Reviews
Ad Astra (2019)
An ecquisitely crafted yet very flawed movie
This movie has superb acting, superb special effects, and superbly directed scenes. Still, it annoyed me for a lot of reasons, which I can condense into three fields.
First, what exactly is the message of this film? We witness the journey of a man to outer space and back on one level, and from an ambition to explore back to his home and estranged wife on another level, with the negative example of his father as motivator. So are we to conclude that explorers are bound to become heartless monsters and should turn back to be with their family?... There is an argument to be made that all the tech billionaires dreaming of colonising Mars could spend their money on several more pressing issues back at home, and the film's segments on the Moon and (to a lesser extent) on Mars could serve that narrative, but not the over-the-top main story about an explorer gone mad. Or, was this truly a story about a father-son relationship? I doubt it, an the expensive sci-fi is way too overblown as a mere backdrop for that.
This brings me to my second issue: a couple of in-your-face religious references which stood out didn't move the story forward in any way. What was all that about? The least bad explanation I can think of is that these lines were added in at the behest of producers hoping to draw Christian conservative crowds into the theatres. The worst I can think of is that the whole convoluted "going for the stars makes you inhuman, your focus should be family" message of the main story was itself concocted up as a variation on the Christian conservative theme.
My third gripe was that, after a couple of good sci-fis with ambition to be as scientifically accurate as possible, this film is a throwback. To be fair, there were SOME instances of laudable attention to detail: for example, Moon dust staying afloat for a long time, or the dim sunlight at Neptune. On the other hand, no attempt was made to show the reduced gravity at the Moon and Mars bases (recent TV shows like The Expanse were much better at that). The Moon bases were designed without taking into account the problems of radiation shielding and Moon dust, resulting in extremely bright cities on the dark side of the Moon. Parking a spaceship under a planet's ring may seem spectacular, but in reality, it wouldn't stay static, it would pass through the ring twice during each orbit. The rings themselves didn't look anything like Neptune's actual rings (a few narrow, discrete rings mostly composed of dust-sized particles). To give moviegoers a sense of depth, I estimate Neptune was reduced to about 1/10,000th of its true size, like in old Star Trek movies. Finally, a trip to the heliopause, barely past the planets (a thousandth of the distance to the nearest star) was presented as an interstellar search for extraterrestrial life.
Renegades (1989)
A uniquely moody 1980s cop thriller
I first happened on this film on a German satellite TV while channel-flipping one late night over two decades ago. It was one of the early scenes of conflict between the main characters (Kiefer Sutherland and Lou Diamond Phillips). The film instantly sucked me in and I watched to the end well past midnight. With constants re-runs on TV, I must have watched it again at least half a dozen times. Now that Netflix has it, I watched Renegades again, and it still didn't get old for me. Beyond the chemistry between its two leads, I want to emphasize a couple of aspects of the film which stand out to me.
One is the strangely gloomy tone for a Hollywood film. This starts with the setting in Philadelphia's decaying urban jungle, continues with the score (no bombastic 1980s pop-rock but a sad Native American pipe) and finishes with an ending that, although a victory for our two leads, is weighted down by a sense of great loss for both of them.
What I also like are the subtle deviations from the standard elements of the genre. In most 1980s Hollywood cop films, policemen are successful by breaking the rules, especially when it comes to torturing and killing suspects, but they never make an error in judgment. But in this film, Kiefer Sutherland's maverick cop is sometimes a real a**hole just to relieve tension, his undercover work leads to the death of innocents, and confronts the villain's girlfriend under a mistaken notion of her level of involvement. Speaking of the villain's girlfriend, I can't write much about Jamie Gertz's role without spoilers, but suffice to say she makes an impression even though the film completely omits the development of a romantic story-line.
What I found particularly interesting in this latest re-watch was the non-black-and-white bad cop character (Bill Smitrovich), a corrupt person who still has some conscience left. His constant inner conflict was skilfully emphasized by the scriptwriter and the actors by having a second corrupt cop character as contrast, with the pair hating each other's guts.
A final deviation from 1980s common tropes is the main villain. Robert Knepper plays a gangster apparently belonging to the less common type of the upper-class bad apple. But, instead of projecting flair like Sean Connery in The Great Train Robbery or Alan Rickman in Die Hard, Knepper expertly brings out the character's notion of entitlement: it's in the scene that puts Lou Diamond Phillips's character on a war path, in his treatment of his henchmen, and especially in his displeasure at failing to control Smitrovich's bad cop.
Finally, I was surprised to find that the film has such a low IMDb score and many negative reviews, almost exclusively from the USA. It's like other reviewers saw a different movie. I accept tastes differ, but I can't chase away the thought that at east part of it (especially the contemporary reception) was down to unwillingness to confront the Native American themes, from the poverty shown in the opening scene through the racism Lou Diamond Phillips's character confronts as an aside to the history reminder at the end.
Kontroll (2003)
The nameless Central/Eastern European subway
I'll comment on one aspect of this excellent movie: location.
Despite the unintentionally funny intro by the Budapest Traffic Company's then boss, many foreign viewers assumed that the film is set in Budapest's Metro. However, the film is set in a nameless Central/Eastern European subway, and the film-makers went to great lengths to make it appear so. Though filmed on Line 2 and Line 3 of the Budapest Metro, all station signs and recognizable texts and symbols were removed, a fictional subway emblem and fictional uniforms were created, and the scene in the dispatching center shows a fictitious network map.
A lot of the elements of the ticket inspectors' decrepit and depressing world are satirized exaggerations of real life in the region, some are entirely fictitious (serial murderers, drunken drivers with cabs decorated like that of truck drivers, some other stuff).
What the film definitely has a lot of is a certain Central European loser look on life.
A view that nothing works out in the end, that you'll fail at some point with the best effort, that The System is stronger than you, so why bother - but you can make fun of it all. A view that is the product of centuries of successive dictatorships and oppressive empires, of which Soviet communism was just the last - or before-last, if post-1989 economic hardships and social downfall for the majority are counted. You can trace this in Kafka's works, in Čapek's writing, in movies from the region, and now you see it in the life of a bunch of social misfits struck underground with a thankless job. Despite his long years in the USA, Nimród Antal seems to know this Central European we're-all-suckers view on life well, and he managed well to get it's dark humour aspect across.
R.O.D the TV (2003)
Of power and orphans
I found R.O.D the TV an outstanding anime: good story, interesting characters, captivating interaction, action and effects, deep emotions, music, grand back-story, cultural hints, good drawing -- it had it all. And all that with some rather unusual story elements.
The anime is a spin off of the successful Read or Die book series, which revolves around a Japanese-English girl with a Harry Potterish look named Yomiko Readman. The franchise spawned manga and anime adaptations. R.O.D the TV continues the Read or Die OVA, but takes it into darker, more serious and mature heights.
In the world of R.O.D, real power is held by two kryptocracies, which strive to rule -- the first unconventional element -- not by commanding armies, but controlling knowledge, especially in book form: the British Library and a Chinese secret society named Dokusensha. Befitting the theme, the series is full of cultural links and hints at a global level, from H.G. Wells through Anne of Green Gables to Hong Kong cinema (though the series' perfect Englishman seems to display Japanese business behavior).
The heroes of the series are agents doing the dirty work for the two superpowers, who come to realise that they are mere tools in much bigger games, and get between the fronts. Like in the real world, organisations are stronger than individuals (even if with special powers). Later in the series, an overwhelming feeling weighing down on the viewer is built with a series of battles lost (another uncommon story element).
The various agents display a number of fantastic special abilities, but the uncontested most spectacular remains the original idea: the 'paper masters' are bookworms who can control and shape paper, a telekinetic origami.
While there is a lot of action, knowledge is wielded as the most dangerous weapon, as the main adversary wins battles mostly with tricks and deception. Also, it's rare in fiction that the potency of half-truths is recognised: easier to sell and harder to unravel than full lies. In this anime however, things are told about people's past to discourage them, good memories are told to only be implanted ones, and the victims will not learn how much of that is true, and if cheesiest story elements are their real past self or pulp fiction.
It is also unusual that the two kryptocratic superpowers aren't 'evil', aren't villains from Bond movies like the antagonists in most anime (also the Read or Die OVA), but actually believe to work for the betterment of humanity. At one point, one of the main characters, by then trying to stop them, asks, 'could it be that we are the bad guys?'.
However, in line with an anime tradition at least since Evangelion, there are only hints and flashes of this big story in the first half of the series, when we learn to know the main protagonists, most of them female. Assignments alternate with idle time basically spent with hanging around at home.
Especially in the latter parts, what I find great in anime drawing is superb: light and shadow. The light of sunset, light between the shadows of skyscrapers, the light from a neighbouring room shining into a dark room, backlight, reflections on glass surfaces; mood-establishing light.
Yomiko Readman herself doesn't appear until half the series. At centre are three girls who adopted each other as sisters, and who protect a novelist. These characters are amazingly well worked out. Anita, the youngest 'sister' has all the playfulness and mood swings of a child, not the artificality of a Disney movie child or the spoilt brat of other animes. The secretary of the main adversary strives hard to give the best service to her boss, contrary to her earlier clumsy self, giving off small hints at internal tension and fear of failure. The stottering shyness of Maggie, the middle 'sister' is subdued, doesn't turn around in highschool movie style, and hints at untold stories. There are a lot of hints at untold stories. Despite an almost female-only main cast, there is very little fanservice.
Not only the main characters, but their relationships were well worked-out, too, with great attention for meta-communication.
The three 'sisters' complement each other and have a multitude of small bonding rituals. Most capturing is the relationship of the youngest sister and the young but grumpy novelist, an attachment shining through constant teases and complaints. Most of the relationships are again told via hints, the love story of oldest sister Michelle and a choleric killer entirely so: pauses and stolen looks, and a scene together at the end.
The overriding emotion is a melancholy to all main characters, especially said killer, captivating the viewer. I explain both this and the strong bonds with the fact that all of them are orphaned somehow, and in different ways, all really long for family.
All in all, I consider this is an underrated masterpiece, 10/10. I think it calls for a big-budget live-action adaptation, but only if they find real good actors.
...altrimenti ci arrabbiamo! (1974)
A True Classic
I first saw this film by accident, one afternoon on TV when I couldn't go where I planned to. Since then, I saw it maybe a dozen times.
While as I grew up, I could recognise that all Bud Spencer & Terence Hill movies have the same basic plot, and are low-cost productions, the better ones continued to shine - this one shone even more. It is easily the best and funniest Europe's seventies-eighties Laurel&Hardy produced.
It's the music, the faces, the slapstick fights, the over-serious baddies, the strange feel of being lost in an urban jungle (I just now learnt it was Madrid!), the music, all with the right chemistry, and of course Paganini.
Europa (1991)
Brilliant, tough historically incorrect
A few years ago, a friend got from one of his other friends a video with the Michael Mann film 'Heat' on it. After we finished that movie, and were about to stand up, we saw that there is another film just after, tough on the cassette's envelope the owner didn't write it up. Yet we were all glued back to our seats by its distinct opening, which lacked credits.
Some two hours later, I just sat there wondering: how could I not have heard of this masterpiece before?...
This film was Europa. Lars von Trier woke film noir from the dead, deconstructed reality with intentionally obvious sets, yet often there was haunting similarity with post-war German photographs I saw. And then the tricky cuts!
The story itself is a hard-to-take moral odyssey that has no happy end. A young American pacifist of German descent comes to post-war Germany, intent on doing some good to pay for the bombs his countrymen dropped. But he mostly meets distrust and self-destructive defiance. He hires with Zentropa, a dining-and-sleeping-car company (modeled on Mitropa), whose owner is one of the Nazi collaborators the Occupiers whitewash. Our hero falls in love with his daughter - who later turns out to be a member of the Werewolf, Nazi post-war terrorists. When he doesn't understand the world (or just Europeans) anymore, in his rage he blows up a railroad bridge under a train which he just saved.
As a final note, for historical correctness: in the real world, the Werewolf were nowhere as important as the film implies, they were mostly a final Nazi propaganda coup. After an SS unit assassinated the major of Allied-occupied Aachen, two months before the capitulation, the Nazis announced the creation of whole legions of saboteurs and terrorists who will be ready to fight behind the lines, the Werewolf. But only a few hundred of mostly Hitler Youth received some training, and while two or three times some were deployed to murder suspected communists or forced-labourer foreigners in Bavarian villages to imprint lasting fear on inhabitants, with Hitler's death and the war's end it all fell apart.
However, the Werewolf propaganda had a profound effect on the occupiers. They feared the Werewolf everywhere, suspected it behind any serious accident - but without exception another cause was found later (ignored by some recent pseudo-historians). For example, when a gas main exploded in the police HQ of bombed-out Bremen, or when the Soviet military commander died in a motorbike accident in Berlin. The effect was strongest on the Soviets, who arrested tens of thousands (in large part children!) 'preemptively' on suspicion of being Werewolf, and closed them off in prison camps where a lot of them died.
The Train (1964)
Definitely the best train-action movie ever
...and now probably unbeatable, with most of the complete infrastructure of steam times gone. Although the film re-draws the map of France, all the 'sets' are real - and the action, real crashes with real trains, just breathtaking.
Meanwhile, the film shows the insanity of WWII on the Western front in all its ugliness: railroaders having to fear Allied planes attacking them as supply lines, German military executing them for sabotage, and the Resistance blowing up tracks under them at the same time; Nazis taking hostages and executing them for Resistance attacks, and the human cost of political decisions like saving works of art or a French battalion freeing Paris themselves. (Tough, what went on in Western Europe was nothing compared to what went on in occupied Poland or Ukraine.)
And then there is the central moral dilemma of the film: is art, because of its uniqueness and because it is considered national treasure, more valuable than a few human lives? The film is rather cruelly inconclusive.
SPOILER ALERT
The fast dying lesser French heroes in the film seem to think so. But so does think the villain of the film, the Nazi captain with a sense for art who wants to take all the paintings to Germany. The distressed leading character (played by Burt Lancaster) has the opposed view - but after his comrades are subsequently killed, seems to think he has to continue so that all these people wouldn't have died for nothing.
In the final scene, when the train is finally stopped, and the left-alone Nazi captain talked his final words in expectation of being shot down, with the shot hostages scattered on the ground behind Burt Lancaster's character, who then shoots - that is an act of desperation and defeat (eerily reminiscent of the ending of a much later film, 'Se7en').
The brutal moral ambiguity of this movie may be one reason that the film, tough having enough patina to have regular night-time TV re-runs, is not that popular.
Pirates (1986)
The best pirate film
This film is one of Polanski's masterpieces. He did to pirate movies what Sergio Leone did to western: showing the opposite of the usual sancticised glamorous movie portrayal of an era, yet achieving an epic effect, and images you want to see again and again.
But a difference to Leone, beyond a high dose of irony and situation comic, is the bittersweet ingredient of the Central-Eastern-European experience, of lack of success and constant failure, constantly hitting all of our heroes in the film.
Memories of living under communism might have also played a role in the (for me) most memorable part of the movie, the failed mutiny followed by the successful mutiny aboard the Spanish ship: the way the aristocrats have power over the people, and make Captain Red and The Frog eat the rat. And then, hilarious juxtaposing, the mutiny is like a parody of a communist revolution.
But the best thing about the film are the actors. Walter Matthau is at his best as the grumpy old liar Captain Red, Damien Thomas is terrific as Don Alfonso the hyper-arrogant Spanish aristocrat who'll never loses his superiority, Roy Kinnear the embodiment of ugliness as the Dutch, and also the young no-names Cris Campion (playing The Frog, the naive young Frenchman at Captain Red's side) and Charlotte Lewis (playing the even more naive daughter of the governor).
11'09''01 - September 11 (2002)
Others have problems, too
Ten out of the 11 short films in this movie are masterpieces (I found only the Egyptian one disappointing). Stragely, all but the Mexican director chose to portray the problems of individuals or groups in connection with 9-11: the Afghan refugees, deaf people, Palestinians, the widows of Srebrenica, AIDS and poverty and corruption in Africa, Pinochets coup and ensuing bloodbath, suicide bombings in Israel, paranoia-hit and state-persecuted Muslim Americans in the USA, old people living alone, and the aftermath of WWII in the hearts of Asian soldiers. This might say something sad about the limits of empathy, in both ways: the directors might feel that Americans ignore the pains of the rest of the world and only care about their own tragedies, while they effectively do the same with their short films.
Surprising myself, I found Sean Penn's piece one of the very best in the collection, and ***SPOILER AHEAD*** I also guess his portrayal of Ernest Borgnine as a half-crazy old man vegetating in a New York flat experiencing his widow life's happiest moment when the Sun shines through his window after the WTC "collapsed out of light's way", I guess this might also be one of the most offending as the general American audience would see it.
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968)
Fall Of The Empire -- the British Empire
An excellent portray of British military at the height of its power, showing the origins of this Empire's downfall: incompetence arising from arrogance, aristocracy and superiority complex. (A good lesson for future Empires, also taught by previous Empires.) This with excellent actor play, especially from John Gielgud. The animated triumphalist-patriotist drawings (in the style of Victorian newspaper caricatures) were a gifted idea executed with great power.
One line that captured my attention for days was Gielgud's character giving judgement about Hemmings's character, the young gifted militaryman who seemed the positive hero until this part of the film, the man who would like to reform the army by throwing out the incompetent aristocrats. Gielgud's character, one of these Lords, says he doesn't like the young cavalier, who is a great talent, but without heart: "an army with people like him kills too many". A chilling remark with the first half of the 20th century in mind, and after the film showed us how inhuman this 19th-century aristocrat-led cannon-fodder-army already was.
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002)
I just saw it... a big THANKS, George Lucas!!!
It was as Ep I should have been (at least, according to my taste). It had the long shots I missed, and the more space scenes I also missed, it had less references to the future (and the ones included made more sense), Jar-Jar's role in Ep II will be appreciated by those who hated him in Ep I [personally, I shrugged at Jar-Jar, other things bothered me], the scenery is better (Coruscant -- Ep I had only glimpses), there is no word about gods, the actors are allowed to act at times, and including a co-scriptwriter was a wise decision. And it is darker, like The Empire Strikes Back (my Trilogy favourite).
On the low side, some scenes looked as if they were made for video-game adaptation, and I counted no less than four scenes whose idea was 'shot down' by other Hollywood films released during Ep II's production.
Finally, a nitpicker's nitpicking: how does one parsec relate to stellar distances at the edge of a galaxy?...