Grizzly Man (2005)

directed by Werner Herzog
Germany/USA
104 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

Even if you didn't know Timothy Treadwell while he was alive and teaching, it's easy to piece together the way he felt about the world around him from the footage shown in this documentary. He was somebody who very clearly created his own kind of idealism, to an almost frightening extent: He saw himself as the sole protector of a bear habitat that, as is revealed in the documentary, was under much less of a threat than Treadwell seemed to think it was. This is a person who has complete control over his life and what we can call his "destiny", who went out into his own personal paradise and just claimed it for himself against the odds, against common sense, probably against nature itself. For a lot of outsiders, the first question that comes to mind is "Didn't he know what he was getting into?" Didn't he know the likelihood of getting mauled or killed? It may seem unbelievable, but I think the easy answer to that is that in every moment he chose to continue living his life as the "grizzly man", he absolutely knew. He knew and he accepted that his fate lied in the paws of one of, if not the most dangerous mammals on the planet.

Since Treadwell is not around for Werner Herzog to interview, he instead looks through his footage and finds not only a man with personal demons but a fellow filmmaker, and that's the way Herzog chooses to relate to Treadwell. The man's actions on footage that, should things have gone better, would probably never have seen the light of day belie a canny awareness of the way his actions appeared on film- Which may not have been in line with the way he was actually being perceived by the general public, but in his mind he exercised perfect control over his own image. Even if you can't understand going to the extremes that he did, you've got to envy somebody who is living 100% of their life 100% as they want to live it.

What was surprising to me was the opposition to Treadwell. Not too much of it is shown in interviews, but it looks like there was tons of hate mail he and his peers received from people who thought he personified everything they hated about environmentalism, people who saw enough insanity in him that they couldn't resist reaching out to tell him so, and other nay-sayers that come with being an activist in any capacity. The majority of them are admittedly bringing up valid points, but the ones who have real vitriol, real malice towards him astounded me- Haven't they ever loved anything? Haven't they ever wished they could live in sync with the thing they love, every minute of every hour of every day? Is it perhaps jealousy that motivated so many people to reach out and condemn Treadwell for determining his own fate?

I think in a sense this is the apex of Herzog's oeuvre, the one that brings together all the ideas he has as a documentarian. This is the one that says that in the most bizarre of places, in the most unlikely people, we can find lessons about the deeper parts of our nature. The viewer can judge the subject of the film however they wish, but at the end of the day and at the end of Timothy Treadwell's life, he was a person who lived out his fantasy to its furthest possible extreme.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010)

directed by Werner Herzog, Dmitry Vasyukov
Germany, Siberia
94 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

As I've said before, Werner Herzog is one of my favorite documentary filmmakers as well as one of my favorite filmmakers in general, for a multitude of reasons relating to the worldview him & his films possess. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga is co-directed by somebody named Dmitry Vasyukov as well; I'm not sure who that is, but I wanted to make sure that name gets mentioned since most of what anybody is focused on with regards to this film is Herzog's role in making it.

Happy People is a documentary about an extremely remote village near the Yenisei river in Siberia where the small population lives in almost total isolation and self-sufficiency, as the place is not accessible for the majority of the year. There is another, shorter film Herzog made about people living in rural arctic Russia called Bells From the Deep that takes almost the opposite approach to this, as large parts of it were apparently staged and it presents a more ritualistic view of its subjects. The rituals in Happy People take on a different form, tending- save for the protector-spirit dolls belonging to the indigenous Ket peoples- to show traditions and pasttimes specific to the villagers' survival, like trapping and hunting.

It is one of the most compelling arguments against a fame-based method of documentary filmmaking that I've ever seen. Werner Herzog has made films about famous individuals before, but in many of his documentaries, all he does is go into the middle of nowhere, seek out a random person, and have them talk to his camera. These people don't necessarily have to be world-renowned, but they are all incredibly dedicated, and Herzog is as well- dedicated to bringing viewers a look at everything that exists in the further-flung reaches of the world that we may know nothing about. The fact that somebody can travel to these places and find a number of people with unique, priceless stories and ways of life is a testament to the necessity of documentary as a way to connect people rather than to enforce already famous peoples' fame.

The documentary also takes a more subtle yet telling view of politics in isolated regions, specifically Russia since it is so impossibly large and varied. A politician on a campaign boat complete with cheerleaders and a stereo system shows up on the banks of the Yenisei and the youth of the village are the only ones vaguely interested, and only that because he's playing pop music. When I watch films about the USSR from when there were attempts to unify an absurd number of countries into one homogenous entity, I get the same feeling I get watching the politician in Bakhtia village: That it is not remotely possible to preside over every single heart and mind in any large enough region, and also that the closer you get to the heat of politics, so to speak, the more dire everything seems. Far enough away from the big cities, in a place like Bakhtia, it doesn't matter one bit who's in charge or what demonym people try to refer to you with.

If you ever forget that your way of living- provided you're living in a developed region with little access to the wilderness- is not the only way, Happy People can be a perfect reminder. As always with Herzog's documentaries, there is minimal interference, and certainly no judgement. It is not new-agey and does not deign to talk down to its subjects. If you feel that documentary cinema has lost its sincerity, watch this to reaffirm your faith.

For an appropriate soundtrack: "Yenisei-Punk" by Yat-Kha in its entirety.

The Lobster (2015)

directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Greece-Ireland co-production
118 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

I've been a big fan of Yorgos Lanthimos for long enough that it was really, really weird to me when he came out with The Lobster and broke- at least somewhat- into the mainstream. I'm not saying this to sound cool, it was genuinely shocking to me to drive past my local theater, a big, non-indie theater, and see The Lobster playing at it. It is also his first wholly English-speaking film with several notable non-Greek actors.

Maybe it's due to its provenance that the plot so resembles mythology, because obviously Greece is known, among a plethora of other things, for its myth. In the universe The Lobster takes place in, people are constantly monitored and, if they are single, brought to a hotel where they have 45 days to find a partner or they will be turned into an animal (usually of their choosing) and sent into the woods. If you were married, but your partner has died, or left you, you have to go to the hotel. This is a society where you are simply not allowed to be on your own.

It is firmly a dystopia, and I say "firmly" because I looked up the etymology of the word "dystopia" and not only is the suffix dys- originally Greek, the word itself is intended to mean "imaginary bad place". A lot of people use the word in a general sense to refer to any fictional society that is oppressive in a nightmarish, exaggerated way, but that all came later; the original meaning of the word does not specify when the world exists or how the society functions, just that it's bad, and it's imaginary. The Lobster is definitely those two things, with its slightly far-fetched plot, but it's also a place- it's somewhere that we can recognize parts of, somewhere that we might be able to identify with depending on how we live or how we're going about trying to enter a relationship. It looks and feels like a place that exists in real life, although the scale of it and the loose ends w/r/t how far into the outside world the philosophy of the hotel and the city stretches are left unanswered.

A recurring theme in The Lobster is that there are no halfways, only absolutes. You can only be gay or straight at the hotel, there is no longer an option to be registered as bisexual. You cannot have a "half" shoe size. And when the film expands outward to explore the fringe society of Loners living singularly in hiding outside of the hotel, the no-halves concept extends there too: It may seem ideal to live on your own if you can't or don't want to find a partner, but the Loner camp is ruled with an iron fist as well, and has several strict rules making it clear that you have absolutely no other options besides being utterly alone, being turned into an animal, or being coupled with another person forever.

The narrative style is typical of Lanthimos' other films, but is unusual as a whole. Rachel Weisz narrates large chunks of the action, giving us an overview of what the main character is thinking and feeling as he is thinking and feeling it. A large percentage of cinema seeks to create a product as close to real life as possible, with all the tear-jerking and frustration that that may entail, but Lanthimos' approach in The Lobster is almost the opposite of that, yet it has similar effects. Through the unemotional, monotone narration, we're not given any cues as to when we should feel bad or feel overjoyed, but those times are still there. It's just that no one reacts to them as they're happening.

The Lobster is a beautiful, horrific, brutal, tender, unique film. It is humorous at times but it's vaguely frightening even in its humor. It's great to see that though Yorgos Lanthimos may have stepped out of the shadows for this one, he has not compromised his vision and style.

The Good Neighbor (2016)

directed by Kasra Farahani
USA
97 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

I had it in my head that The Good Neighbor was going to turn out to be supernaturally-tinged due to what I knew of the plot, which was that two teenagers set up a fake haunting for their neighbor as a "social experiment" and things turn out more real than they anticipated. I thought there was going to be an actual ghost in there somewhere and there definitely wasn't, but this was not disappointing at all. This is a good movie for my nitpicky self because I'm annoying about how I like my horror, and most of the time if there's nothing paranormal I can't get into it like I'd be able to get into other things. But in this case, the lack of a ghost was really not even a concern.

I'm guessing there's gonna be some comparisons to Don't Breathe because the two share a couple of similarities: There's an old guy, there's some teenagers breaking into his house, they find out things about the old guy that they hadn't expected. They're not carbon-copies, but it's enough to notice that The Good Neighbor was probably piggybacking off of Don't Breathe. However, I wanted to make it a point to compare/contrast the two, because I think Don't Breathe is a good starting point to discuss a lot of the reasons why I liked The Good Neighbor.

People were saying about Don't Breathe when it came out that it's a movie that's not afraid to ramp up the adrenaline and give the viewers, first and foremost, scares- even if those scares may come off a little bit cheap or obvious. But where Don't Breathe baits its viewers, The Good Neighbor relies on a subtle, slow(ish) release of information. Or maybe it does bait a little bit, but that's the best thing about it: Curiosity about what any given person does in their alone time is something I think we all share, and an experiment where one would get to see just that sounds interesting, but this movie gives an argument as to why we should never ever do that. It knows that its viewers will be intrigued by the possibility of spying on a stranger, ethically ambiguous as it may be, and it embraces that and uses it to the plot's advantage.

So, is there some deeper moral here? Is some of this intentional irony, a metaphor for the invasiveness of surveillance or possibly the ways people will gawk at public displays of closeness yet seek to invade personal privacy to an increasingly distressing level? Is it a commentary on the withdrawn nature of some of modern society? I hope not, because I'm tired of the "everybody's on their phone these days" camp, and I'd rather not have them in my horror movies. But taken as a whole with no underlying messages, The Good Neighbor is a clever and intelligent film that has more than a few setbacks it manages to evade and overcome.

Sacrificed Youth (1986)

directed by Zhang Nuanxin
China
91 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

Sacrificed Youth is a movie set during the Cultural Revolution in China that follows a young girl gone off to live in a rural Dai village to "chasten herself through work". She finds herself very out of place in the village, being from a large city herself and also accustomed to a drastically different system of government. In places, the story moves at an idyllic, languid pace and represents an ideal of living that probably everyone could stand to benefit from, but it also stands firmly in the realm of coming-of-age movies, and there is no shortage of the awkwardness and feelings of being a misfit that come with that.

One of the reasons this movie is important is because it doesn't look down on the people living in this small village without electricity or books or access to a lot of the modern amenities the main character is used to. It doesn't posit that anybody is better than anybody else, just that standards of living are different. The main character sort of looks down on herself for not being like the Dai villagers. Nobody should be down on themselves for anything unjustified, but we don't really get any of that in America. We usually look down on our native peoples and rural areas, illogically, even though the people there are far, far better than city-dwellers at recognizing the language of nature and having the knowhow to survive outside a city. Every movie should portray its indigenous population's rural life as just as enriching and fulfilling as urban living.

Sacrificed Youth also shows that there are ways to come into yourself and realize your own beauty as well as your love for beautiful things that doesn't necessarily have to stem from a capitalistic desire to be seen, to hoard your jewels and spend all your time beautifying yourself. The standard of beauty in the Dai village is something a lot more traditional than the vanity the main character is trying so hard to escape from, it's as much a tradition as anything else the villagers do. Their beauty rituals are about much more than resembling celebrities or adhering to an unattainable ideal.

Shot on location with a cast made up of who I'm assuming were not "professionally-trained" actors, it's a great window into parts of China that might not see the light of day- or the light of film- that often. A lot of people don't know that "China" as a label is actually not something a lot of people who outsiders would call Chinese apply to themselves and their country, and this is far more complex than I can explain in a reasonable amount of time, but the identity and cultural heritage of the region commonly known as China is more varied and storied than can be kept in a neat and tidy single-word definition. This is a movie for recognizing the diversity of what-we'll-call-China and making time for stories that take place outside of Beijing.

Fair warning for two things, though: The first is that they do butcher an ox onscreen, and the second I'm not so sure how to explain without spoiling things. I'll just say that this movie does not round out as neatly and optimistically as one may come to expect from other films. It seems more concerned with portraying a realistic, emotional situation than catering to a viewer who would like a happy ending. There is also one weird usage of the N-word that I'm hoping was the product of a rather poor translation, because having that in the middle of a movie whose intent seems to be to not look down on anybody was bizarre.

Morgan (2016)

directed by Luke Scott
92 minutes
USA
3.5 stars out of 5
----

A lot of people have been looking forward to Morgan, and thankfully I am not alone in the opinion that Anya Taylor-Joy should do more things and that I should watch all of those things. I don't know if I'd have watched this without her, because it seems to ride too heavily on the coattails of a lot of other movies, yet doesn't quite have the courage to take those others and combine them into something original. The premise is just slightly this, just slightly that, and not enough innovation to surprise anybody.

The current attitude towards artificial intelligence in our society is one of distrust, for the most part. I'm not going to give you any "We live in a world where..." narrative because we've always lived in a world where the distrust of technology is deep-rooted in a large fraction of the population. We've been reaching towards scenarios of technological disaster since the early days of cinema, using the latest and greatest inventions to fuel our worst nightmares of what could go wrong when the ghost gets tired of living in the machine. The difference is that today, the uncanny speculations of what could come next go hand-in-hand with what is already here, and the further we advance into the territory of artificial intelligence, the closer to home such series as Mr. Robot or Person of Interest or films like Morgan can hit.

The driving force behind this film is the fear that something that is like us but tweaked just a bit, or separated by a slim margin from human beings, would be an abomination. Morgan the character is the consciousness of an outsider inside the body of one of our own, an intruder in our society, an outlier whose nature can't be predicted. The way Morgan the film deals with the problem of a potentially hostile artificial intelligence is, however, not very original, and none of the characters surrounding the AI are that likable either. There is a scene in which a psychologist is brought in to analyze Morgan, and before going into her room, he is a total cynic, jaded about his job and not friendly towards his patients. But when he sits down with her, he puts on a mask of congeniality and concern. And that really threw some light on the hypocrisy of Morgan's developers- If this man can act caring while he's in actuality a rigid, sarcastic person, why are we so surprised when the innocent-looking robot is also capable of atrocities?

I think for the most part the bottom line with this film is that it's not quite as deep as it wants to be. It's current, it's stylish, and it's relatable in that it reflects perennial fears of usurping and overthrowing of human intelligence, but it doesn't seem to go much further than the outer reaches of things that have already been said. I saw the ending coming from a mile away and it was interesting, and it probably would have been fairly impressive if I hadn't guessed it so early. All in all this movie is strangely engaging but doesn't stay in your mind for that long after it's ended.

Karakum (1994)

directed by Arend Agthe and Uzmaan Saparov
Germany/Turkmenistan
98 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

Karakum is an obscure German-Turkmen joint effort concerning the adventures of a young German boy trying to get to his father who ends up stranded with a new friend in the sands of Turkmenistan after the two boys' guide falls down a well. It is exactly as uncomplicated as I've just made it sound and it 100% tries to make "falling down a well" a valid cinematic obstacle. The most crucial plot point before the whole well thing is the intrusions of a wily goat into the party's water supply.

The thing about this movie is that it is extremely slow, and although since it is ostensibly a family movie it lacks any feeling of anybody being in serious, life-threatening danger, there could definitely have been more action. That's not to say I wanted there to be any more action; I was fine with the way the plot didn't seem to be in any hurry to get anywhere, content to revolve around two boys in the desert with a big language barrier between them, but it's one of those movies where when it was almost over I looked back on the preceding minutes and I couldn't figure out what all had actually gone on during that time. 98 minutes is stretching it for a movie this simplistic.

I watched it because I was curious to see what Turkmenistan had to offer the film canon at large, seeing as there's not exactly a bottomless well of movies coming out of that part of the world, and I felt like it was probably a decent representation of some of the area in Turkmenistan (having never visited there myself) but it still felt too much like it was all seen from an outside perspective. The context under which a movie was produced and released makes a lot of difference when it's set or shot in any lesser-known region: You have to consider whether the filmmakers were concerned with making the stories of the locale known or if they filmed it solely to entertain more well-off people in their home country. There's a line between ogling at something like this because it suits you aesthetically and watching something while actually caring about the people in it.

I can't say for certain if that line was crossed or meddled with with Karakum because I can't find out much about its production or its reception upon release. I would have liked to see a movie about Turkmenistan coming straight from the source rather than having such a heavy involvement with foreigners, but it doesn't seem like this one wants the viewer to look down upon its characters or portray them as less than capable.

It's also enormously a product of its time. In the opening scene, the German boy is told he can't bring his switchblade comb on the plane, but then he flicks it out, brushes his obnoxious fringe (shoved through the hole in a backwards baseball cap, because this is 1994) and garners big laughs from the security personnel. Family movies are mostly family movies the world over, and this comes with all the trappings one would expect from that- the adults are all rudimentary good/evil archetypes with little development, the optimistic ending is pretty much guaranteed right from the start, and any danger that was there was understated. It's a fun watch, and probably doesn't deserve to be as forgotten as it is, but it's nothing special.

Dog Star Man (1964)

directed by Stan Brakhage
USA
78 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

Dog Star Man consists of four parts and a prelude, usually shown together as one long piece. In the prelude, there's a lot of focus on contrasting cityscapes with the human body and images of the sun and the moon. The combination of sparse shots of city lights and nighttime urban landscapes put against flesh and blood is an already entrancing start, but the city lights do not remain in the film in any strong capacity past the prelude, despite being interesting to look at.

In part one we get the first shots that are recognizable as being what could be called an "action sequence", i.e., a human doing something for more than one second, not spliced or cut up or degraded in any way. It's a person walking in the snow with their dog and an axe, and- though this is conjecture and most likely not Brakhage's intent- this put me in mind of Neolithic man journeying through the wilderness, axe in hand; as the person is wearing modern clothing I'm not sure if this was a narrative intentionally put in or my brain making connections that didn't exist.

From part two onward to the end, we get a lot more solidity than in the prelude, more stable shots with things that are recognizable as being people (and babies), but also a sort of painterly look at the interior of the human body. The things Brakhage does with blood and gore are amazing, he uses imagery of guts and such like Tarkovsky uses long takes: It's both a trademark and an original statement, something no one else does and probably no one else can do. It's almost celebratory, the way he puts our insides right alongside the decay and wide color palette created by the abstract form degraded film stock takes on. It's grotesque, but it feels pure at the same time.

This looks like an effort to put everything in the world on film in as short a timespan as possible. Brakhage, his wife, his baby, their dog, the stars, the sun, the moon, and the frantic mishmash of dead film representing every other possible thing in existence. The presence of Stan Brakhage's family in this film felt, at least to me, like a tremendously intimate act: Here is a filmmaker taking the things dearest to him and depicting them in the way he's most familiar with, using their images as art alongside the abstract and the experimental.

The thing that I kept thinking about during this and I think the thing that interests me the most about tape decay is how it throws a wrench into the concept of the camera as an eye. When the optical element is removed and instead of being pointed at a landscape the projector is fed reels distorted and destroyed into a myriad of colors and textures, it takes the camera and turns it from an eye into a brain. An interface is removed, the "middleman" that the camera is when it conveys people and places is replaced by material coming directly from the artist's hands. This is difficult to describe and I'm sure I'm making no sense at all, but the concept of tape decay as art is a really fascinating thing to me and Dog Star Man is absolutely ahead of its time.

Collective Invention (2015)

directed by Oh-Kwang Kwon
South Korea
93 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

I'm fairly certain that the English title of Collective Invention is a nod to the Jungian concept of archetypes, which isn't a huge leap to make considering how it deals with the effect of celebrities on society at large and the way people tend to project their own agenda onto a singular person who really isn't anything like what they make them out to be. Gu the fishman is a symbol for whatever the people want him to be a symbol for, he exists as a different thing in everybody's subconscious. This was a society that needed somebody like him, so they made him up. They turned him into the second-coming when he could have just been a one-off mutation.

I talk like these events really happened. Honestly, it's all ridiculous, but I'm glad Collective Invention exists; I'm glad I get to analyze a movie where a guy turns into a fish and causes mass hysteria.

The question that this movie poses is whether or not a movie with a premise so far-fetched and fantastical as clinical trials turning a dude into a half-fish, half-human hybrid who then becomes a massive celebrity can actually be a serious film, and the answer to that question is a fairly surprising "yes". If Gu had undergone some other, more realistic transformation following the experiments that were performed on him, this movie would be a solemn, tragic affair. As it is, it's still very tragic- you definitely do feel for the fishman- but something about having Gu's situation be so absurd added some amount of satire to the whole thing. It can be easier in a lot of situations to criticize society if you veil your criticisms with unlikely scenarios and exaggerated characters to stand in for real-life topics.

Collective Invention sits at a kind of crossroads, because if it were slightly more serious, it would never work, but if it were slightly more humorous, it would become slapstick and feel forced. I think it's more clever than it seems on the surface, and I think the choice to make that character into a fish specifically, with his staring eyes and unreadable expression, was a way to throw the viewer off and entice them to- maybe while unaware of it- project whatever they were feeling onto Gu just like the fanatics and devotees in the film.

So keeping Gu's real feelings towards his situation ambiguous was probably the best route to take, but that meant that there were also details left out that I would have loved to see explored further. In a vision test, Gu is shown several small icons of random objects, and when he gets to the picture of a fish, he seems unable to name it. That made me think- How does his transformation affect his view of what separates a person from an amphibian? It may seem pointless to ask these existential questions, but the movie itself invites them to some extent. There's a latent horror there somewhere that, though hidden behind excellent practical effects, lovely cinematography, and sharp wit, is still vaguely disturbing, even if you laugh while being unsettled.