News You Can Bruise for 2014 June 29 (entry 0)

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.