#krell laboratories

[krelllabs]

Krell Laboratories: I Ain't Afraid of No Ghosts

Oh, look! I'm writing about movies again! Whoohoo.

[krelllabs]

I wrote a bunch of words about the latest “it” indie horror movie, The Witch.

There's an element of survival narrative in the forlorn circumstances in which this film's family find themselves and the film sometimes seems like that's the direction it's heading. But the slow accumulation of sinister moments--many of them as mundane as corn cobs that are going bad or a hare staring at the camera from a clearing or twin children playing with a goat--create a mounting sense of dread and make a promise to a patient viewer: "Yes, this is an observational drama for now, but just you wait." When the cloud bursts at the end of the movie, when blood is spilled, and the film begins to move beyond quotidian menace into baroque horror tableaux, this patience pays off. The shot of Katherine feeding her new familiar, for one instance, hits like a steamroller, as does William's struggle with Black Phillip and Thomasin's final confrontation with her mother. This is a film that keeps its promises to the audience. And yet, it stays true to its own imp of the perverse, too. Its ending subverts the idea that Christianity or Patriarchy or even social order are "good" or desirable. This is the return of the radical horror films of the 1960s like Witchfinder General or Night of the Living Dead, where, having loosed chaos upon the world, it suggests that the world deserves it.

[krelllabs]

Looking at Jurassic World on my movie blog this weekend. A very frustrating movie.

If, on the other hand, you want something else, something with recognizable human characters? Well, this film is going to be a disappointment to you, then. This is a film with types rather than characters, and depressingly conservative, hetero-normative aspirations for those types. The politics of gender in this film are completely regressive. Claire Dearing is a familiar character: a woman whose drive to succeed in business has unsexed her and turned her into shrew, a woman whose career path has severed her from her motherhood instinct. But worry not! The film is sure she'll find her inherent motherhood eventually and even tells her so in the text of the movie. This movie also recycles the impulse of the third movie to use children in peril as a means of uniting parents who are divorced (or divorcing in this case). The nuclear family is all in this movie, with women in traditional roles and not dabbling in careers. Worse, we're expected to side with the charming rogue who treats Claire like shit. Admittedly, this is stacked because the charming rogue is played by the very charming Chris Pratt and the brittle career woman is played by the frosty Bryce Dallas Howard. Most of the film's non-dino jokes come at her expense, not his, starting with the high heels she wears through the entire film. The movie never questions why her shoes might be useful to her in her realm (as opposed to the jungle where red of fang and claw reigns). The movie never stops to suggest that she might have sensible sneakers in the drawer of her desk. Instead, you have a parody of femininity, placed where "femininity" isn't "appropriate." I call bullshit on this, because it sets goal posts at both ends of the field. Claire isn't feminine enough because she pursues a career in preference to a family, but she's too feminine because she expresses her femininity in realms where it's a hindrance. Feh.

[krelllabs]

Back to cataloging what I saw at the True/False Film Festival this month, with a look at the unsatisfying Drone.

Drone is a film that tests something I tell people about True/False (full disclosure, I work for them as a screener). I usually tell people looking for screening advice that no matter what they pick, they’re bound to see a good movie, even if it’s not entirely to their tastes. I’ve seen plenty of films at True/False that I haven’t liked, but it’s rare that I’ve been willing to say that such and such is a bad film. While Drone may not be a bad film, I don’t think it’s very good, either. I think it’s a film with a scattered narrative constructed of declarative statements by carefully curated sources. It’s a classic case of a filmmaker that doesn’t trust their b-roll to tell the story, one in which the point of view is imposed by the choice of on-screen voices. It loses the audience by having too many parallel points of view. Worse, it’s impatient. This is a film that ends on a curious point of anti-climax at Brandon Bryant’s testimony before the U.N. There’s no real feeling that this is meaningful in the long run. There’s no real feeling of progress being made in the world or even of the futility of raging against the machine. This is a film that probably should have been incubated for a few years longer, where a wait and see approach for however long might have yielded up a broader view of the course of history and, perhaps, more nuance. The film as it stands doesn’t really have an ending. It just stops.

[krelllabs]

Finally getting back to movie blogging with some reports from the True/False Film Festival. First up is a look at Best of Enemies

When I saw the description of Best of Enemies on the True/False schedule, I wasn’t sure it was a film I wanted to see. It’s a kind of documentary that I normally roll my eyes at, constructed of archive footage and talking heads interpreting that archive footage. This isn’t always very cinematic, and I’ve gotten to a point where I want my documentaries to play as movies as much as I want them to play as journalism or essay. The archival documentaries haven’t always kept up with the state of the art. As I made my way to the exit after Best of Enemies, I was already framing my mea culpas. This was terrific. True, it’s not a film that stretches the boundaries of what non-fiction films can do, but that doesn’t matter much. It does enough to play like a movie that you don’t taste a dry recitation of events. The filmmakers punch up the form a bit with playful editing between their news footage and footage, for example, of Vidal on Playboy After Dark or snippets of the film version of Myra Breckinridge or Buckley’s appearances on game shows or hobnobbing with the Reagans, that the film is constantly surprising. There’s a playfulness in the way the film phrases the debates as prize fights, too, complete with a bell for the rounds. More, the filmmakers have cast the interior voices of Buckley and Vidal perfectly, with Kelsey Grammar reading from Buckley and John Lithgow reading from Vidal. The form of the film turns out to be fun in spite of my expectations.

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Looking at Calvary (2014) on my movie blog today.

It’s not for nothing that this film is titled “Calvary.” It’s a passion play of sorts. Father James is a Christ figure, and each of the days the film counts down act as a stand in for the stations of the cross. The film heaps suffering on Father James until he meets his fate down on the beach. More, the film has twelve important supporting characters, representing disciples who abandon Father James as Christ. The film is more subtle than that, though. James’s relationship with his daughter is nuanced, as is his relationship with the wife of the man who is killed. These are instances where the virtues of forgiveness—spiritual or secular, it makes no difference—are lovingly detailed. Beyond that: in his final confrontation with the man who has vowed to kill him, he’s asked, “And when you read about what your fellow priests did to all those poor children down all those years, did you cry then?” he says “no.” He has no legitimate answer. He’s the embodiment of the Church’s crimes in this instance and in some ways, he deserves the bullet. This film is nothing, if not conflicted. The juxtaposition of this scene with the montage that follows suggests ambiguous interpretations. The images are provocative: The money-worshiping nihilist, the adulterer and her lover, the violent Buddhist barkeeper, the asshole atheist, the fallen priest reading The God Delusion, these represent a world adrift without The Church. These are the mocking grotesques of Bosch’s painting. The last images in the sequence subvert this interpretation: the grieving wife taking comfort from God, the daughter granting some kind of forgiveness (maybe) to her father’s murderer. When I first watched the film, the meaning of the last images didn’t register. I just saw the grotesques. John Michael McDonagh, the film’s director, has mentioned that Calvary is influenced by the films of Robert Bresson, but it can’t quite bring itself around to the same level of spiritual misanthropy, perhaps because it’s organized around a character the likes of which was an anathema to Bresson. The film is also more aware of the power of grotesques and its own roots in art. The most baroque example of this is is the conversation Father James has with Chris O’Dowd’s butcher, which takes place in a meat locker and calls to mind Rembrandt’s painting of a flayed ox hung up for meat. A more subtle example is the painting on which Dylan Moran’s rich man pisses. It’s Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors. a painting famous for the anamorphic skull painted on the floor. This is one of the film’s cleverest memento mori.

[krelllabs]

Looking at Jupiter Ascending on my movie blog tonight. It’s a magnificent folly.

Dune is a key touchstone for this film. This is as grand a folly as Lynch’s version of that book, to say nothing of Jodorowsky’s unfilmed version. Some of the space ships and some of the futuristic sci fi elements echo Jodorowsky’s designs, as do some of the weirder sci-fi concepts built from an emphasis on the mutability of genomes. Many of these elements—particularly the idea of planets as fiefdoms for an oligarchy—go back to Herbert’s original novel. The allegorical elements of this film are as obvious and as rich as those Herbert chose. This is a whizbang for the Occupy crowd, in which the .001% literally enrich themselves by devouring the masses. No surprise here, I guess, given that the Wachowskis are also responsible for V for Vendetta. In truth, I would not be surprised if this film winds up with the same kind of underground cult as Lynch’s film—it will never be respected, per se—but it will be remembered and reevaluated. That process is already underway.

[krelllabs]

Looking at The Imitation Game on my movie blog tonight.

"The Imitation Game" that gives this film its title is the so-called Turing Test. The premise is this: you ask a machine and a person questions without seeing or hearing the person—text only, basically. You only receive their answers with no other clues. If the judge cannot determine which respondent is a machine, then the machine is said to have passed the test. This does not necessarily answer the question of whether a machine can think or not, though Turing thought that it did because we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Whether the computer can understand what it is processing is another matter entirely. But this is beside the point. There’s a reason that "The Imitation Game" gives this film its title, because it is presenting Turing himself as a kind of thinking machine. Hence the presentation of him as autistic (there is no evidence beyond his famous eccentricities that he was). This is an artistic choice rather than a historical one, and it’s why you shouldn’t trust movies. This is not a movie about facts. Many of the film’s "facts" have been streamlined or fudged in the name of storytelling. The film is an imitation of facts and a game at that. It starts with the games in its first scenes. Turing’s interview with Commander Denniston, for instance, is a word game. Commander Denniston is the film’s primary antagonist besides the Nazis, which is another artistic choice; Turing and Denniston were friends in real life. This is a movie imitating life in the way that movies know how to imitate life. The question becomes, does the movie succeed? Is it indistinguishable from life? That’s a good question. I think it plays as a movie, but I consume so many movies that I know better than to learn history from them. But I also know that historicity is a trap and that as fiction, the job of a movie is to tell me the truth—not facts, mind you, but truth—by lying to me about people who never were and things that never happened. "Based on a true story," is the first among lies, even among documentaries where every cut is a lie.