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Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2016.18

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<n>These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made <a href="http://www.imdb.com/user/ur1323291/ratings">the list</a> of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other---I rate the film on how well it suited me for the <i>genre</i> and my mood. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid <b>spoilers</b>.</n> <dl dt_class="field"> Crash (1996) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115964/">7/10</a> <div>David Cronenberg produced and directed this adaptation of the J.G. Ballard novel. The initial central couple of the film is James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger as James and Catherine Ballard (I doubt that the name is a coincidence), who work in film. They have an unorthodox sex life. Whatever it takes to turn them on is fair game. We see them cheating on each other so that they can later discuss it to heighten their own passion. On his way home from a late shoot, James weaves out of his lane and into oncoming traffic, shattering his own leg, instantly killing the other driver and injuring the driver's wife Helen Remington, played by Holly Hunter. They seem to have a bond from the beginning, odd as that is (this is Cronenberg, after all). The bond grows, and they almost get into another accident when he's giving her a lift to her job at the airport. In a flash, they discover that they get really turned on by car accidents. They have explosive sex in the car in the parking lot---which leads to James once again reigniting his passion with Catherine later that night. Next we see them at an accident reënactment---of James Dean's fatal car crash. A mysterious figure named Vaughan (Elias Koteas) runs the show. Helen seems to know him well. The cops break it up and they scatter into nearby woods. Well, more like limp: most of the spectators are accident victims with a wealth of scars and damage. They come back to a house where two ladies are waiting: they too have been severely injured. Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette) is in a body cast. The theme is a familiar one for followers of Cronenberg, spelled out by Vaughan: <iq>It is a project that we are all intimately involved in: the reshaping of the human body by modern technology.</iq> This transformative power of car crashes is echoed in the later novel by Chuck Palahniuk, <i><a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=3127">Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey</a></i>, which, in retrospect, seems to draw heavily from this film. Vaughan then chases Catherine with his car, which turns her on to no end. Later that night with James, she takes talking dirty to a whole new level. They continue to meet with the crash crew. Koteas inhabits his role as Vaughan. Ballard moves from Gabrielle to Vaughan. Later Ballard and Vaughan metaphorically continue their coupling with cars on a highway. Vaughan dies in a fiery crash. Helen and Gabrielle sneak onto the impound lot and make love in the wreck. Gender doesn't matter, just the overwhelming power of the crash. The physical damage they all incur and endure---and the pleasure they deriver from it---reminds me of <i>Fight Club</i>. Even Catherine finally gets her own crash when James drives her off the road with Vaughan's car. They make love in the wreck while he whispers that <iq>maybe next time it will work</iq>---suggesting that death is the ultimate orgasm for them. It's an interesting film, in that it commits to the concept, but I've liked other Cronenberg movies better, for example <i>eXistenZ</i> or <i>Dead Ringers</i> of <i>Eastern Promises</i>.</div> To Be Or Not To Be (1942) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035446/">9/10</a> <div>Ernst Lubitsch directed Carol Lombard as Maria Tura, Jack Benny as her husband Joseph and Robert Stack as Lieutenant Stanislaw Sobinski in this farce about a theater troupe in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. The troupe puts on a show taking the piss out of the nazis. They even let Joseph as "Hitler" out on the streets of Warsaw to see if will people believe it's him. The Nazis invade Poland and the war heats up. Sobinski is part of the Polish wing of the RAF. He gets wind of a possible spy in the person of Siletsky (Stanley Ridges) and heads back to Poland on an undercover mission. By purest coincidence, he must involve Maria Tura, with whom he's in love. To prevent Siletsky from delivering his files to the Gestapo, they concoct a plan: to have the theater troupe pretend that they are the Gestapo office instead. It's Tura's (Jack Benny's) time to shine. When Siletsky tells him that he (that is, the Colonel he is playing) is notorious, knows as "Concentration Camp" Ehrhardt, he replies that <iq>Yes, well, we do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping.</iq> He receives the papers about the Polish underground and then learns that there is a duplicate at the hotel. Maria is still at the hotel, but they have no way to reach her. Joseph Tura is in charge of distracting Siletsky, but he lets his guard slip when he hears about the code word between Sobinski and Maria. ("To Be Or Not to Be"---the phrase of Hamlet during which Sobinski would get up to visit Maria in her dressing room.) Joseph puts this all together and spins off into a rage, blowing his cover and confirming Siletsky's suspicions. Siletsky overwhelms Joseph and temporarily escapes in the theater before he is felled by a bullet.<fn> With Siletsky dead, Joseph takes Siletsky's place and returns to the hotel. However, he can't just flit away with the documents---he is expected in another meeting, with the real Colonel Ehrhardt. Tura starts off the conversation with the same line that Siletsky used. Ehrhardt lets him know that the Führer himself is coming to town. Siletsky tells Ehrhardt that, in London, he is known as "Concentration Camp" Ehrhardt. Magical. The dialogue is fast and furious and all the funnier because those delivering don't see it as funny at all. Intrigue piles on intrigue. Siletsky's body is found and Ehrhardt thinks it's sad but starts to make moves on Maria Tura. She hurries away to warn her husband that the Germans know that Siletsky is dead, but he's already called Ehrhardt to tell him that <iq>he'll be a little late</iq> (as Siletsky). The whole troupe tries to stop Joseph from going to the gestapo, but they are too late. Ehrhardt sends him into his living room, where Siletsky's body is slumped in a chair. The Nazis wait outside until he "cracks". He thinks quickly and, with a quick shave and an extra fake beard, makes it look like the <i>body</i> is the imposter. The actors head off to the theater where Hitler is expected to show up, again to infiltrate and try to prevent the names of the underground members from falling into German hands and also to rescue Maria.<fn> She's doing just fine on her own, being exceedingly clever. Meanwhile her husband has lost his mustache---and his disguise---out the window of a moving car. Ehrhardt is stunned to see the Führer himself pick up Maria from the hotel and shoots himself in utter exasperation.<fn> The whole troupe makes it back to England, where Tura is rewarded with playing the role of Hamlet. Sobinski is in the audience. When Tura starts the famous soliloquy, a <i>different</i> soldier stands up and exits the theater and <i>both</i> Tura and Sobinski are left gawping. And scene. My summary might be a bit confusing, but this is truly brilliant writing<fn>, trimmed down to essentials, packing in what would be a three-hour movie today into just 1:40. This film was remade in 1983 with Mel Brooks in the starring role, which would ordinarily be tempting, but I can't see them having improved on this movie. Highly recommended.</div> Inland Empire (2006) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460829/">8/10</a> <div>This is what may very well be David Lynch's last film. He is odd to the very last. The film starts with a blurred, smeary encounter between a prostitute and her john, there is some Russian spoken and then English. She stares teary-eyed into the blank distance afterward. Rabbit-like creatures form a sitcom tableau in the next scene. No idea what's going on here. Now we're at Laura Dern's house as her new, older neighbor pays a visit. The camera is odd here, jittery, semi--fish-eyed, unsettling. When the camera is on the neighbor, objects shift and move in unnatural ways, as do her face, her accent and expression. Dern is a sea of calm, seemingly in another room. The neighbor tells two odd little stories in a very demented manner. She could be demented but she could also be evil. Lynch is so good at this kind of engrossing, long-running oddness. It pulls you in. You try to extract meaning from its slippery, nonsensical surface, so sure that the care and craftsmanship that went into all of the detail must have a purpose. Back to normality: Nikki Grace (Dern, who will also play a completely different person, par for the course for Lynch) gets a role in her comeback movie. Jeremy Irons directs. Their first appearance on a press junket swerves right back into oddness, with a strangely aggressive hostess. They all meet to do some reading, again starting normally and veering off with odd, ghost-like behavior on the set. Irons admits that this isn't the first time they're trying to make this movie: the last time out, both leads were mysteriously killed. They soldier on with the film. From scene to scene, it's nearly impossible to tell whether Dern is Nikki (herself) or Susan (her role); likewise for Justin Theroux as Devon Berk (actor) and Billy Side (role). It's all so fluid. Where it sounds like they're discussing an affair and Nikki seems totally different, the camera pulls back to reveal another camera, this one with Irons the director behind it, filming a scene. So disorienting. Lynch's worlds are just a bit off-kilter. I have no idea what's going to happen next. Harry Dean Stanton as Freddy is Irons's odd partner. He also has odd stories and non-sequitor--like behavior. He borrows money from anyone he can. This strikes no-one as odd for a producer. The disorientation continues, subtly driven by various tricks: strange closeups, takes that linger too long on a face, slightly too-long pauses, a picture in which pieces of the face, hair and background subtly shift (it's hard to describe, I'm not even sure how Lynch did it---but I'm not surprised to see him accompany his move to digital by taking full advantage). Sound shreds and jostles in the same way that the image does. Eyes jitter in their sockets; hair shifts like parts of a wig. Faces blur unexpectedly. It becomes increasingly hard to tell what's being filmed for the film being filmed in this film and what's actually happening in this film. Nikki/Sue starts losing the thread and can't figure out which part she's playing at which times. She loses track of when she is. So does Devon/Billy. It looks like they're having an affair not just in the movie within the movie but also in the movie but Billy doesn't know it's real. Time and space shift jarringly, slopping about like oil in a barrel on the deck of a boat in heaving seas. Nikki herself causes a disturbance she heard at the studio days before. This oddness segues into a dream sequence, then back out again, seamlessly. Lynch toys with maximal disorientation while maintaining narrative coherence of a sort. Her husband seems to play some central warlock-like figure in her consciousness, in her apprehension of the world, both real and imagined. This is a Lynchian horror film and it's creepy, eerie but anchored enough that its realism is what makes it more disturbing. Lynch depicts madness, an acid trip, mental illness. Pieces of other scenes in this movie return, are interleaved out of order with other scenes that remind me stylistically of other Lynch films (the soundscape and black-and-white sections in particular remind me of <i>Eraserhead</i>.) Parts of the film are in Polish. There is a Polish couple where the husband also suspects his wife of cheating. <bq><b>Nikki</b>: A lot of guys change. Well, they don't change, they reveal. In time, they reveal who they really are.</bq> At this point, we are far down the rabbit hole. Nikki's life as an actress is no longer evident, she's in a back-alley office talking to a silent interlocutor. Lynch has made a film that shows what it would be like to live in the fifth dimension---outside of time and space---much more eloquently than Christopher Nolan in <i>Interstellar</i>. Dimensions and timelines overlap, with Nikki seeing herself, film tearing, sparking noises tearing from the speakers. This disconnection from experience, from a flow of time, from contiguous space, from a single self, from any plot or thread of reality, from any sense of familiarity. There is just a notion of a story, of kernels of thought that float in a multi-dimensional soup, a miasma utterly incomprehensible to the human sensorium, appearing as noise and static and utterly shattered. This is madness. She staggers the halls of memory, reeling from convulsing and softening walls of reality while the floor buckles beneath her and she shifts again, with no relief, no shoal in sight, just nonsensical and seemingly utterly unrelated symbols heaping up faster than they can be apprehended. You give up and let it wash over you. Lynch forces you to stop sorting and organizing his ideas into a coherent and familiar pattern and just ride his hallucinatory wave. The film returns to actors and locations, but with different roles (again, typical for Lynch). There are stories within stories within stories. This is a film about the making of a film based on a cursed film where the heroine gets lost in her own mind and tells stories about the making of the film and other moments in her life. It's <i>Inception</i>-like in its onion skins. Stanislaw Lem (also Polish, probably not a coincidence) and Philip K. Dick wrote very much like this. It's confusing enough in print; in video, it takes a talent like Lynch to even come close to pulling it off. This movie is long, at nearly three hours. It documents, it embodies the swirling of a frantic mind. When you're inside your head without vocalizing, you think much faster, flitting from one thing to the next in fractions of a second. What takes seconds to think takes minutes or hours to explain. Is this amount of madness normal? Do you never have wild, inchoate, poorly chained thoughts you'd rather not have thought? That happen so quickly that you can't stop them? Lynch writes it all down. There is no recognizable plot, just moments, disconnected melodrama. What's up with the giant, plush rabbit family? Where are they? In a dollhouse? On a sitcom? Is Nikki cursed by the script? Or her dark past? Or her evil-seeming husband? Has she lost a child? It's almost like Lynch filmed a bunch of scenes, then stitched them together and lets the viewer come up with a story. He trusts that we will find meaning for ourselves. He is, largely, right. That's how our minds work. Laura Dern is great. Terry Crews, William H. Macy, Mary Steenbergen have cameos. Even in the credits, Lynch is almost parodying himself, but doing it so well, a giant ensemble in a ballroom with a monkey, a lumberjack, a one-legged woman, two dancing troupes and with a woman lip-syncing to Nina Simone's <i>Sinner Man</i>---but it all works, his odd camera framing, shifting angles, focus play, strobes, a master at work, at play. From <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Empire_(film)">Wikipedia</a>: <bq>Lynch sometimes offers a clue in the form of a quotation from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: <iq>We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe.</iq></bq> This is a difficult but rewarding movie. It could have been shorter. I don't know to whom I would recommend it. Lynch isn't for everyone. If you have the patience, it's a tremendous mindfuck movie, unlike anything else I've seen, interesting and enjoyable for long stretches. </div> </dl> <hr> <ft>This scene, with roving camera and spotlights, reminded me strongly of the finale of <i>Inglourious Basterds</i>. Knowing Tarentino, this is not a coincidence.</ft> <ft>This scene is <i>also</i> very close to the one in <i>Inglourious Basterds</i>50 years later.</ft> <ft>There is a Sergeant Schulz, on whom Ehrhardt blames all of his ills. At the end of one scene, Ehrhardt bellows "Schulz!" in the exact manner that Colonel Klink would in <i>Hogan's Heroes</i>, over 20 years later. It's hard to believe that that's a coincidence.</ft> <ft>And quite brave, too, when you note the year that the movie was released. It was 1942. The war was still very hot and this film was making a roaring joke out of it.</ft>