Three Films Make A Post: Something wonderful is about to happen

Fantasma aka Bloody Ballet (2018): This indie production directed by Bret Mullen clearly wants to be an 80s giallo, starting with its original title (apparently, the ballet title is the ill-advised work of the distributor, who really didn’t understand the film’s audience in the least), continuing through lighting, production design, the script’s use of mental illness (which nobody should confuse with an attempt at portraying actual mental illness and be offended by), plotting, acting style and camera work. At times, it’s about as cool an emulation of its chosen style as can be, but there are also quite a few scenes that simply go on too long, and double the amount of dream sequences needed. None of that makes the movie unwatchable or unlikeable, but these problems do keep the movie down enough to keep it from being as good the better of its predecessors.

Tokyo Sunrise (2015): I didn’t like this male-centric sort of road movie by Ryutaro Nakagawa quite as much as his Summer Blooms and Mio on the Shore. In fact, in theme and partial road movie structure, it feels like a bit of a warm-up for Summer Blooms. The film never quite convinced me that its flashback elements were necessary and wouldn’t have better been simply implied (as most of these things would be in those later films by the director), and its metaphorical level seems a bit blunt and too obvious. On the other hand, there are still some great scenes throughout the film; just in this one, you have to wade through less great ones to get to them.

2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984): A director needs a certain amount of guts to dare make a sequel to Kubrick’s 2001 (quite a few people I know argue Arthur C. Clarke never should have written his sequels either), so if nothing else, you have to give Peter Hyams (who also produced, wrote and was the director of photography) that. If a viewer goes in expecting something close to the tone and style of the Kubrick movie, they are bound to be disappointed, for Hyams’s idea of science fiction is a rather different one. It is concerned with the contrast between the political tensions/madness on Earth and space, and the need to leave these divisions behind to be able to reach understanding of the cosmos, not so much on a spiritual level, but a practical one.

If you’re willing to go with that, this actually turns out to be a rather great film, with the lived in naturalistic feeling of technology you’d expect of Hyams (see Outland, Project Capricorn), fine performances by Roy Scheider, John Lithgow and Helen Mirren, and one of the better variations of American filmmakers’ sad obsession with aliens pressing humanity into peace by threatening us with genocide.