I think The Troll Hunter could be this year’s ‘Let the Right One In.’ It’s creative, the effects are great, and it’s got that foreign feel while still being accessible enough to the average filmgoer. If it had more English segments it would be this year’s District 9, but alas, many people still hate readin’ at the movin’ pitchur show.
Kinda reminds me of Shadow of the Colossus.
Hey y’all!
I don’t have time for a really meticulous, in-depth review today, but I wanted to get these thoughts down while I had time.
Last night, we saw The Troll Hunter at the Florida Film Festival. It’s a Norwegian film, in the style of faux-documentary (it’s NOT a mockumentary, because a mockumentary contains elements of parody, and this is NOT a parody). Sort of like a Blair Witch situation, where there’s a bunch of material and investigators are trying to figure out what happened, etc.
A group of students from Volda College are following a man suspected by hunters of being a bear poacher. The hunters are annoyed because the state carefully maintains the bear population, and so they are angry that someone’s gone rogue and is poaching all the good bears.
The students follow the man, named Hans, into the woods one night after being repeatedly rebuffed by him. When they see what he’s up to, they beg him to allow them to document his work. He’s an agent with the Norwegian Troll Security Service, which is part wildlife conservation effort and part nuisance response. Basically, trolls have always been around, and the government has made concerted efforts to cover them up while keeping them alive.
The premise is pretty simple, and most of what you’d expect to see in this kind of documentary happens; we get a viewpoint of a very complex person who does a dangerous job, there is danger and excitement, and some pretty goddamn boss special effects.
It’s definitely a thrilling ride, but upon reflection, now that I’ve had my troll-heated blood cooled, I can see where some critics gave it a medium-to-positive review. I won’t go into spoilers, but there are definitely some weak spots that you just dont’ notice while all the action is unfolding.
I think The Troll Hunter could be this year’s ‘Let the Right One In.’ It’s creative, the effects are great, and it’s got that foreign feel while still being accessible enough to the average filmgoer. If it had more English segments it would be this year’s District 9, but alas, many people still hate readin’ at the movin’ pitchur show.
I hope it does really well though, I found it thoroughly entertaining and interesting.
Maybe I’ve been out of the independent cinema world a little bit, but seeing these amazing films made me really, really hopeful for the future of cinema. That there are such imaginative filmmakers waiting in the wings, to take over the studio system, makes me think that the next 10-15 years in cinema are going to be really, really amazing.
Last night I actually managed to get across Orlando in record time in order to see my first film in this year’s Florida Film Festival, a collection of short animated films.
They were amazing.
Nathan pointed out while we were there that previously, we had been to see the MIDNIGHT shorts, which were a whole other thing–those were usually full of childish scatalogical humor, and left me wondering why the hell any of these people thought they had a future in filmmaking. And wanting my time back.
Not so last night!
Last night, not only was animator Bill Plympton (of Hair High, I Married a Strange Person, and other well-known cult animations fame) in the audience, but not one entry left me dissatisfied. Even the weird, more esoteric one, the Wonder Hospital, I think it was called, was a treat, because it was so weird and otu there it forced me to dust off my enjoyment of the abstract. Eventually I understood it, but anything that’s not facile is always a treat.
It wasn’t just that the shorts were so creative, but I was impressed by how polished they were. One of them (the one about flying books) looked like an early Pixar piece, and the emcee actually pointed that out, remarking that he’d thought they had submitted an entry to the festival. There was also a common thread of existentialism running through them, but rather than the dreary postwar type, it was a more positive existentialism, that kind that totally aligns with my own personal philosophy of ‘Make the most of what you have.’
I wish I had time to track down the websites for each entry; maybe I’ll do that later today. But if you have a chance to catch any of them at other festivals, here are a few of the names I can remember.
Annie and Danny – A short about an elderly couple’s relationship. Reminded me of the first 10 minutes of ‘UP!’ And I totally cried.
The Birds Upstairs – Stop motion done in the style of a Regency-style anti-romance, about two people (puppets with birdskull heads) and their attempt to conceive and raise a child. Amazing.
Bottle – Long-distance romance between sand and snow, who come to know each other by communicating through a bottle.
Fred – Another stop motion in which a performer (who looks kind of like a muppet) tries to talk himself into quitting his performance. I had the feeling he was going to be a ventriloquist’s dummy, since his boss seemed to be a shouting hand, but it was never confirmed. I wasn’t as keen on this one, although the execution was amazing. I just wasn’t sure why I should care about this seemingly bitter, worn out character.
Tales of Mere Existence – Untraditional 2D animation containing very witty observations on relationships and masculinity. Writing reminded me of David Sedaris.
Guard Dog Global Jam – Plympton’s entry, which was a sort of redux of his other short, Guard Dog, but all the segments had been done by amateur animators from around the world. He mentioned there were entries from an Iranian woman and a young Chinese boy.
The Deep – Stop motion animation of keys, gears, and other mechanical devices arranged to resemble abyssal plain creatures. Very creative.
Always, Only, and Ever – A monster deals with a breakup, drunkenly. MUCH better than the summation makes it sound!
Forensic Science – A young couple visiting San Francisco with too much interest in forensic science are convinced their driver may be the Zodiac Killer. The animation reminded me of the PS3 game Little Big Planet, in that everything had a handmade feel and rich textures.
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (here’s a link for this one!) – Amazing, amazing story about a man who discovers a sort of library where the books are all alive, and in caring for them comes to understand the importance of a good story. Totally made me cry, in its beauty and simplicity.
Maybe I’ve been out of the independent cinema world a little bit, but seeing these amazing films made me really, really hopeful for the future of cinema. That there are such imaginative, talented filmmakers waiting in the wings, to take over the studio system, makes me think that the next 10-15 years in cinema are going to be really, really amazing.
Anyhoodle, Insidious is fun like a decent haunted house ride; there are scares, and the atmospherics in the beginning are pretty awesome. It’s a shame the ride had to make a stop in Clichetown along the way. And it introduces one of the more creepy haunted house characters i’ve seen recently, a character I shall only refer to as Darth Goat. See it for him, at least, but maybe wait until it’s on video.
Is your washroom breeding old lady ghosts?
If a friend had not asked me to go, I would probably not have seen Insidious in the theater, and truth be told it probably would have flown right through my radar without making much of an impression, otherwise. A lot of horror movies come out these days, and few of which are worth my time or money.
I’m definitely glad I went, though.
It’s not a diamond in the rough, it’s not a secret success–Insidious is one part atmospheric haunted house movie in the vein of The Others, one part magical realist/dark fantasy like House of Leaves or Clive Barker’s Thief of Always, and one part lurid freakfest. Unfortunately these themes are as clumsily meshed as the three acts of the film are mismatched, but each one on their own was entertaining.
The nonexistent segues made if feel as if I was watching one film made up of segments by 3 different directors; it reminded me of the old Tales from the Crypt series, which was a little 30 minute vignette written and directed by a variety of Hollywood’s finest and most creative. But while that works for a tv series, it doesn’t lend itself well to a film.
While the trappings of the movie–creaks, groans, mysterious things moving about, and eventually some pretty batshit-weird looking ghosts–are all fine, the story was fairly creative. There were flashes of some really interesting and innovative ideas here, but they just didn’t pan out.
Also problematic for me was the uneven tone of the movie. It starts out with Renai (Rose Byrne) and Whatsisface (Patrick Wilson, of Watchmen fame) and their three kids moving into a big old house where weird shit starts to happen. And of course, it begins happening to the wife, because when you’re driving this model of cliche wagon you had damn well better trot them all out. Women are emotional, so they have these dumb feelings, and that’s why ghosts go after and attack them. Cause they’re unable to ignore dumb shit like feelings.
What’s telling is the creepily static gender roles espoused in the movie: in the first half, when ghosts are passive-aggressively making their presence known, only the female notices and reacts predictably, freaking out, screaming, crying, etc. When things get serious and action is needed, the movie literally switches protagonists and the male becomes the center of focus.
If they had wanted to do something really interesting, they might have taken a leaf out of The Devil’s Advocate’s book; in that, we did not see the things that were happening to the wife, which made them that much harder to accept as real, and that much easier to dismiss her problems as imagined or the result of a mental illness. Imagine each day the guy comes home and his wife is acting weirder and weirder, to the point where he doesn’t know if he trusts her with his kids anymore.
Here’s my theory on the current psychology behind these ghost movies where women are the protagonists:
The ghosts, who are being passive-aggressive with their ‘walking around in the background’ and moving objects around shit, are weakly requesting attention. The stereotypical assumption is that women are better at noticing nuances of behavior, and are more likely to notice these types of behaviors. Men need more direct interaction, and only become involved when furniture flies around and the walls start oozing blood, again on the assumption that men don’t recognize nuanced behaviors as well. All of which is horseshit, but is the faulty logic upon which haunted house/woman in peril movies operate. /rant
Anyhoodle, Insidious is fun like a decent haunted house ride; there are scares, and the atmospherics in the beginning are pretty awesome. It’s a shame the ride had to make a stop in Clichetown along the way. And it introduces one of the more creepy haunted house characters i’ve seen recently, a character I shall only refer to as Darth Goat. See it for him, at least, but maybe wait until it’s on video.
There just aren’t enough high-level movies where women respect each other and get along. For Christ’s sake, we comprise HALF the world population, getting along with each other and learning not to compete for some dude’s attention shouldn’t be this hard. For reals.
In 2000, just a few hours past the dawn of the new millennium, American culture stood on a cusp, though it did not know it.
Stuff Blows Up Real Good. And Titties.
The late 90’s saw a wave of postmodern feminism (yes, this is going to be one of THOSE posts) that I look back on with nostalgia. We had Buffy. We had Scully. We had Tank Girl. We had L7 and Poe, Veruca Salt and other snarly girl bands.
We had females DOING things, speaking their minds, making mistakes, trying and failing; granted, it wasn’t perfect, but it was stumbling, staggering, and shuffling towards that equality that feminists of the previous 100 years had dreamed of.
Charlie’s Angels was an exponent of that time, almost more so than the subsequent Kill Bill movies, and here’s why:
Charlie’s Angels, for all the glitter nail polish, high heels, explosions, and bouncing boobs, acknowledged the ridiculousness of the action genre by allowing women to take part in it the same way that men did. Plain and simple, it showed that women could be as witless in movies as their male counterparts.
For example: take any action movie that preceded it, and look at the cliches. The bad guys are terrible shots, go down with one punch, may be blown up but are never hurt in a way that humanizes them (ie broken limbs, etc.), attack one at a time, posture, but are less competent than your average frycook.
The good guys never miss, can do ridiculous stunts, have 12-foot vertical leaps, can punch through concrete, and have encyclopedic knowledge of Earth and all its contents. Most importantly, they never look bad: with one exception (played for laughs) their hair and makeup is always perfect. Just like in the boys’ movies, where the protagonist can be shot at, beaten up, fall out of a helicopter into a volcano, fight their way through a herd of buffalo and look elegantly rumpled, so too the girls of Charlie’s Angels are always sleek and poised. After a couple kung fu go-rounds with the baddies, the most disheveled they get is that ‘just been fucked’ look.
And really–for a tom boy girlified enough to like the accoutrements of beauty and fashion, what better movie is there than Charlie’s Angels? The main characters are capable, intelligent, and violent when necessary. It’s just plain awesome.
Of course, for anyone even marginally aware, the last decade has seen a bizarre return to 1955’s gender roles. Commercials would have you believe that women need men to do math and open the pickle jar, and that men are barely civilized savages who only wear pants and use utensils if women are around to nag them into it. Plain and simple, it’s bullshit.
I know women who are so slovenly in their household affairs you’d consider calling the health department, and men so neat and tidy (gay AND straight) you could perform brain surgery anywhere in their home without fear of contagion. I know women with no social skills, men afraid of snakes, women who lift weights, men who wax, women who hate children, and men who daydream about changing that first diaper. When people begin sentences with ‘Well, girls are naturally. . .’ or ‘Little boys always. . .’ my hackles begin to raise and a host of anecdotal evidence lines up for reference in my mind.
Unless you are speaking about biology, gender doesn’t matter a whole lot to the individual; but it matters to the masses, and this is where enculturation comes in. Think of the boys’ and girls’ toy aisles in the store: teaching males to be ‘boys’ and females to be ‘girls’ begins at a very young age, even before children are mobile. Hell, it practically begins in the womb, with people showering pink and blue gifts on people.
But I digress. I was talking about how much fun Charlie’s Angels is.
Because I like watching movies where women DO things rather than ARE things. The Angels, although directed by the ever-unseen Charlie, are more proactive in the investigation, following threads and formulating theories (however convoluted they might be) to the final showdown with the bad guy.
Very pointy. From the sword, to the eyebrows, to the nose, very pointy.
The other thrill that Charlie’s Angels presented the world was Crispin Glover’s return to mainstream cinema.
I was sitting in the theater, agonizing over why the Creepy Thin Man was so familiar, when my friend leaned over and informed me that it was none other than George McFly, from Back to the Future.
“But that’s impossible,” I thought. “That movie came out like 20 years ago and he looks about 25!”
He was about 35, actually. Which, since I am not too far away from that myself, doesn’t seem that huge a difference. But still. A well-kept 35, to be sure.
Man, I had a crush on him for like 2 years after that.
Anyhoodle, Charlie’s Angels was followed by the slightly less fun Full Throttle, which was only lessened by the enormous expectation set up by the first fun-filled film.
I think the most fun thing about Charlie’s Angels is the simple camaraderie of the 3 lead actresses. No backbiting, no veiled criticisms of each other, no snark; literally just 3 people who get along very well but for a few quirks and function as a well-oiled machine.
VERY well-oiled!
There just aren’t enough high-level movies where women respect each other and get along. For Christ’s sake, we comprise HALF the world population, getting along with each other and learning not to compete for some dude’s attention shouldn’t be this hard. For reals.
The late nineties saw a small explosion in movies with an overabundance of CG, pretty much because a lot of scripts were being greenlighted purely on their reliance on effects (Wild Wild West, I am definitely looking at you). Although the 5th Element does its share of leaning on effects and spectacle, Luc Besson had the sense to keep them mostly in the background and focus on practical effects and foreground activity. Filling out the cast with recognizable faces from the fashion world du jour helps as well, and their outfits and makeup would have inspired me to new heights with Barbie modifications had I seen the movie as a child.
Coming at you, in FANTASTIVISION!
There will never be another summer like the one in which the 5th Element came out.
It was 1997. I had just graduated from high school, and was working at Cross County 8 in West Palm Beach. Cross County has since been torn down, but when it was still standing (briefly, it was the only thing in that mall still standing, as the rest of the mall had been torn down) it was known to be one of the most ghetto theaters in which to see a movie. Most of my friends wouldn’t come see me, even if I promised to get them in for free, mostly because the police were at that theater every weekend and some weeknights, too. My manager was doing (I suspect, no proof of course) mountains of coke as well as a concessionist, and I know the latter to be true because she shwoed me the fancy nighty he bought her. Maybe in another universe platonic friends give each other gifts intended to be worn over their naughty bits, but not in the universe in which Cross County 8 existed.
Used condoms on the floor, rats in the concession, most of the staff stoned, and a homeless Vietnam vet who would pay his 2.75 admission and watch movies all day. The cokefiend manager would give him a drink and a bag of popcorn and let him be, and at the end of every day he would hobble out on his crutches. One leg ended below the knee in a gnarled stump, and his pants sometimes slid down until you could see his junk, but otherwise he was a perfect gentleman.
The rest of the mall was mostly derelict; there was a gift shop of some kind, and an abandoned marionette theater, but otherwise all the storefronts were vacant. The whole thing looked like a level in Silent Hill, and it would not have shocked me to have run across an anthropomorphic vagina wandering around, stalking the hallways on chicken legs that end in giant steel claws.
"I'm sorry sir, but I can promise that our evening ticket prices are not within my control. Yes, 5.75 for evening IS outrageous." God, that was a long time ago.
It was such a shitty theater that we didn’t even get big new movies; we got a lot of second runs, some film festival stuff, and a lot of detritus, but otherwise the big expensive action pictures went to the theater down the road, that had a decent sound system. Which is where I took some friends to see The 5th Element on opening weekend.
If you haven’t seen the movie, imagine something along the lines of a bigass fashion show/music video in space, with monsters and laser beams and beautiful people running around doing things. There’s not a lot of coherence to it, storywise, which isn’t much of a drawback. I know almost NO ONE who watches the movie for the climactic scene at the end, when Leeloo must summon the will to care about the human race in order to save the universe; we watch it for the costumes, the effects, the music (especially the music) and for a batshit loony performance from Gary Oldman, and a brilliant comedic turn by Ian Holm.
This is where I make the official and obligatory mention of his hair. Yes. Yes, it is ridiculous.
Seriously. You just don’t think of him being that funny, but Iam Holm is wonderful as the priest Vito Cornelius, who recognizes Leeloo as the savior of humankind and fumbles his way into helping her.
Another underappreciated performance is Bruce Willis as the standard action foil; his working-class hero amusement at the ridiculous situations in which he finds himself carry the movie for me now, but at the time I remember thinking he just seemed like a smartass. Now I realize he was just having as much fun as a straight man in an orange rubber vest can while pretending to fly a bulbous space taxicab. The story is so overwritten there’s even a sub-subplot in which his mother calls and complains to him about what an ungrateful child he is. No idea why that was necessary, but it was fun.
I did find myself wondering though, in terms of cinematic spectrum, does Bruce Willis consider The 5th Element to be his Zardoz?
You're welcome. And now, like The Ring, in order to unsee it you must inflict it on others.
I certainly hope not.
Like many other excellent sci-fi films with an abundance of effects and a cast of actors eager to make their last payment on houses and cars, The Fifth Element does not begin with a giant stone head flying through the air spouting gibberish and vomiting assault rifles. Or brutal rapes.
I guess I’m just picky and weird about that.
The non-formulaic but familiar story has enough twists to keep things interesting, and honestly the plot is such a goofy mess in places it doesn’t really matter.
The late nineties saw a small explosion in movies with an overabundance of CG, pretty much because a lot of scripts were being greenlighted purely on their reliance on effects (Wild Wild West, I am definitely looking at you). Although the 5th Element does its share of leaning on effects and spectacle, Luc Besson had the sense to keep them mostly in the background and focus on practical effects and foreground activity. Filling out the cast with recognizable faces from the fashion world du jour helps as well, and their outfits and makeup would have inspired me to new heights with Barbie modifications had I seen the movie as a child.
But the shining moment of the movie, which will always be what I associate with it and the scene that I watch over and over again, is the Diva Plavalaguna’s performance.
Check it, y’all.
Makes me want to get up and DANCE.
When I am by myself and listening to it, I do my best to sing along, but, well, you can imagine how that sounds: a cat and a drum machine in a blender.
A friend in high school who was an opera singer declared it one of the greatest things she’d ever heard, and I wish I wish I WISH there was a whole album of this. I mean I have the 5th element soundtrack, but I need MOAR than just one song. Anyone have any suggestions, please post them below. I’ve got a lot of Die Form, but it’s just not the same–Inva Mulla Tchaka’s voice is so joyful, the notes and tones don’t just resonate, they soar. I love the joyfulness the song brings, especially when contrasted to the morose excerpt from Lucia Di Lammermoor that precedes it.
And it provides a suitable brain-rinse to the mildly disturbing image up above. I mean it’s not horrifying, Connery’s a good-looking dude; but to me that picture is the equivalent of seeing a good friend reduced to selling off all their possessions in order to make rent.
The 5th Element is available on Instant Watch, and there is no better way to spend an evening, I promise.
