Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles (2011)

directed by Jon Foy
USA
86 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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The Toynbee Tiles are a series of messages embedded in roads all over the upper east coast of the United States as well as South America. They're alluring because it's so hard to conclusively prove who did them, why, or what they mean. Nearly all of them read "TOYNBEE IDEA/IN MOVIE 2001/RESURRECT DEAD/ON PLANET JUPITER", sometimes substituting "Kubrick's 2001" for "Movie 2001" but always referring to the same basic concept: An idea by historian Arnold Toynbee, shown in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, that the dead can be brought back to life on Jupiter.

I think the most compelling thing about the tiles is that it proves that at the tail end of the 20th century and even into the 21st, you can do something like this and there's still a good chance no one will find out who you are. In an era where it's relatively easy to find out who somebody is, where forensic technology and, likewise, technology used to do less scrupulous things like doxx people is on the rise and getting stronger, the Toynbee Tiles serve as a reminder that you can still disappear in the world. This is why the tiles are meaningful to me.

And this phenomenon is also a striking example of the fact that the world changes massively from generation to generation- one of the conclusions of the film is that at some point in the past, the Toynbee Idea was an active force, and the buzz around it today is merely a resurgence. In the early 80s when there were real efforts by the organization behind the tiles to get people involved, it wasn't just crack investigators ferreting out the smallest bits of information, there was a network of people associated with the idea, but now the people reviving the mystery are too young to know that, and the people who were around at the time aren't inclined to adopt new technologies. The true story behind the Toynbee Tiles is not dead, not erased from the surface of the planet- it simply exists in the minds of people who happen to be relatively difficult to find.

This is one of the best documentaries I've seen and one of the most sympathetic in its portrayal of someone who doesn't want to be found. Justin Duerr, the man who the doc focuses on the most, seems like a genuinely kind and understanding person fueled not by a desire to know who the hell this "crazy, delusional weirdo" is but to find someone who he admires and cares about. Too many documentaries about outsider art dehumanize their subjects when they assume that they are mentally ill or otherwise part of The Other, invading privacy and taking work out of important context because people who aren't in on it can't empathize with anyone they assume to have mental health issues. Resurrect Dead acknowledges the importance of respecting someone's privacy and individuality. This may in fact be my new favorite documentary on any subject, ever.

Frontier Blues (2009)

directed by Babak Jalali
Iran
95 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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So this movie is set in and around Iran's northern border with Turkmenistan, and it involves issues of both countries but the main theme is universal human boredom and isolation. It follows four different men (mostly- the other people around them are sometimes involved as well) whose stories overlap with each other as they go about their routines, stuck in a place where it's hard to live and be anything other than "stuck". This is not presented as overtly tragic nor is it something to look down on as inferior, it's simply a look at a region that's barren and dry in many senses of the word.

It's difficult to believe that this was Babak Jalali's first film because it's so good at framing shots and putting unspoken yet intimately understood information and implications in shots that, at first glance, just look sparse- people isolated against an expansive steppe landscape, a man and his donkey, life inside a chicken factory, all of these things become more than they are when put in the context of something like Frontier Blues. It not only has a keen understanding of what it's like to live in boredom but also a sharp and occasionally absurd sense of humor to accompany the feelings of loneliness on that frontier.

I really appreciate that Jalali is an Iranian-born director who put a character in this movie who is from Tehran and is a portrayal of the way foreigners come to someplace they deem to hold some element of exoticism that they couldn't find in their home country and photograph people in situations intended to show the reality of their country that are, in actuality, totally set up by the photographer, and not anything that would occur in real life. The Iranian photographer in Frontier Blues follows around a Turkmen guy and four children and tries to capture them living "authentic, majestic Turkmen life" which is really a background propped up by what the Iranian guy believes Turkmen life to entail. The Turkmen guy is not amused by this.

It would seem that in attempting to capture the folly of people attempting to capture the magical spirit of whatever region of the world they romanticize, this film has accurately captured something of the actual spirit of the few-man's land between Iran and Turkmenistan.

Blood and Carpet (2015)

directed by Graham Fletcher-Cook
UK
72 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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So this movie is about a couple who commit a murder in late 1960s England and have to deal with the dirty work of disposing with the body. Unfortunately- considering that this was the main draw for me- the story doesn't only follow the process of covering up the murder, but also covers marital disputes between the couple as well as their nosy "friend" and the wife's general dissatisfaction with life. All while they happen to have a body stashed in their bathroom.

It's very bare of set pieces or anything to embellish the visuals aside from some nice costuming and being shot in black-and-white, but this still feels novel despite the plethora of late-60s period pieces cropping up lately. It feels much, much more like a classic English play than a regular old movie; definitely don't go into this expecting schlock or anything less than actors putting in 110% despite the ordinariness of their surroundings. This is why I liken it to a play rather than a traditional movie: People acting the hell out of their script in a sparse, non-showy background.

Because of the divergence from the meat and potatoes of a conventional murder film, there's some stuff that doesn't feel satisfyingly resolved and some questions I wanted answered that weren't. If it's ever stated who the first body is in the beginning, I didn't catch it. I thought more than once that the characters were going to kill somebody and then the two narratives would join, because it looks like multiple different points in this film could plausibly match up to one another and ultimately lead to an explanation for why there's a body in the bathroom at the very beginning, but that body is consistently mentioned throughout the film, so nothing in it could truly have taken place prior to the events of the opening scenes.

I actually feel a little embarrassed for being confused by a modest 72-minute crime flick with a £3000 (about $4,060, less than rent for some studios in Manhattan) budget in which we know who the killers are and there's basically only two or three truly important characters. But I guess that could be seen as a good thing. I wasn't confused due to inept writing, it's just that even though it's lacking visually, this still manages to pack in a lot of angles that don't reveal themselves to a viewer all at once. It is also remarkably good at casting actresses who resembled the main actress for those shots of her as a child and an elderly woman. I want to wrap up this review so I'm going to stop talking now, but I wanted to mention that that final shot of the protagonist as an old woman was brilliant for many reasons, but largely because it gave us a connection to our time, it let us look at her as somebody whose story still existed in the present day after we had been contextualizing her throughout the whole movie as somebody belonging to a time firmly in the past.

Road (1987)

directed by Alan Clarke
UK
67 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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I already knew that Alan Clarke was probably my favorite director working with television, but even so, this movie blew me away. There's no real props to speak of and very little set embellishment, but it does more with its sparse nature than the majority of movies I've seen recently.

There's nothing much that really happens in this movie: Some people argue, some other people make a very slow suicide pact, a guy rambles to you about The Good Old Days, some more people attend the world's most ominous-looking dance party- but it's what's being said that you have to pay attention to. I'm not kidding when I say that this is some of the best acting I've ever seen combined with some of the best writing I've ever seen. The actors deliver these monologues that are incredibly well-constructed and engaging, yet manage to avoid falling into the trap of "nobody actually talks like this" syndrome. It's the context and the situation that make that dialogue feel appropriate rather than silly. If they were speaking to another person it would feel a little overblown. But just people, walking along, ripping into themselves and the people around them and more than anything the state of the country they live in-  it's like nothing I've seen before. I'd like to mention also that a lot of work that went into this: One monologue was done sixteen times. A quarter of a mile walk and a scathing, emotionally raw speech that took sixteen takes to get perfect. And good lord does it achieve that perfection.

I think I've said something like this already, but I'm impressed that this was shown on mainstream TV. Here Stateside I'm used to anything with this much genuine anger and depictions of class struggle and dereliction being relegated to the loosely-defined sphere of the "underground" because criticism of government and displeasure with the capitalist system is not a worldview that garners favor among bigger-name studios and certainly not big-name television studios. "Road" is pain, real naked visuals of the consequence of a government that sucks out the livelihood from its people, this is a society with no prospects. Evidently this is life under a Tory government, and I'm not familiar with British politics, but I am familiar with the looks of things in Road, and I can agree that this is a state of being no pocket of any country should ever be forced to endure.

I do wish that this spoke to issues of class-based racism or oppression based on religion or status of being LGBT+, because it is overwhelmingly white. I appreciate wholly the focus on class struggle, economic depression, and its myriad of effects on one's life and being outside of just the usual "got no job got no money wanna drink m'self to death" that anybody can think up. But there is a whole other layer of oppression that this doesn't even touch upon, and I can tell that if it did, it could have done so powerfully and potently.

Bluebeard (2009)

directed by Catherine Breillat
France
80 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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This is one of those movies that earns five stars for not doing anything wrong. Each shot can be described as "painterly" and the tableaux of images it offers up, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, is rich in color and style. I knew that Catherine Breillat was a great director just from watching Fat Girl but now I think I should probably go deeper into her filmography.

This is an adaptation of the story of Bluebeard, a violent lord who murders all of his wives, and it's also a story in miniature of two little girls reading the tale between period-piece flashbacks of it happening. This adaptation of Bluebeard takes a considerably kinder stance on its titular character than the original, even though the sisters reading it seem to be more familiar with the tale in all of its violence as opposed to in the gentler version being shown onscreen. Bluebeard is depicted as a world-weary old man, a fatherly character to his much younger and consistently much physically smaller wives. He has a seemingly endless supply of kindness to give them- he tells the sister he ends up marrying that she can roam around the castle as much as she likes, he gives her her own small, secluded room when she requests it, though he would like to give her lavish riches and as much room in the castle as she wants, and overall he seems to just be thankful for her presence.

I think there are a lot of underlying statements about gender relations in this, and the fact that the unexpectedness of Bluebeard's kindness comes off as shocking may have been a statement itself: that we're at a point where it's surprising when a man isn't careless towards his wife or girlfriend. But it is inevitable that he does turn on her in the end, and the violence he exhibits when it comes time to do this isn't hateful, just... disappointed. It's almost like he's a symbol for how social conditioning allows any man to exert power over a woman just by default of his gender, even if he himself is a nice man and doesn't want any part of that. I think Bluebeard was a character who recognized that he had a great amount of status to uphold, not only as a lord but as a man.

The story of Bluebeard is not, however, entirely about Bluebeard, and it would be a big mistake to twist this review into something that only talks about him. In the story, the two sisters quite plainly do whatever they want, and this is shown and written in a way that's contrary to a lot of stories about "female empowerment" that put on airs; ones that pretend to be empowering and show girls that are advertised as having individualistic, forward-thinking mindsets, but in reality are shills for whatever beauty product is being peddled in that moment. The sisters in this film go out on their own, make their own choices, do whatever they want to do for them- up to and including marrying guys for their money, something often looked down upon as trashy. The Bluebeard story ends up having a semi-happy finish, but I don't know why I expected the rest of the movie to, considering Breillat.

Ring 0: Birthday (2000)

directed by Norio Tsuruta

Japan

99 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I've been burned by Ringu sequels many times, occasionally encountering ones that were so bad I couldn't finish them, so unfortunately that's the mindset I have whenever I check out a new one, since it never seems like they can match the quality of the original. But in Ring 0: Birthday, I've found something that not only matches the original film and builds upon the tone that it sets but may in fact be better than the original 1998 Ringu.

Ring 0 follows a human Sadako as she struggles to get past the trauma of her childhood by joining a drama troupe. I'm not as up on my Ring lore as I would like to be, so I'm not sure how much depicting Sadako as a normal yet stressed-out young woman goes against what was established in the first films. I also know that on a deeper level Sadako takes characteristics from older kwaidan stories, some of them folktales that have been in Japan for ages, and I don't know how well this movie reconciles a somewhat modern Sadako with her older origins. But I do know that this movie is a great case for the fact that dread is universal, and that even though it might not hold the same meaning to me as someone who never grew up hearing the specific ghost story that Sadako came from, I can still understand when this movie wants me to that something is terribly terribly wrong.

I'm surprised by just how terrifying this movie manages to render the prospect of having extra-sensory abilities like telekinesis and the ability to see the future, because the majority of movies about psychic powers tend to end up being goofy as hell. Ring 0: Birthday has its main character's brush with Fortean powers shown as something jarring, revolting; almost a body horror feeling.

I would argue that this film is frightening because it has an almost primal perspective on psychic ability: that the fear of premonition is an instinctual fear of violating the laws of the universe, which say people can't see the future, nor can they heal someone by laying hands on them. Regardless of whether one uses their powers for good or bad, the fact that they have them is an inherent violation of what should be true, and if you can do things that break the laws of physics, chances are the break isn't restricted to you. So I think a lot of the horror in Ring 0 lies in a fear for the status quo.

This film is dead serious where a lot of others use unnecessary screaming and inappropriate orchestral scores. It holds up incredibly well despite the 17 years between its original release and now. Hideo Nakata did a great job with Ringu and continues to do a great job with other movies, but Norio Tsuruta makes of Sadako not only the recognizable figure with long, thick black hair but also a deeply tragic figure whose fate was not under her control. And no matter how many sequels and prequels and loosely-associated films I watch, this is now my accepted version of Sadako. And I'll know from now on that she wasn't a child unceremoniously dumped into a well while either too confused or too young to fight. This Sadako fought hard, and it's the fact that she lost when she didn't deserve to that now casts a different light across all incarnations of her on film.

Ascension (2002)

directed by Karim Hussain
Canada
108 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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You may know Karim Hussain better as the cinematographer for several other very distinctive films, including Antiviral, Hobo With a Shotgun, Territoires, the recent and quietly successful We Are Still Here, and a couple of episodes of NBC's Hannibal. If you know him you know him: his sense of pervasive darkness is often the defining quality of a film, Hobo With a Shotgun excepted.

Ascension is an attempt to take on an absolutely massive concept: the murder of God at the hands of some other incredibly powerful entity, and the subsequent transformation of the entire human species into a race of little gods who can create miracles. Unsurprisingly, this is not used to mutual benefit- the world looks pretty grim. But I found it unrealistic that there wasn't actually more chaos, and it seemed like there were some unsaid rules to humanity's power. I would think that there wouldn't be any shortage of people who, for various reasons, would decide to end the human species as a whole if given boundless power. This alone is a great source of questions, because maybe if one person didn't want humanity to end, they alone could prevent multiple people from ending it? This is speculative fiction if ever there was any.

The one catch to such an immense and wide-reaching undertaking is that Ascension takes place essentially within the boundaries of a single stairwell in an impossibly tall building. This is actually what turned me off from watching the film for a very long time, but I don't want anybody else to feel the same way, because although the setting never changes much, it doesn't feel like it's confined to a stairwell. The three women ascending the stairs in order to kill whatever is at the top (which is implied to be God's murderer) converse among themselves in a way that not only offers us a bit of backstory on the world outside, but also a look into the prevailing worldview of the survivors of the "miracle plague" and, on an individual level, a look into the psyche of the women themselves.

There's a scene where all three women are in conversation where the actors are changed for a split second to completely different people, and the message behind this is fairly clear as far as I could see: that these people don't actually matter; the identity of whoever's going up those stairs to do that deed isn't a concern. The overwhelming feeling behind this movie is an utter disregard and even disgust for the physical, a statement of the meaninglessness of the body without action, the use of the body as nothing but a vessel for important actions to be performed.

I think this narrative works because there's so much left unsaid. The only time that ambiguity got on my nerves was the ending, which I felt was a little cliched and didn't seen satisfying, although I doubt if anything would have been given that this is basically 105 minutes of buildup. But the world this is based in, the bleakness of it and the uncertainty, is something that you can think about for longer than the movie runs.

H2S (1969)

directed by Roberto Faenza
Italy
85 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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This movie opens with a soft, calming voice narrating the horrible things that eventually happen to overcrowded rat colonies. I'm not really sure how their specific plight played into everything else, though- the problem of H2S isn't necessarily that people are overcrowded, it's that they're being told what to do and forced into a routine. They're crowded at first, but a small student revolution early on takes care of that problem very nicely.

H2S is apparently not that well known outside of Italy, and inside of Italy it was banned after its premiere (which is unsurprising: this seems like the poster child for "movies that would get banned in Italy in the late 60s"). It has some undeniable similarities to A Clockwork Orange, not only because its protagonist bears more than a passing resemblance to a young Malcolm McDowell, but because of its themes of conformity, re-education, and repression by a state regime. It lacks about 90% of the depravity of A Clockwork Orange, though it does certainly have some upsetting scenes. But nothing that's really as upsetting as those poor rats in the beginning.

I can't think of anything in particular that I disliked strongly about this, excepting the weird and exotifying treatment of its sole black castmember, but when I think about it as a whole I just can't get that excited about it. It's got a keen sense of visuals, and I would imagine that a lot of it actually cost a pretty penny, as there's a lot of constructed machinery that had to be built and work reasonably well in motion, since this was before you could seamlessly CGI everything into action. 

It feels a little watered-down since 90 minutes isn't enough to explore all the intricacies of totalitarianship and subsequent revolution, but H2S is also probably not intended to have been a sweeping, bracing picture of democratic triumph. It's a little goofy. Some of the characters abscond to the alps and wear lederhosen. There's a comically evil Cruella DeVille-type witch lady who's supposed to be 101 years old. It's got its meanings that ring true, but the absurdity of it is as much in play as what it has to say about revolution. And its Ennio Morricone score has become unfortunately disembodied, considering the obscurity of this against the fame of his other scored films, but Morricone apparently still plays it in concert.

Mars et Avril (2012)

directed by Martin Villeneuve
Canada
90 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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I'm gonna be a little bit salty with this one because I don't remember the last time I posted a review of a movie I didn't actually like.

I'm not going to try and challenge any of this movie's visual aspects, because it's basically perfect in terms of effects and the overall look of it. It was made for about $2.5million which sounds like an astronomical amount of money but I'm being told that considering the scope of it, that's not much- in fact, the director has a TED Talk on how he made something so expansive for such a small amount. I'm even hesitant to mention that its aesthetic isn't my personal favorite because it looks so good that it could have been done in a totally different way, but as long as the effects were basically the same, I would have had no problem with it.

The problem I had with this is that it is, to be blunt, insufferable. I was trying to goad myself out of believing that because it didn't have to be. But good lord did it seem to be. I was thinking hard about it and I truly do believe that this is a pretentious film because I know of so many people who do the same things with art and music that people in Mars et Avril do, who explore strange concepts and avant-garde formats just like this, and they don't come off even a quarter as artsy-fartsy and irritating as these characters do. These people act so superior just because they make experimental art. 

I'm not interested in watching sci-fi movies where the upper class invents more and more far-fetched methods to elevate itself. I'm tired of seeing movies where the status quo is upheld but because the rich have hover limos instead of regular ones, it's somehow futuristic and deep. I hate the flippancy with which this treats art like it's a trump card you can use to make yourself instantly superior to everyone else. Artists are everyone else, it's just that when rich people decide to make art they suddenly believe their scribblings and farting into a microphone are worth more than other peoples' entire lives.