Blue Mountains, or Unbelievable Story (1983)

directed by Eldar Shengelaia
Georgia
97 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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The beginning and end of my reason for watching Blue Mountains (or Unbelievable Story) is because it's from Georgia and I like Georgia a lot. I'm not inclined to watch comedy movies voluntarily, though, because the majority of them tend to feel forced to me, so I'm glad this one turned out good.

Blue Mountains uses a style of comedy that's recognizable in any locale. The cast of characters each have their specific action that they do, and they're all defined by it, more or less: The guy who keeps complaining about people playing sports outside. The spacey old guy who doesn't really realize he's barging in on people and just wants to get his book published. The cute secretary. The old lady. Everybody's basically a cliche, but they're all played well and it doesn't feel forced or awkward.

The main character also has his defining traits and it's after the book he's trying to get published that the movie is named, but he's just about as big a factor in the movie as anybody else is, which is to say not too much. We don't get any backstory on him, we don't see where he lives or anybody close to him, we just see him being this trod-upon character who's constantly having his desires passed over by everybody else because they're all involved in their own lives. I did feel like the characterization left something to be desired, not just of the MC but of everyone, but due to the ensemble-ish nature of the whole thing, I guess that was to be expected. I would recommend it more to somebody who's used to British-style comedy though because it does get to be a bit bland after a while and I personally am accustomed to quicker-paced humor. Most of the gags come from things the characters do in the background that go unspoken but are still always there.

There's a couple of interesting motifs that are used as well- The motorcyclists outside keep on playing and the grapes on the balcony keep on growing; despite how hectic life inside the apartment block is, life outside continues to go on. And it takes a page from Zazie dans le métro (and several other films) and comes to a close with the destruction of the apartment building due to the actions of builders dynamiting out a subway tunnel under it, which is another thing representing progress being underway while the inhabitants of the building get caught up in their own flurry of activity.

Robinson in Space (1997)

directed by Patrick Keiller
UK
78 minutes
4 stars
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Watching this made me think about something I'd never thought of before: The line past which a documentary becomes an experimental film and vice versa. There's a lot of movies that belong solidly to the experimental canon that are, in reality, just shots of various scenery- I think about Dog Star Man, Stemple Pass, Russian Ark, Water and Power, and basically whatever is generally considered to be "classic" in terms of experimental cinema, and it occurs to me that all of these share much the same quality as Robinson in Space: Static shots of a number of things, no onscreen interference from actors or a director, yet somewhat of an "agenda" in its production nonetheless.

I guess the thing that could be said to set Robinson in Space apart from classic avant-garde cinema is the presence of a fully articulated narration, but seeing as we don't see either the narrator or his... friend? colleague? lover? Robinson at any point in the film, and seeing as the camera doesn't move much and just gives us static shots of different places around England, it can barely be said that this is any kind of documentary at all. I believe this was shown on TV when it was released, which is interesting because public-access television is not the first place I'd turn to for explorations of the further reaches of documentary filmmaking.

That agenda that I spoke about comes in the form of the narrator relating how his and Robinson's faceless, mysterious employer instructed them to make a documentary on "the problem of England". What this problem is is never directly touched upon, nor is it even mentioned beyond the narrator making clear what his motivation for the film was in the very beginning.

Whatever its intent, it's an interesting look at a modern-day England (though it is 20 years ago by now) that's bulldozed, paved, fenced off, and stuffed to bursting with smog, slag, coal, steel, garbage, and other byproducts of society. The problem of England could be interpreted as actually being England itself- where demand increases rapidly and is supplied by unclean fuel, cheap materials imported from overseas, and destruction of the environment. Politics comes into play only very infrequently but it would appear that this documentary is not entirely happy with the state of England as it's shown within.

The Triangle (2017)

directed by Andrew Rizzo, Lee Rizzo, Brick Patrick, Nathaniel Peterson, & Ciara Rose Griffin
USA
94 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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(going to talk about some thematic spoilers in here, also this is a movie you should go into knowing as little as possible. ok that's it)

The Triangle is about as close-knit as you can get: Every actor plays "themselves", the main actors directed and produced it, the compound it takes place in was apparently actually in operation for the two weeks it took to shoot the movie, and a lot of the reactions are unscripted. Nearly everything happens in real-time as it was happening on set, a fact which the camerawork highlights by at times having a dual-screen or even tri-screen perspective from multiple characters' points of view. Take all this and put it together and you have a remarkably authentic and organic film, which makes it all the more unsettling.

Once we first get to the cult/compound things are still relatively normal for a while, and the commune actually seems idyllic: everyone is very comfortable with themselves and others and it looks like an overall great place to be if you're the kind of person who's down with living out in the desert. The signs of anything being amiss are extremely subtle, but they seem to point to the typical picture you'd think of when you watch movies about cults; it looks like the leader might be poisoning or otherwise messing with his followers and some of the ideas people have are... not exactly Jonestown material, but they're a little unorthodox.

And then it hits. The reveal hits, and we realize that it isn't about the people. It was never about the people. The people are innocents with big ideas about the world and your run-of-the-mill hippie beliefs. How this movie spends a large part of its runtime masquerading as something completely different and still succeeds as an interesting and engaging movie, I don't fully understand.

Now once that twist hit and the full extent of the situation was revealed, my ability to review this coherently kind of went downhill, because the only thing I was thinking about was how distinctly wrong it started feeling; how perfectly these filmmakers were able to capture a sense of danger and mystery after filming what was basically a documentary. This doesn't fit the mold of what people try to make found-footage out to be- it's got an aesthetic, it's got a purpose, the camerawork doesn't suffer from being amateur. This might be one of the best found-footage movies I've ever seen.

They hit the mark exactly, and there isn't a moment of this movie that I thought shouldn't have been there. It's creepy without being forced, it leaves loose ends untied just enough to make you even more frightened by the time it all concludes, it comes from somewhere entirely different than what drives the majority of horror movies. If this is even a horror movie. It feels like science fiction but it also feels like nothing I've seen before and I know I'm constantly hyperbolic but this one really did blow me away.

Ju-on: The Curse (2000)

directed by Takashi Shimizu
Japan
70 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Last night I intended to watch Ju-on: The Grudge, but as it turned out I actually had the very first Ju-on movie, which is this. Takashi Shimizu also directed a few very short short films before the series that got right down to the bare bones of its concept, giving the world its first glimpses of Toshio and Kayako, and I'm very fond of those short films, which is possibly why I was also so fond of The Curse and its minimalism.

It was shot directly to video and it certainly looks like it. It's a completely different movie from The Grudge, and it certainly looks like that too. That's one of my favorite things about this series; there's not a whole lot of clearly defined rules for it outside of its ghosts and curses, so the sequels get to say that they're based in the same universe, but they don't share any characters or continuity. Sometimes this is good, sometimes it's bad. But I like the feeling of a cinematic world connected only by the thinnest of threads.

I recently read a book on the history of the Japanese yūrei and it helped me to understand the position that movies like The Grudge and The Ring that were able to break out of their locality and into the hearts and minds of horror fans across the globe hold in the history and folklore of spirits in Japan. I encourage everybody to think of yūrei not as simply a translation of the word "ghost" but as an entirely separate entity, as disparate from the general idea of a ghost that persists in Western and other cultures as a dog would be from a wolf. They exhibit convergent evolution, they're both explanations of what we become and where we go after we die, but the specifics of them are different enough that they shouldn't be thought of as the same thing.

Toshio in The Curse, for instance, is actually more along the lines of the oldest versions of yūrei- in old Japanese literature before kabuki plays and the printing press "standardized" the idea of yūrei a little more, these spirits were often not distinguishable from living people- there's even a story where a man's wife bears his living child after she's become a yūrei. The blurry lines between when Toshio is dead and when he isn't make me think about stories like that. The makeup on both him and his mother all across the Grudge films also pulls from the standard yūrei vision, although this time it's taken from the way actors in kabuki plays would have their makeup done to convey to the audience that they were playing a yūrei.

One of the things I'm fond of about this movie and its sequels is that despite the relatively high body count and unsettling method of death, it never quite gets to feeling like it's exploiting death or tragedy. You always- or at least I always- retain a feeling of care for the people who die, because they're given more than just a name, for the most part. Who deserves it less than a schoolgirl, or a responsible teacher, or anybody else who just kind of blundered into the curse by accident? The "nobody's safe" mentality makes the Ju-on series of films remain potent decades after their original debut.

Touki Bouki (1973)

directed by Djibril Diop Mambety
Senegal
85 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Film is probably the best coping mechanism we have to deal with change and even facilitate it, if we want to. We can record our memories of where we've come from to better remember them, and we can contemplate what the place we're going to will be like in a medium that allows us to visualize our ideas. Touki Bouki is, while slightly obtuse, a film about change- a very culturally specific change; a young couple becoming disillusioned with their life in Senegal and seeking out the supposed hip, youthful paradise that Paris advertises itself as.

I was looking at the movie's page on imdb while I was watching it and it kind of surprised me to see it called an avant-garde film because until then I had thought it wasn't avant-garde at all, and I was right in the middle of watching it. I do wonder a bit if maybe the temptation to quickly call it avant-garde isn't due to a cultural divide in which the contributions of a specifically Senegalese person recording their own experiences isn't able to be parsed by another party and is therefore dismissed as abstraction. I think you have to consider the filmmaker's background before you slap a genre label on it like that. Touki Bouki might not make the most sense to white, Western audiences, but Djibril Diop Mambety definitely had an intent in making every scene and it's not really great to throw that in the avant-garde pile.

In fact, that a filmmaker can make something like this where it's a little different from the traditional dramatic narrative and still successfully relay the message of change and youthful disillusionment utilizing a range of unique methods is a real indicator of some serious talent.

The visuals are gorgeous and the way people blend into their environment no matter where that environment may be (save for times where the disparity between the two is the focus of the scene) is something I don't always see. I think it's hard to get people to be in the right places at the right time and look the right way, but the textures of the characters' clothing against the colors of the natural landscape belie a very deliberate aesthetic that's really appealing to watch. If you get the Criterion version, there's a little note before the beginning of the film about how a couple of big names like Martin Scorsese and some high-end clothing brands stepped in to help preserve the film, and it's sad that the availability of relatively old movies like this to wider audiences sometimes has to depend on the help of outsiders. I wish African film was more readily available in the States because it could broaden a lot of peoples' horizons and there's so many filmmakers from so many countries in Africa who never get the recognition they deserve worldwide. The goal for all Americans should be to watch more African film.

The Postman's White Nights (2014)

directed by Andrey Konchalovskiy
Russia
90 minutes
4.5-star
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The Postman's White Nights is a calm mix of documentary and fiction about a rural town in Russia that can only be reached by boat. The director scored some big-time awards for it, as he should have, because this is, in my opinion, the best way to make docufiction that's authentic and doesn't exploit anybody.

All of the actors in the film are actual people who live in the village. Their characters are based off of their real lives, and none of them are professionals. The movie states this clearly at the beginning, so it doesn't attempt to deceive the audience by bringing them a scripted atmosphere and passing it off as everyday life (*cough* Moana *cough*), but it also incorporates the natural tone of village life into its semi-fictional narrative. It's roughly equal parts gorgeous nature shots, scenes with people going about their business, and scenes that are clearly from a "fixed" perspective that mark it as not quite all candid. Then later in the film there is a storyline about the main character- the postman- beginning to hallucinate a little grey cat whose metaphor, if any, I haven't been able to decipher.

The story does not get outwardly mournful or spend a large chunk of time dwelling on what tragedies may occur in the village, but early on in the film, an elderly woman dies, and her funeral procession is the moment that defines the attitude the film has towards the passage of time. It acknowledges her role as not only a member of the community but a tie back to the past. The postman himself is a significant character in defining this feeling of changing and moving on, as well, because with some of his time spent in the village and some spent on the mainland, he serves as a bridge between the old ways and the new. 

Another thing I thought was interesting that this movie brings up is the individual vs. the community. All throughout, there's things that show how the town generally stays the same but one individual can still influence people on many levels. A single man steals the postman's boat's engine, so now he can no longer service the town. The postman himself, though he's only one person, brings the villagers' pensions, their food, letters from relatives, basically the whole backbone of the town. I think in a lot of Western cultures, it gets away from us how important one person can be to a larger whole, but it's not entirely our fault, because I know that in America, at least, the majority of any contributions we might make as individuals are erased by corporations; hence why a single person taking shorter showers or reducing their food waste means next to nothing in the face of a multi-billion-dollar industry that literally plans to have massive amounts of waste.

The Postman's White Nights is a good and ultimately a bit somber reflection on an isolated way of life that's less and less common. It's not anything quaint or infantile, but it takes a good hard look at life outside the rat race, and I wish we could see more documentaries that do that.

River of Grass (1994)

directed by Kelly Reichardt
USA
76 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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I didn't know where to start with Kelly Reichardt's filmography so I figured her first film would be as safe a bet as any. Although there's not as much hubbub around it as with her later works, River of Grass is something that makes me definitely want to know more, and I'm glad I watched it. It's the kind of movie that can change the mood of a day or evening entirely.

It introduces us to the main character, Cozy, straight away, and while the virtue of having a camera turned on her inherently makes her at least a vaguely interesting person, the intent seems to have been to make the protagonist as average and unremarkable as possible. As I said I'm pretty unfamiliar with Reichardt's output, but I think having characters who feel unembellished is a bit of a trademark for her. This movie is a melting pot of influences- Coen brothers, Jarmusch, Linklater, and a helping of neo-noir- but none of them hold a candle to the upcoming talent that was Kelly Reichardt.

I know the early 90s were a time for only the most proto- of proto-mumblecore, but watching this, it's clear how much of an influence it's been on modern-day mumblecore as well as just how inauthentic so many of those modern films are. River of Grass doesn't feel like it's trying and it certainly doesn't feel like it's meant to make its characters look cool and savvy; these are people in their 30s or close to it who still have no direction in life, no real aspirations, and absolutely no money. Compare that to what people generally think of as the face of mumblecore today: Everything out there seems, in some way, to relate to New York, all the characters are achingly youthful, having no money is turned into a trendy thing as opposed to an obstacle, and in general there is an air of trying much, much too hard that does not befit the humble beginnings of- if we can call it one- the genre.

I think Kelly Reichardt understands what it's like to live in America truly, not the sophisticated, high-class America of anywhere known to be a hub for youth. There's something depressing about this movie, though it stays as far away from becoming "poverty porn" as it can- that feeling of depression comes from the larger image that it paints, an image of a country where the lifestyle of the average person is bumming around with no idea where to go or what to do. It also speaks to the fetishization of violence that's prevalent in American culture, with how Cozy feels like if she isn't a criminal, if she isn't living life on the edge, who is she, really? That paints a portrait of the American identity at its barest and most truthful: Everyone wants to be someone, even if that someone is a bad someone.

Fido (2006)

directed by Andrew Currie
Canada
93 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I love when an aberration in the zombie subgenre like Fido comes along, something that goes in a completely different direction than the standard formula most movies use. The classics are classic for a reason, but a lot of them also came out 45+ years ago, so when a director decides to go with a new direction and makes something that contains few references to the pantheon of zombie films even the least horror-oriented cinemaphile can name, I get kind of excited.

Fido starts off with a short advert about how the zombie outbreak and subsequent zombie war got started in the universe of this film. It's set around the 1950s and it echoes the fascination with outer space and the terror of the Cold War that hallmarked that era, using "space dust" and then "radiation" to explain why the dead just don't stay dead anymore. We get an informative glimpse into the measures taken against people coming back to life, things like separate head coffins and funerals that have become so expensive people save up for them like college. There are subtle digs at capitalism, too; hints at a conglomerate that monopolizes the market and convinces citizens that they depend on them for their very survival.

One of its few downsides is that it can feel like an unrealistically small environment- the fully fleshed-out backstory of the zombie war seems to only have an effect on the one neighborhood that the film takes place in. We don't get to see anything too far from suburbia, although to be fair, that could have been intentional, there's always the possibility that this is the last colony of survivors on Earth, desperately clinging to 50s sunshine and normalcy, while the corporation that dominates them continues to cling to the ugly final scraps of capitalism.

There's also a psychological aspect to this that I rarely see zombie movies do, or if they do, they do it heavy-handedly. The mental state of the populace has clearly changed greatly since the "space dust" came; children are largely desensitized to death and the passing of an elderly loved one is no longer tragic but another thing to be monetized. When somebody's zombie gets free and kills people, well, it's a rare thing, but it happens- and strangely, the deaths themselves are not treated with much feeling, but the punishment for owning a rogue zombie seems to be getting shipped off to the "wild zone", AKA the boundaries beyond which ZomCon's all-seeing empire does not bother to clean up.

The question of what sort of mental capacity a zombie retains is hinted at almost constantly, but never addressed outright. There's mentions of older zombies being trapped underground for the rest of time unless their family can cough up the funds for a head coffin and a proper funeral. On the surface, in dialogue, this movie touches few of the messier aspects of its premise, but believe me, they're there. It hides behind sardonic Lassie references and a genuinely cute story about a boy and his zombie, but if it were to shed its shiny-plastic and colorful-chiffon exterior, it would be one of the deeper and more interesting explorations into the mechanics of a zombie apocalypse.

Where Adam Stood (1976)

directed by Brian Gibson
UK
77 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Where Adam Stood came out at a point in time where arguments in favor of creationism were beginning to become more vocal in the face of scientific advancements. There has always been a battle fought between the two factions, but I suppose that as more time passes and more discoveries about the natural world are made, those who still cling to creationism seem more and more illogical. This particular edition of Play for Today seems to be- from what I've seen- on the intimate (though all relationships it portrays are thoroughly detached and stiff) and personal side, and it's about a father whose staunch belief in the existence of an all-knowing, all-seeing God informs every avenue of his life including, unfortunately, the way he treats- or does not treat- his ailing young son.

Now this does seem to be a scenario that provides ample fuel for strawmanning- other films might set up their own agenda and render the creationist character into a buffoonish caricature with no dignity, but instead Where Adam Stood somewhat sympathetically presents a misguided figure. As it goes on and the trouble with the main character's son develops, it becomes apparent that no small measure of the man's faith is due to a refusal to believe in a universe that would turn its back on his suffering child. At first he may seem selfish with his belief system, but when he insists with unshakeable clarity that "It must be so"- after a while that feels less like what the bible is telling him to say and more like a personal insistence on the existence of a higher power that he holds onto for dear life because of the implications that the alternative would mean for his son. This is a story that looks at the way that fear of death, whether ours or of the ones we love, drives every single aspect of our personal worldview.

I don't like the way it reads that this program included a mentally disabled woman to make some sort of point (though I'm not wholly sure what that point is), because I feel like a lot of the time in things that deal with topics like these there will be a physically or mentally disabled person and the narrative will present them as some kind of proof of God's absence.

This caricature of mental issues is a dark spot on an otherwise great episode of an otherwise great series, and the monologuing and philosophical tangents included in the script are typical of Play for Today. You feel like it's building to this depressing finale, but in its final moments there's just a sliver of hopefulness and it seems almost coy- putting its faith in the level-headedness and flexible beliefs of the younger generation.