The Visitor in the Eye (1977)

directed by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi
Japan
100 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

So I'm a big fan of Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, and like most people, my favorite movie of his is Hausu, because it's also one of my favorite movie in general. But he's also directed a substantial amount of short films that more closely follow the conventions of Japanese new-wave cinema, as well as some advertising work. I like to watch his shorts when I have nothing else to do because I can be guaranteed they'll be good. But I'm less familiar with his other feature-length movies, like this one.

The Visitor in the Eye appears to be based on some kind of manga that I've never heard of, and as such I think there's a lot of characters who are inside jokes from the source material that I didn't get the full context behind. The main character in the manga looks to be the roguish, Phantom of the Opera-looking mad doctor (played by the always fantastic Jô Shishido!) who is brilliant and successful but kind of broody and weird. But to me, not having any knowledge of this manga, the main character in this movie looks to be a young girl who gets her eye put out in a tennis accident and, upon receiving a replacement cornea, begins to have strange visions.

I think the reason why people don't talk about this movie as much as Hausu is because, to be blunt, it really isn't as good. I was hoping I'd come away from this telling people about a virtually unknown second Ôbayashi masterpiece that was equally deserving of love as Hausu, but it's just not all that. I absolutely love the way it looks, the cinematography has that painted-backdrop feel to it, unique to Ôbayashi, where everything looks vaguely fake but in a deliberate and aesthetically pleasing way. There's random screams for no reason and less surreal imagery than you might expect, but again, this seems to be an adaptation, so the director may have had less room to work with when it came to creative license. But despite looking perfect, there's no getting over the fact that this is just boring for about 95% of its running time. The beginning is interesting enough, but in the middle it lapses severely into a weird love triangle between the girl, her mystery dream lover, and the girl her mystery dream lover killed, and it never recovers. Good if you like soap operas, not so good if you like Hausu.

It also makes me really, really uncomfortable that the doctor character in this has a little girl living with him who refers to herself as his wife despite clearly being maybe six years old. I kept trying to figure out a way in which this was not disgusting- maybe she's joking, she's doing that kid thing where kids insist they're really adults because how dare anybody treat them like babies; maybe she's supposed to be a grown woman with a little kid body. But there is like no way to parse that that makes it not awful. I don't feel so bad about disliking this because that's just such a gross and bizarre element that I didn't understand the purpose of.

Lemme also leave a link here to where you can watch a bunch of Nobuhiko Ôbayashi shorts for free, legally, in case you also need to pass some time. "Emotion" is probably the best and longest on there, and involves vampires.

Where Have All the People Gone (1972)

directed by John Llewellyn Moxley
USA
74 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

A good movie for those who are fatigued from the Black Friday crowds today, considering it takes place in a world with almost no people whatsoever.

Apparently this was a made-for-TV movie, although its content is a bit different from what I'd think to expect flipping through channels for a movie to watch. It's about a band of survivors trekking through California after some mysterious solar event wipes out a large portion of the population, and up until its suspiciously optimistic ending, it's actually pretty grim. Save for Peter Graves' hair. You could power a whole city on how bright that man's hair is.

This movie shows a little bit of the American attitude of the time towards nuclear bombs and the threat of war, and the characters have an obvious bias towards their own country in terms of who they believe can and can't have a bomb dropped on them. They all have a kind of "immunity"/"accident" attitude, wherein nothing could possibly happen to the USA, they're "immune", so any nuclear disaster that might be to blame for their circumstances must certainly be an accident. I don't even think they refer directly to being bombed, they either say it's a nuclear accident or assume it's the army testing something nearby- which by itself has a lot of connotations about the license the military gets to do whatever they want, but I won't get into that now. At one point one of the characters is brooding about her situation and mentions having seen "some pictures of Hiroshima", but if she'd really seen those photos, she would have recognized that the area her group was in couldn't have been atom-bombed, because trees would be flattened and there would be significantly more smoldering wreckage in and around their persons.

This isn't a bad movie, and it's fun to imagine viewers in the 70s having their day interrupted by this drama about a group of people coming to terms with the death of their loved ones along with nearly everybody else in the world, but it's too lighthearted and vaguely nationalistic to feel like a good exploration of war or even a good exploration of solar flares. This certainly couldn't have been made today, considering how the widespread nature of the internet makes the importance of electricity even more dire now than in 1974. And the ending is almost comically out of left field- the characters disregard practical difficulties and suddenly assume everything will be perfectly fine. "Well, we'll just have to get to farming! What do you mean by minimum viable population size?"

From the Pole to the Equator (1987)

directed by Yervant Gianikian + Angela Ricci Lucchi
Italy
98 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

Most of the time when I talk about found-footage movies, I'm talking about horror movies like The Blair Witch Project, [REC], or Cloverfield that claim their contents were "found" by somebody else in the aftermath of some terrifying event, usually on a battered camcorder or cell phone. But the term was used earlier to describe a particular kind of experimental film that re-assembles old, degraded film stock to form a narrative entirely different from that which the material originally depicted. The two directors of From the Pole to the Equator are quite prolific in this format, while some other notable names are Peter Delpeut, Pere Portabella, and individual films such as Mother Dao the Turtlelike.

Often, the goal of these films is to make explicit undertones that were never intended to come to light in the original materials. These films can be overtly political and I would go so far as to say that the format has its origins in radical leftist politics. With From the Pole to the Equator, the goal is to dismantle and examine the colonial gaze and the nature of tourism. The footage it employs has a heavy focus on early ethnographic work, the kind that was mostly intended to use populations of distant parts of the globe as showpieces to bolster the intellectualism of high-class white academics.

In the beginning, all we see is a series of trains, and then a montage of polar explorers shamelessly butchering various animals. The recontextualizing of these expeditions in which polar bears, walruses, seals, and other large game were shot puts human beings in a threatening light, and dehumanizes them to a great extent- the animals become helpless, the humans become strange figures with branchlike limbs and round heads who advance mercilessly to employ their killing machines against the wildlife. With no expressions they use their machines to trap the bears, machines to kill the bears, machines to haul the bears onto their sea-faring machines after they've killed them.

The footage isn't just presented without alteration, it's sped up, slowed down, and replayed in order to highlight each intricate detail in which the colonial gaze can be seen reflected. A woman shrouded in layers of clothing meant to shade her unacclimated skin slowly, very slowly, teaches a class of young children somewhere in Africa how to cross themselves, clasp their hands in prayer, raise their arms above their heads. Behind the camera, a phantom voice can almost be heard encouraging its subjects to perform whatever action they want to capture. Repurposing these travelogues and exposing the racism and othering inherent in them shakes out the pockets of these disintegrating nitrate films to give them one last chance to say their piece before becoming lost to time.

Kedi [Cat] (2016)

directed by Ceyda Torun
Turkey
79 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

If you ever find yourself considering the plight of humanity, then this is the film for you, because while we may be having a time of it right now, these lovely, beautiful, and talented street cats in Istanbul are not. Possibly there are cats in the city that don't have it as good as the ones in this film, possibly it's an unfair depiction of feline life. But it sure looks like the grand majority of them get taken care of like finicky pets who refuse to come inside.

This movie is as simple as the title implies, it really doesn't employ any special tricks or narratives to show the furriest citizens of Istanbul and the people who love them. You can even overlook the fact that it's a YouTube Red Original Movie (perhaps the only decent one?). This is a well-made and very warm-feeling portrait of a city through the eyes of those animals who live there "incidentally", who weren't brought there on purpose but who nevertheless made it home and continue to live alongside humans in a sort of semi-domesticated state- whatever it is, it feels wrong to call them "feral".

What struck me about the relationship between the cats and the people is that like I just said, the cats weren't something that was intentionally put into the city for the humans' benefit. We build movie theaters, fancy restaurants, bars, clubs, spas, salons, and anything else you could possibly think of in cities for our own amusement, and you could argue that we've brought dogs along as companions too. But the cats are just there for themselves, and the fact that people enjoy petting them, feeding them, and taking care of them is something that neither the people nor the cats seem to have planned, though everybody profits from it. We think about ancient Egyptian civilization as being the OG cat lovers, but from what I understand, there wasn't a whole lot of "owning" cats going on then, and the situation was much like in this film- cats went around and did what they wanted, and humans admired and cared for them, but only a few people actually kept cats like pets.

 It's adorable to see how every kitty has their own personality, usually inherent to them but supplemented by these mythologies that the humans made up- this one's a ladies' man, this one is tough, this one's a big baby, etc. It's lovely to see so many grown adults enjoying themselves in a lighthearted manner. The people gain something wonderful from living with the cats, and this documentary makes you wonder which of the two benefits the most from their interactions.

The Place Where the Last Man Died (2010)

directed by Ivan Perić
Croatia
86 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

One of the only Croatian sci-fi/horror films I've heard of. This takes place in the somewhat far future: the population is stated to have reached seventeen billion, there's been time enough to have at least one more World War followed by some kind of a plague or biological weapons outbreak, and technology has regressed to almost a 1950s-like level after much time and degradation. There's a whole lot of doom and gloom in this one and certainly a very realistic atmosphere of post-disaster societal breakdown, even though the most society we ever get to see is a group of four people.

The main character is responsible for ending the human race and seems quite happy with himself about that. From his narration we learn that as a military scientist he apparently had the means to wipe humanity off the planet, and decided to do it because he judged that too many people were suffering while a select few enjoyed paradise on Earth. Which does hit the nail on the head, but to see the only solution to it as... global genocide? Instead of redistributing wealth and resources from the pampered elite to those in dire need? End the world for all of us because life is unfair, instead of working towards making it fair? There's some shaky logic in that decision.

Predictably, because it would be more surprising to not have any stragglers, the main character meets some survivors. They all have on gas masks the whole time, which is a decision I had trouble seeing the symbolism behind, because it felt counterproductive: the gas masks, to me, suggested anonymity, when in reality it would basically be the opposite of anonymity to be one of four people who are maybe the last humans left alive. Because I couldn't see anybody's face, I couldn't get attached to them, and the acting seemed to suffer as well since I had no idea what expressions anybody had at any given time. I also mixed up the characters quite a bit as three of them are men who all have roughly the same build.

Like I said, this is impressive in how it manages to worldbuild with very little, just the Croatian countryside with some gritty filters laid over it and a whole lot of rubble and debris. I actually didn't care for the filter at all, because it looked like something meant for an industrial music video and not a full-length, professional movie. What's black and white and vaguely greenish all over? This movie. But it's still very interesting, and I'll watch basically anything post-apocalyptic, bonus points if it includes some horrible tragedy where humanity is decimated. I love that doom and gloom. I'd just like to have an actual story to go along with it.

The White Reindeer (1952)

directed by Erik Blomberg
Finland
70 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

It seems like there's a decent amount of horror movies coming from Finland today, but as far as early forays into the genre go, The White Reindeer is among the oldest I've seen. If there wasn't such a consensus that it's definitely a horror movie, I might not even regard it as such, but I guess certain elements- the air of general mystery, some weird vampire-like business, and a feeling of danger- do place it firmly enough in genre territory.

I was surprised at how little happens in the first half of this movie, and for maybe ~50 minutes you could watch this and be unaware that it has any kind of horror bits at all. The majority of it is just reindeer stuff. As a rule of thumb I don't trust dramatized films to have any kind of ethnographic bent or be an accurate window into whatever kind of cultural practices they attempt to depict, but there's shots in this that would have been difficult to show had they not taken place during actual, non-staged reindeer herding events. In other words, there's just too damn many reindeer in here for all of it to be staged. So if you're into reindeer and/or reindeer herding, this is the film for you.

The plot appears to have been based off of a folktale, and I'm guessing that the fact that folktales are often just large blocks of plot with little extraneous material between them is responsible for why it was necessary to spend so much time on filler to make this not be 45 minutes long. It follows the standard format of many folktales and fairytales where a woman gets punished in various ways for doing something deemed inappropriate for a woman to do. In this particular case, she gets lonely when her husband is away for a long time, so she takes matters into her own hands and visits a shaman who makes it so that "no reindeer herder will be able to resist her". Somehow this goes wrong and she becomes... basically a vampire, except instead of turning into a bat, she turns into a reindeer. For a brief moment her character wields power, escaping life as a woman and becoming an unstoppable reindeer, but she's eventually brought down in the end.

What was surprising to me was that this movie just feels so chill. It's very beautiful, and the score got stuck in my head all night afterwards which almost never happens with orchestral scores. It progresses down the road these things usually progress down, and ends tragically for everyone involved, but for a while there it's just fun snowy shenanigans. It stands out from cheesier 50s horror (and boy, did horror go through a cheesy period in that decade) by using lingering shots of faces and longer, tracking outdoors shots to create a haunting and sometimes powerful atmosphere. Black and white is probably the best format for this to have been in.

Litan (1982)

directed by Jean-Pierre Mocky
France
88 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

After having searched for somewhere to watch this for ages, it's different than I expected: I thought of something more rural, but this is too hectic to be bucolic, or to be much of anything other than oneiric and slightly distressing. The plot is anybody's guess, but it revolves around a woman and a man trying to evade certain death in a town inhabited by people with a drive to either put themselves in grave danger or injure others with reckless abandon. It's established that much of what happens during this film was foreseen by the main character during a dream just prior to the beginning of the movie, but of course nobody believes her because if you ask people in a dream if they're in a dream, they'll usually try to deny it, or at least that's been my experience, anyway. Whether or not this movie actually takes place in a dream is left open to interpretation.

The subtle hints of surrealism couched in more overt surrealism are a driving force here. We see several characters along the way who we never get to know the backstories of; like a cross-eyed man who pines for an undisclosed past life, a babushka-looking woman speaking a dialect different from all the other characters, musicians in skull masks, non-musicians in skull masks, the living dead, a guy who looks like Willem Dafoe and Peter Cushing had a baby whose second cousin is Robin Wright, and more. These people are encountered again and again, but the influence they have on the main character is either negligible or unclear. I guess you could argue that everything in the town is acting in sync to harass the main character and her companion- that the people are all only facets of a larger dream/nightmare who fit together like puzzle pieces.

Many people are in masks, doing strange, non-everyday activities, and supposedly this is because the protagonist and her travelling companion ended up in the town on "Litan's Day"- a holiday which Google provides no clues as to the existence/non-existence of- but this explanation seems feeble to me. It looks more like this is always how the town is, or at least that it's always how the town is beneath the surface, and on this day the true nature of the townspeople is allowed to be let loose. Everybody dresses up like death so nobody can figure out who the real Death is. This motif is represented by the overwhelming presence of the color red in almost every scene. Death could be everywhere- it is everywhere- but the layperson still can't tell where it is.

This whole thing is structured almost exactly like a dream in that it doesn't have a clear beginning or end and the main character seems to always be running from one place to the next with no goal in mind. Here is there, scene lays over scene so that many things can happen at exactly the same time. Narrative magic. Where the asylum ends and the rest of the village begins is not clear. Possibly the whole of the village is inside the asylum. The water is to be avoided. Possible better in concept than execution, but a good one for fans of Jean Rollin or some of Louis Malle's work.

1922 (2017)

directed by Zak Hildich
USA
101 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

This came out right alongside Gerald's Game, another Stephen King adaptation, which I'm assuming was done on purpose. I was surprised to see that it was directed by the dude who did These Final Days, a strangely bro-y Australian apocalypse flick, because the atmosphere of 1922 is the exact opposite of that. Which is admirable, and I was glad that that weird bro-ness didn't show up in 1922.

The first thing to know is that you will either absolutely hate Thomas Jane's performance in this or you'll love it. At first I thought he was ridiculous, but as it went on I realized that those affectations he was putting on for the role were exactly in line with how I heard Wilf's voice in the original short story, despite how silly it initially sounded to hear it out loud. Thomas Jane the actor is borderline unrecognizable as himself in this. Molly Parker could have (and did!) also contributed a great deal, but I felt she was underused.

I'm glad that so much of the dialogue was kept, because the way the novella was written is very specific and I don't think anybody else's words would have fit so cleanly with the idea of a 1920s middle-American dialect that King had constructed for his protagonist. But the one thing that I didn't see in this movie that I felt would have added a lot was the emphasis on the hatred Wilf feels towards the prospect of his river being sullied with pig guts. This may seem like a small detail, but it's mentioned repeatedly in the book yet is lost almost entirely in the movie, and it's something that stuck with me. Because when you think about it, when Wilf murders his wife for the sake of keeping the tract of land she planned to sell to the hog farm out of the hands of the butchers, he proves that he values hog guts (or rather, the absence of hog guts) more than he values his wife. He would rather have a pristine stream free of hog guts than a living, healthy wife.

The central murder was also underwhelming in the film adaptation of this story. I think it may have been intentional to show the murder as something relatively fast in order to highlight how one quick deed ruined multiple lives, but in the book the impression I got of the act was that it was a horrible, drawn-out process that none of the characters, no matter how jaded, were prepared for.

I gave it four stars, though, since I think this is enough of a complex and atmospheric film to stand on its own, but it doesn't escalate as satisfyingly as the book does, and the impression of something truly supernatural going on- in the way Wilf knows, actually knows things he couldn't possibly have known unless his dead wife quite literally rose from her grave and told them to him- is rushed, as is Hank's downfall. But I have to say that what I'm most disappointed by is the film's total refusal to recognize Stephen King's obvious fixation on the word "snood" that had been so memorable in the original material. Snood!