Kill List (2011)

directed by Ben Wheatley
UK
95 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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This isn't the first time I've watched Kill List, and contrary to the usual reasons why I re-watch movies, I wasn't asleep the first time. Shortly after I watched it originally I saw so many opinions that conflicted with my view of the movie that I figured I was going to have to watch it over again sometime.

One thing that's agreed upon pretty much across the board is that Kill List is a love-it-or-hate-it type of deal. There's people who liked the first three-quarters, but hated where it went in the end, and there's people who liked the ending but were bored by everything preceding it. Taken piecemeal, there's a lot of things you catch upon second viewing that you wouldn't have noticed the first time because you weren't looking for them, and ultimately I think this is one of the few cases where it's questionable whether or not it's better to go into it without the knowledge that it takes a dramatic turn at the end.

I'll try to avoid spoilers, but suffice to say: Something does happen. Watching this I was reminded of why I started to like Ben Wheatley's style of filmmaking in the first place; even before the sharp turn there's a feeling of building dread that I rarely see outside of supernatural horror movies and it's a very interesting way to make a movie about violence. Something is looming over the landscape and over the lives of all the characters, and at times it comes out as this choreographed frenzy of pain and blood but most of the time it's just there, in the background, watching. As you could guess from the title, the main character gets a job as a hitman, and the people on the hit list he's given gradually begin to seem strangely aware of what he's got planned for them, and strangely okay with it. It reads almost like the hitman's internal worldview is influencing the outside world, and the total strangers addressing him directly are perhaps a manifestation of his own feelings towards his profession. Even without the ending, this is a brilliantly shot and soundtracked look at existential violence, and an exploration of human nature that elevates itself to an almost metaphysical level.

I'm actually upping my own personal rating on this because it's just so signaturely Wheatley that it made me glad that filmmakers like him (& his writing partner Amy Jump) exist today. I would watch a movie on absolutely any subject if he directed it, because I know he'd be able to work it into something unnerving and monumental no matter what it was.

Rapsodia Satanica (1917)

directed by Nino Oxilia
Italy
55 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Rapsodia Satanica opens with Alba, its well-off protagonist, making her way through a party. She has gotten old, and the throng of young people around her serves to remind her that her youth was fleeting and far away. She moves through the crowds wrapped in layers of black clothing, looking for all the world like the Red Death in black, except this time the meaning is reversed: Instead of the spectre reminding partygoers of their over-indulgence, she grasps for a little more opportunity to enjoy that indulgence herself.

While she walks the halls, the figure of Mephistopheles climbs out of a painting and follows her, striking a deal with her to temporarily give back her youth; a deal that is as ill-fated as classic stories always tell it to be. This is some interesting imagery, because it felt to me like a holdover from the era before cinema when the best way to tell a story was to just verbally tell the story- in oral tradition and ghost-story-retellings it's much easier to get your listeners to suspend their disbelief enough so that a person climbing out of a painting is not an unusual occurrence. In film you kind of have to justify it more, you have to present a scenario in which something like that could happen before you can actually show it happening, but I think Rapsodia Satanica still existed in a time where viewers could accept implausible things.

For 1917, the makeup is really something else. Sure it's awkward, and Mephistopheles has big dastardly eyebrows, but there's something subtle about it as well that I can't explain secondhand. All of Alba's ages are played by the same young woman, and the only thing they do to make her look elderly is take off most of her makeup and maybe paint a few lines on her face, and I thought that was striking, perhaps unintentionally. Vanity, even in this early age, was such that a woman presented without makeup onscreen was the "before" picture, so to speak, the fate that was to be avoided.

In the end, you realize that there is no devil here. There's the archetype of a trickster, an opportunistic demon, but he's not even the worst this film has to offer. All there is to this is an old woman realizing her time is limited.

Monkeyshines no. 1, 2, & 3 (1890)

directed by William K. L. Dickson and William Heise
USA
~3 minutes (total)
4.5 stars out of 5
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Something a little different today. There are three Monkeyshines segments, which are each roughly a minute long and are probably the very first instances of a motion picture (shot in America, anyway). They were made around 1889-1890.

A lot of reviewers are open about finding them boring and inconsequential, which I totally understand, because objectively, these films are basically nothing. Somebody at Edison's studio probably just went "Hey, anybody want to test out this camera?" and then they got somebody to come over and wave their arms around a bunch. But looking at it as a part of the historical record and considering just how far we've come with movies in 127 years is pretty jaw-dropping. Time moves- relatively speaking- at a breakneck speed these days, and when I think about the fact that some of the primitive artwork in places like Lascaux and Chauvet cave have, just for one example, a period of five thousand years between them, and then I think about the time between the invention of the movie camera and Disney earning an average of $124.7 million dollars in gross revenue every time they release a new film... I become aware that I am living in a blink of an eye.

You can find these easily enough on YouTube, but #3 might be lost according to which source you're looking at.

You Are Here (2010)

directed by Daniel Cockburn
Canada
79 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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So Daniel Cockburn had only done video art installations prior to You Are Here, which made me assume (correctly) that the narrative style was going to be a little bit different than usual. I'm not even totally sure this has anything that could be defined as a narrative; several characters seem to exist in multiple roles, sometimes as both narrator and character, and it defies the traditional beginning-middle-end structure. I was under the impression that it had something to do with time-travel, and for a little while I was thinking "Alright, cool, this is the kind of lo-fi sci-fi film I love watching", but slowly the shape of it is revealed and it proves itself to be much, much more difficult to classify.

I'm going to try and explain a little bit of what it's about, inasmuch as a "plot" can be deciphered from any of this. For the most part it's got to do with thought experiments, and there's a couple of segments that are loosely connected that each seem to describe an individual thought experiment, but there's also a running storyline about a woman who acts as an archivist for materials she finds laying about on the streets. These materials- which are film canisters, manila envelopes full of slides, pictures, and other media- seem to be meant for her in some intrinsic way, but also, the more she tries to archive them according to what she deems the most appropriate way, the more the media actively resists her. The contents of her archives appear to mostly be the thought experiments, so it is unclear whether or not the story of the archivist is the only "true" story while everything else exists only on films within the film.

The definitions of half of the words I just used up there are blurred to incomprehensibility. The notion of fiction and nonfiction is ignored and violated. Where the archivist fits into everything or if she even has a place in it at all is of no consequence. Who is the main character? Are there any characters? Could the viewer be the real main character? It's really anybody's guess.

One thing that I did not anticipate about this movie is that it's unsettling in a persistent, gnawing way. There's no outward danger threatening any of the characters, and nobody in the film has a motive that's explicitly nefarious, but it imparted upon me the kind of anxiety I feel when I try to comprehend things like the existence of a black hole with 40 billion times the mass of the sun. Something in You Are Here speaks of a truly infinite universe in which nothing is impossible, just improbable, and the laws that govern probability have begun to break down. You get the feeling that there's a lot happening just outside the lines in this movie, that what you're seeing onscreen is the byproduct of some external force or happenstance coinciding with the events of the film. In actuality there's probably as many ways to interpret this movie as there are stars in the sky, so in the end, this review means nothing.

Lessons of Darkness (1992)

directed by Werner Herzog
Germany
54 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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Lessons of Darkness is unusual both as a documentary and as a Werner Herzog film, although Herzog himself is an unusual director. It doesn't necessarily aim to verbally explain its subject, which is the overwhelming terror of Kuwaiti oil field fires, but instead it focuses on what we can learn from isolated footage of the fields. Its perspective seems to be one that embraces its status as an outsider for an change, and much of it is shot through the lens of an alien observer, almost literally- it's easy to feel like you're in a spacecraft, overlooking some ruined landscape on another planet far away from here. But the devastation, the all-over blackness, the quiet following the inferno: It's all ours.

There's something interesting going on in this film in how it looks at silence and the ability to speak. There are few interviews, but the subjects all seem to have had their speech affected in some way by the trauma they've endured during the last days of the first Gulf War, and though their faculties appear to be physically intact, their voices have been lost in response to the circumstances they were under. Silencing the witnesses like this is a form of devastation that can accompany the aftermath of war, and it's something that passive audiences might not think about; that the people whose stories most need to be heard are those who no longer have the ability to tell them. And I think there's something deliberate about that enforcing of silence.

Some of the best aerial photography I've seen in recent memory brings the viewer to a landscape that really, truly seems to be the end of the world. When the helicopter passes over acres and acres of totally ruined desert, immense lakes of oil, burnt and blackened shrubs with oil clinging to them, and the skeletal wrecks of machinery and vehicles, it made me wonder how the rest of the world has not been consumed by this same fire. Because it seems so easy when you watch it here- you see how easily it's all set ablaze, how a single match thrown into a gusher of oil can instantly turn it into a raging column of fire. It can make one nervous. It can feel like this is what's slowly coming for every corner of civilization. Could it really all be burnt desert someday? Could the struggle for resources finally overcome humanity's ability to rebuild itself?

The narration and the stand-alone imagery stays pretty far away from recognizable politics, but there's one line from one of the interviews- "The soldiers came at night, while the children were sleeping". The horror of that line holds sway over the entire movie from the moment it's said; any footage of workers in the fields, whether American or otherwise, you could hear the echo of that line over their faces and voices. This is only 54 minutes, but it's a hypnotic, captivating thing that could have gone on for hours. But at the same time I so desperately wish that there wasn't enough of this to fill even ten minutes of film.

Maria, the Wonderful Weaver (1959)

directed by Aleksandr Rou
Russia
74 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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So the first thing to consider with Maria, the Wonderful Weaver is that it's primarily targeted at young children, and therefore watching it as an adult is inevitably going to expose a myriad of flaws that a child might not have noticed. The important thing is that kids found it entertaining and could watch it without having any sinister agenda pushed on them, and this movie more or less accomplishes both of those things.

I also don't know if it was based off of an already-existing fairytale or not (what, your parents never told you about Grandmother Falsehood?), but it's got all the archetypes of one: the canny, mature hero, a lost little boy, a kidnapped damsel in distress and a ludicrously mean villain with a hidden lair and a host of cronies, each with their own individual personality as well. Our main character is a retired soldier, he's done serving his time and he's ready to go home. But he runs across a little boy who doesn't know where his mother is, and because our soldier is not like part-time retail workers who won't even think about helping a customer if they're on break, he brings the boy on a quest to find out where his mother has gone.

The majority of its entertainment value if you're watching it as an adult actually doesn't come from the story (or the singing, or the dancing...) but from the way it's put together. It's obviously dated, so there's none of the shimmery special effects that kids' movies boast nowadays, and the practical effects are relatively decent for their time, but there's something a little bit off about all the greasepaint and fairy-dust that makes it look almost pitiful. The rapid switching between an actual bear and somebody in a goofy bear suit is the first tipoff that this is going to hold some comedic value, and before long we get such wonders as "underwater" scenes that are just waves projected over a normal set, "coral" that's clearly branches and twigs painted red, and all sorts of lovely, bizarre costuming for the underwater wizard's legion of lackeys.

I can't put my finger on exactly why all of this adds up to become something very vaguely unnerving. It's like being taken behind the scenes on a carnival ride or seeing the animatronics at Disneyland without their cartoonish skins- as soon as you know how something works, you can no longer focus on its exterior, you're just thinking about the mechanism behind it. Characters seem slightly too tall or too big for the sets; so little of the sets actually allow for interaction that it's like everybody is performing in front of a flat screen; the knowledge of the widespread abuse of "trained" bears makes the cute little bear cubs' antics feel a little less than magical. Surely it's got a gorgeous paint job, but under it all is nothing more than the same cast of adults who could take off their disguises and then turn around and make a movie about some brutal topic right after this one.

This only matters if you're not a child, of course. It's easier to find no fault with a magical environment plopped down in front of you when you're a kid- I miss being able to suspend my disbelief that hard. And even as an adult, it's a fun, kooky watch, but the framework of it falls apart once taken out of the vacuum of the late 1950s.

BBC's Dead of Night: The Exorcism (1972)

directed by Don Taylor
UK
50 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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Like the majority of 70s BBC anthology series (and a good chunk of their series today) this starts out very stuffy. Two wealthy couples have a dinner party together around Christmastime and they discuss things at length that are not interesting. But, as is also the case with most BBC genre series, the "genre" part slowly begins to worm its way in relatively soon, and although it doesn't show itself outright, from pretty early on in The Exorcism you've already got a heavy feeling that something sinister is in the house with the characters.

At first it manifests as a kind of thought experiment: One member of one of the couples demonstrates how you can influence the mind externally by blindfolding someone and convincing them they're touching things they're not, like they do with bowls of spaghetti and grapes and whatnot in haunted houses. He runs an ice cube down his wife's cheek and convinces her it's a razorblade, proving his point that you could "kill a man with a drop of water on the back of his neck". I assumed from this that the rest of the runtime was going to follow a similar path, and that the ultimate goal of this was going to be to show an is-it-or-isn't-it grey area between natural and supernatural that makes the boundary between the two as foggy as it can get. I was prepared for that, and I liked it- this isn't the kind of thing that uses mind games for cheap shocks.

But after a while things start happening to the house, and to the people within it. Sensations are inflicted upon them that one feels, but not the other, or vice versa. And eventually the prospect of thought experiments is abandoned entirely in favor of a larger, more horrifying truth, though it does not, as you'd expect, involve an exorcism in any conventional sense.

Anna Cropper playing the character of Rachel gives this 10+-minute-long monologue towards the tail end of the episode that's just absolutely bonkers. I mean out of this world. It changes the entire climate of the story and until then I had been under the assumption that the acting was as stuffy as the initial atmosphere. Suddenly everything made more sense; the flippant and casual mentions of socialism and Marxism throughout the first half were no longer weird jokes but are reminiscent of the way upper-class people in real life talk about politics as if they don't affect actual people. It goes from ghost story to searing commentary on greed and inequality and back to ghost story again. The really frightening thing is that this is still as relevant as it was in the 1970s and it gets more relevant in more and more countries with each passing day.

Bottom of the World (2017)

directed by Richard Sears
USA-Canada co-production
85 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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There's a certain subset of movies that seem like they're going to be these mind-bending journeys through the subconscious, when in reality all they are is run-of-the-mill relationship dramas with a couple twists and a hazy, dreamy atmosphere laid over everything. Not all of these movies are necessarily bad, but my issue is that the motivation behind them isn't anything innovative. This is what I was prepared for Bottom of the World to be, and thankfully, this is not what I actually got.

The first thing I thought when I started this movie was "Wow, somebody's got a thing for Mulholland Drive". This bleeds David Lynch worship and the overall exhaustion of the American dream/late-20th/21st-century disillusionment aesthetic that he and other modern surrealist filmmakers tend to use often. Characters wake up in a corny retro-themed motel in the middle of the desert, bathed in neon pink light, and a preacher is vigorously trying to save somebody's soul on the television (or is he?). The desert goes on for miles, longer than it should, it's dusty and hot and yet somehow the microcosm of the motel embodies everything that needs to be said about midwest Americana. If this were set in the south I could call it Southern Gothic but instead I just call it the way things are in the midwest.

I couldn't shake the feeling during all of this that it was very "surface". Like, it's this attractive couple traipsing all over the place with disregard for money or anything else, casually enjoying their privilege and telling long stories with less impact than they should have had about how they used to torture disabled people when they were kids. It's too flippant about all this, very little about it looks authentic, it's just visuals with no meat to it.

I did get to thinking after a while, though, that the boundary between a thing and an imitation of that thing is often blurred or doesn't even exist at all. What do I judge this movie against, and how do I determine that it's a pale imitation of an aesthetic and not a successful assimilation into that aesthetic? How do I define David Lynch worship versus a faithful entry into the sub-sub-movement of cinema inspired by David Lynch?

There is something really unsettling lying under all of this, and I think some of the acting or the dialogue may have been a bit too flat to get that message across one hundred percent of the time. Jena Malone does a great job, but unfortunately she's not present in every single scene, instead we get Douglas Smith, who's alright, but he's... alright. I didn't get the feeling that his character was deep or developed enough for my personal taste. Sometimes it's flat-out goofy, sometimes you can't get past the fact that some guy who sounds like Darth Vader in a gross old ski mask is shouting about digging holes, or that our main character is having a serious existential crisis over the presence of a rotten pea in an otherwise normal batch of peas. But other times it succeeds in becoming something more; other times it's a portrait of the wide, terrifying expanse that is the sparsely-populated desert regions of the US and the fragility of memory and identity. My overall opinion of this movie is that I really dug it, but I felt like I should or could have been digging it even more.