Salt and Fire (2016)

directed by Werner Herzog
Germany
98 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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I went into Salt and Fire expecting something like a standard eco-thriller, or if not a "thriller" then just a movie that involves an ecological disaster and some scientists, but after watching it I have to say I'm a bit ashamed that I'm not yet familiar enough with Werner Herzog to know that no matter how any film of his looks on the outside, it's not going to be "just" anything.

There are two halves to this film that are almost as distinct as the halves in Tropical Malady- i.e., they can basically be considered different movies. The first half is centered on a team of three scientists who travel to Bolivia to present their data on a man-made ecological disaster referred to as Diablo Blanco, for which details are extremely scarce. It's a pretty confusing first half, even though it's actually the most coherent part of the movie, and eventually it segues into a bizarre, dreamlike second half in which a professor from the team of scientists is kidnapped and left on her own on an island in the middle of a vast salt flat near a volcano along with two blind boys named Huasca and Atahualpa and a meagre amount of supplies.

It is as weird as it sounds. There's a quality to this movie that's immensely different from literally everything else out there. It eschews any element of sensationalism or violence and even when there's tension between the main character and her kidnappers, there's no tropes that could be expected in any other scene from any other movie involving a kidnapping. The characters speak every line of their dialogue as if they're reading literary quotations (and believe me, there's no shortage of those, either) and they offhandedly say these totally random things that aren't quite outside the realm of acceptable conversation, but would nevertheless make you look at someone strangely if they were to say them in real life.

I would go so far as to say that in order to properly appreciate any of Werner Herzog's non-documentary work, you have to watch some of his documentaries first, because it dawned on me midway through Salt and Fire that the whole reason the dialogue was so strange was because this is just how Werner Herzog talks. He's writing the script as if it's a story he is personally telling, and once you've heard his narration in other films, you'll know immediately that this is the case. And every single actor, no matter their personal speech patterns, adopts that inflection seamlessly and speaks it like they're fluent in a second language.

I still have no idea what this movie was supposed to be about but I think it's essentially a very, very roundabout way of saying that science needs more humanity in it. There's a lot of literary and historical references that would feel insufferable coming from anybody else but in the context of this film every one of them felt like it had to be there. The soundtrack is unbelievably fitting and just the fact that they used steel cello made me really excited. I don't think this is a film for everyone and especially not if you didn't like My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, but at the right moment in time if you're in the right mindset it can be phenomenal.

Slow Action (2010)

directed by Ben Rivers
I'm really not sure what country this is technically "from".
46 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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Like most of Ben Rivers' other works, Slow Action skirts the line between documentary and narrative film, and essentially functions as a documentary about entirely fictional events that nonetheless have real-world counterparts. It's a speculative look at several different island cultures that develop after climate change has caused sea levels and global temperatures to rise drastically, and it uses extant locations- Tuvalu, the Canary Islands, the island of Somerset in the UK, among others- as roosts for these imaginary populations.

While it also includes some elements of magical realism like highly-evolved lifeforms made out of plastic that most likely will never happen, and while, save for the white-painted and masked inhabitants of an imagined Somerset, none of the people the narrators speak of actually come onscreen at any time, there is something potent and frightening about pointing a finger at islands that are being affected by climate change and exploring the possibilities of how human life could adopt stranger and stranger forms in order to adapt to these rapidly changing environments. There's a note of humor to the narration that occasionally gets lost in its objective, deadpan nature- silly names for landmarks, like "Anus Island"- yet it doesn't take away from the overall stark feel of an ethnographic film, and I think that's important. I think being able to put in a joke or two about the format while still respecting that it is a good format is a good way to make a film.

There's a line in this that says "we are our own visitors and ghosts", and that's true both as a descriptor of the disparity that arises between societies that form in highly-populated areas versus on small, secluded places like these islands, and of the process of climate change itself. It artfully summarizes something I've been thinking about for a while- that the nature of climate change makes assigning guilt on a smaller scale difficult to do, because on the one hand we are all human and as a species the growth of capitalist living is slowly eroding the planet, but on the other hand, an individual person living in poverty or even just living a modestly low-income life is not as responsible for climate change as a CEO of a multi-billion-dollar corporation who might order that destructive processes be continued despite detrimental effect on the environment simply because the alternative would be either slightly more expensive or would clash with a political or socioeconomic "image" they focus on projecting.

Visitors from the Galaxy (1981)

directed by Dušan Vukotić
Yugoslavia
82 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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Visitors from the Galaxy (AKA Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy) is similar to a lot of Iron Curtain-era sci-fi in that it's easily identifiable by two things: Goofy practical effects and a really goofy plot. It concerns the misadventures of an aspiring writer who has the ability to make things real with his mind- though in practice, it seems more like the things that want to be real do it on their own, because there's multiple scenes that demonstrate he has poor control over this ability and, if you use common sense, there'd be a lot more chaos if he just manifested random things whenever his mind wandered. So I feel like maybe the actual plot isn't crucial to this movie's end result (of having a bunch of aliens run around Earth). Which is fine, really, I didn't care that much about how the aliens- one adult robot and two bratty little kids, all in shiny gold skintight suits- got there after they had been introduced.

This is by far not the weirdest thing about it, but one of the more unusual qualities about this strange little film is that I honestly have no idea who it's for. It's definitely not something you'd show to your kids, because there's a lot of full-on nudity, particularly concentrated in one scene where a bunch of people decide that taking all their clothes off would make them seem less threatening to the aliens, but at the same time, none of that nudity is overtly sexual in nature. In fact the nudity is by and large the only thing about this that would make it unsuitable for children; everything else is thoroughly fantastical in a way that I don't really see being marketed at adults.

I was very much in love with those aforementioned goofy practical effects, because big, lumbering monster suits that look like they were put together with love and care feel more real to me than CGI of any quality. I could watch something like Interstellar that's widely praised for being one of the most accurate movies out there and I would still not be able to feel like the computer-generated bits were real. But give me a guy in a monster costume and a ray gun made out of plastic and tinfoil and I can go along with it much easier. I'm speaking subjectively about what I like to see, though; there are a lot of times where computer-generated images are far more appropriate for a specific context than actors in suits.

It kind of bothers me to think about where those props ended up. I'm not sure why I think about this so much but I do. Are all the alien costumes moldering away in a warehouse somewhere? Did anyone keep the still photographs the photographer character took? I just hate to think about things that were so inventive and beautiful getting lost among piles of forgotten movie artifacts. The big monster's name is Mumu and it has a face on its belly, a long mole-like snout, giant ears for wings and the ability to belch fire. That suit deserved a place in some Yugoslavian nerd's mancave, not a props warehouse nobody remembers exists. This movie would also have made an excellent TV series and I'm sure it would have gained a cult following had it been so.

Don't Look Now (1973)

directed by Nicolas Roeg
Italy/UK
110 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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As far as I'm concerned this movie has one of the most striking opening scenes ever. I realize that if you're fairly detached from it it can seem almost corny with its heavy use of slow-motion and its melodrama, but good lord, in the right light it's a heartrendingly tragic scene that's so stunningly shot I can't believe it. The use of color- which will be a repeated motif, bright red and sometimes blue- and the cuts from one image to the next, glass breaking segueing into a spilled drink, blood segueing into the red of that all-important rain slicker, and the elaborate yet disarrayed image of Donald Sutherland's character coming out of the pool carrying his dead daughter; it's all immaculate. This strategic use of imagery that's so heavy in this first scene also has the effect of making you look for other important things throughout the rest of the movie when they may or may not actually have been there. There are certainly other subtle images, but they're spread more thinly than in the opening scenes.

Essentially everything that happens during Don't Look Now is a statement about loss, either hidden or turned into metaphor to varying levels (sometimes obvious, sometimes not). It can be easy to disregard that or only pay attention when it's being stated outright, because the characters don't explicitly mourn other than when they're, well, explicitly mourning, but nearly every image in this draws back to that main theme of loss or the fear of loss. Grief makes its home in the entire city of Venice and traps the characters inside it. It's interesting in how it replays disaster- accidents aren't just shown once, they're repeated again and again, from several angles, sometimes in slow-mo, making sure that the drawn-out nature of mourning is clearly stated.

One other thing about this movie that adds to its atmosphere is that there's all these random people who seem to leer at the characters and at the viewer. There's always somebody strange peering out at you from the shadows like how in real life you will occasionally catch the eye of a stranger and think about them for more than a passing moment before forgetting.

I think this is one of the most effective horror films I've ever seen, because it has the characters go through what's instinctually frightening to us all but it also doesn't go for the same things every horror movie uses. It relies heavily on the amount of time it takes for your brain to resolve something into an image or a sound that it can make sense of- you know when you see or hear something and your brain takes a moment to try and fit it against things it's seen before, because it looks or sounds so strange? That's a good chunk of this movie. Both the viewers and the characters spend so much time in this world that's more detailed than ours, one that describes all kinds of hidden uncertainties. I think this makes a spectacular companion piece to Carnival of Souls, because they both share an atmosphere of a character or characters trying to navigate through a world that's suddenly unfamiliar to them.

A Dark Song (2016)

directed by Liam Gavin
Ireland
100 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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This is a movie about a woman who pairs up with a man to help her to engage in a months-long, supposedly dangerous Cabbalistic ritual to bring her into contact with her dead son. The magic in this film is a startlingly real thing, but it's not the kind of magic that exists only in dusty corner bookshops and things like Harry Potter films wherein, when we watch them, we're required to make allowances for blatantly impossible things like walking through brick walls and transforming people into animals. A Dark Song contains the kind of magic that exists skin-to-skin with our world, right there beyond the surface and completely accessible if you're willing to subject yourself to some intense physical and mental torture that may or may not actually get you where you want to go.

This kind of "common people" magic is immeasurably interesting to me. Any film or other form of fiction where characters engage in 100% real divination and conjuring while remaining normal human beings with no outward signs of them being Actual Wizards™ is something I dig. For all of this normalcy, any themes of gender relations or misogyny or anything like that is kept to a minimum, but there is something kind of interesting about the dynamic between the man and the woman- it portrays a situation that comes up often in real life, where a woman does grunt work that requires a little assistance from a man, and the man doesn't realize that the woman is the one who's really bearing the weight so ends up screaming at her that she couldn't do anything without his help and she should be grateful.

This is... a very rare movie. There's something deep and dark in here that few films ever touch upon. I feel like this is a case where the director had a very specific vision in mind and was able to put just about every last bit of that vision onscreen. I'm aware that I do tend to get more immersed in movies than is probably normal, and there's been a lot of times when I've fallen head-over-heels for a film and looked up reviews only to see that the overwhelming majority opinion on it is "eh". So you may take my praise of this with several grains of salt seeing as I'm full of hyperbole all the time, but to me personally there's absolutely no question that this is a five-star film.

None of this would work without the actors playing off of each other so well. Individually they're stellar, but the unique aspects that they bring- the guy being this utterly average-looking person who says things like "I've had gods rain silver upon me" in the same breath as he's calling somebody rude names, and the unbelievable determination and devotion that the actress playing the woman is able to convey- mesh and conflict with each other in just the right ways to create something fantastical that is at the same time fully human.

13 Tzameti (2005)

directed by Géla Babluani
France
93 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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13 Tzameti follows a young man working as a roofer for a couple who have a tumultuous personal life that he, by virtue of his physical proximity to them, ends up involved in. This unintentional closeness eventually leads to an impulse move on his part to pick up a letter and a train ticket intended for the man of the house and follow its instructions for no apparent reason. As a main character and also as an actor playing that main character, I really liked everything about our protagonist- he doesn't speak up a whole lot but he's got the kind of body language that can convey more than a script could, and although we find out relatively little about his inner life, the way he is as an individual is used as a good foil against the seedy underbelly he finds himself in after following the letter and train ticket.

I don't get the feeling that this is the kind of movie that would put in subtext like this, but I see that the director is Georgian and has made at least one other film concerning the Georgian-French experience, and I wonder if the main character embarking on a journey that requires him to pretend, at least in some part, that he's not who he actually is is somewhat of a commentary on the experiences of an immigrant trying to fit in in their adopted country. There's not actually a whole lot of direct mention of where our protag is from, other than scenes of him speaking Georgian with his family, and that lack of onscreen backstory made me feel like there was another metaphor stepping in for the backstory instead.

In my opinion this movie as a whole had a bit of a hump to get over in the beginning, because until it hits its stride with the actual context of the title and the "game" that's the backbone of the whole thing, it doesn't feel quite right tonally. Troubled domestic life is not this film's forte, gritty crime and men pushing their nihilistic philosophies to the limits is. This is in large part because the presence of music during the first quarter felt really off-putting and unfitting, and when it became quieter during the "game" portions it felt more like it had a mastery of its subject.

All in all this is a really good watch with an intriguing plot and characters who feel human. It's not pleasant or optimistic, and I can't speak for the quality of its Jason Statham-having remake, but the raw, amped-up nature that action movies starring people like Jason Statham tend to have is thankfully absent in the original 13 Tzameti, and is substituted instead with a sort of bleak nihilism more fitting for a more artful film. As usual, the Letterboxd synopsis seems to not have very much to do with the actual plot, but to its credit it's better to go into this one with no idea what it's about.

Nakom (2016)

directed by Kelly Daniela Norris & T.W. Pittman
Ghana
90 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Nakom's story follows a man originally from a small village who left to go to medical school in the big city coming home, at first only for a little while, after his father dies.  Like a lot of movies about the process of coming home, we get the feeling that although the main character's family and the people around him would eagerly accept him back into the fold, he's alienated himself to some degree by choosing to move so far from what he knew growing up.

The thing I immediately noticed about this movie is that it's beautiful. When I watch movies set in places like Wales, Ireland, Iceland, or some of the more rural areas of Eastern Europe, no matter the genre, they tend to put in a lot of nice but ultimately purposeless shots of wide-open countryside that feel kind of like somebody going "yeahhh look at our country". But the film world tends to ignore the natural beauty of much of Africa- you won't have trouble finding documentaries that look at wild plains with many species of animal but a small human population, but Nakom takes us to a rural village and uses that more human backdrop as a look into the natural beauty of Ghana and its surrounding areas (at one point the main character ventures all the way into Togo to sell some onions). There's also a gorgeous soundtrack throughout the whole thing that fits the mood perfectly, and I loved that this movie balances so well between looking very polished and intricate and still feeling like there's something personal about it.

The main conflict is between the main character's desire to be loyal to his family and his feeling that the village isn't the place for him anymore, but you can also tell there's a definite but subtle allusion to things like the way the village sees gender roles and the way the individuals themselves see their place in the larger picture. It feels like the protagonist's trepidation at staying in a rural setting really is a man thing, because not only him but a few of the other men in the village say things about there being no work and nothing to do there, but do you see any of the women doing that? The protagonist's sister mentions wanting to go to medical school like him, but for the majority of the women, leaving the village just doesn't seem like an option, and I think the parallels between the men doing what's looked at as "serious" work versus the women doing things that don't get applauded as much as they should like taking care of children, farming, and selling things at the market are deliberately illustrated.

One last thing, about language- everything I can find claims that this movie is in English but I don't know why because only about 5% of it is, with the other 95% being in what I'm guessing is Asante or another dialect of Akan, it being the most widely-spoken non-English language in Ghana and being spoken in Kumasi which is roughly the area that Nakom takes place in. So if you're seeking this movie out you do have to find subtitles unless you're a speaker of any dialect of Akan.

King for a Day (1983)

directed by Nikolai Volev
Bulgaria
87 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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I wanted to watch this because I wasn't sure if I've ever seen a movie from Bulgaria before. I'd say that this is as good a representation of the country's cinema as any, as long as you bear in mind that it is from the 80s and set in the 30s, so don't go looking for a modern Bulgarian point of view in it, just enjoy watching a country that puts its past on film in a far more authentic and enjoyable way than the overinflated number of American movies about the Wild West or Victorian times.

The movie appears to be set during wartime, but in a small village that's only ever in the peripheral vision of the government, who occasionally sends a Member of Parliament to the town to put up a little monument and give a speech about how everybody's doing a great job and nothing could get done without them, et cetera, et cetera, then they send the taxman who takes everybody's cows. There's an outlook about war that I find in fiction- often in satire- from pretty much everywhere around the world, this kind of (if I can be so pretentious as to invent a term) Vonnegutian attitude that war is a horrible, unnecessary thing waged between factions who do not represent the voice of the majority, but it also, at the same time, happens to be very, very boring for some of those not involved in the immediacy of it. The wartime atmosphere in the village in King for a Day is this rather than misery: Everybody's got to get along somehow, and the village would just like to keep its sons around.

Despite both its actual age and its setting in the 30s, it uses forms of comedy that are recognizable no matter what. Probably its best feature is that it uses the inherent goofiness that comes from speeding the film up juuust a little bit when people are running or doing any complicated motions, so that they look exaggerated and comedic. This actually could have been an artefact of the copy I was watching, but honestly it provided half the humor in the whole thing, and I prefer to think it was intentional because it was hilarious.

It unravels a little bit as it goes on and delves into the perennial myth of coming to America as a solution to all ills- it still keeps its sense of humor as main character Purko ends up in wild situations due to various misunderstandings (and scams) involving a guy with gold teeth and an "American" woman who promise to spirit him and his family away to better times, but as it departs from the local setting of the village, it did feel like it lost a little of its charm. It's surprisingly aesthetically pleasing from start to finish, though, and it's got a lot of really great folk music and clean humor, so I'm rating it by the things I did like about it rather than what I didn't.