Movie Update 5

I mentioned before that I didn't want to dedicate entire posts to movies that didn't inspire that amount of writing in me anymore, but I don't want to let them go completely unmentioned either. So here are my brief thoughts on some movies I watched in the last week or so.

Django


I watched this because it was streaming and I was reading all the reports about Quentin Tarantino's next film, which is supposed to be a Western called Django Unchained and including this film's star Franco Nero in the cast. And it's not bad at all, though it's not nearly a classic either. Django is an interesting character, and his gimmick of dragging around a coffin with a surprise inside is interesting if a little impractical. The movie starts out pretty strong, but it bogs down a bit later after he starts hanging out with Mexicans and ignoring the obvious fact that he's still in danger. It's a pretty brutally violent movie for the era, and has some really great moments, though like many contemporary Spaghetti Westerns it's lacking in polish. Probably worth checking out if for nothing else than homework on Tarantino's upcoming movie. I'm still annoyed I never watched the original Inglorious Bastards when it was streaming.

Life is Beautiful


This is truly one of the most confounding movies I've ever seen, and I'm still not sure that I didn't totally hate it, though I don't think I did. I did really dislike the first half, which was a silly and boring (tough combination) romantic comedy, and I really don't like director Roberto Benigni's performance in the lead role, and I'm frankly flabbergasted by the fact that he won the Oscar, considering some other performances that were considered. The movie does improve significantly in the second half. I was still pretty vexed by slapstick comedy showing up in the Holocaust, but there's something powerful about the way he uses it to protect his son and the extent to which he goes not only to keep him alive, but to keep him unafraid. I think I would have liked it a lot more if it was half an hour shorter at least, with most of that taken out of the beginning, but I'm pretty sure it was otherwise decent. Pretty sure.

Singin' in the Rain


I'm surprised it took this long for a musical to pop up on my list, though that's certainly partly attributable to the nature of the sources I used when compiling it originally. As far as very famous musicals I've seen, Singin' is a bit lacking in classic tunes (there's the title song and "Make 'Em Laugh", obviously, and I've heard "Good Morning" before), though I thought it more than made up for it with the dancing, with Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor tapping and jumping all over the place in a generally enjoyable way. It's a funny movie too, more of a comedy without the music when many of the classic musicals would be closer to dramas. There's lots of great set ups and memorable lines, and it was able to take a bunch of existing songs and throw them into a fun story with likable characters without much of a hitch. I thought Jean Hagen's screechy performance was more irritating than funny, but it was the only major blemish on an otherwise nice film.

Solaris


The original book has been adapted numerous times, most recently by Steven Soderbergh, but this is the 70s version by Andrei Tarkovsky. Much like his later work Stalker, it's a very slow moving, cerebral science fiction film with less of a focus on the exact nature of the bizarre phenomena its characters observe and more on the inner turmoil it brings to the surface. A strange planet is able to produce reproductions of things inside the head of people who are staying on a space station floating above it, and when a scientist's wife is brought back to life, it opens up a huge can of worms for him and the other crew members. It looks kind of cheap now, but the story gets through despite those limitations. Definitely not for everyone, but it's an interesting movie with a unique style and a great ending.

The Mirror

The Mirror is pure art house cinema. It's not a movie made to be casually absorbed and enjoyed, it is a film designed to be examined and reexamined and appreciated. It's the kind of thing that requires careful study to truly grasp the complex subtlety of, and having only seen it once and with less than perfect attention, I can't say I fully got it. There's not really a plot anywhere, as the film jumps back and forth in time, from black and white to color, from reality to dreamy imagery, as the main character reflects on his past. Scenes are punctuated with poetry written and read by the director's father. It does the classic art house thing of having one woman play multiple important characters in a person's life. The "pretentious" label really isn't hard to apply, and it's easy to see why a casual viewer wouldn't fall in love with it.

I still liked it though, which speaks to Andrei Tarkovsky's skill as a director. It takes a lot of talent to make a movie with no real story interesting for close to two hours. I don't know to what extent the film reflects his own life, knowing only that it's considered a fairly autobiographical film, but there's a sadness and believability to the whole thing that comes across even if you're not doing the best job of combining all of the separate little pieces into a cohesive whole. There's some really striking and profound imagery, most commonly found in the pretty amazing dream sequences, and letting the film wash over me proved to be an interesting if not thoroughly exciting experience. I definitely prefer a little more plot in my movies, but Tarkovsky is good enough to carry the thing out of the endless void of its own ass it could have fallen into.

Andrei Rublev

After how taxing Stalker was, I was worried about how difficult Andrei Tarkovsky's historical opus Andrei Rublev would be to get through, being nearly an hour longer. Luckily, it was relatively easy to watch, considering the obscure subject matter and expansive running time. The trade-off is that it wasn't nearly as gripping, but you take what you can get. The film is about the titular Russian painter, who worked mostly in icons and lived during a turbulent period in his country's history. Despite taking place six hundred years ago, the subject matter was apparently still pretty touchy for the Russian government, as the film wasn't available in its full uncut form for years after it came out in the 60s. From what I've read the movie is more accurate when it comes to the historical content than the actual life of its central figure, and while it's easy to stop paying attention while watching it, if you focus there's some pretty interesting stuff there.

The movie is chopped up into a bunch of segments showing various periods in Rublev's life, making it feel more like a quick miniseries than a long movie, which helps make it as easy to watch as it is. A lot of time is spent with Andrei discussing philosophy and life with people he comes across, but what was most notable to me about the film is its more controversial content. I may just be forgetting something here, but it's the earliest real film I can think of featuring nudity (and not just a little bit of it), and it's also pretty violent in areas, including an infamous scene that required the actual death of a horse to film. As shallow as it might seem, it helps keep a movie that otherwise seems a bit aware of its own importance interesting. I appreciate the scale and skill behind the accomplishment, I just wasn't nearly as intrigued by it as I was by the Tarkovsky movie I just watched. One of those movies I'm glad to be able to say I've seen, but that I'm not exactly ready to watch again soon.

Stalker

A year or two ago I played S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, a Ukrainian PC shooter about men called stalkers entering the dangerous zone around the famed nuclear power plant to seek out a room holding a machine that would grant their wish. I was vaguely aware that it was loosely based on a Russian novel called Roadside Picnic, which was also adapted into a film. This is that film, and while it obviously doesn't involve Chernobyl since it was made years before the disaster, the similarities are obvious. The difference is in how the story is portrayed by director Andrei Tarkovsky, who is considered by many one of the best ever. I could see why when I was watching the movie, which is one of the most starkly memorable and affecting I have seen in a long time.

There are only four characters that speak in the film. The first is the stalker, a man who is paid by those who have heard of him to lead them into the Zone; a mysterious, restricted area fraught with danger and housing the wish granting Room. The writer and the professor are his two clients in the movie, both wishing to see the Room but not divulging their reasons why. The last speaking character is the stalker's wife, who is only in the beginning and the end of the movie, and she provides a glimpse into the way his profession has damaged their lives, but admits she would rather be with him than not. They have a daughter born deformed because of his trips into the Zone, and she's an obvious consequence of what he does.

The most obvious thing anyone will notice about the movie is how it was shot. The areas outside and inside the Zone are shown in a brown-tinged black and white and full color respectively, providing a very harsh contrast that compliments the mysterious and unknowable nature of what they are entering. The whole thing is also done almost entirely in very long takes, some lasting for several minutes on end and few not going on at least a few seconds longer than they would in any normal scene, lending a very specific feel to the film. This style lends an oppressive atmosphere to the story, a certain existential dread that puts you in the mindset of the characters and makes you constantly on edge, waiting for something to happen while you wonder if there's really anything to what the stalker is so afraid of. I was physically drained by the end of the two and a half hours the movie takes to watch, and while it's not an experience I would like to replicate any time soon, it was certainly a unique one I appreciated the merits of.

I haven't talked much about the story itself, but while the actual plot content could probably be easily covered in about half the time the film takes, it's still an interesting one, a great example of how science fiction can look at real ideas in a new light. The discussions the characters have aren't just there to break up the monotony of scenes that seem to last for ages, but make you really consider the implications of what the Zone may or may not actually provide. The climactic scene is especially long, but extremely tense despite the static way in which it is shown, and the final scenes are perhaps the film's most mysterious and powerful. Recently I've seen several films that I said weren't for everyone, and I'm not sure I've ever meant it more than I do here. But while it was definitely taxing, I prefer that to being bored, and I found it to be extremely fascinating the whole time.