Wild Country (2006)

directed by Craig Strachan
Scotland
67 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I had an unusually tough time finding new things to watch this week, so I ended up watching a couple of movies that were pretty much just random picks, including this one. It's a relatively low-budget Scottish werewolf flick that somehow got Lionsgate distribution (or so I've heard). The cast is largely no-names who do a surprisingly good job, but Peter Capaldi is there for a bit too.

I probably liked this more than a lot of other people because I was surprised in general at how well-made it was. There are parts that were more slipshod than others, including some apparently botched fake daylight scenes that I didn't notice but other reviewers did, but as a whole it feels like something where a lot of effort was put into it from everybody involved. The storyline isn't very original and really at times there seemed almost to not be any storyline; it just progresses along the track of "some goofy teens find a werewolf baby" and doesn't have any extra twists save one at the end that was a bit predictable anyway. Like the director just wound up the key on this movie's back and set it going, then didn't interfere.

I think about 98% of the reason why this was able to win me over so much was the practical effects. It uses those on both gore and wolfy stuff, and admittedly those creatures don't even remotely resemble wolves, nor do they look like living, breathing organisms so much as what a large Muppet might look like if infected with a zombie virus, but I just loved them so much anyway. I loved that they didn't look like wolves. They looked like their own beings, and every time I looked at them I got a sense of "somebody made that!" that felt more unique and genuine than the typical picture of a bipedal, muscular, long-clawed lycanthrope. I dug those silly-looking werewolves. We need more silly-looking werewolves.

Basically, Wild Country had a lot of positive attributes that were enough to outweigh the negative for me, but I can't tell if anybody else will like it. Film opinions are totally subjective. This might not go down in the annals of werewolf movie fame, but who decides what does?

Happy Death Day (2017)

directed by Christopher B. Landon
USA
96 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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When I first saw the trailer for this, my first thought was "wow, that looks ridiculous" and I was very surprised to see Blumhouse putting their name behind it. I'm not sure if it was a bad trailer or a misconception on my part, but as it turns out, the thing to understand before going into Happy Death Day is that it is, in large part, a comedy. It does take its characters and their stories seriously, but it's set in almost a cartoon version of what a college is supposed to be like. I'm not sure why this eluded me at first.

The repeated-day premise isn't original, but the movie itself acknowledges that fact. The repeated-day premise with the added intrigue that the person repeating her day has to figure out who keeps murdering her is certainly more original, and it's fun as hell to watch. This entire movie has some serious watchability to the point where it felt strange watching it on an iPad instead of in a theater. I'm separating the concept of watchability from what I personally thought about this movie, because while I myself wasn't overly fond of the idea, the main actress absolutely makes her role work, and scenes like the one where she walks completely naked down the courtyard of her college because she knows nobody will ever remember it are so genuinely energetic that their energy becomes almost infectious.

Being a caricature of college life, and therefore involving a lot of sorority girls, Happy Death Day does buy into that "girl binary" pretty hard, which is unfortunate. Girls are either caring, sensitive angels, or they're deceitful, stuck-up sluts. Sometimes they're in disguise as one, but are actually the other. The main character is the only one who gets afforded any development and even that is simply a shift from one end of the binary to the other.

It feels wrong to count a full twenty minutes of a film's runtime as a point against it, but I wasn't fond of the sort-of twist ending to this. They could have ended it on a nice note of this girl hanging up her old, rude ways and eventually moving on with her life, but I guess they thought the audience needed one more twist in order to stay interested (which we didn't, IMO). Another thing I wasn't a fan of was the romance that developed between the main character and somebody who probably shouldn't have been more than a bit player. It really drives home how hard mainstream cinema tries to shoehorn in hetero romances when a movie can literally be about a girl reliving her own murder over and over and trying desperately to use the time allotted to her to figure out who's doing it, track them down, and kill them, but she still has to fall in love with some college bro while she's doing it.

Who Killed Captain Alex? (2010)

directed by Nabwana I.G.G.
Uganda
64 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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This is Uganda's first action movie and it doesn't let you forget that for a second. It was filmed in the director's home village on a budget of around $200, and was supposedly never meant to reach such a wide audience as it did. The director sold everything he owned to buy a camera. I'm really hoping all the people out there giving this five stars and proclaiming it the best movie ever aren't making fun of it, because this is genuinely an amazing movie, I'm not saying this ironically.

The most important detail of this for me personally was that the version of it I watched (it's free on Vimeo) included a voice-over dub by somebody else, and I'm not sure if this person was friends with the director or part of the production company or what, but having this guy comment on everything improved the experience tenfold. He narrates as if he's sitting next to you in the cinema joking with you, making exaggerated crying noises when a character is sad, making up "internal monologues" for them, and sometimes saying things like "The action's coming soon! I promise!" You would think that this would distract from the movie itself, but I found that I was almost more interested in the commentary than the original film. I'm not sure if voice-overs are a common thing in Ugandan film, but at one point the narrator mentions "this is how we watch movies in Uganda", so I hope it is. I would love to have every film narrated by an enthusiastic Ugandan guy.

As for the movie itself... it definitely feels and looks like it was made for a couple hundred bucks in somebody's home village, and that's great. It's a great movie beyond the framework of what Western film criticism tells us to expect from something. I wish that everybody could make films like this because then maybe we'd all get out of the mindset that a movie has to go over the viewer's head to be intelligent and use elaborate visual metaphors to convey its message. This is an on-the-nose action movie that doesn't hide anything, doesn't try to be anything it isn't. You know what you're getting into when you start watching it and you just sit back and enjoy the ride.

It just makes me sad that anybody would dismiss this as amateurish because of things like the guns being made out of pipes and scrap metal and the CGI being hilariously cheap. This feels like Uganda for Ugandans. Characters are named as the Ugandan Mata Hari, the Ugandan Bruce Lee (or Bruce U as he's called), there's a Ugandan Shaolin monk. Truly DIY cinema in its best and purest form.

Teens in the Universe (1975)

directed by Richard Viktorov
Soviet Union
80 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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An interstellar expedition of young Soviet scouts, none older than 14, reaches a planet called Alpha Cassiopeia. They send a landing party out and discover that the humanoid indigenous population has been largely eliminated or heavily modified by some out-of-control robots who are played by people in black leather bell-bottoms who walk like they're constantly listening to "Stayin' Alive". Everything that happens outside of this very basic framework of locations and circumstances is entirely anybody's guess, because I couldn't tell what was going on 98% of the time.

Given how many movies from the Soviet Union during this time period were basically dressed-up propaganda, I'm assuming there's some kind of hidden political agenda within all of this, but it was certainly too obtuse for me to have recognized. There's really no overstating how off-the-rails this movie is. By the end there's some completely different robots with baby carriages showing up who were never mentioned before. One of the guys involved in the mission back on Earth suddenly appears on the planet the pioneer scouts are on, and the only explanation given for how he got there is "the call of duty". The robots have a kind of "siren song" that entrances the aliens, which turns out to be a sort of futuristic jazz tune that makes them do a funky dance. This is truly an oddball.

I watch a lot of Russian Fantastika, and the set design in those films is always a treat, but old Soviet sci-fi like this gives them a run for their money. Anything you can imagine can be built out of plastic, tinfoil, cardboard, or wood. Aliens come in exactly one flavor, which is "person in greasepaint with weird costume". Teens in the Universe is actually a lot closer to what a child's thought process looks and feels like from the inside than a lot of other movies made specifically for kids. The Soviet Union had some incredible children's media going, but people like to ignore that and make fun of the political message behind it all. For what it's worth, American media does a ton of "indoctrinating the children"-type stuff too, people just don't really realize it. And it's never as fun as things like this.

Black Mirror: Arkangel (2017)

directed by Jodie Foster
UK/USA
52 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I don't typically review Black Mirror episodes since I don't really count them as "movies", but I've seen a couple of other people doing it, so why not. Spoilers ahead, probably, depends on how little you like to know before you watch things.

I'm gonna start out by saying that I thought Arkangel was very well done but it's definitely not my favorite Black Mirror episode for a few reasons, all of which fall under the umbrella of "it just doesn't feel like the others". It doesn't have the same feeling of wrongness that Black Mirror typically seeks to convey, because the technology in it is working exactly as it was intended to and isn't even being misused. This is literally about a surveillance system for children, that's the beginning and end of it, the fact that the software ends up fracturing the relationship between a mom and her daughter isn't a deviation from what the program was intended to do. All (or most, I haven't seen all of them) other Black Mirror episodes are about technology being either abused or misused, or running wild, and this one is just a program developed by average, probably non-sinister people doing exactly what it was meant to do.

On the other hand though, I appreciate this for being a more one-on-one story in the middle of a series all about widespread societal alienation. This is about a single application of technology as it effects two people, as opposed to things like U.S.S. Callister, Black Museum, Fifteen Million Merits, or pretty much any other episode where the scale involves several people if not an entire population being impacted negatively by a new technology.

I also liked that it was subtly implied that all of this could have been avoided had the mother just treated her daughter like a human being. There's numerous points where, instead of directly communicating with her daughter, the mother instead sneaks around and influences the situations around her daughter, attempting- as any mother would, honestly- to make the world safer for her, instead of priming her to survive in a world that can't always be 100% safe for anybody. This impacts the daughter enormously and in a way that's very realistic and not at all exclusive to some dark, digital future. I do have a couple of problems with the things it seems to be implying about mental illness/lack of empathy, but thankfully those things aren't at the forefront all the time.

Jigsaw (2017)

directed by Michael and Peter Spierig
Canada
92 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I'm not even really a "fan" of the Saw series, I've seen the first four and they got gradually worse so I never bothered to watch any of the others. I don't know what the motivation behind titling this one "Jigsaw" instead of just sticking with the traditional format and having it be another Saw [numeral] was, considering that this is very much a Saw movie, and it isn't even a creative or original one. Maybe they want you to think it is.

The thing with me and the Saw movies is that I always seem to get caught up in dissecting John Kramer/Jigsaw's morals, because they are irritating to me and I hate him as a character, not just because he kills people but because of the garbage he says while he kills people. But it's a case where, if 100% of how he's written is intentional, then me hating him is a sign that he's a well-made character. Because, like Kylo Ren, I feel that John Kramer is an example of a stereotypical white man with access to way too much power who uses that power to act on opinions that we typically only see as ridiculous Facebook posts made by people we pretend we don't know. He (Kramer) acts like his philosophy is the only truly enlightened stance, and that everybody but him is a shallow, mindless drone liable to accidentally inflict suffering upon others through their carelessness. I see dudes who think like this all the time but in Saw we have somebody who acts it out.

Outside of that, though, Jigsaw happens to not be an especially good movie. Thanks to some traps that are as good if not better than any Saw traps that came before them, it's at least got some watchability. There's always that nervous thrill you get watching people spring themselves out of their trap in the nick of time. But the things that happen when people aren't in mortal peril are extremely boring. I've always thought that. The police-procedural aspect of these movies has always been laughably melodramatic and obviously just filler.

The whole finale of this movie is a balancing act based on manipulations of timelines and creative hidings of the truth that I guess I should have seen as ingenious, but it just felt like some last-minute scrambling to me. It ends so abruptly as to be jarring, not satisfying, and several characters and questions get left in the lurch in favor of guys saying corny stuff like "I SPEAK FOR THE DEAD" as if it actually means anything. I see many avenues for this franchise to be continued (even though we all know it would continue somehow even if this movie ended with the whole planet getting blown to pieces) and that worries me. However, this does win my favor for featuring grain entrapment.

Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1974)

directed by Omar Amiralay
Syria
83 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I held off watching this for a while because I felt like I wouldn't be able to write about it well, but that's a bad reason not to watch something, especially something that isn't necessarily intended to be received with criticism for its artistic direction. This is notable for being the first film from Syria to talk about the injustices of the government, and that's its main intention, although there's clearly a strong cinematographer at work here as well.

What I particularly liked about this is that it highlights the failings of a government that claims to be socialist from a left-leaning viewpoint itself, and it doesn't negate the value of socialism based on one example. It seems like the Syrian government at this point in time used revolutionary sentiment to further its own agenda; hooking supporters by saying "yeah, sure, we can be socialists now", but not changing its own corrupt, money-hungry way of governing in any way other than slapping a new label on it. Communal work and unions are shown to be the key to creating an economy that serves the people, but it's emphasized also that the government should be doing things that it certainly isn't.

One other interesting thing was how there's repeated emphasis on the minority controlling the majority. I felt that this was interesting because it highlighted the way that modern Western thought has been propagandized into believing that individualism is a virtue, that everybody is on their own and it's a bad thing to be part of a majority. Because in this village, being part of the majority means you're part of a working class that produces all the resources for the rich few, yet gets nothing back; in places like America, a message of "non-conformism is good" has been pushed to get us to separate from each other so that when the time comes to unite, we fight over small, petty differences and can't recognize our common struggle.

I think the government has changed (likely not for the better) since this film was made, but it's still a good example of how inequality can manifest itself in parts of the world where the working class are still struggling for their rights. There's a lot in this that can't be applied to other situations, because every place and every circumstance is unique, but this kind of abuse of power repeats itself and the outcome is always more suffering and pain for the non-wealthy.

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

directed by Victor Erice
Spain
97 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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I've been thinking recently about how so many movies that aim to create a narrative of a child's perspective on adult things fail at doing so because they don't recognize the weirder aspects of childhood. They only want to show things that can be translated into a coherent, aesthetically-pleasing spectacle. Much of childhood revolves around fears and anxieties that are altogether irrational, and as a young child, you have an understanding of the world that often doesn't match up at all with how things really behave. This is what The Spirit of the Beehive gets right where other movies about children get it wrong. It doesn't drive things into absurd fantasyland, but its depiction of childhood is honest and true.

One of the most striking things about this movie is how it accurately depicts the belief a lot of kids hold that there's a merging of the real world and the fictional world they watch in movies. The Spirit of the Beehive shows children believing that the fictional is something that exists "just over there". Just beyond that horizon, beyond that field, in another land, all the creatures and myths they've witnessed onscreen are really real.

I think this movie isn't about one singular thing, but one of the themes it explores most in-depth is cinema itself; how we perceive movies when we're young and how movies work and interact with the physical world. It's interesting to me that one of the little girl characters explicitly says that everything that happens in a movie is a lie, none of it is real, it's all entirely a trick; but her and the other girl as well as us in the audience still believe what we're seeing onscreen. The girls believe the monster they talk about lives in an abandoned farmhouse, and the audience believes, despite knowing in the back of our minds that these are scripted, made-up, directed, costumed actors, we're seeing genuine acts by genuine people. We believe this because that's how it truly feels- no hackneyed depictions of childhood through the rose-tinted glasses of an adult, no implausible CGI of the inside of a child's mind, just innocence and purity. No tricks here. I think this is a new, old favorite.

2017 was a rough year, but now it's behind us. I hope you and yours are lucky and loved in this coming year.