Five movies I saw recently:
1. WALL·E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)
On 35mm at the Balboa Theater with Lucía, Grampa, Ben, Barb, and Sunny in early July 2008.
WALL·E carries on the Pixar tradition by having an extremely imaginative premise and an intricately detailed setting, but a fairly formulaic set of plot devices. What really sets WALL·E apart from other Pixar films, or indeed any other children’s film I can think of, is how dark it is. What is clear is that the Earth is rendered uninhabitable through environmental disaster most obviously manifested in the form of garbage. Also, some percentage of the world’s population was stranded on an interstellar cruiseship for 700 years, over which time they became not only unable to care for their own basic needs, but pretty much unable to manage locomotion of any kind without the assistance of machines. Strongly implied, if not explicit, is that all the rest of humanity has succumbed to the environmental catastrophe of Earth, and that the population of the cruiseship is all that remains.
I take the suggestion of the film to be something along these lines: if we follow our current course of consumerism we will find ways of adjusting to and evading our problems until we lose self-determination and perish.
As much as I liked WALL·E, I recognize that it lacked cohesion, and that its sophistication was undermined at times by an inability to manage effectively a balance between bigger-picture issues and the individual characters. While the plot wasn’t particularly complicated, its various threads seemed to be pulled in and out of focus almost at random. The subtlety of the background details were weighed down by the complete lack of subtlety in many of the foreground details (a particularly awkward example being the captain’s revelation about dancing and hoedowns, a scene that provided no insight or comic relief and only helped emphasize the improbability of the entire situation humanity had gotten itself into). A number of people I’ve talked to preferred Kung-Fu Panda to WALL·E, and I can certainly understand, given how tight Kung-Fu Panda’s story is, not to mention its consistent flashes of brilliant comedy. Ultimately, however, I think Kung-Fu Panda is a largely forgettable work of perfect escapist fluff while WALL·E is a flawed but beautiful attempt at making a thoughtful work of lasting significance.
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2. 十字路 (衣笠貞之助, 1928)
Crossroads (Teinosuke Kinugasa)
[wikipedia (no article as of this writing)] - [imdb]
On 35mm with piano accompaniment at the Castro Theatre with Lucía, Ben, and Sunny on 13 July 2008 at 18:10.
Not as experimental or memorable as A Page of Madness, Crossroads is unique presentation of Japanese theater through Kinugasa’s Expressionist stylings. I didn’t enjoy the film all that much (the main male character is too stupid to bear), but it’s very interesting to see the possibilities of the medium being explored by a director determined to push the boundaries of cinematic conventions even as they are only just being established. Fortunately the film escaped some of the plot twists that at various points of the film were beginning to seem inevitable (in particular, that Okiku opts for prostitution or is raped), but it would be difficult to call the story interesting.
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3. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
On Blu-Ray at Evelyn and Vincent’s house with Lucía, Evelyn, and Vincent on 20 July 2008 at around 21:00.
I remember when the so-called “Director’s Cut” of Blade Runner first showed at the Castro Theater back in 1992. I don’t recall too much, but certain sections of the film left a deep impression on me—Roy Batty, shirtless in the rain with a dove, talking about C-beams and tears in rain; Pris, motionless under a veil with raccoon makeup, and then screaming a robot scream and thrashing on the landing after being shot by Deckard; Deckard having his fingers bent backwards by Roy Batty, who had just grabbed his arm through a tiled wall.
Later, back in March of 1997, when I was working out Tower Records, the first six DVD titles hit the shelves in six test cities, including San Francisco. I don’t remember what the other five were, other than that they were of no interest to me, but one of the six titles was Blade Runner. Using my employee discount, I immediately bought the disc, despite the fact that I had no device on which to play it and was lacking the wherewithal to buy one (they were several hundred dollars then, as I recall). I knew, however, that some day I would, and that in picking up Blade Runner on DVD I was somehow snatching a tiny piece of history.
It was many months before I eventually watched the disc in its entirety, and a year or two and many DVD purchases later, I actually bought a computer (the very first I could call my own) with a DVD-ROM drive and a Hollywood+ decoder card on which I could watch DVDs any time I wanted to.
So no surprise, then, that Blade Runner would also be my first Blu-Ray purchase, even if the format has been around for some time, and I no longer have any heightened sense of the importance of such an event. I’ve moved on from owning discs (I’ve given—or lent, depending on whom you ask—my DVD collection to a friend, built on credit cards purchases when I had no money and arrested around the time I started earning a salary), and I have no intention of owning a collection of Blu-Ray discs, but since I recently bought a PS3 so Lucía and I could play Rock Band, I thought it would be nice to have at least one film around that I could watch on it.
My good friend Vincent had never seen the film, and since they have a film capable of resolving 1080p (unlike the remote control-less 19″ RCA ColorTrak that came with our semi-furnished apartment), we brought it over to watch.
It’s been at least six years since I last saw the film. What immediately struck me within minutes was the thought that they don’t make films like this anymore. Despite the sheer limitless fantasy that computer-generated special effects is capable of providing, I can’t think of any film with such an immersive level of imaginative detail in the last ten years.
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4. Hancock (Peter Berg, 2008)
On 35mm at the AMC Bay Street in Emeryville with Lucía on 27 July 2008 at 20:05.
Silly film. I always enjoy Will Smith’s acting. Nevertheless, if I remember anything about this film a year from now, I’ll be very surprised.
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5. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Guillermo del Toro, 2008)
While I’m much more likely to remember Hellboy II than Hancock, Hancock probably had the better story, and it certainly had the better acting and dialogue. Fortunately the acting of the little boy version of Hellboy was painful enough that the film could only improve from there. That said, Hellboy II was inventive enough in setting and costumes to make it the more interesting of the two films. The tooth fairies were particularly fun to watch, and on the other end of the spectrum, the forest god brought a moment of awe that the rest of the film could never quite live up to (it was more than a little reminiscent of the Night-Walker from Princess Mononoke).
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