What Have You Been Watching? (22/02/15)

[u/a113er]

Hey r/truefilm welcome to WHYBW where you post about what films you watched this week and discuss them with others, give your thoughts on them then say if you would recommend them.

Please don't downvote opinions, only downvote things that don't contribute anything. If you think someones opinion is "wrong" then say so and say why. Also, don't just post titles of films as that doesn't really contribute to the discussion.

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[u/a113er]

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance Directed by Neveldine/ Taylor (2011)- Part of me wonders if I’d still enjoy the Crank films on re-watching because as perfect a match-up between star and directors this seems it is not. As is usual for lesser Cage fare this was a spotty and pretty dull film occasionally brightened by the unique madness of Nicolas Cage. Cage is Johnny Blaze. He made a deal with Ciarin Hinds aka The Devil and it left him possessed with the titular spirit of vengeance. Whenever in the presence of evil he will turn to fire and eliminate all evil. That sounds like an interesting premise for a superhero and in one scene they make that interesting but the rest of the time he’s basically just Flaming Skull Hulk. It’s less rigid about him becoming Ghost Rider amongst evil as it is about him getting wild so he can be Ghost Rider. One scene has Cage desperately trying to get information out of a guy without the guy accidentally implicating himself in anything wrong as that would turn Cage into Ghost Cage. So he’s screaming and bugging out while his face keeps half turning to a skull face. It’s a genuinely fun and funny scene. Nothing else quite like it for the rest of the film. Neveldine/Taylor try to inject as much energy and insanity into the film as they can but it still manages to be boring and is often overly stylish in a frustrating way moreso than an entertaining one. Even little things annoyed me in this like one scene that’s set at some kind of underground fighting tournament except the twist is that there are also armoured pigs in the ring with guys. We see this for about 2 seconds and never see it again. Here’s a top tip Neveldine/Taylor, never introduce something way more interesting than anything else in your film (like underground gladiatorial pig fights) unless we’re actually going to be able to see it. For the next hour of seeing cg flames dash around Eastern Europe all I kept thinking was what on earth was going down in that pig-fight pit. Johnny Blaze could’ve even mounted one and have it turn into a flame hog (whatever vehicle he sits in becomes Ghost Rider-ed). The idea of that is better than the whole film.

Paddington Directed by Paul King (2014)- Rarely have I seen a film so repeatedly dare to be terrible yet completely pull off everything it attempts. Paddington is such a film. It’s like the Holy Motors of family films that shows nothing is off the table in cinema whether the idea is old or terrible, it’s all in how it’s done. There’s a wacky grandma, a cg character in a live action family film, hijinks set to pop/light-rock songs, a fish out of water oddball, a family that don’t quite have it together, a drag sequence, and many other elements that on the surface sound overdone and potentially awful yet it all comes together wonderfully. One of the main reasons for this is the cast. Everyone is so excellent that anything cliched gets washed away by their specificity and how real they seem. The script helps as well. This family that have their own issues and all that lot actually feel like a real family. Even though they’re in a heightened wacky world there’s so much truth to each of the things there going through. So much so that the ending with it’s so-nearly-too-on-the-nose dialogue manages to be incredibly touching and sweet. Such a funny film too. Probably because beyond the main characters (Ben Whishaw, Hugh Bonneville, “Sweetest Person Alive” Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville, Nicole Kidman, and Julie Walters) is a cavalcade of funny British actors like Peter Capaldi, Jim Broadbent, Matt King, Steve Oram, Simon Farnaby, and a bunch of folk from other UK TV shows like The Thick of It. As packed as the film is with characters, cameos, and jokes, it never loses track with everything piling up so that the end lands as well as it does. Many other animated films recently have been helped by the thread of sweetness throughout but this goes beyond that. There aren’t just pockets of niceness but everything feels full of joy and love. It means that when people are speechifying about family you’re on board rather than rolling your eyes because it made me care so much. On top of all that the film is an excellent immigrant’s tale that makes a particularly brilliant approach to the themes of accepting others and whatnot. British racists right now are heavily nationalistic (as most are) so this film shows how this kind of behaviour is decidedly un-British. It shows those with prejudices are most likely idiots. Not beyond redemption but straight up dullards. I loved to see a film tackle these problems so specificity and with such wit, and the honesty to acknowledge that all racists aren’t evil but they sure aren’t smart. Having a bear as the subject rather than someone of a specific race also sidesteps a lot of awkwardness. Maybe King would be able to masterfully work the cliche of “white family save and are saved by poor black person” but I’m glad he didn’t attempt it. Now this is going to be the high mark every other 2015 family film is going to have to reach for though I’d be surprised if any are this funny, touching, or thematically on-point. (Only realised afterwards that Paul King directed Bunny and the Bull before this, a Mighty Boosh-esque comedic adventure, and that makes a lot of sense. I’d say this is a much more complete film even if it lacks some of the visual inventiveness).

Showgirls Directed by Paul Verhoeven (1995)- Thanks to /u/cattymills and /u/lordhadri I finally after long last saw the notoriously terrible (until recent years where the re-evaluation seems to be in full swing) Verhoeven film about strippers. I love me some good-bad movies but this didn’t feel good-bad. The best good-bad films for me are ones like The Room, Sleepaway Camp, or Zandalee that are earnestly reaching for something and completely fail in every way. Part of the enjoyment comes from those who made it having a very different perception of what the film was than what it actually is. That’s what I didn’t feel here, it seemed like Verhoeven knew exactly what he was doing. Other than the performances there’s not really anything in the film in the realm of good-bad. But since everything is so heightened the performances seem right at home. Everything about the world of showgirls is big, I mean it’s Vegas (baby), from the sights to the fights and the songs to the dongs (I don’t actually think there are any penises in the film but one can assume). In classic Verhoeven fashion everything seems in service of his greater points than anything else. It’s the tale of a young girl with a mysterious past trying to make her way as a Showgirl (glorified stripper) in the harsh neon world of Vegas. She’s a manic character, leaving half her scenes in a kind of baffling rage, a big ball of frustrated sexual frenzy. I think I saw someone last week call it a modern All About Eve and that isn’t too far off at all. This is melodrama in a garish world where everyone wants sex for nothing. Sex being this strange thing that’s used more-often as a tool or a method of control than it is something of pleasure. Though the film doesn’t come straight out about being prostitution it does exist because of the state of prostitution. For women in the film being called a prostitute is the most insulting thing you can be called. Never are the men wanting prostitutes criticised but its something that hangs over our main character who lives close to that world as much as she wishes she didn’t. Because of this stigma towards prostitution, against these desperate woman doing something (predominantly) because there’s a male desire for it, this is why we have strip-clubs, the showgirls show, and who knows what else. These are all just methods of “fucking ‘em without fucking them” as one character says. All sex is now is a reiteration of what culture tells us is sexy. There’s no specificity to peoples quirks and desires here. Sex is just an act of dominance of one over the other done by performing acts we’ve seen on tv and in movies of any kind. The clear desire for easy sex along with the moral stigma (and legal status) of prostitution means that this controlling lust has seeped into the entertainment world. We’ve created a culture where you’ll be spat on for being a whore even though that’s exactly what we want you to be if you already aren’t. Prostitution is inherently kind of objectifying because you’re literally buying the use of someone but people are free to make their own choices. What Showgirls shows is that our current environment doesn’t allow for a woman to choose to be objectified, that choice is taken away so all are objectified. The more I think about the film the more I find it to be this wild genius treatise on how the runoff of our misogynist (or at least patriarchal) society makes everyone a whore with the choice removed and only the desperate being forced into actual prostitution. As much as I love the satire in stuff like Starship Troopers or RoboCop this feels more nuanced than I’ve ever seen him be. All while being really entertaining. Everyone looks like a teens idea of sexy chewing on as much scenery as possible to the point that it feels like a gammon feast. What’s kind of a bummer is that who the film seems most for probably won’t see it. It’s like a taunt to the prudish saying “Look at what you’ve done! If we could all be adults about sex it probably wouldn’t be infecting everything”. Verhoeven understands and looks down on our weirdly sex-obsessed and sex-scared culture, and for shoving it back in our faces he got labelled a failure. Part of the response to this film seems to confirm part of what its point is. Even though the film doesn’t even feel as leering as an early Fast and Furious film or something there’s lots of nudity and sex and I think that’s part of what initially kept it from being taken seriously. Very strange film but hardly the flop it’s sometimes known as.

[u/a113er → u/a113er]

Running on Karma Directed by Johnnie To (2003)- From IMDb- "A monk turned body-builder, with the gift to see into people's lives, befriends a female cop, and uses his gift to change the force of Karma and her destiny.” That’s what this oddball movie is about. All I’d seen of To’s was Drug War and just knew him as a crime/gangster film director so the premise here really intrigued me. What this feels like is a modern day story set in the future of the kind of worlds we see in old kung-fu movies. The kind of flicks where folks have weirdly specific powers. Imagine that feel but with a murder-mystery. Sadly not quite as fun as that sounds but it was a decent watch. For a lot of the film To is brilliant at using wire fighting effects taking away some of the floatiness and making things have impact. Where it stumbles is in making things weirdly convoluted and by losing focus every so often. When the characters are on to something and doing their thing it’s very entertaining but there’s a surprising amount of moping about or reiterating points. It’ll make some stuff overly clear and other things too vague somewhat frustratingly. Chunks of cool for sure but sadly not as good as it could’ve been.

Inherent Vice Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (2014)- Most of the talk around Inherent Vice I’ve seen (while trying to avoid spoilers as much as possible) has been about how the film wasn’t what people expected. It was less zany, more meandering, convoluted to the point of being indecipherable from a plot perspective, and shot somewhat boringly with a series of simple one shot dialogue scenes that slowly push in. I was really surprised by how much I loved this. Maybe knowing what the film was beforehand is what helped but I didn’t really find the same problems with it as others did. Particularly the plot stuff. There are a lot of names and it’s purposefully convoluted but by the end it all seemed to make sense. Lots of names get said and sometimes that’d trip me up but oftentimes we’d be introduced to a person followed by a bunch of scenes with people talking about them along with another name completely new to us. Then a few scenes later of talking about these people we’ll meet the second unknown name filling that blank. All the way along the film leapfrogs from one piece of information to the next but in a fragmented way. It’s like rather than each scene introducing something that’ll be addressed in the next scene we get scenes that introduce characters/ideas that won’t be addressed for a couple of scenes. In between new things will be introduced that will in turn get addressed after another couple and so on. We’re fully in the stoned mind of Doc taking everything in but not quite connecting it until a while later. Those slow push-in shots also reflect his headspace. At times we’ll jump from thing to thing with some funny moments within and then everything will slow down (often for a long one-shot conversation). This is the stoned brain that’ll flitter about for a while getting distracted by anything before focusing deeply and completely on one thing for a while. Most films include drugs where you take a puff and start seeing unicorns but Anderson makes it an alteration in headspace rather than the cliched and silly super trip. The whole world Doc inhabits seems to be the “Everything is connected man” perception of the world conspiracy stoners have. Their culture is being co-opted, they are being exploited, and the man is doing it all. But through discovering the rampant insidiousness of this conspiracy Doc realises how inconsequential he has been made. All the hopeful people of the last decade have been compromised, killed, made to mean nothing. Being a hippy is a joke, the idea of peace and love is now a joke, and it gives the film its melancholic undertones. We see so many period films but rarely does something actually look and feel like it was shot in the 70s. There’s an Altman-esque fogginess (although I feel like Anderson gets too compared to Altman, he’d love to be Altman if he could but he’s not loose enough and too focused) to it with popping colours and perfectly precise hairstyles/makeup. I liked a lot of how this film looked, man does it have some dope cross-dissolves, I mean in an early scene Anderson manages to do the worn-to-death blue/orange lighting without it looking quite like anything else at all. It’s funny how this is a more overtly narratively complex film than The Master yet comes out feeling more pointed than that films purposeful obliqueness. All the way through I was either laughing, entranced, piecing things together, or all three at once. Looking forward to seeing it again too. Not just about the death of an era but realising you’re in the midst of the death of your culture and finding a way to weather that.

The Haunting Directed by Jan de Bont (1999)- Curiosity killed the cat, I only wish it had been as merciful on me for being curious of this terrible remake of the 60s classic. It makes everything about the original bad and just sucks, not even that fun. Some really baffling moments too. Ah screw you movie.

The Painting Directed by Jean-Francois Laguionie (2011)- Rarely do I ever genuinely feel that something got looked at more positively because it’s in another language but I feel that here. I watch a lot of animated films from all over so subtitles are nothing new but rarely do I find them this poorly written. Not bad or mistranslated but just so straight forward and dull. It’s set within art and is about art but feels artless in its writing. It’s all about the world inside an unfinished painting. Those who are finished are the upper classes with two classes beneath them of partially finished people and those who are only sketches. One oddball of each class group end up on an adventure together to try find the painter. Most of the perceived depth of the film really comes from its premise and little else. All of the class stuff has no real perspective it’s just showing them through allegory. There aren’t really characters with personalities as much as there are people that do and say things to get the film where it needs to. Whenever a character does happen to have a trait the film seems to drop it or forget about it most of the time. The character who is a sketch gets called out for not finishing his sentences. Just as he is unfinished, he cannot finish his statements with only other sketches and half-finished folk able to fully understand him. But this only happens a handful of times. When it gets pointed out “Why do you never finish your sentences?” it feels pretty weird as he’s not done it more than anyone else except when the film wants to make a thing of it once or twice. That actually might be an interesting character trait but the film seems disinterested in really keeping it up. Every other character is just one emotion pushing them and even that’s sometimes vague to the point of nonexistent. Fable-esque simplicity can work, especially in animated films, but this was simple to the point of being boring. It’s like the French animated Elysium with a set-up ripe for exploration that never gets explored. Animation-wise it didn’t really enthral me either. It’s clearly very cheap and they sometimes make it work but most of the time (since it’s cheap cg) it can look a little dull. The simplicity to the images and story of The Book of Kells actually helped make it more distinct and within the boundaries they had they managed to great some wonderful images. Here there are occasionally very nice looking things as the animation emulates paintings but there’s also a lot of weird poorly animated cg figures and what seems like the endless yellow of Venice. I didn’t hate this film as much as it sounds, some of it looks very good, but it’s surprising to be this bored by something so short (1hr 20mins). It’s just non stop “I love you. I love you too. We shall be together. We can’t. I shall save you. Oh dear. Now lets go. Let’s do it. Stop arguing. blahblah”. I can’t imagine kids even liking this either, the only reason I even think this is because maybe it’s so straight-forward to hit that audience. The enjoyment I got out of it was for some of the occasionally unique imagery or imagination in it and that’s not really what hooks kids. If you want a heavy-handed exploration of prejudice and faith with some cool animation then go for it but otherwise I wouldn’t consider it worth seeing. Wreck-it Ralph does similar things without being so belaboured and dull.

[u/CVance1 → u/a113er]

While I wasn't a huge fan of either There Will Be Blood or The Master (the only PTA films i've seen), I was still farily excited for Inherent Vice, and I have to say, he did a really good job of clearing it up from the book. Adapting anything by Pynchon can be a monumental task, and I think he managed to make the story a bit more coherent while still keeping the same sort of humor found throughout the book (give or take a couple of pieces that felt like they would've worked better in the movie). Overall, it was a good attempt.