#28 - Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in)

Let the Right One In is the story of Oskar, a young misfit living in a town in Sweden who is driven by bullying to thoughts of revenge.  Oskar finally finds meaning in his life when he is befriended by Eli, a young girl who also happens to be the vampire whose lust for blood is behind the town's recent spate of bizarre murders.  Together, the two of them try to navigate a confusing and lonely world ravaged by the forces of love and death.

Let the Right One In is a quietly intense film, with a narrow enough scope to allow us to go deep into its complex issues.  It is shot largely in darkness, with few bright colors, echoing the bleak solitude of its characters and setting.  And yet every frame is gorgeous and perfectly aligned - it is the kind of film that truly justifies the existence of cameras.  While violent, it is never gory or gratuitous; while suspenseful, it does not aim to be frightening.  Its supernatural elements belie the film's true center, which is the connection forged between two of the people that the rest of the world forgot.

#27: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

In the height of the Cold War, tensions run high and eventually something snaps.  Deeply unstable General Jack D. Ripper gives the order to the US Air Force to drop the hydrogen bomb on Russian targets, setting off a frenzied chain of events as both the United States and the USSR realize the horror of their impending doom through mutually assured destruction.  Meanwhile, the intrepid crew of one B-52 aircraft, under the command of Major T.J. "King" Kong, head toward their target, determined to serve their country despite any setbacks.

Director Stanley Kubrick originally planned to create a serious, sober adaptation of the Cold War thriller novel Red Alert, but while putting together plans to make the film began to see through to the absurdity inherent in the nuclear scare, and instead created the bizarre, off-the-wall satire that is Dr. Strangelove.  Kubrick was living in England at the time, and the influence of British comedy shows through clearly, albeit dissolved somewhat in American cultural themes.  Dr. Strangelove - except for "King" Kong's perfect, climactic exit near the end of the film - is a movie without punchlines, just an ever-creeping horror that continually builds even as the credits roll.

Oh, and it's funny, too.  The acting (by Peter Sellers in three roles including the titular mad scientist, Slim Pickens as Major Kong the Texan, George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson, and a myriad of other skilled actors playing characters with punnish names) is spot-on and just barely over-the-top, not ridiculous enough to go flat.  The script's inside jokes and one-liners are perfectly timed.  And somehow in showing the extent of the madness that results from Armageddon, Kubrick brings the end of the world down to a level where it can be ridiculed.

I imagine that as a member of Gen Y, and someone who hasn't watched a great deal of war movies, to some extent the jokes went over my head.  Dr. Strangelove does still work today as a comedy but only when observed from a historical context; while we still see this trigger-happy paranoia in the post-9/11 world, schoolchildren are no longer watching 'duck and cover' videos, Europe is no longer a foreign wilderness, and most people alive today don't remember World War II.  Yet Kubrick is an artist - and even at those moments when the tension goes slack (because we've all come out on the other end of the Cold War) this film can be enjoyed for the beauty of its shots, the use of light and shadow, and the way Kubrick and his actors work together to portray the darkest depths of the human psyche.

...No, really, this is a comedy, I promise!

#26: My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro)

In mid-20th-century Japan, young sisters Satsuki and Mei Kusakabe, along with their professor father, move into a new house in the country near the hospital where their mother is recovering from a long-term illness.  The house has been uninhabited for years, and as Satsuki and Mei explore their new home and the surrounding forest and fields they discover that the area is inhabited by several woodland spirits.  My Neighbor Totoro follows the two girls as they settle in to their rural home and befriend the spirits of the forest.

My Neighbor Totoro was one of Hayao Miyazaki's first productions for Studio Ghibli, the start of a long and successful career in creating gorgeous animated films that explore the mythology of Japan.  Totoro is the epitome of this genre.  Its subtle and quiet form of storytelling lets the tale and its characters unfold slowly in front of our eyes, at times delving very deep into its emotional center and at other times utterly light and carefree.  The whimsical animation is a trip back to childhood, when the line between reality and imagination is arbitrary and unimportant, and the simplest things in the world are full of wonder and awe.

With that said, it does take a while to unfold, and will require patience on the part of adult viewers for about forty minutes of childlike antics before the real magic starts to happen.  It is definitely a story with a slow fuse, if you are willing to accept this.  My only real complaint is related to the English dub, which as far as these things go is almost entirely excellent.  It rejects the general trend of early anime dubs to stamp out all references to Japanese culture, preserving everything (names, locations, orthography, superstitions) except a couple instances of Buddhist prayer and referring to what I could easily see was mochi as 'cake'.  However the title and ending themes are abysmal - I cringed.  Otherwise this is yet another wonderful work of art from Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.

#25 - The Soloist

LA Times columnist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey, Jr.) is looking for a new story to write when he chances upon a surprisingly talented street musician, Nathaniel Ayers, Jr. (Jamie Foxx), and discovers that Ayers is a brilliant multi-instrumentalist whose schizophrenia eventually caused him to drop out of Julliard and abandon a potential career to live on the streets.  What begins as a story for the paper soon leads to a close and unlikely friendship between the two men that changes the lives of both.

Sigh.  Here's another film about a privileged white* person's deep and important emotional journey as he plays the father figure and helps out all the poor homeless people.  The film is based on the real Lopez's book about this relationship, with all the egotism that one might expect from someone who would use the life stories of the less fortunate to propel himself to fame.  The Soloist is frequently unbelievable and almost entirely cringeworthy (and the 'comic relief' provided by scatological humor doesn't help).  It would have still irked me a little with its tendency to put Ayers and the other street people of Los Angeles in the position of the other and the naive child, but a film about Lopez coming down from his pedestal a little and realizing that offering endless handouts to his favorite homeless person for being so, I don't know, noble or whatever, is nothing short of insulting might have been a bit more forgivable.  Unfortunately this isn't it, and Lopez walks away a hero.

At least The Soloist does know what it has going for it.  For one thing, it is gorgeously filmed, with evocative use of light and shadow, echoing the contrast between the worlds of Lopez and Ayers.  For another, Downey manages to find the heart of the role of Lopez, and if nothing else this is an interesting character study of someone who tries to change the world in order to escape from his own personal problems.  Then when Lopez and Ayers attend a rehearsal of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the scenery fades to a display of color and light and the music takes center stage.  Maybe it should have from the start.  Maybe this should have told the story of a gifted, yet troubled man trying to keep his dignity and express himself through music**.  But again.  Not this film.

*Wikipedia tells me that Lopez is "the son of Spanish and Italian immigrants", but in the film, the surname is the only indication of this.
**Which would make this an oddly themed week of movie-watching for yours truly.

#24 - The Devil and Daniel Johnston

The Devil and Daniel Johnston tells the story of the titular Daniel Johnston - music's eternal outsider - as he ascends to (niche) fame and descends into a spiral of mania, Christian fanaticism, and mental breakdowns, constantly producing reams of drawings and stacks of cassette tapes of music.  Johnston himself, though he is still alive and (relatively) well, is elusive and at times opaque, and so the story is told through the words of family and friends, over the soundtrack of his musical recordings, which are simple and yet haunting.

Though the film gets off to a rocky start by describing Johnston's fairly unremarkable childhood, the story quickly picks up to the point where it would be impossible to create something uninteresting about this man.  Johnston - and his illness - is fairly presented: he seems at times to be the mythical figure, the childlike mad genius in his world of delusions, unreachable and prone to outbursts, but always cutting through the mystique is Johnston's sardonic self-awareness.  There is a great story here, and the production team were successful in finding the right people to tell it and to bring it out, and in showing us, gently, the strange and at times wonderful contents of Johnston's teeming mind.

And yet I wonder - if this story is so perfectly cinematic, why didn't anyone think to make cinema out of it?  When so many scenes, excellently articulated, would be fantastic to see acted out by a talented cast, this documentary's choice of sort of 'reenactments' (where we inhabit a camera as it supposedly follows Johnston's footsteps into the settings of the film's events) not only fall flat but seem almost disrespectful to Johnston's life in their sensationalism.  But if the team weren't going to find actors to actually bring these scenes to life, it should have remained as it was without the reenactment scenes: a collection of interviews (and tape recordings and archival footage) that present reality as it actually was, not as a lurid tabloid fantasy.  And at the times when The Devil and Daniel Johnston sticks to reality, it is solid and painfully, gorgeously true.

#23: Blade Runner

Important note for those who are keeping score: we watched the Final Cut edition.  (And based on what I hear about the other editions, I am very glad we did.)

In the metropolitan labyrinth of 2019 Los Angeles, 'blade runner' Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) hunts down genetically-engineered humanoids - 'replicants' who have broken free from off-world labor colonies and run loose in the streets where their supreme intelligence and physical abilities make them highly dangerous to the human race they rebel against.  Deckard's mission: to recognize them and take them down.  And yet, that pervasive ethical dilemma...

Director Ridley Scott achieves a sort of nirvana for the top elite here.  In an almost MacGuyver-esque turn, he takes a very tired and overdone concept with heavy-hanging morals, a clumsily unsubtle script, and a cast who can't seem to muster up the energy to care about their characters...and not only manages to spin them into a tapestry of gorgeous-and-painful-and-painfully-gorgeous images and almost impenetrable layers of meaning, but also to use them to his advantage in setting the film's dystopian tone.  Blade Runner plays out like a dream, with disorienting cuts and surreal, kaleidoscopic imagery.

We couldn't stop talking about it afterward.  In this cut particularly, Scott leaves several important questions left hanging.  The answers are all buried somewhere in the film, but there are more answers than there are questions.  A narrative that appears to be straightforward can be reanalyzed and restructured to give each scene new context and meaning.  And at the same time, the expansive and dizzying futuristic cityscapes and high-octane action scenes are also a visual delight, so I can turn my inner academic off and yes, still enjoy the ride.

#22 - Kung Pow!: Enter the Fist

Steve Oedekerk's Kung Pow! is something of an experimental comedy.  The premise: a parody of kung fu action movies.  The gimmick: splicing together shots from Hong Kong martial arts film Tiger and Crane Fist with original footage, sometimes using greenscreen to bridge the gap.  The story: fairly simple - a young man, Chosen One, seeks to avenge the murder of his parents by members of the mysterious Evil Council in hand-to-hand combat.

My friends and I put on this movie because we had remembered it being uproariously funny.  We are fairly sure now that the reason we remembered it that way is because the last time we saw it, we were twelve.  A fairly intriguing concept crumbles in Oedekerk's hands.  The humor consists of a series of sophomoric gross-out gags, and even the few shining moments in this rotten script are dragged out until they no longer induce laughter.  This is the pitfall of allowing one individual to take on the roles of writer, director, and lead actor.  (Unless you're Tommy Wiseau and the result is unintentionally funny.)

Moreover, Oedekerk's treatment of the Tiger and Crane Fist footage lacks true heart, the ingredient necessary to bring a parody beyond mocking and into the realm of enjoyable entertainment.  In order to make this concept work, we need to understand why it is that kung fu films, in all their over-the-top splendor, are nonetheless captivating.  Had it been the center of gravity of the film, we could have then gotten the chance to laugh at its overindulgence and melodrama while simultaneously enjoying its exuberance.  Choosing instead to deface the footage with scatological humor and slapstick renders it irrelevant: this would have been the same film had Oedekerk used 100% original footage, and it would have been similarly dull.