Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

directed by Robert Bresson
France
95 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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Everybody knows Au Hasard Balthazar, it's that art-house film with the donkey. You can find out the basics about it easily enough through synopses and reviews but it's practically impossible to describe to someone who's never seen it exactly why this movie is so affecting. Balthazar the donkey gives one of the best- if not the best- performances of any animal I've ever seen, and whether that's a testament to the ability of the donkey or of the director can't be easily said, nor can it be a fair comparison, really. Robert Bresson directed to the best of his human ability and Balthazar acted to the best of his donkey ability. This makes little sense on paper but neither does anything else about this film.

The use of animals as a measure of a person's compassion is a fairly easy motif for a movie to follow, because it's true-to-life: You really can gauge a person's character by the way they treat creatures that can't reciprocate like other humans would. One of the characters, a sad and mistreated young woman, walks barefoot to Balthazar at night, picking flowers to braid around his head. When I saw that scene I understood immediately the fondness she had for the donkey- I understood that she loved this animal because he was her one good thing, he was the thing that didn't treat her badly. Balthazar serves as an external factor for the characters to bounce their own traits off of so that the viewer can understand who they are, but neglecting to mention the fact that Balthazar is himself a character and is the driving force behind this movie would be gross under-appreciation.

The balance in this movie is a very delicate thing and had it been shifted at all, you could get either something bizarrely comedic or something that comes off like it was intended for children. What's interesting is that Balthazar does not possess any of the preternatural kindness or outgoing personality traits that, say, a dog in another movie would have; he isn't a hero, he doesn't run to the aid of people in need, but somehow he's this... this force of pure good, this silent witness to the cruelty of life. Balthazar is a creature trying to get along like the rest of us, and his position of relative defenselessness and place as an easy target in the eyes of those who wish to do him harm is a statement about human vulnerability as well as the vulnerability of all life; the impermanence of it and the fact that it could so easily be left to wilt along the side of a road when water is just a few steps away.

I am not fluent enough in the language of this particular movement in film during this particular time to be able to say with clarity what, if any, is the overall metaphor of this film. I think it shifts around a lot, sometimes it's what you see on the surface, sometimes it goes deeper. But I think that at times- not all the time, but when he needed to be- Balthazar is a stand-in for all of us, all of humanity except for those who can afford to buy their way out of the struggle at the bottom. Balthazar takes on the weight of the unkindness he is surrounded with, and he incurs the wrath of bored, sadistic minds. He shoulders the burden of impossible things, but the thing is: So do you. So do I. And we all inevitably keep going. It's no great surprise when Balthazar dies at the end of the film, but it's also not a thing of negativity when he eventually passes: Again, as will you, as will I. Au Hasard Balthazar is a movie that embodies every drop of life in its harsh reality, but it also shows that kindness can still exist within an inhospitable climate.

Moebius (1996)

directed by Gustavo Mosquera R.
Argentina
88 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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There's something innately comforting in riding public transport (providing that nobody is trying to rob or grope you) and there's something innately uncomfortable about a situation where that comfort is taken away. The dialogue in the opening scenes of Moebius talks to the viewer about how trains and buses are transitional spaces for entire populaces, places where anonymity is virtually guaranteed; they assure you a kind of privacy where nobody wants any trouble and nobody wants to know anybody else's business. With this in mind, Moebius takes us on a journey along the rails to somewhere where these rules of conduct are up-ended.

When an entire train vanishes without warning from an otherwise high-functioning underground rail system, a topography and math expert- our main character- is called in to investigate where it's gone and how to get it back. His search leads him to some strange places, because where do you have left to search but the strange places when something as impossible as a traincar full of people disappearing happens?

This is not what I'd call a horror movie, not in the conventional sense- it touches on something deep and unsettling hidden in the calculations and problems only encountered when one leaves the arena of simple math and enters higher territory that infringes on the bounds of reality we take for granted. This movie knows what to do with open space; shots of characters contrasted against concrete walls and florescent lights and endless tunnels enforce a feeling of foreboding, but instead of any bogeyman with claws and fangs, it's a little math discrepancy that could have you wink out of existence. Sometimes it's so intriguing that you forget it's a little frightening, and for some people, it's unlikely this will be a scary movie at all- it takes focus and probably no small amount of experience in this kind of quasi-scientific disturbance to get why exactly the scenario presented in this movie is frightening.

On that note, it's very self-aware about what kind of horror it deals with. At one point a character quickly walks by a large sign that says "Borges", and I was thinking "Yeah, Borges, I know, you don't need to remind me".

What this also reminds me of is one of the better and more cerebral episodes of Fringe. I know especially towards the end Fringe got kind of wacky and the pseudo-science turned a lot of people off from it, and Moebius is not exactly playing according to concrete laws of physics either, but in the earlier seasons when Fringe was restricted more to the real world, when a little error in physics or biology would come up and create something that was frightening because it was impossible, it's the same feeling Moebius gives off. It also reminds me of the "Moving sofa problem"- an as-of-yet unsolved math problem that states that it's impossible to determine exactly what size a sofa has to be to fit around an L-shaped bend. 

Maybe this isn't your kind of horror- if you even consider it horror- or maybe you don't like math (neither do I). But this is one for the train nerds, the architecture nerds, and the topography nerds, and those are a subset of interests that don't have a whole lot of media pertaining to their particular areas of fascination to turn to, so I hope someday this excellent movie can be more widely known.

Rapture Adrenaline (2009)

directed by James Ferraro
USA
94 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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To keep this preface short- James Ferraro is a ridiculously prolific and talented "experimental" (for lack of a better term) musician who, along with Spencer Clark, formed The Skaters, maybe the most well-known of his non-solo projects. But he also has an incredible amount of solo monikers, mostly one-off cassette releases that are all but impossible to find. I'm a huge fan of his stuff but I was somehow unaware that he made a movie until very recently.

Rapture Adrenaline can only be loosely called a movie, but that's okay, because I'm sure there are those who would argue that his music can only be loosely called music. Apparently there was supposed to be a plot, but I've completely lost it- though I don't think the statement of a plot existing within the universe of Rapture Adrenaline is an entirely futile thing. All 95 minutes of it are composed of clips from action movies and ads from the 90s to early 2000s: a bunch of Mortal Kombat footage, that awful Rumpelstiltskin movie, Ms. Doubtfire, pro wrestling, and many others that aren't as easily identified. The concept of having a common plot throughout these movies, one major archetype that the viewer can follow from film to film to film, is interesting; and Ferraro's whole oeuvre is basically centered around the anthropological concept that every single form of culture emerging from the "modern" age (meaning the last two decades or so) has been around since the beginning of time in some form or another.

One thing that I noticed while watching all these godawful action movie clips is that during the late 90s and early 2000s while we were in this era of outrageously violent movies and video games, we also had this preoccupation with the ancient past. The whole "cursed Egyptian (or other culture du jour) artifact" theme is still kicking, but this was a time where nearly every single movie had ties to an ancient civilization. I realized that the driving force behind this is that we wanted to think their violence wasn't like our violence. We wanted to think that when an ancient Egyptian king died, it was somehow more noble than death today. We wanted to feel like if you called yourself a warrior and practiced martial arts, kicking the stuffing out of somebody made your violence more courageous. And we wanted to think this about the future, too- all the shiny CGI robots and aliens with awful facial prosthetics were also a stand-in for our desire to find a period in time where violence and war would somehow be more beautiful, more worthwhile; because being stuck in a rich country with its hands around other countries' throats was a reality we didn't- and don't- want to own up to.

Rapture Adrenaline is quite different from James Ferraro's musical output, but it holds the same concepts. Had it been soundtracked exclusively by him, it would have been a different experience, but then we would have lost the awkward post-grunge chunky, choppy guitar riffs and overhyped vocals. It's really not an experience that everybody would enjoy because it's draining in a way, and you feel like you've been staring at the sun after it's finished, but watching actors who have faded into obscurity fight and moan and shout and kiss and give witty one-liners on green screens and in random deserts is a strange feeling that makes you consider some truths about American culture.

The Great White Silence (1924)

directed by Herbert G. Ponting
UK
108 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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I have a great interest in the Heroic Era of Antarctic Exploration, and now you're going to hear about it.

The Great White Silence is a firsthand account of Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition, during which he became, by margin of just over a month, the second person to reach the South Pole. It was also the expedition that lead to him and his entire polar party's death during his return journey from the Pole, after three years spent in the Antarctic. The filmmaker behind this documentary survived along with his film and along with a decent amount of other crewmembers- it was not a complete loss, but due to the disappointment of having placed second in the race for the pole, it's possibly the most well-known South Pole expedition. Scott's diaries also survived, and the optimistic tone he takes even while probably knowing full well that him and his men were at death's door makes the whole mission an unusual story. They also had a black ship's cat they named the N-word, so you know, white guys are the same throughout history.

The thing that interests me about this era is the mindset of those who undertook the journey. They were all invariably doing it to garner recognition for whatever flag they claimed as their homeland, and there's a deep sense of national pride when one watches The Great White Silence. People went forth, and people died- people knew they might die, people saw the history of polar exploration and the disasters it could bring and they did it anyway, over and over, man-hauling and hunting every last miserable animal they could find to feed themselves until eventually they would succumb. Having the ship get stuck in the ice and needing to winter over for multiple years wasn't just a possibility, it was something to be expected. For that reason there is an undercurrent of madness to the Heroic Era in my mind, and it's what makes it so fascinating.

The personality behind this documentary is not excluded in the way modern documentarians tend to avoid placing themselves in the spotlight. Herbert Ponting shows us not only the lives of the crew he sailed with but his own filming methods and what he personally found astonishing; often no one in the general populace would have seen these things before. There are multiple shots of the Terra Nova breaking its way through ice floes, and when I saw them, I thought in passing "Oh, they strapped the camera to the side of the ship?", and those thoughts were answered by a still photo of Ponting suspended in midair on a jury-rigged contraption of planks and pulleys multiple feet over the side of the ship, holding his camera.

As much as there is a feeling of importance and novelty in this documentary, there's also a feeling of naïveté when you consider the ultimate fate of the expedition. Ponting had no way of knowing that his would be the mission that would bring the Heroic Age to a close, and that one of the most famous British polar explorers of the time would not return with him. So he shoots penguins- lots and lots of penguins, and he narrates their lives to us in an irreverent (if anthrocentric) commentary. An hour and change of penguins, gulls, seals, sledge-dogs and -ponies, and an elegy hidden between the lines for not only Scott himself but the whole of British Antarctic exploration.

Kagbeni (2008)

directed by Bhusan Dahal
Nepal
114 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I was interested in this one because it's from Nepal- genuinely 100% Nepal, not made by outsiders and set in Nepal. I don't know if I've ever heard of any other horror movies from Nepal, and I'm always enthusiastic about horror made in countries that don't make regular contributions to the genre, because most mainstream horror follows a specific (and terrible) path these days, and deviations are very much welcome. I guess I was glossing over Kagbeni whenever I saw it because the poster highlights its one-off kissing scene, which doesn't have an impact on any other part of the plot whatsoever.

So, what is it? Ostensibly a supernatural drama adapted from the short story The Monkey's Paw. I say "ostensibly" because that's what it says it is, but if you didn't tell me, I'd assume it had nothing at all to do with that story. The paw does make an appearance, but the characteristic elements of the original story, such as not being able to get a second chance no matter how badly you want it, as well as other hubristic acts committed out of desperation, are all absent. I thought at first that the time spent establishing the relationship between the two main characters at the beginning was a good thing, setting us up so we'd care about the characters before the plot devastated them, but all it turned out to be was an indicator that the brunt of the film would have little to do with monkey paws or poorly-interpreted wishes.

That familiarity with the main characters that it tries to insert is also heavily based on misogyny. Maybe it's relatable if you are a guy who jokes with his guy friends about women as if they're a hobby you all indulge in on occasion. But if you're any gender other than brodude, it reeks of the same stale sexism that is prevalent in nearly every country on Earth.

Let me just rewind for a second though because I am trashing this movie and it doesn't deserve it. Only a little trashing is justified. Because it's a decent movie; it's somewhat engaging and I suppose the nearly two hours of its runtime don't ever feel that trying or boring, it's just that it completely failed to meet my expectations. Now, that's not a point I'd usually judge a movie on since expectations are subjective, but I'm bringing it up because I honestly had the bare minimum of expectations (I.E. something that vaguely followed the plot of The Monkey's Paw) and I got the opposite of that. I suppose I don't have any well-defined problems with the movie, it's just unfortunate that it strays so far from what should have been a pre-made plot. I was so game for a Nepali gothic horror.

Moana (1926)

directed by Robert J. Flaherty, Frances H. Flaherty
USA/Samoa
61 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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Oh yes. The new Moana is currently a sensation with kids the world over, which means, of course, it's time to ignore that and watch the 90-year-old Moana.

The thing to understand about old Moana is that it's fake. It's docufiction. The guy who made Nanook of the North (similarly fake) got paid by Paramount Pictures and rolled up in Samoa with 16 tons of camera equipment with the intention of repeating the success of Nanook. Very, very little you see in Moana is- or was- genuine Samoa tradition at the time: the director set up pretend interpersonal relationships between unrelated individuals based on how "photogenic" they seemed, he had them dress differently than they would have in day-to-day life, perform customs and do activities that had become obscure by that time, and most notably paid a very large sum to the lead actor to get a traditional tattoo, a process that is extraordinarily painful. I guess everybody probably used their real names, at least- probably. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was all fictional too.

It's not that there's no merit in going somewhere and deliberately casting indigenous actors to act out roles that would fit into their society. But Moana ignores the fitting into their society part- it creates a picture of what Samoan life should look like according to outsiders, and it insulates the belief people over in England and the States and in other citified areas of the world had about these peoples' daily lives. It sweeps all the staging under the carpet and presents us with a watered-down and in some instances completely wrong peephole into Samoa.

I suppose some good could have come of it, seeing as at the time I think the number of movies coming out that involved actual Samoans was hovering somewhere around zero. Robert J. Flaherty and his wife/collaborator drew some attention to that locale and hey, maybe they sparked somebody's interest in going there and making an actual documentary about the residents that wasn't fake. And it is definitely not a disparaging or insulting film. But the way it's harmful is in how it looks to regress Samoan tradition into the past when it just wasn't like that at the time- Samoans leading modern lives (influenced, of course, by colonization) just wasn't enough for Western audiences. They needed to see a people that were quainter than them, more peaceful, more simple. They needed to see a Samoa full of people who acted like characters in a play that they could predict the actions of and giggle at as a novelty.

Like I said, there's not a total lack of merit. I don't doubt that some- possibly even a lot- of Moana catches Samoan people living their lives in an authentic way. But it's the mission behind this kind of filmmaking and the incentive of the director to, at the behest of a huge film studio, go and just decide what the indigenous population should do in a way that conflicted with how they would have acted naturally that bothers me.

The Lights (2016)

directed by Christopher Krupa, Sam Kinlyside
Australia
70 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I kind of took a chance on this seeing as it's really a no-name, out-of-nowhere type of deal that was apparently made for just under $11,000 USD. The most "famous" actor in it has the distinction of being credited as "Dead man" in the mildly successful Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead. I've been burned by these kinds of things recently and had to quit on a bunch of movies that were so terrible that I couldn't continue watching them. But I'm very glad I did put my faith in The Lights, because though it may be rough around the edges and come from left field, I thought it was excellent.

It keeps a lot of things ambiguous, which, whether intentional or the product of a lot of horror filmmakers throwing their hands in the air and shrugging when faced with explaining their creature, is usually for the best. We know that the titular lights are some kind of UFO phenomena and that they're responsible for the disappearance (and re-appearance) of numerous missing persons, but why? How? Who are these creatures taking people and blinding bystanders with a brilliant light? How are the visions all the characters seem to be experiencing of distorted versions of themselves connected to the lights? What happens once you go into the light? Maybe all the unanswered questions are objectively a bad thing, but I always enjoy having a few loose ends to nag at me when I finish watching a horror movie.

The Lights feels like it stands for the "common" paranormal experience; the friend of a friend of a friend who says he was abducted by aliens, the persistent urban legend, the weird aircraft you think you saw one night. The events of this movie are what happens to those people who go missing one day with no trace and no explanation. It lacks the sensationalism of big-name Hollywood horror and it would probably not be warmly received if in a parallel universe the people who made it were rich and successful, as opposed to new filmmakers on a budget. The low production value is the thing that keeps it "real", and the actors might not be the most polished or be able to give the greatest dramatic performances but they feel like a group of friends and, in the end, a singular friend left to grapple with the reality of her experiences.

I realize that yes, a lot of the effects were bad, and yes, it leans way too heavily on jump scares. Multiple times I got uncomfortable watching it because it kept throwing in bursts of loud static out of nowhere with no warning. I guess I was just happy to see something not be so typical, you know? I know it's not the most in-depth movie but there's a lot of huge horror films that can't compete with this type of drive and originality. I'm giving it four stars because I simply don't see any reason not to. I genuinely enjoyed this and I wish I could say that about more things.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

directed by André Øvredal
UK
86 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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The Autopsy of Jane Doe hinges on that most irresistible of plots: A body with a backstory; a crime with no evidence save for a corpse with a tale to tell. Several impossibilities plague our lead morticians, things that just shouldn't be. Real-life mortuary workers might hate it, criminologists of all kinds might think it cliched and too unrealistic to watch, but for the general public, a mystery centered around a corpse with weird details to it is fascinating.

If you plan at all to watch this, for your enjoyment's sake, please stop reading here. It's better to go in with no idea what's to come, and I'm going to discuss enough spoilers here that it would take away from the impact of the film.

So we are presented with a crime scene, and subsequently with the body of a young woman with extensive internal injuries yet a pristine exterior. She's a total mystery, no ID, no solid cause of death. The title of the movie isn't misleading, by the way- There's wall-to-wall practical effects in this one, really stretching the limits of what's possible at the moment to create incredibly gorgeous autopsy scenes that are virtually indistinguishable from an actual corpse and its actual innards. This is a great example of a movie that has a significant amount of gore but doesn't feel like it's showing off or trying to give the viewers a cheap, edgy shock.

This is a juicy locked-room mystery with mysterious goings-on both inside and outside the room. A storm rages outside like the whole world knows who's on that slab. This is a Twilight Zone episode on steroids, this is a nightmare. This is a rational world where the dead should never come back to life, but they do, and I loved it. I can't find any other, more eloquent ways to express just how head over heels I am for this film. This is the last new movie I watched in 2016 and I'm so glad I didn't wait until later. A five-star rating and a comfortable spot at #5 in my favorites list is guaranteed for this.

It's just... so much more than it has to be. It keeps throwing punches. I was content with the apocalyptic chaos to have been the result of nothing but two guys meddling with a weird corpse, but it goes beyond that and then beyond that even more. The final reveal of Jane Doe's identity (or maybe not her identity so much as her... profession?) made me gasp out loud and clap. I know I've got a problem with hyperbole but when a movie this spectacular is still fresh in my mind it's impossible for me not to want to talk about nothing but how much it amazed me.