Once, a foolish man thought “hey I’ll just put my notes about films into short chunks and update them perdiodically, then I’ll have my memory log of films much more up to date as I watch them” and well yes let’s see how that works out. “Not very well” is the answer.
The Boxtrolls
Before talking about the film itself, something that hit me very forcefully while watching this is that I wish that Laika, the studio behind it, were funded to make a series of Discworld films. The city that they’ve built for this film, and the characters in it, just make me think that they’d get Ankh-Morepork in a way that all too many of the attempts to adapt it have failed to.
Anyway, Boxtrolls itself is a very fun film; while the basic plot - bad guy seeks power based off of misrepresenting and persecuting a minority for his own benefit, bolstered by child abuse panic - is both annoyingly relevant and not particularly new, it’s well done, well-acted, and the stop-motion animation is gorgeous. Very much enjoyed it.
Annihilation
Visually lovely, but otherwise solid sci-fi flick that didn’t really stick with me.
Moonrise Kingdom
After I watched this, I told a friend that it was the first Wes Anderson film that I’d seen; afterward I found that I was quite wrong, because he was also responsible for a stop-motion Fantastic Mr Fox released earlier in the century. That said, it’s the first of what most people would think of when you say “a Wes Anderson film.”
It was a good introduction to Anderson, his mannerisms, his visual style. I enjoyed the oddball characters, the artifical-in-the-best-way dialogue, and the straight-on shooting of the film. A pleasant alternative to realism.
Sisters with Transistors
An absolutely fascinating history of key women who were pioneers in electronic music, beginning with Clara Rockmore who was an early adopter, designer, and promoter of the theremin, drawing on her background as a classical musician to promote this un-traditional instrment as “real music”. From there, the film takes us through to the mid-eighties, in each era - the war years, the post-war period, the waves of the sixties, seventies, and eighties - to give us examples of the technical and musical innovations that notable women in each era developed and drove.
I found Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire especially interesting, with both of them manipulating raw tape and film in interesting ways - even drawing on rolls of film and feeding them through optical scanners for a more tactile experience of transcribing and generating music. Both came out of different eras of the BBC, and built up amazing analogue machinery for music.
But the whole film is compelling, dipping into the tools, the social context, and the music itself in each era, and it’s laden with interviews with the women themselves. A well-done documentary, and one you should see if you have any interest in the development of music in the 20th century.
In Bruges
This is one of those films which had spectacularly misleading advertising when it was released; the original trailers left many audience members with the impression that they would be seeing a comedy and those people would be unpleasantly surprised because a comedy it most definitely not.
So what is it? Well, moments of black comedy aside, it is a meditation on loyalty, friendship, and the corrosive effects of violence on the people who perpetuate it.
Pig
Nic Cage films are a gamble; Cage is a talented and committed actor, but how he feels like expressing that in any given film can leave you feeling like you’ve seen anything from a work of genius to scenary chewing catastrophe.
Pig stands out for a couple of reasons; the first is that it’s Nic Cage delivering a restrained, emtional, even gentle performance. There’s his intensity, but it’s relentlessly controlled. That’s a huge part of the character he’s playing, but it underscores how good an actor he is. If you’re looking for Cage delivering memeable content, you’re shit out of luck. If you’re looking for Cage showing how he can disappear into a different character to the ones that he’s best known for - well, here it is.
The second is that it entirely fakes out the audience; I don’t want to go into too much detail here, because part of the joy of the film is, I think, being lead away from the what you look like you’re getting in the first act, to what you are delivered in the second and third. The set-up is for a John Wick knock-off, but you don’t get swagging action. At all. Instead you have a film which is far more focused on love, and loss, and the importance of finding and doing the things that you cae about. Even that may be saying too much.
This is a wonderfully thoughtful and interesting film.
Lamb
Lamb is a gloriously weird Icelandic piece which makes full use of an isolated Icelandic farm to play out its drama: a farming couple, having lost their child and unable to have more, find that one of their sheep has a lamb which is a hybrid of human and animal parts. Seizing it, the couple raise her as their daughter; with a lamb’s head, she remains mute, but plays and interacts like a baby and then a child. Noomi Rapace remains undefeated in the “actresses who love fucked-up shit”.