Movies Round-Up
May. 6th, 2015 12:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustI spent the weekend going to Steve's friend Chris's wedding and then making sure Mom got as much Cal-time as she wanted before departing for her opera tour of Poland, which is where she is now. I also watched a bunch of movies--mostly on DVD and BluRay, but at least one in the theatre. Said one was Avengers: Age of Ultron, about which I have many thoughts, but I'm not going to go into all that right now because it's a post to itself, half of which has more to do with Fandom's reaction to the film than the film itself. Instead, because I've been asked to, I'm going to write about all the other entries on that list.
The first thing I bought was Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, on BluRay, and not for myself--Steve's become weirdly enamoured of it, watching it whenever it happens to be on the Space Channel, which is more often than you'd think. For myself, I think it's perfectly innocuous; I like Jay Baruchel, who plays the titular apprentice, a nerdy physics student who discovers he's "the Prime Merlinian!" and therefore must learn magic from crazy-ass Nicholas Cage, so he can eventually defeat Morgana Le Fay and stop her from intruding into our world. Blah blah blah CGIcakes, in other words, and it's definitely one of those instances in which I get all Tumblr, thinking: "But wouldn't this be so much more fun if he was a nerdy gay geek-girl sweetly obsessed with the hip blonde deejay she's loved since grade-school?" Maybe so. Or maybe if Jay Baruchel was that character's mentor, instead of Cage. Or if Cage was a slightly nutty Helen Mirren, all ancient cracked leather cape-cloak and tangled grey locks, pining over the lost male love she had to imprison in Morgana's hell-dimension a thousand years ago. Any of that.
But no, what I really wanted was Jennifer Kent's The Babadook, finally out on BluRay, so I snatched it up and paid for it post-haste. Keeping in mind what tinybuffalo had said about it previously, I knew it was probably essentially a parable about post-partum depression, constant sleep deprivation, the difficulties of raising a child with very definite special needs and the abuse which can result from that sort of hothouse parent/child relationship, and that definitely turns out to be the case: Essie Davis and the kid playing her son are spot on, making everything about that part of it excruciatingly relatable. That said, the phantom they conjure up between them is an amazingly creepy one--the titular monster, with his great black hat and his grin, can't really ever be defeated, simply imprisoned, fed, dealt with. Your personal darkness doesn't go away, but it can be set aside, and I don't see that as a bullshit conclusion, because I've lived it...I'm still living it, always will. So yeah, personal resonance all 'round, and I'm very interested to see what's next from Kent, because she's a damn cinematic powerhouse who uses every storytelling tool at her disposal to maximum effectiveness.
While I was there, I also picked up a really cheap copy of You're Next, by the same team behind The Guest, which everyone in horror culture'd been shitting themselves about, um...two years ago, now? I'd put it off because home invasion narratives don't usually interest me, but here it was for eight bucks, so why not? And it's tight, nasty, very funny in parts yet never without merit; my favourite part of it is another Aussie actress, Shari Vinson, as the central Final Girl, who turns out to be far more effective at dealing with this sort of massacre than anyone expects her to be. ("I kind of grew up in a Survivalist compound?" she tells another character, halfway through; "haven't even told [my boyfriend] that, yet." "If you'd reacted like a normal person, you'd be fine!" Said boyfriend tells her, later on, in the climactic reveal, with a note in his voice like he's complaining about shitty restaurant service. This tells you exactly the sort of hairpin[s] we turn out the be dealing with, here...a bunch of whiny, intensely entitled adult children, all faux-intellectual hipsters who routinely savage each other over piddly crap from their shared childhoods ad conspire to murder their own parents for the inheritance, mainly played by fellow filmmakers the production team already knew. [Boyfriend], for example, is some big mover/shaker in the Mumblecore scene, which alone merits him getting bloodily slaughtered, in my books.)
And then there's Tomm Moore's Song of the Sea, an animated selkie tale from the same people who brought you The Secret of Kells. It's absolutely lovely, a gorgeous palate-cleanser which tells the story of Ben and Saoirse, who live with their sorrowful lighthouse-keeper father on a tiny island off the Irish coast, where--years before, around the time of Saoirse's birth--their mother Bronagh mysteriously disappeared, perhaps returning to the sea she came from. Ben resents Saoirse, who's six years old and has never as yet spoken; he spends his days obsessively writing the afirytales Bronagh once told him down in a little book and playing with his massive dog Cu, which Saoirse fends for herself.
One night, Saoirse finds a key, opens a chest and puts on a seal-skin coat she discovers inside. Transforming into a seal, she dives beneath the waves, emerging with a cough and a widening streak of white in her hair. Her fearsome grandmother is horrified, and insists they move to the city, which they do-but the world of the Fae is now aware of Saoirse's existence, pursuing her at every turn. Half of them want her to sing her selkie song and save them from the Owl Witch, Macha, who's been turning them to stone because she no longer believes it's possible to return to their own land; she thinks she's "saving" her people, taking their emotions and pain away, giving them peace and forgetfulness. But Saoirse can't sing without her skin, which her father threw into the sea after her midnight swim, and taht becomes the point of the quest she, Ben and Cu embark on.
As ever, Moore's filmmaking style is deceptively simple, his designs almost geometric, yet subtle and rich in the extreme; he has a great understanding for layers and textures, capturing the calm sea below and the restless waves above perfectly, the mercurial play of light and shadow across an Irish sky, the constant rain and fifty different shades of green and grey making up the countryside. But the other driving component is always music, a glorious score made up of strings, vocals, hammered dulcimer, competing drones plus ambient noise...you could sink into it head-first, and never drown. A startlingly beautiful creation.
And what else, what else. At BMV, I found second-hand copies of Brian De Palma's Faustian rock musical Phantom of the Paradise on BluRay, plus David Lee Fisher's weird-ass stunt of a "remix" of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, on DVD. The latter, shot in video, inserts actors shot against green-screen into the original movie's backdrops, marrying old footage with new performances and a new score, and casts Doug Jones as Cesare the Somnambulist. It's hypnogogic but quite riveting, at least if you're not watching it really late at night. I also picked up Ana Lily Amirpour's Iranian vampire western A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, shot in black and white, which manages to be both deadpan funny and quite offputting in sections--the violence is stylized but the rage is genuine, our chador-clad heroine starkly alien, the general ambiance lodged halfway between Jim Jarmusch and Michael Almereyda's Nadja. I'm particularly fond of a moment where he realize the reason The Girl is gliding rigidly down a street in true Nosferatu fashion is because she's actually standing on a skateboard. (Great use of White Lies's song "Death," too.)
Okay, I'm wrote out. Back to nothing much, I guess.
The first thing I bought was Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, on BluRay, and not for myself--Steve's become weirdly enamoured of it, watching it whenever it happens to be on the Space Channel, which is more often than you'd think. For myself, I think it's perfectly innocuous; I like Jay Baruchel, who plays the titular apprentice, a nerdy physics student who discovers he's "the Prime Merlinian!" and therefore must learn magic from crazy-ass Nicholas Cage, so he can eventually defeat Morgana Le Fay and stop her from intruding into our world. Blah blah blah CGIcakes, in other words, and it's definitely one of those instances in which I get all Tumblr, thinking: "But wouldn't this be so much more fun if he was a nerdy gay geek-girl sweetly obsessed with the hip blonde deejay she's loved since grade-school?" Maybe so. Or maybe if Jay Baruchel was that character's mentor, instead of Cage. Or if Cage was a slightly nutty Helen Mirren, all ancient cracked leather cape-cloak and tangled grey locks, pining over the lost male love she had to imprison in Morgana's hell-dimension a thousand years ago. Any of that.
But no, what I really wanted was Jennifer Kent's The Babadook, finally out on BluRay, so I snatched it up and paid for it post-haste. Keeping in mind what tinybuffalo had said about it previously, I knew it was probably essentially a parable about post-partum depression, constant sleep deprivation, the difficulties of raising a child with very definite special needs and the abuse which can result from that sort of hothouse parent/child relationship, and that definitely turns out to be the case: Essie Davis and the kid playing her son are spot on, making everything about that part of it excruciatingly relatable. That said, the phantom they conjure up between them is an amazingly creepy one--the titular monster, with his great black hat and his grin, can't really ever be defeated, simply imprisoned, fed, dealt with. Your personal darkness doesn't go away, but it can be set aside, and I don't see that as a bullshit conclusion, because I've lived it...I'm still living it, always will. So yeah, personal resonance all 'round, and I'm very interested to see what's next from Kent, because she's a damn cinematic powerhouse who uses every storytelling tool at her disposal to maximum effectiveness.
While I was there, I also picked up a really cheap copy of You're Next, by the same team behind The Guest, which everyone in horror culture'd been shitting themselves about, um...two years ago, now? I'd put it off because home invasion narratives don't usually interest me, but here it was for eight bucks, so why not? And it's tight, nasty, very funny in parts yet never without merit; my favourite part of it is another Aussie actress, Shari Vinson, as the central Final Girl, who turns out to be far more effective at dealing with this sort of massacre than anyone expects her to be. ("I kind of grew up in a Survivalist compound?" she tells another character, halfway through; "haven't even told [my boyfriend] that, yet." "If you'd reacted like a normal person, you'd be fine!" Said boyfriend tells her, later on, in the climactic reveal, with a note in his voice like he's complaining about shitty restaurant service. This tells you exactly the sort of hairpin[s] we turn out the be dealing with, here...a bunch of whiny, intensely entitled adult children, all faux-intellectual hipsters who routinely savage each other over piddly crap from their shared childhoods ad conspire to murder their own parents for the inheritance, mainly played by fellow filmmakers the production team already knew. [Boyfriend], for example, is some big mover/shaker in the Mumblecore scene, which alone merits him getting bloodily slaughtered, in my books.)
And then there's Tomm Moore's Song of the Sea, an animated selkie tale from the same people who brought you The Secret of Kells. It's absolutely lovely, a gorgeous palate-cleanser which tells the story of Ben and Saoirse, who live with their sorrowful lighthouse-keeper father on a tiny island off the Irish coast, where--years before, around the time of Saoirse's birth--their mother Bronagh mysteriously disappeared, perhaps returning to the sea she came from. Ben resents Saoirse, who's six years old and has never as yet spoken; he spends his days obsessively writing the afirytales Bronagh once told him down in a little book and playing with his massive dog Cu, which Saoirse fends for herself.
One night, Saoirse finds a key, opens a chest and puts on a seal-skin coat she discovers inside. Transforming into a seal, she dives beneath the waves, emerging with a cough and a widening streak of white in her hair. Her fearsome grandmother is horrified, and insists they move to the city, which they do-but the world of the Fae is now aware of Saoirse's existence, pursuing her at every turn. Half of them want her to sing her selkie song and save them from the Owl Witch, Macha, who's been turning them to stone because she no longer believes it's possible to return to their own land; she thinks she's "saving" her people, taking their emotions and pain away, giving them peace and forgetfulness. But Saoirse can't sing without her skin, which her father threw into the sea after her midnight swim, and taht becomes the point of the quest she, Ben and Cu embark on.
As ever, Moore's filmmaking style is deceptively simple, his designs almost geometric, yet subtle and rich in the extreme; he has a great understanding for layers and textures, capturing the calm sea below and the restless waves above perfectly, the mercurial play of light and shadow across an Irish sky, the constant rain and fifty different shades of green and grey making up the countryside. But the other driving component is always music, a glorious score made up of strings, vocals, hammered dulcimer, competing drones plus ambient noise...you could sink into it head-first, and never drown. A startlingly beautiful creation.
And what else, what else. At BMV, I found second-hand copies of Brian De Palma's Faustian rock musical Phantom of the Paradise on BluRay, plus David Lee Fisher's weird-ass stunt of a "remix" of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, on DVD. The latter, shot in video, inserts actors shot against green-screen into the original movie's backdrops, marrying old footage with new performances and a new score, and casts Doug Jones as Cesare the Somnambulist. It's hypnogogic but quite riveting, at least if you're not watching it really late at night. I also picked up Ana Lily Amirpour's Iranian vampire western A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, shot in black and white, which manages to be both deadpan funny and quite offputting in sections--the violence is stylized but the rage is genuine, our chador-clad heroine starkly alien, the general ambiance lodged halfway between Jim Jarmusch and Michael Almereyda's Nadja. I'm particularly fond of a moment where he realize the reason The Girl is gliding rigidly down a street in true Nosferatu fashion is because she's actually standing on a skateboard. (Great use of White Lies's song "Death," too.)
Okay, I'm wrote out. Back to nothing much, I guess.
