2001 murder of his best friend, Dr. Andrew Bagby; Andrew was killed by his ex-girlfriend, who fled the United States for Canada, then discovered she was pregnant with Andrew's son, whom she named Zachary. Originally begun as a project for Zachary to learn about his father, the film follows Andrew's parents' battle to win custody of their grandson from the clutches of their son's murderer, and is an activist plea for reform to Canada's flawed bail system, which allowed Andrew's murderer to walk free while awaiting extradition and kill again.” (From IMDb)

It’s difficult to criticize a documentary like this, one that is passionate and has a bona fide cause to champion. Suffice it to say that the material did not need the overly-edited treatment that Kuenne gives it; horror movie tropes and comic talking heads seemed at times just inappropriate. Tiny gripes, really, in the grand scheme of things. This film is so honest and heartfelt, so gut-wrenching and infuriating, that it will stay with me for some time. See it, then write to your member of parliament about bail reform. What’s art for, if not to change the world?

Mister Lonely

2009-07-13T09:34:00.000-07:00

Last week, on the day of Michael Jackson’s funeral, it seemed fitting to start watching Mister Lonely, a film starring Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson impersonator. He meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator, played by Samantha Morton, who convinces him to come to a commune where her husband “lives as” Charlie Chaplin, her daughter as Shirley Temple, and others as The Pope, The Queen, Buckwheat, Abe Lincoln, James Dean, Madonna, Red Riding Hood, Sammy Davis Jr. and the Three Stooges. A subplot stars Wernor Herzog as a pilot/priest who oversees flying nuns. How could this not be amazing? I loved Mister Lonely, loved its beautiful cinematic long sequences, its genuine and unsettling weirdness, its wonder and hope that slowly revealed its dark tragedy, its entrancing music by Jason Spaceman from Spiritualized. Released in 2007, Mister Lonely was Harmony Korine’s first film in eight years. It’s the kind of film that provokes strong reactions: you either love or hate it, as I hear is the case with his previous films, Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy (which I haven’t seen, though I do mean to). This film is, evidently, not as dark or disjointed as his others, and might even be called spiritual or uplifting if it weren’t for (maybe because of) its sadness. The perfect film in theme and mood to pay tribute to the real Michael Jackson in all his strange sadness as well. Diego Luna as Michael explains his obsession: “I don't know if you know what it is like to want to be someone else, to not want to look like you look, to hate your own face and to go completely unnoticed. I have always wanted to be someone else. I have never felt comfortable the way I am.” It makes perfect sense on so many levels.

Starship Troopers and a general reconsideration of Paul Verhoeven

2009-07-07T11:06:00.000-07:00

I admit, I had pretty much dismissed Paul Verhoeven, widely known as a maker of trash. He wasn’t always considered as such, though. He’d had a long and successful career in his native Netherlands already when he went Hollywood. The movie that put Verhoeven on the map was Robocop, a pretty good movie that spawned not-so-good sequels, a tv series, videogames… it was followed by the mostly well-received Schwarzenegger vehicle Total Recall, and his most successful and controversial movie, Basic Instinct. Showgirls was widely panned, but not as much as Hollow Man, which almost killed his Hollywood career. Critics love to trash his work, myself included, seeing his fondness for overblown violence and smut as misogynistic, exploitative spectacle.

However, I was surprised to learn that many of his movies had gone on to find a cult following. Showgirls, for instance, has become a classic of Gay Camp. Then recently, I saw The Fourth Man, and was honestly surprised! As Verhoeven’s last movie made in Holland before he went to America, it was very stylishly edited, twisting and compelling. I was hooked! I could seen, then, that I had to re-evaluate my views of Verhoeven.

Joe wanted to see Starship Troopers, as friends had been telling him it was actually pretty good. When it first came out, there was a lot said about it being an ode to Nazism, which had been enough to turn me off of it. But of course, it’s more complex than that. We watched it last week, and it turned out to confound all my expectations, not a small feat indeed. I had thought it would be a straight-up, cheesy kind of space-action flick with totaliarian aesthetics, but it was actually rather Disney-esque in its “wholesome” and cartoony characters and sets (though not so Disney-esque in its gore and skin quota). It was overblown, overacted, and completely clichéd… and these were its good points! It was so very obviously all these things that it became something else, a blackly funny poke at action movie heroics and rabid patriotism. And interestingly, sexism has been eradicated, and the army is entirely co-ed, right down to the showers (Verhoeven's not one to miss an opportunity for wet, glistening flesh).

On the other hand, the satire doesn’t get more clever than this, and so it gets a little boring after a while. I got to dislike the characters more and more, and by the end of the film, had mostly contempt for them, and while this may be a desired effect, it wasn’t fun spending time with them. Or perhaps I’m reading the intent completely wrong, and I was actually supposed to like and identify with these characters! But that clearly didn’t work out either. So I wouldn’t call Starship Troopers a really good film, but it’s certainly not to be dismissed.

These last two movies have prompted me to reconsider Verhoeven completely. I’m not saying that I suddenly see Verhoeven’s films as “high art” (if the line dividing high and low even exists anymore). I do think, however, that his gung-ho approach to movie-making is more subversive than I previously gave him credit for. He takes clichés of sex and violence and amps them up to levels that are crassly titillating (ahem), then just absurd and funny. We’re planning to watch his new film, The Black Book, his first Dutch film since The Fourth Man. I also want to see Soldier of Orange from his earlier Dutch period, which comes highly recommended as one of the best Dutch films ever. And hey, I might actually even rent Showgirls again! I see now why it’s become a camp classic. Verhoeven is way more fun than any of the other action cheesemongers in Hollywood put together.

The Fall

2009-07-02T11:53:00.000-07:00

I had never heard of The Fall. Joe had been reading good things about it, but since it had barely had a release, we thought, how good could it be? Well, we were stunned and amazed. It is simply one of the most imaginative, cinematic, beautiful and clever films that I’ve seen in quite some time! The story, set in the 1920s, is about a paralyzed and heartbroken Hollywood stuntman who weaves a magical tale of five mythical heroes (a fey and fancy Charles Darwin with a monkey companion among them) to a little girl with a broken arm (Catinca Untaru in one of the best, most natural performaces I have ever seen by a child). There are telling and clever little details that illustrate the interactive nature of storytelling. For instance, when the stuntman tells of an “Indian” who has a wigwam and a squaw, the girl, who is from Romania and unfamiliar with Hollywood Cowboys and Indians, imagines a beturbaned Indian from India. The imagery blends fantastic and surreal elements throughout, and is so stunning that I was convinced it had to be CGI, but evidently it is not. This is the kind of whimsical, extravagant metanarrative that’s right up my alley, though I can see how one either buys it completely or hates it completely. But for me, all the threads work beautifully together to weave a tale of wonder and imagination.

So how is it that The Fall is virtually unknown? It first premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006, but didn’t receive a (very limited) theatrical release in the States until 2008, and went straight to DVD in most other countries. Tarsem, whose first feature was The Cell with JLo, made the movie himself over four years and in 28 countries… that is, he financed it completely himself, outside of any studio help, so as to have complete creative control. Tarsem was hoping to get a rave review from Roger Ebert (who was a fan of The Cell) when the film premiered, but unfortunately, Ebert was ill that week, so was unable to attend. Even more unfortunately, the generally negative responses to the film at the TIFF gave it a bad rep, which it was unable to overcome, even though Ebert later gave it four stars. The film is a meta-fairy tale for adults, which made it hard to peg down and market, according to several acquisition executives. Tarsem’s reputation as a commercial and music video director worked against the film, as many saw it as thus having more style than substance. And the fact that it was self-financed gave the film a reputation as a "vanity project," unworthy of being studio-financed or distributed. What a picture this paints of how the film market works in abominable ways! How it quashes originality while bolstering mediocrity! How many other gems of movies remain unseen because of similar situations?

Fortunately, the film is slowly receiving some recognition. It’s drawn comparisons to Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, and the DVD comes as “presented by David Fincher and Spike Jonze,” which lends it their stamp of approval. It’s a shame that as a result of one poor reception at its premiere, it hasn’t had the chance to gather the audience it deserves. I say, go see it ASAP! Maybe it can gain a second life on DVD.

The US vs. John Lennon; Helvetica

2009-06-29T09:46:00.000-07:00

Two documentaries that we’d been wanting to see for some time! The first one was triggered by a visit to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which was celebrating the 40th anniversary of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s famous 1969 Bed-in for Peace, held in Suite 1742 of Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel. We decided to watch The US vs. John Lennon a few days after seeing the MMFA show. It was a good, straightforward documentary, following Lennon’s peace activism (including the bed-ins) and his battle with the USA who wanted to deport him. There were a few overused effects that highlighted attempts to add interesting visuals to the talking heads, which were overall a bit annoying. But such a great subject!

On the other hand, Helvetica is a documentary about a font. Yup! But it’s also, of course, about the impact of visual design on our everyday lives, which I found fascinating. It’s maybe a bit overlong but the montages showing the ubiquitus font in logos and signs are really well-done. Yes, it’s a beautiful font, but there were times when I thought, it would be terrible if EVERYTHING was in Helvetica. One designer in particular was denigrating “terrible 1950s design” which I love… however, other designers provided counterpoint by saying that yes, it would be very boring if there was nothing but clean design and Helvetica. Both documentaries highly recommended!

Andrei Rublev and Paul Blart, Mall Cop. Strange Bedfellows!

2009-06-18T19:35:00.000-07:00

Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice is an incredible film of light and shadow, grace and despair, prayer and insanity. It unwinds slowly, letting you enter each moment. It was the first Tarkovsky film I’d seen. So I was looking forward to watching Andrei Rublev, which I’d brought home from the library. Ultimately, it did not disappoint, though it took us a while to get the hang of being in the movie, what with its multiple monks and painters. We finally sorted out who was who well into the film. There’s a famous scene of the "Tatares" raping and pillaging the village. We see a horse falling down stairs and being speared, and a cow on fire. We were pretty disturbed by this! I don’t think it’s right to set an animal on fire for art… and I don’t think they had stunt cows.

In complete contrast to Tarkovsky was Paul Blart, Mall Cop. Could anything be more different? Well, actually, it would have been worse had Paul Blaert been a completely horrible film. It wasn’t! I guess I had expected it to be, so with lower than low expectations, it turned out to be not bad.. and not offensive, not stupid, not mean, and not full of misogynistic sex humour. Good clean fun that you could watch with your kids/parents!

The Rapture

2009-06-10T19:52:00.000-07:00

The Rapture (1991) was written and directed by Michael Tolkin, who wrote The Player, one of the best Robert Altman films ever! Good pedigree, I thought. Mimi Rogers gives a great performance as a telephone operator by day and sex-orgy addict by night, who suddenly finds God. Well, I must say, it was a nutso film, and just when you think you’ve gotten a handle on it, it would change directions, making 180 degree turns into a completely different kind of nutso. Yup, said Joe, there’s a lot of different crazys in there! That, however, was what made the film interesting to me. It pushed the situation into extremes, then flip. It was very theatrical, very dark, and very (if strangely) well done.

Cashback

2009-06-09T09:28:00.000-07:00

This 2007 first feature from young Brit director Sean Ellis certainly has visual flair and a promising premise. What if you could stop time? Well, if you were a 14 year old boy, you'd look at a lot of titties. Alas, the protagonist of Cashback is not a 14 year old boy anymore, but a heart-broken art student with insomnia who works the nightshift at a supermarket whose main clientele are beautiful white women. Annoyingly, instead of just admitting that he wants to look at a lot of titties, he waxes poetic about the beauty of the female form, art, etc. etc. etc. in ways that show he is more sensitive and artistic than everyone else. In one of the many "aren't I profound" monologues, he wonders whether the girls would forgive him if they knew he has been stopping time and taking off their clothes to draw them... he likes to think they would because of his "artistic motivations" but I would say he was just a jackass. What to do when the narrator and protagonist is a jackass and an annoying little self-important prig? What to do when the director throws in a slapstick, unrelated soccer game in the middle of a saggy and boring plot? Stop watching. That's just what we did.

From Hell

2009-05-26T07:55:00.000-07:00

Interestingly, when Joe asked me if I wanted to watch "From Hell", I said yes. Those of you who read my top ten list of movies I wouldn't watch know that there is a fine distinction between those movies I enjoy and the ones I refuse to see. But several reasons made me interested in this. First of all, I like Johnny Depp. Actually, that's the main reason. I'm also interested in Alan Moore, who wrote the graphic novel that the movie is based on. The movie turned out to be quite entertaining, and not extremely graphic, though there is a lot of blood. The killings are swift and handled fairly well. However, the ending was ruined for both myself and Joe, as the film swerved away from the book, from history, and from any narrative sense, and (SPOILER ALERT) managed to produce a somewhat happy ending. No, Johnny doesn’t get the girl, but the very fact that the girl is spared rather than butchered spoils the movie’s credibility as a serious adaptation. I told you there’d be some spoiling!

Chats perchés by Chris Marker

2009-05-25T19:39:00.000-07:00

Ever since seeing Sans Soleil recently, I have been obsessed about Chris Marker. I went to the library and got out a stack of books about him, and a DVD of Chats perchés (2004), or as known in English, The Case of the Grinning Cat. Made in his signature style with loosely connected and rambling thoughts jumping now and again to amusing or amazing juxtapositions and revelations, Chats perchés was originally made for French television, and starts by exploring yellow painted Cheshire-like cats that began to appear all over Paris. From there, we meander through an exploration of the previous four years, from 9/11 and the Iraq war to scandals in French politics, all punctuated by the return of the cats. My favourite line was about the narrator doing an Internet search for chat (cat in French) and having to weed out all the links to chatrooms. Not being up on my French current events, I have to say I wasn't as drawn in by Chats perchés, but appreciated seeing more of Marker's work.

Matrix #83: Terror!

2009-05-13T10:32:00.000-07:00

Turn it off!

“I just don’t understand you,” Joe said to me after we’d turned Blindness off after our second attempt at watching it. “It’s so random,” he says, “why you can watch one thing and not another. You can watch corpses and blood and dead bodies but not this?”

It certainly might seem random, as I’m not always able to articulate the reasons why I don’t want to watch a particular film. But there are certain traits that these movies share. That was when I first conceived of the Matrix Movie List of Terror: movies that I’m too terrified to watch, that I dare not watch, that I will not subject myself to. I mean, what is the whole point of wanting to be terrorized by a movie? I just don’t get it.

Horror films are most obviously associated with terror, and what distinguishes the two terms seems almost ephemeral. There is extreme anxiety in both, sure, but horror as a genre encompasses films that are not necessarily terrifying (like those great old Karloff/Legosi silent films). And I’m not one who simply dislikes a genre – I like a good horror film, in fact, the feeling of prickles cold on my neck, hands sweaty. I’m quite fond of many Japanese horror films, for instance. I admire how a really good thrill is constructed through mood and editing, as in Ringu or A Tale of Two Sisters. And we recently watched a Mario Bava masterpiece, Black Sunday, which featured truly horrible scenes such as a woman getting a spiked iron mask nailed onto her face. Aghhhhhhh!

Most of these films are so over the top that I know they are not real. Camp and comedy are excellent distancing devices, classic techniques that allow the audience to step back from the abyss with relief, knowing that although what they are watching is horrible and terrifying, it’s still just a movie. A good horror makes me laugh as well as squirm, even if I’m just laughing to let off steam.

We’re watching Da Vinci’s Inquest right now, that long-running classic of Canadian television. I’d never seen the show before and was sucked right in. There is a lot of aftermath of violence: murder, suicide, even infant rape in one particularly gruesome episode (I felt it might have gone too far with that one). But it’s all aftermath, and the corpses are simply grisly objects, clues in a puzzle to be solved. We take the same detached tone as the coroner, the pathologists and the murder unit.

So what am I unwilling to watch? What is unbearable?

My List of Terror includes horror movies, thrillers, a movie about terrorism, a religious drama, and some documentaries:

Blindness is the movie version of a book by José Saramago, about a plague of blindness and the rapid decay of societal order that follows. It’s a book that I read and loved, though its subject matter is dark and depressing indeed. But reading is not the same as seeing, and the pleasure of prose, of well-written words and the long followed-through thought on the page provides an aesthetic steam valve. The thought of actually seeing some of those scenes, especially one involving mass rape, was a bit too much to bear. Perhaps I was prejudiced by that thought alone. I wanted to stay open-minded about it, though, and tried to watch the film anyways. It was too clean-looking, with too many stars in it, for one. Too pretty, maybe. But getting to that scene, the men hitting those women in the face in silhouette, that just made me want to turn it off. So we did.

United 93’s tagline: “September 11, 2001. Four planes were hijacked. Three of them reached their target. This is the story of the fourth.” I‘ve heard it is actually a very good film, striking the right tone, no big stars to distract, very measured and respectful. Joe saw it and agrees. I don’t want to see it anyways. I’ve heard about the people on that plane, calling home to say goodbye, and for a moment, I’m with them, calling Joe to say goodbye, and it breaks me down everytime. I can’t bear to be with them for more than that moment, never mind almost two hours.

Polytechnique by Denis Villeneuve is on the list for similar reasons. By all accounts, it is very well-done, and has been compared to another poetic and meditative approach to the subject of a school shooting, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, which I’ve seen and liked. Why this and not that, indeed? I like Villeneuve’s work, and I’m not against seeing Polytechnique, necessarily, but it seems too close to the bone still, an open wound I’d rather let heal than disturb.

Then there are the horror films. The Amityville Horror I’ve always had a fear of, ever since it came out when I was a kid. I’d been reading ghost stories and movies about hauntings and demons always scared me way more than zombies or ax murderers. Amityville was “a true story.” I was scared shitless of it, and even though I could probably watch it now, I’d just rather not. Same deal with The Exorcist and The Omen – though I think I’ve actually seen The Exorcist but blocked most of it out.

Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer, is supposed to be a very, in fact, too realistic and graphic depiction of a serial killer. Like I need to live that out. No thanks!

Films like Saw and 8MM both seem entirely tasteless to me, morally and aesthetically, particularly 8MM’s use of a snuff film as a plot device.. Maybe if I thought they’d be any good, it might be another story, but I won’t be bothered to find out.

The same can be said for the last two entries, both purportedly documentaries. Executions is a real documentary, Faces of Death part stock footage, part faked. I’m not sure which is worse, but both seem too exploitative for words. I’ve heard arguments about Executions being a great argument against the death penalty, but I don’t know that you need to partake in it to be against it.

And finally, Mel Gibson’s Jesus movie, what was it? Oh yeah, The Passion of the Christ. Two hours of straight sadism and torture. Don’t want to see it, nope. My mother, a devout church lady, saw it with her church, can you imagine? My mother said everybody should see that film to know what Jesus went through for us. I can’t believe her church made her do that! She said she couldn’t sleep for weeks afterwards. But I’m not going to have that problem, because regardless of what my mother says, I’m not going to see it.

I can tell you what each of these movies have in common, besides my unwillingness to put myself through the wringer for the sake of entertainment: It is the portrayal of the prolonged suffering of others, first and foremost. Whether it’s the ultimate in exploitation, or done with the utmost respect, I still have trouble with it. Some might argue that it’s the elements of catharsis, or consciousness-raising, or “looking into the face of the abyss” – that kind of thing, that might justify viewing these films. Okay, maybe. But as Nietschze’s oft-used aphorism (popular especially in horror movies) points out, the abyss looks back… and when you battle monsters, you must take care not to become one yourself.

The Matrix Top Ten Movie List of Terror: movies I’m too terrified to watch!

Blindness (2008) – Fernando Meirelles
United 93 (2006) – Paul Greengrass
Polytechnique (2009) – Denis Villeneuve
Amityville Horror (1979) – Stuart Rosenberg
The Exorcist (1973) – William Friedkin
Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) – John McNaughton
8 mm (1999) – Joel Schumacher
Faces of Death (1978) – John Alan Schwartz
Executions (1995) – David Herman, Arun Kumar, David Monaghan
The Passion of the Christ (2004) – Mel Gibson

We're back with Da Vinci!

2009-05-12T18:54:00.000-07:00

Life has been koo-koo lately but now the days are clearing up and I can get back to my work, so here I am, filling up the days with distraction. Yes, I need to be editing my film! But I need to do so many things at once or else I just procrastinate and then get nothing done. Strange, how my brain works... but at least I know it.

So, here we are, writing about watching, making lists. We're starting season 6 of Da Vinci's Inquest tonight! Da Vinci's Inquest is probably the best Canadian television series of all time, and I hadn't watched any of it while it was still on. But after watching just one episode, I was hooked! Based loosely on real-life Vancouver Chief Coroner Larry Campbell, it ran seven seasons (1998-2005), then one season in 2005 as Da Vinci's City Hall (Campbell was elected Mayor in 2002) and a final TV movie, The Quality of Life. We mean to watch them all! Sure, it has its stylistic flaws, overused and overblown background music, crazy titles. But Nicholas Campbell (no relation to Larry, I assume!) is a cranky old treasure and more people should know about this series. It's starting syndication in the States now, and it's low-key, character-driven storylines are finding an audience with people who are tired of slick, formulaic shows like CSI. Da Vinci is often completely wrong, and cases are often never solved.

Occasionally we take breaks from it to watch something else, most recently, Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie and directed by Timur Bekmambetov. So absolutely preposterous, it's fun! Bekmambetov has a way of ramping up his unbelievable digital effects into the craziest action sequences, and though he has distractingly terrible music and ludicrous plot devices (The Loom of Doom!), it's clear that sheer craziness is the whole point.

And last week, Chris Marker's Sans Soleil - incredible that it's the first time I've seen it. An experimental essay-documentary about a man who travels, mainly through Japan and West Africa, writing letters about the things he photographs, the nature of memory, life on earth. It's beautiful, hypnotic, thought-provoking, incredible. Now one of my favourite films ever.

A Matrix of Anxieties

2009-02-14T20:00:00.001-08:00

One of the best pieces of advice ever given was in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Don't panic! And it’s true, it's never useful to panic. Sure, everything has the potential to induce anxiety: normal social etiquettes, self-doubt, the daily news full of catastrophe and fear-mongering about the economy, war, toxins in our food -- just plain living. And nothing I do seems to affect change. But panic doesn't help. It fogs the brain. Stay calm, breathe deeply. There is hope, although it’s this that makes me even more anxious. Dare I hope, lest I be gravely disappointed once again? The emotional swing of hope and fear duelling daily has made cynics of us all. Nonetheless, one deals however one can: pharmaceutically for the mental-disorder variety of anxiety; meditatively for those inclined to sitting still; cinematically for the rest of us.

Movies have charms to soothe the anxious beast. Escapism: to lose oneself in the pleasures of narrative and forget about the world. Is cinema part of the monster spectacle that connives to keep us apathetic and narcotised (opiated!), or can it also poke, prod, and enrage us into action? Well, there's something for everyone. When it comes to the movies, anxiety as a theme is, like life, sprawling and unwieldy, encompassing everything.

There is, most often in American films it seems, anxiety as a comedic and neurotic state, such as in most Woody Allen films. It’s Allen that first comes to mind for me, as he pretty well defined the sub-genre of movies about Anxious New York Jews, which often overlaps with the sub-genre Anxious New York Writers. Any list of films about anxiety would naturally include writers as subjects, since they seem to be among the most anxious of people, or at least the ones most public about their own phobias, their psyches and their analyses. So, we have the Coen Brothers’ dark comedy Barton Fink, and the Spike Jonze-directed, Charlie Kaufman-penned, brilliantly self-referential Adaptation (not to mention Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York). I could probably think of ten great movies in this genre alone.

But, there are so many other varieties of anxiety! David Cronenberg’s unique brand of horror has an underlying element of anxiety based on fear of the body/technology and the possibility of malfunction. David Lynch explores a similar anxiety, though more existential, surreal, and ominous in nature, especially with Blue Velvet and Lost Highway. And some of the well-defined genres of Asian horror (for instance, Hideo Nakata’s Ringu – don’t even talk to me about inferior Hollywood remakes) excel in exuding a thick atmosphere of anxious and chronic dread. Then there are those films that inspire anxiety because of their realistic docu-drama aesthetic and extremely harrowing plots involving ordinary people. These can be unpleasant to the point of agony to watch, since, unlike horror films, there is not the same distancing effect that allows you to mark them as fiction. I could barely stand watching Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, for instance, which made me question why I was putting myself through torment. Was there a sense of catharsis in suffering so graphically with the characters? Was it simply gratuitous exploitative spectacle disguised as art? I can’t decide. Babel was released in 2006, with a barrage of similarly tense though more fantastical films like Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. The cinematic mood back then looked unbearably bleak. But even in the darkest of times, there is always humour. So who better to conclude the list of anxiety movies with than the Master of Wry Suspense? Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, with its emblematic and technically brilliant zoom shot through a staircase, induces a delicious thrilling anxiety that is movie-watching pleasure at its finest. But oops, speaking of Hitchcock! Mel Brook's High Anxiety, an appropriation of over ten Hitchcock flicks including Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds, brings anxiety full circle to outright spoof, satire, slapstick. Laughter, as they say, is the best medicine, so maybe the Americans got it right there. And now, as America is about to swear in a new president, it seems that hope is back, again fighting daily with fear and anxiety. Good luck and Godspeed to each of us.

And so, the final list:
The Matrix Top Ten Anxiety Movies!

Deconstructing Harry (1997) – Woody Allen
Barton Fink (1991) – The Coen Brothers
Adaptation (2002) – Spike Jonze (written by Charlie Kaufman)
Dead Ringers (1988) – David Cronenberg
Lost Highway (1997) – David Lynch
Ringu (1998) – Hideo Nakata
Babel (2006) – Alejandro González Iñárritu
Children of Men (2006) – Alfonso Cuarón
Vertigo (1958) – Alfred Hitchcock
High Anxiety (1978) – Mel Brooks

Matrix #81: Indie Music

2009-01-02T19:29:00.000-08:00

What, just ten Best Music Movies?! Why even try? For the sheer fun and ridiculous obnoxiousness of such a task, of course! I’m not talking about musicals here, though Singing in the Rain would certainly be there if I were (perhaps the greatest musical of all time, topped only by The Sound of Music for its kitsch-cult factor). I’m talking about capturing the zeitgeist of when you were young. Is it nostalgia, that somewhat dirty yet deceptively sweet and bitter feeling that brings me back to my idealistic and stupid younger self? Does that give my age away? Yikes! But no, I wasn’t even alive for Beatlemania, too young to remember the beginnings of punk. No matter your age, thanks to these music movies, our collective consciousness remembers.

The Matrix Top Ten Music Movies:

A Hard Day’s Night (1964) – Richard Lester’s groundbreaking Beatles film! Sweeeeeet…

Syd and Nancy (1986) – Alex Cox, who also gave us Repo Man, directs the brilliant Gary Oldman in the morbid punk bio of The Sex Pistols’ Syd Vicious, accused of murdering his girfriend Nancy Spungeon.

Stop Making Sense (1984) –Perhaps the greatest concert film of all time, Jonathan Demme film of The Talking Heads leaves me with two words: Big Suit!

Gimme Shelter (1970) – This is not so much a concert film of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 tour, as a document of the death of the Sixties at Altamont.

Big Time (1988) – I was eighteen when I saw this and fell in love with Tom Waits forever.

Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) – One of the best biographical music films out there, starring Sissy Spacek in an uncanny performance as Loretta Lynn. And what a life she had!

The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) – Penelope Spheeris, who later gave us Wayne’s World, first made her mark with this excellent documentary on the 1980s LA punk scene.

‘Round Midnight (1986) – Legendary jazz musician Dexter Gordon as the fictional tenor sax player Dale Turner in a film that captures the 1950s New York jazz world.

24 Hour Party People (2002) – I’m a fan of both director Michael Winterbottom and Joy Division (though the movie focuses more on the band’s label), so that’s why this movie makes the list.

This is Spinal Tap (1984) – Rob Reiner’s eminently quotable rock mockumentary that turns it up to 11! Co-writer Christopher Guest would go on to make A Mighty Wind, also worthy of mention, but Spinal Tap defined the genre.

Movie Mythos in Matrix #80 - Gallows Humour

2008-06-29T12:18:00.000-07:00

Cracking jokes as the noose tightens? Your ego doesn’t care if you’re about to die. Your ego thinks it’s entertainment. And everything is catering to the ego these days, to some degree or another. The news, politics, sports, gossip – it’s all spectacle. Jokes about any given catastrophe fly around the Internet mere hours after the tragic occurrence, many of them shocking in their flagrant disregard of respect for the dead. But it’s good to have a sense of humour! Whistling past the graveyard, we go to the movies. The best ones combine a dark (yet clear) vision, often a pointed commentary on human foibles and society, and a wicked grin. It’s a thin line, that noose around your neck; it’s a tightrope that can be as difficult to walk as a barbed wire fence. But ah, what flare is achieved by the properly placed last quip, how pleasurable is witticism in the face of death, how delightful it is to laugh with the recognition of truth as the bombs burst around us!

The Matrix Top Ten Gallows Humour Movies!

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) – A Stanley Kubrick masterpiece! Peter Sellers is particularly wonderful as the ex-Nazi Dr. Strangelove, struggling with himself not to Seig Heil the President of the United States, also played by Sellers.

The Trouble with Harry (1955) – Tagline: A comedy about a corpse! This is the most straight-up comedy of Alfred Hitchcock’s, but his films always have elements of macabre humour. He’s even described Psycho as a practical joke.

Fargo (1996) and Blood Simple (1984) – The Coen Brothers seem to take their sadistic pleasure with prolonged scenes of murders gone awry, shovels and woodchippers…

Delicatessan (1991) – Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s gorgeous black comedy with cannibals and slapstick suicide attempts.

Harold & Maude (1971) – 20-year-old Harold is obsessed with death, until he meets and falls in love with 79-year-old Maude. A romantic comedy!

Apartment Zero (1989) – A great thriller with laughs falling into the category of “getting rid of bodies.”

Shallow Grave (1995) – Danny Boyle’s first feature, and more “getting rid of bodies” chuckles.

Stroszek (1977) – Though his films are hardly comic, Wernor Herzog always has a certain dark, ironic outlook on the absurd, and here, it’s a dancing chicken shown right after the final death scene.

Life of Brian (1979) – Okay, not very dark at all, but when crucified criminals start singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” it’s certainly gallows humour at its brightest!

A New Year!

2008-02-06T19:51:00.001-08:00

It's Chinese New Year's Eve, and fine time to turn over a new leaf! I've fallen behind on this impossible (for me) task of writing on every movie we see, so instead of trying to battle the rising flood, I'm instead resorting to lists, with occasional commentary. So here is a list of all the movies we've watched since last October, rated completely unobjectively from one to ten.

The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal - 7
The Weather Underground - 8
The Notorious Bettie Page - 7 (Gretchen Mol is great as Bettie Page, even if the film seemed a bit underdeveloped)
Under Fire - 5
Kaspar Hauser - 10 (one of Herzog's best works)
My Best Fiend - 10 (just for the gossip on Kinski)
Wheel of Time - 9
Possible Films: Short Works by Hal Hartley 1994-2004 - 7
Best of Youth - 9
The Machinist - 4 (I was too disturbed by Christian Bale's extreme weightloss for this role, and too concerned for his health to suspend disbelief. Couldn't he have just tried acting?)
The 40 Year Old Virgin - FF (Fast Forward)
White Diamond - 10
Cobra Verde - 9
Spiderman 3 - 4 (It would have been alright until Spidey started in on a dance number)
Chuck and Buck - 8
Atlantic City - 5
A Bizarre Love Triangle - 6
Little Dieter Needs to Fly - 9
Wes Craven's New Nightmare - 4
The Host (Gwoemul) - 9
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster - FF
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (about my 99th viewing) - 10

Happy Year of the Earth Rat!

Matrix #79: The New Underground

2008-01-21T16:16:00.000-08:00

Here is my Movie Mythos column from Matrix #79:

Joe and I aren't up on many current films. That is to say, we know what new films are coming up and we read the reviews; we have high or low expectations of them. We don't, however, see very many of them (ah, the sacrifices of parenthood). So it gives us a lot to look forward to when the films come out on DVD. Because this is our dominant mode of movie-watching, and because of our internet movie-rental service, we might end up watching Wernor Herzog one night and Wes Craven the next, as we just did. We are not movie snobs; we like Wernor and Wes both, though you can't compare apples to oranges, as the saying goes. Now, aside from Wernor Herzog, who always astounds in one way or another, when was it that I last thought, wow, that's really good? Sure, there's lots of better-than-mediocre stuff, but I think that Hollywood mainstream is pretty much kaput. As for "independant cinema," well, now it's just Hollywood-lite. It's been clear for quite a while that, for example, the Sundance Festival has become a Hollywood genre unto itself, showing a certain type of small, quiet, well-observed drama, or a quirky kind of darkish comedy that in fact is completely status quo.

Checking back over our rental list for the past couple of years – seeing that in writing, I think, am I obsessive-compulsive that I keep lists like this? But no, I decide finally that it's in the interest of a scientific survey. Plus, Joe sometimes forgets if he's seen a movie or not. Ahem… back to it. Checking back over our rental list for the past couple of years, I realize that the freshest, most surprising, sink-into kinds of films that I've seen were practically all from Asia, especially South Korea and Thailand. I wonder, is it simply because I'm not used to seeing Asians in North American movies so much, and so I like the reflection of seeing people who look like me, somewhat? I enjoy not having to read subtitles of Cantonese films, but do so anyways for fun. But no, I think it's just because so many of them are darned good. A couple of years ago, one of our national newspapers ran a front page headline that started with a few words of Chinese, then “if you can't read this, you're in trouble.” I was shocked at the overtones: “the Yellow Peril” is coming, folks! But now I realize, it's true. Asian films are superior and they will take over the world.

Here, my list of top ten Asian film rentals (I've tried to stay “underground” and not include the perhaps more well-known directors such as Wong Kar-Wai or Ang Lee, or anything too genre, which warrants a whole other list!):

The Quiet Family; A Tale of Two Sisters by Ji-woon Kim – Perhaps these might be classified as Asian horror, though The Quiet Family is more comedic than horrific.
The Host by Joon-ho Bong (2006) – Okay, as a monster movie and as South Korea's biggest box-office hit of all time, this one is not exactly “underground,” but let's face it, most of the time, “foreign” is “underground.”
Oldboy; J.S.A. (Joint Security Area) by Park Chan-wook – The hyperviolence of Park Chan-wook's films is often way over the top and at times, just too much, but in Oldboy, it works with the intensity of the plot to become a poetic crescendo of psychological gore and mayhem. J.S.A. is an earlier film that explored political tensions on the border of North and South Korea with the same kind of unabashed and soap-operatic style.
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring; 3-Iron by Kim Ki-Duk – I can't say I like Kim Ki-Duk's earlier works such as Bad Guy quite as much. They seem to be obsessed with violence and misogyny, albeit in an interesting way, but nevertheless, difficult to watch. But Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… is a pure revelation about a Buddhist Monk and his disciple, and 3-Iron was likewise a lyrical, near-silent Zen-like story about a young man breaking into people's houses and doing their laundry. Extraordinary films.
Saving My Hubby (Be Strong, Geum-sun) by Nam-seob Hyeon – I'm cheating a bit with this one, since it isn't available as a rental yet. I saw it at a film festival a few years ago and have been keeping an eye out for it ever since. Billed as a Korean Run, Lola, Run but way cuter and funnier.
The Eye by Danny and Oxide Pang – Alright, another genre film, but this Thai ghost story about a blind woman receiving a cornea transplant is also Buddhist in nature!
Last Life in the Universe by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang – Another near-silent film about a Japanese man who meets a Thai girl, neither of who speak the other's language. Breath-takingly beautiful (shot by Chris Doyle), meditative yet darkly funny and with a yakuza subplot and a bodycount.

Dracula; Matrix #78

2007-10-24T19:35:00.000-07:00

Guy Maddin has to be one of the most original and just plain strange directors around. I find his work hilarious, surreal and compelling to watch. He's been called the David Lynch of Canada but I think that does Maddin a disservice. Eraserhead has similarities to Maddin's work but that's where the comparison ends. We watched Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, which is an adaptation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's stage production, and I think it's perhaps the best Dracula I've seen to date (not counting Bela Lugosi's, a class by itself). And speaking of Maddin, the newest issue of Matrix is back from the printers, featuring an excerpt from his "autobiographical" film, Brand Upon the Brain!. It's the Narrative "I" issue, film and autobiography all mixed together by yours truly, plus it includes a DVD of short vids and animations by such artists as Elisabeth Belliveau, Victoria Stanton, Yvette Poorter... Tell me what you think of it!

Fun; Zodiac

2007-10-12T21:15:00.000-07:00

A pair of movies about killers, neither of them great, but Fun (1994) was downright awful. Neither Joe nor I remember (or would admit to) putting this film on the list, and so we're both baffled at why either of us would have done such a thing. I started with extremely low expectations, and so, I was actually pleasantly surprised, at first. It's nicely shot, in what looks like 16 mm black and white for the scenes set in the present, colour for the past. The first third of the film roped me in with what started as some fairly interesting characters, two teenaged girls who murder an old woman. The dialogue was stagey, as often are films adapted from stageplays (of which this is one), but sometimes it didn't matter. A couple of monologues felt like it was trying to ape David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago (which became About Last Night, a 1980s film starring Demi Moore). But Fun never breaks out of its theatricality, which becomes a burden that eventually sinks the whole film. The acting became stale and overdramatic without any insight, so I stopped believing, and after that, it was just a chore to sit through, especially when the horrible techno music came on and wouldn't stop. It became a fast-forward.

Zodiac, on the other hand, was a film that Joe had been looking forward eagerly, Fight Club and Seven being among his favourites. But Fincher, he said, you let me down! We weren't as enthralled by his newest work as we wanted to be, though that is a tall order. A detective film about the Zodiac killer who was never caught, it wasn't great, but it was, on the whole, quite watchable - except for the few scenes of murder and killing during which I simply left the room, not willing to endure explicit violence these days. Being a mother has made me super-sensitive, which I personally think is a good thing. I don't know why I don't mind Seven so much, maybe because the actual killings don't take place before your eyes, and the bodies are treated as incredible pieces of set decoration.

Kramer vs. Kramer; Coal Miner's Daughter

2007-09-29T20:33:00.000-07:00

Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) belongs to the spate of Oscar-winning emotional family dramas of the late 70s/early 80s, such as Ordinary People (1980), On Golden Pond (1981), and Terms of Endearment (1983). I'd never seen any of these in their entirety, so I was interested when this film about a divorce and child custody battle showed up in the mail. And sure, it was really well-acted and well-written, a little overdone in the way of Oscar-winning Hollywood films, all orchestral music soundtrack and traumatic events. I always feel a little manipulated, even as I'm enjoying it. And I did enjoy it, though I sympathized for Meryl Streep's character, who is portrayed as a real selfish witch. I guess that's a testament to her acting, since the film's POV seems to side with the father. I wonder if the feminist overtones to the mother's story (which only comes out in the end courtroom scene) are actually there, or something I'm reading into it? And the ending, I found pretty unbelievable, like something tacked on because they wanted (SPOILER! MOVE TO NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON"T WANT TO KNOW) a "Happy Ending." What? A Happy Ending? Quelle surprise.

Joe has always said that Kramer vs. Kramer had one of his favourite scenes, where Dustin Hoffman is sprinting down the street to music on the soundtrack, when suddenly he runs past a band playing that music, effectively turning it from non-diagetic to diagetic. When Joe saw the actual scene again after so many years, he said the details of the scene were completely different than how he had remembered and described it. "Maybe the scene I remember comes later on," he said. But it didn't.

And then, from the same time period (1980) and also graced with an Oscar for Sissy Spacek's performance, was Coal Miner's Daughter. Surprisingly, I enjoyed this film pretty much without reservation! Most of the credit goes to lovely Miss Sissy as Loretta Lynn, whose performance truly is amazing (she sings her own songs live for the camera, no lipsyncing here), though Tommy Lee Jones as her husband is also pretty darned good. Loretta Lynn's life makes quite a story, and I was in the mood for a good old-fashioned story. What fun, when done right! Right on!

Highball

2007-09-24T20:18:00.000-07:00

Highball is another Noah Baumbach film, except that it is credited to Ernie Fusco. I found this out only after we watched it and were searching the credits for Baumbach's name. Who the heck is Ernie Fusco? I said. Joe looked it up on the internet, which is substituting for his and everyone else's memory these days, and it confirmed that Ernie Fusco was Baumbach. He had shot Highball on a shoestring with his famous friends improvising, in only six days. And in spite of the fact that the film looks and feels like it was shot in six days, it was a lot funnier than Mr. Jealousy. Baumbach's usual stylistic tics are here, like the use of quick jumpcuts that look like stutters, which seem like a mistake everytime it happens, except that it happens so often. It's dialogue heavy and seems like a stageplay, especially since the camera often frames two-shots from the knees up, for whole scenes, without any close-ups, shot/reverse shots, or any other edits. But there are some genuinely laugh-out-loud scenes which occur when the cast lets loose into serious wackiness, like a great gag with two giant lizard suits, or a falsetto karaoke rendition of Beautiful Dreamer.

Jennifer Eight; 25th Hour

2007-09-15T19:31:00.000-07:00

We rented Jennifer Eight (1992) because it was written and directed by Bruce Robinson, writer and director of the very very excellent "How to Get Ahead in Advertising" and "Withnail and I." It's said that this movie was his attempt to do a mainstream, formula film so he could get leverage to make other projects, but it was box office failure. And frankly, it feels like his heart wasn't really into it. Beautifully gloomy photography can't cover up the gigantic plot holes that destroy this film. I mean, a blind woman (or anybody, really) wouldn't notice that someone is in your bathroom with you, taking pictures of you in the tub? Come on! In fact, the sound design really sucked throughout. People are always walking noisily around Uma Thurman, the blind woman who can't hear the most obvious sounds. Halfway through the movie, Joe, who had put it on the to-rent list in the first place, suddenly said "I thought this was another movie! I remembered John Goodman being in it!" And he's not. The last comment on this really not good film is that it was brought to you by Diet Coke, which is drunk very conspicuously at least twice.

Next, we watched Spike Lee's 25th Hour, which we were both looking forward to. Frankly, I'm not a Spike Lee fan, since I've only ever liked Do the Right Thing and She's Gotta Have It. The rest of his oeuvre I've found either "meh..." or just not very good, though I admit I haven't seen Malcolm X, which Joe likes a lot. But 25th Hour had gotten excellent reviews, and we were psyched! But expectation has a lot of influence in how one receives a film, and if we hadn't been so psyched, maybe we would have liked it better. I thought it had a few good scenes, but I didn't like the spoken word pieces that popped up. Maybe as short films in themselves or in another film, but not as part of this one. It felt too completely disparate with the rest of the movie. The soundtrack was the most obtrusive thing I'd ever heard, trying to give drama to everything, even banal things like walking the dog (which, I know, is perhaps the point, but I found it simply distracting). It's one thing to build drama with music, but when it's on all the time, it becomes flat, like it's not even there because you learn to ignore it. Joe was less forgiving of the film. He said: "It's a muddled pile of poop!" This film seemed sponsored by Guinness, as it was drunk conspicuously a few times.

Le Neg'

2007-09-04T16:37:00.000-07:00

The DVD interface amazed Joe and I immediately, consisting of a stop-motion animation clip from the movie that was one of the most original ideas I'd seen in quite some time. It looked like plastic toy figurines moving around a toy farm set. But then, their eyes moved, making us realize with a shock that they were humans in costume and make-up. Wow!

If you're not familiar with the work of Robert Morin, all I can say is, you should be! His classic film Yes Sir! Madame... is a classic of faux-mockumentary fiction, exploring the bi-personality of growing up Franglais in Montreal. He often uses video to heighten the soap-operatic dramas that build to violence, and fractured storylines and POVs. Le Neg' is an intense, Rashomon-like story of one night of violence, reconstructed through the POVs of each of the participants, whose stories, of course, contradict each other while giving more and more details as to the climactic scene of horror. The story follows a police investigation into the assault on and torture of a young black kid after he defaces a lawnboy, which ultimately leads to the shooting of the elderly woman who owned it. One of these POVs is from that of an autistic boy who has his walkman on all the time, listening to a beautiful song "Donnez-moi des roses" by Fernand Gignac. The racism is intense, at times verging on too much, and hard to take, but at the same time, not too explicit. The characters are, to their credit, full of surprises, becoming less and less stereotypical and flat as the film progresses, though more and more cruel. A harrowing, but powerful Quebecois film.

Mr. Jealousy; Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

2007-08-26T09:58:00.000-07:00

Joe and I rented Mr. Jealousy (1997) because it was written and directed by Noah Baumbach, who also wrote and directed the very funny Kicking and Screaming, the squirmingly well-observed the Squid and the Whale, and penned the charming The Life Aquatic by Wes Anderson. Mr. Jealousy seemed like it was his first film, and I was surprised to find that it actually came after Kicking and Screaming. It had all the trademarks of his other films, with some excellent dialogue at times, interesting characters in strange situations. But it felt like a first film because it seemed way too in love with itself, trying to be showy and clever with fancy camerawork that is always panning and zooming, iris in and out, jumpcuts and freeze frames galore. The narration felt overwritten and completely unnecessary, and the main characters were prone to literary monologuing, as though they were in a stageplay. Eric Stoltz and Annabella Sciorra are pretty good as a new couple whose relationship is threatened by the guy's excessive jealousy, but the supporting cast overact as though they are projecting to the back of the theatre, probably because the script is so theatrical. And, wow, a lot of sensitive rock guitar. Baumbach is certainly talented and it comes through despite all the excess, but he is so much better when he doesn't try so darned hard.

Then we watched Dirty Rotten Scoundrels with Steve Martin and Michael Caine who play two conmen out to gold-dig. What a delightful confection! What a comic treat! Great acting, great script that twists and kicks all the way to the ending. What a pleasure!

The 4th Man; Twin Peaks, Season Two; The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse

2007-08-15T07:39:00.000-07:00

I would never have rented The 4th Man (1983) by Paul Verhoeven, director of such Hollywood schlock as Showgirls, Basic Instinct and Starship Troopers, though I admit, Robocop was a fun treat. But Joe said our friend Johannes in Rotterdam had recommended it, and we're glad he did! Filmed in his native Holland before Verhoeven hit Hollywood, The 4th Man is a taut psycho-thriller with shades of the surreal (the main man has crazy visions) and lots of male full-frontal. Great editing and special effects that teeter on the line between incredible and cheesy. Thanks Johannes!

Speaking of surreal, incredible, and cheesy, we finally got the 2nd season of Twin Peaks (disc 1) on DVD! It hasn't been available until just recently, and believe or not, I hadn't seen any of it back in the day when it was on TV. I didn't have cable back then, and I was making an effort not to buy into the hype (and frankly, I hadn't liked any Lynch film since Eraserhead). Silly me! Years later, when Joe and I watched Season One on DVD, well, we couldn't get enough. Season Two starts out weirder than ever, in fact, seemingly weird for the sake of weird, but by the third episode, we were once again sucked in. More, more!

Finally, we just finished Fritz Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), the sequel to his earlier Testament of Dr. Mabuse, and his last film. Fritzy, old boy, you've done it again! A brilliantly orchestrated, twisty thriller. And interestingly, a lot of silence in this film, something you rarely find nowadays. So much of film music soundtracks are manipulative and unnecessary, so it was pleasing to hear the action unfolding without benefit of the orchestra. Thanks, Fritz.

Crush; Cure

2007-08-02T20:47:00.000-07:00

It's not the 1993 thriller called The Crush with Alicia Silverstone, or the 2001 comedy called Crush, which you've probably never heard of, with Andie MacDowell. It's the 1993 Crush, which you've also probably never heard of, with Marcia Gay Harden. We rented it because it was directed by Alison Maclean, who later did Jesus' Son, which is, btw, pretty good. The other thing that links these three films with similar names is that they all are overly-contrived in both plot and characterization, manipulative, and boring. Joe and I fast-forwarded through much of this movie, and we noticed that we still more or less knew what was going on anyways. The surprise ending was no surprise.

Then we watched Cure, not the Robert Smith band of the 80s, but the Japanese psych-horror-thriller made in 1997, just before Ringu (1998) pretty much blew open the popularity of that genre, worldwide. For one thing, it was a relief not to have to brace myself though scenes of torturously extreme violence. Some creepy imagery, sparingly used, is plenty. It’s a police thiller about murder, hynosis, memory and identity, where seemingly well-adjusted people commit bizarre murders using the same technique of slashing the throat with a giant X. The main characters are, for the most part, really well-drawn, rounded, intriguing, and though the pace is slow, it’s tense enough to have kept me interested. I like a story that takes its time to build into a deep, menacing drone. Joe, however, thought the film was “just okay” since he kept falling asleep through it.

The Matador; Someone to Watch Over Me

2007-07-25T19:03:00.000-07:00

Sometimes movies show up in the mail and we're not sure why. Sometimes Joe gets carried away with his browsing and sometimes I read about some film that seemed interesting at the time. Maybe the director did something else that we liked. Now, The Matador (2005) was one of those films that might have sounded good on paper: an oddball comedy thriller that turns into a buddy pic, with Pierce Brosnan as a hitman who befriends Greg Kinnear as a suburban businessman. Only, as Joe says, the screenplay seemed as though it was written from a book about how to write screenplays. The camerawork and editing felt as though the director came straight from doing music vids and commercials, all showy tracking and zooming and panning. "Is it really homoerotic, or is it just me?" asked Joe. Indeed, Brosnan smokes a lot of fat cigars around Kinnear and seems intent on seducing him, though under the aegis of friendship. In the end, The Matador wants to be a slick, quirky British comedy/gangster thriller like Guy Ritchie's Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels but ends up feeling empty and soulless, just trying too darned hard. "No," said Joe, "it was just a stupid stupid film!"

Someone to Watch Over Me (1987) was next, another Ridley Scott film, coming just after Alien, Bladerunner and Legend. Right off the bat, we had Sting warbling the theme song, and later, that 80s saxophone music. So many movies don't age well because of the music! A working class cop falls in love with the socialite he has been assigned to guard after she witnesses a murder. "Competently done is all you can say about it," said Joe. By the book and bland. Next!

The Duellists (1977); Lady Vengeance (2005)

2007-07-18T21:35:00.000-07:00

Every time I see Keith Carradine in a movie, I always, without fail, ask Joe, "who's that actor? He looks familiar." Each and every single time, Joe replies, “It’s Keith Carradine.” I asked this question through all the Alan Rudolph films we watched, as well as Nashville. Why can’t I remember who he is? So, again, when we were watching Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (his first feature). The film follows Carradine and Keitel throughout the years as they challenge each other to duel after duel. “Who is that guy?” I said to Joe. This time, he just laughed. In any case, the film is beautifully, stunningly shot, and even though at first I made fun of Carradine and Harvey Keitel’s costumes (the sidebraids and foppish hats made them hard to take seriously at first), I eventually ended up enjoying it. The ending made revenge a very dignified, gentlemanly affair.

For Park Chanwook, however, revenge is a dish served best to your nemesis-turned-victim while he is still conscious, so that you can both fully savour the torture. Lady Vengeance is the third in his revenge trilogy, of which Oldboy is probably his best work. We loved Oldboy, but none of his other films have come close, save J.S.A.:Joint Security Area (not part of the revenge trilogy, but a tense political thriller set on the border of North and South Korea). Lady Vengeance has been at the top of our to-rent list for a long time, and it finally arrived to much anticipation. Hooray! The same kind of lush stylistics, over-the-top camera work and intense violence. I was into it, savouring the twists of plot, the crazy digital edits, the cartoon-like action scenes.

But then, in the flow of the gorgeous credit graphics, remarkably inventive camerawork and editing, and twisty, harrowing plot turns, came one scene that just made Joe and I turn the movie off. It was too much! The scene shows children in what are practically snuff films (a child murderer films his victims crying to their parents for help), which is worse than gratuitous, it’s seriously cretinous. Even if it’s not real. Granted, Joe and I might be particularly sensitive because we’re parents, but come on! One kid was in a noose, crying that he couldn’t breathe. “Think about those child actors!” Joe said. “Imagine having to be in a scene like that? They’re not old enough to not be affected! How could any cretin let their kid do that? WHAT’S WRONG WITH PEOPLE TODAY?!”

The next evening, we fast-forwarded through the objectionable parts, as well as much of the rest of the film. We watched the ending, just to see what would happen. Lots of blood and some slapstick, none of the choreographed grace that marked Old Boy’s hammer scene. In the end, it might have been not a bad film, but it was just ruined by intolerable excess. I don’t like kids in my violence, nor do I like too realistic violence, and that brings me to a whole other can of worms: what is the point of realistic violence? Why do people get off or otherwise feel they should endure depictions of other people’s pain? Is it cathartic, or masochistic, or an attempt to look at the world’s horrors in the face? Why does it need to be so unrelenting? But that’s a tangent that is too off-course to get into here. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, but I’ll pursue it elsewhere else.

The Black Castle; Permanent Midnight; The Poseidon Adventure

2007-07-12T20:15:00.000-07:00

It’s well into July and I haven’t yet posted! I have much to catch up on. Briefly, then, let me enumerate our recent films. Most recently, Joe and I watched Boris Karloff in The Black Castle (1952) with our friend Day, but I remember only that Lon Chaney Jr. stole the show as the monstrous, gigantic and massively scarred henchman. “His name is Gargon!” Day exclaimed. Of course, what else could it be? And before that, we watched Permanent Midnight, a dark comedy/schlockfest starring a very sinewy Ben Stiller as Jerry Stahl (based on Stahl's autobiographical book about being a television writer hooked on junk). The first half was the dark comedy, which was actually not bad, featuring the memorably shocking line uttered by Ben Stiller’s blond mistress when they first screw: “Ohmygawd, I’m f**king a Jew!” The second half descended into schlockfest with every cliché in the book, so to speak, and it might have been funny had it been done ironically. Alas! It didn’t seem ironic in the least. It felt instead like a studio ending cooked up by executives welding focus group tests. “They really messed that one up,” Joe said.

And before that… The Poseidon Adventure! The 1972 version,and don’t even talk to me about the remake. Along with The Towering inferno (which I saw as a kid and it scared the shit out of me), this is Seventies Disaster Movie at its best! It’s got religion in the form of Gene Hackman as an arrogant and buff preacherman battling to lead his flock of survivors up to the hull of a cruise ship after it gets hit by a tidal wave and turns over. Lots and lots of bodies. Big cheesy fun acting. Big cheesy but pretty good effects. The new version only had lots and lots of bodies and cheesy but too CGI-ey effects, no character whatsoever. However! We do have an odd story associated with the remake. While in New York last year, when Poseidon was in theatres, Joe and I saw a giant billboard advertising the movie, just across from the cruise ship that we were about to board. Was it a joke, we wondered?

Soldiers Pay; Black Christmas

2007-06-28T10:06:00.000-07:00

Soldiers Pay is a hodgepodge documentary short, directed by David O. Russell among others, consisting mostly of interviews with dozens of soldiers about the 2004 Iraq war. There's enough enraging and fascinating material here to choke a Halliburton horse, but not really enough to make it a full-blown documentary. It's more like DVD extras material for Russell's excellent film Three Kings, which it was actually supposed to be. Russell was hoping to use this as ammunition against Bush during the elections, but the studios found out and nixed it; however, Russell managed to release it to the public at a later date, well after the elections. Damn! I still can't believe that $#%&*#@ was re-elected, or that we're in the mess we're in. What to do? Throw up our hands in despair and disgust, and watch another movie.

And the next movie? Black Christmas (1974) by Bob Clark, who is perhaps most famous for directing Porky's. Laugh if you want! Black Christmas practically invented the slasher genre, inspiring such films as When a Stranger Calls. With no outright blood or gore, it's pretty low-key in comparison to modern slasher flicks, but even today, some of the shocks are truly horrific, the obscene phone calls truly obscene.

Cléo de 5 à 7 by Agnès Varda

2007-06-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

Agnès Varda's The Gleaners and I is one of my favourite documentaries, passionate and thoughtful and personal, about people who glean, who comb through trash and recycling, who live off of what is leftover. I was eager to see her earlier work, as part of the French New Wave. Varda started out as a still photographer, and her films are evidence of her careful attention to framing, to detail and photographic stunts like images reflecting off mirrors and windowpanes. Cléo from 5 to 7 is full of such details and other New Wave signatures like jumpcuts, long tracking shots, and stylish, showy editing. The story follows a young singer, Cléo, who is waiting results from a medical test. At 5 P.M. her fortune teller turns up the Death card for her and refuses to read her palm. In the following two hours, she wanders the streets of Paris, seeing omens of Death everywhere, until finally she meets a young soldier who gives her some hope and comfort as he offers to accompany her to the hospital to get the results. What a great concept! The movie doesn't quite live up to its potential, but it's absorbing and entertaining to watch anyways. Varda's later films show much more depth, and we've put 3 more of her films on our to-rent list.

Spanking the Monkey; Curse of the Golden Flower

2007-06-13T10:31:00.000-07:00

Curiously, our two most recent films both feature incest between a mother and her son. Coincidence? I don't know. Sometimes the universe thinks it's pretty funny. Nonetheless, I really got into both these films, though they both had their weaknesses.

I first heard of Spanking the Monkey years ago only because there was a poster at the old Cinema de Paris on St-Catherine St. in Montreal. I didn't see it back then, and knew next to nothing about it. Only years later, after seeing David O. Russell's excellent Three Kings, did I realize that Spanking the Monkey was by the same director, and so I put it on our to-see list. Finally, it arrived. And wow, is it ever uncomfortable to sit through! The film handles the build-up to the incest with subtlety and tension. Very believable, solid and well-rounded characters. And truly, truly, squeamishly, painful to watch. In a good way!

We've had Curse of the Golden Flower kicking around for a while now, but Joe was reluctant to see it, for no reason he could really name. I knew what he meant. Zhang Yimou films are grand, epic, relentless, and very long. Sometimes too long and relentless. His early works like Raise the Red Lantern were smaller in scope but epic in human drama, but some of his later works, like Hero, while gorgeous to look at, were cold in characterization. But finally, we watched his latest film, and we were surprised at how quickly we were sucked in to the escalating drama. Curse of the Golden Flower is Shakespearean in scope, the story of an empress who is sleeping with her stepson, the emporer who is trying to poison her into insanity, an attempted coup, revenge, tragedy, betrayal. It was fantastic, and incredibley art-directed as usual, though really, we had to laugh sometimes at how over-the-top it got. And then near the end, the climactic battle scene started to resemble The Lord of the Rings! Thousands of CGI soldiers storming the walls, the bows and arrows, the armour, it was all there, only with Chinese soldiers instead of Orcs and Elves. Normally, Zhang Yimou makes realistic, effortless use of computer graphics, but here, the sheer size of the armies, while fairly well done, still foregrounded their unreality. Joe said it reminded him of insects, crowds of insects. This may be intentional, as part of movie's theme was about the absolute power of the Emporer over his minions. But at the same time, the humanity within the tragedy, so evident in his earlier works, was lost.

Shampoo by Hal Ashby; An Inconvenient Truth

2007-06-06T08:36:00.000-07:00

Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude was such an odd and beautiful gem, that when Shampoo came in the mail, Joe and I were looking forward to seeing it. Joe says he remembers the furor the film made in 1975, as it was considered rather racy back then. But unfortunately, Shampoo turned out to be more oddly confusing than oddly entertaining. Warren Beatty produces, co-writes with Robert Towne, and stars in this odd film as a hairdresser who sleeps with many of his clients, but who seems more interested in doing their hair. It's a comedy but not very funny. Joe and I had an ungoing debate about whether Warren Beatty's character was supposed to be ridiculous or genuinely sexy. It's set in 1968 and his hair is an incredible pouf. Julie Christie plays the woman that Beatty falls in love with, though there is no palpable chemistry between them here, unlike in Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Towards the end of the film, Beatty does her hair so that she ends up looking like a drag queen. Again, Joe thought she was supposed to be sexy after the style of the times, though failing, but I thought she was supposed to be ridiculous. I mean, it's a comedy! Clearly, Goldie Hawn and a very very young Carrie Fisher are both way sexier but Beatty goes for the drag queen! Is that where the comedy is? I dunno. Very hard to figure out. "Shampoop" says Joe.

The next film we saw was An Inconvenient Truth, which we'd been meaning to see for a long time, but never really felt like it since, after all, global warming is a bit of a downer. But it turned out to be solidly entertaining as well as a highly convincing, frightening, effective, really well-made film. Al Gore is a charming and even funny lecturer. It's heartbreaking to think where we might be now if things had turned out differently and he'd been made President. And it ends with hope. There's still hope! We must all take action now! Joe said the only thing about the ending was that it should have been thoughtful and meditative, instead of trying to rock out with Melissa Etheridge.

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, by Alan Rudolph

2007-06-03T09:42:00.001-07:00

The last film in our Alan Rudolph festival had been sitting on my desk for almost a month. After the last four films we watched of his, three of which were fast-forwarded (see "Alan Rudolph festival" entry), we weren't looking forward to Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, a film that I remember watching in the theatres when it came out (1994). Back then, I thought it wasn't bad. Watching it this time, well, we didn't fast-forward, but we were glad when it was over. It started out well enough with interesting Altmanesque dialogue (as he is Altman's protegé) mishmashed over Jennifer Jason Leigh's acerbic portrayal of the bitter and wisecracking writer Dorothy Parker. She recites Parker's poems in little black and white asides throughout, sometimes sounding like Joe when he is doing his rendition of a Shakespearean actor (Oh brave new world, that hath such creatures in't!). But as she became more and more dreary, bitter, and depressed, we couldn't help wishing that the film would end. It was the same way with Sylvia (the Sylvia Plath biopic with Gwyneth Paltrow): I kept thinking, when is she gonna stick her head in the oven? Joe says, what a monster you are! Maybe I am, but really, we all know what's coming. We shouldn't want the end to come faster!

Film Noir Classics: Quicksand (1950) and Suddenly (1954)

2007-05-31T18:21:00.000-07:00

Quicksand and Suddenly were the other two movies on the 3-film DVD we got in the mail, ostensibly titled "Film Noir Classics" (see previous post on "Scarlet Street" for the first). None of these was what one associates with film noir, especially since they are over-exposed white from poor quality transfers, faint and burnt out in the middle.

Quicksand's most notable feature was Mickey Rooney as Dan Brady, a none-too-bright mechanic who borrows $20 from the till at work, only to find himself spiralling down deeper and deeper into crime. The story spins out as a morality tale, except that Dan's every decision seems so not-bright that you almost think he deserves what happens to him. Mix that with wild chance misfortunes that keep happening, and Danny is in trouble indeed. It was a bit much. Peter Lorre makes a small but welcome appearance as a sleazy game arcade owner.

Suddenly's raison-être is Frank Sinatra in a really nasty and amazing role as a former soldier and current soldier of fortune who has been hired to assassinate the President. He's mean, cold, and charismatic, in contrast with the hostages that he takes, including a smart-alecky kid who doesn't know when to shut up, an annoying pro-arms sheriff, a sickeningly right-wing patriotic grandfather, and, just for contrast, a pacifist mother. Eerie foreshadowings of Kennedy and the current state of American politics, as well as capturing the McCarthy paranoia of the time. But without Sinatra, this film would have sucked. Sinatra makes it suspenseful, and gives it dimension.

Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (1945); Everything is Illuminated

2007-05-28T08:06:00.000-07:00

A couple of nights ago, we finished Scarlet Street, one of three films on a film noir DVD collection that came in the mail. This Fritz Lang film stars Edward G. Robinson, who usually plays a snarling thug (perhaps the quintessential thug, see...), but here, he is Chris Cross, a sadsack bank cashier with big, puppy-dog eyes. He falls in love with Kitty, who is, unbeknownst to him, a prostitute. Johnny, her pimp boyfriend, is one of the most unlikable characters I've seen in some time. Kitty and Johnny manipulate Chris into giving them money, which he obtains by embezzling from his company and stealing from his horrible shrew of a wife. Things get worse and worse, culminating in a truly horrible scene with an icepick. Fun!

Last night, it was Everything is Illuminated, by Liev Schreiber. I haven't read the book by Jonathan Safran Foer, but that is probably the best way to see a movie adaptation of a book. I've only seen three movies that even come close to their literary roots: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, A Room with a View, and Hardcore Logo (which in fact, may surpass the slight book of poetry on which it is based). But even without the spectre of its literary origins looming over me, Everything is Illuminated still felt like the book would have been better. We found it entertaining (perhaps an unseemly adjective when applied to a movie about the Holocaust) and quirky at times, beautifully shot. But the movie was in love with its own sentiment, never a good thing. Joe pointed out a scene where a character takes off his jacket, a large yellow Star-of-David sewn on to it, and leaves it on the heap of bodies out of which he has just crawled. He does this slowly, ponderously, full of emotion. "That's just the wrong way to do it," Joe said. "He should have just torn that jacket off and gotten the hell out of there!" Yes, indeed.

Alan Rudolph festival; The Fountain by Darren Aronofsky

2007-05-23T20:13:00.000-07:00

As I say, I used to be a purist. I would watch an entire movie from start to finish, in one sitting, even if I hated the movie. I have only walked out of a theatre once, and that was from a combination of hunger, boredom. and the fact that I'd just seen 27 films that week (film festival). Now, faced with a glut of movies we want to watch and with limited time, we fast-forward through the ones we don't like.

We have an internet movie rental system, you know, the kind where you make a list of movies you want to see and they randomly send them to you. The last bunch of movies that came in the mail were all Alan Rudolph films. All except one we fast-forwarded. The only one that we actually watched was his latest, The Secret Lives of Dentists (2002). I wasn't expecting that much, I guess, but halfway into it, I was surprised by the Denis Leary character, in a good way. The rest of them – Trixie, The Moderns, Choose Me – Joe had seen before and remembered them as being good. Watching them this time, he was appalled. "These are crap!" he said. They were completely artificial, as in theatre. Sets, costumes, lighting, acting. All overdone. We have Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle to watch still, and both of us remember liking it when it came out. But now we're not looking forward to it. We decided to watch The Fountain instead.

Unfortunately, The Fountain was also a fast-forward. I was astounded by Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, and liked Pi though it was student film-y. But Batman Begins was a disappointment, failing to translate the spirit of the Dark Knight. The Fountain felt like it was made by a 12 year old kid with lots of money.

Movie Mythos - Matrix Magazine #77 (theme: Science and Poetry)

2007-05-22T01:51:00.000-07:00

Here is the Movie Mythos column from the upcoming issue of Matrix:

Lately, Joe and I have been watching a lot of old horror classics with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. These old movies, when they’re bad, they’re really bad, with cheesy acting, unbelievably fake special effects, plodding plots. But when they’re good, they take overblown to a whole new level. The jagged, shadowy sets of German expressionism, mixed in with suspicious scientific experiments, the corrupted powers of the scientist who has gone mad, mad, mad! What poetry it is! In thinking about the theme of this issue of Matrix, what could be better? Sure, science in the movies has a humongous range, from documentaries such as Errol Morris’ A Brief History of Time, based on the book by Stephen Hawking, to the entire genre of science-fiction, from Isaac Asimov adaptations to the truly groundbreaking but ever-geeky Star Trek. But for me, these old mad-scientist movies really capture the fear and the horror of scientific possibility, and the concerns of scientific responsibility:

The Matrix Top Ten Mad Science Movies!

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) – Perhaps the first true horror film ever made, ushering in an era of German Expressionism which, need I say, remains influential to this day!
Metropolis (1927) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) – Fritz Lang masterpieces.
Frankenstein – the famous 1931 version that introduced Boris Karloff to the screen and spawned a legion of sequels and imitations, from the campy and comedic (Andy Warhol’s, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman) to the over-serious (Kenneth Branagh’s melodramatic embarrassment). Though none of these have ever come close to truly adapting the book, Karloff’s is the most iconic.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – 1920 silent version with John Barrymore in the lead role,
1931 by director Rouben Mamoulian, & 1941’s big Hollywood production by Victor Flemming, starring Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, and Lana Turner!
The Body Snatcher (1945) – Based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, this film explores the practice of using real cadavers in medical science, and how those cadavers were sometimes procured. Features one of Karloff’s greatest and truly chilling performances as a cabman turned graverobber and murderer.
Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Black Cat (1934), The Raven (1935) – This trio of films, “inspired” by Edgar Allen Poe in taking the titles but little else, all star Bela Legosi as, respectively, a mad scientist, a good doctor (battling Karloff as a Satanist), and a mad doctor.
The Fly – The original 1958 version with Vincent Price features the famous ending of a tiny fly/scientist caught in a spider’s web (Help me! Heeeeelllllp me!). And David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake is memorable too, especially for its vivid fly-goop special effects.

And speaking of science… I’m currently writing a story about my father, the scientist-turned-philosopher, and his new book on Chinese and Western cultures (not to be mistaken with country-and-western culture). At the same time, I’m making a short film about my mother. All this to say, well, autobiography figures largely for me. I’m digressing from the theme here in order to introduce another theme, that is, the theme of the next issue, which will be edited by me, called The Narrative “I”: Autobiography in Film and Fiction. Whew!

I’ve been trying to think about how to frame this theme for a while now. How film and fiction intersects my daily life, not just as a filmmaker but as audience, how we watch so many movies, how I think cinematically or try to. How does film and fiction fit into your life? From lurid confessionals, diary entries, screenplays and first-person accounts of historical moments (real and unreal), from the poetic to the absurd, any genre, any medium from page to screen. Besides the usual fiction, poetry, comics, essays, drawings, and other stuff to go on the page, I’ll be looking for short films, videos, and animations (under 10 minutes) or what have you that could go on a DVD, which will be included in the next issue. Send to:

Matrix Magazine
The Narrative “I” Issue
1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West, LB 658,
Montreal, QC
H3G 1M8

Deadline for submissions will be August 1st, 2007.
Questions? Contact me for more info!
moviemythos@soyfishmedia.com

Here We Go

2007-05-21T20:02:00.000-07:00

Joe and I love watching movies. We watch a lot of them, though we would make a purist shudder. I would know – I used to be a purist who wouldn’t watch a movie unless I could watch all of it at once. Widescreen, if possible (otherwise, you lose 1/3rd of the picture, I would whine), subtitled, not dubbed. Of course, after baby Sam appeared in the picture, well, things have changed. We watch 1/3 of a movie each night, every night, on whatever format we find it in. We do draw the line at bad quality pirates since Joe can't handle my incessant complaining about the sound, the contrast, etc.

I had been wanting to keep a journal of all the movies I watch with Joe, since we watch (part of) one every single night. So, here we go!