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Posts Tagged ‘movies’

Juan of the Dead

The trailer for Juan of the Dead, Cuba’s first horror film, just blew me away.

There are a couple teasers floating around youtube that play up the entrepreneurial “We kill your loved ones so you don’t have to” aspect of the plot: this one, for example.

Juan of the Dead, like Attack the Block, looks set to play with monster movie cinematic vocabulary using settings that are less comfortable, less upper-middle-class, and, frankly, less white than those of the traditional US-made horror film. I only slept for a handful of hours last night, which leaves me barely competent to write this sentence, let alone discuss the implications of these movies and the ways they’re embellishing, enlivening, and ennobling (what I often think are) tired genres – or to compare them with new American takes on similar material, like Zombieland and Super 8. Let’s just say that Juan of the Dead and Attack the Block have me more excited about horror films than I’ve been for at least a decade.

My Black Swan Review

“It’s a wonderful time to be alive, at least until the Mayan calendar runs out next December and the sun goes dark.  It’s 2011, the internet rules, I have a magic box in my pocket that can access the sum total of human knowledge, and a ballet-sploitation wereswan horror flick is a serious contender for five Academy awards.”

Read more on Flames Rising’s website.

I review things for Flames Rising now.  Flames Rising is cool, as the Doctor would say.  I hope to do a few more of these in the near future.  Watch this space!

Imaginarium

Steph returned from the City of Lost Angels Saturday evening, so we spent yesterday reveling, browsing bookstores, and wandering the frozen Common, and topped the evening off with a pleasant Chinese dinner where I got a chance to embarrass myself in rapidfire conversation with a gaggle of waitresses (I’m much less sure on my feet with Mandarin than I was in Anhui, though maybe I remember myself being more awesome than I really was).  Afterward, well-fed and happy, we staggered to the AMC for an evening inside Terry Gilliam’s head at the newly released Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

Imaginarium massively improves with your acquaintance with its principals.  The more you know Tom Waits, for example, the more awesome his turn as a gambling addict Devil; the more familiar you are with Terry Gilliam’s particular brand of insanity, the more intuitive sense the surrealistic visuals within the Imaginarium will make.  A great deal of the draw to this movie will probably arise from Heath Ledger’s turn as Tony, The Mysterious Stranger, and that’s well-deserved; as Tony he devours the film a bit less than he did as the Joker in The Dark Knight, but he portrays a fiendishly complicated character nonetheless.

Gilliam’s awesome visuals catch the eye, but at its heart this is an actor’s film- the main plot revolves completely around the choices our imaginations allow us (or don’t), and this places an immense burden on the actors to become characters who make sense even after the audience has seen the inside of their minds.  Plummer, Waits, and Ledger own their screen time, and the other mains, Andrew Garfield, Verne Troyer, and the fascinatingly bow-mouthed Lily Cole all push their envelopes.

The ending leaves a good bit up to interpretation; I don’t expect anything less from a movie about art and decisions, and while I think I know what’s going on, I’d much rather leave you to decide for yourself.  Go prepared with a friend & have a pleasant place in mind to sit and chat afterwards.  Also, by way of warning, while this isn’t a funny movie per se, it probably helps to be in a Monty Python-ish mood for madness.

If you’re like me, one main concern will be how you can find a copy of the “We Are the Children of the World” ringtone Gilliam uses throughout the film; I haven’t found it yet, but I’ll let you know if I do.

The New Holmes

This is not an entry about the Harry Potter movie, which was fun.  It’s an entry about the trailer for the new Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movie beforehand.

To clarify: I’m a die-hard Holmes fan. I’ve read Holmes stories since I was a tiny kid; every time I pass a collection of Holmes in the bookstore I am overcome by deep, profound yearning.  I can recite many of the stories, turn-for-turn, from memory.  My first exposure to Japanese animation was Miyazaki’s Sherlock Hound, and one of the two episodes of The Real Ghostbusters I remember is the one where Sherlock Holmes and Watson get made real by the sheer force of belief.

Our culture embraces Holmes as the Victorian Batman.  Practically infallible (except for the Irene Adler affair), best at everything.  For which they’re hardly to be blamed; Doyle himself slowly drifted away from the first chapter of The Sign of the Four, in which he lays out very clearly the limits of Holmes’ knowledge.  It’s gotten to the point where Alan Moore, in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books, makes a decided point of distancing the “Great Detective” from the action — he becomes a superhuman figure, and tacitly in the midst of every battle we can hear the beset members of the League thinking: this wouldn’t be a problem if only the Great Detective were still around.

So, set that against the Robert Downey Jr. version, which plays Holmes as, to judge from the trailer, a drug-addled, brilliant action detective pressing the bounds of Victorian society while prim, mannered Watson trundles grumpily alongside.

I love it.

The movie might be crap, but they’ve performed a brilliant trick by seizing one of the most subtle aspects of the books: we see everything through Watson’s perspective.  Watson clearly is a prim, proper Victorian army doctor; through him we see Holmes as a brilliant, mannered outsider.  But what do we *know* about Holmes?

He’s a workaholic, a cocaine addict, a  master of boxing, the singlestick (beating people up with a stick) and Bartitsu (a form of jujitsu taught in Victorian London), an occasional cross-dresser and sometime opium smoker, a man with a set of talents that verge on the criminal and a host of shady contacts throughout London, who is equally at home in an opium den as in the Belgian ambassador’s residence.  He’s possessed of immense physical strength (capable of bending a poker back into shape, which is a LOT harder than bending it out of shape in the first place) and speed (outrunning a bevy of younger men with apparent ease in Hound of the Baskervilles).  He plays something that can best be described as jazz fiddle, which Watson regards as incoherent noise.

Imagine, for a moment, that Watson, not Holmes, is the consummately prim one (as is, in fact, also supported by the stories – Watson wouldn’t be caught dead masquerading as a beggar or what have you).  He’s faced with a man who flies in the face of Victorian morals with alarming ferocity, yet whom he deeply respects for his brilliance.  What is poor James Watson do, then, when he tries to record his friend’s adventures?  He writes them faithfully, and skirts the truth in presenting Holmes as a Victorian paragon who just happens to possess a host of questionable skills.

Come to think of it, this also explains why Holmes is so derisive of Watson’s reporting of his accomplishments.

Anyway, I’m not saying that this is the truth of Holmes. It is, however, an interesting reading of Holmes, and a refreshing shift from classic portrayals of the infallible, unflappable Detective. I might need to play with this idea some more in the future.

In the meantime, go hunt down a copy of Young Sherlock Holmes and watch it. You’ve almost certainly earned it for something you’ve done today.