News You Can Bruise for 2014 June

Mon Jun 02 2014 09:37 May Film Roundup: Ready for "Wacky Wednesdays" here at News You Can Bruise? Here's the deal. We got five movies in the May roundup, but only three of them I actually saw in May! One is from April and one I saw yesterday. Also, it's not Wednesday.

• THX-1138 (1971 2004!!!) I saw this in April and forgot to write about it, and then I remembered it and I was angry! Because guess what? George Lucas went in to this movie in 2004 and George Lucased it, and that's the version the museum showed us, under the pretense that we'd be seeing a 35mm print of the 1971 original. Fortunately, I don't think there were any substantial changes, because—and this is the official Crummy.com Opinion Of George Lucas—Lucas wouldn't know a substantial change if he made one by accident. He goes in and re-edits his first movie, not because the studio meddled with it, but because he now has the technology to make the car chase look cooler? Gimme a break. I'm sure it was fine.

  The thing is, this movie's really edgy and disturbing for a 1971 sci-fi flick! I really liked it while I was watching it, and I would still like it if I weren't so angry about the editing. The plot is awful but, to damn with faint but sincere praise, I consider George Lucas to be one of the world's great art directors. There's a lot of eyeball kicks (I loved the opening scene), deliciously overwrought dialogue, and bizarre details and conundra.

  For instance, why are all the holograms played by black actors, and why are they the only black characters in the movie? Is it mere artifice, an allegory that we see but the characters don't? Or is it a horrible reality within the world of the movie? With another director you could debate this point, but with Lucas, why bother? We've seen what he considers an artistic decision, and it's nowhere near this level. We've also seen that he frequently puts super racist stuff in his movies, so maybe it's best to back away slowly.

• The Famous Sword Bijomaru (1945): The museum is on a serious Mizoguchi kick (I believe they call it a "retrospective"). I never heard of the guy, but I figured I'd see a sampling. This is a bit of rally-round-the-emperor wartime propaganda that's full of low production values and sword-slashes that clearly don't connect and battles that are choreographed like kids roughhousing in the backyard, and overall it's not very good. But given that the Americans were firebombing the country while it was being made, I'm not in any position to complain.

  In an interview Mizoguchi said making this film saved him from being drafted, so yay this film.

• Altered States (1980): This movie brings a lot of intellectual firepower (screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky!) to a subject that can't support it. It's like if Aaron Sorkin wrote a Godzilla movie. And not one of the tentpole Godzilla movies, but, like, Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla. The dialogue is snappy, the scientists talk more like real scientists than movie scientists, and there are quiet moments of yelling between the action scenes where it turns into something really special; the sort of good movie you made up in your mind when I said "Aaron Sorkin wrote a Godzilla movie," just to prove me wrong. But overall it's a mess, too ridiculous to even be pretentious.

  Also not a good picture from an animal cruelty perspective. It's my non-expert opinion they actually killed the cute lizard (or a cute lizard, anway) used in the first hallucination sequence. Maybe you think I'm a fool and it's all Hollywood magic, but Cannibal Holocaust also came out in 1980, and William Hurt hits an elephant at one point, so who's gonna stop them killing a lizard?

• Lady Oyu (1951) Original title "Oyû-sama". More Mizoguchi. Three people spend their whole lives being miserable because the alternative is... doing something impolite. Just bite the bullet and do the impolite thing! A sad, sad movie.
• My Love Has Been Burning (1949) Original title "Waga koi wa moenu". Here's a confession, folks: I didn't originally intend to see Altered States or Lady Oyu. I saw them because twice in a row I showed up at the museum at 6:55 hoping to see My Love Has Been Burning, and twice in a row I'd misread the schedule and the 7:00 movie was something else. It doesn't help that the museum's website illustrates almost every Mizoguchi film with a screenshot of a woman looking unhappy. You think I'm joking? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 and the one happy woman.

  Anyway, I kept coming back for this movie because it sounded awesome, and let me tell you, it delivers! Kinuyo Tanaka gives an incredible performance for a character whose emotional options never open up past a) put up with shit, or b) quietly refuse to put up with shit. Much worse things happen in this movie than in Lady Oyu, but because the stakes are so high it feels like a political thriller, not angsty or exploitative (even when at one point it literally becomes a women-in-prison movie). It's preachy and didactic, but when virtue and right are repeatedly trampled, preachiness serves as a rallying cry.

  I didn't think much of the first two Mizoguchi films I saw, but My Love Has Been Burning takes him all the way into James Tiptree "are we sure this is by a man?" territory. Like The Famous Sword Bijomaru, this film is propaganda: it was produced during, and to some extent for, the American occupation of Japan. But as Lori Spring wrote in 1983 (courtesy of the museum's handout flyer): "there has not been, to my knowledge, any film produced in the American popular cinema from the 40's to date with nearly as direct and radical a feminist intent as that of this film produced under American supervision."

Sun Jun 29 2014 11:03 June Film Roundup: It doesn't get better than this. I liked every single movie I saw this month. Two, maybe three of them are in my top ten. I guess that's what happens when you only see time-honored classics and movies you've already seen and loved. I'm posting this a little early because I'm going on vacation next week. Have fun!

• Ghostbusters (1984): When Sumana said she wanted to see Ghostbusters my first thought was "She's going to love the fake Atlantic cover." And she did like that, and she liked the rest of the movie, because Ghostbusters is fabulous. 'Nuff said.
• Godzilla (1954): A top-ten movie for me. I'd seen the American version once and the Japanese version once, but never on the big screen. This movie speaks to me because it takes something silly and cheesy and gives it a real emotional core. That's what I always try to do with my work, and when you see a work of fiction that deconstructs the Godzilla mythos, that's what they're trying to do to Godzilla. (I admit I have dabbled in this myself.) But there's no need to deconstruct anything--just strip away the goofy stuff that has accumulated over the past sixty years, and you have the raw power and horror of the original. You leave the theater totally mystified and overwhelmed by Godzilla's invincibility.

  The one false step: the first appearance of Godzilla, when it puts its head over the hill, doesn't look good. A hill can be any size, so there's no sense of scale.

• The Terminator (1984): Hard for me to believe this came out the same year as Ghostbusters, because I never heard of this movie until 1991 when Terminator II came out. Wasn't it Sylvester Stallone who starred in Terminator? Weird.

  Anyway, this movie's... all right. (Sorry, Sukiko.) Definitely my least favorite of the June films, despite being the only one that passes the Bechdel test. I liked the basic concept, and seeing Sarah Connor's transition from harried waitress to seasoned freedom fighter. I liked seeing the sleazy side of the L.A. of my youth. Not a fan of the heavy-handed satire; Robocop (see below) would do it much better. I haven't seen Terminator II but I feel like it's got the material to be a much better movie, and IMDB agrees (8.5 vs. 8.1).

  There's a lot of skulls in the future scenes. Like, disproportionately many skulls. I guess the robots invented a weapon that turns a human into a pile of skulls?

• Solaris (1972): I was apprehensive about the length of this movie, especially in the context of a brief clip I'd seen a few years back, which was the dialogue-free scene with the car driving on a Japanese highway for several minutes. But I can't say no to a Lem adaptation, and after two years of stretching myself with art films I was up to the challenge. And it was fun! Having read the book definitely helped. This is the earliest filmic use I've seen of my beloved "dingy spaceship" aesthetic. Probably not going to see it again because of the length, but an excellent movie. Next up: Stalker, I guess.
• Robocop (1987): What a weird, weird movie. Like Godzilla, it wants to have its B-movie cake and eat it too. And it does! Twenty-five years, later, it's still got that cake in the feezer. But unlike Godzilla, it doesn't do anything to elevate the material. I think enough has been written about the way Robocop managed to simultaneously satirize and embody the blood-lust of the Hollywood blockbuster, so I won't add more, but how about this example: Robocop shows you a fun stop-motion animated effect and then it's embarrassed about it. Stop-motion isn't cool in 1987. So then it shows you a fake commercial with some really cheesy Ray Harryhausen type stop-motion, just so you know Robocop is in on the joke.

  I dunno, man. It's like there's two movies here in one package: a totally off-the-wall movie full of wild ideas and a dull Terminator-like cop movie. The satire is a couple levels above Grand Theft Auto, but that's a really low bar to clear. And it's so violent. If they were getting some emotional mileage out of the violence, like Godzilla does, I could see it. But that never happens!

  I'm also pissed off at how the movie's critique of capitalism suddenly starts pulling punches in the final scene. But Robocop contains what for me will always be one of the great moments of cinema: the comedic slow-burn of ED-209 encountering stairs for the first time. It's so good. I'm so happy I saw that.

  PS: I'm no master criminal, but if I were being hunted by Robocop I'd aim for the mouth.

• Silent Running (1972): Unlike most of my reviews this is spoiler-free because I want to watch Silent Running with Sumana. This was my third or fourth time seeing this movie, and the first time on the big screen. I picked up a few details I'd never seen before, and it was fun to see it with Tully Hansen, a known #botALLY, but also in the theater were Hal and Babs, who hated it ("It's so earnest." -Hal), so I feel like I have to defend it.

  Silent Running is my second-favorite movie. It's my second favorite in a different sense than The Big Lebowski is my favorite. Lebowski has a good concept that's executed perfectly. It's the movie I wish I could make. But I'm not a filmmaker. Silent Running has a perfect concept that's executed near-perfectly, except the plot makes absolutely no sense. It's the movie I could fix.

  All right, so it's earnest. It's okay for a movie to be earnest! Earnestness is the difference between Godzilla and Robocop, and I stand with Godzilla. If I were writing the screenplay I'd give it more nuance, but the core is perfect. The movie starts with an act of redemptive violence—the way movies like Robocop end—and then it turns out that the violence wasn't redemptive at all.

  Visually, this film is so beautiful it hurts. The cramped but relatively tidy interiors are the missing link between the roomy jet-set aesthetic of 2001 and the "dingy spaceship" aesthetic of Star Wars and Alien. (Solaris, of course, was ahead of its time). Yeah, great movie all around, but the plot doesn't make sense. You might also try Moon (2009), a more modern take on the idea whose plot also doesn't make sense.