A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) - I'm bad. I've done bad things.

It's the fifth Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme eight, part two - a foreign horror film!

(Chosen by Jackie!)

(Well alright, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is an American production directed by a British-born Iranian-American, featuring Iranian-American actors, with dialogue in Farsi delivered in California locations.  It's not any more foreign in the traditional sense than would be any other film by a US citizen embracing their ancestry with others of a similar background.  Mistakes made, we press on regardless.)

In A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, director Ana Lily Amirpour has crafted the ideal scene kid movie.  Though this is easily construed as a dismissive insult, I mean it as the most earnest compliment I can pay her film.  After all, we've a picture whose centerpiece revolves around two characters dressed in all black, both evoking vampiric motifs in their own way, one gently moving towards the other across an expansive widescreen with slowed-down disco ball lights rotating across the wall as the other turns into his embrace, contemplates his neck, and sinks into his arms to listen to his heartbeat instead.  All in beautiful black-and-white, all scored to "Death" by White Lies, grinding out across the screen over five whole minutes.  There's a weird techno-scored seduction scene that climaxes with a scummy drug-dealer getting his finger chomped off and throat ripped open, a cross-dresser dancing with a balloon, a quiet, awkward ear-piercing scene set against the backdrop of an empty trainyard, and, most importantly, a skateboarding vampire dressed in a black chador and striped long-sleeve.  This is a film purpose made to appeal to teens and college students who fuck with Bauhaus and Have a Nice Life and black out their windows to better appreciate the effects of poorly-strung atmospheric lighting on the posters of bands who'll never come to their town but inspire gobs of gif-based appreciation posts and self-insert fanfiction on tumblr dot gov in the year of our lord two-thousand and fourteen.  I'm deeply envious towards anyone who saw this right when it came out and felt the full sledgehammer-to-the-chest impact of finally seeing all their predilections thrown onscreen in a glorious act of stylistic exercise - those folks got exactly what they always wanted in their scant two-decades on this dying Earth.  All power to 'em, no sarcasm meant whatsoever.

The film lives and dies (and all states between) on how much appeal you can find in a slow-moving mood piece with minimal concessions to narrative.  To my mind, it takes the visual celebration pretty damned far, producing numerous memorable moments with little more than its two main characters stood before simple small-town backdrops and allowed to awkwardly interact as Farsi tunes play on the soundtrack.  There IS some character work going down, with Arash struggling under the pressure of his father's heroin addiction and eventually dealing himself when their dealer is sucked dry, while the nameless girl displays a streak for enacting justice and intimidation on the people of Bad City, pines for an immaterial long-lost something, and draws closer and closer to Arash through the force of what I (stealing from Connie) can only describe as his big dumbass energy.  Act delineations are primarily marked by the girl making a kill that impacts Arash's life in some manner, and their relationship takes a strange turn when she gives him what he always thought he wanted, without the film's taking time to explore what this will mean for them in the future.  Beyond these elements, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is far, far more about the sublimity of the girl rolling down an empty suburban street with her chador billowing in the wind, or Arash, blasted out of his mind on ecstasy and dressed in a Dracula cape, hobbling to a sitting position while the girl tries to steady him and bring him back to her place.  Time beyond these two is mostly dedicated to the small supporting cast, who exist to either more clearly define aspects of the girl's mysterious personality through bracing encounters, or do wrong so she can punctuate the moment with a swift bite to the neck, again through scenes better defined by their stark imagery than writing or acting.

Normally, I'm in favor beyond belief of works that presume the eyeline's slow journey from exposed neck to nestled beating heart are interesting in and of themselves, and turn out absolutely correct.  Here, however, I think Amirpour's decision to leave a skeleton narrative at the center results in... not exactly a poorer film, but rather one I can't help see as fallen short of its potential.  If it were exclusively a mood piece, following the camera's bliss and leaving interpretation of Arash and the girl's lives entirely to the audience, I'd find the film far more intriguing in a good way.  As filmed, there exist components like the girl savagely drinking from an unconscious homeless man, which indicates the presence of a basal need to feed beyond her active, motivated choice in targets, or the unmistakable contrast in how Saeed the dealer seductively dances towards the girl before his death and Arash's careful move to embrace her later on, which raises the question of, "Why him, exactly?" when coupled with the first point.  We see the girl express kinship with Atti the prostitute along the dimension of lost dreams and forgotten remembrances, and something in Sheila Vand's performance communicates a bottomless sadness, but there are no guideposts, no indications Amirpour means us to travel these lines of thought with intent or direction.  There's a potentially fascinating study about why Arash is the one to bring the girl beyond her situation, or how the girl's interactions with Arash liberate him whilst also crippling what seemed a potential future on his own two feet, or else some treatise on her vampiric nature reflecting or rejecting views of women in Iranian society, whether you choose to construe it as parasitic or liberating, and what that might mean for her as a person.

The film, essentially, has its toes dipped into the pool of conventional narrative just deep enough to intrigue me, and a few moments where it lowers a whole foot in and reveals great potential for these gorgeous images to become so much more in the ripples it creates; yet its dedication to being as much a visually-driven, story-free experience as possible means it never takes the full plunge and explores that which it teases to the fullest.  Perhaps I'm being a touch stupid here, asking a deliberately ambiguous film to flesh out what it only means to tease, to elaborate where silence is the intent.  In my defense, my own aesthetic concerns almost always lie with purity of form: while a work may eschew storytelling conventions and be for the sake of some ideal towards beauty or horror or coolness, if it chooses to keep a minimal story and even develop this story to some degree, I'm going to want either the story's removal or a greater cohesion between idea and image.  Blending the two often leads to feeling a weaker story, and images that would hit more potently entirely on their own or in active cooperation with an idea.  Applied here, I understand Amirpour's intent, I really do, but she has tantalized me with the possibility of seeing this picture play out with her thoughts and feelings guiding and interacting with my own, giving me insight into the specifics she's teased.  To not get these is consistent with her aims as director, and yet I cannot shake the notion of her film improving if I knew her perspective on some of these more interesting ideas beyond, "It's up to you."

That which is ambiguous about A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night would entice me to think on it as a vagary all the more if it were purely sound and vision instead of neglected narrative, basically.  Flipwise, sacrificing some of the ambiguity for specificity would work wonders in my assessment.  Again, I'm probably being stupid and unappreciative here, but I like what I like for the reasons I like it, and find it hard to stop thinking this film better if aesthetically pushed further one way or the other.  Those scenes that work still work like all hell regardless of my artistic preferences towards storytelling - I've been replaying the "Death" scene in my head all day, it's so powerful a moment.  Watch beyond the form-based hang-ups of someone who thinks Danger! Diabolik the ideal comic book movie, and you've nevertheless a splendent post-punk vampiric impression upon the brain, something unique and dark and beautiful, well-worth a watch and however many hours of debate it inspires, internal and external alike.  Shred on, you funky little vampire you.

3.5/5

Ring (1998) - You better get some rest; I have a deadline.

It's the fifth Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme eight, part one - a foreign horror film!

(Chosen by me!)

I think it only fair to begin by noting how a proper discussion of Ring inevitably clashes against spoilers, spoilers everyone knows about though they be.  Ever since Hideo Nakata's adaptation of Kōji Suzuki's 1991 horror novel literalized the "frightened to death" aspect of the Ring Virus by transforming the moment of death from a simple hallucination-induced heart attack to vengeful ghost Sadako crawling from the well that served as her grave and out the victim's television to enact an abstracted killing blow, a pale, stringy-haired girl in white has been the franchise's defining image. Appropriately so, given it's an incredibly striking sight no matter the execution, an extension of the book's technology-as-conduit-for-supernatural-curse concept in a way friendly to continuous reinvention across the American remakes and numerous sequels in both Japan and the US during a time of rapid technological evolution, in a manner the original restriction to video tapes and phone calls couldn't hope to make interesting beyond changing the cursed tape's medium.  Thanks to Nakata's not-quite original and Gore Verbinski's The Ring making such an enormous splash in their respective markets, Sadako crawling from YOUR TV has become fodder for nightmares and jokes aplenty in the last twenty years.  You talk about Ring, you talk about the TV thing.

As such, talking about Ring by focusing on the film's bulk concerns across its runtime makes the lack of televised emergence conspicuous by its absence.  The journey undertaken by journalist and single mother Reiko Asakawa and her videographer ex-husband Ryūji Takayama across the second and third acts involves a great deal of level-headed investigative work into the origins of the cursed tape, with a mind towards breaking the curse by laying the ghost to rest.  There's absolutely no paranormal activity beyond the tape's evil aura until an hour's way in, which presents as psychic visions rather than hauntings, and Sadako's signature manifestation doesn't take place until the final ten minutes as a twist about how the protagonists were dead wrong as to her nature.  If I were to play coy with this and try to preserve the twist for everyone, it wouldn't work, because you all know what made Sadako iconic, and you'd figure out all my talk about plain Jane research and agonizing over retrieving the body of a wrongfully murdered woman was all mere prelude to a twist, simply by way of my not mentioning someone coming out a TV screen.  So we're just gonna note how the film's big famous moment can't function as a legit surprise anymore if you've extremely basic working knowledge of the culture, and move on to more fertile discussion.

Like I mention, Reiko's response to the cursed tape and her seven day deadline is more rational and intelligent than one might expect from a supernatural curse story.  There's an element of dogged pursual to her early movements, an undefined, restless need to see the cause behind her niece's sudden, inexplicable death days earlier, the kind've unknowing march towards doom you'd conjure when thinking of the paranormal intersecting with the mundane.  Once she's viewed the brief, surreal tape and been warned of her fate (no "Seven days..." whisper over the phone in this version, just the same eerie metallic scraping sounds from the tape), though, her next moves are all very sensible - contact someone she knows and can trust who has relevant experience studying and dissecting taped media, exercise her skills as a journalist, and start looking for a solution based on slowed-down viewings and cross-referencing.  A good chunk of the film passes with Reiko and Ryūji studying the tape frame-by-frame, seeking out clues and dissecting hidden meanings from the seemingly disconnected imagery, which gives the film this strange yet appealing atmosphere of extended repetition making the sights and sounds yet more disconcerting mixed with the reassurance of discovery and understanding.  Ring plays in large part like a serious-minded murder mystery, with the curse hanging overhead as a vague, barely-comprehended threat.

The horror, therefore, comes about through the increasing inadequacies of their method.  No matter how much Reiko extracts from the tape or how close she comes to understanding its origins and breaking the curse, it's not enough to prevent her young son from watching the tape late at night in a mid-movie twist, condemning him to the same fate without him ever knowing what he's done.  The work necessary to to unravel clues and discover new angles takes time, and on-screen captions remind us how quickly Reiko's clock is running down; it seems like no time at all between the roomy seven day starting point and our arrival at an all-too-close two.  Despite a rather blase attitude towards confirmation of psychic phenomena on both leads' part (one I suspect worked better in the book, where the protagonist's journalistic background had an element of past failed paranormal exposés), contact with various psychically burnt objects and persons as they get closer and closer to Sadako produces more overtly freaked-out reactions, and marks the characters' potential inability to handle the situation before them.  It gets a little bit clunky when the film uses overt flashes of the tape's imagery and sound to remind us how certain places, objects, and persons relate back to the clues rather than subtler interlacing, or when negative turns are accompanied by the otherwise quiet score going utterly manic on  the screechy strings, but in total effect the build rests on a solid foundation of exposing the limitations inherent to rational thinking when faced against the beyond.

When it comes time for the movie to climax, the twist enables it to do so twice in a row, with distinct approaches to the payoff.   In the first, Reiko and Ryūji's toilsome efforts to empty the abandoned well and retrieve Sadako's body may not entirely parse as to why the characters believe doing so will save their skins, but it turns on the great image of Reiko hauling heavy buckets over the course of many hours as her body grows weary and the sight of honeycombed crawlspace barriers facing the outside takes on a distinct menace, even knowing nothing's coming.  When she and Ryūji swap places and she's rooting around in the stagnant wellwater for the corpse, the shift to a damper, more claustrophobic environment continues the film's sense of undefined paranoia, and brings it to the head with the discovery of the corpse, oozing slime from its sockets like grateful tears as the seventh day fully passes and Reiko is saved... only for it all to come to bunk.  Just as the fake-out climax trades on an intensified version of the vaguely menacing feel of the preceding story with the payoff seemingly reward for such diligence under pressure, Sadako's sudden emergence stomps all over any sense of fairness or meaning to the film's events, killing Ryūji for reasons we cannot understand.  Once Reiko puts two and two together, and realizes it was not their hard work towards discovering Sadako's origins and laying her bones to rest that broke the curse, but rather the most innocuous, natural step she took that transferred it instead, the story attains  a wonderfully nasty bent.  There's a demand for cruelty from anyone who views the tape, a need to intentionally expose others and expect them to do the same in a never-ending cycle, and that's just that.  The relief of thinking those tested investigative convictions finally paid off, followed immediately by proof positive they're useless against real evil.

For its strengths, Ring does seem a touch lacking in a few places.  The gender-flipping of the protagonist from the book's Kazuyuki Asakawa to Reiko and the subsequent change of Ryūji from friend to divorced husband introduces the possibility for a more meaningful relationship dynamic between the two, one the film does not adequately explore outside a few brief moments.  It's more focused on the process of understanding and halting the curse than exploring the characters doing so in great depth, and so leaves them in a bit of an emotional limbo regarding one  another.  Something similar effects Reiko's relationship with her son, who's obviously very important to her yet drops from the film once he views the tape, to serve as little more than another reason to break the curse beyond Reiko dies.  These noted, the picture still goes plenty far on the journey to test how much a rational series of questions are worth under unusual and demanding circumstances, and the sheer meanness of its twist lands with a satisfactory thwack even when you know it's coming and spend the whole film waiting to see someone scramble out've an analogue set.  Much as later entries and online culture have diluted the special, unique fear of Sadako's emergence (coming out of a Jumbotron at scale is a natural evolution, but it is also extremely silly), Ring's dedication to earning that sigh of relief before gutpunching the wind from your lungs ensures its USP continues to demonstrate value as a scare worthy of the construction around it.

(I rather like how every other element of the tape has a concrete explanation, including the audio playing over the crawling figures, yet the crawling figures themselves remain unexplored and open to interpretation.  Adds to the creepiness and the sense of the investigation coming to naught.)

3.5/5

Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb - Nuclear Warhead. Handle With Care.

It's the fifth Letterboxd Season Challenge! Theme seven, part three- one of Spike Lee's essential films for aspiring directors!

(Chosen by John!)

Nothing written herein will be new or insightful. Without proper academic training into the act of film analysis, I cannot provide you a single word about Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb any different than what a multitude of thousands have already said over these last fifty-five years. Not because Stanley Kubrick was some kind of inherent genius whose works are far too intricate for mere mortals to tackle, requiring a deftness of wordsmithery and cinematic insight beyond the ninety-ninth percentile before any decent work can take place - bout a year ago I watched and reviewed his Eyes Wide Shut during a different challenge, and managed a detailed piece I find satisfactory. Difference is, I watched Eyes Wide Shut for the first time then, without any preconceived notions or general knowledge of its general reception or common interpretations, a benefit of the film sitting outside the core Kubrick classics. Dr. Strangelove, by contrast, is a film I've watched in full multiple times since high school, regularly use as idle YouTube clip entertainment, read about from any new critic I discover who's covered it in any substantial detail, and love for all the reasons everyone else on the planet loves Dr. Strangelove. I know, you know, everyone knows the best lines, the ins and outs of what makes the performances tick and what Kubrick did to make George C Scott act Like That, all the little sexual innuendos, the Thing about how Kubrick insisted the table in the War Room be pool felt green despite the film's being shot in black and white. "You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!", "Precious bodily fluids," "He'll see the big board!", "Mutiny of preverts," Major Kong riding the bomb, "MEIN FUHRER, I CAN WALK!", all of it.

Still, I write, and write quite substantially on every film I watch for these challenges, so a lack of fresh insight shan't serve as any deterrent. In the name of maintaining forward momentum, let me simply state the observation I mean to work and expound upon in the bulk of this review: Dr. Strangelove is as cacklingly funny as it is because Stanley Kubrick did not make a comedy.

To clarify, he certainly conceived the scenario and directed his actors in the manner of a comedy. One can hardly look at George C Scott masticating on hunks of snack food between flustered, easily-excited outbursts and think his General Turgidson anything other than an immensely funny figure. Same goes for all three of Peter Sellers' characters, be they Group Captain Mandrake fighting back an emotional breakdown as he tries to calm his commanding officer's psychosis, President Muffkin ineffectually managing his staff and generals with ill-projected strength, or Doctor Strangelove gleefully describing a eugenics program to survive the end of the world while his Nazi hand flies into salutations. Beyond this core group, other characters aren't quite so wacky of immediately humorous, but Sterling Hayden's Jack D. Ripper and Keenan Wynn's Colonel Bat Guano are both such tightly-wound, deathly serious military men that their self-important speeches can't be anything save giggle-worthy, in isolation or in contrast to Mandrake's flustered replies. Clowns in positions of power all, even Slim Pickins, whose Major Kong is perhaps the mildest of the bunch despite his natural and entirely out-of-place Texas drawl, and still gets the film's bleakest, best punchline all to his lonesome.

Through Major Kong and his crew aboard the 843rd Bomb Wing, we can understand what I mean by Kubrick not making a comedy. Their scenes contain jokes same as the rest of the film, primarily quick lines from Slim and absurd background details, which render the plane a locker room hangout much as a militaristic instrument of death, but their composition and placement in the film do everything in their power to dissuade any impression you're watching a comedy. The majority of production design choices reflect Kubrick's typical eye for detail in a set based on then-top secret military hardware, the camera prefers views which emphasize the cramped space and the movements of dials and switches and blinking lights, the cutting shows us every man engaged in his obscure function as the crew flies onward to their final destination. Any time we jump to join the 843rd, the soundtrack strikes up a drum-based rendition of When Johnny Comes Marching Home, and the action plays out like any other military movie wherein a contingent of our good ol' boys are out on a mission to save Democracy and Freedom, and nothin's gonna stop 'em. They'll follow orders to a T, endure heavy enemy fire, face setbacks that mean their inability to return home safely, and still they fly on, fearless and undaunted! That they are flying a mission whose success means an end to all living things, one which sees every other character is tying themselves into hysterical knots in a desperate attempt to halt it, matters not one whit to how things play out.

Cross your eyes and ignore Slim Pickins and the pin-up girls on the safe containing classified orders, and there's really nothing funny about this stretch of Dr. Strangelove. Even once Mandrake and Ripper's side of affairs has concluded, and Muffkin and Turgidson and Strangelove are approaching their peak, the 843rd is still playing out its war game completely stonefaced, still emphasizing the technical work necessary to pull a last-ditch bombing run, still marching to its heroic tune. Right up until the bomb drops with Major Kong astride its girth, and the film corpses hard as it possibly can with him yippin' and hootin' and waving his hat all the way down to smack dab in the middle of Mother Russia with the world's biggest atomic penis between his legs... and then silence.

Such an effect applies across the entirety of Dr. Strangelove. Across every technical aspect, across set design, lighting, camerawork, sound editing, shot-to-shot cuts, Kubrick composes like he did and would any other film across his career, as a director driven to get everything just so and generate an atmosphere of cold, carefully manipulated sterility. The War Room is this monstrously huge, mostly empty space, with dozens of men all cramped around a comparatively little table with hot lights creating massive dark spaces all around and an imposing map of the world flashing ominous updates overhead. Ripper's office is laid out and decorated according to the sensibilities of a respectable military man, and gradually gets completely trashed by gunfire until it's an almost impressionistic space with slatted lights and obscure destruction strewn all around. Spaces we glimpse with comparative briefness still communicate a fussy, uncomfortable environment, such as the too open operating centers and offices Mandrake calls his own until he's stuffed into a cramped telephone booth, or the confusing mess of mirrors in General Turgidson's bedroom, which make it impossible to tell how he'll enter the frame until he does. Our view into these spaces consists of extremely long takes of two characters in close conversation, low close-up angles to emphasize projected strength, and more heavily cut sequences designed to show how stressed and uncertain all parties involved feel at any given moment. It looks and feels for all the world like the kind of military thriller that gets your teeth clenched til they feel like shattering, scootching forward to the edge of your seat desperate to know if they'll make it or not.

Except the subjects in the midst of this clockwork contraption of a tension machine are a group of sexually stunted, immature, undisciplined men who boggle for the camera and say patently ridiculous things in patently ridiculous ways, and make it beyond clear their petulance and desire to feel just a little bigger rules above anything else. I can only think of two instances in which the film is shot to explicitly laugh alongside the audience - when Kong rides the bomb, of course, and when Bat Guano gets a nice close-up of the Coca-Cola company squirting their product in his face. Beyond these two moneyshots, Kubrick does not once deviate from his thriller sensibilities. The script takes the plot seriously and makes damned well sure we know its every mechanism, the camera glares on like we can gleam some greater meaning from seeing these very important men in crisis, the editing holds and holds and holds til we can bear it no more, and then holds off the next cut just a bit longer for good measure... and George C Scott is in center frame, imitating an airplane and getting hopping excited about his boys dropping a nuke on the Ruskies to trigger a doomsday device. Or Sterling Hayden speechifying about how the commies are gonna fluoridate children's ice cream to an extremely uncomfortable Peter Sellers, or Sellers arguing with an unseen Russian premier like an old married couple, or any number of other silly things that completely destroy your faith in the chain of command. Completely unoriginal, argued to death argument here, but the contrast of the most handsomely mounted political thriller you ever done seen, and Peter Sellers talking up breeding caverns and wrestling an evil hand while Scott muses about megadeaths like a little boy in an old lech's body leaves you only the choice to either cry and commit suicide at the state of the world, or laugh at the same.

Even moreso than concerned Terrence Malick and Days of Heaven, I cannot recommend aspiring filmmakers try and emulate Stanley Kubrick's actual techniques. Genius and detail-oriented though he was, his work and writings about it clearly evidence a man who frequently demanded excellence beyond reasonable expectations from all around him, obsessed over things that didn't matter, and actively manipulated his actors instead of working with them if it suited the film. His methods produced some of the greatest films of all time, but I'd not think anyone who wants to work beyond a single project should try and do as he did. Rather, for the purpose of this challenge theme, I say we take Dr. Strangelove as a lesson in the power of contrasts - how complete and total dedication to a contrary tone with your actual, intended vibe peeking through juuuuuuust enough to recolor everything around it can pay massive dividends. The moments when the film breaks down and laughs alongside its audience are exceedingly rare, but its big break represents one of the most iconic images of Kubrick's notably iconographic career, and certainly the funniest of the bunch, so, y'know. Probably worth a study there.

(I meant to put my personal favorite moment from the film as a final tag here. I'm not doing so because I just can't choose one. It's either "HAS HE GOT A CHANCE? HELL YEAH HE....!", "Well, he went and did a silly thing..." or, "Our source was the New York Times.")

5/5

Days of Heaven (1978) - I was hopin' things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine.

It's the fifth Letterboxd Season Challenge! Theme seven, part two - one of Spike Lee's essential films for aspiring directors!

(Chosen by Jackie!)

The conventional approach to discussing Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven is to focus on its visual aspects. Rightly so, given its award-winning cinematography with the oft-noted golden hour exteriors emblazoning silhouettes against a gorgeous sky, and the freeform editing techniques at play affording a higher number of beautiful shots than your average movie without sacrificing its deliberate pace or contemplative tone. One could easily write a review doing little else beyond listing off the film's best shots one after another, and still communicate a good deal of what makes Days of Heaven such a gripping work of visual fiction. To get at what grabs me about Days of Heaven, though, we'll need to set aside its famed visuals, and focus on the sonic, for it is through the sound design that I think the film finds its greatest cohesion and meaning.

It is, after all, through a deafening cacophony loud as the world that we enter the picture, in a Chicago steel mill where the clatter crash clack racket bang thump of enormous machines completely swallows the particulars of an argument between Richard Gere's Bill and a foreman before the former kills the latter. Following sequences of Bill, his sister Linda (Linda Manz), and girlfriend who pretends to be his sister Abby (Brooke Adams) fleeing via train, starting on as hired hands on a wheat farm, and working the fields amongst an expansive cast of background players are equally devoid of specific information, with the camera frequently too far away to capture conversation, the voices in a crowd too numerous for total comprehension when we can hear dialogue, Ennio Morricone's score too busy with its swells and strings and swirls to give diagetic sound its due. When we are privy to spoken words, they are frequently brief, terse snatches, words exchanged in a free passing moment or divorced from the larger context by a cut to later. Our only consistent human voice throughout belongs to Linda, whose narration is as enigmatic and breezy as the editing, occasionally providing bits and bobs of inner thought we might not gauge from what we see, but most often engaging in its own form of contemplating a distant house rising above the wheat fields or staring at a grasshopper munching away at a corner of wheat by musing about esoteric matters of the heart and mind.

From the word go, Days of Heaven impresses itself as a film unconcerned with specificity, one with a far keener interest in the in-between moments of its plotted happenings. Approached like a conventional story, I doubt there's more than five concentrated minutes for the love triangle between Bill, Abby, and the sickly farmer they intend to con with a disingenuous marriage. Prior to the second act wedding, Malick's eye is on the community of workers, their hard work in the fields, their blessings upon the crops, their lines to get paid, their celebrations of a harvest well reaped, with equal weight assigned to Linda's friendship with an unnamed older girl as Bill and Abby noticing the farmer's interest in her. Afterwards, domestic drama and fears of cuckoldry are of secondary importance to the now-isolated group functioning as budding family, bedding down for winter and eventually preparing for the next harvest; even scenes where characters directly confront one another about their suspicions or toy with the possibility of murder are more about the place and mood than what the actors are doing or the characters thinking. The twin climaxes reflect this, first with the spark between natural disaster of the locust swarm and manmade disaster of the wheat fire coming with the exact moment of the farmer's rage finally breaking getting lost in the flurry of both, and then with how casually and lengthily it moves past Bill's final fate despite his actions causing every major plot development in the film. Malick's attentions are elsewhere. He's out here to explore life and experiences beyond the rigors of a Spartanly slight plot.

And yes, the vistas of characters against a dusky sky with their features darkened to nothing yet their outlines visible as midday and the wandering editing system concerned just as much with a man tapdancing to entertain a crowd as the farmer watching Bill and Abby steal away precious moments in righteous jealousy are primary means of communicating to the audience an intent to do more than bunker down on character development and traditional storytelling. This noted, I do very much believe the sonic landscape as crafted by Malick's audio engineering crew pulls a great deal of weight in getting you into the right headspace for appreciating the visuals' effect. I've already noted how cacophonous the sound of machines and crowds and raging fire can become, and how they drown out individual voices in moments of celebration, blind panic, and total indifference, but the swallowing effect really becomes complete and all-encompassing with how much the silent moments do the very same. Days of Heaven often dives so deep into its contemplation of minute detail, even Morricone's score is nearly lost to the emptiness of a room absent its usual figures, or a country sky stretching along for miles upon miles. The wind rolls along the plains, tickling stalks of wheat as it goes, captures a voice, and blows right on by without a second thought. A lone thought dances upon the breeze, its words and ideas as scintillating yet enigmatic and uninvolved as the currents it rides. Whether the world roars with the voice of a million locusts lit aflame, musically mirrors the exultation of a mass of persons rushing for a train, or falls to all-encompassing silence so total even thought itself becomes dull and distant, the individual, traditionally recognizable human experience stands as the farmhouse often does on the horizon: identifiable as itself, still significant by its presence, but rendered a smaller part of a larger whole by all that threatens to envelop it from every side.

I'd go so far as to say my own interpretation of Malick's open-ended cinematic landscape is highly dependent on viewing it as a reflection of how I read his soundscape. Those characters who skulk beneath the breeze's touch, who plan and plot and secret away all manner of hidden reasons for being, who refuse to speak for fear of not being understood, are effectively torn to shreds by the slicing force of the world around them roughly gashing their unwillingness to flow freely. In simpler terms, Bill and the farmer, our most traditionally active characters, adopt attitudes of deceptiveness and righteousness respectively the face of fates that threaten to toss them about, plant their feet too firmly, and allow their unexpressed passions to broil beneath the surface until they explode into fire and murderous rage and unfocused flight. By contrast, Linda is a decidedly uninvolved character, tossed from place to place by the decisions and failings of others, and merely tries to keep herself afloat and engaged wherever the winds may take her. Her status as weaving, winding narrator indicates this quite clearly, and the way her final words sound as if they're meant to lead into another statement before the film fades to credits casts her as a leaf who'll continue her travels whatever they mean. Abby, caught between the two states of being as one who engages in the shifting modes of living more than those around her while still entangled in Bill and the farmer's plotting, finds herself a far more ambiguous end, taking a train full of soldiers on the wings of swelling music rather than walking away of her own power to the sound of her own voice like Linda does. They who can adapt and flow through tumultuous times and settle where they settle are afforded far kinder fates than those who strain or fight against the voice-taking wind, in effect.

Speaking briefly on the film as it relates to Spike Lee's recommendation to aspiring directors, I think the primary takeaway should be one of willingness to step back and flow. Replicating Malick's exact process for crafting Days of Heaven is suicidal folly in the modern industry (hell, even in the New Hollywood days falling so vastly behind schedule with no plan for the look or feel of the final result after a year in the editing bay would likely cost most other directors the job), but the driving philosophy of being like wind, appreciating the world from a perspective alien to most persons, with a willingness to lose out on hard cognitive detail now for the sake of capturing a richer texture makes for an admirable, enviable mindset. You see this across all levels of Days of Heaven, the visual and the audio and the intangible, and it speaks to a deep enough confidence in technical craftsmanship to strive for an achieve something open and mutable and beautiful. Can't quite advocate anyone go full Malick unless they've already proven themselves or are exceptionally willing to take on a nightmarishly heavy risk, but considering the results he achieves here, a little stylistic adoption couldn't hurt.

4.5/5

A collection of FUCK YOU, IT'S JANUARY reviews

A smattering of terrible dump month release reviews written over this last month on letterboxd!

***

Stephen Sommers should've probably taken a few more passes at the screenplay for Deep Rising before he started shooting. There's a solid hook to the premise, with Treat Williams' smuggler captain carrying a group of trigger-happy mercenaries to God knows where in the middle of the ocean, only to discover they've filled his ship with armed torpedoes and chartered a course to an abandoned cruise ship. That things aren't at all what the mercs expected, what with the proliferation of smashed up rooms and digested skeletal remains throughout the liner, gives us a pretty good line into the movie. Could serve as a workable mystery to keep tensions high until we're ready for the monsters, except his movie is structured so we're constantly cutting between the smuggler boat and the cruise ship before the disaster. I understand the impulse to play with both during the first act, considering the larger boat's owner is somewhat important to the mercs' place in the movie and we need to introduce Recognizable Actress Who'll Sell Tickets Famke Janssen early on, but doing so makes it harder for the movie to grab an audience. We know where we're going and how we're gonna collide, so a large portion of the film becomes a waiting game for the plot to hurry up and let the characters figure what we already know.

It also harms the character dynamics, which weren't particularly strong to start. I suspect the production intended to coast on Harrison Ford's charisma before he turned 'em down, and so Treat Williams is largely affecting his best Ford impression to middling effect. He'd still serve if he had a good, long stretch to exercise a dynamic with his fellow crewmembers and butt heads with the mercs in interesting ways, though. Unfortunately, because we've simply gotta spend so much time on the cruise ship before it sinks, the time we have aboard the smuggler ship is halved, and Williams only has the briefest amount of time to establish a back-and-forth with Wes Studi's merc captain before they're on the liner, and people start dying. Aside from him, there's only Kevin J O'Conner around, who's too deep in snively comic relief mode to impress a relationship with his captain or the men antagonizing him, and Una Damon as first mate, who gets killed to make way for Janssen as our lead. Considering Janssen's character is entirely superfluous if you cut the mystery-ruining early scenes, has little chemistry with Williams (much less time to IMPLY a romance before they're face-smearing one another), and just not giving it her best, it feels we left a potentially more interesting character to die in favor of a conventional dangling love interest.

Our writing woes just spill out from there. Once we start killing characters it happens at an alarming clip that removes a lot of potential for interaction. Losing out on the potential mystery/thriller aspect undercuts what impact the second act revelations could've had. Even with the improvements I've suggested, the nature of the conflict basically leaves us with nothing to DO character-wise in the third act save escape the boat, which takes the form of very simple tasks being complicated by sudden bursts of busywork. All throughout, conflict and tension are generated more by characters suddenly acting needlessly aggressive rather than drawing on a dynamic built naturally through exchanges and events. The movie's even so committed to insisting Anthony Heald's boat owner is the more interesting presence, it kills Studi early in favor of having Heald act the selfish psychopath for the finale. There are bad screenwriting decisions spilled all over this movie, the cast aren't really charming enough to distract from said issues, and it's all incredibly frustrating, because I can see how some tweaks to this one early structural element might've capped these poor impulses and resulted in a stronger final product.

I go with a 2.5 rating rather than the 2 stars my discussion here implies on the merit of the film functioning fairly as an action-horror in the watching. The Ottoia-derived monster's just a massive blob of CG nothing when we see it in full, but the tentacles look fairly menacing on their own or in a pack, and have some damned good effects work for the time and budget. If you take the deaths as less scary moments and more a game of Who's Gonna Get It Next, there's a few solid whacks throughout. Treat Williams, though working an entirely thankless job with so many Star Wars references I'm not at all surprised Ford refused his participation, manages some charismatic presence through a part that doesn't really realize he's protagonist till halfway through. And like... it's a monumentally stupid part of this movie, but I do think the whole setpiece with Williams and Janssen zipping around the flooded corridors of the sinking ship on a jetski, trying to build up enough speed to ramp out while blasting tentacles and obstacles with a shotgun is a good bit've fun. I'd play that part of the Deep Rising video game, it's got a neat two-player mechanic - one of you drives and hits fire, the other has to pump and reload and aim the shotgun over the other player's shoulder.

You can see the rot settling in Stephen Sommers' brain watching Deep Rising. The same inability to write or direct meaningful character interplay, structure a screenplay without a lot've ancillary bullshit stapled on, or deploy special effects without obviously using them as spackle to hide cracks in his scenario. All things that would fester and dig their roots deeper until he went all-out with Van Helsing and just broke the movie. Here, they're a hindrance, but he gets a little something out've the enterprise all the same. Like I say, if he'd taken another week to edit the script and narrow in on the potential for a mysterious situation where the main character learns what's going on alongside the audience and has a stronger rivalry with the dangerous men he's smuggling, he might've had something wholly passable. The near-misses are always more disappointing than the total misfires, even when they're still enjoyable at their own level.

2.5/5