Viewing Journal - May 2016 #5

Love & Friendship (Whit Stillman, United Kingdom, 2016)

I'm now convinced that Whit Stillman was born to write and direct Jane Austen adaptations. While watching Love & Friendship I realized he's been making Austen stories all along - comedies of manners that are both satirical and affectionate - only in contemporary settings. His unique wit flourishes even more in the 1790s, and when matched with Austen's beautifully drawn characters. I haven't yet read Lady Susan, which Love & Friendship is adapted from, but in some ways it's an atypical Austen story. Lady Susan is a devious and cheerfully amoral character, a social climber with a genius for manipulation. She begins and ends the film unrepentantly horrible, but she is so witty and charismatic that we can't help but be impressed by her scheming ways. Kate Beckinsale clearly had a blast playing this character, delivering Lady Susan's politely wicked dialogue with virtuosic comic timing. Love & Friendship also has a welcome absurdist, irreverent streak, more reminiscent of Oscar Wilde or screwball comedy than Jane Austen. Yet, more than any other Austen adaptation I've seen, Love & Friendship captures her humor - her genius for mining comedy out of the gap between what people say and what they actually mean. It's one of the funniest movies I've seen in ages.

Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, United States / Hong Kong, 1973)

Despite considering myself a fan of Hong Kong kung fu flicks, I had never seen a single one starring the legendary Bruce Lee. Clearly I needed to correct this oversight. Enter the Dragon is a collaboration between East and West - made in Hong Kong with a local crew, but filmed in English with an American director and co-stars. It's a genre hybrid as well, both a martial arts extravaganza and a James Bond-style espionage thriller, with influences of so-called "blaxploitation" and psychedelia. About every B-movie genre popular in America or Hong Kong circa 1973 shows up in Enter the Dragon in one form or another. This democratic blending of East and West is typical of Lee, a citizen of both Hong Kong and the United States who was passionate about spreading the philosophy of martial arts across the globe. Enter the Dragon is also a total mess, though an exuberantly fun mess. I now see why Bruce Lee was such a star. He's not only an astonishing athlete but a magnetic screen presence. There's a mischief and wily intelligence in his eyes, and his lightning quick movements are mesmerizing. His body zigs when you expect it to zag; his bird-like shrieks in battle are amusing and terrifying.

The Most Dangerous Game (Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel, United States, 1932)

I love these horror-thrillers made in the early 30s, before the Production Code clamped down on what Hollywood films could show. Though tame by today's ultra-violent standards, The Most Dangerous Game remains an entertaining thriller that must have shocked audiences of 1932. Based on a famous and influential short story (which I have yet to read) with a perfectly simple, sinister premise: a wealthy madman and big game hunter entraps shipwrecked people on his private island to hunt them. If they survive a single night, he will release them - but none have survived before! Though it's only an hour long, The Most Dangerous Game spends much of its runtime building up to the hunt, as shipwrecked survivors are trapped inside Count Zaroff's gothic castle. The evil Zaroff is played by an over-the-top Leslie Banks; his bug-eyed expressions and preposterous Russian accent are difficult to take seriously but quite entertaining, especially next to Joel McCrea's stiffly stoic leading man. The really good parts arrive in the final twenty minutes, in a cat-and-mouse showdown in the jungle. The Most Dangerous Game was filmed on the same sets as King Kong - Kong would use the sets during the day, and Game at night. It's clearly an artificial jungle, but with all the grandiose charm and dream-like exaggeration of Old Hollywood. It's the perfect setting for an action-packed climax, as our heroes set elaborate booby traps, flee from hounds across logs bridging canyons, and do battle at the edge of a giant waterfall. The final fight is unusually realistic for the time, with sweaty, flailing desperation that looks unchoreographed.

Flirting (John Duigan, Australia, 1991)

Ignore the frivolous title. Flirting is the rare teenage comedy that treats its adolescent characters with dignity, as intelligent and thoughtful people. In 1965 Australia, two boarding schools, one all male and one all female, face each other across a lake. Danny is a gawky kid, intelligent, not athletic, teased by fellow students, though he's mostly unfazed by them. Thandiwe has just arrived to Australia from Uganda, and stands out from her peers for her race, her sophistication and irreverent humor. Both are attracted by the rebellious qualities of the other, and over a series of awkward and charming encounters grow to love each other. Flirting is the kind of well-observed film where even minor characters come alive as real, specific people, where you will laugh and cringe with fond recognition at their behavior. Noah Taylor and Thandie Newton give sensitive, lively performances as the leads, while Nicole Kidman and a baby-faced Naomi Watts appear in small early roles. Director John Duigan brings to Flirting a quiet beauty unique for its genre - like when Danny sneaks out at night to meet Thandiwe, rowing across a shimmering starlit lake out of a fairy tale.

The Films of Hayao Miyazaki: Part 1

Over the next few weeks, I will be re-watching and reviewing all the feature films of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, internationally acclaimed as perhaps the world's greatest animator and among my personal favorite filmmakers.

Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)

The Castle of Cagliostro was Hayao Miyazaki's first feature length animation, though he had been working in the medium for years creating television episodes. It's based on a pre-existing property - the Lupin III manga series, which had been popular in Japan since the 1960s, inspiring a television show and several films. All the Lupin III adventures center around a mischievous gentleman thief and his escapades, which unfold in a fantastic Eastern vision of continental Europe inspired by pulp serials and James Bond. The Castle of Cagliostro is less purely a result of Miyazaki's imagination than his later films - many of the themes and character types that would define his work are not present in this more generic adventure. It feels less like a deeply personal passion project than a job for hire from a budding animator. The animation, too, looks more cartoony than his later films, lacking their richness and painterly beauty.

Yet it's equally clear that Miyazaki gave his all to make The Castle of Cagliostro the best film it could be. The animation might be cheaper, but it's excellent considering the budgetary limitations. The backgrounds have real scale, depth and detail, and the simply-designed, caricatured characters are fun and expressive in a style unique to cartoons. The silly adventure story is generic, but in the best way - it revels in the most fun elements of its genre. The Castle of Cagliostro is restlessly action-packed and gleefully goofy. It is filled with all the most delightful cliches of swashbuckling adventure stories - trap doors and secret passageways, damsels in distress and nefarious henchmen, car chases and heroes dangling from great heights - all done with high-spirited style. It may look simple or unaccomplished compared to Miyazaki's more ambitious subsequent work, but taken on its own terms The Castle of Cagliostro is marvelous fun.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984)

Like The Castle of Cagliostro, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is based on a pre-existing source - this time one of Miyazaki's creation, an epic manga series he wrote. He compressed and simplified his sprawling saga into one two-hour film, and the result, although not Miyazaki's first film, is the true introduction to his unique vision as an artist.

Nausicaa is set in a futuristic world that is equal parts Star Wars and Mad Max. A long-ago man-made disaster has poisoned the earth. Small pockets of civilization are threatened by ever-expanding toxic jungles, lethal to humans and inhabited by enormous insects. Our titular character is the princess of one of these human strongholds, the Valley of the Wind, an agricultural, utopian society amid the wastelands. The peaceful Valley is disrupted by an airship crash-landing in their midst, carrying strange cargo - an enormous beating heart. The ship belongs to the Tolmekians, a military state who are planning to grow a giant, a living weapon of mass destruction to wipe out the toxic jungle. We learn that these ancient giants were what destroyed so much of the earth in the first place.

Nausicaa is a big step forward from The Castle of Cagliostro in sophistication. It tells a complicated story on a massive scale, with urgently expressed environmental and pacifist themes. It struck me on this viewing that, in a certain sense, Nausicaa is the type of film Avatar wanted to be. It is both an action-packed adventure and an unabashed message movie. Yet Avatar swerved into annoying pontification in expressing its environmental, anti-colonial messages, and was simplistic and hypocritical in its us-versus-them violent conflict. In Nausicaa, Miyazaki's concerns arise organically out of the world and characters he creates. The reasons for warfare are not simple. The most villainous characters in Nausicaa have humanity and legitimate reasons for the beliefs they hold - their faith in the ends justifying the means is what leads them astray. Even the hideous giant insects are allowed to have dignity; they are never portrayed by Miyazaki as other than dangerous wild animals, but they have nobility in their animal natures. Many films preach non-violence while reveling in violence, but Nausicaa consistently upholds empathy and self-sacrifice over force and might.

Miyazaki protagonists are often brave, intelligent young women, and Nausicaa is among the most memorable. She is feminine and powerful, skilled but humble. Though an excellent fighter, she almost always prefers to be diplomatic - the one instance where she does erupt in violent anger nearly leads to disaster. Her vengeful fury would be presented as empowering by many a less thoughtful film, especially since the reasons behind it are entirely sympathetic, but Miyazaki is too conscientious a storyteller to make things that easy.

Hayao Miyazaki's imagination as a creator of worlds seems boundless. The animation, while it does not have quite the same painterly richness as Miyazaki films to come, offers up sequence after sequence of astonishing beauty and originality. I'm especially fond of the design of the Ohmu, enormous trilobite-like insects whose eyes glow blue when peaceful and red when enraged. Their scale and power is awesome in a way only a master animator could capture. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind pulls me in to the world it creates with each viewing. This is a major work from a very special artist and storyteller, though even better was to come.

Viewing Journal - May 2016

Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, United Kingdom, 2013)

An alien, in the form of a desirable woman, stalks the streets of Scotland looking for male prey. A basic plot description makes Under the Skin sound like a trashy sci-fi thriller in the vein of Species, that late night cable mainstay aimed at boys eager for a side of pin-up sexiness with the main course of B-movie alien action. The fact that said sexy alien is embodied by Scarlett Johansson no doubt brought much of the same crowd to Under the Skin in droves.

Many were probably disappointed, as Under the Skin is almost entirely lacking in sexy, gooey genre thrills. This is one of the strangest, most challenging science fiction films of recent years. It opens with an abstract animated sequence, reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which might represent the alien being formed - circular shapes emerge from light and darkness to form an eyeball, a woman's voice pronounces syllables that form words. We then see a nameless woman (Johansson) driving the streets of Glasgow in a white van, picking up lonely men. She flirts with mechanical skill, but otherwise has a blank, impassive face. The men (whose Scottish accents are so thick that I only understood half of what they were saying) are amazed by their luck that this beautiful woman is interested in them. They fall into a lustful trance as she lures them into her inky black lair, where they slowly sink into a dark pool and disappear.

Under the Skin not only centers around an alien, but the film itself adopts her alien perspective. There's an unnervingly discordant, off-kilter rhythm to the editing, the sound design, and the soundtrack, which consists of shrieking strings and eerie droning synths. The scenes set on the streets of Glasgow are filmed with mundane realism and a coolly observant quality, similar to a nature documentary. But once we enter the alien's lair, Under the Skin becomes stylized and uncanny. When the alien witnesses tragedy - an entire family swept away by the seas on a rocky Scottish beach, a truly disturbing scene - she observes calmly, totally unaffected. The camera mimics her perspective, filming the horror from a distance, detached from their struggle.

We begin to wonder how much the alien knows and what she is thinking. Does she know what her victims want from her, or is she ignorant and merely programmed to complete a task? Can she even be called a "she"? Cracks begin to appear in the alien's facade. She observes herself in the mirror, lingering on her reflection with some sort of dawning awareness. She begins to watch people, with curiosity more than predatory intent. And she meets one victim who is different than the rest, in a moving and surprising scene. This causes a change of heart that perhaps not even the alien can explain. Considering her fame, it's amazing how quickly I forgot that I was watching Scarlett Johansson in the role. Under the Skin would not have worked if she could not convincingly play a non-human character, but she does - it's a quiet but unique and unearthly performance, free of any celebrity ego.

When I was a kid, I wrote a short story about an alien who visits earth and views humanity from a different perspective. My alien was a sentient blue glob and not a seductress, and the story probably did not add up to anything of insight, but I've always been fascinated by that idea. Under the Skin is the best take on that concept I've seen. As the alien becomes increasingly fascinated by humanity, she discovers its capacity for kindness and for hatred. She tries to become one of them, yet runs against her own alien nature. Her attempts to navigate this foreign place are bizarrely endearing, but ultimately pathetic and tragic. Under the Skin provokes many divergent reactions, often within the same scene. It is somehow compassionate while being pitilessly cold and cruel. It is frightening and disturbing, but exploratory and curious. As someone who loves both creative cinema and thoughtful science fiction, I found it exhilarating.

Watch trailer here

High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, United States, 1973)

A nasty, brutish western with a supernatural twist. It opens like many a classic Clint Eastwood western. A Man with No Name rides into town, and his mysterious presence immediately causes a stir among the skittish townspeople. He is the meanest bastard Eastwood has ever played, a cold-blooded murderer and rapist. The town has a troubled history. We see flashbacks of its former sheriff being whipped to death by hired killers, while the townspeople stand by and do nothing. Without stating it outright, the film eventually makes it clear that Eastwood is the sheriff's spirit, returned from the grave to seek vengeance and expose the communal sins of this cowardly town. Despite his righteous anger, he's no hero, merely a vengeful agent of chaos. There's nobody good in High Plains Drifter, just the bad and the ugly.

High Plains Drifter is among Clint Eastwood's earliest efforts as a director. Stylistically, it's a classical all-American western, but ultimately little about it is comfortable or familiar - it is tinged with horror and black comedy, and has a subversive sting of cynical social satire.

Watch trailer here

Vampire's Kiss (Robert Bierman, United States, 1988)

The Cage is unleashed, and it's a glorious thing to witness. Vampire's Kiss is essentially a showreel for Nicolas Cage at his most deranged. The film is dominated by Cage's insanity - the inexplicable way he enunciates words, his unnatural body language and bugged-out eyeballs, his bizarre outbursts.

Sure, there's a story here. Cage is an 80s yuppie and businessman, and an obnoxious misogynist who harasses his poor secretary. After a bat flies into his apartment, he meets a woman who bites his neck. He begins to believe that he's turning into a vampire, though it's clearly a delusion. There's something like a social satire here, though it's never clear what the movie is actually satirizing. It's easy to imagine Vampire's Kiss as a dark psychological thriller, but in practice that's not what happens. In practice it's Nicolas Cage prancing around Manhattan yelling "I'm a vampaya! I'm a vampaya!" while wearing plastic fangs he bought at a novelty shop, chasing pigeons, shrieking at crucifixes and begging passerby to drive a wooden stake through his heart. And whatever the hell this was all about.

It is, legitimately, one of the funniest things I've ever seen. I am at a loss as to what Vampire's Kiss was trying to be, but I'm equally delighted that it exists and is so totally bonkers. A must-see for Cage cultists.

Watch trailer here

Viewing Journal - April 2016 #4

Flash Gordon (Mike Hodges, United States, 1980)

I knew I was going to love this from its ridiculous start. A villainous voice whines that he is bored and wants a new plaything. His equally evil minion presents him with an obscure planet to toy with, "the inhabitants refer to it as the planet Earth", he sneers as contemptuously as possible. Cue comic book styled opening credits and Queen's earworm of a theme song (Flash! AAAH! Savior of the Universe!).

We discover that the villainous voice belongs to Ming the Merciless, an evil intergalactic emperor with wicked eyebrows. Ming is played by none other than Max von Sydow, known for his existentially despairing Swedish dramas with Ingmar Bergman, and few movie-related things are more delightful than hearing great thespian von Sydow deliver dialogue such as "Halt, Lizard Man! Escape is impossible!". 

Flash Gordon is absurd and aware of the fact. The sets are gaudily colored and elaborately fake, with spaceships that are obvious painted models. The plot is convoluted and nonsensical. The performances are hammy - especially Brian Blessed, the leader of the Hawk-Men who bellows all his dialogue in a ludicrous Scottish brogue. I have a fondness for old-school space operas in the Edgar Rice Burroughs vein, which are usually low on brains but high on fun and imagination, so I had a big goofy grin on my face throughout Flash Gordon.

Watch trailer here

Beau Travail (Claire Denis, France, 1999)

A sergeant of the French Legionnaire grows jealous of a young soldier's seemingly effortless skill and bravery. His envy grows, leading to tragedy. However, very little of the barebones plot is expressed through dialogue - Beau Travail often unfolds like a dance performance. As the soldiers perform their drills in the desert, Claire Denis films the ritualistic exercises like a modern dance. Beau Travail is beautifully photographed, with special attention paid to the gorgeously barren Djibouti landscapes, the idealized masculine bodies of the soldiers, and the faces of local African women, peering with bemusement at these foreigners beneath their colorful hijabs. It's all very lovely and very tasteful - maybe too tasteful? Macho competition is largely expressed through intimidating glares, and in one sequence the two men circle each other like territorial lions while opera soars on the soundtrack. Yet I was never persuaded of the intensity of Sergeant Galoup's hostile obsession with the young soldier. Beau Travail is intelligent and artfully made, but its themes - masculinity, conformity, neo-colonialism - felt too notional and neat to have much weight. And then there's the ending, which I'm not sure yet is beautiful or ridiculous or both. Either way, it's unwise to make definitive snap judgements about a Claire Denis film. Better to let them steep in your mind.

Watch trailer here

Valley of the Bees (Frantisek Vlacil, Czechoslovakia, 1968)

Mesmerizing from its opening credits, rolling over eerie reverse-negative images of a swarming beehive and scored to an ominous male choir. This sequence begins Valley of the Bees on an unsettling, offbeat note that it never wavers from. In medieval Europe, two men form an intense friendship within their strict religious order of Teutonic knights. Ondrej was placed in the order after his father threw him against a wall, then in regret promised to commit his son to God if his life was spared. His friend Armin is a former soldier of the Crusades, and a fanatic believer in his order's harsh form of Christianity. His friendship with Ondrej is possessive and quite probably underlaid by repressed sexual desire. Ondrej flees the order, losing faith in its holiness after a particularly brutal incident. He returns to his former home and marries - his new wife is, disturbingly, his stepmother and his father's widow, though they are the same age. Armin is disgusted by his friend's betrayal of the order and attempts to persuade him to return, eventually turning to violence fueled by jealousy and religious psychosis.

Valley of the Bees is a brutal immersion into medieval life. In Frantisek Vlacil's vision, medieval Europe offered only violent religious fundamentalism or amoral sensuality that is hardly less cruel. Perhaps the only exception comes from a blind woman that Armin meets in the wilderness, who lives comfortably with both sincere faith and healthy sensuality. He is alarmed by her lack of shame, yet she reacts to his extremism with sympathetic pity and kindness. Armin is an unforgettably frightening character. Late in the film, he has a discussion with a more reasonable priest where he reveals that he believes all men deserve to die since nobody can achieve moral perfection. "Let life be extinct. The angels will remain. No one has ever seen them, and yet I hear the beating of their wings." His desire for moral perfection is really fueled by a hatred of humanity, and above all hatred of himself. Armin is a chilling and still-relevant warning of religious purity descending into apocalyptic nihilism.

Beauty and the Beast (Juraj Herz, Czechoslovakia, 1978)

Nobody does dark, creepy fairy tales better than those crazy Czechs. This version of the old gothic romance exists on a hazy border between fairy tale and outright horror. It creates a marvelously sinister atmosphere on a small budget, helped greatly by a dramatic organ soundtrack. The Beast's castle is rotting and overgrown, the cursed forest is populated by the skeletons of dead trees and overhung with mist. Juraj Herz's conception of the Beast is much darker than the grouchy but essentially harmless big teddy bear of more well-known versions. The Beast is bird-like, with giant talons and a grotesque feathery body. In the opening scene, he slaughters a caravan of travelers trespassing in his forest - he is beastly both inside and out. Belle awakens a human, gentlemanly side of the Beast, but at the same time an evil, Gollum-like voice in his mind urges him to kill her and drink her blood. This is decidedly not a Disney version of the tale, yet the romantic heart of the story remains the same. It is still a story about the redemptive and transformative power of love. Though this Beauty and the Beast is not as great as the magical Jean Cocteau version from 1946 or the beloved Disney animation from 1991, it is another distinctive and creative take on the story. Worth seeing, especially for those who like their Romances spiked with horror.

Barry Lyndon

United States / United Kingdom, 1975
Directed by Stanley Kubrick

Barry Lyndon is seemingly Stanley Kubrick's most "normal" film. Based on an 1844 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, it outlines the rise and fall of Redmond Barry, an 18th century Irishman and opportunistic social climber, who fights in the British and Prussian armies in the Seven Years' War (and deserts both), ascends to the highest levels of society through lies, luck and seduction, and ultimately loses it all. The broad strokes of Barry Lyndon are typical, it's a story we've all heard before. There is nothing here as obviously outrageous as many of Kubrick's other films - including, prior to Lyndon, a political satire ending in nuclear holocaust (Dr. Strangelove), a trippy science fiction epic (2001), and a bizarre shocker about crime and punishment in a dystopian London (A Clockwork Orange). Yet in its own way, Barry Lyndon is every bit as unusual and challenging as any of them, and just as clearly an uncompromised product of Kubrick's vision.

Barry Lyndon's opening sets the tone for the 3 hours to follow. The funereal notes of Handel's "Sarabande" blare on the soundtrack as the opening titles appear.

The first image shows, from a distance, two men about to engage in a duel.

We cannot see their faces, and their human drama - of life-or-death importance to them, obviously - is dwarfed by the landscape surrounding them. The scene almost looks more like landscape painting than photography. A narrator informs us, without an ounce of emotion in his voice: "Barry's father had been bred, like many other young sons of a genteel family, to the profession of the law. And there is no doubt he would have made an eminent figure in his profession -" BANG "- had he not been killed in a duel, which arose over the purchase of some horses." And we see Barry's father fall limp in the distance.

This opening tells us several things about Barry Lyndon. 1) This is a highly formalized film - from the overwhelming classical music, to the fussily decorous titles, to the painterly cinematography. 2) Largely due to 1), this is a distant, cold film. We are observers of these people and their tragedies, but Kubrick never invites us to feel sympathy for them. We are always kept at a distance. The dry narration often tells us what is about to happen before it actually does, flattening suspense or typical engagement with the story, and it even makes sardonic little jokes at the expense of the characters, which leads us to 3) this is all quite absurd. The duel may have been of the utmost importance to Barry's father, but to us it looks petty and foolish - a dumb quarrel erupting over an event as comparatively trivial as the purchase of horses. The grand aesthetics do not elevate the characters and their tragedies so much as parody them.

Barry Lyndon's attitude of bemused detachment is what makes it so unique. Our main character is never particularly likable, and star Ryan O'Neill intentionally plays Barry as a blank slate of a person. The film moves along at a steady pace - about the speed of a glacier, also an apt comparison for how warm and friendly it is. I've probably made it sound deeply unappealing: Barry Lyndon is beautiful but cold, and unconcerned with character development or traditionally engaging storytelling. Yet it is mesmerizing, and even surprisingly enjoyable. How so?

For starters, I'm not using the word "beautiful" lightly in this case. Barry Lyndon is one of the most gorgeous movies ever made. If every artform has at least a handful of indisputable genius artists, then Stanley Kubrick must be considered one of the true geniuses of the movies. From the cinematography to the music to the editing, Barry Lyndon is masterfully crafted. Every image is carefully composed and lighted - Barry Lyndon used natural lighting instead of set lights, which at the time required the development of a new type of camera lens (also used by NASA). The effect is magical, especially in the scenes lit only by candles. The images have a soft glow that, along with the film's slow, steady rhythm and beautiful music, has a hypnotizing power. Taken purely as abstract art, Barry Lyndon is remarkable.

But there's more to it than that. The images of Barry Lyndon are designed to look like paintings, not only for beauty's sake but to communicate the story's themes. Redmond Barry wants to attain a certain status within a society that prizes a rigidly aestheticized lifestyle. He lies, cheats, and transforms himself to achieve his goals, and as he does so, the images themselves become more formal and stylized. Through much of the first half, detailing Redmond's humble beginnings as an Irish lad and anonymous soldier, the imagery is painterly, but has an openness and freedom to it.

As the film continues and Redmond reaches the highest levels of his society, the photography becomes more static and controlled. In Barry Lyndon, the indoors, ritualistic life of the high class is portrayed like a luxurious prison. Characters are trapped in beautiful images resembling the tableaux of 18th century paintings. The Lyndon estate becomes as claustrophobic as the Overlook Hotel of Kubrick's next film, The Shining.

The highly controlled camerawork is violated during several violent moments of the story. Redmond starts a fistfight with another soldier during his time in the British army. Kubrick films the fight with a handheld camera, giving it an intimate, visceral quality shockingly different from the cool distance of most of Barry Lyndon. We hardly ever see Redmond happier than during this scene, where he is beating the hell out of another man.

Stanley Kubrick rarely had a kindly view of human nature, and his Barry Lyndon is a savage satire of the classism of 18th century society. As Kubrick views it, there is a brutal animal nature beneath the formality of high society. All the rituals and grandeur of their civilization are just fancy trappings on a "survival of the fittest" Darwinian struggle to be the biggest and the best, to crush any competitors. A perfect society for a sociopath like Redmond Barry to flourish in. Moments like the aforementioned fight scene are just the characters - and the film itself - dropping any pretense and revealing their true nature. Kubrick plays much of this for sardonic, bone-dry comedy, and it is surprisingly hilarious at times.

Yet, to the film's credit - and keeping it from becoming totally misanthropic - Redmond Barry is not entirely unsympathetic despite being a nasty cad. He is also tragically misguided, a young man in search of his place and in want of a father figure. We see him behave gently and honorably around only a few people - including a superior in the army who becomes a mentor, and Barry's young son who he loves dearly - and he loses all of them. For all its frigid cynicism, Barry Lyndon accumulates moments of tremendous power, particularly towards the end. Kubrick may be ruthless in his view of human folly but Barry Lyndon is not entirely heartless.

Badlands (1973)

United States, 1973
Directed by Terrence Malick

 Here's a review I wrote for Badlands a while back:

I am currently enrolled in a film class – for our film screening this week we watched Badlands. I was pleasantly surprised, as Badlands is the debut film of my favorite living director, Terrence Malick. It is the film of his I am least familiar with, as I had only seen it once previously and several years ago – watching it again on a theater-sized screen was a wild experience. I was captivated by it. Yet writing a review of any Terrence Malick movie intimidates me. All of his films are wholly unique and deceptively complex, and their peculiar magic must be experienced and cannot be captured or summarized in words – but I’ll give it a try anyways, and hopefully won’t butcher the attempt horribly. Also: keep in mind, while Malick’s movies are not very traditionally plotted and thus difficult to “spoil”, I might discuss plot and narrative details that could be considered spoilers. So, be warned.

Badlands is loosely based on the real-life murder spree of 20-something Charles Starkweather and his teenage girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate in the late 50′s, or more accurately “inspired by” – the names and many of the events were changed, and the true story inspiration is not even mentioned or acknowledged in the film. Badlands belongs in a tradition of “criminal lovers on the run” movies, such as Bonnie and Clyde which was released to enormous controversy and popularity several years earlier. Despite the similarity of their narratives, the approach of Badlands and Bonnie and Clyde to their subject matter is starkly different. Bonnie and Clyde forthrightly romanticizes the two killers – they are played by gorgeous sex-symbol actors, and their passion is portrayed as pure and beautiful. Bonnie and Clyde perhaps doesn’t condone their murders, but it certainly glamorizes their violent us-against-the-world attitude and turns the infamous duo into tragic, sexy rebels. It is a very exciting and aesthetically amazing movie, but its attitude is amoral. Badlands bluntly refuses to make its young killers at all cool or desirable. They are sad, pathetic, even laughable. Kit is a charismatic but aimless young man who believes himself to look like James Dean, who spouts out advice and witticisms that increasingly reveal themselves to be irrelevant noise used to disguise his lack of purpose, and whose slightly “off” geniality barely conceals his bottled-up rage. Kit does all the killing, yet his girlfriend Holly is, in her own quiet way, just as frightening. She is an utter blank slate, someone who apparently never developed a personality or moral compass, who follows Kit into horrible situations just because he pays attention to her. They fall into their status as serial killers casually, with no visible motives aside from boredom and moral obliviousness. Kit and Holly are not motivated by hate, but by general purposelessness in life. If you have spent any time around restlessly angry kids with violent tendencies, Kit and Holly’s moral vacuousness and lack of awareness of other human beings as actual human beings will ring frighteningly true. The violence in Badlands is presented with similar un-romantic bluntness. The murders are nonchalant, neither exciting nor immediately horrifying, but anticlimactic and clumsy. Violence here is not a grim spectacle or a thrill – it is sad and stupid, an obvious and avoidable waste of life. While the off-kilter approach to violence makes Badlands less thrilling than Bonnie and Clyde and multitudes of violent Hollywood films, it makes for a haunting, unnerving experience. This is a vivid portrait of the banality of evil.

I admire Badlands for its deliberate refusal to sensationalize or glamorize violence, but what elevates it to a classic (and a surprisingly easy-to-watch film considering its disturbing content) is the remarkable artistry. Normally, director’s debut films, even the great ones, have amateurish edges or undeveloped ideas. This is not the case with Badlands, which is brilliantly crafted and hugely creative on every level. Some aesthetic techniques appear here that become staples of all of Malick’s works. One is voiceover. All of Malick’s films have narration, by one or multiple characters, that reveals their sometimes profound, sometimes mundane thoughts and is not always reliable. Badlands is narrated by Holly, in a flat, emotionless tone of voice. Her thoughts are innocent and guileless, replete with mundane recounting of day-to-day events and clumsy attempts at poetry. Holly's narration reads like the average diary of a naive, fanciful young girl, excepting the dreadful events they describe. The disconnect between the form and the content of Holly's narration creates eerie irony. The music is similarly ironic. One repeating theme is a jaunty, peppy classical music piece that would seem more at home over a montage of “this is what I did at summer camp today” than the events of Badlands. Yet the irony in both the voiceover and theme music is not smug or jokey, but a chilling way to contrast the dumb naivete of Holly and Kit and the wretchedness of their actions.

In what would become another recurring feature of Malick's films, Badlands always calls attention to the environment surrounding the characters. After their first murder, Kit and Holly flee into the woods and build a treehouse to live in. This is the most idyllic stretch of the film. They raise chickens, fish, laze around, and dance to rock music on the radio like two regular teens. Terrence Malick’s films often focus on characters discovering or trying to recreate lost, Edenic states of being, in innocence, peace and simplicity, before their own sinfulness snatches it away. While his later, more religious films are more explicit about this idea, the dreamily gorgeous woodland hideout scenes in Badlands are an early example. Later in the film, Kit and Holly aimlessly drive through the vast badlands of Montana to escape police. Their lone figures are constantly contrasted to the vast landscape and skies that overwhelm them – their foolishness seems almost inconsequential in the grand scope of the universe.

I’ve gotten this far into my review without even mentioning Martin Sheen or Sissy Spacek. Neither were famous at the time, and both are outstanding – Sheen in particular, making his character equal parts charming, comically absurd, and scarily amoral. Their very odd but very human performances, along with Malick’s sensitive, thoughtful direction and the beautiful photography, make Badlands a masterpiece. It is definitely not my favorite of Malick’s works – it is less spiritual and emotional than anything else he’s made, and too bleak to watch as often, but is just as accomplished and preternaturally perfect.