Three Films Make A Post: Band Together

Bandslam (2009): In part, Todd Graff’s film is of course your typical teen music comedy drama with a bit of a conventional streak, but since I’m not usually complaining about this sort of thing when it comes to other genres, it would be weird to suddenly start with that sort of thing here. Particularly since the film may be typical to some degree, it’s also a great example of the form, certainly not lacking in imagination on how to fill out the genre format it inhabits, and charming as a level 20 bard. Its portrayal of a certain type of teenage alienation isn’t quite as paper-thin as it seems, either, it’s just treating those parts of its tale with a very light hand, so it can enable the proper hopeful happy ending where most everything is set right with the world without needing to pretend the world is perfect.

You Were Never Really Here (2017): From a bit of a different planet comes the great Lynne Ramsay’s movie about a mercenary vigilante (and PTSD sufferer) portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix in an un-showy and therefore brilliant mood, who is specialized in hitting people with a hammer while finding kidnapped girls. The film’s really not interested at all in fulfilling any genre expectations, instead using the loose genre framework to draw a portray of a deeply alienated personality in a way that must be consciously chosen to alienate most viewers at least a little. The film’s approach is somewhere between the dreamlike and the oblique, editing out actions and only showing us their consequences, divorcing acts from those committing them. The film’s not called like it’s called by chance or committee.

Burning aka 버닝 (2018): Speaking of alienation, that’s a core concern of Lee Chang-dong’s film, too. Here, though, like in many South Korean films made in the second half of the 2010s, it’s an alienation mainly caused by class divides and by poverty and all the pains and indignities and deepening of certain personal traumas and flaws that come with it. This is also a pretty oblique film, slowly exploring the world of its main characters, circling themes and ideas through careful, detailed observation but never quite turning into the thriller some of its plot elements suggest,  keeping a distanced and observant poise throughout. It also teaches that you can’t really be an effective thriller protagonist when you call yourself a writer of fiction but really don’t get when somebody talks to you in metaphors, or that it is a very bad sign when (the same) somebody tells you he has never cried in his life and doesn’t know if he’d recognize sadness if he felt it.


But seriously, it’s a great film if you don’t go in expecting it to eventually turn into a tight South Korean thriller and are fine with it staying the slow but thematically rich character and social portrait it starts as.

Three Films Make A Post: Entombed for eons - turned to stone - seeking women, women, women!

Her (2013): The really surprising thing about Spike Jonze’s film for me is how little of the simplistic “oh noes, the modern world is so alienated” piece its set-up might threaten is actually in it; this is not beholden to any cult of authenticity apart from that of human feeling. It’s also a perfect portray of loneliness, and longing, and sadness, and oh, by the way, it’s also a mainstream (in the broader sense of the word) SF film that isn’t ashamed of having more than two brain cells to rub together, not exactly expanding on what written SF has thought about its themes and props but putting it on a human level as good as anything I’ve seen or read in a long time.

There’s also a pervading sense of joy as well as of quotidian strangeness running through the film, some fine performances in particular by Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson and Amy Adams, and an absolutely perfect score. Why, the film’s so good I’m even pretending not to notice it doesn’t seem to know what an OS is.

Cutie Honey (2004): Between remaking Neon Genesis Evangelion again and again and again, Hideaki Anno somehow found the time to direct this live action version of Go Nagai’s sleazy yet wondrous magical girl manga/anime, turning down the sleaze quite a bit in the process – leaving only a lot of coy and pretty good-natured shots of Eriko Sato’s shapely behind – and surprising me by how enjoyable the result is when it should by all rights annoy me to kingdom come.

Anno manages to turn elements of the original into a crazy mix of pop-art, kitsch, the grotesque and goofy humour, somehow finding just the right mixture ratio to make the film work as something beyond mere camp. There’s a sense of fun, often actually funny humour and an exuberance surrounding the proceedings that does curious things with the film’s crazy and grotesque side, turning the whole affair into one of the more charming pictures you’ll see in whatever week you watch it.

The Serpent’s Egg (1977): This is generally treated as Ingmar Bergman’s Big Failure (yes, with capital letters) but I don’t agree with that assessment at all. To me, the film seems to do exactly what it sets out to do, show the Weimarer Republik as a sort of hellish state of mind, filled with increasingly bizarre elements like the onset of the insanity that would become the so-called Third Reich. The people in the film can hardly communicate with one another, their actors only given the choice to emote either with very emphatic lacks of expression or through over-heated hysteria, which is of course no communication at all.

The film’s an often unpleasant experience, slowly dragging itself along like any good economic crisis does, only waking up for moments of ever increasing unpleasantness, sometimes bordering on the sort of thing that the exploitation movies I talk about more often would indulge in, yet filmed with a palpable sense of revulsion those films can’t afford. Nobody ever said films about people getting crushed by the wheels of history should be a pleasant experience.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,german movies,japanese movies,sf,romance,drama,wtf,tokusatu,spike jonze,joaquin phoenix,scarlett johansson,amy adams,hideaki anno,eriko sato,ingmar bergman,liv ullmann,david carradine,gert fröbe