Possessed (1999)

directed by Anders Rønnow Klarlund
Denmark
96 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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It's a very appropriate coincidence that this movie's original title (Besat) should be so close to the English word "beast".

If you're into despairing over how much time has passed since 1999 and how movies from the late 90s and early 2000s all seem like relics of a more distant time, then Possessed is for you. Apparently Denmark was also fascinated with the amped-up neon lights and dark, gritty, steamy noir that much of US cinema had been infatuated with at that time because this movie has that sort of aesthetic that only really specific crime shows tend to have. I actually started thinking at length about what the meaning of those distinctive neon colors was, because it seems like it was a color palette that only existed in the popular view for a short period of time but was nevertheless bonded to crime flicks like leaves are bonded to a tree- for a brief period this was the new noir, this was the trademark of a crime film. Then we moved on, and we stopped overusing neon solids in every scene.

But to me it looks like in this film those neons are meant to represent environs that are as far from nature as possible. The effect is obviously toned down outdoors as it's difficult to find plant life that fits the striking color palette in an urban environment, but when something happens that we're meant to perceive as being unnatural- moments of high tension, the committing of the central crime, or a scene that's supposed to convey the mental state of a criminal- the neon is brighter than at any other time. It's interesting to me how this hearkens back to the early days of cinema when the only way to color a film was to either color a scene in one single color or not color it at all. The directors are picking and choosing which single colors best represent the emotional content of a scene just like directors in the first decades of the 1900s did.

So how is the movie in general, aside from its aesthetic? Pretty generic, honestly. It reminds me a lot of Nicolas Winding Refn's very early films in both style and content, but it's a little more coherent, at least for a while. It starts out looking like a tense drama involving epidemiologists, police, and several people both living and dead who are connected to a rash of bizarre, fire-related disease outbreaks. All the while there's something shifting through the background, a vague looming that gives you a sense of everything not being out on the table at first glance. As far as slow reveals go, this one is pretty good at doing both paranormal and normal well and not losing anything in the transition between one or the other.

Phoenix Forgotten (2017)

directed by Justin Barber
USA
87 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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Phoenix Forgotten is a sci-fi/horror hybrid in the found-footage format that may otherwise have disappeared among the miscellaneous sci-fi/horror movies released every year had it not been for Ridley Scott's name as a producer (and really, I have no idea where he came from). Despite there being several other movies about the Phoenix lights, I think this is a solid film and maybe the best one about the phenomena. So just a warning: This review may contain some unpopular opinions.

One of the things I actually didn't like was that it's one of those things that's only found-footage when it wants to be. It switches back and forth from a traditional style to home videos recorded by three missing persons whom the movie centers around. It seemed like there was a heavy emphasis on the nostalgia element; the home videos were made during the late 90s and there's a lot of hallmarks of the era present in them as well as an overall atmosphere of family and especially of family disrupted- the three people on the tapes are the people whom the main character in the present day is investigating, mainly because one of them was her brother. 

But outside of that my feelings towards this were overwhelmingly positive. I don't ever, and I mean ever get scared by alien movies, they're like zombie movies in that I can recognize their value but I don't think they're something I could ever be afraid of. But there's something in Phoenix Forgotten that makes the presence of aliens altogether more foreboding. This is the ultimate in alien non-appearances, we only ever see hints of the ship from afar and occasional horrifying, lightning-bolt-throwing glimpses of things in the "eye of the storm" at the end of the film. The lack of a concrete agenda, along with the lack of visual reference that would have allowed viewers to get used to the UFOs, goes towards making this feel mature and restrained, two things that I almost never see in found-footage.

Whatever else may have happened along the way, the scares are all there. In the pivotal scenes towards the end, as much of the horror comes from being a teenager alone in the desert in the freezing dead of night as it does from the presence of UFOs. This is a movie that uses unconventional ideas about what an alien encounter looks like and I'm totally willing to defend my opinion that it was excellent.

Ixcanul (2015)

directed by Jayro Bustamante
Guatemela
93 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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So, Ixcanul, finally. Had to watch something to break the streak of cruddy horror movies I've been in lately, though I didn't particularly want to. It was good to get this movie off of my Netflix queue, though, and I suppose an interruption to the horror monotony wasn't too unbearable.

I have doubts that this movie could have been what it was had it not been for the main actress, Maria Mercedes Coroy. The camera unashamedly loved her, and the careful use of lighting captured how pretty she was in every shot- the color of her skin, the texture of her hair, her effortless, teenage Lana Del Rey levels of fashionable disengagement with humanity- and besides that, her acting, though very subtle, was perfect for the character. I tend to think that even in the hands of a different, possibly less skilled director, this actress would still have saved the film with her performance.

The main character is defined by her longing to be somewhere else, no matter what she was doing or where she was, and I know time-tested writing advice says that you should always give your characters something to want, but I felt like they could have either given the main character something else to want as well, or kept her from being solely defined by it. In every scene she conveys a feeling of wanting to leave, but we don't know anything else about her, we never meet her when she's really alone, we don't find out her inner feelings. Once she becomes pregnant it feels like she's almost not even in the movie anymore until something bad happens. 

I was skeptical of this movie's intent at first because it seems to have been heavily supported by various tourism industries, and I was initially feeling like this was a case where local people were being used as a kind of enticement to come visit a place, which I think is gross- treating people like some kind of exhibit for tourists to flock to and admire. And it did seem like that was where this was going because as it was I felt like it had a bit of a rosy outlook on plantation work, which in real life is probably nowhere near as calm and relatively simple as it was presented here in Ixcanul, but it turned out that all the endorsements of the tourism boards were a little ironic- this movie has a very disparaging view of the Spanish and the Americans and it seemed that the message was basically "screw those people, they're bastards" which, if you're looking to attract tourism from those countries, may not have been the best outlook to have. But it is an outlook that's very much appreciated instead of pandering to the gods of capitalism and consumption.

Goodbye, 20th Century (1998)

directed by Darko Mitrevski, Aleksandar Popovski
Macedonia
83 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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This movie opens with what I considered to be its high point, a scene featuring elaborate costuming that tells us the story of the film with every detail and also establishes an atmosphere right off the bat that tells us where humanity is in terms of religious ritual and belief. The "neo-orthodox" look mixed with scavenged weapons and bizarre handpuppets puts viewers squarely in a post-disaster Earth where old traditions are blending with new.

I'm having a bit of a hard time coming up with things to say about this movie outside of praising its costumes and overall visual sensibilities. It's about an immortal man who's survived a nuclear apocalypse along with several bands of black-clad stragglers and occasionally a more bizarre character, like the green-haired, English-speaking Joker knock-off he has to fight at one point. The purpose of the main character as a presence in the film seems to be to search for spiritual meaning in a newly decimated world; the purpose of the main character within the context of the story is to find some measure of his own significance. But several things seem to have gotten lost in translation or were perhaps never there at all.

I felt that the second half of this was incomprehensible and had little to nothing to do with the preceding events. If it could have held on to the feeling of a gritty new religion that was shown in the opening scene, this could have been a phenomenal and fascinating version of the end of the world, but instead it appears to have been going for some kind of satirical non-sequitur surrealism. Maybe "the plot" wasn't what I was thinking it was, maybe it's my fault for holding onto the hope that this would be predominantly centered on the journeying of the main character through the wasteland. But upon the arrival of the character featured on its poster (a very angry Santa Claus with a gun) and the transition into the second half, everything went sharply downhill and I felt like I was watching a bad Matthew Barney film instead of what I had thought I was signing up for.

Still, though. How many times do you get to see an immaculately-styled Macedonian sci-fi film about the end of the world and the search for the meaning of life? In some places this movie is very powerful, and I guess it was just a matter of not being able to sustain that forcefulness for every minute of its runtime.

It Looks Pretty from a Distance (2012)

directed by Wilhelm Sasnal, Anka Sasnal
Poland
77 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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As far as I can tell I may be the first person to review this film. I'll try then to do a decent job because information on it seems to be scarce and Netflix is just doing its thing of trying desperately to make artsy, inaccessible films sound interesting by hinting at romance in the synopsis and misrepresenting what the film is really like.

The first thing is that it doesn't resemble Wilhelm Sasnal's art at all- his painted works utilize shadows that are sharp as razors and milky, blocky patches of solid color to create an almost uncanny valley-like effect when used in portraits of human subjects. It Looks Pretty etc. is set almost exclusively in broad daylight, in a rural environment, where the sun and the light blue sky seem to worm their way into every shot, even the interiors. However this bucolic look clashes with the human element of the film, as all of the characters are exceptionally unremarkable.

The lack of charm or personality and almost total lack of dialogue makes this an unusual case study of a rural Polish village, where typically, a director would try to set up some kind of quaint, folksy atmosphere depicting its subjects engaging in arts & crafts and traditional farming techniques and whatnot. It Looks Pretty shows a village for what it is, in the modern era at least- a place with barely-working electronics and little to no connection to the outside world where there's not much to do and even less if you happen to be a child. The inhabitants are shown as extensions of this landscape with no attempts to move the viewer into feeling good or bad about them. This approach renders this movie into what I thought was a very subversive experience loosely in the same vein as Talking Heads' idea of "conformism as nonconformism": boredom as a unique cinematic perspective in a world where directors seek to titillate and entertain.

Occasionally the narrative slips into something significantly darker and closer to surrealism. One scene that kept haunting me was a shot where the camera slowly backs away from an expressionless person standing in front of a window making a repetitive "Aaaah... aaaah... aaaah..." sound, which grew louder the further away the camera got. That kind of randomness clashes with the grumpy, mostly silent outlook of the rest of the characters and doesn't have any precedent or real reason to have been there other than to present the viewer with a jarring, unsettling experience that threw the whole rest of the film into a different context.

American Fable (2016)

directed by Anne Hamilton
USA
96 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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The whole "magical realism in America's heartland with a child as the protagonist" thing is actually fairly popular, and I do tend to like a lot of the movies in that vein, because most of them are creative and use the Americana aesthetic with grace instead of clunkiness. As for American Fable... I'm undecided on how I feel about it, but I guess its use of aesthetic could be a lot worse; it's gorgeous and summery and absolutely perfect for this time of year, but I didn't feel like it penetrated very much deeper than a lovely color scheme and some good child acting. 

The magical realism elements felt heavily subdued, and when they were there, the symbolism left something to be desired: the lady with horns on horseback didn't do it for me, and none of the other imagery that was intended to convey the main character's imagination felt particularly well-executed. I suppose the 1980s setting was meant to capture some nostalgia from either the director's childhood or the childhoods of her target audience, but it fell flat and was inconsequential to the larger plot. I'm also tired of movies about financial inequality set in the past because at a time when more attention needs to be drawn to the plight of poor families, we continue making movies about how things were in the 80s.

Something that I feel like a lot of people might have trouble getting past is how the main character has a pretty lofty view of her place in the world, and that seems to violate a lot of the unwritten rules about how a protagonist "should" be- I.E., making their way through a magical world while never addressing the unspoken question of "Why this girl? Why is she special?" The main character in American Fable clearly believes herself to be special- I mean outright stating "I'm special"- and initially that kind of upfrontness caught me off guard, but it works well in context. I think I and a lot of other people can relate to that secret feeling of significance during childhood, where you're working out your place in life and accepting the responsibilities that growing older brings but at the same time thinking "maybe something amazing will happen to me, maybe I'm a special person destined for adventures and magic".

That's the vibe of this whole thing, in short. A little girl with a magical worldview in a world that does not hold any magic, and instead is full of treachery, and people doing bad things. I didn't appreciate the way this seemed to demonize farmers rebelling against capitalism, but I think that this movie is largely successful- just maybe not in the areas it was aiming for.

L'Inferno (1911)

directed by Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, Giuseppe de Liguoro
Italy
68 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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This adaptation of Dante's Inferno holds claims of being both the oldest surviving feature-length film and the first Italian film, but when it comes to early cinema there's a great deal of titles vying for various "earliest" and "first" labels, so I'd take that with a grain of salt. I wasn't able to find it with English translations for its formidable amount of intertitles, but that wasn't a big deal at all seeing as I'm familiar enough with Dante's Inferno anyway. 

I ended up much more fond of L'Inferno than I had expected to be. A particular scene from it- Lucifer devouring a sinner- has broken off from its context and made the rounds in "creepy stuff" internet circles, mostly because it's an excellent example of some amazing effects from a very early era in film, and I'd known about that scene for a while, but if you just watch that one scene you'll be missing out on a multitude of other scenes demonstrating the prowess of the people who made this. For the most part it looks within the means of filmmakers of the 1910s, occasionally in endearingly simple ways such as scenes where people are missing "limbs" that are in reality just painted black and set against a black backdrop to make them nearly invisible- this is best used when a man carrying his own severed head comes onscreen, and we can clearly see the outline of the rest of the "head"'s body- but there are also things like people gradually fading in or out of the picture that seem like they came from a later time.

I was very intrigued by the way that the first circles of Hell are still recognizably located in this world, with real plants and scenery. The notion that you can access hell through a place in our world, and that for a little while hell could have trees and grass and whatnot that look exactly like they do elsewhere, is something that I don't usually see in stories about the underworld- typically you have to go "under" somehow and you don't really enter until you're pretty far down into a pit or cave or other subterranean enclave. Another reason why this is such an interesting movie is because we don't get many chances to see people from the early 1900s nude, but boy, there's no shortage of that here. From a purely curious standpoint it's fascinating to see your ancestors naked as they came, stripped of all the now-obsolete fashions that they wore at the time.

Okja (2017)

directed by Bong Joon-ho
South Korea
120 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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I haven't seen the full extent of the popular reaction to Okja, but from what I've heard it's stirred up a little bit of controversy, chiefly among people who think its message has been said before too many times already (that message being about animal cruelty in the meat industry). But sometimes a message can be trotted out repeatedly by various sources and still be valid, popularity doesn't always mean something doesn't bear repeating- that's why we have the phrase "bears repeating".

First off, I appreciated the tone with which Mirando Corp- the "villains" of Okja- were portrayed, because it deftly avoids strawmanning or creating an unrealistic caricature while still enforcing the fact that these people are unethical beneath their shiny exterior. Their statements aren't over-the-top, and the happiness they sell is the kind of happiness that's peddled everyday in real life, not a bizarre, dystopian idea where it's laughably obvious how evil they are. The graphic design has a lot to do with this. The marketing and aesthetic of the company is nothing that you wouldn't see in an advertisement for a health drink today.

I also appreciated the fact that it's heavily implied that many of the people on the wrong side of the conflict do genuinely believe they're doing good, or at least that they're not "as bad" as their competitors. That the chain of command doesn't start and end with somebody trying to do good, that it goes from the people who don't care about morals at the bottom to the people who think they're not doing anything wrong, but also are unwilling to shoulder any kind of responsibility, at the top is an accurate portrayal of how a lot of ethical violations actually occur in real life.

Bong Joon-ho is no stranger to showing you CGI creatures up-close and personal for large chunks of time, as evidenced in The Host, and if we thought the effects in The Host were pretty good then ten years later with huge advancements, they're nearly perfected in Okja. There are patches of roughness around the edges, often when someone is in direct contact with the superpig, and also the eyes- I don't know that anybody will ever be able to get the eyes quite right with CGI- but by and large it's very easy to believe the superpigs are a real species.

Everyone really, really goes all-out with their performances in this one, to a point where you'd almost think it would come off as corny, but it doesn't. For me, the realism wasn't affected by characters who were absurd and clownish, like Jake Gyllenhaal after having attended the "Nic Cage in Valley Girl" school of acting, or Tilda Swinton at peak weird pixie lady (and simultaneously at peak cynical businesswoman). The only person who gives a performance that feels genuine is Ahn Seo-hyun as Mija, and I felt that that was the most important point of the movie: that they kept everything with Mija unspoiled, that she was always the only character who was truly acting for the wellbeing of her animal friend.

Life (2017)

directed by Daniel Espinosa
USA
104 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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There's one thing I wanna say to anyone interested in watching this: Don't expect a miracle. This isn't a bad movie by any means, but if you don't have high expectations for this, you'll be satisfied with it.

This might actually be one of the only times that I say this, but I think Life might have been better if it had a smaller budget. The reason I say this is because its real strength seems to lie more in isolated scenes than in the bigger picture of how it all meshes together into a seat-filler with a lot of well-known stars. That initial scene where the Mars life-form (I refuse to call it "Calvin", that was just dorky) crushes one of the astronauts' hand is genuinely very tense, and in fact the majority of the attack scenes are the same way- but they all feel like things that the whole rest of the movie was based around, instead of vice versa. The way they put in random cultural references in the beginning to try and be like "haha look at us guys we're relevant!!" came off as desperate. Take away the space shuttle, stick the crew on a semi-permanent Mars base and get rid of the big budget for fancy zero-gravity special effects and this could have been a much more imaginative and in-depth film.

That being said, even in scenes that felt like they were engineered to fit in a mainstream sci-fi thriller, there was something interesting behind the way the humans interacted with and comprehended the alien. It's easy for this message to get lost in dramatic space battles and fights for survival, but the goal of this movie seems to have been to impart upon the viewer that the alien's intentions may be hostile, but they're not... hostile, for lack of a better term; it's not exterminating with extreme prejudice, it's just life going the way life goes. One singular line alludes to the cognitive dissonance this induces in the astronauts- when one of them mentions how despite knowing that it isn't personal and it doesn't make sense to humanize it, she still feels nothing but knee-jerk hatred for the alien.

The special effects got a little obnoxious and made me wonder if it had been designed for 3D (it's always really awkward watching 3D movies in 2D), but the heart of this film is interesting in a philosophical way and that's a rare thing to be able to walk into a theater and see. This came from a Swedish-Chilean director who's previously only done a couple Swedish-language films and some other bigger-name American ones, so I'd welcome a return to the sci-fi genre, maybe with less money and stars behind it next time.