Yet another in my orgy of movie postings, I saw Kill Bill 2 last night. Very good. A somewhat different feel from Vol. 1: less campy, less bloody (though still, pretty damn bloody), more intense. Excellent cinematography. QT is the ultimate cult-film aficionado who was granted three wishes by a genie, and he has made the most of those wishes. He even appears to be using different kids of film stock to evoke different moods (or digital post-processing to create the same effects): black and white segments, which are memorable for the brilliantly lit tight shots of Uma Thurman and David Carradine showing the geological surface of his face and the subtler imperfections on hers; muddy-colored segments located in Barstow CA, that made me wonder whether he had unearthed some 1970s-era film stock, and super-grainy blown-out footage from Pai Mei’s temple, evoking cheap Hong Kong action flicks.

Some movies leave you with the sense that some establishing scenes, which would have helped make sense of the plot, were left on the cutting-room floor. Not with QT. This movie is all about how we got to where we are. So before The Bride can punch her way out of a coffin, we break to a flashback, a story that would stand on its own, to explain how she came to be able to do this. And this is tightly linked to another flashback story that answers another niggling question.

It was interesting to be made aware, with those pitiless close shots, of the tiny wrinkles now appearing on Uma Thurman’s face. Even teenage celebrities are getting obligatory plastic surgery these days, and some women a generation older than Thurman can no longer frown from all the botox paralyzing their faces. And it was interesting to consider that this increasingly inhuman standard of beauty must be influencing the way movies are made: a lot of actresses probably would refuse to put their features under the audience’s loupe, or would insist that the laugh lines be photoshopped away. Some actresses probably couldn’t be cast for a role like this at all, because they are physically incapable of the facial gestures required. It seems ridiculous to say that Thurman deserves respect for putting herself on display in this way, but the way things are headed, perhaps she does.

Saw The Seagull’s Laugh a little while ago. Noteworthy if for no other reason than being the first Icelandic movie I’ve ever seen, it’s interesting as a weird little slice into life in a postwar Icelandic village, and the study of a mythologically witchlike character (appropriately named Freyja) and her machinations. In fact, I suspect there are a lot of mythological references that I’m just not catching (there’s something about Freyja’s red hair pinned to the wall that seems especially freighted with symbolism).

Robot Stories was a special AFS showing at the Arbor, and I’m glad I caught it. A tetralogy of related shorts that dealt with serious science-fiction questions, questions of the edges of what is humanity. These are rarely addressed in SF movies–in AI the last time I saw, though perhaps less successfully because of the Spielbergian cruft.

The second of the four in this film was out of place and the weakest of the lot; the others looked at how we relate to machines, and at what point machines become people. Or people become machines. And a host of related questions, many of which have been taken up many times in SF literature, but which a good movie shows in a new perspective. If your consciousness is downloaded to a computer shortly before you die–and continues to be aware, present, and involved in the world–are you dead? And if you had a spouse, are the two of you still married? And if you are, is that a good thing? This movie evoked these questions in me, in some cases with a single silent shot.

Gwen picked out Of Freaks and Men to rent the other day. I usually don’t blog renters, but this is worth a mention.

It’s a strange movie, occupying a quiet space somewhere between David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch–there was a lot about this movie that reminded me of Dead Man: the lush black-and-white cinematography, the understated violence, the lumbering pace, and Putilov’s suit. Except this is Russian. A lot of class-struggle satire that would probably be more acutely relevant to someone who had lived through communism.

Gwen surprised me by being as interested in seeing Hellboy as I was, so we made yesterday a double-feature day.

It was fun–visually interesting, with entertaining and baroque villains (I especially liked the wind-up Nazi). Ron Perlman is a good actor with a habit of taking on roles in movies that otherwise probably couldn’t attract his level of talent, and this movie is the better for it.

As part of her day of hookey, Gwen and I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Charlie Kaufman has really outdone himself, managing to combine PKD-style mindfucks with a really poignant story.

One exchange was especially memorable, and relevant beyond the scope of the movie

Clementine: This is it, Joel. It’s going to be gone soon.
Joel: I know.
Clementine: What do we do?
Joel: Enjoy it.

The whole movie is wonderful.

Another Bernado Bertolucci movie that tries to document a pivotal moment in history and tell a story of psychosexual drama, I just don’t quite get the Dreamers. The historical setting is Paris in 1968, during student uprisings, and the characters are an American exchange student who hooks up with a brother-sister who seem joined at the hip.

Perhaps it’s because I don’t know enough about Paris in 1968 that the historical angle leaves me cold–a bunch of students marching in the streets and venerating Mao, clashes with police, etc–it’s not clear what they really thought they would achieve, if anything, or if they were just being rebellious and blowing off steam. The movie sort of muddles along for the first three quarters, occasionally punctuated by significant moments, and in the last quarter has several momentous but completely ambiguous moments that leave the audience wondering not only what is happening but why the characters did what they did. The cinematography is quite good, but the content could be condensed down to less than an hour.

Saw the Triplets of Belleville along with Destino at the Dobie.

Destino is an animated short that finishes off an unfinished collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali; it has all the melting clocks and visual imagination you’d expect from a duo like that. Here in town, it’s only playing at the Dobie, but it’s worth it. Apparently the original project didn’t get beyond conceptual sketches–what we saw was all computer-generated.

The Triplets of Belleville is another animated movie, and it’s wonderful. It has no dialogue, very much like Mr Hulot’s Holiday, and in fact, it made a couple of explicit references to that. The characters are (pardon the pun) two-dimensional, but there’s so much visual and auditory inventiveness I just didn’t care. The movie rewards careful viewing, and demands a pretty good visual vocabulary to get much out of it. It also, I have to point out, was made by someone who loves bikes and bike racing, and he gets right a lot of little details that only another bike person would notice.

I’m somewhat amazed at myself for having sat through this movie twice now, but last night I saw Alamo’s foleyvision production of Turkish Star Wars (op cit). The key difference this time being the English voiceovers. “Now I’ll know what that movie was actually about” I thought when I bought my ticket.

Two hours later, I was sadder, poorer, but wiser. The movie is so profoundly nonsensical that it defies comprehension in any language. This is not to criticize the translation, and I must say, the entire audience–a packed house–cheered when the translator’s name scrolled up in the Alamo’s homemade credits, which made my heart swell.

The foleyvision crew did a fine job, and took well-earned poetic license on occasion. Kudos.

Yesterday, Gwen and I saw Aileen, a documentary about the eponymous woman immortalized in Monster (which I also want to see).

It is unfortunate that this story is in the hands of Nick Broomfield, the documentarist. He’s just not very good at his job. He’s clearly wrapped up in his subject, he asks leading questions and occasionally, he practically answers his own questions for the interviewee. He fails to follow up on potentially interesting points that his subjects bring up. He has too much face-time and is too much a part of the story. To some extent, this is inevitable: he made a previous documentary about Aileen Wournos, which was introduced as evidence at a hearing shown in this film, and he was deposed as a witness in it as well. Setting that aside, though, he’s still too much in the movie. Though he clearly takes a dim view of other people who exploited Wournos’ story for money (a group that included several cops who were on her case), he’s in the same boat, and we see him onscreen paying $25,000 to her onetime lawyer for the right to film her. The camera work is also shoddy (not that the camera is necessarily his hands).

But Wournos herself is the real story, and she’s plenty interesting to make the movie worth seeing. Like some other documentaries that focus on crimes, we are left unsure of what really happened. Wournos, a hooker, killed seven men in the space of one year. The first had a history of sex crimes, and her initial defense was that he had brutalized her, so she was acting in self-defense. By the time this film was being made, she had been sentenced to death, and had publicly recanted her earlier story, saying she killed all of them for the money and no other reason. When she thought she was off-camera, however, she whispered that it was her original story that was true–that each of the men she killed had brutalized her–and she just recanted to get her execution over with. She couldn’t stand being in prison anymore, and she knew she’d never get out.

Wournos was also clearly mad. She said the prison was using “sonic pressure” on her brain. That the police knew about her after her first killing, but that they let her continue to kill six more men to create a more sensational case, and that the subsequent killings were really, somehow, the fault of the cops. Despite this, she passed a psych evaluation to determine her competence a few days before her execution. The evaluation lasted all of 15 minutes. Certainly, as long as the evaluation was carefully constructed of questions like “do you know what day it is?” (ie, the kinds of questions they ask to determine whether you’ve suffered recent brain trauma) she would pass.

We were unsure what really happened, but we speculated anyhow. Wournos had a shockingly awful upbringing–her mother running away at 6 months, losing her virginity at 9, having a child at the age of 13 (probably by a pederast), her father dying, her grandfather throwing her out of the house, and her living in the Michigan woods until she hitchhiked down to Florida at 16. It is not hard to imagine this putting a person in a fragile state of sanity. And it is not hard to believe that she really was brutalized by the first man she killed. Perhaps that’s what pushed her over the edge.

After this, we needed something to clear our heads out, so we rented The Magic Christian, the sixties anti-war/anti-capitalism/anti-authority semi-linear hippy freakout starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr.