Strangers in the Dark

For the duration of the Practices module and beyond, we watched a series of films at the Plymouth Arts Centre. I attended all that I could, missing only Apocalypse Now. I do not have a definitive list of all the films that were screened, but the following are all the films I have notes on, and I don't recall any films not on this list.


Paris, Texas
Dir. Wim Wenders (1984)
The story of a man found wandering in the desert, the slow reveal of how and why he's been missing for the past four years, and how he finds closure on the past he's been running from. Presented to us as "America seen through the eyes of a foreigner", namely director Wenders, it's a simple story that's engagingly told and beautifully shot. It feels almost painterly in the way shots are composed, with the focus of the shot not necessarily focused on in composition, in particular one scene where two characters exchange dialogue around a truck, and the camera is quite a way away from the truck, most of the image taken up by the empty sky. In a world where you can almost second-guess what shot is coming next in a Hollywood movie (e.g. "two characters talking? Eh, just shoot two over-the-shoulder angles and cut back and forth in shot-reverse-shot"), the composition and editing are refreshingly creative. The un-Hollywood nature of the scene construction really helps grip you, for example, one shot is a distant shot of a car pulling up and a character gets out to have a conversation with another character, and you keep expecting a cut to a close-up that never comes.

Speaking of the editing, while a story like this requires a slow pace, it can be a little too slow in parts. I felt one scene in particular, in which we meet Travis' ex for the first time, was too slow. I'm not one of those people who think that unless every shot is filmed with excessive shakycam and each shot lasts less than three seconds that a movie is 'boring', far from it, but the scene felt unnecessarily dragged out. We we're learning any new information, it wasn't adding to the atmosphere or tone, it just felt like the movie was dragging its heels.

Thankfully this was an isolated incident, and otherwise the pace hit the right speed of being slow and contemplative without being indulgent. The story structure of a mystery being dragged out until a very quick explanation and resolution near the end could be easily mishandled, but thankfully the explanation of Travis' disappearance, while not amazingly good or anything, is still sufficient to not make the rest of the film feel like we wasted our time building to a lame reveal, and is revealed in a wonderful scene written, played and shot very well. Not only are both the actors giving great performances, one given a long monologue and the other having to act without much dialogue, but the way it's shot and framed is of the high standard present throughout the film. The character telling the story is, in essence, confessing, and it is conveyed extremely well through composition and lighting. The character sits in the dark with his back to the other character, lit in dark blue tones, while the other character stares at his back, lit in bright, sunny colours, not only getting the light/dark contrast but also having colours on opposite ends of the spectrum. As his monologue progresses, he turns to the other character, his face now partially lit in daytime colours, showing that he's 'come into the light', even if just a little. At one point where he talks about lying, the other character moves her face, and his reflection in the glass is superimposed over her face, subtle symbology for the way he sees himself in others. All of this information is conveyed subtly, usually when colour is used to relay information like this it's done in a very in-your-face way (e.g. in The Pagemaster, a scene in which Ahab spots the white whale suddenly turns the entire image bright red for no reason, or as one critic put it, "as if God was watching and said 'ooh, a dramatic moment! This'll need a red gel...'"), but here it is done purely through light you'd expect to be in the location. The fact that there's one-way glass between the two characters is also a strong metaphor for the monologue-heavy conversation itself. It tells the story in more ways than just the dialogue, which on its own would be a breaking of the cardinal rule "show, don't tell".

The considerable amount of one-sided conversations in the film also tell more of the story and the characters in a more overt way. Travis comes from a world with no people, and thus hasn't spoken in years, and so remains silent even when people speak to him, and doesn't interact in any way unless forced to. Walt, meanwhile, comes from the civilised world, and thus has been socially trained to avoid silence at all costs, since any dead air left unfilled makes for an uncomfortable atmosphere for social people. While this is less of a non-Hollywood tradition, it still makes for good fiction for a great deal of information about the characters to be relayed simply through the way they interact rather than being told things outright.

This isn't to say that 'not Hollywood = good, Hollywood = bad', there have been plenty of films not made in the Hollywood tradition that are as bad or worse than the low-grade, badly made blockbusters that come out between the truly good mainstream Western films. Paris, Texas for the most part tells a conventional story in unconventional ways, but it isn't without its tired cliches. Namely, two moments stand out as examples of storytelling contrivance: the first when two characters chase a third in a car, and there just so happens to be two cars of the same make, model and colour, which just so happen to be going different directions so the characters have to pick one at random to follow, risking losing the trail if they pick one, and the second when Travis just misses his ex, who was in the same room as him but just so happened to be out of sight at that moment. The former just adds a pointless moment of conflict for no reason than to add some cheap tension, and the latter is so unbelievably contrived in how close they are yet still managed to miss each other that you half expect the mice from An American Tail to walk by yelling "FIEVEL!".

Overall, while I doubt I would watch it a second time, it grabbed my attention quickly and held it throughout. A simple story very well told.

11'09"01 September 11:
France / Iran / Mexico / USA
Dir. Claude Lelouch / Samira Makhmalbaf / Alejandro González Iñárritu / Sean Penn (2002)
A collection of short films, each from filmmakers of various nationalities, all around the theme of the 9/11 attacks, with the only caveat being that the films have to be precisely 11 minutes, 9 seconds and 1 frame long. We were shown four of these shorts, although I'm not sure of the order we were shown them in.

The France short focuses on a couple (insert joke about the French taking absolutely any story and making it about a romance here), a deaf woman and a deaf-interpreter man, whose relationship is falling apart. The film is told out of sequence except for the final, pivotal scene, jumping back and forth from the early stages of their relationship to later stages as they begin to drift apart from each other. The final scene takes place on the morning of the attacks itself, as the man returns covered in the dust of the towers' collapse.

With the viewpoint character deaf, the film makes clever use of sound. The little sounds that exist are low bass rumbles whenever she can feel vibrations she can't hear, such as when she rests her head on a piano as the man plays it. This really gets you into the head of the character, breaking from her viewpoint and restoring sound only for one brief moment as the man talks on the phone, well placed in the film to keep you from completely adjusting to the lack of sound.

Taking the story of 9/11 and making it about fictional characters who are affected by it in an ancillary way can easily be mishandled (as we'll see later), but this film handles it well, especially since the idea of the attacks being used as a device to rebuild the bond between two fictional lovers could easily have been reprehensible in its trivialising of a tragedy. Fortunately, the power of the event is well conveyed, when the door is opened revealing the man covered in dust, he just stands there. Not talking, not signing, not trying to communicate anything. Just standing there, the actor's face saying it all. A small-scale story told skillfully enough to dodge any potentially offensive implications, and engaging and just generally well told in of itself.

Samira Makhmalbaf's Iran short takes an approach and viewpoint on the events that is told far too rarely: the perspective of non-combatants in the Middle East. Specifically, it focuses on one teacher's attempts to explain to a class of children exactly what happened, the children incapable or unwilling to understand.

It is the best told of the three conventional narrative films, saying a lot while speaking little. It doesn't need long introductions explaining to us the environment and context of the story, it is all done through character interaction. The opening scenes of the teacher almost pleading with various children to stop work helping the adults build nuclear bomb shelters out of mud tell you far more about how these children are taught to think than the film flat out telling you through narration or text ever could. Then, when the class is assembled, the children act refreshingly realistic. They aren't treated as either complete idiots or miniature adults, like so much media does, but instead their thought processes and outlook on the situation feels like how an actual child would react. Instead of acting dumb or nonchalant about being told about the disaster, they attempt to rationalise and wrap their heads around the situation through their own very limited understanding. When they're first told a disaster has happened, they can only contextualise it in the small world they know, thinking that the disaster is that someone fell down a well and died, and where they need the concept of a tower explained to them. It feels real in a very tangible way, and doesn't have a defined happy or sad ending, ending with no clear answers or resolution but without feeling like the story just stopped. Another small story, but this one exceedingly well told and from a very different, very real perspective.

Mexico by Iñárritu is a very different prospect indeed, instead being a far more experimental piece. Rather than telling a traditional narrative, the short is made up of audio and video footage of the actual event. That description makes it sound rather limited in scope, but in practice it is an extremely powerful piece of work. Like France used the power of sound by removing it for long periods, Mexico does something similar for visuals. Much of the film is a black screen, making the sudden appearance of imagery have far greater impact as a result. While news coverage blitzing you with these sounds and images desensitises you to them, this film returns to them the emotional power they had all along.

However, even a film like this can't avoid trite sentiment, it seems. After letting the images and sounds speak for themselves in a strikingly stark and mature move, the film ends with a very slow (to the point that you have to think that this was Iñárritu's way of keeping to the time restraint when the film came in far too short) fade into a title card, displaying the message "Does God's light guide us or blind us?" in English, and I assume the same message in a Middle Eastern alphabet. I don't think I need to say anything about this blindingly obvious "make sure the cheap seats get the point" moment other than to quote Frank Darabont in his interview for the documentary Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner: *makes wild gesture* "Yes, thank you. Thank you for kicking this delicate emotional note we were achieving right in the nuts. It's like having sex and someone dumps cold water on you."

I really shouldn't complain about Mexico being trite and dunderheaded though, because at least it has the preceding ten minutes of excellence to weigh against the stupid ending, which is more than can be said of USA, which was excreted out of one of Sean Penn's less sightly orifices. This film focuses on a senile old man who now lives alone but who talks to his wife as if she were still alive. This is treated as a sad, melancholic, 'man has seen better days' bit of melodrama rather than the horrifying psychosis that it should be treated as, because that's what it is. The story then reveals it what way it is related to 9/11: when the towers fall, the sun is no longer blocked from the apartment. Seeing the positive in a tragedy can work as a story if handled correctly, hell, France showed a good example of that.

That is when the film plays its trick card: as soon as light falls on the apartment, the dying flowers immediately revive back to life by way of awful CGI. The old man rejoices at the now bright and colourful flowers. I'd be pretty happy too if I found out ET was alive. The film ends as the flowers not dying apparently snaps him out of his senility to realise that his wife is dead. The healing powers of magical CGI flowers sadly do not extend to making the man aware that several thousand people are dying horrifically outside of his sappy, emotionally manipulative little story. One of the saving graces is Ernest Borgnine, who seems incapable of giving a bad performance no matter what he's in, even when he's given tripe like this to work with. While the actual implications of the image and the stunningly stupid way in which the story handles it may have problems, the actual image itself of the first tower's shadow falling is striking and memorable. For the rest of this insultingly simplistic garbage, I have no words. Well, actually I have two. Those two words are "fuck" and "this".

John Smith double bill:
The Black Tower / Worst Case Scenario
Dir. John Smith (1987/2003)
Smith is basically the forerunner to the modern internet troll, deliberately making films that defy any art critic to give deeper meaning to them, to act like there is some deeper meaning when in fact it is just whatever random thing he felt like doing, and generally 'taking the piss'. Prior to this screening, we were shown his other film Girl Chewing Gum in another module, which while not a film I would sing the praises of, was still an amusing thing that was good for one watch and was pretty clever in the way it played with your perception.

The Black Tower continues this trend of toying with perception in a very different way, this time constructing an almost Poe-like narrative about a man who sees a black tower in the distance, but which seems to vanish and reappear at random times and in different places. Not as explicitly comedic as Girl Chewing Gum, there are still some comedic moments of absurdity, such as when a boy on a bike disappears behind a tree as if he's entering Hammerspace. The focus is instead on creating a story which while not actually scary, is still eerie and ominous in the same way that the modern phenomenon of 'creepypastas' are, which uses limited perception techniques to make an inherently stupid or silly idea creepy by the way it is told. Just being told with traditional storytelling techniques would make many of these stories not work (e.g. "once upon a time a wizard made a black tower and it teleported around the place", "there is an extradimensional creature who wants to take you back to its home dimension to kill you", or "the boy had a possessed Pokemon cartridge that killed his friend"), but the limited viewpoint and 'realness' of the way the story is told creates enough unknown factors and plausibility that it becomes effective (e.g. "I walked home the next day, and saw the black tower again. It was not where it was the week before. I asked a local shopkeeper, and he said the tower had always been there", the section of this video that ends at 4:35, or this video and its description). A great example of a simple idea working very effectively.

Worst Case Scenario, meanwhile, is the complete opposite. An infuriating film that is created through photo roman techniques for the most part, Smith shoots the various people traveling across a street from his room a few storeys up. It's about as interesting as it sounds. There are one or two entertaining moments, such as when everything in the entire world appears to stop and wait for a red light. It doesn't engage on any level because it simply doesn't want to. It isn't entertaining as a mainstream film since it doesn't have any conventional narrative or flow. It isn't intellectually stimulating as an art piece because it's deliberately built to be meaningless. It isn't even tolerable as just something you sit through, since it isn't visually striking and sections drag on far past acceptable lengths, one sequence in particular of a door slamming repeatedly almost causing several people in the screening to flat-out walk out of the film. Again, I can do no better to sum up this thing than to quote a critic, specifically popular internet critic 'ToddInTheShadows': "Stupid by accident, stupid on purpose, it doesn't matter! It's still stupid!"

Blowup
Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni (1966)

Presented to us as 'the Pulp Fiction of its day', this is the story of a photographer who does things in various vignettes, with the extremely loose plot that he accidentally witnessed a murder occasionally popping up to remind us of its existence. The idea of a vague collection of scenes placed roughly in a semblance of order has been done well in films like Wayne's World and indeed Pulp Fiction, but the difference between those films and this one is that those films did it right. This is a meandering pile of scenes that should, when assembled in order, if not tell a story then at least provide some entertainment, some artistic statement, something. This film boldly defies such rules in being utterly pointless.


Which isn't to say it doesn't have some effective scenes. If you throw random shit at a wall, at least some of it will stick. One such scene takes place in a nightclub, when the main character takes part in a mad mob fight to grab the remains of a guitarist's smashed instrument, runs outside to escape the people attempting to steal it for themselves, and when he has successfully got away with it, immediately tosses it away. It not only informs the character, but also has a good, well conveyed point to make about how social contexts can put tremendous value on values and concepts that are ultimately worthless. If it were put in a film about that idea, it would have made for a great film. The argument could be made that the film is about that, with several sub-plots about the pursuit of something unimportant that is important to the pursuer, such as two young girls desperately attempting to get into the infamously cutthroat modelling industry, a woman attempting to destroy photos of her extramarital affair, and, in the end, the "main" "plot" about the murder ends up this way. I don't need a theme a film is trying to make to be spelled out in an obvious manner, in fact that approach would have ended up with a worse film than this one, but on the other hand you can't just have a collection of scenes vaguely centering around the same theme that are connected by all having one character take part in them, smash them together into one work, then throw up your arms exclaiming 'fuck it, that'll do!' and leave it at that. You have to hit the sweet spot where an audience doesn't feel insulted in how obvious you're being and being so obtuse that your audience only notices what you were doing months later when writing about it, and even then while questioning if they're just seeing patterns in jumbled chaos. All of that isn't even addressing the ending, in which the "plotline" of the movie is suddenly dropped and the movie just... stops. I don't need a conventional Hollywood ending to tie up every loose thread, I don't need every little detail explained, but I do need a hell of a lot more than the main character giving up on uncovering the mystery he seemed so obsessed with throughout the entire movie. See my previous statement about arm-waving and exclamations. He goes to play ball with some mimes no less, since our main character is so deep and layered he identifies most with the people substituting reality with their own, he takes black and white photos in a colour world, man, his modern photo studio shows how he's, like, totally disconnected from the world. So what? My electric fire is disconnected from the wall socket, while given the right context that fact could mean something, but just randomly putting stuff like that out there doesn't automatically make it say anything deeper than the plain facts. MEANING! A POINT! YOU NEED ONE!

The comparison between Pulp Fiction and Blowup is apt, because it is a perfect juxtaposition. Pulp Fiction is a linear story told through chaos. Blowup is meaningless chaos told through a story.



Beasts of the Southern Wild
Dir. Benh Zeitlin (2012)


In a million years, when kids go to school, they'll know that once there was a girl named Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in The Bathtub. The Bathtub is a community of people in the wild of the deep American south, completely cut off from the rest of humanity, living in houses of junk off of the animals they raise, at least until a storm unlike any other sweeps through the area and decimates The Bathtub, leaving Hushpuppy and her father to try and survive in the flooded forest. Told through the viewpoint of a young child, naturally the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred. One scene in particular that really shows it understands the viewpoint of a child is when the storm approaches, we're shown through cutaways that the girl has no idea what is actually happening, instead thinking that an iceberg is collapsing nearby (of course raising the question that if she doesn't know what a storm is, how does she know what an iceberg is?). It also tells its very character-piece-driven story in subtle ways, such as how gender stereotypes are put onto Hushpuppy only when she comes to 'civilisation' and is put in a dress and her hair styled. It's a little moment that tells a lot. Another great vignette has Hushpuppy bond with a woman who might be her mother, but it is left vague whether she actually is or not, and it's a question that is more interesting left unanswered.

It isn't perfect though. Although it isn't nearly as obnoxiously blatant as some films can be, the film does feel rather award-bait-y. The innocent viewpoint character musing about philosophy in a naive fashion in voice-over, the handheld camerawork, the quality and sound of the score, on their own these elements don't say anything about the film as a whole, but when put together with the general tone and pace of the film it screams 'Oscar bait'. It didn't impede my enjoyment of the film, but it is still a problem when a film is obviously pandering in this way. One thing that wasn't given enough explanation was the large boars that escape from Hushpuppy's fantasy iceberg and are randomly cut to throughout the movie, eventually culminating in a scene where Hushpuppy confronts them and essentially tells them to go away, and then they do. End of subplot. It isn't like this is a meaningless element, there is a metaphor for Hushpuppy's overcoming her fears of the future without her father, if she really is that mature to be thinking that way which I don't recall any evidence of, but the way it is played is confusing. It isn't clear whether anyone but Hushpuppy can see the creatures, but unlike the mother subplot, which is best left unexplained, this subplot needs more explanation. Is this just a fantasy and a metaphor? Is the look on her father's face due to the fact that she's talking to nothing, or that a gigantic boar creature just wandered into the camp? This isn't the kind of mystery that inspires discussion and makes a film more intriguing, it's just obtuseness for the sake of it. Other than that though, while it is a competent film, and I'd even go as far to call it good, it didn't leave much of an impression on me after viewing it. I didn't think that this film glorifies the people it shows in poverty, I simply thought it was giving a different perspective on something which is always presented in the same way, the way of pitying the homeless and uncivilised and trying to fill the audience with the desire to "help" and "fix" these people when in actuality they may be perfectly content as they are.

Argo
Dir. Ben Affleck (2012)
The recently declassified story of how several diplomats trapped in Iran were safely rescued by a CIA operation. The kicker? Said operation involved the creation of a fake movie, the science fiction movie of the same name as this movie, with a CIA operative heading into the country on the pretense of location scouting, sneaking the diplomats out disguised as his crew. Star and director Affleck has been gaining critical praise ever since his move into directing, specifically his earlier movie The Town, and although I didn't see that movie, I can see why from watching this one. This is a tight story that, even though it contains scenes of wildly varying tone and may not contribute much to the narrative, still ensures each scene has a purpose, keeps the tension throughout even when handling comic relief, and doesn't take the easy route in either glorifying Hollywood or cramming it with self-depreciating jabs at the industry. Instead, what little role Hollywood plays in the film is largely played through characters interacting with absolutely sparkling dialogue, such as one moment when the producer hired to perpetrate the act asks if the plan is, in fact, to get someone who knows nothing about movies to act like he knows everything. When he is told that is indeed the plan, he responds "you'll fit right in".



Which isn't to say the movie is flawless. In its final act the contrivances to create cheap suspense start to become tiring, such as the producer being blocked from his office right at the moment when Iranian customs calls him to confirm the identities of the 'crew', returning to pick up the phone at the last possible moment, or the laughable climax where the underplayed, oppressive tension the movie was doing so well at maintaining is tossed out in favour of an incredibly out of place chase scene where jeeps attempt to stop the airplane. It's like watching a biopic with the last ten minutes of Die Hard 2 spliced into it, and I do wonder exactly what the thought process was behind this. Did the suits just want an action scene so they shoved one in at the end?

Other than the badly mishandled ending, this is a strong movie that I enjoyed. Like Berberian Sound Studio this uses a host of clever techniques to make you think you're seeing things you're not, in this case using the clearly miniscule CGI budget with precise timing to get the intended effect without lingering enough to spot the obvious effects, redressing and shooting around locations to make it feel like Iran without actually shooting anywhere near there, and generally pulling clever sleight-of-hand tricks to stop the audience from noticing these ploys, and does it so well that you don't care even when you're told about them. Definite candidate for rewatching.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Dir. Peter Jackson (2012)

Not much really needs to be said about Jackson's industry-changing Lord of the Rings trilogy, but suffice to say this prequel adapts part of the original book that started the Middle-Earth universe, telling (part of) the story of how Bilbo Baggins traveled with a company of dwarves to the stronghold that once was the pride of the dwarven empire, but has been taken over by a mighty dragon. Since not only is this a current, high-profile release, but also part of a franchise beloved by nerds like me, I got more opinions from others on this film than all of the other combined. The reactions have been simultaneously different and similar, most of them all making the same criticisms of the film whilst reacting in wildly different ways to them. It's too long. The source material's clearly been stretched to breaking point to cover three films. It takes away from the impetus of the main quest to cut away to completely unrelated material taken from other Tolkien works (The Silmarillion et al). The original book is just a simple story Tolkien wrote for his children, it was only with the later Lord of the Rings books that it became the serious epic everyone knows, and as a result the film jarringly flits between children's book writing and attempts to recapture the 'epic scale' feel of the original films.

With all this bias and foreknowledge going into the film, I can sum up my feelings on the film as a definite, solid... "meh". I can definitely see where the complaints are coming from; the opening sequence taking place just before the start of Fellowship of the Ring goes on far, far too long and is clearly there not only to pad the length of the movie but also as a transparent, ineffective attempt to tie the film to the original trilogy as hard as physically possible. It just comes off as blatant fanservice more than anything else; the dwarves being given one character trait each and being near impossible to tell apart most of the time (not to mention having a silly song that could have been cut without any affect on the story, atmosphere or character development) is very much children's book writing, which jars hard against the serious storylines around them; you feel the length in a tangible way that you never did with the original films; the list goes on. However, when looking back on the film, it is still a definitively Middle-Earth tale filled with the stellar cast you'd expect, the visuals still look gorgeous, the music is still Howard Shore on top of his game (even if the music score nerd in me says that it can't live up to the original trilogy of masterpieces, and that the dwarves theme blaring again and again every time something happened got repetitive), it is still a good film. Of course it wasn't going to be on par with the originals, they were one of those rare instances where the stars aligned to make something transcendent that resonated in the popular culture like very few pieces of media ever do, and the multitude of problems revolving around its creation does take its toll, but even with all these problems it is still far from bad.
 
Rust and Bone
Dir. Jacques Audiard (2012)
Even in France, Katy Perry is inescapable. A single father tries to support his child by taking low-grade jobs and entering the world of underground fighting, while building his relationship with a woman attempting to recover from the accident which left her without legs below the knee. The mantra that you can make a good movie out of any story rings true here, since while there may not be much in the way of a narrative, the film excels in being a character study, developing the leads and their interactions with each other and others.



It's a very French film, with plenty of sex and dialogue exchanges about relationships and whatnot, but it does this in a very believable way. The characters develop in subtle ways rather than big speeches causing character u-turns, with maybe the possible exception of what happens at the lake near the end of the film, but since that's such a traumatic event anyway that can be excused. The CGI used to remove the actress' legs is seamless, far less obvious than most CG these days and is the best kind of effects: even when you know where the effect is and how it's done, you still can't see the join. Not the most memorable of films, and not one that really impacted me enough to talk about it at length, but a solid film nonetheless.

Berberian Sound Studio
Dir. Peter Strickland (2012)
A simultaneous tribute and throwback to the Italian horror movies of the 70's, an English sound artist is hired to create the sounds for an Italian language horror film, with the line between reality and fantasy inevitably beginning to blur. One of the true marks of good craftsmanship is in making the audience think they saw more than they actually did, and this movie pulls this off in spades. Despite the fact that the entire film is focused on a film-within-a-film, and takes place for most of its runtime in a single room, it never feels that way and it's only when you think back that you realise that, other than a clip of the title sequence at the beginning, we never see any of the film-within-a-film, we just hear the dialogue. This also holds up the golden rule of horror: what you see is never as scary as what you don't. The scenes depicted in the film-within-a-film cross the boundary from graphic into exploitation, and then leave that boundary in the dust far, far behind it, but they are made endlessly more horrific by the fact that we only hear the assistant describing the scene as he logs the audio takes and the sound effects themselves. Again, it is a major achievement to make what is essentially a stage play that tells most of the story through sound and yet manage to keep the audience from noticing that fact until after the film ends.



Like Rust and Bone, this movie also deals more with character arcs than a narrative. The feeling the main character is going through of being in a totally alien place with no foothold to keep himself centered is extremely well conveyed, and it's done in more clever ways than just playing the language barrier card over and over. One example of this is in the way that the director assures the main character that his flight will be paid for, in that very real way where the promise feels genuine at the time, and as it doesn't happen again and again the excuses aren't the standard weak repetition of the promise, instead the tactics and phrasing changes subtly to the point where he is turning it around on the main character, passive-aggressively asking why money is so important to him. This may seem like a strange thing to highlight, but in practice it shows just how clever and real the writing is. In most media, a subplot like this would have the director be blatantly lying and have every excuse be as flimsy as possible just so the cheap seats understand what's happening, but here it's played in a manner that feels truthful, since so many of us have met this kind of person in real life before.

The way in which the main character's sanity begins to slip is also played with an admirable amount of subtlety. It isn't an obvious change, instead he slowly becomes less and less affected by the horrific imagery being paraded before him in scene after scene (with a very illuminating character moment when the director insists it isn't exploitation because "these things really happened", thus packing almost every scene with grisly torture cannot be anything other than "truthful"), and becomes steadily more hostile in his interactions with the secretary. Again, it speaks to the quality of the writing that he doesn't become a snarling monster by the final encounter with her, he still ends up retreating and sniveling when he still can't get his money. The final scene is one which would require multiple viewings to fully grasp, as the line between what is on the dub studio's screen and what is reality becomes completely interchangeable, and is stopped from reaching Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite levels of insanity only by the lack of psychedelic visuals, it still completely throws narrative flow to the wind and doesn't so much end as stop, questions unanswered and plot unresolved. No doubt if I watched it many more times I could glean more meaning from it, but during the first viewing your only response can be to go with the flow and not question the craziness occurring out of nowhere. Another very well made film that didn't really grab me on an emotional level.

Stalker
Dir. Andrey Tarkovskiy (1979)
One film that did grab me on an emotional level, meanwhile, was director of Solaris Andrey Tarkovskiy's Stalker. Set in an apocalyptic future where a meteor has decimated the area, the blast zone is said to contain a house. Within the house is a room. If you enter the room, your deepest desire comes true. This is the kind of movie I want to see when someone tells me a film has a lot of metaphorical meaning: a film that not only has that deeper meaning, but also a perfectly functional narrative to go along with it. The narrative can be enjoyed without any deeper reading, while the metaphors hit that perfect balance of transparent enough that you can walk away from your first viewing with an interpretation and opaque enough that it doesn't feel like the filmmakers are bashing you about the head with the BIG MESSAGE. The science fiction/fantasy holds up when considered outside of the metaphors, and when you're looking for them you can find all sorts of meaning. Returning to the idea of not leaving things explained, the fact that the characters have to go through all kinds of apparently meaningless diversions for no given reason with no explanation of what will happen if they don't follow them adds to the mystical air of the zone, and the fact that they don't even actually enter the fabled room gives both it and the zone itself this fantastic air of magic where the unanswered questions are far more intriguing than the answers to them could ever be.

It is also a visually enrapturing film. You can stun an audience with bright colours and fantastical imagery, and that's perfectly fine, but it takes a director in a league of their own to make rundown interiors and overgrown exteriors so captivating they hold your interest alone. It's also an example of how a slow pace can be just as exciting and enthralling as any mile-a-minute explosion-fest blockbuster, one shot in particular that lasts several minutes of just three characters traveling on a cart through the wastes with minimal score playing behind it, no interruptions or obstacles, technically speaking nothing is happening, and yet it holds your attention constantly. If I had to pick one film alone to revisit of all the films in the screenings, this would be one of the strongest contenders.

Zero Dark Thirty
Dir. Kathryn Bigelow (2012)
On the second of May 2011, a small American strike team of commandos headed into a compound less than a mile away from a Pakistani military academy. This may seem like one of the many hundreds of missions carried out in the war in the Middle East, but it had a target unlike any other: military intelligence suggested that the compound contained the long illusive terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. Like Argo, this could have become a Michael Bay level of American self-aggrandising wank, the type of film that could be entirely set to DVDA's "America, Fuck Yeah!" without being jarring at all. Instead, it opted to take the far more mature route: to look at exactly what had to be done to get to that one night in May.


The fact that the main character is female, and yet no big deal is made of this fact speaks to the intelligence of the film. It instead tells the story of brutal torture, murder and subterfuge on both sides of the battle, we may be rooting for the Americans but to call them 'the good guys' would be a gross oversimplification. It's a very unique and deftly crafted film that can show a scene of a politician outlawing torture and have the audience reaction be negative to it as the leads have a vital information source cut off. It is the very definition of a film dealing in shades of grey, one scene that stands out features one of the main supporting character's monkeys being killed as a security risk. Both sides are shown as equally tricksy, another scene that's almost Hitchcockian in design features a supposed informant coming to give vital information to the Americans, and it keeps you guessing throughout the agonisingly drawn out (in a good, tense way rather than a badly paced way) scene of the informants car slowly making its way into the compound. It may not be the mature look into a highly politically charged situation that the American-loving public deserve, but it is certainly the film we need. Another thoroughly excellent film.


No
Dir.  Pablo Larraín (2012)
1988. Chile. The country has been ruled by dictator Pinochet for fifteen years, but the time allowed by the Constitution for him to retain power is running out. He is forced by law to allow a vote: "Yes" to continue with him in power for another eight years, or "No" to dethrone him and create a new democracy. Although a rebellion wants Pinochet to be removed from power and taken to trial for the atrocities he has committed, the general populace is likely to vote yes out of complacency and fear of the regime. So, an ad executive comes to the "No" campaign with an idea: instead of using their legally required fifteen minutes of television time to pound the atrocities of the regime into people, instilling more fear and defeating their purpose, they should instead use the techniques of American advertising to convince people that a Chile without Pinochet will be an idyllic utopia. Of course, opposing a dictator is a risky prospect, made all the worse by the fact that the executive's boss is leading the "Yes" campaign. The fact that that synopsis is so long speaks to the fascinating narrative the film has, even if it turns out most of the events are fictionalised. However, that kind of thing doesn't matter to me, Ed Wood has a ton of inaccuracies about the original events and how people acted, but it doesn't stop it from being one of my favourite films. As long as the changes aren't an outright offensive lie about the actual people (e.g. taking a good friend of Hunter Adams who was actually killed in real life and making him into a stock 90's female character who has no depth outside of what's required of her as a love interest in the supposed biopic Patch Adams), accuracy to the facts will never be a substitute for good storytelling.

This film is an example of this, telling its story in a manner that makes you care about the characters and real life conflict even in the context of a fictitious narrative. It's also technically unique as well, being produced with the same 80's-era videotape and cameras that the media being created in the film is, not only placing you right in the era just by the video quality alone, but also allowing actual archive footage to be mixed in with new footage almost seamlessly. It's an interesting visual experience to see 80's video without having to see it through the medium of worn-out VHS tape if nothing else. This is another example of a film that while sound on a technical and creative level, just didn't grab me on an emotional level. Like all the other times I've used that phrase, I don't mean that I wasn't emotionally invested, I mean that I simply didn't engage with it in the way that you do with films you enjoy. Did I hate it? No, far from it, I quite enjoyed it. On the other hand though, it wasn't a film that resonated with me to the extent that I truly engaged with it and will sing its praises. To put it another way, it is a film that I watched once. Nothing more, nothing less.


Baraka 
Dir. Ron Fricke (1992)
Throughout this post, you've seen me present films with strong stories as something I liked, and ones with weak or no stories as something I think is bad. This is a false impression, as here we have a film with no story, not even in a non-conventional sense, which I loved. As an IMAX film, it is essentially a glorified tech demo, no different than any other IMAX film where there's little to no motivation to do anything other than say "ooh look at the pretty things isn't the screen big?" However, like Anno used his giant-robots-fighting-giant-monsters to tell a very unconventional story of recovering from depression and learning to find worth in yourself, Yager Development realising that they only had the budget and resources to make a lowgrade Call of Duty knockoff and using the opportunity to make a shocking deconstruction of everything wrong with the modern warfare genre of games, and Lauren Faust taking the commission to work on one of the most infamously worthless franchise for girls of all time to create a show that appealed to all ages and genders and further her goals to prove media for little girls shouldn't be as devoid of effort as it is, here Fricke took the job to impress people in one of the most shallow ways possible in cinema and used it to photograph truly astounding imagery from across the globe. A documentary entirely free of dialogue, narration or narrative, it is instead a visual experience of the best kind: one where you're taken on a journey rather than shown a selection of pretty images.

That may seem like an arbitrary distinction, but it the difference is palpable when viewing the film. The image of clouds traveling over a mountain in fast motion so they look like a river in particular burnt itself into my mind. The final, stunningly beautiful shot shows the night sky wheeling around a dead tree. A segment devoted to a native ritual is shown, but no context or explanation is given. No political or religious overtone given, no lens through which you are supposed to view the things presented and come to a conclusion that the filmmakers want you to come to, you are simply presented with it as just something that they do. This carries throughout a great deal of the film, simply being presented things with only whatever prior knowledge you possess to give you context. The only moment that truly feels like a statement is the segment set inside an intensive chicken farm. While you could argue that it is simply the prior conceptions of the viewer that charges these sequences with a political statement, and that it is just presenting these things in the same detached 'this-is-something-that-happens' manner of the rest of the film, I would counter-argue that if the continual long, close shots of baby chicks being tossed into a funnel aren't trying to say "aww, aren't the things they do to these adorable little things awful?", I'd hate to image the lengths it would go to if it weren't. I may be lenient because I happen to agree with the sentiment of this segment, but I don't think that this one part is enough to ruin the impartiality of the film (even if there's a similar segment where people scrounging amongst a landfill is set to the most maudlin, depressing, sorrowful music imaginable). It truly is an example showing that any genre, even ones as shallow as IMAX "experience", can be done right and a good film made as a result.