News You Can Bruise for 2015 May 31

Sun May 31 2015 17:55 May Film Roundup: This month features some interesting foreign films, an old-favorite blockbuster, and an awesome new blockbuster with a surprising connection to one of my all-time favorite films. What are these nuggets of cinema gold? I don't know, I'm just the intro paragraph, you'll have to ask the bulleted list:

• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001): I know this movie pretty well by now, so I watched up to "Fly, you fools!" (my favorite part) and then left the theater and got some dinner. It was interesting to see the expanded editions on the big screen (and in a real digital print, not the DVD projected onto the theater screen like the museum sometimes does). I don't know how often I'll get to see that.

  Dunno what else to say, if you've been reading this blog you know my feelings on Tolkien, both book and film. In fact this is one of the few films I reviewed when I first saw it, thirteen years ago, and I stand by everything in there. MinecraftMoria looks good, the elves are limpid, the large creature CGI now looks terrible. Hell, Peter Jackson, go ahead and pull a George Lucas, clean up that motion capture. It was all done on an SGI machine to begin with, you're not disrespecting anyone's craft. Although... to be honest I think the Hobbit movies had the same problems. All the mo-cap characters are constantly milking the giant cow. I don't think it's a solved problem yet.

  It was really weird being in a theater seeing a movie that a) has been the basis for major Internet memes but b) the whole movie isn't a meme a la Rocky Horror/The Room. There was a lot of snickering at Boromir saying "One does not simply walk into Mordor" and it felt awkward, like people snickering at Ginger Rogers saying "Aren't we gay?" or Groucho Marx saying "Making love to Mrs. Claypool is my racket." They didn't know how we'd read that line!

• The 39 Steps (1935): Sort of a dry run for the much better North by Northwest. To be honest I forgot I even saw this movie until I saw it in my notes. It wasn't bad, the handcuffs conceit was solid, but there were just too many betrayals. It got old after a while. I also think this scenario (ordinary person on the run, in over their heads) demands spectacle, and the budget wasn't there.
• Black River (1956): aka "Kuroi kawa". Good drama about the corrupting effects of being under military occupation. It's pretty amazing how visually striking it is for all the signage in a Japanese movie to be in English.

  There's a laugh line where the protagonist is confronting a gangster:

  Protagonist: "Who are you?"
  Gangster [flicking away cigarette]: "Godzilla."

  It's funny and topical but also accurate, because the gangster is planning on tearing the protagonist's house down. Within this movie he is, effectively, Godzilla. This is notable as the only cinematic Godzilla joke I can think of that's not a Japanese character in an American disaster movie running away from the disaster screaming "This is worse than my encounter with Godzilla!" Which always struck me as a weird joke to make, because it puts your movie in the Godzilla universe, where the UNGCC exists and governments should be prepared for, or at least accustomed to, large-scale disasters.

  Other Japan-specific plot points: obsession with knowing everyone's blood type, the near-uselessness of personal seals as a form of document security.

• Max Max: Fury Road (2015): I'm just glad that we as a nation have finally moved beyond Thunderdome. (Actual review starts now.) This was a good movie that became great at the beginning of act three, when it used my favorite action-movie plot twist—"let's turn around and go directly into the danger"— and revealed itself as an update of my third favorite film of all time, The General (1926). Pure infernokrusher fun.

  As always, the worldbuilding is incredible (and understated), but expression of character is limited to everyone's individual post-apocalyptic fashion statements. Other downsides: every time there's voiceover or text on the screen it's embarrassing. The whole premise of the series remains silly. But c'mon, it's a canonical Mad Max movie featuring Megaweapon. Best of the year list for sure.

  Doubting the The General connection? Here's director George Miller (h/t Sarah): "[T]he best version of this movie is black and white, but people reserve that for art movies now." And:

  A while after this talk, during a post-film reception, I spoke with Miller about his affinity for that black and white version of Fury Road. He said that he has demanded a black and white version of Fury Road for the blu-ray, and that version of the film will feature an option to hear just the isolated score as the only soundtrack — the purest and most stripped-down version of Fury Road you can imagine.

  Maybe you'll believe when you finally see Fury Road as a silent movie. Or just watch The General now. No other movie puts so much work into creating a nonstop thrill ride. Gravity (2013) does a good job keeping the adrenaline pumping, but it's got a totally linear narrative. (I'm guessing you could say the same for Speed (1994), the other big Sandra Bullock vehicle, but I haven't seen it.) Fury Road uses the double-back twist to turn all the ideas used in the first part of the movie on their head. And The General does all that while also being funny as hell.

• Rashōmon (1950): My verdict on this movie is that it's done its job and is now mainly of historical importance. I understand what it was doing but it had a really awful message of "gee, the rapist and the rape victim have conflicting testimonies, I guess we'll never know the truth!" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I also don't think the movie wanted me to feel the moment of maximum tension right at the end. What's going to happen to that kid? After all that I'm supposed to believe that kid is going to be okay? Don't you know how foreign films work?

  I feel like this is a rare example where the Mel Brooks spoof would convey the appropriate points just as well, and age better than the actual movie.

• I Can Quit Whenever I Want (2014): aka "Smetto Quando Voglio". A decent Italian comedy that's... a huge ripoff of Breaking Bad on every level, from plot to cinematography. I guess the character arcs are different. I'm not really unhappy about this, because there is one major twist in the formula: the drug the disgruntled chemists make in this movie isn't actually illegal. Changing that one variable and leaving everything else the same makes the movie feel more like a scientific experiment than a ripoff. It is in fact still a huge ripoff, but I had fun.

  The main source of my fun was watching the non-chemists in the gang of academics bring the mindset of their fields to drug dealing. The one laugh-out-loud moment for me was seeing how they acquired guns for their heist. There was a lot of laughter in the theater, though, even for jokes previously found only on the Buzzfeed list "Only Real Italian Academics Will Get These 25 Jokes About Hyperfragmented Leftist Politics." There's some ethnic stereotyping of Roma which I didn't really pick up on because they used a specific Italian sub-group of Roma I'd never heard of, but I looked it up afterwards and yup. Pretty uneven overall, but if you wanted Breaking Bad to stay a comedy the whole way through, I think this is the current frontrunner.