So that was my second 'Thon. Also a success.
We got a late start this year, so we missed John Carter (2012) and the American version of Reptilicus (1962); we came in on the last third of The Ghastly Love of Johnny X (2012), which I suspect we would have enjoyed seeing from the beginning, but there was something peculiarly delightful about arriving just in time for the denouement of a '50's-style rock-and-roll musical about juvenile delinquents from outer space—shot on the very last of Kodak's black-and-white, 35mm, Plus-X film stock—and having to mentally reverse-engineer the plot if we wanted to know what the undead rock star had to do with the interstellar rumble or whether it really was a running gag that the soda jerk kept fainting. The film was very clearly a goofy labor of love, complete with low-budget landscapes and slightly out-of-synch sound; it gave Kevin McCarthy his final screen role, even if we only saw him in the credits. Les Williams has a good period face. I was not expecting Paul Williams as a rather Nabokovian talk show host. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel: "Bud Cort's really let himself go.")
Every film festival needs a big dumb action movie to MST3K and War of the Worlds: Goliath (2012) delivered on all fronts. It's a nominal sequel to Wells' novel, imagining that in the fifteen years since the initial Martian attack Earth has undergone a steampunk revolution and an international task force named A.R.E.S. now patrols the skies in giant war zeppelins and the earth in three-legged mecha-walkers, training constantly against the aliens' inevitable return. The science is the purview of Dr. Nikola Tesla, the Secretary of War is Teddy Roosevelt, the best pilot in the A.R.E.S. Air Corps is hot-blooded Manfred von Richthofen in his Heat-Ray-wielding red Fokker triplane, and any alt-historical promise inherent in this premise is undercut completely by the fact that World War I is still breaking out as the interplanetary action begins and the characterization of everyone who isn't a historical figure (which is everyone else in the movie) begins and ends with their haircut, their accent, and their nationality. No cliché is left uncommitted, no matter what knots of logic the film needs to tie itself into in order to introduce it. We would have cared a lot more about the heroic sacrifice of a major character's son, for example, if we'd known he existed for more than the five seconds before he bravely lets himself fall into the burning ruins of New York City so that his father can ram their fatally damaged zeppelin into the Martian mothership. I hope I didn't give anything away.
Asternauts (2012) is a nearly perfect short: sweet, funny, not as obvious as it looks, it doesn't condescend to its characters and evokes a genuine sense of wonder without needing to invoke science fiction. The audience may have its suspicions, but for the two brothers with the smoking crater in the back forty and the bits of ex-cow splattered all over the field where whatever it was came screaming down in a ball of fire, the results are the same whether it was a weather satellite or a close encounter: kind of WTF and kind of wonderful. "The front seat of a planet" is a line I just really like.
We had planned on burritos from Anna's again, but the dinner-slot movie was the special edition of Battle Royale (2000), so we watched Takeshi Kitano dispatch two students with throwing knife and explosive collar and then went in search of very rare burgers. I don't know why the Boston Burger Company closes at eight o'clock on a Sunday, especially on a Sunday when the wind chill is below zero. We swore a lot and slogged up the frozen bike path to Joe Sent Me, which was open like a normal restaurant.
Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) was not quite last year's Dimensions: a Line, a Loop, a Tangle of Threads (2011), but two strong time-travel films in a row is beginning to give me hope for the genre again. It pulls off the trick that Pamela Dean's Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary (1998) never quite did for me: the speculative elements are all half-hinted and metaphor until all of a sudden they are unambiguous fact and it works. I expected the story to finish a scene earlier than it did. I'm very glad it didn't. The four main characters could each have fallen into different stereotypes and all of them, even the difficult ones, are real; as a person with strong feelings on the subject, I appreciated that none of the romantic leads are conventionally attractive Hollywood people. No one is a manic pixie anything. I will watch Aubrey Plaza and Mark Duplass in many things now.
I still really hate the "Time Enough at Last" episode of The Twilight Zone—the one with Burgess Meredith and his glasses—but I understand it's the one everybody knows. The last shot pulling away, the bewildered man among his shattered columns and neat-stacked books with a clock-face staring at his feet, is a very good surrealist image.
I had not seen The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) since my family lived in the old house on Appleton Street, meaning I could have been eleven at the most; I had vague images from it, mostly the final third where it becomes a kind of existential survival horror, first against the cat, then the basement wilderness and the spider (which is seriously just minding its own business when Scott goes all Sam Gamgee on it), then the enormity of the universe itself. Unless you count the philosophy at the end, it really doesn't pull any of its punches. No miracle cure, no reassurance of mastering the atomic age; it's not even the glittering cloud that's the horror so much as Scott's awareness of the inexorable, irreversible change it's set in motion within him. Much of it could be a movie about terminal illness, watching a partner slip away from themselves, finding ways to fight for what they are instead of what they still remember being. I recognized William Schallert as Scott's first doctor instantly and couldn't figure out why. This afternoon, I finally remembered Star Trek.
I liked everything about Death of a Shadow (Dood van een Schaduw, 2012) except the cinematography. The conceit is ghostly and worthy of Cocteau, effectively rendered in the hall of shadows that seem to breathe faintly against their canvases, death-pinned with iron nails like fetishes or butterflies; Matthias Schoenaerts as the soldier-photographer has a somber, skinned-bone face that peers through his steel-rimmed glasses and his camera's strange lenses as though reduced even farther from life now than when he was shot in a French chateau, spinning around with the last image of a girl imprinted on his dying memory like light on silver salts, a shadow on the walls of death; and I wanted some strong formal composition to tell me the story, not floating handheld shots and naturalistic views of winter-paled copses and the warm humming bronze of rotors and keys of the machine that spits out, like ciphers, the names of all the dead whose shadows our protagonist has the choice of capturing. I'm not saying it had to look like Bergman, but it was like reading a striking story in serviceable prose: I wanted to see the uncanny as well as the actions it made possible, and I couldn't feel the contrast was a choice on the filmmaker's part. The telling was just sort of there. I can't remember ever feeling this way about a film rather than fiction before. I can still see why it got an Oscar nomination.
I had not heard of Phase IV (1974) before Rob read its cast and title off the schedule a week or so ago. It doesn't even seem to be a cult hit so much as a real obscurity. There are reasons for this. They are not the clunky, homebuilt mainframe computers or the strangely quiet nature of the movie's apocalypse; they are nothing against the casting, even if the female lead is something of a nonentity (note to scriptwriters: shock is not the same thing as total erasure of personality), and I even like how little the movie explains of its science and science fiction both. It's the minutely detailed, brilliantly edited close-up photography of the ants whom the film gradually reveals as the real protagonists of the story, not the besieged humans who have not yet realized that the increasingly specific behavior they have been hired to study is not some kind of environment-impelled anomaly, but the first stages of the shift in power of a planet. This is not a movie to watch if you have even a mild insect phobia. At any given time, the screen is more than half full of ants. After about thirty seconds, you're pulling your sleeves down and trying not to touch everywhere your skin twitches.
No amount of MST3K could save Motivational Growth (2012), the film which replaced The Hands of Orlac (1924) at four in the morning. At first we thought it was a short. It did not seem to have enough organization or inspiration for anything longer. At the forty-five-minute mark, the hideous truth became clear. I couldn't persuade Rob to leave the theater entirely, because if he didn't see it end with his own eyes, he felt he might never be sure that it wasn't still playing on somewhere in a kind of horrible Shining loop, but we spent most of its runtime downstairs in the lobby commiserating with other audience members similarly driven forth or staring at the contents of the Museum of Bad Art, because at least that was bad art we'd elected to put into our brains. I'll discuss the plot if you want, but I'm pretty sure anything I could say will only make it sound more interesting than it was, at all. I really had been looking forward to Conrad Veidt.
Because we had each seen it like half a dozen times, we bailed on V for Vendetta (2005) in favor of donuts at Verna's, hot coffee for Rob and hot cocoa for me. Returned just in time for the short La Luna (2011), which Rob had been trying to show me on the internet for months, and John Carpenter's Escape from L.A. (1996), which is exactly the sort of splashy stylized videogame movie you want to stare at after being awake for slightly over twenty-four hours and that's generously including the previous night's two hours of sleep. We did not stay for The Fifth Element (1997), much as I wouldn't have minded seeing its art direction on a big screen. We went back to Rob's and spent the afternoon in various states of prone and went out for dinner in the evening, only slightly vindictively, to the Boston Burger Company. And now I am doing a lot of Nokia, because continued employment is something I really do need.
Still not a full twenty-four hours of movies. There's always next year.
We got a late start this year, so we missed John Carter (2012) and the American version of Reptilicus (1962); we came in on the last third of The Ghastly Love of Johnny X (2012), which I suspect we would have enjoyed seeing from the beginning, but there was something peculiarly delightful about arriving just in time for the denouement of a '50's-style rock-and-roll musical about juvenile delinquents from outer space—shot on the very last of Kodak's black-and-white, 35mm, Plus-X film stock—and having to mentally reverse-engineer the plot if we wanted to know what the undead rock star had to do with the interstellar rumble or whether it really was a running gag that the soda jerk kept fainting. The film was very clearly a goofy labor of love, complete with low-budget landscapes and slightly out-of-synch sound; it gave Kevin McCarthy his final screen role, even if we only saw him in the credits. Les Williams has a good period face. I was not expecting Paul Williams as a rather Nabokovian talk show host. (
derspatchel: "Bud Cort's really let himself go.")Every film festival needs a big dumb action movie to MST3K and War of the Worlds: Goliath (2012) delivered on all fronts. It's a nominal sequel to Wells' novel, imagining that in the fifteen years since the initial Martian attack Earth has undergone a steampunk revolution and an international task force named A.R.E.S. now patrols the skies in giant war zeppelins and the earth in three-legged mecha-walkers, training constantly against the aliens' inevitable return. The science is the purview of Dr. Nikola Tesla, the Secretary of War is Teddy Roosevelt, the best pilot in the A.R.E.S. Air Corps is hot-blooded Manfred von Richthofen in his Heat-Ray-wielding red Fokker triplane, and any alt-historical promise inherent in this premise is undercut completely by the fact that World War I is still breaking out as the interplanetary action begins and the characterization of everyone who isn't a historical figure (which is everyone else in the movie) begins and ends with their haircut, their accent, and their nationality. No cliché is left uncommitted, no matter what knots of logic the film needs to tie itself into in order to introduce it. We would have cared a lot more about the heroic sacrifice of a major character's son, for example, if we'd known he existed for more than the five seconds before he bravely lets himself fall into the burning ruins of New York City so that his father can ram their fatally damaged zeppelin into the Martian mothership. I hope I didn't give anything away.
Asternauts (2012) is a nearly perfect short: sweet, funny, not as obvious as it looks, it doesn't condescend to its characters and evokes a genuine sense of wonder without needing to invoke science fiction. The audience may have its suspicions, but for the two brothers with the smoking crater in the back forty and the bits of ex-cow splattered all over the field where whatever it was came screaming down in a ball of fire, the results are the same whether it was a weather satellite or a close encounter: kind of WTF and kind of wonderful. "The front seat of a planet" is a line I just really like.
We had planned on burritos from Anna's again, but the dinner-slot movie was the special edition of Battle Royale (2000), so we watched Takeshi Kitano dispatch two students with throwing knife and explosive collar and then went in search of very rare burgers. I don't know why the Boston Burger Company closes at eight o'clock on a Sunday, especially on a Sunday when the wind chill is below zero. We swore a lot and slogged up the frozen bike path to Joe Sent Me, which was open like a normal restaurant.
Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) was not quite last year's Dimensions: a Line, a Loop, a Tangle of Threads (2011), but two strong time-travel films in a row is beginning to give me hope for the genre again. It pulls off the trick that Pamela Dean's Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary (1998) never quite did for me: the speculative elements are all half-hinted and metaphor until all of a sudden they are unambiguous fact and it works. I expected the story to finish a scene earlier than it did. I'm very glad it didn't. The four main characters could each have fallen into different stereotypes and all of them, even the difficult ones, are real; as a person with strong feelings on the subject, I appreciated that none of the romantic leads are conventionally attractive Hollywood people. No one is a manic pixie anything. I will watch Aubrey Plaza and Mark Duplass in many things now.
I still really hate the "Time Enough at Last" episode of The Twilight Zone—the one with Burgess Meredith and his glasses—but I understand it's the one everybody knows. The last shot pulling away, the bewildered man among his shattered columns and neat-stacked books with a clock-face staring at his feet, is a very good surrealist image.
I had not seen The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) since my family lived in the old house on Appleton Street, meaning I could have been eleven at the most; I had vague images from it, mostly the final third where it becomes a kind of existential survival horror, first against the cat, then the basement wilderness and the spider (which is seriously just minding its own business when Scott goes all Sam Gamgee on it), then the enormity of the universe itself. Unless you count the philosophy at the end, it really doesn't pull any of its punches. No miracle cure, no reassurance of mastering the atomic age; it's not even the glittering cloud that's the horror so much as Scott's awareness of the inexorable, irreversible change it's set in motion within him. Much of it could be a movie about terminal illness, watching a partner slip away from themselves, finding ways to fight for what they are instead of what they still remember being. I recognized William Schallert as Scott's first doctor instantly and couldn't figure out why. This afternoon, I finally remembered Star Trek.
I liked everything about Death of a Shadow (Dood van een Schaduw, 2012) except the cinematography. The conceit is ghostly and worthy of Cocteau, effectively rendered in the hall of shadows that seem to breathe faintly against their canvases, death-pinned with iron nails like fetishes or butterflies; Matthias Schoenaerts as the soldier-photographer has a somber, skinned-bone face that peers through his steel-rimmed glasses and his camera's strange lenses as though reduced even farther from life now than when he was shot in a French chateau, spinning around with the last image of a girl imprinted on his dying memory like light on silver salts, a shadow on the walls of death; and I wanted some strong formal composition to tell me the story, not floating handheld shots and naturalistic views of winter-paled copses and the warm humming bronze of rotors and keys of the machine that spits out, like ciphers, the names of all the dead whose shadows our protagonist has the choice of capturing. I'm not saying it had to look like Bergman, but it was like reading a striking story in serviceable prose: I wanted to see the uncanny as well as the actions it made possible, and I couldn't feel the contrast was a choice on the filmmaker's part. The telling was just sort of there. I can't remember ever feeling this way about a film rather than fiction before. I can still see why it got an Oscar nomination.
I had not heard of Phase IV (1974) before Rob read its cast and title off the schedule a week or so ago. It doesn't even seem to be a cult hit so much as a real obscurity. There are reasons for this. They are not the clunky, homebuilt mainframe computers or the strangely quiet nature of the movie's apocalypse; they are nothing against the casting, even if the female lead is something of a nonentity (note to scriptwriters: shock is not the same thing as total erasure of personality), and I even like how little the movie explains of its science and science fiction both. It's the minutely detailed, brilliantly edited close-up photography of the ants whom the film gradually reveals as the real protagonists of the story, not the besieged humans who have not yet realized that the increasingly specific behavior they have been hired to study is not some kind of environment-impelled anomaly, but the first stages of the shift in power of a planet. This is not a movie to watch if you have even a mild insect phobia. At any given time, the screen is more than half full of ants. After about thirty seconds, you're pulling your sleeves down and trying not to touch everywhere your skin twitches.
No amount of MST3K could save Motivational Growth (2012), the film which replaced The Hands of Orlac (1924) at four in the morning. At first we thought it was a short. It did not seem to have enough organization or inspiration for anything longer. At the forty-five-minute mark, the hideous truth became clear. I couldn't persuade Rob to leave the theater entirely, because if he didn't see it end with his own eyes, he felt he might never be sure that it wasn't still playing on somewhere in a kind of horrible Shining loop, but we spent most of its runtime downstairs in the lobby commiserating with other audience members similarly driven forth or staring at the contents of the Museum of Bad Art, because at least that was bad art we'd elected to put into our brains. I'll discuss the plot if you want, but I'm pretty sure anything I could say will only make it sound more interesting than it was, at all. I really had been looking forward to Conrad Veidt.
Because we had each seen it like half a dozen times, we bailed on V for Vendetta (2005) in favor of donuts at Verna's, hot coffee for Rob and hot cocoa for me. Returned just in time for the short La Luna (2011), which Rob had been trying to show me on the internet for months, and John Carpenter's Escape from L.A. (1996), which is exactly the sort of splashy stylized videogame movie you want to stare at after being awake for slightly over twenty-four hours and that's generously including the previous night's two hours of sleep. We did not stay for The Fifth Element (1997), much as I wouldn't have minded seeing its art direction on a big screen. We went back to Rob's and spent the afternoon in various states of prone and went out for dinner in the evening, only slightly vindictively, to the Boston Burger Company. And now I am doing a lot of Nokia, because continued employment is something I really do need.
Still not a full twenty-four hours of movies. There's always next year.
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