Just Watched: 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963)

             OK, I'll admit right off the bat that I've seen this one before. Normally the "Just Watched" tag denotes a film I've just watched for the first time and consists of my initial reactions to the movie and thoughts  after the first viewing. I watched Fellini's beautiful masterpiece 8 1/2 a few years ago, but I don't remember it because I was completely stoned out of my mind, which means I appreciated the visual ingenuity of the film but wasn't paying as much attention to the plot as I probably should have been. Still liked it a lot though, just watched it again and here we are. Anyways, 8 1/2 is brilliant in the fact that it is basically a movie about a movie and the movie the movie is about is 8 1/2. Seriously. Charlie Kaufman must have been channeling Fellini when he created his own meta masterpiece Synecdoche, New York, which is sort of similar in concept, but also incredibly brilliant in its own right and worth watching several times. I'll write about that one later though, this post is about Fellini.

             In summary, 8 1/2 follows the struggles of a film director with writer's (or director's) block. He's achieved success in the past and has huge plans for his next film, but has no idea how to proceed. People are watching him and he doesn't want to let them down, but his greatest concern is creating a masterpiece, an emotional, personal, flawless piece of work. The feelings of Guido Anselmi, the protagonist, are established right from the start. The film begins with an ethereal dream sequence. First his car begins to fill with smoke and suffocate him while everyone nearby stares enthused, and then he flies through the sky only to find himself floating above a beautiful beach, and subsequently pulled down as he desperately tries to free himself from the rope that tethers him to the ground and the people below him who want to bring him down for good. These opening scenes symbolize Guido's (and Fellini's) desperation for creative freedom, to be able to create something personal and perfect without outside interference. Guido is constantly inundated by people asking him how his work is going, trying to help him speed things along, or attempting to change things about his film altogether. A writer Guido asks to edit his screenplay eviscerates his work, saying it has no point, no conflict or statement to give it a purpose. No one seems to understand his level of creativity and what he is trying to do. As a result of this, Guido spends more and more time in his own brain, closed off from the noise of the outside world. People talk, but he's lost in thought, barely listening. This, and some very clever framing and cinematography illustrate his separation from others very well.

            One of the things that makes 8 1/2 succeed so well at what it does is the intimacy in which it is made. Every thought of Guido's is made clear to the viewer, we get to explore his very dreams. Abrupt dream sequences and unannounced flashbacks may create a feeling of disorientation at first, but they also give us incredible insight into Guido's mind and accurately represent the unpredictable nature of memory and thought. Seeing his relations with his parents and the escapist fantasies of his subconscious mind let us project ourselves onto him extremely easily. Anyone who has struggled with any form of artistic block should be able to relate. And that's really one of the main points of the film, isn't it? That art is more than just production. It's expression of one's inner self created by their experiences and personality. Guido's producers try to stifle this creativity, claiming that his vision is arrogant or flawed, inconsistent with the state of cinema and what is culturally accepted to make a financially successful film. They tell him his film in inaccessible to the audience, his expression is indiscernible to the layman who will watch it. Therein lies a dilemma as well. Should Guido be creating this film for his own sake, or for the sake of the viewer? If the movie is perfectly consistent with his vision for it and turns out to be exactly what he wanted it to be, does that make is a success even if no one else understands it? Who is art for? The creator or the audience? Hollywood would say the audience, but this is a film of passion created by Fellini, born from the depths of his own creative mind. I, for one, think it's pretty cool that he took us along for the ride.

Casino Royale: A Feminist's Nightmare

So in preparation for Skyfall's North America release next week, I watched Casino Royale again. I'm no Bond expert (not really much of a fan, either), but for what it's worth I would definitely say that this is probably the strongest 007 film I've seen. Also, Pierce Brosnan is horrible. Needed to be said. Anyways, Daniel Craig's debut performance as the famous James Bond is really quite impressive, and a taut, well written story along with Eva Green's smoking-hot-ness really brings this film together into something special.

But the quality of the movie isn't really what I want to talk about, what I really want to touch on is how masculine, borderline sexist and misogynistic (sort of, depending on who you ask) Casino Royale is. Bond has always been a masculine, strong manly man with a thing for the ladies, but damn Daniel, you could have toned it down a bit in this one. In the first hour alone he crashes the car of a rich dude who pissed him off by mistaking him for a valet (partially to create a distraction, but still, dick move), takes huge amount of money away from a dude in poker including his absolutely gorgeous Aston Martin, before proceeding to (almost) bang his wife and then later looking straight into his eyes as he pushes a knife into his gut in the middle of a crowded museum. Now that's how you kick a guy while he's down. Bond seems to be a very primal person in this movie, eager to assert his dominance over every foe he encounters, and even more eager to get with every woman that crosses his path.

Our hero 007 has been a ladies man in pretty much all of his movies, but this movie is the first I've seen where they actually have some exposition as to why. Bond says himself that he is pretty much only into married women, so he obviously enjoys the thrill of the hunt, going after women who are unavailable or hard to get, and especially ones who won't get attached to him because that's the last thing he wants. Women are disposable to Bond, and when one he was getting romantic with is killed because of her involvement with him he doesn't care. Why? Because he's JAMES BOND, that's why! He can just find another one and start over. And he does, the one he's working with to bring down the bad guy. Or does he? the very woman who abhorred him at first sight for his objectification of women and his massive, uncontrollable ego falls for him, only to stab him in the back and end up dying because of it. When asked how he felt about it Bond replied with his signature sentimentality, he said "It's over. The bitch is dead." They were apparently in love, but he got over that one pretty quick, probably because he's mad because he thought women were just stupid objects and he got outsmarted by one.

In summary, James Bond probably had mommy issues

Probably going to post a Skyfall review after I see it, stay tuned.

Just Watched: eXistenZ (1999)

If you enjoy video games, or consider yourself a gamer, watch this film.

For real, this movie appealed to the incurable video game addict in me a hundred times more than the awful video game "adaptation" movies that Hollywood pukes out every year. Directed by the brilliant (and Canadian) David Cronenberg, this is an intense study of a possible future of video games and the effects a person's immersion in them can have. Basically, games have progressed to completely realistic virtual reality. People get small holes called bioports surgically embedded into their lower backs, which allow them to plug into "gamepods" which are basically weird looking sacks of flesh that are apparently biologically engineered and grown from DNA, something like that. The player is connected via a tube that looks a heck of a lot like an umbilical cord, and is brought into a fully realistic virtual world. eXistenZ's plot centers around a game designer and her bodyguard (apparently) who are on the run because video game haters called "realists"  want to kill her and stuff. This eventually leads to them entering the video game she created and chaos ensues, plot twists happen, and I become too lazy to summarize it all because I'm tired and ruining the ending(s) of this movie would be a dick move. Just watch it for yourself.

What I really want to talk about is the treatment of the subject matter. Cronenberg's attention to detail in the game world here is perfect, but if you're not a person who regularly plays games you're unlikely to notice. The characters programmed into the game appear as real people, but their mannerisms and the way they behave gives them away as constructs of the virtual reality. If waiting for a player to say the right line of dialogue or figure something out that they are supposed to do, they'll stand there looking around, silently blinking, waiting for something to happen for them to react to, just like the NPCs (Non Player Characters) in the video games of today. They have pre-programmed dialogue that they use to react when given the proper trigger, and their facial expressions serve as a reminder that they are really nothing but lines of code. 

The people playing the game also had characteristics that are common in video game protagonists, and after a while I began to see them as characters, and not actual people. In the movie it is explained that people playing the VR games get "game urges", inclinations in their mind that strongly tell them to do something, actions that elicit responses from NPCs and lead to discoveries that further the plot. It's really convincing, and watching it reminds me of video games I've played where a hint, or a phrase pops up onscreen and you immediately know what to do. In addition to this, there's a fairly linear plotline (for a while, everything goes to hell eventually) where the players receive objectives through dialogue and must complete them on their own, like in every game ever where the guy is like "hey, go do this, it's your quest" and you do it to find out what happens next. The narrative is structured like a video game, and that aspect of the movie is extremely well done. Cronenberg is either a gamer or he really did his homework on this one.

eXistenZ also stays true to Cronenberg's style, his "body horror" genre of movies. This deals with augmentation, degradation and transformation of the human body. It bears parallels to his other film Videodrome, where the main character grows a weird slot in his chest where he can put videotapes. In eXistenZ however, the characters stick an umbilical cord in their backs and go into a video game world in a Matrix-esque (ehhhh, maybe more like Inception now that I think of it) transcendence of reality. And that is another theme that is also explored in Videodrome. Man's interaction with technology, his reliance on it for entertainment. Where does it end? Will we eventually be able to alter reality so much that we can't tell what's real and what isn't? Is that a bad thing? What moral and ethical rules apply in a virtual game world? I guess we'll have to wait until science catches up with David Cronenberg to find out.

Just Watched: The 39 Steps (1935)

Note: Posts with the "Just Watched" tag are movies that I just watched for the first time.

          I have a confession to make. I'm a really big fan of Alfred Hitchcock, but I've never seen The 39 Steps, a film that is regarded as an essential espionage movie and one of Hitchcock's greatest works. Thanks to Netflix, I just changed that.

          This movie is fantastic. Although some of Hitchcock's movies are shot in colour, I think black and white really was his best medium. His use of light is brilliant (see the picture above), often using heavy amounts of contrast and sharp, unsettling shadows to reflect the constant state of paranoia that the protagonist lives in, something that could probably not been accomplished (or possibly done to a lesser effect) in colour. That said, the setting in this particular film are gorgeous. This was made before Hitchcock's departure from England to Hollywood, and most of it takes place in rural Scotland. Gorgeous hills, peaceful farms and quaint country life visually counterpoint the chaotic chase that unfolds throughout the movie, as a man wrongfully accused of murder runs from police and spies trying to find answers. Hitchcock's signature attention to detail is also dominant in the composition of the elements onscreen. Everything is in its place, drawing the eye to the most important parts of the shot and keeping  the viewer focused on what matters.

          The plot of 39 Steps was absolutely not what I expected. I was expecting a spy movie focused on a protagonist (a spy), trying to stop an evil nemesis of his from taking over the world, stealing technology etc etc etc. In short I was kind of expecting a typical espionage film, which was probably stupid of me because all of Hitchcock's work is anything but conventional. Blame it on me watching too many Bond movies, I suppose. The story is more focused on the journey of the main character, and his struggle to prove his innocence. His character definitely grows over the course of the movie, turning from a freaked out average guy to a (sort of) fearless perceived criminal who jumps off trains, runs from cops, gets shot, and eventually proves his innocence in the end. And that's what made The 39 Steps so appealing to me. There was a lot of effort put into character development. A movie hero is nothing if not interesting, and I was constantly left wondering how he was going to get out of these tough situations. Hitchcock really makes the viewer empathize with the plight of his character here, and that is one of the biggest triumphs of this movie.

          This was also one of the first Hitchcock movies I've seen where I was able to spot his famous onscreen cameo on my first viewing, and I just want whoever reads this to know that I am really proud of myself for that. But in addition, there were some other plot elements that are very "Hitchcockian" that I noticed in 39 Steps that also show up in other films he has made. For instance, the concept of an average, normal person becoming involved in some type of conspiracy, or suddenly thrown into a world they know nothing about. This also happens in North By Northwest, where the main character's identity is mistaken and he is kidnapped. There were also a few things in Psycho that are reminiscent of this movie. Both contain a character that is just kind of "off". The crazy killer Norman Bates doesn't immediately strike his victim as a psychotic murderer, but you can definitely tell that something is not right in his head. In 39 Steps, the main character stays with a farmer and his wife in Scotland, the husband is extremely religiously zealous and suspicious; he has an unsettling presence on screen. The viewer knows that he is not trustworthy and is going to negatively impact the protagonist. This adds to the suspense because we do not know initially what is going to happen in that circumstance. Also, the concept of killing off a character early in the story is evident, in Psycho the "main" character is killed off fairly early in the film, in 39 Steps our hero appears to be shot and killed halfway through but survives due to a book hidden in his jacket. It's things like these that Hitchcock uses to mess with our minds, one of the reasons why he is known as the Master of Suspense.

          This is classic Hitchcock, I love it.