Thu Apr 02 2015 10:55 March Film Roundup:
We saw lots of stuff this month but not a lot of feature films. The upside is that a lot of what I did see is online for free.
- A Matter of Life and Death (1946): a.k.a. "Stairway to Heaven" but tragically with no Zeppelin on the soundtrack. I'm really impressed by Roger Livesy. He keeps showing up in propaganda films (previously The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp) and bringing so much humanity to the role that he subverts the propaganda aspect. This film is no Colonel Blimp (another film that really could have used some Zeppelin on the soundtrack), but it's really weird and worth seeing. Half the film takes place in heaven, specifically a heaven for Allied service members during WWII. A sort of heaven as USO club. There's some great morbid humor where e.g. a squad of American flyboys whose plane has just been blown up come into heaven and head straight for the Coke machine. Ribbing their lieutenant when he asks for officer's quarters, etc.
As with many genre works created by people unaccustomed to genre fiction, the fantasy setting falls apart on the slightest examination. Like, where are the Russians? There are no Russian soldiers in this movie. I don't expect a British propaganda movie to show dead Nazis in heaven, but there's no mention of hell, and one of the main characters is an eighteenth-century French nobleman—certainly an enemy of the British in his day. There are Americans who died in the Revolution. Those guys hate the British. In fact, the postmortem hatred of colonized peoples towards the British underpins the best plot point in the movie. We see Indians, so the issue isn't religion. Where are the Russians?
Sumana proposed that the Axis powers have a separate heaven, to keep fights from breaking out, and they'll be integrated after the war in a divine Marshall Plan. But this means that the paperwork hasn't gone through to transfer all the Soviet soldiers from the Axis heaven to the Allied heaven, so there must be all sorts of post-Molotov-Ribbentrop fights going on in the other heaven, and that's a much more interesting story than the one we have here.
- Brotherhood of Blades (2014): OK but not great Chinese period piece. I don't have much to say about this one. I'm gonna keep going to see the museum's martial arts series but they only stand out for me when there's a stylistic twist (Tai Chi Zero) or an unusual plot (The Pirates).
- Film festival special! Sumana and I saw two runs of shorts from the International Children's Film Festival. It was really good, thanks to the general conflation of "animation" with "children's film" (only one film we saw had no animated component). You get a ton of animated films that, although kid-friendly, weren't necessarily intended for children, and which can explore some really dark territory. Here are the ones I liked, with links to full video or at least trailers or IMDB pages where possible.
- 5.80 Meters - Surreal and French, incredibly realistic CGI, my fave.
- Eyes - Chuck Jones-ish, literal "sight gags", Sumana's fave.
- JohnnyExpress - Incredibly dark comedy with super-colorful Pixar-style animation.
- Mythopolis - Clever and sweet.
- Me and my Moulton and A Single Life are Oscar nominees, so you know they're too good for full-length online videos. All you get is a trailer! A Single Life is effectively a music video, so that "trailer" includes a good portion of the film.
- Submarine Sandwich - "Like a Sesame Street short." - Sumana
- Imagination - Gumbyesque and Cyrillic.
- Leaving Home - Funny until it takes an abrupt turn into sad.
- By the Stream - Sad the whole way through.
- Eyes on the Stars - From StoryCorps, illustrates the stubborn badassness necessary to become an astronaut.
- Giovanni and the Water Ballet (trailer only) - Initially I was upset that the museum tricked me into watching a "sports movie", but I was won over by the hilarity of the relationship between Giovanni and his girlfriend Kim. This film is full of Dutch people being incredibly Dutch in different ways.
- Tigers Tied Up In One Rope. It's like The Human Centipede, for kids!
- Electric Soul - Visually great but nothing really happens.
- We also saw the three Wallace and Gromit shorts on the big screen, which are still totally fun and charming.
- And, not related to the film festival, but featuring a similar lack of feature-length movies I can review for you, we saw this retrospective on Jim Henson's commercials, which was absolutely hilarious. It started with the Wilkins Coffee ads (plus the many variants used to sell regional brands of bread or bottled water or luncheon meat). It also showed some fake promotional "behind-the-scenes" videos where Henson, Oz, and company get hired to do some Wilkins-style commercials, but spend the whole day goofing off on set instead of filming. Lots of other good stuff. The whole thing was really funny and Karen Falk of the Jim Henson Company did a great job curating.
- The Girl Can't Help It (1956): Frank Tashlin's test run for Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, released the following year. I imagine Tashlin telling Jayne Mansfield: "Everyone else looks at you and sees boobs, but I see socially incisive, character-driven comedy! With jokes about your boobs." In any comedy involving the intersection of gangsters with the non-gangster world, the question is whether it's the gangsters or the squares who will steal the show, and here, as usual, the gangsters run away with it. Edmond O'Brien's mob boss quickly reveals hidden depths, and Mansfield's gangster's moll gets a ton of good lines with the stick-up-his-ass male lead acting as straight man. Fun, but not as good as Rock Hunter?, which itself isn't as good as I'm making it sound here.
- Europa Report (2013): Every dramatic element in this movie comes from somewhere else, as does much of the footage. But it's effective, and pretty incredible that you can now take those pieces that required blockbuster money to realize back in the 1980s, and do them justice with a budget like that of a SyFy original movie. In fact SyFy should start doing originals like Europa Report.
This film has a bit of the tentacle monster prejudice problem, in that it's very easy to read as a horror movie but I really don't think it is. It generally avoids or subverts viewer expectations regarding the obnoxious found-footage genre. So maybe that's part of the general mood of subversion. Not original on the level of plot or characterization, but a very well-made film, and fun to watch.
- Bowfinger (1999): Frank Oz returns, hopefully with a little more professionalism than when he was drinking beer and dancing with girls when he should have been filming those lunch meat commercials with Jim Henson. Sumana really liked this movie when it came out, and I like it too, but not as much as she does, I think. The concept is great but I feel like it's got an indie-movie plot full of Hollywood-movie comedy. At this point I've watched a lot of movies about an absurd situation becoming more and more absurd, and I like it better when the escalation is driven by the characters trying to change strategies and dig themselves out of the absurdity. In Bowfinger the characters never change and the escalation is shown by involving more hardware in each successive scenario.
The only characters in this film who change are Bowfinger's crew, who start off knowing nothing about film but who show the hard-working entrepreneurial spirit traditional to American immigrants and become good enough to get steady work in Hollywood, unlike the rest of the losers in this movie. That's your subtle indie-movie humor there, and I wish the other characters had had real arcs.
