Man Vs. (2015)

directed by Adam Massey
Canada
82 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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This was a newer movie I had been looking forward to for a while, so getting to see it was exciting, but what wasn't exciting was that it actually ended up being mediocre. I'm always hesitant to criticize movies that obviously had a shoestring budget because they have a lot more excuses for not being up to snuff than a larger production would, but seeing as this director actually has two other movies under their belt (one being The Intruders, which was not received well at all), I feel less guilty because I'm not ripping on total amateurs. It feels like I am, though; the movie looks for all intents and purposes like the product of somebody who has not made a movie before and therefore doesn't know what to avoid and what to do more of.

The biggest thing that I kept coming back to over the course of the whole movie is that I don't think the format worked very well. I know some directors might be afraid to make a found-footage movie because of the backlash that they inevitably get from people who automatically dismiss every single one of them out of prejudice, but this is a time where it would have worked a lot better if it had been found-footage. Given that it's set during the filming of a one-man survival reality show, with only the main character and a few cameras to document all the action (and lack of action), having the film be shot from the main character's POV would have made it feel a lot more "real", like we were right there with him. Instead, since it's shot on the outside looking in like a normal movie, I felt removed from the situation, and watching this one guy react to his environment from a few paces away felt awkward and forced which could have mostly been remedied if he'd been behind the camera as opposed to in front of it. Characters talking to themselves is also something that irritates me because I feel that it just signifies lazy writing, and while the guy in Man Vs. isn't exactly talking to himself since he's filming a television show, the whole self-conscious "ooh that was a creepy noise... I'm feeling mighty scared now haha! out here in the woods, hahaha!" narration got on my nerves after a while.

Despite all this, the movie juuust managed to be more good than bad up until it effectively shot itself in the foot once it's revealed what the main character is up against, and it's a blow that it never recovers from. The CGI was just not good at all and even if they had managed to pull off something with the same appearance using practical effects, the look of the thing was very poorly-planned. It's difficult to take a monster movie seriously if the monster in it looks like it could be marketable to children with a few tiny tweaks. It had a lot to do with visibility too; a fleeting CGI silhouette is obviously going to look more realistic than a full-frontal shot of something, and unfortunately there's much more of the latter than the former in Man Vs. It's not totally horrible in every area, the concept is strong and unique and there's parts that were a lot better than others (the "man trap" the big bad sets up to catch the guy was pretty clever and an interesting image) but it's just a little too hammy, a little too forced, and a little too full with filler to have lived up to my expectations.

The Plea (1968)

directed by Tengiz Abuladze
Georgia
72 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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I'm a huge fan of older movies from Caucasia. There's a lot of different reasons why but something a lot of films from that region made within a certain time period have in common is a really gorgeous, organic color palette that comes from the traditional dress and customs of the more rural areas of Caucasia, which is why it surprised me a little to see that The Plea is in black and white. It definitely benefits from it, though, and the cinematography works very well with the lack of color- all of it is composed beautifully, people and faces stand out against stark black backgrounds in many of the indoor shots and although nature doesn't have a huge role in the film, characters look striking framed against the outdoors as well. It's a movie made of nothing but sharp angles and hard edges, no real softness or anything that would allow a viewer to take a breather from the dead serious atmosphere for even a second. Despite lacking most of the cinematic elements usually used to create tension in mainstream productions, it's very taut from start to finish as you watch the story play out in an expertly directed way.

The narrative is unusual enough that I had to look up a synopsis afterward to see what it was really about, and I think that might owe largely to my viewpoint as a Western outsider observing the setting and culture of the film. Although it's technically a classic "good vs. evil" story, with the struggle of the main character to believe that evil is not more all-powerful than good being the main point, it occasionally doesn't come across that way. Its origin in Georgia, a region of the world so storied and rife with conflict for so many years, definitely influences the overall tone of the movie to be something much, much different from the stories of valiance and vaguely self-centered courageousness that exist in the myths and fairy tales that are prevalent in the US. The whole film comes off a bit harsh and even bloody-minded in tone, where the evildoers have as much of a fighting spirit and hard heart as the good side does. It's definitely an unusually somber film that reflects the history and climate of the country it came from.

The film has a scope that seems to not fit its short runtime because of how every corner is filled with culture and ritual. It's something out of time, and the presence of a funeral procession in modern (for 1968) formalwear is a little jarring when put in the midst of a village composed of huts that regularly employs animal sacrifice. All in all it's a wonderful depiction of poeticism in a part of the world that can, at times, be very unforgiving, and a case for the importance of cinema as cultural preservation and a cornerstone of independence. 

La Moustache (2005)

directed by Emmanuel Carrère
France
87 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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(another older review)

La Moustache is an interesting and deceptively clever movie. I say it's deceptive because due to its tongue-in-cheek, almost foolish nature, it makes anybody looking to review or watch it critically also look foolish by extension. Even if you take it seriously and try to present a good and reasonable argument for your personal point of view, the argument that the movie itself presents just by existing is strong enough to override most things anybody says about it. It could be a more complex metaphor, it could be far deeper than meets the eye in several different ways, or it could just be what it looks like: A movie about a man going through an identity crisis because he's shaved his mustache off and suddenly everybody says he never had one in the first place.

The obvious question that almost everybody has about this film is "is it a metaphor?" and it very well could be, it's fairly easy to draw the conclusion that the main character's loss of his mustache and subsequent loss of everybody else's perception of him ever having a mustache represents some sudden questioning of his identity, the need to change things up having lead him to shave it off in the first place. His frantic attempts to reason with people who (to him) seem totally wrong could represent his uncertainty about who he really is, an uncertainty that eventually leads him to freak out and move to Hong Kong, at which time he eventually finds and maintains something resembling normalcy. But the best thing about the movie is that its meaning is entirely subjective. You could go back and forth forever about what it is, what it isn't, what it all means, et cetera, and while you do so the whole concept of the film itself will almost feel like it's mocking you because, as I said, it's just a weirdo movie about a mustache. I'd be surprised if it hasn't been at least a small influence on Quentin Dupieux and his philosophy of making movies that are about nothing and mean essentually nothing.

Everything about it works surprisingly well, the level of effort put into the filmmaking itself works perfectly to support the "joke" (if you perceive there to be a joke at all) and despite being a solid, decently-made film it still bends itself to whatever your interpretation of it is. There's definitely a side of it that's genuinely a little bit unnerving, because I know how disquieting it can be when some small thing is off about your daily routine with no logical explanation- nobody noticing that your mustache is gone might not be a huge matter, but smaller things like that nag at you even worse than big things that are obviously amiss. Another way the events of the film could be interpreted is that the main character has actually lost it, that he's an unreliable narrator and the images of mustache/non-mustache that the viewer sees are not what other people in the film are seeing. Personally I choose to believe that there was something wrong with the rest of the world and possibly reality itself rather than the main character, and I think the final shot puts a little more weight behind this theory- the main character's eye snapping open while he's laying in bed, supposed to be asleep; the continual back-of-the-mind fright that would persist if something like the events of the movie happened to a person even if everything eventually righted itself.

All in all, this movie is pretty impressive. It manages to do so much in such a relatively short runtime, it's black comedy and mild existential terror and psychological drama all at once. A lot of people would dismiss it quickly because they think they didn't "get" it, when in reality not getting it is kind of the point.

Cemetery of Splendour (2015)

directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Thailand

122 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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The premise of Cemetery of Splendour, although seeming fantastical (a group of soldiers are hospitalized with a sleeping sickness as a telepathic nurse develops a deep bond with one of them), works out to be no different in tone than any of director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's other films. There's several elements of the plot that are things that just don't happen- such as telepathy- but instead of focusing on these almost metaphysical occurrances with an exploitative lense or one that seeks to make a spectacle of them, they're put into the context of everyday life as something... not "mundane", that's not the right word, but something that's entirely plausible in the environment of the film that would otherwise never happen in daily life. You get to thinking that these things maybe could happen, maybe they are happening somewhere else in the world, right this second. It's a powerful effect and a beautiful, one-of-a-kind experience to watch.

It's difficult to describe the way Weerasethakul's films feel to somebody who's never seen them or somebody who isn't used to watching movies that abandon any traditional narrative, and from a layperson's standpoint the concept of a movie that goes against all conventions of filmmaking shouldn't work out very well. But forgoing the narrative for something broader and more open creates a flawlessly immersive experience that requires all of your attention, even though it might not seem like it at first. In this film there's no real "plot" in the sense that the word is typically used, there's not a neat-and-tidy beginning / middle / end progression, instead Weerasethakul seems to be filming both everything at once and nothing at all. If what Jean-Luc Godard said about "all you need for a movie is a gun and a girl" is true, this is the exact opposite of that. There's girls, yes, but there's also rural Thai landscapes, people strolling by in parks, in malls, outside shops, people in small hospitals, hens and chicks, trees, the wind, the nighttime, music- anything you can imagine is contained in this film. The sounds of birds and bugs chirping and other wildlife are never gone from the background and they never once seem obtrusive because they're as much a part of the film as anything shown directly in front of the camera.

Despite the lack of a concrete storyline, I think (and this is just my interpretation) the overarching theme in Cemetery of Splendour is human life existing in several states at once. Human life after a person has died, human life being borrowed by spirits to be used for another purpose while the human in question is asleep, one human life inhabiting another human, just human life as a permeating, inescapable part of the landscape. The people in the film seem to blend right in with the non-people; there's not a marked difference between a person and the recurring motifs of a crane digging up dirt, a chicken, and various flora and fauna. It's about life being a much more fluid thing than we typically think of it as. I'm hesitant to use certain terms to describe this, because even though "simple" and "gentle" and other terms like that might be accurate descriptors, using them in this context feels dismissive. I don't want to infantilize this movie at all. Just because it's two extremely slow hours in which nothing actually happens doesn't mean there's less intelligence to it than any big-name action thriller. Something else I really love about Apichatpong Weerasethakul is that his movies are so unafraid to be "not from here", to go against the grain of the gargantuan Western film industry and to take a standpoint entirely separate from the long-reaching hand of American culture and society.

In short: Cemetery of Splendour is exactly as good as I've come to expect from one of my all-time favorite directors, and another brilliant entry in his filmography. Nothing else like it and there probably never will be

Black Mountain Side (2014)

directed by Nick Szostakiwskyj

Canada

99 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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(this is an older review that I figured I'd put up just to start things off!)

I'd been anticipating this movie since a time when there was practically no information about it anywhere, so finally getting to see it was exciting. I didn't read any reviews beforehand because I wanted to form my own opinion, but I did end up reading something where somebody used the term "holy butt" to describe it, and after watching it for myself I gotta say: Holy butt indeed.

Some people might not like how slow it starts out, and I can understand that because it is really slow and sometimes it's hard to stay awake, but the slowness is the best thing about the movie and is essential to giving it all of its atmosphere. There's so much time spent on total mundanity that it makes the weird things seem a thousand times weirder. A tone- or rather a lack of tone- is established in the beginning and it's kept exactly the same from start to finish, so that when the really frightening stuff starts happening, it doesn't feel like there's any melodrama or that you're being told "be afraid of this thing!" with musical cues or anything like that. It's also interesting because there's absolutely nothing at all to endear these characters to the viewer; no wisecracking, no backstories, no tales of family, friends, or lovers, just this group of guys in some cabins out in the Canadian wilderness going stir-crazy. They snap at each other occasionally but more often than not they're just dead serious, which, again, has the effect of making the creepy stuff all the more creepy.

I know that how scary a horror movie is isn't a measure of how good it is, so saying that it scared me really doesn't mean anything about the overall quality (which is great), but I would be remiss not to mention that I was literally blinking back tears from being so creeped out at multiple points. It's not any kind of creepiness that you're used to; it's not blood and guts, it's not the fear on a character's face as the murderer stalks them around a corner, it's not gruesome discoveries soundtracked by wailing violins. It's just a group of average people accidentally finding something so utterly wrong that it corrupts them, it makes them unable to trust their own minds and eventually unable to trust each other. Since you don't know anything about the characters from the start, you never really "settle in" and get that feeling of the calm before the storm that most horror movies try to build up. It's really just a fantastic exercise in minimalism in a genre that so often tends to run extravagant cliches into the ground.

I would recommend this to people who like the feeling of monstrous deities from another place that H. P. Lovecraft was going for but don't like all the tentacles and racism. It's a paring-down of that Lovecraftian cosmic horror vibe to its purest form, there's no huge monsters or disgusting, writhing flesh but what there is is an entity that we were never meant to make contact with. I'm not entirely sure how I felt about the actual physical appearance of the creature because you know how it is with showing your monsters, it makes them immediately lose a little bit of the scariness when you see them up-close. But thankfully the thing is never shown too up-close, it's mostly covered by shadows whenever it appears which was a total saving grace because honestly a bipedal deer rendered in low-budget CGI could have driven this movie straight down the toilet. Its voice was incredibly effective as well; I'd say like 99% of horror movies that go for the whole "growly demonic voice" thing totally fail to make it sound the least bit scary- probably because it's been done so many times- but oh my god, something about that deer-thing's voice was genuinely terrifying. 

I'm surprised that this was the director's first-ever movie because this is totally how I want all my horror movies to be, and if this director is going to stay in the genre they're gonna be producing some really stellar films in the future. There's a quote from the monster that stuck in my head for a long time after I'd watched the movie: "When an animal looks up at the sky, it sees a million tiny points of light. When a man looks up at the sky, he sees millions of planets and stars. Do you want to know what I see?"

Ye Olde Introduction Poste

Welcome to Tomb on the Moon. This is going to be a film review blog eventually, I'm still working out the kinks in layout/design so it'll be a couple days from now before the first review gets uploaded.

For a couple years I've been doing film reviews offline in a personal blog (read: a large TextEdit document) and it's something that's always made me really happy to do. After so many years and so many reviews, though, I began to feel like keeping everything private was a waste, and it was making me feel like doing reviews at all was pointless, so I decided it'd be best to start some kind of public platform. Because I have so many reviews already written, I'm not even going to try and format/post them all on here, so for now if you want to know if I've seen and reviewed something, mention it in a comment and I'll post the review. Aside from that, all of these reviews will be brand-new unless otherwise mentioned.

At this point I've seen around 580 horror movies alone, and I watch a movie every day (sometimes two, but rarely), so I've got a lot of unpublished reviews.

I'm going to keep personal stuff to a minimum here, apart from my biases and opinions towards cinema that I'll inevitably give away in reviews. I'm Rhys, I like folk music and dogs and kakapo and those little Cadbury mini eggs. I'm an advocate for social justice and human rights so that's going to be reflected in my reviews. My taste in movies is all over the place, I've always been into horror more than anything else but I'll basically watch anything. I don't really watch a lot of mainstream Hollywood-type stuff, though.

I guess that's it. I'll see you in a couple days once I'm ready to post the first review.