Originally, for this month, I was going to watch a bunch of spooky movies, but then I found out that Inception, a movie I've had on the list for a long time, was going to be removed from Netflix after Halloween. Now, I know myself very well, so I decided to watch it this week because otherwise I would put it off for the next weekend and then the next and then--oh, would you look at that? It's November 1 and I didn't watch the movie while it was still easily accessible, who could have seen this coming? Anyways, here's what I thought about Inception.
I really liked all of the actors. I can't say anybody really stood out to me much besides Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb, though. He really comes across as a guy who knows his issues are bubbling up but can't bring himself to face them yet. Elliot Page also plays Ariadne as a relatively down-to-earth character. His acting feels realistic rather than stunted, and I think it works well considering Ariadne is the one being sucked into this world of dream extraction and inception (Saito, too, to a lesser extent), so it makes sense that she's the most grounded character of the six or seven we follow. I liked all of the different settings the movie got to use. By the nature of what the movie's about, it makes sense that the dreams changed settings from layer to layer. I really wasn't expecting a frozen-over military base as one of the settings, but the movie threw me for a few loops. I don't have much to say about the different shots other than the use of wide shots at the impossible architectural marvels of the dream world really let you know just how much can be changed, and the rotating rooms whenever there's gravity manipulation are fun. The special effects were all really good, too. I don't have much to say about the soundtrack other than it's good. And kind of a meme. If I could describe it in one word, it would be BWAH. I had already known about the ending of the movie since forever ago. Considering it's one of the most widely debated endings in film, it's kind of hard to avoid mention of. I know that Christopher Nolan, the director, has said it doesn't matter if the end of the movie is reality or not and that what matters is that Cobb doesn't care. I think the ending is satisfying no matter which side you take, but I prefer to think that he's in the real world. The movie doesn't play with our main characters' skewed perceptions at all until the very end, when Cobb gets thrown up onto the shore from the beginning of the movie, so it would be a weird directorial choice to make that false reality the ending of the movie. Also, I don't recall the top wobbling like it does at the end in any of the dreams. (Not related, but Ariadne makes her totem around the 30-minute mark, and then we just never see it the rest of the movie, so make of that info what you will.) Maybe I just didn't pay attention, but whose dream would Cobb even be in anyways? They woke up Fischer from limbo and then from all the layers of dreams, so would Cobb just be stuck in Fischer's subconcious at all times, awake or otherwise? I didn't think that was possible, but maybe it is.... I guess, like Nolan said, the reality of the ending doesn't matter that much, but it's still fun to think about. Anyways, Inception gets a 9/10 from me, I enjoyed it more than Interstellar, but sadly, there was not enough BWAH to give it a perfect 10.
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This week, I watched Metropolis, a film I knew next to nothing about. All I knew was that it was a sci-fi movie about--you guessed it--a metropolis. I watched a trailer for the remaster of the film, it looked pretty good, I found out it was free on YouTube, I watched it, and here's what I noticed.
I love a movie with good imagery. Every movie on my top 5 movies list at the moment (save for The Truman Show) really knows how to use shot content and composition to its advantage. Maybe that's part of the reason why I like movies like End of Evangelion and A Clockwork Orange (or any Stanley Kubrick movie) so much. Metropolis fits right in with these films. It likes using special effects as a transition into its wider shots, and scenes like the Heart Machine sparking, catching on fire, and exploding are very cool to watch. (Really, the entire 3rd act is fun to watch.) None of the actors stood out to me all that much except for Brigitte Helm as the Machine Man and Maria. When Helm is playing Maria, she does a really good job portraying subtle emotions, especially for a time when extreme close-ups were rare and spoken dialogue was non-existent. She just does a really good job of showing how the character feels. But she doesn't just play a sweet maternal figure. She also plays Machine Man Maria better than I could have hoped for. She knows how to keep her audience's eyes on her whenever she's on screen, whether it be in the middle of a crowd or front and center on a stage. Watching the way she riles up the army of workers is something else. You can also just tell she had a lot of fun playing the villain during her Machine Man scenes. The way that the film uses the story of the Tower of Babel is actually really cool. It changes the story but in a way that fits well with the story: "The same language was spoken, but these men did not understand one another..." The tower isn't struck down by God above but by the workers below because they don't understand the dream of the tower. Essentially, the film takes the stance that "The mediator between head and hands must be the heart!" I think it's a decent theme, but I also think the ending... doesn't do a great job driving it home. Freder makes his father, Joh, and the Heart Machine worker, apparently named Grot, shake hands, and from there, the movie just... ends. It feels less like a resolution and more like the start of the resolution. I don't think I'm asking for a neat little bow on the whole story, but I do feel that the ending leaves something to be desired. I just wish we would have been shown how exactly things changed after the head and hands began to communicate better, but I guess the director, Fritz Lang, wanted to leave that open to interpretation. I don't think I've got much else to say on this one. I liked it a lot, and it's definitely worth watching. The story's dramatic, the special effects are neat for the time, and it's all just a very cool movie. 7/10, my favorite part is when they destroy the set. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a movie that's been on the list for a long time. Now that I've seen it, I really don't know what to think. It's a fantastic movie, that much is for sure, but here are some more detailed thoughts on it.
Admittedly, I don't have much to say about the directing. The main thing I noticed is that Milos Forman lets his long shots linger for longer than most long shots do, which is almost always a strength here. All of the actors are very good, too. Jack Nicholson as McMurphy is great, Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched is great, and the supporting cast is great. The symbolism of Nurse Ratched's cap being dirty after the night of the party (ruining her "spotless" record or her perfect grip on the patients) is very nice, as is the use of sterile white. All of the characters wear white in the first meeting scene except for McMurphy, who's front and center wearing a green shirt. As the movie progresses, you can see that more of the men are wearing different clothes underneath their white robes, and a few start losing the robes entirely. Little details like those are nice. I'm more interested in talking about the story, though. First off, I don't think Nurse Ratched is as evil a character as she's made out to be. (Maybe it's just because the "Nurse Ratched" archetype was well integrated into media before I was even born, so the goalpost for the evil nurse character has moved even further for me.) Even Wikipedia describes her as tyrannical and a battleaxe, but I just think she does her job the way an elementary school teacher does theirs: she prioritizes keeping order above all and doesn't handle anything well that's in between the extremes of total order and total chaos. Judging by all her character summaries, I think the movie just didn't do a good job of making Nurse Ratched a truly despciable character. For example, in the book, she blames McMurphy for Billy's suicide, but in the movie, no such line exists. (Honestly, maybe Louise Fletcher made her a little too human, too.) Everyone says that Ratched is in total control, but the movie makes her feel like there are powers outside of the ward. For example, in the scene where McMurphy is given electroshock therapy, it's not made super clear that Ratched ordered it be done. (Or maybe it is and I just missed it, who knows?) She's closer to a child's perception of an "evil" schoolteacher than to a true villain, in my opinion. To be fair, though, I don't think the movie is about Nurse Ratched nearly as much as it is about her patients. I think McMurphy isn't really a good guy either, but I don't think anybody believes he's supposed to be a shining beacon of morality. No matter how severe their mental illnesses are, he gives all of the patients hope. I think he's stupid and impulsive, but I do think he cares about all the patients, their self-sufficience, and their individuality above all else. McMurphy still does stupid and impulsive stuff to ensure these things, though. The example that stuck out to me the most while watching was bringing a suicidal kid into deep, open waters with not a single trained professional to rescue him in case something bad happened. My anxiety just kicked into full gear for that whole fishing scene, to be honest. Chief Bromden is also a really good character, but I didn't realize just how important he was until about halfway through the movie. He starts out as the strong, silent type, but by the end, he breaks out of the ward on his own. Watching him scheme with McMurphy only for McMurphy to get lobotomized is just heartbreaking, especially the scene where Chief has to choke him with a pillow. The whole ending is perfect, though. It's sad, it's hopeful, it makes you feel things. The cigarettes scene is really good, too. You can feel the room get more and more riled up until McMurphy, Cheswick, and Chief are all subdued and taken away. All the actors knocked it out of the park for that scene. I should mention: doing some extra research to make sure I get everything right while writing this is making it very clear that the movie, while still excellent, isn't really a full adaptation of the book. It leaves out details that are sort of important. I get why, (it is a movie, after all,) but still, some of these seem... kind of important. For example, half of Chief's character arc is just... missing from the movie. They still make it work, but it just feels incomplete after reading a summary of his character. Another example: the way Nurse Ratched is described in the book is much closer to the popular image of her we all know and hate than how she is portrayed in the movie. I think this is a writers' room issue above all, though. Finally, and most importantly, Danny DeVito is in this movie. No, I will not elaborate. That's all I've got. I know I criticized this one a lot more than usual, but I genuinely did like it. 8/10, "Nurse Ratched poisoned our water supply, burned our crops, and delivered a plague unto our houses!" "She did?" "No! But are we just gonna wait around until she does?" I love messed-up, tragic movies. All of my top 5 favorite movies at the moment are all intense and dramatic with a heavy emphasis on... "mind-heckery," for lack of a better word. (The Truman Show is sort of a black sheep in this regard, but you could probably argue the point if you really stretched for it.) This could mean almost anything, from being too confusing to follow properly on a first watch to beating down your brain with beautiful and/or violent imagery to just making you question everything you think or know. (The best ones usually do all three of these things.) With movies like A Clockwork Orange, Perfect Blue, and End of Evangelion being some of my favorites, where does an early 2000s parody of teen romance and coming-of-age movies like She's All That come into play?
As much as I love my dark and horrifying movies, I also love my stupid and raunchy flicks, and Not Another Teen Movie is very stupid and very raunchy. I can't even talk about most of the stand-out scenes because of how bad it is. (If you've even seen the opening scene of the movie, that's basically the mark for medium raunchiness.) It also has to be willing to have fun and not take itself seriously. This movie hits every box. It's stupid, it's raunchy, it's fun, and I love it. I didn't take notes since I just wanted to relax with this one, but here's what stood out the most. There's a recurring joke about how the main character is a loser because she wears glasses, has her hair in a ponytail, and always has paint-stained overalls on. During the classic makeover scene, when Jake's sister, Catherine, "fixes" Janey, she takes off the glasses, lets down Janey's hair, and says "That's it! I did it, I'm a miracle worker" in the most deadpan, proud way possible, and my initial reaction was laughing out loud and saying, "Oh, man, this movie's great!" (As you can see, I am easily entertained.) All the character tropes are here, too. You've got the quirky, "I read Sylvia Plath because I'm not like the other girls" main character (she doesn't touch a piece of literature the entire movie), the jock who learns how to feel feelings, the creepily over-excited younger brother and his friend group, the jealous, petty cheerleader ex, the fat best friend who's the butt of all the physical comedy, the creepily overly-attached best friend with a very subtle (obvious) crush on our main girl, the token black guy who does nothing but be the token black guy, they're all here. There's also a random, out-of-nowhere musical number about the prom where the whole cast sings about how they're prepping for prom night. It exists for no reason and yet it doesn't feel out of place in the slightest. The movie doesn't just rely on parody for its humor, though. For example, when Jake is trying to woo Janey, he beats up her younger brother and immediately after tells the other guys not to pick on him, gets Janey tackled and tazed for a suspected gun on school property, and... offers her a bannana split. If you know, you know. There's also the scene at the house party where Janey drunkenly jumps into the pool because she was given non-alcoholic beer. When she gets out of the pool, the mean girls pour water down her dress while she's still sopping wet, and she runs off crying. There are a lot of good moments that don't have to 100% rely on parody to be effective. There are also some funny gags (especially around the school) you might not necessarily notice, like a trophy case marked "Last Semester's Panty Raid" and a poster in the locker room that says "SUPPORT YOUR TEAMMATES... IN FRONT OF THEIR BACKS." Even thought it still feels like a movie from 2001, I got a kick out of it. It's no masterpiece, not even close. By most accounts, it would be a bad movie, but I personally enjoyed it a lot. If you want a stupid, raunchy, fun movie to just turn your brain off for and laugh at, then this is it. 6/10, followed the formula so well I can't tell if it's parody or not. I'll be completely honest: when I first learned about the weekly blogs for this class, I figured I'd use it as a good excuse to watch the "classics" that everyone's seen since, admittedly, I don't watch as many movies as some of my friends do. (Call it having a short attention span, being a YouTube addict, "I could be playing this new game I just bought," whatever.) That's not to say I don't like them (I do), but I'm not really caught up on the bare-basic "film canon" like most people are, the canon that includes movies like Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
This week, I watched Snowpiercer. I knew it was supposed to be pretty good (the director is Bong Joon Ho, director of Parasite) but I didn't really know what to expect of it. The premise is simple: 17 years ago, the world froze over, and what was left of humanity was put into a train circling the Earth. Where there are people, there are problems, and this train is no exception. The train is divided up by class: the tail of the train is where the poor live, and the head of the train is where the guy who built the train and all of the rich people stay. And of course, just like real life, the rich and their enforcers oppress the poor. Yay. Here's some of what I noticed:
The shoe on head speech. Right off the bat, Snowpiercer wants to explore a lot of themes, one of them being how accepted superiority plays a role in the oppression of the helpless. The first thing Minister Mason does in the movie is get rid of the possible existence of a meritocracy -- she straight up tells the people in the tail of the train that, "I am a hat; you are a shoe. I belong on the head; you belong on the foot. Yes? So it is." There's also that last part, "so it is." She repeats it throughout her time in the movie. It's used the same way the word amen is: "so be it." Her whole character reeks of a scummy, intellectually dishonest "religious" fanatic abusing the class system for her own benefit. At the end of her speech, she also asks Mr. Wilford, the man running the train, to say something about what she said and is met with silence. Later, she tells the tail-enders that they can talk to her instead of Mr. Wilford. These two interactions led me to believe that Mason's character was, in fact, the scummy, dishonest fanatic I had suspected it was earlier: "You can't talk to God, but you can talk to me instead." On a directorial note, there are a couple of times where shaky cam is used. It's very jarring at first, and I really just don't like it when the camera doesn't focus, but it strangely works here. Everything feels disordered enough that it works, but the camera still stays focused on a single subject at a time instead of bouncing around more than is necessary. People get high on literal industrial waste for fun, even the rich. I just think it's an interesting idea. The combat in the movie is surprisingly bloodless. For example, there's only one death I can think of that's "graphic," and it's still largely censored by the camera: one of Mason's henchmen gets impaled through the stomach on a pole and slowly slides down as he dies. Even when people are fighting each other with axes and picks, there's not a lot of blood outside of some on the characters and some quick sprays on the windows. No close-ups of the wounds, just a lot of slashing and screaming. I just like the idea that the director didn't need to use gratuitous blood and gore to do these scenes. One of my notes put it best: The movie isn't about bloodshed, it's about the brutality of oppression. Minister Mason really hates poor people. She gets visibly excited by the murder of the tail-enders. I think it's done in part to make her character more unlikable, but the thought of powerful people taking pleasure in the sight of the weak being put in their place is... well, I imagine it's not too far off from reality. There's a whole scene of children being indoctrinated into a cult. It's... something. They're told that Mr. Wilford had some divine or clairvoyant knowledge which is why he built the train in the first place. The rich people don't seem to care about anybody but themselves. In one scene, for example, a man in a sauna is shot dead through the door by Franco, one of Mason's henchmen. In that same scene, when he's fighting one of Curtis's men, Curtis is careful not to shoot until he knows he can take out Franco without hurting his own. Little details like that really drive home the movie's portrayal of the efficacy of solidarity in class warfare. There's also a scene where Namgoong sees something outside, but we're never told what it is. Thinking of it now, I'm pretty sure it was a polar bear. We're told that all life on Earth was killed after CW7 wiped it all out. At the end of the movie, though, we are shown a polar bear climbing a mountain, and the last shot is the bear looking at the camera. I think the implication is that Namgoong saw the polar bear (or some other animal) living outside of the train, and he realized that life outside was possible. Also, the cars look like they were designed with class separation in mind, and this is supported later in the movie. In Curtis's conversation with Wilford, where he discloses that not even he himself has walked the entire engine tail to head, Wilford says that, "Everyone has their preordained position, and everyone is in their place, except you." (Already, we can see where Minister Mason got her ideas of how the train should function.) Curtis responds with "That's what people in the best place say to people in the worst place." Wilford calls the train a closed ecosystem, a callback to the aquarium scene from earlier in the movie. "We have no time for natural selection. We would all be hideously overcrowded and starved waiting for that." He talks about how "individual units killing off other individual units" was all part of his plan, including Curtis's revolution. When he reveals that Gilliam was part of the plan, he says, "The front and the tail are supposed to work together." Also, he keeps calling Curtis's insurgency "exciting," showing little regard for the toll of life it took on the train. Those are where my notes stop, and I feel like I've written enough. I really enjoyed Snowpiercer, so I'll have to watch Parasite sometime soon, too. The movie says what it wants to say, and it says it very well. Using the setting of a class-based train is also a really smart way to effectively simplify the struggles between classes while still allowing it to be founded in some sort of reality. 9/10, too much shaky cam. This is gonna be kind of all over the place, but here we go.
I do not have the time or energy to get in-depth about the long and complicated production history of this series, so let me be brief: The original series aired from 1995-1996, and a theatrical finale was released in 1997. In 2007, the first Rebuild (reboot) film released. The second released in 2009, and the third released in 2012. (I first got into the series around 2017.) The fourth and final film didn't release until earlier this year and didn't hit streaming services (i.e., Amazon) until August 13th because of countless delays. Believe me, though, it was well worth the wait. I watched it the weekend it came out and figured I'd make it the first movie I reviewed here. The whole series relies somewhat heavily on having seen the rest of the series (TV show, film, and Rebuilds), but it more than pays off. I'll try talking about as much as I can without spoiling anything (this whole series really is one that you need to experience firsthand), but it's gonna happen eventually here. Right off the bat, the movie looks gorgeous. Not even talking about the use of imagery yet, it's a very pretty movie, better than the preceding three Rebuild films. The movie does a good job blending the CGI and hand-drawn animation together in a way that just works for me. The lighting is also noteworthy, especially in the first half of the movie where we get to just slow down and enjoy how pretty everything looks. Also, the characters. Evangelion really isn't about the giant fights between robots and aliens; it's about the characters, and boy oh boy are the characters good here. We've got so many shades of depressed you could fill a therapist's schedule, from "everything I've ever loved is gone" depressed, to "I hate all of you (projection edition)" depressed, to "what does living really mean?" depressed, to "I hate all of you (hedgehog's dilemma edition)" depressed, to "I don't know what will make me happy" depressed, etc., etc., etc. Everybody's a little (a lot) broken, we love it here. One thing the director, Hideaki Anno, loves doing is breaking down his characters. I mean that in every way possible, too. He loves killing his characters in sad ways, he loves emotionally destroying his characters, he loves mentally scarring his characters, but most of all, he loves putting his characters through intense therapy and deconstructing them that way. The original series did that, and the original movie did that, but fans got mad that the first three Rebuild movies didn't do that. In hindsight, it seems obvious that this was done for good reason: how you can you deconstruct a character that you haven't really fleshed out yet, who, for all intents and purposes, is a separate character from the 1995 series? The first movie follows the original series's start almost shot for shot, but as the movies continue, they diverge more and more until the start of the third movie is just completely different. Anyways, the payoff is here, but I can't talk about it without getting into spoilers. Okay, from here on out are spoilers for the entire series, in case you actually care. It's the final installment in a 26-year-old media franchise, what do you expect? Go watch it if you haven't, it's worth it. Seriously. The most important parts of the movie are the first and last parts, but I really mean that. If you've already seen the movie before, those are probably the only parts you care about. The first act of the movie plays out like a dark Ghibli film. What I mean by that is that everything is very pretty and seemingly hopeful, but there's a looming air of dispair right up until the main crew leaves for the final battle. Rei, now named Ms. Look-Alike because she's not the real Rei, is learning what it means to be human, even though she's a clone with a predetermined consciousness. So, while Shinji's practically a depressed vegetable and Asuka won't shut up about him doing a whole lot of whining and not enough eating, Rei (the Wiki tells me this is iteration number 6) goes around town talking to people, and we get those quiet, everyday "Ghibli moments": cats making their homes under a train, women doing farmwork, men unloading a truck. It's so detached from everything else in the Rebuilds that it's very calming and a little heartwarming to see a clone try to understand something she was never meant to. And then she bursts like a water balloon. A water balloon filled with Fanta. She goes through a bunch of character development and then is forcefully ripped away after telling Shinji thanks for trying to help her. Before her death scene on my first watch, I thought the philisophical dilemma would be about the original Rei, somebody who had started to love Shinji of her own volition but still didn't really understand people, vs. Ms. Look-Alike, a clone of a clone who had started to understand people and was more human than the "real" Rei that Shinji still wanted to save. Apparently not, though. I think Rei's arc here is more about coming to realize why you feel things. The original Rei doesn't really understand what she feels but pursues it anyways. Ms. Look-Alike, though, constantly asks about things like why we say goodnight or why we thank each other. It's the difference between just saying, "I love you," and knowing why you love somebody. Moving on to the ending. Like in the End of Evangelion (yes, that is the name of the original film finale), Anno puts his cast through an apocalypse scenario based entirely around the merging of all of humanity into one collective consciousness. People explode into Fanta as "Human Instrumentality" begins. Unlike in End of Eva, though, Shinji is not the one being "saved." Instead, he has to "save" everybody else, starting with his dad. We were never given a truly fleshed-out motivation or character breakdown for why Gendo, Shinji's dad, does what he does in any of the series besides wanting to see his dead wife (his whole thing is being detached from Shinji and an all-around mystery), but here, we do. With his wife, he realized that life could be fun and enjoyable. Before meeting her, he just kinda existed. After her death, though, he thought that pushing his son away would be the sacrifice he needed to make to bring her back. Honestly, Evangelion is a pretty circular story to talk about in that it involves people pushing people away who in turn push other people away when all they crave is love and intimacy. The hedgehog's dilemma, a philosophical idea often explored in the series, is when hedgehogs can't keep warm in the winter because they'll poke each other if they get too close, so they have to find the right distance to protect both themselves and each other. It's explored more heavily in the original series, but it's still noticable here: Gendo pushes away Shinji constantly so that they can't hurt each other, and Shinji barely tries to talk with his dad. Also, if there's one thing Evangelion has always done right, it's apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic imagery: gods with wings emerging from the earth and cradling all of humanity; entering into the eye of this "god" as your individuality, willfully or otherwise, is taken from you; a sea of souls streaming on and becoming one painless, borderless collective. Evangelion's apocalypse scenes are something entirely different from any that I've ever seen. They're horrifyingly beautiful, heart-poudingly tranquil, a real paradox, and they will sear themselves into your mind. Especially End of Eva's, good Lord, that movie's haunting. End spoilers. Anyways, 10/10, go watch it all, you can binge the entire series plus EoE on Netflix in like a day (a weekend if you really need the time), and all 4 Rebuild films plus a documentary about the making of the final one (which I have yet to see) are available on Amazon Prime Video. |