The Forbidden Files (1989)

directed by Jean-Teddy Filippe
France
95 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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The Forbidden Files can be taken either as a whole movie or as a series of short segments, which is the way it was initially presented when it was first aired on an Australian television channel. It is often cited as one of the earliest examples of found-footage horror, and not only is it one of the earliest but also one of the best. In fact I'd go so far as to say it could be the best found-footage film I've seen thus far, and among the most effective (if not the outright greatest) horror films of any format.

It uses the clandestine "footage recovered after the death/disappearance of its subject/s" format that's still common to see in horror today, but it does several things that modern found-footage movies tend to neglect, most prominently the attention given to the backstory on each segment. Although they range in length from around four and a half minutes to over thirteen, each one of them gets an established background and atmosphere. All of the situations depicted are disparate and relatively unusual for horror; things like a man adrift in a small boat for over forty days, a commune of Russian men who were given enhanced abilities but then forgotten about after the Cold War, and several instances where the focus is on some impossibility arising (quite literally) from the sea. The establishment of a solid background contributes to how effective the horror is overall- in modern found-footage there's basically only a handful of scenarios to choose from: "couple on vacation", or "teen filming a documentary", or "teens breaking and entering", and it's only around the fringes when movies distance themselves from these stereotypical plots that things tend to get interesting.

The other reason it all works so well is because it's so subtle that you can barely tell there's any hype. Again, this is something modern FF horror gets wrong: It's all rife with scare chords and swells of dissonant strings, and while that does prime a person for something to jump out at them, it gives away too much. In The Forbidden Files, if you look really closely, you'll see that it's all hype- the narration constantly tells you to look closely, and informs you of the extraordinary circumstances depicted in the film- but you only notice it if you're deliberately looking for it. To a casual viewer it comes off clinical and drab, which makes the appearance of the unfathomable all the more startling.

And really, the unfathomable is the only subject this movie deals in. It doesn't posit that the occurrences within the segments are paranormal or just normal in nature, and in fact it doesn't posit anything at all. It shows us these bizarre situations and leaves the cause, the after-effects, and the underlying mechanics of it to the viewer's imagination. This is the first rule of horror: The monster you don't see is always scarier than the monster you do.

I'm a bit conflicted about how to view this in keeping with the rule I try to follow about not letting the scariness of a horror film dictate my perception of its quality, because in this case its success in creating an eerie atmosphere is directly tied to how good it is. That it has the intelligence to know when and how to absolutely terrify a viewer without the use of obvious tricks is what makes it such a formidable watch. Each of the segments is roughly the same in terms of quality, but if you're pressed for time I'd recommend The Witch, The Shipwreck, and The Ferguson Case, the last of which is genuinely one of the most frightening things I've ever seen regardless of length or genre.

One Hundred Mornings (2009)

directed by Conor Horgan
Ireland
85 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Movies about the end of the world! Good! Romance movies set during the end of the world! Less good. There seems to be a lot of movies that use the apocalypse as a backdrop for romance and I could probably go on at length about why that is, what the promise of eventual destruction adds to a romantic plotline, but at the moment I'm not going to. It is an interesting trend though.

With hundreds if not thousands of other end-of-days movies out there, the question for One Hundred Mornings is: Is this apocalypse interesting? As it turns out, it's not; not by any stretch of the imagination, but that's just fine. The apocalypse in this film is a slow, boring, quiet, monotonous end-times that's less of a total cataclysmic end of the world scenario than a sort of slow dismantling of society as seen through the eyes of four people who decided to pack up and get away from it all. No bombs, no natural disasters, nothing of the sort- just humanity eating itself alive from the inside out.

The romantic bits don't actually get too annoying at any point because mostly there's too much arguing for it to focus on being a tender and mushy romance or anything like that. It's less about being in a relationship during the end of days and more about simply being human during them. After you've packed up your friends and found a place to wait out the chaos, there's still the question of what you're going to do with your more human problems; things that don't involve oil or food shortages but rather the pervasiveness of human emotions even when the world around you is totally falling apart. No amount of societal upheaval is going to be able to stop somebody from cheating if their mind is set to it, nor will it take away the pain that inflicts upon the person being cheated on.

Unfortunately I feel like the movie went a little too subtle with its end-of-days. The struggle to find food and survive without electricity would have felt more realistic had we actually gotten a window into what was going on in the outside world. All we see is a dingy-looking Wicklow, dirty and full of trash. I get the vibe that the budget of this thing was not cushy enough to accommodate many actors to populate its post-breakdown city and as such it had to make do with the absence of people rather than the overabundance of them. It is somewhat intriguing the way the total lack of people is contrasted with the dilapidated state of the town- it's like everyone trashed things and then disappeared, and it's one of the only parts of the movie that really up-front screams "Hey, the world's ended here".

This is also one of those movies where nature is totally indifferent to the plight of humanity and it's absolutely beautiful for it. We don't get overindulgent shots of rolling hills and open fields but we do get a very atmospheric environment surrounding the cabin in which the four main characters take up shelter. The feeling of the natural world finally proving itself to be superior than humanity after humanity goes ahead and wrecks itself is constant and palpable. Having such gorgeous scenery and such a raw, woodsy color palette pretty much makes up for the lack of action.

Housekeeping post.

I've made the decision to scale back this blog's post schedule from one review daily to one, maybe two reviews per week. I love writing reviews, and I'll probably still be doing it even if I don't post them publicly, but right now posting one every day is feeling pretty futile.

I don't do this for the views, but at the moment I don't have any followers on here and I know for a fact that the majority of the pageviews on this blog are from spambots and webcrawlers that somehow got a hold of my URL. There's no way to fix this problem without password-protecting my blog. 90% of the views I get I can't verify are from an actual human being, and that's just disheartening to me. Right now I feel like continuing to put out reviews at this pace I'm currently at amounts to shouting into the void, so to speak.

If I get more followers eventually or people start to comment, I'll probably switch back to the review-a-day, because I can sustain that format easily considering my output even when I'm not posting publicly. But for now I'll just pick and choose the best of my reviews and post one or two per week.

In the meantime, I want to introduce some list-format posts- things like what I mentioned a few days ago where I compile some obscure names in filmmaking that I feel should be more widely known, also a list of short films I've had kicking around in my head for a while. I might do a few of those types of posts along with the reviews here and there.

I hope the flesh-and-blood visitors who may or may not be reading this are all doing well. I don't know how some of you stumble upon this blog but I'm very happy that you do. Thanks a lot for reading.

The Silence (1998)

directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Iran/France/Tajikistan
76 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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So I was very excited to watch this one because I've been trying to find a movie from Tajikistan for a long time. It's a co-production with Iran and France, but hey, Tajikistan helped out.

Right off the bat what I saw in this film was a strong visual sensibility and some nods to The Color of Pomegranates. There's even some pomegranates featured in the movie, which could have been a coincidence, but I'm choosing to believe it wasn't. That visual motif just starts out strong and keeps getting stronger- it's almost montage-like, disjointed images chosen for their visual impact and symbolic significance rather than whether they make sense or are integral to the plot. Everywhere you turn there's poetry: That sequence with the guy singing to the dog, the little girl hanging cherries on her ears like earrings and dancing, just a whole heavenly host of culture and beauty packed into a very short film.

Unfortunately the narrative feels a little bit left by the wayside more often than not. The plot is noticeably absent, left by the side of the road and glossed over in favor of the strength of the imagery and sound. I honestly didn't mind this: Sacrificing plot details to create an otherworldly, intoxicating experience using sight and sound isn't the most egregious of cinematic crimes.

This is really something that gets you out of your comfort zone, and I expected it to be a little more... conventional I guess? Only to find out that it's not. I'll admit that acting is not its strong suit but that actually helps with that otherworldly feeling I mentioned. The less the child characters' mannerisms and dialogue resemble anything a child would reasonably say in real life, the closer it moves to a dreamlike atmosphere. The main character has some pretty big problems- he's paying rent at age 10 and is about to be evicted- but there's just no emotion, no break in his neutral expression, none of the pleading or crying or even a trace of sorrow that anybody else would write into a movie. How this works, I don't exactly know. Maybe the solemnity of the film's children aids it in being taken seriously. You can tell that the adults are trying to act in more of a typical fashion but the kids just let it happen and you wouldn't think that would work but it does.

Also, as it's filled to the brim with traditional music, I personally thought it was incredible since I love the rebab and bağlama and all the other traditional instruments featured therein. Its strong focus on music as a side-effect of the main character being blind is really what makes it so immersive.

End of Days, Inc (2015)

directed by Jennifer Liao
Canada
83 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I don't know where this came from. It should have a lot more attention paid to it yet for whatever reason it hasn't made much of a splash. It's as good as pretty much anything else that did gain notoriety, possibly even better than a lot of things. The cast and crew aren't even that unknown- a lot of the actors have worked before and the writer wrote Ginger Snaps Back, for Pete's sake- but it's just not out there at all for whatever reason.

I guess since it's not that popular I should probably give a quick summary. Which I don't usually like doing, but with movies this obscure there's less of a chance that anybody reading these reviews would already know the plot. Basically: Four employees working what they think is their last day at a mysterious corporation are told that if they pull one final shift, they'll all receive a million dollars in severance pay. But the complications that final shift entails end up being nothing short of cataclysmic. There's more that goes into it but you can kind of extrapolate that from the title.

It's got that atmosphere- and I know I'm not going to do well describing this- of a low-budget movie that knows its stuff and either isn't afraid to show off that meager budget or just can't really do anything about the way it looks. Around the edges, the sets are very set-like; there's a particular lighting to it that might be half-deliberate but also half-lack of resources. You can tell it's a movie, the audio echoes in a certain way and all the acting has this certain practiced vibe to it, but this is where I probably hold the unpopular opinion, because I think all of those things added to how good it was. I got the feeling that the idea behind this movie was big and good enough to carry it beyond its means, and all of the actors do such a good job (even Mort the zombie) that it keeps the thing afloat.

I was scrounging around for at least some small criticism of it because from a glance at reviews it doesn't have the warm reception I'm giving it here, but I really think any faults are due to small details unrelated to its quality. The length is something of a problem, not because it's too long but because it's just hard to sustain a comedy for the length of an average movie without getting a little boring here and there. The beginning got me hyped up with how good it was but after a while when the quality kind of leveled out it felt maybe like it was getting milked more than it could handle. Still, though: Good beginning, bearable middle, decent end.

Things like this just don't get seen and it's frustrating. At this point there's basically a canon of movies that people consider "underseen" and that in and of itself is annoying because it means that you get all these movies that aren't widely-known, but in certain circles of the internet, you can't go a minute and a half without seeing them mentioned. They're the "acceptably" indie films- Frank, Short Term 12, Winter's Bone, things from the mid-2000s to the 2010s that get this hype that isn't proportional to the amount of critical success they got, while things like this remain un-spoken for.

One of these days I'm going to make a list of really really underwatched directors and post it on here. I'm fired up. My rating for this might be more than what it ultimately deserves but it represents that undiscovered niche that I'm really enthusiastic about.

Taxi (2015)

directed by Jafar Panahi
Iran
82 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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How do you make a movie without making a movie?

Jafar Panahi's backstory is stated and re-stated at the beginning of nearly every review of one of his films, but as it's necessary to understand the filmmaker if you want to put his work in context, it has to be said again. Panahi was banned from making movies by the Iranian government on the grounds of having criticized the workings of Iranian society, but even with this restriction placed on him, he continues to make movies using unconventional methods. In all likelihood neither him nor his works will fit your model of a guerilla filmmaker and his output: He's an unassuming older man, and his movies are all relatively slow, thoughtful dramas about everyday life in Iran- with enough criticism of the government thrown in to earn him his gagging order.

In Taxi, Panahi creates his story through a dashboard camera and uses himself as a subject as well as the actors he clandestinely hires and picks up as passengers. He poses as a regular cab driver and executes vignettes with different people, often connected to each other somehow, that are both personal and reflect some truth about Iranian society. A lot of it is self-referential, having to do with either filmmaking as a whole or directly referencing Panahi's own work. In short: This is Jafar Panahi making a film about Jafar Panahi making a film about Jafar Panahi making a film, and it's brilliant.

The faux-candid POV where every passenger is no more than an ordinary citizen is probably the best way to get perspective on life in Iran. With the semi-recent popularity of sketch comedy that attempts to look as spontaneous as possible, including several series and other projects taking advantage of the dashcam format, it's important that Taxi not feel performative without totally ignoring its status as a fictional work. It falls squarely between those lines that divide documentary and fiction, just aware enough of being a movie to feel relevant while also seeming like a genuine window into the lives of some average Iranians. Each is charismatic in a way, including his little niece Hana and her own version of navigating the world of filmmaking within the restrictions placed on her.

I've seen someone giving it a review that mentions how it's ultimately "just another film about Iranian media censorship" and I'd just like to add that even if you disliked the movie as a whole, that's the wrong attitude to come at it with. When you get tired of this kind of thing, when you begin to categorize it in your mind as "oh, this guy's complaining again?", that's when it loses its potency. Jafar Panahi's clandestine form of filmmaking works because he continues to fight against the rules that try to regulate him out of existence and taking that stance, that perception of unoriginality, is ignoring what's been put into making this film.

Cell (2016)

directed by Tod Williams
USA
98 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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I was fully aware of the poor reception this movie got, but I was curious about it anyway and I recently re-read the book for the express purpose of comparing it to the movie. One of the big things about the book is that I could clearly tell Stephen King had meant it to be a dig at young people and their attachment to cell phones, and that's a viewpoint I can't stand, but it was subtle enough in the book that I could pretend it wasn't there, and thankfully that was the case in the movie too- but that doesn't mean it's salvageable. Interestingly, the issue of texting comes up in the movie- the book was published before the advent of texting was widespread- but, like most topics in the film, it's touched upon and then dropped completely within moments.

Right off the bat we've got one of the ugliest opening credit designs I've ever seen, followed by some truly atrocious (like "how did this get made" bad) acting in the initial outbreak scene. The acting among the people making up the crowds of infected is not uniform, but as a whole it's ultimately a point in the movie's favor since they differ so much from the typical portrayal of zombies. That I appreciated. If the book didn't exist, that aspect would probably get the movie some points in my opinion.

But the beginning also sets the tone for what turns out to be an extremely disappointing cast of characters. Clay in the original book was pretty flat, I'll admit, but his traveling companions Tom and Alice each had a distinct personality with several traits in particular that expanded their character beyond the very basics, and this movie neglects all that. It had such a good chance to bring these characters to life and really make the viewer feel something for them, but instead it casts aside everything the book set up and creates bland, unoriginal fake people. At one point Tom quotes a lengthy bible verse in complete earnesty and I found that to be particularly annoying since in the book he is gay and the only reason he knows a few bible verses (he's also an atheist) is because he had a somewhat traumatic upbringing in a religious household.

Like with the texting, it introduces concepts- sometimes ones that were very important in the book- and then either drops them or doesn't develop them enough, and they become meaningless symbols thrown in for continuity's sake. Pacing is of course very difficult to get right when adapting a book to a film because of the level of detail possible in writing versus what's possible in film, but the movie basically rushes right to what I thought was the pivotal moment in the fight against the phone-freaks and then just dawdles around for an hour, mostly improvising things that weren't too important in the book. It could have been like the source material, a lengthy and treacherous journey that the characters have to fight for every minute of, but instead things get revealed too quickly and easily and characters get handed plot devices on a plate.

Honestly I could probably make amends with everything else in this movie but I can't get over what they did to Tom. Ignoring his upbringing and the very valid reason for his distrust of religion to make him an automaton that conveniently spouts wisdom was almost a personal offense.

Lunch Break (2008)

directed by Sharon Lockhart
USA
83 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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Full disclosure, I'm a total newbie to Sharon Lockhart. She's been at the fringes of my mental "directors I need to get into" shortlist but I'm not familiar with her work or even with video art at all as opposed to the concept of a "movie" that I'm used to. For anybody unaware, Lunch Break is an 83-minute (or 73-minute depending on where you watch it) single tracking shot where the camera moves slowly down the main corridor of a shipyard while the crew eats their lunch off to the sides. It's not that it's an extraordinarily long shipyard, it's that the camera moves so slowly that it takes the full runtime for it to traverse the hallway- and it's only just part of the hallway.

Lockhart's presence as a woman in the avant-garde canon is important, because men are afforded so much creative freedom and more often than not are the ones in the forefront getting their works discussed and celebrated while women's efforts tend to go unnoticed and occasionally get grouped into the "too weird" category. For some perspective, Michael Snow's film Wavelength, a 45-minute zoom-in on a window, has 1,494 ratings on imdb. Andy Warhol's infamous Empire, eight hours of a single shot of the Empire State Building, has 804. Lunch Break has 35.

I can't say for certain what the film is meant to symbolize if it's meant to symbolize anything at all. I had two total spitball theories that are most likely way off the mark but were the only things I could come up with. The first is less a theory than an examination of the structure of the film: Considering that Lockhart worked to become intimately familiar with the shipyard and its crew during filming, the movie can be looked at as almost a brain-body type structure where the brain is disconnected from the body- the "brain" part is all the knowledge Lockhart acquired over the five days in which this was filmed, and the "body" is the film itself, which draws absolutely nothing from Lockhart's efforts to get close to her subjects. The body is not aware of what the brain is doing and the brain does not influence the body.

The second thing I noticed was that it reminded me very vaguely of the saying that life flashes before your eyes before you die. The film could be something of a drawn-out death sequence, the camera serving as the final memories of some unnamed person working on the shipyard, their life slowing down and stretching into infinity as they lose consciousness.

Whether you like it or not, you have to agree that this is something we never see. It's a common and boring locale to spend 83 minutes in, yes, but it's a perspective on the shipyard's hallway that nobody ever gets to see. The world's slowest ethnographic film, if you will. People carry equipment all over the world to film remote parts of civilization, Lockhart turns her camera on the accessible and makes it a study of that environment similar to any study taking place in the badlands of an isolated country.

Kaliya Mardan (1919)

directed by Dhundiraj Govind Phalke
India
47 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Most Indian silent films from the early days of film have been lost, and although Kaliya Mardan's survival all this time is nothing short of amazing, it is also a very poor print and probably hasn't been touched or restored since it was first released. The bad quality of the image can't stop it from being a movie that's creative and full of intrigue, though it's so old that judging it must be done on a different scale than judging a modern movie or even one made after the advent of sound in cinema.

Movies like this make a niche for themselves that they can't be extracted from when you review one. Is it a good film in the technical sense of things, as in does it have good acting, good pacing, an interesting plot and beautiful cinematography? No, not really. It's too old for anybody to have really gotten the hang of directing movies in the style we're used to today, but realism wasn't exactly the most popular thing back then. Most movies you see from the 20s and before come across more like filmed plays, with exaggerated acting and unrealistic set pieces and effects (if there's any effects at all), and to a public who had (purportedly) been shocked into terror upon seeing a train rush at the camera for the first time, filmed plays were enough.

It's kind of interesting actually because now nearly one hundred years later, there's a movement in film that seeks to get as un-embellished and as close to real life as possible, much like these very early films where nobody really had any choice in whether or not a movie felt realistic or not. We've gone through the introduction of practical effects, dramatic soundtracks, heartbreaking acting, and spine-chilling horror, and arrived back at the beginning where we try to film people acting as untrained as they did in films like Kaliya Mardan.

Unless some attention is given to it pretty soon, this might be lost forever. But what the director and the stars of the movie couldn't have predicted was that we could preserve this even if the original print is destroyed by putting it up on the internet, where nothing ever goes away. Even if you've got no interest in Indian mythology or legend, this is a worthwhile movie based on its background alone. The director's daughter, seven-year-old Mandakini, plays the lead role of young Krishna and steals the show with her presence in every scene she's in.

The Bed Sitting Room (1969)

directed by Richard Lester
UK
87 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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This is your typical dry British comedy about the state of the nation following a "nuclear misunderstanding" (the bomb being referred to as "that rude thing", "that mess", and various hand gestures and sound effects) and an apparently very brief WWIII. I think I've mentioned before that for reasons even I don't understand I'll eat up any films related to a nuclear-war-induced apocalypse, even movies like this that are comedies and don't show any of the emotional devastation following the destruction of a nation.

Except... it kind of does show emotional devastation, in its own weird, non-confrontational way. Which was unexpected. The landscape is an exaggerated, comical wasteland full of elaborately-constructed ruins that are really quite visually pleasing (something about a mountain of shoes in the middle of nowhere spoke to my aesthetic sensibilities) but at the heart of it all, it uses its humor as a coping mechanism, and sometimes not even that. Beneath the absurdism and the jokes is a stiff-upper-lipped type of mourning, a refusal to acknowledge the end of the world out of difficulty coming to terms with it. Family ties and the pursuit of happiness (wait, wrong country) are still very much intact and are held onto with a death grip despite the ruination of the world around the characters, and that desperation occasionally breaks through the humorous exterior to be something weirdly touching.

It gets a little more meaningful when you consider the time it was released in as well. I initially thought it came out in 1989 but it turns out it was 1969, and while that's fairly far removed from the devastation of WWII, this is still a nation dealing with the aftermath of what was close at some points to total annihilation. A factoid that gets tossed around a lot is that London only returned to its pre-WWII population in 2015. Considering how much was lost in the war, this film's use of humor as a coping mechanism gets a little more reasonable.

Unfortunately I felt that this movie felt a little too thrown-together as a whole to be all that it could have been. It's disjointed and the jokes come rapid-fire instead of being set up and executed with any kind of pacing, and it is still very funny- Marty Feldman is in it, after all- but it wears out its welcome eventually, and jokes at the speed of machine-gun fire for 87 minutes can tucker you out.

Observance (2015)

directed by Joseph Sims-Dennett
Australia
90 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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Observance has gotten a little hype this year from people outside the mainstream horror circles, but for a while I was hesitant to watch it because it gave me the impression that it would be one of those "dude angst"-type horror films: Movies where the horror stems from some guy's frustration towards a woman and the blame for whatever happens is pinned on said woman. Given the title, I also expected something where stalking would either be depicted as justified or as something more nuanced and meaningful than the horrific experience it actually is, but it turns out that the main character is actually a spy, so while his spying on a woman is unethical it isn't exactly like he's just doing it to be perverted. There's some weird stuff later on where the main character hints at becoming attracted to his target but honestly all of that had no bearing on the plot and really didn't need to be there.

The true center of this movie isn't the spying. There's heavy emphasis on a feeling of being watched, but the main character isn't the only one who's doing the watching, and the woman he's spying on has an unclear role in the bigger picture. What happens when we take the power away from the observer, make it so they're not omniscient with their binoculars and wiretaps anymore? The answer to that is what makes Observance so unnerving.

The cinematography is gorgeous but what this movie really nails is the sound design. Horror films use so many different sounds to accompany their most frightening scenes- a crescendo of dissonant strings, a sudden jolt of music, even sometimes a noise so high-pitched humans can't hear it, intended to create a baseless fear- but this movie has none of that. This movie uses total silence when it needs to reinforce a point. With what seems like minimal effort, it gets you into that state where you think you hear something and all you can do is be as quiet as possible, straining to hear it.

There's something hiding just under this film's silences and its dingy exterior, but I don't know what it is. I don't even think the movie itself knows what it is. It feels like the whole thing is harboring a ghost, but at the same time putting the term "ghost" to what happens here implies something that, while supernatural, is still ultimately understandable- everybody knows ghosts, you die and you become one and you haunt people. But the fear conjured up in this film is something that somehow goes beyond that. Beyond fear and into sheer dread and paranoia, paranoia, paranoia.

This is probably the closest any movie has gotten to imitating Suspect Zero, which I've thought for a long time was basically the pinnacle in cinematic dread (and undeserving of its lukewarm reception). If the uncomfortable, sickly-looking greens and yellows of this film were replaced by industrial greys and hard monochromatics, it would come off like a lost E. Elias Merhige film.

I guess the only thing I wasn't particularly fond of was how heavily this movie leans on the "vomiting black goo" horror trope. Every time a movie has to convey a character being corrupted or possessed, the black goo is turned to as a catch-all symbol of body integrity failure. Although to be fair the intensity with which our main character in Observance hacks up the stuff is a bit more forceful than usual. I also have to say, I'm not totally happy with the ending- obviously I want to stay away from spoilers but it just felt like after all that buildup there probably wasn't any way the film could have ended that would feel like a fitting climax to all that dread. 5 minutes of boring ending definitely doesn't take away from 85 minutes of ideal horror filmmaking.

Kauwboy (2012)

directed by Boudewijn Koole
Netherlands
77 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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I knew going into this that it was going to be a very raw and emotional movie. I was anticipating that, I knew what it was about, I thought I could guess how the gist of it was going to go. But making assumptions about this particular movie turned out not to be the way to go because you may know the plot, and it may seem simple- a young boy with a rocky relationship with his father adopts a jackdaw- but this is a movie that has such rich emotional range that it can't be limited to just a short summary of the concept.

This movie highlights the tendency of people who are going through trauma or who have been through trauma before to find something smaller and more fragile than them and protect it, which is something I don't often see in film. The bird needs the boy, but the boy also needs the bird- his home life is so full of hair-trigger anger at the slightest thing that he needs the bird to teach him to be gentle, he needs to be able to see the way his actions can impact this small life, and most of all he needs a friend that can interact with him and care about him more than the humans around him can. The movie does weird things to your ideas about wild birds; at the beginning of the movie I was thinking about how it really wasn't such a great idea to adopt a random jackdaw, but by the end, I didn't care one bit. It smells vaguely of Disneyfication and idealism and you still shouldn't take home a bird unless it's gravely injured and needs help, but gosh, none of that mattered by the end.

Something I'm realizing just now while typing this is that all of the anger and all of the negativity in this film comes from a place of grief. It's not an excuse or a justification, but it changes things a little when you understand that the characters in this film are only hurting others because of how much they hurt themselves. There is a lot of that hurt in this, but there's also healing, the possibility of forgiveness and of fighting your way to making peace with the things that weigh heavy on your heart.

None of this could have been as beautiful as it was had it not been for some truly wonderful child acting as well as what had to have been an expertly trained bird. It feels like we're seeing all of this boy, Jojo; one hundred percent of his character and all of the things unique to him, and the understanding the film has of what it's like to be a child and to be vulnerable but brave is perfect. It gets Jojo's father's abuse so right it's hard to watch. The way he isn't violent all the time, they way he occasionally shows a little bit of love towards his son, but then he doesn't give Jojo an inch and is unwilling to show forgiveness. I guess that's another central theme of the film: Forgiveness, how hard it can be, how much it can hurt, and all the good it can do.

Movies like this are cathartic. Movies like this with an open heart that show the inner workings of a relationship and how it can go both wrong and right tap into some reserve well of emotion that needs to be drained every so often. This might not be the most realistic portrayal of animal husbandry (but really, what child has mastered animal husbandry by their tweens) but it is a realistic portrayal of a cycle of love and hate, hurt and hope.

Sunrise (2014)

directed by Partho Sen-Gupta
India
85 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Made with somewhat of a neo-noir feeling in mind, Sunrise is a mostly visual movie that has a very deliberate aesthetic to it, occasionally letting the plot fall by the wayside in favor of establishing atmosphere. It communicates itself less with dialogue and more with sidelong glances, knitted brows, looks of concern and uncertainty. It borrows heavily from older noir movies as well as the pool of commonly used generic mystery tropes; men chasing shadows, pouring, pounding rain, a main character repeatedly drawn to a seedy nightclub for reasons he's not aware of. When it's not nighttime everything is honey-colored and gorgeous. But when it is nighttime the rain comes and soaks everything to the bone. For this, India's streets and nightlife are turned into a labyrinth into which all that you love may disappear and be lost for good.

It's unusual in terms of narrative because it feels like the movie itself doesn't have a "voice" and it's very hard to explain what I mean by that. I think it's due in large part to the man who's supposed to be our main character hardly speaking ten words throughout the entire movie. Where other films might have a clear and confident way of presenting their story, this one just stays in the darkness and never reveals its full self. 

It's great at creating a feeling of overt danger and of people lurking in the night, and I very much enjoy detective movies that are more vague and eerie like this one is. But once or twice it kind of misfires and that shadowy feeling gets overblown. There's a recurring motif of the main character chasing after somebody who we can only see the shadowed silhouette of, and that's a pretty clever visual technique, but the shadow figure keeps striking these poses that are so outwardly aggressive they don't translate well and it just looks goofy. The detective is shooting at this hammy shadow person posing like somebody playing a game of charades where their phrase is "bad guy", and for a film that's otherwise so great at being subtle, those fight scenes come off as being out of place.

The shadow motif is really small potatoes in comparison to what this movie achieves as a whole, though. It's genuinely haunting and feels unsafe and at its heart is the looming threat of child trafficking. The detective in this film does have a personal connection to the case he's working, but his own personal deterioration takes place in the backseat while the actual crimes unfold and are committed. All throughout is the feeling of helplessness, of powerlessness- a parent's worst nightmare of losing a child and knowing they're trapped somewhere in the underbelly of the city.

Embers (2015)

directed by Claire Carré
Poland-USA co-production
85 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Embers sounded iffy from when I first read its synopsis, because it has a plot that could easily be really cheesy: After a "global neurological epidemic", the whole of Earth's population has forgotten everything about who they are.

Thankfully and somewhat unexpectedly, it manages to be engaging without resorting to any cheap heartstring-pulling tactics. The world in which humanity finds itself is one that is as open to interpretation as the current state of life as we know it in reality is. Like now, there are people who are kind and innocent, there are people who are curious, and there are violent, angry people who will take advantage of anybody they can. Not everyone experiences the aftermath of this plague in the same way, and the presence of several different characters kept it out of sappy lovey-dovey territory.

The plot is very interesting and the way the movie was executed makes it a convincing portrait of a world that could almost be called post-human despite humanity's continued residence on the planet. It's like the whole of the world suddenly walked into a room and forgot what they meant to do there, except the room contains all of their memories and life experiences. Everybody lives in the same environment as they did before, but now they're stuck in a world where they no longer know how to interact with their surroundings. The only big problem with this film is that it doesn't really do anything with that concept, and that's kind of a waste; nothing significant happens at any point and it's like they came up with this great idea and then just let it meander around on its own terms instead of adding anything to it to distinguish the very beginning of the movie from the very end, or from any other random spot during its runtime for that matter.

It also doesn't quite seem to have its story straight with regards to how the plague works. Sometimes it seems to imply that you forget everything only if you fall asleep. Sometimes you forget the person you were with if you turn your back on them for long enough. Some people seem to remember a bit more than others, knowing the basics of who they are, but some others forget things that are rudimentary, like how to make fire, or what windows are. The inconsistencies add to the dreamlike atmosphere and I suppose I shouldn't complain because like I said, it would have been easy to wreck this concept, and the movie is overall way better than I had expected.

If there's a hidden moral to it all- and there probably is one, because movies like this always have some kind of hidden moral- I couldn't see it. There's a subplot about a girl being kept in an underground bunker by her father in a (successful) attempt to avoid the epidemic above-ground, and I guess that could be a message about how you shouldn't hold onto old memories because they'll weigh you down, but frankly that's a pretty terrible message if it is what the movie was going for. Holding onto old memories is something everybody in the world does, and sometimes they're painful, unhealthy memories, but letting go of your entire identity and past life as a whole is not going to get you anywhere or make you a better person.

Lost Souls (1980)

directed by Tun Fei Mou
Hong Kong
90 minutes
? stars out of 5 (I don't feel good about rating this)
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Lost Souls is a movie about a group of immigrants fleeing oppression in China only to face incredibly brutal conditions and sadistic men in Hong Kong. It is a category III movie and it's also directed by the same person who did Men Behind the Sun, so those two facts alone should give away that it doesn't shy away at all from showing the full extent of human cruelty.

Tonally it might be a little difficult for somebody not familiar with other films of its era (like me, admittedly) to get used to, because it is a Hong Kong action flick from the 80s and action movies produced in that part of the world at that time period are notoriously exaggerated and cheesy. Since there's no kickboxing or thievery or other edge-of-your-seat thrills in this, it's markedly less goofy than anything else would have been, but it still remains that it's in the style of goofier movies and it's still chock-full of punches that sound more like someone dropping a steak on concrete.

You have to consider, though, that not everybody has lived with the narrative of what a tragic film should look like that the Western world is most used to; soft string music and sad-eyed women and a very slow pace, things like that that come to mind when you think of depressing movies. For somebody who knew Hong Kong film all their life and worked exclusively with local talent and producers, this movie bears all the same depth that an American movie known for being sad would have. It's just delivered in a different format.

That being said, however, this movie has a weird fixation with nude women that doesn't become any easier to take in any context. I appreciated that it didn't shy away from depicting how the women in these camps would be treated particularly horrendously, because obviously that would have been a huge blind spot if they'd just shown the men getting abused, but it's just... it shows so much. The camera kept focusing on naked bodies and fleshy bits and maybe I'm missing some intonation that I was supposed to get but to me, sometimes the nudity just felt like it was there to titillate. And considering that the nude women in question were getting beaten and tortured, that puts me off, to say the least.

One thing's for sure: You definitely have to have some endurance to make it through this whole thing. I'm surprised it's not talked about like Men Behind the Sun is talked about because it's nasty. Nevertheless it tells a story that probably a lot of people weren't too happy to see told, covering the issue of immigration where other filmmakers might tend to sweep it under the rug.

ABCs of Death 2.5 (2016)

directed by many people (go here for a full list! there's too many to type out)
USA
85 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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When the call for short film submissions went out as ABCs of Death 2 was being made, apparently the letter "M" got a massive amount of entries- 500, allegedly- so this was put together as a companion piece since choosing just one out of those 500 entries was too difficult.

The majority of the shorts are bad. When I say "bad" in this context I mean that all of them have some element that would make them bad as compared to a professionally-made film, maybe they're poorly-acted or poorly-shot or maybe they have something else wrong with them entirely, the possibilities are endless. But as a showcase of current and upcoming talent in horror filmmaking, it works better than you'd think. All of the shorts have a runtime of three minutes, and that has the effect of making it very clear who can and can't use their time effectively, and the directors who did manage to use their three minutes in the best possible way are ones who I'd say have a shot at directing a successful full-length film someday if they haven't already.

Every director was given full creative control, the only rules were that their short film had to be about death and the death had to involve the letter M somehow (obviously). The surrender of control to the filmmakers as opposed to having them adhere to a strict theme does something interesting: It gives people freedom to focus on pure concept, to just really go for it with no restrictions whatsoever. Where the shorts will go is a constant surprise, sometimes you get interesting things and sometimes you get raunchy, immature, misogynistic nonsense, but every one of these films isn't pretending to be anything it's not just to fit with a theme.

I had the same problems with this as I did with the first two ABCs films, but they all amount to one thing: It's impressive and frightening to me that you can get 26 different directors (29 in this case as some segments were a joint effort) together and the majority of them will not deviate from the norm, I.E., sexual violence and general bigotry. Surprisingly, this actually does better than the first two ABCs films in that respect; there's still a ton of pretty disturbing misogyny but there's a few moments here and there that are better, morally. Nothing is super innovative or game-changing, though, and the shorts that aren't awful to women kind of get swallowed up by the ones that are.

There's too many segments to individually review them all, but the one that stuck out to me as being superior to the others was M for Martyr. That was a case where the concept was so interesting and the execution was so intelligent and original that I could see the director making a good full-length film, easily. On the other hand the bad ones are really bad, but it's easy to tell when they're just bad due to lack of resources (like the first one, M is for Magnetic Tape) or actually bad-bad, as in no talent, as in M is for Mailbox and M is for Moonstruck. The quality varies a lot but for some reason these ABCs films are just so much fun.

The Mind's Eye (2016)

directed by Joe Begos
USA
87 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Good lord I was waiting for this movie for a long time.

At first it threw me off a little because everything I'd heard told me it was going to be a non-stop wild ride full of exploding heads, etc. So when the movie did not immediately open with a lot of gore and action, I was thinking that maybe it would be something still very good, but different from what I had expected. Fortunately the second half proved me wrong.

I have no idea why it was so relatively subdued in the first half but the heads start flying when we hit the halfway point. It might not be a masterpiece, it might not hit every note it reaches for, and it might get a bit hammy here and there, but more than anything it's enjoyable. It doesn't clutter up the plot with anything unnecessary, it is 100%, start-to-finish conceptual purity: It puts its whole heart into being a movie about violent telekinesis and doesn't spare any expense on establishing a worldview where that fits in as not only a plausible concept but a widely-researched one.

I think the thing about this movie is that you have to be at least a little well-versed in 90s action/horror because the entire atmosphere basically relies on being set in the 90s to work. It's got this way of looking at things that you don't see in action or horror films today; this all-out battle where the villain is absolute evil seeking absolute power. You have to be accustomed to things being exaggerated, to villains making broad, cheesy, ridiculous "I'll conquer the world!" speeches in front of the hero. This actually does have a great villain- he eventually gets a deep, ominous voice and gross pulsating veins on his face to advertise to the viewer that oh yeah, this guy is Evil™.

Also, it's shameless about its attempts at a neon-soaked 90s aesthetic. I love it. Like, nobody's house actually looks like that at 1 in the morning. The strobe lights and heavy red/blue coloring were so super fake and unrealistic and I dug every minute of it.

Probably the biggest flaw I could see in this is that it's guilty of grossly mishandling Lauren Ashley Carter. I love everything she's in and I keep hoping that someday she's going to be in a movie where she gets a couple of big butt-kicking scenes to herself, but nobody seems willing to put her in that kind of a role. It's a little ridiculous in this movie in particular how the two guys get to duke it out and go around unleashing primal screams and ripping people in half with their minds while the lead woman is stuck in a hospital. Sure, she gets some action, but as soon as things start to really get out of hand she takes a bullet and is out of commission for a while.

Overall, if you're looking for something that feels genuinely enthusiastic about its own concept, this could be the movie for you. It's the kind of thing that makes me enthusiastic about this current era of indie horror because there's so many talented people on board who have been cranking out the hits left and right lately. The director's previous film, Almost Human, also comes highly recommended and may even be a little better than this one.

The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)

directed by John Erick Dowdle
USA
85 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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The Poughkeepsie Tapes is one of those movies that has a reputation for being exactly what it is: An extremely uncomfortable watch.

I think the reason why it got so popular while still being within a subgenre that tends to get a lot of hate is because it's the exemplary model of a found-footage movie. It's what people want out of the genre. There's no teenagers fooling around, nothing flying at the camera, no cheap scares, just this faux documentary about a stash of tapes recorded by a serial killer. It feels genuinely clandestine, genuinely gritty; we know it isn't real but it feels dirty. 85 minutes of documentary about an alleged 25,000 hours of video that manages to feel 25,000 hours long despite its actual runtime.

Personally, the reason why I found this to be an interesting and worthwhile film was because I feel like it stays away from being exploitative in a way that more movies could stand to follow. The notion that the sort of content this movie shows is something not everybody can handle is stated pretty clearly in various ways over the course of the film. At one point a character- a professor teaching a course on criminology- has a monologue about how not every student in that class will remain by the time he's done showing them the footage on the Poughkeepsie killer, and I don't think that was intended to come off as a "viewers beware, you're in for a scare"-type thing to exaggerate the horror of what was coming. I think that was a message about how this kind of horror does truly exist in the world and you're not any less brave for needing or wanting to tune it out. I admire this movie for not falling into the typical traps of edginess and offensiveness that so many films about murderers end up in.

I'm becoming increasingly aware that we make films about things we don't understand because we want to understand them. Scripting out a movie about a depraved killer and dictating when and how their fictional murders take place has the effect of "containing" the story, of giving both the filmmakers and the viewers a window into the mind and actions of such a person while still retaining control. And producing such a movie in a way that, while jarring and disturbing, is ultimately fake can also have a distancing effect- at the end of the day you get to step back and go "whew, I'm glad that particular situation never happened in real life".

The first time I watched this I had a big problem with the fact that it has subtle music added to some key points, but the second time around, while paying more attention and allowing myself to get more immersed in it, I'm inclined to think that the music was its saving grace. The music reminds you even in its darkest moments that it is just a movie, while doing what music in film is ultimately supposed to do, which is compliment the scenes it accompanies. Both Dowdle brothers have directed some successful horror films, but they all look like child's play next to The Poughkeepsie Tapes.

Into the Forest (2016)

directed by Patricia Rozema
Canada
101 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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If you look at Patricia Rozema's filmography, you'll notice that while she's a fairly influential name in unsung Canadiana, she doesn't have any other movies with speculative- or science-fictional elements, just dramas. When a director known only for doing strictly non-genre films puts out a movie that has genre elements in it, usually it will be more thoughtful than a movie directed by somebody who's only ever worked with genre film. It can also sometimes mean that the one-off genre movie will be treated as more of a metaphor than anything else, that it won't really be a genre film, it'll just use fantastical concepts to disguise a hidden meaning- but Into the Forest is most definitely an apocalypse film, as it appears on the surface.

This apocalypse is a frightening one indeed because it's both slow and sudden. It comes about like a bad power outage after a storm, first the power fails and you don't think too much of it but before long the power has been out for longer than you expected and you start to have doubts that it'll ever come back on. This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang but with a flicker, the herald of the apocalypse not angels with trumpets but an unexpected power cut that seems innocent at first until it starts to threaten lives.

While this is solidly a movie set during the collapse of society as we know it, it is also a catharsis film. It's the kind of thing you can watch and get immersed in and before you know it you'll be feeling the characters' pain right there with them. Evan Rachel Wood and Ellen Page support this movie entirely, and their brilliant performances bring the emotions of the film to life, making it feel like you're watching something that's really happening instead of a fictional situation. The narrative of nature being "smart" while urbanized society (smartphones, cars, etc) is "dumb" is overused and ignores the needs of people who depend on technology for their livelihood, but the narrative of nature as the cradle of humanity that will always be there for us if and when we need it will always be a true and accurate description of the connection between person and wild.

A quick note on how I appreciated the way the women were characterized- Rozema draws a lot of focus on their bodies but never in a sexual way, there's definitely a distinct fascination with the "womanly form" as it were but rather than pointing a voyeuristic lens at the women getting naked it focuses on things like dancing, having an intimate moment with the last chocolate they may ever eat, splitting wood, just generally showing their bodies as the capable machines they are while retaining a sense of grace and beauty not depicted in an exploitative way.

Fair warning, there is a rape scene that gets pretty uncomfortable; like everything else though it isn't cheap or exploitative and actually takes the time to show what something like that can do to a person and how it can change somebody's entire personality afterwards. I feel the same way about that scene as I felt towards the entire movie, it deals with pretty difficult matters in a graceful and tender way to create a portrait of two sisters forced back into the woods by their circumstances, surviving as best they know how while trying to retain their humanity.