Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) - Dream that they've all turned into white mice and crawled into an eternal pumpkin!

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme twelve, part one - a film starring Ingrid Bergman!

(Chosen by me!)

It takes a bit've time to settle in with Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman in the parts of Dr. Jekyll and Ivy the barmaid respectively, primarily owing to the accents.  Neither is turning in a bad performance throughout the first act of Victor Flemming's remake of an adaptation of a stageplay based on the Robert Louis Stevenson novella, far from it as Tracy brings his usual hard-mouthed moral pillar with a gentler side to his performance of the good doctor with a disturbing preoccupation over evil, and Bergman makes her part as a would-be rape victim turned slinky temptress to her savior come alive with just how thirsty she plays the role.  As set-up for the film's later dive into a crueler relationship once Jekyll takes his serum and unleashes Mr. Hyde, their flirtations come across well enough... but the accents are still quite a lot to accept.  Tracy a little less so, seeing as American-accented leads in American productions set in Britain is a fairly common practice, and he strikes a compelling enough figure by simply being Spencer Tracy to make the lack of an effort to put on anything remotely posh easy to filter.  Bergman, however, is only two years out from learning to speak English for her part in Selznick's remake of Intermezzo, and trying her damndest to strangle her natural Swedish accent into a lower-class Irish brogue.  Heaven help her, it's not happening - she slips back into her usual mode with great frequency, and her constant seizing onto dialect snippings like "ain't" or replacing "my" with "me" do little except sound odd coming from someone whose screenpresence was otherwise so refined.  S'a thing you have to sit with and learn to accept across the nearly two-hour runtime, cause it never gets better no matter how hard she tries.

I focus so much on the accenting issues in this first paragraph because I think it's necessary to note the film has some uphill territory to cover before detailing how I believe it traverses the terrain like completely flat ground throughout the second act.  Once Jekyll unleashes Hyde and goes out for a night on the town, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde settles into its true intentions, and produces a second act worth praise all on its own terms.  Not at all what you'd expect with Hyde storming about foggy ol' London Town causing a ruckus in bars and making himself a disreputable member of the community (though the act's opening scenes do give you some've that, if incredibly toned down), the film is most interested in exploring how Hyde acts as a manipulative hand behind Ivy's back to cost her a job, isolate her from her friends, and push as far into depicting their abusive relationship as the Hays Code would allow.  Bergman stands as the focus character for this half-hour stretch, and weird accent or no she's doing a fantastic job of portraying an abuse victim in what feels like a realistic manner.  True, you still get the histrionics that can be recut as Fay Wray-style screams for the trailer, but her response to Tracy's mocking runaround conversations and mind games as he pushes her into giving him what he wants are excellent, doing her best to keep her composure against someone who's obviously harmed and violated her many times over even as he's dead in her face and she's on the verge of breaking entirely.  Scenes set apart from Hyde see her putting on a brave face for friends and tip-toeing around anything she thinks might earn her another assault, suddenly recoiling into a ball of defensive excuses when she can't hide the scars.  On Tracy's end, his Hyde certainly isn't a stunning physical or behavioral transformation compared to some of the more lauded actors to fill the part, yet I think him playing it as merely a crueler, disheveled Jekyll rather than a completely split personality opens the film to further exploration of whether or not his postulations regarding good and evil in the human soul are as accurate or bifurcated as he believes.

Fact, let's talk Jekyll/Hyde theory for a moment before digging further into the film.  Per Jekyll's outline in an early dinner scene, those aspects he calls good and evil are inherit to all, expressed not in totality one way or the other, but intermingling at all times, a little of each depending on the circumstance.  To isolate one from the other, express the evil in a man as a wholly different person from the good-facing side, should follow into the good living with a clear conscience and no impulse to do wrong.  Locked away from one another, one might even eradicate the evil altogether by giving it no outlet, no infusion of serum to bring its full force to bear on the physical world.  Course, as we know from Stevenson's novella, Jekyll cannot be considered a righteous innocent if he indulges Hyde's expression at all, for Hyde is of him, a man born of thoughts and impulses within his own brain, and if the two are to draw on knowledge and memories of the other and mutually regard their back-half as a figure worthy of disgust, then they must know what their mirrored self does and why.  Jekyll might safely say, "It was Hyde who did all those horrible things, Hyde, not Jekyll," yet he alone is responsible for drinking the formula that gives Hyde flesh, just as Hyde is responsible for taking the same to hide behind the guise of Jekyll.  Whatever Hyde does is an exercise of what Jekyll wants to do, and in denying Hyde reflects on him and continually indulging his evil side another night's escapades, Dr. Jekyll's supposedly pure half a soul becomes stained with every drop of blood Mr. Hyde sheds.  If, say, Dr. Jekyll were to continually unleash Mr. Hyde in the name of venting his frustrations over not being able to marry his fiance due to her father's concerns, and allows Hyde to torture and rape an innocent woman because it leaves him feeling better, then it's not really good and evil he's separated: it's presentable and unpresentable, only called by another, morally simplified name.

So!  All this in mind, why on earth does Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ask us to sympathize with Jekyll during the third act?  Despite all the work it puts towards locking our sympathies squarely in Ingrid Bergman's corner, once her scene of pleading with Tracy to save her from the insidious Hyde is over, the film takes a turn towards Hyde coming into prominence without the serum, has him murder Ivy, and spends the remaining half hour fretting over how poor innocent Jekyll has lost control over his totally separate evil side.  It's terribly incongruous, dedicating so much time and effort towards depicting an abusive relationship full of manipulation and heavily implied rape as something horrifying, postulating on how the rapist is not a separate person but the inherent desires of a front-facing "good" man, and then escalating to murder our most sympathetic character before acting like the murdering rapist is somehow still deserving our pity.  Worth noting, I think, the picture doesn't get into Jekyll's perspective during the second act at all, so we're left with a bland reassurance of his goodness without any attempt to explore why he unleashed Jekyll so many times, which can only lead to the worst assumptions about his person.  The whole thing plainly doesn't work, as the story only functions if you throw away everything we've been told about how the Jekyll/Hyde dynamic works here and believe Jekyll a tragic protagonist because he's the protagonist and so should be counted as tragically struck low.  What's more, in refusing to examine the why behind Jekyll's actions or condemn him for it, an entire ACT's worth of material I think excellently executed suddenly feels like a cheap, exploitative depiction of the exact same subject matter, because all Ingrid Bergman's suffering comes to is a quick murder and hand-wringing over how oh, how totally innocent is the man who allowed this atrocity!  Such a powerful depiction of abuse and rape denied a point beyond "Isn't it all so horrifying" does not gain from the absence; it only subtracts, and lessens, and yes, cheapens the whole thing by making it a commodity for entertainment rather than a serious issue.

I do so hate it when lazy storytelling taints an otherwise good aspect in a film with the taste of sand and ash.  I hate it doubly so when it's a film with such beautiful views of a reproduced Victorian London shrouded in fog and enclosed spaces darkened by the presence of a single man, a film with good performances across the board and chilling music and some rather nice if not standout effects sequences for the transition from Jekyll to Hyde and back.  Going with a zeroed-in focus on Hyde as a rapist to one victim has massive potential for a character study into the presumptuous nature of Jekyll and men of his like, but without a point beyond "Don't ya feel sorry for him?" all this good work adds up to a bad film.  The post-film conversation with Connie last night ranged for quite a while longer than usual as we debated whether the film deserved 3 stars for its technical and performative aspects, or 2.5 for its thematic failings.  While I argued in favor of the former for a time, after listening to Connie's perspective and considering it in view of my own history of assessing well-made films with major themeing flaws, I think the lower rating is only right and consistent.  If you're gonna do Jekyll and Hyde and expect the audience to stand with Jekyll at the end, either run with Hyde as a more typical force of mayhem and standard crime, or don't even try if you mean to go so hard on the magnifying-glass look at abuse.  "Man willingly unleashes his devils and terrorizes a woman until he ultimately murders her" and "Man never did anything wrong, pure cinnamon roll, etc" do not jive at all.

(The fades employed to transition between the two aspects are pretty impressive technically when you consider how well each successive shot matches to the next, especially given how many subtle little movements Tracy makes that somehow flow near-seamlessly from one to the next, but the part where they try to focus on his eyes by rendering them as a separate strip over the rest of the picture falls apart the second you notice a horizontal stripe of his head bouncing around independent the rest.)

2.5/5

Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie (2008) - Vietnam DOES have a Bigfoot!

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme eleven, part three- a film distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories!

(Chosen by John!)

(To be read to the tune of All This Time.)

Events of late make it difficult to say how one should feel about the main subjects of Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie.  In fairness, Dallas Gilbert and Wayne Burton's conspiratorial mindsets should always make it difficult to determine the best approach to understanding them, for a conspiratorial mindset will always mean an otherwise amiable person is given towards myopic views on who knows how many otherwise agreeable topics, towards pushing friends and family away in the name of maintaining ideological purity, and towards twisting the world before their own eyes into something that will always agree with them no matter what.  From the documentary, we know Dallas and Wayne are (were in Dallas' case - he passed in 2016) given to these mindsets, for they admit it readily enough on-camera numerous times.  I more mean, however, that with conspiratorial attitudes taking over so many online spaces friendly towards the elderly in recent years, and with those views being so easily coopted by bad actors looking for an easily riled army to spread more substantially dangerous lies and calls to action amidst the Bigfoot hunting and the UFO spotting, the notion of a harmless conspiracy theorist is difficult to believe in this day.  Any one might prove the pressure point in an online campaign to harass the families of shooting victims, or fire a vulnerable population into protesting coronavirus quarantine protocols, or spread coded language to radicalize the youth.  It's difficult to sit back and believe in the notion of a harmless conspiracy theorist when even belief in Bigfoot is the merest step or two removed from something far more sinister, and with a decade-plus passed from this film's release and Jay Delaney showing little interest in cross-examining his subjects, I don't want to reflexively think kindly of these two when I don't know what the next few years brought.

Let's back off from the bully pulpit, though, and examine the actual film.  Important as it is to acknowledge a documentary cannot show one all the facts, what's on-screen still matters, and what's on-screen here does paint a sympathetic picture.  Dallas talks about estranged family members, Wayne makes it clear he has and continues to use threats of suicide to control people (something I'm inclined towards and find detestable in both myself and others), and both men make it clear they've staked their families' financial futures on proving Bigfoot real, but it's hard to think them wicked figures.  Given a stretch to talk about their mutual passion, both men speak with conviction and passion, and importantly a respect for others who show them respect in turn.  To Dallas' mind in particular, he believes in the Bigfoots he finds in his clearly empty photographs so deeply and dearly, it is more a matter of lacking faith in others that stands in his way of finding proof.  Such an attitude can read as sad, and for sure in a few quiet, solitary moments, he seems morose at how impossible his self-appointed task seems.  Yet from what we see, he's got his family, he's got his beliefs, and even if he doesn't have nearly so much money or respect as he'd like, what he holds is his.  Similar attitudes are evident in Wayne, who talks just as much about his attempts to continually better himself and accept his past failings as he does his regrets over those failings or his oncoming financial and legal woes.

It helps when Delaney captures incidents which incline us to understanding how easily others can takes advantage of Dallas and Wayne, foe and friend alike.  When Wayne appears on an internet radio program to discuss his theories and misspeaks about the timing of showing a photo to a dead friend, it is the host who seizes on the error and mocks Wayne to the point that his followers deface and doxx Dallas' website.  When Thomas Biscardi, a noted Bigfoot hoaxer cum hunter comes to town, the contrast between his hunts and the expeditions Dallas and Wayne undertake do much to frame him as an antagonistic figure.  These two older men go into the woods with their Native American words of power and their cameras ready to capture any moving shadow, the trip as much a reason to spend time with buddies as it is a serious attempt to capture Bigfoot; Biscardi drags everyone out late at night, plays disturbing recorded screams into the dark, and berates and belittles everyone who's not taking his mission to fool people seriously as he is.  The pair are plainly uncomfortable around Biscardi, and yet when he abandons them and skips town the next night, it is still a sad moment for the pair as their chance to work with someone they consider one of the greats slips away.  It's much like Wayne says in a roundabout manner during his (somewhat uncomfortable) rant against all political figures: nobody ever considers them as two old men chasing after something they sincerely believe in.  All anyone ever sees are rubes to mock or exploit or celebrate when they take a lick.

Owing to the evidently serious monetary strain both men place their families under thanks to their focus on Bigfoot rather than more sound routes to money, I can't quite say Dallas and Fred's obsession makes them admirable.  The difference between the mystique of sincere belief and taking it too far is the moment when you stop inconveniencing only yourself and start worsening the lives of those who depend on you. At the same time, though, their strategy for making money rather dispels a good deal of my concerns from the opening paragraph: the pair aren't able to see their blurry nothing photos cannot possibly make them any money, and so lack the dishonesty to fake them and exploit others.  Being victims within their own community who also use their mutual conspiratorial belief as a means through which to bond and better themselves makes me think, whatever happened in the years after this documentary, however the conspiracy theory crowd has become something terrible and ugly beneath the wing of the Alex Jones and Steven Crowders of the world, Dallas and Wayne have likely sequestered themselves away from all that.  I hope to God they have, for while Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie won't win anyone over for its filming or ambition or deep insight into anything beyond these two men and their little corner of Ohio, something in the cozy banjo music and amiable manner from our main subjects makes me want to believe in the goodness of their hearts.  I might not ever see what they see or think what they think, but long as they aren't out there trying to make others less or do harm to the marginalized, I'm happy to let Wayne live as he lives and wish Dallas a restful sleep.

(The Amazon rental for this film includes Delaney's 2001 short, American Dream, which interviewed Dallas and Wayne on the same topic and eventually morphed into this production.  It's nice to see it there, but it's also more focused on just letting the two of them explain their Bigfoot theories than talk about and live their lives, which is the main draw of the feature and not half so interesting, so I can't confidently recommend the short, even if it is only ten minutes.)

The Fits (2015) - Must we choose to be slaves to gravity?

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme eleven, part two - a film distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories!

(Chosen by Jackie!)

.｡*ﾟ+.*.｡It's exorcising personal demons time*ﾟ..｡*ﾟ+

I've discussed my difficulties participating in middle school and high school sports here a few times before.  Primarily as they pertained to the social aspects, bad interactions with my mental issues and hazing and bullying and the like. The actual running wasn't too easy either, tho, and I don't mean in the sense that pumping your arms and legs hard as possible for miles on end is physically taxing even when you're used to doing so day in and day out.  The part where you feel like you belong to a team, use the energy of those around you to better your performance and feed back into the loop with your own contributions was demanding for someone inclined to hole up inside their own head and define themselves as apart rather than within, especially when forming non-antagonistic relationships was already so difficult.  Even a sport so isolated and self-determined as racing requires an understanding of the self as part of a collective, which proved an understanding I could never fully grasp.  Never hit second gear or second wind or whatever you'd like to call it, never took any interest in what my teammates were doing, always felt stressed and drained by people trying to encourage me instead of boosted like I know they meant.  Really, honestly, truly getting what it means to remain oneself while giving it all to a team is maddeningly difficult, and I'm still not sure I'll ever be capable of putting it into practice.  It's a matter I'm always looking to work on, of course, for one must deal with one's devils in addition to simply acknowledging them, but when you're right on the wire, it almost has to be something you either tap intuitively or can't access at all.

All to say, what jumps at me most about The Fits, the directorial debut of Anna Rose Holmer and acting debut of Royalty Hightower, is how they use main character Toni's struggle to balance her old sport of boxing amongst boys with dancing drills amongst girls as a mysterious psychic illness sends her new friends into spasmic fits to explore that sense of individualism amidst the collective.  An early moment I found particularly telling is Toni's initial audition to join the Lionesses, when older girl and instructor Legs emphasizes the need to think of themselves as a unit, and lays out the complicated series of drill steps they're to demonstrate.  Toni, in a space she's not at all comfortable in just yet, and coming from a background where the camera and sound design have emphasized her tendency to obliterate all save herself for the sake of focus, dances about as badly as everyone else in her new group, yet takes the experience harder.  She's not able to engage in the locker room like her new peer, hiding in a stall to avoid others seeing her change while simultaneously listening in on their calls.  During practice, the camera often spins with Toni as its pivot point, highlighting how everyone around her seems perfectly capable of following the steps, yet she remains slightly out of time, tending to misplace or mistime steps, keeping a barrier between her and the group she wants to join.  She still returns to run stairs and work boxing routines with her brother, and during private moments in these exercises, she practices in isolation and seemingly starts to get it when she feels freer to treat the dance like a fight to be overcome, yet when she returns to group practice it never translates.

There's a fear of losing herself entirely if she clicks with the team, one her interactions throughout the film complicate through interesting wrinkles.  When the titular fits start striking the older girls, we the audience can tell each one manifests differently than the last, and eventually understand they leave no lasting harm, but they're still frightening seizure-like events that disrupt the flow of events and prevent Toni from taking advantage of moments when she's closer to getting it.  The uniform sense of uncertainty they produce, however, also enables Toni to bond with the two girls who take to hanging around her in calmer moments, Maia and Beezy.  Beezy in particular gives rise to many positive interactions, opening doors for Toni with temporary tattoos and ear piercings that mark a more physical transformation, and spending a night running about the fitness center in the dark during a rapturously shot scene, which transitions into a moment of quieter understanding when Toni helps Beezy after she gets scared and pees herself.  For Maia's part, she seems a quieter hanger-on for some time, yet shows herself as a more contemplative older presence, specifically as we move to the third act and Toni is able to have an honest conversation with her after the fits appear more sporadically and make the future of the team more uncertain. Of course, just as everyone starts feeling safe because they think the fits can only impact the older girls, Maia and Beezy have their own fits in short succession, and leave Toni more isolated than ever.

What's interesting here is how this sense of isolation plays into Toni's preexisting feelings of being an intruder in a space not meant for her.  In the downtime between notable events, she's often seen blanching at items signifying her welcomeness to the group - picking at the temporary tattoos, fiddling with the piercings before tearing them out, placing herself a subtle distance away from the main body of girls, pinching and pushing herself.  While her distant, colder relationship with Beezy after the latter has a fit can be read as the fits themselves drawing a line between those who've had them and those who've not, I can't help but wonder if Toni thinks of herself as having caused all this.  She shows up, and all of a sudden what looks to her like a cohesive singular unit starts falling apart and feeling afraid.  Even her own friends start acting distant to her because she's too aggressive and stand-offish before they experience a fit.  Her interactions with the boys' boxing team grow less frequent and more distant throughout the film, until she's looking in on their practice in shots framed to mirror her looking in on the drill team for the first time, except there's no more curiosity, only distant observation.  The things that made her part of this old world seemingly disrupt this new world, yet the new experiences here make it so she can't go back and still feel herself.  All the world seems gray, her ears buzz with anxious pounding rhythms, everyone seems distant, fit or no fit, and Toni just doesn't seem to belong anywhere.

So we come the finale, when Toni has her own fit, and it makes one question just how much these are truly negative experiences.  True, they're outwardly frightening, striking at random and producing different effects in each person, yet we've also inhabited the perspective of someone who doesn't possess the faculties or insight to understand what anyone who experiences a fit truly makes of it.  In Toni's case, when her feet leave the ground, and she dances the routine with an energy and individual strength not seen prior to this, we come to understand the experience as one of gained insight.  She envisions herself approaching the covered bridge where she and her brother practiced, shedding her gray sweatsuit to reveal the spangled, colorful Lioness uniform beneath, and dances in perfect time with her team in a variety of locations visually defined as her's throughout the film.  Understanding of the matter I outlined above comes to her for the first time: that it's not about becoming less to contribute to a whole, but about making a whole from many wholes, using the greater flow to build what's already within you, and expand the energy outward in kind.  Yet despite this revelatory moment, we don't see the aftermath.  Toni's teammates are still shown as intimidated by her dance, and when she falls to the floor smiling in the last shot, all we get afterwards is the Lioness hype chant and a return to the tingling, anxious music over the credits.  She gets it now, and will likely have a chance at building her friendships again, but do her revelations match to what her friends came to understand?  We aren't to know.

The Fits offering no insight into what comes next seems appropriate to me.  Much work as Holmer and production/writing collaborators Lisa Kjerulff and Saela Davis put into crafting a world where we can instinctively understand Toni's internal divide, the mysterious, otherworldly nature of her own fit pairs perfectly with what I talked about above.  The actual click is internal and personal in a way no camera or cut can adequately capture - we can only see the aftermath, and the film's conflict is more about Toni coming to balance her two worlds and be comfortable in her own skin than actually dancing as part of the Lionesses.  If she feels she's mastered it, and can show such mastery to others even in the midst of what they've come to view as a scary experience, then we must take whatever comes next on faith.  Perhaps I only think this way because I never got to this point, and remain uncertain whether I ever can.  From listening to the commentary on Criterion this morning, though, I feel confident saying the filmmakers achieved such intuition, and crafted a powerful film about the same,whilst exploring matters of gender expression and growing up in the same breath.  An intense, multitudinous picture, The Fits is bound to register as a profoundly personal experience for all who watch and remember the struggle of trying to be one for the sake of all.

4/5

Kedi (2016) - Cats know that people act as middlemen to God's will.

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme eleven, part one - a film distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories!

(Chosen by me!)

I should like to avoid melancholy while writing this review.  Kedi is exactly the film to get me feeling depressive in the watching, thanks to its documentation of the cats from Istanbul including numerous scenes of people tending to stray kittens and discussing their methods for dealing with death and monologuing about modern developments making the city less suitable for humans and animals alike.  It's enough to inspire thoughts of personal inadequacy and inability to handle a crisis, or fall into the depths of fear towards losing pets and loved ones, or spiral the drain of powerlessness at the advance of progress taking away green spaces and wild places.  I've issues aplenty readily triggered by seeing these sights, and I could very easily dedicate the entire review to a bleak, despairing outlook.  However, while Kedi contains these passages as a matter of necessity, in order to honestly discuss all aspects of life with cats in the Turkish city, it is not dominated by them.  The dominant mode is one of watching and appreciating and loving cats, celebrating all they do, and our role as their companions and caretakers.  If Ceyda Torun has the fortitude to film and edit and present such sad sights, I have the emotional strength to discuss her movie as its own thing, an even piece of documentation whose highs are equally worth discussing as its lows.

What makes Kedi so special a film, worthy your consideration beyond offering eighty minutes of cats running around doing their thing?  Universality, I think.  Between the structure built around a glimpse into the daily lives of seven different cats throughout the city with plenty breaks to trace the non-central players as well, the interviews with the people most familiar with these four-legged inhabitants, and the wide scope Torun and her crew trace across Istanbul, Kedi imparts a strong sense of kindred spirithood across the distance.  Of finding feline personalities similar to those we know wherever we are, of applying personhood to the cats and thinking of them as we would any other neighbor, of feeling an ethical obligation to ensure their health and safety, of balancing the scales between getting so little in return for so much effort and understanding the nuances of their affection for mutual benefit.  Cliched (and untrue if we're honest) as it remains to call love for cats or any other companion animal the one global constant across all cultures and walks of life, the film is inclined to make anyone who loves cats believe the idea by virtue of showing us so much.  A man breaking off an interview to take an injured kitten to the vet for emergency help, a woman with depressive issues talking about how caring for the alleycats in her neighborhood proves therapeutic, a sailor alternately discussing the history of cats in Istanbul and wondering at their supernatural side, numerous off-screen narrations describing the personalities they find in the local psychopath and the ladies' cat and the social butterfly and the conniving thief - amidst it all, you're liable to stop and say, "Hey, I've known/know a cat like that!" or else, "I've done that/thought like this before!" and the distance between you and Istanbul becomes a vacuum and collapses instantly.  Might not work for everyone, but it certainly worked for the whole watch party last night, and worked constantly.

There is, I've seen, some debate as to whether the inclusion of the human interview segments dilutes the film any, takes away from the potential of a work purely dedicated to watching the cats go about their business free from interpreting voices.  Being as great a lover of purity in form as I am, I can definitely see the argument, and think it has merit.  After all, the universal appeal of cats is quite obvious on the face of it, just by how utterly dominant videos of the same have been in the culture before even the internet - America's Funniest Home Videos and the like.  It would doubtless make a wonderful meditative experience, the only voice the silent word of the camera operators and editors as they guide us through the streets from a cat's eye view.  In total, though, I think the imposition worth it, for the simple reason that verbalizing the humanity the human residents find in the cats is probably the most potent idea Torun advances through Kedi.  To find human traits in the non-human animal is, of course, a quirk of the human condition, a somewhat ridiculous extension of useful traits that proved adaptive to survival many millennia ago.  We all do it, though, because lifelong/generational proximity is bound to engender such thinking patterns, and while we might agree this or that cat has this or that personality from simply watching, part of the point is that vacuum collapse, and one feels certain in their thinking far better if another speaks and confirms yes, I do think this cat is a little clingy, or a bit of a troublemaker, or very suave for a cat.  In effect, we need the humanity of the people as they commentate on the humanity of the cats to find the commonality across it all just a little bit clearer.

You run the risk of losing common agreement when you go the tone poem route, and despite thinking cats excellent subjects for a tone poem, I do not think Torun's vision for Kedi runs down that route.  It is not merely about the cats of Istanbul, but the cats of Istanbul, and the people of Istanbul, and modern Istanbul itself, as viewed through the frame of cats.  You could focus on them exclusively and count on the resonance of the city and its movements in the background to communicate the same ideas, or you could keep it all in frame and find the unifying whole with an unusual subject at the forefront.  Either choice works, since cats are cats and lovely subjects all the same, but Kedi is only Kedi if the people vocalize alongside their less verbal furry friends, in the same way I only feel right discussing the film in total effect rather than drilling into what strikes me hardest about the watching experience.  It's fine and good to take a single idea and squeeze it until all potential is wrung and a paint can be derived from its contents with which you paint the whole canvas.  It's perhaps more worthwhile (and in my case, healthier) to draw from many sources, and coat the canvas with all you can acquire.  Striking though a solid color block be, the total picture of life best emerges when you consider the joy of a cat leaping from ground to roof in a single bound alongside the human who marvels at their superhuman power, and the lamentations at how they can't do more for the less fortunate.  It's all necessary to get what's going on.

(I do so love Gamsız and his little sideways knock.  Hope he and all the other cats are still doing fine four years on.)

High School (1968) - It's against my principles, you have to stand for something.

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme ten, part one - a cinéma vérité* film!

(Chosen by me!)

The uniting theme of discussions about Frederick Wiseman's 1968 documentary High School typically holds Wiseman shot and edited the faculty of Philadelphia's Northeast High School to argue they less teach their students the assigned curriculum and valuable skills for independent living, and more constantly drill and drone and degrade with the end goal of producing uniformly gray members of a conformist system.  Some arguments further advance this notion by noting how the film takes place against a backdrop of the counterculture revolution and growing dissatisfaction with the war in Vietnam, and construe intent to paint certain amongst the teachers and disciplinary staff as doubling down on their usual techniques in the vain hope of halting the crushing tide.  It is an understandable perspective to adopt, both in face of how Wiseman presents ample scenes of students trapped beneath apparent doubletalk and quickly escalating punishment and the endless bore of great poetry made bland by bad reading, and how the 1960s carry a commonly accepted Identity in the generally held western world and the United States in particular.  This was a time of Unrest, of Change, of the youth who'd seen a rise in visibility and souring of temperament over the preceding decades finally coalescing into a Movement - whether you're living through the moment as with audiences and critics of its day or watching from a distance as now, the image of a teacher reading private correspondence from a student convinced they'll die in Vietnam against that student's expressed wish for privacy within the letter, and then claiming their success as a grunt destined to die in some anonymous jungle is proof High School works conjures the image of a system that's either failing its intended goals, or meeting them perfectly.

I understand these perspectives, and I agree Wiseman's film is cut and presented to drive the idea firmly as he can manage.  His vignettes are carefully chosen and placed in relation to one another with visible intent of wearying on the strength of collective memories within similar halls and against similar authority figures.  High School is a film sympathetic to the teenager in all of us, the person trapped in a sterile, nonstimulative environment for hours of the most valuable years of our lives, wishing the prick at the front of the room would shut up and let us go five minutes early.  It understands your feeling the adults are dead set on grinding every last piece of you from your person with arbitrary rules and unfair detentions and lessons about what a REAL man does, what CONSEQUENCES there'll be in the REAL world if you don't toe the line, how the line and the toeing thereof is the be-all end-all from the moment you graduate to death's door.  I hold it is right for Wiseman and his work to adopt and argue this perspective, for the experience of being in school and blanching against authority is near-universal; even as someone who socialized better with their teachers than their peers and took to lessons so well I'd actively ask for extra work just to keep the mental stimulation going, I've been in the spot of thinking this is all designed to get rid of me and replace that with what THEY want.  You'll clash against authority and find you're not as equal as you'd like in your teenage years one way or another, model student or no.

I hold, however, that a screed against teachers as willing engines of conformity is not all High School contains for the discerning eye.  Indeed, I'm of a mind to argue the film's just as sympathetic towards the faculty and staff as it is the students who struggle beneath their byzantine rules.  Call it a lingering niggle of doubt born from liking my instructors better than the people who'd shun or belittle me, but I cannot believe the high school experience is truly MEANT for such grinding with individualism as the meat.

One has to understand, the film shows Northeast High School as an unpleasant environment for anyone within its confines.  The only people who show a spark of humor or vibrancy are those who don't have to call its blank white brickwork and uncovered fluorescent lights home forty weeks of the year, parents and guest speakers and the like.  The building itself is an unpleasant, confining structure, and the activities going on within are repetitive by nature, necessarily so if a student is to hypothetically retain any information.  Thing is, while we are only shown a lesson or so per classroom, a single meeting of a club, a few handful of shots in the gym, a limited glimpse into the most telling examples of teachers and administrators failing to reach their charges, you must know, from common experience, there is so much more we don't see.  Lesson plans repeated across days, the same faces week after week, the same lessons year after year.  Routine serves as a millstone for those who have to enforce it as well, because there are still people responsible for said enforcement, people who must balance the nightmarish task of imparting information in an interesting, retentive manner, and remaining distant enough from their pupils to act accordingly when a stronger hand is needed.  Both the English teacher reading "Casey at the Bat" in a monotone that robs the poem of all life, and the English teacher trying to make learning cool by teaching Simon and Garfunkel's "The Dangling Conversation" and failing to roue any interest fall prey to the same problem - this environment is not good for anybody.

How could it be?  The United States model of education asks the impossible of those who serve at its whim, to perform as robots while remaining available as a thinking emotional creature when needed, to educate a body of hundreds while thinking of each unit as a person worthy attention and nurturing, to do this until you can perform no more and yet never show signs of fatigue.  The teachers and faculty here can only look bad before Wiseman's camera, for the easiest, most natural response to such conditions is to do whatever you can to get through the goddamned day.  It'd make everything so much easier if nobody piped up or made trouble, if everyone just did as they're told and marched through freshman to senior years without requiring special attention, if those who DID require special attention were dealt with quickly and easily so you can get onto the dozens more who require the same today alone.  All this against a backdrop  of barren walls and glaring lights and prison-like air and the knowledge you'll have to keep coming in again and again and again, that if you leave to do anything else either someone will replace you and endure the same, or no one will and your colleagues will struggle to pick up the slack.  A drive for conformity, I think, arises not because anyone particularly wants to live in a world where marching in lockstep and speaking as expected when expected and thinking authority should not be questioned, but because we've all inherited into a situation so difficult and grinding and so very terribly samey that trying for control is perhaps the response requiring the least effort.

It sucks.  It does.  For everyone.  Understandable as the reaction is, the students are the ones who suffer because their instructors are pressured until they too ask the impossible from their charges, which is the real tragedy of the high school experience, which is why Wiseman's High School is the way it is.  To balance his film between the two perspectives would lose the raw expression of what it feels like to endure these conditions and lessen the youthful drive to push back and be new and different and stubborn on purpose, yet to leave the limitation of its present state with regards to how the situation comes about in the first place unacknowledged is wrong to my mind.  It'd be ever so nice if I could conclude here by saying the solution is and always will be greater mindfulness about what the easy road will do to those around and below you under strenuous circumstances, for those in charge of education to give it their all every single day to the last and fashion a better environment.  Aware as I am, though, of the ever-diminishing value of education by those in power above our instructors, of the constant underfunding across the country, of how even with maximum effort there ARE the bad actors who want to exercise power and genuinely do see the goal of education as the production of unthinking drones subservient to the whims of those who'd use them as gears in a revenue-generating machine or pawns in a holy war... I cannot make such a suggestion in good faith.  Best I can say is we should ditch those enclosed buildings and make the switch to open-air like the schools I came up in, because honestly, so much of the oppressive environment comes down to not getting any goddamned air or sun between classes, students and teachers alike.  Can't bear the thought of working there for decades on end.

(*I know Frederick Wiseman prefers the term "observational documentary" for his films, but the list we were linked to as example includes it as an option, so we're sticking to our guns here.)

The Wizard of Oz (1939) - What makes the muskrat guard his musk?

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme nine, part two - a film named a 20th century milestone in cinematography by the American Society of Cinematographers!

(Chosen by John!)

Fellas, fellets, all in-between, let me tell y'all somethin' - it's tough out there sometimes.  Some weeks you wind up emotionally exhausting yourself for multiple days over a lot of trivial here and there, and just don't have it in you to go through the usual motions, like writing out a detailed review for one of the greatest films ever made, even if it's one you personally love to pieces across every aspect.  I've burned myself out well and good here, but I'm still looking to provide y'all with at least a little decent content at a pace of once a week anyhow.  Fortunately, since we're looking at The Wizard of Oz, I've already got a review in my back pocket from when I first watched it at a TCM Live event in January of last year for another challenge!

Having reread my work and slept on it, I still largely agree with what I wrote, and feel I don't have any lengthy new insight a scant year later anyhow.  As such, after a few brief bullet pointed thoughts that'll probably flit between stray observations and jokes, I'll present you with my full review of Dorothy's adventures, and see you on the flipside for when we start the cinéma vérité leg of this journey with High School.  Hope you lot have a decent time staving off the coronavirus, and just remember what Charles Manson said about reruns on Family Guy: "If I haven't seen it, it's new to me!"

• We can all agree the ASC likely chose this film as one of the 20th century's great achievements in cinematography due to its stunning, popularizing use of Technicolor to make audiences believe in the Land of Oz like no cinematic fantasyland prior.  I'll definitely agree with this, but think it worth noting how Harold Rosson's camerawork goes the extra mile to sell Oz and its tangibility in much the same way his work on the titular musical number from Singin' in the Rain.  The sets on the MGM lot are quite obviously sets, with visibly painted walls and plainly fake plants and all the trappings of reality achieved via paint and wood and fabric, yet the camera tracks a course through these spaces in such a way as to make them feel all the more vast and expansive than they already are.  It'll pan through Munchkinland or seamlessly take us through multiple sets to create the impression of a longer Yellow  Brick Road or position the character skipping towards a flat horizon, and by this movement and emphasis on space make it all feel as if it really does go on forever.  Regardless of how obvious the seams are, your brain honestly believes this is how Oz should be because the camera is so free to explore and convince you there's forever more to be seen.
• I only briefly mention her below, and I haven't much to add others haven't noted in the preceding century, but Margaret Hamilton's performance as the Wicked Witch of the West really is one of the all-time greats, huh?  The cackle, the hunched, stalking movement, the obvious sense of enjoyment and frustration with every action, the energized presence of an actress who'd reprise the role many times over across the next fifty years out of simple love for the part.  Imagine anyone else doing half so well.  I can't.
• There's so much to unpack from the line, "Only bad witches are evil," that the world needed to craft an entire multimedia empire with one of the most popular live stageshows ever produced at the center just to explore all the implications.
• You'd think the Tin Man would be a terrible choice for putting out a fire, considering how oily he is at all times.
• I've said it before and I'll say it again - I earnestly believe films with this style and approach to effectswork, not just the hoary old "We should ditch CGI and go back to practical effects!" argument, but a total embrace of taking the conventions of stage plays and giving them the best polish studio money can buy can still have a place in the modern cinematic landscape.  Please, anyone, I beg you, give me more soundstage reality productions, they're too glorious and dear to my heart to believe audiences wouldn't respond well anymore.
• Much as it is fun to joke about movies and throw up a cynical affect at times, I really can't be insincere about this film.  Although I didn't note it in the review below, at the time I told Adept how the Munchkin Land sequence felt distinctly of its time and difficult to appreciate on its own terms, and how the Cowardly Lion's "King of the Forest" song felt like weird filler to keep the film moving rather than a fully realized work on its own terms.  These were my only complaints after my first watch, and on a second I cannot possibly imagine what I was talking about.  They're both delightful segments in a film bursting with delight and charm and whimsy and life, and I can only think I meant they felt the least of a work where everything is at the top of its game and endlessly timeless.  I watched both with the biggest of smiles alongside everything else this time, and as such feel no qualms about bumping what was initially a 4.5 star review up to a perfect 5.  It's just... so terribly good, I haven't words, aside from what I'm about to repeat.

So!

***

To dive right into the heart of the matter, The Wizard of Oz succeeded as a piece of family fantasy entertainment and entrenched itself as THE definitive vision for fantasies in live action until George Lucas upended the game some forty years later entirely because it fails to deliver its moral. Owing to the producers fearing audiences were too sophisticated to believe in Oz as a real place one might escape to, the film ends with the revelation that Dorothy merely dreamt the land of scarecrows and tin men and lions and witches, the parts of her closest allies and greatest enemy having been played by people from her average, everyday life. To give the producers some credit (as if their role in overseeing one of the greatest achievements in factory filmmaking wasn't already credit enough), it's a good decision, as it helps emphasize and transform the book's original standard fantasy adventure ending of "It's so good to be home again" into the more basally resonant, ever-iconic "There's no place like home!" which is a solid moral for a children's story. The visual stylings include little touches emphasizing the idea of comings and goings, and Dorothy's departure from Oz becomes a strong bittersweet moment when we realize the spirit of these lovable characters lives on in their real world counterparts, if not the exact forms we grew to adore.

But it is an utter failure nonetheless. The Wizard of Oz boasts larger than life, blisteringly colorful reality by way of a soundstage fantasy, the sort where you can't help but believe this is EXACTLY the way the Land of Oz should look, even if you can pinpoint the spot where set dressing turns into painted wall at all times. It has some of turn-of-the-century's most beloved children's literary characters realized through still-technically-impressive makeup and soft, charming performances from up-and-comers and vaudeville staples alike. It moves at a great clip, has little touches of comedy at every turn (I was just... so glad to hear the reactions of people who've obviously loved this film for decades and still get the fullest enjoyment out of it in the theater today), and a sentimental approach to every aspect of the production so strong that you can easily forget how brutal studio work could get eighty years back. It has the "If I Only Had A..." songs, and "Ding-Dong the Witch Is Dead!", and "We're Off To See the Wizard", and "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", for chrissake.

You can't make a movie with "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and not have people believe it. Bringing a fantasy world to life and then telling your audience they should really be grateful for their warm bed and loved ones is always a hard sell, because you simply cannot spend so much money making the fantasy world look the way it does and expect home to look even half so attractive. In the case of Oz, Mervin LeRoy and Victor Flemming and the veritable army of MGM staffers responsible for this world did such a good job making its scenery and inhabitants feel real and immediate, the decision to deny their reality at the end comes across as little more than an attempt to avoid stepping on the toes of a far more conservative America.

Thank God the film fails. If it were to sell you on the notion of Oz as a nice fantasy, but ultimately less preferable than life on the Kansas farm, it would require a far inferior Oz. Perhaps a less menacing Wicked Witch, or a less lush Munchkin Land, or a less joyous Emerald City, or - heaven forbid! - a less endearing Cowardly Lion. Something would have to go wrong for Kansas to ring true as the best of all worlds, and then where would we be? In a time where the film doesn't continue to birth homages and inspirations for how to make the impossible believable? When its themes didn't resonate so powerfully in the wakes of both the Great Depression on original release and World War II on rerelease as to serve as a comforting delight for children the world over? When audiences would ever want to do anything but hug the Cowardly Lion and never leave him behind because he's perfect just the way he is?

No, it's better that The Wizard of Oz fails to convince the audience of a healthier moral. Such pure, unbridled fantasy took near-inhuman levels of personal sacrifice and compromise to bring to the screen. We almost saw a classic encapsulation of the studio system in its prime and the American willingness to accept flying monkeys and fraudulent wizards changed into something totally unrecognizable a million times over in the development process. A film like this is, after its own fashion, a miracle, and should a miracle stumble over its words while trying to instruct us on loving our home more than a land over the rainbow, then why not take advantage of its failure to communicate and live there for a while? Happy little bluebirds fly - why, then, oh why can't we?

5/5

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) - Air East 31, do you wish to report a UFO, over?

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme nine, part one - a film named as a 20th century milestone in cinematography by the American Society of Cinematographers!

(Chosen by me!)

Of all elements in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the way Spielberg and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond work to associate the aliens with light is easily the most outstanding.  Though the grays and their ships have definite corporeal forms, which stand in a range from impressive feats of production design to a little wobbly when watched nowadays, the primary takeaway of any scene with alien contact is always how the world becomes luminescent when touched by their presence.  Be it the first act business with small probe ships zipping along a highway in glowing, multicolored baths, the phenomenal abduction sequence with its unearthly blare piercing through every opening in the house and rendering the sky as on fire when the door is opened, or the mothership coming down in such an enormous, all-encompassing blast of dazzling disco ball colors and a white light big as the world that makes the ludicrously oversized landing strip set and its hundreds of extras look small, the effect and lasting impression remains the same.  It's as if one of those trillions of twinkling, distant spheres across the blanket of heaven detached itself from the cosmic fabric and came down for a look at our world.  Smaller moments strengthen the association, such as the early near miss when trucker Roy is almost abducted and the sudden activation of his flashlight startles him into thinking the aliens are coming back round, or when he spends all night attacking a model of his vision and finding no meaning, only for night to turn to day through an in-camera lighting transition, and the final piece of the puzzle falls into place with new light.  The simple experience of seeings, of having your sight nearly blinded by something brilliant beyond brilliance, and to keep staring until some comprehension worms across your mind - that is the way Spielberg constructs his extraterrestrials here, and it's striking as ever over forty years on.

Also impressive is the growing sense of scale, and how the film dwarfs all things for its final act.  The choice to divide the story between the scientific/military level response and the experiences of two characters touched by the aliens' passing during the first keeps proceedings nice and broad and shallow in a good way, following multiple perspectives on a single, small-scale fantastic event.  Following this, we start to pull out, with Roy and Jillian puzzling over the psychic imprint in their heads, the expansion in scope signified by the abduction scene.  Roy's impression of Devil's Tower grows from compulsive small scale reproductions, to a miniature clay model, to an impressively detailed room dominating reproduction, to the revelation of the actual Devil's Tower, which then dominates the background as a looming presence throughout the more chase-oriented stretch.  The landmark photographs quite impressively in Zsigmond's hands, growing ever larger as we and the characters approach its base and climb its slopes, until that iconic flattopped peak is looming over practically every shot as we enter the third act.  Entering the landing strip base and seeing the heights of human engineering in such detail (as well as confining the action to one huge location after focusing on interiors and less spacious location shoots for so long) does much to prepare us for the arrival of the mothership, which as already mentioned blows all sense of proportion out of this world and completely dominates the entire last twenty minutes.  I don't believe I can stress enough just how all-encompassing its extraterrestrial lights seem, how far they go towards making the tiny aliens seem like agents of a far higher power.  A gradual build with a hell of a wallop at the very end, definitely a Spielbergian technique.

When it comes to the actual story these techniques service, I'm a little more mixed on the total effect.  The scientific side of things is appropriately regimented and distanced from the awe-inspiring nature of what they study, with an appreciable slide towards true comprehension and inspiration thanks to François Truffaut's turn as the head researcher. Its contrast against the human story, however, is rather weaker. Strangely for Spielberg, he seems distanced from the inner lives of his average everyday POV characters, interested in the events that impact their lives without taking much care to depict these as a natural focus for his story.  Make no mistake, the abduction sequence with Melinda Dillon and Cary Guffey, the part where Richard Dreyfuss is peaking and tearing apart his block in search of materials for his model, and the whole sequence of Dillon and Dreyfuss climbing Devil's Tower are well-acted and promise visceral impressions of a mother losing her child to something otherworldly, or a man so driven to understand the beyond he'll willingly alienate his family, or two lost souls finding meaning in a common goal, but the film never coalesces around these ideas, never thinks to prod at the fallout.  Jillian loses her child and Roy scares his family away, and they sorta just continue to function as the plot needs them to function so they can arrive at the landing strip when the aliens arrive.

Now, the focus is on the aliens, and rightfully so.  Spielberg directs, Zsigmond shoots, and Michael Kahn edits strongly enough in combination to make the whole "the most important event in human history is happening right now, all other petty concerns matter no longer" effect come through, but I still object on the grounds that all other petty concerns should have mattered before the mothership's arrival.  There's space aplenty for examining the psychological effects of the extreme choices the main characters make in favor of chasing down UFOs, examination which could make the contrast against the military's rigor and power all the more prominent, and the final reveal of our intergalactic counterparts' sheer enormity perhaps a bit more impactful.  I must confess we watched the theatrical cut of Close Encounters, not the 1980 special edition or Spielberg's own director's cut, so it's entirely possible my concerns here are addressed there.  Also worth noting is just how much work went into hammering this story together without a solid concept of what it would Be for much of early development, the constant reworking during shooting to fit in new shots and sequences Spielberg dreamed of on the fly, and the budgetary restraints and subsequent rushed release impacting post-production - it's entirely likely Close Encounters' humane story would feel flat and incomplete compared to his other works no matter what.  Still, from the man who brought us, "Anyway, we delivered the bomb," "Indiana... let it go," "An aim not devoid of merit," and "I could have got more," it's disappointing I don't vibe with these people and their struggles more.

It's a colder film than I'd prefer, the potential warmth deemphasized in favor of a larger overarching goal with considerable force behind it, though not nearly as much as on release when there was literally nothing of the like.  These issues registered and understood, I maintain the poetry of light on so large a stage, dancing against such little people and John Williams' famous five-tone composition, makes Close Encounters of the Third Kind a worthwhile watch on their own.  If nothing else, Spielberg and company managed a first of its kind technical achievement with powerful filmmaking at its back, and central performances which can rise above the less considerate screenplay.  I'd crack a joke about this being better or lesser than ET, but I haven't seen that one yet, so I'll instead go for the lower blow and claim it's superior to War of the Worlds, though inferior to Jeff Wayne's live prog rock rendition, as are all things.

Also better than Contact, though I'll admit I'm seemingly in the minority on feeling cool about Contact.

4/5

Polterheist (2018) - How're you gonna make me talk? I'm already dead.

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

(Chosen by John!)

Just reading the synopsis for Polterheist makes me unreasonably angry.  Two stupid criminals need to extort some money from their mate lest their boss have them beaten to death, but they've already killed the bloke, so they kidnap a medium and force her to channel his spirit so they can find what they're after.  Those of you in the know about your supernatural entities will understand straight away how possession by the recently deceased has nothing to do with poltergeists.  A poltergeist is very specifically the invisible paranormal manifestation of pent-up negative emotions, usually from a child or teenager, which makes its presence known by violently moving objects with intent to frighten or harm.  Granted, Poltergeist doesn't fully get this right, hitting the mark as it does with the whole household items getting stacked and thrown about whilst explaining it all as the result of a desiccated Native American burial ground (again, not really a poltergeist!), but Polterheist is off the mark entirely.  You might wonder, "Why get upset about a punny title for a ghost-infused crime movie that tells people, 'Hey, there's a ghost in this thing, just thought you should know,' by virtue of most people only knowing 'poltergeist' means 'ghost thing?'"  It's a valid question, and I'll tell you why: because if I ever write and publish a screenplay about some crooks breaking into a mansion inhabited by some shitty repressed millionaire's teenaged kid and teaming up with the poltergeist within to execute their heist, I cannot use the accurate and awesome title of Polterheist because the people behind Polterheist wasted it on this film.

(Harry Potter gets a pass for making Peeves a physical manifestation because Hogwarts is a deeply magical building filled with hundreds upon hundreds of teenaged witches and wizards for over one thousand years, so of course all that negative psychic energy would coalesce into an awful little man.)

Mark you,  the actual film behind the title contains plenty reason to hold the product itself in disdain.  Polterheist is a technically uneven film, occasionally looking pretty darned alright for its limited budget and inexperienced crew, mostly showing the detrimental effects of four camera operators and two editors working without a strong voice to unite their styles.  The visuals aren't at all consistent from shot to shot, with such highlights as a master shot and its three close-ups somehow all featuring different lighting, and an otherwise fairly tense sequence suddenly cutting to what looks for all the world like test footage for no good reason.  Such notably shaky visual language permeates the film, and extends to its sound department whose work renders loud voices and quiet environmental effects alike loud as all holy hell.  The editing team seemingly struggled with prioritization, as we spend way too much time in a black and white flashback that gives us tons of information we shouldn't get based on the presentational context, linger on jokes way longer than is at all funny, and infrequently cut over to gawk at the main mob's goings on without ever finding anything of great interest or import.

It's a sloppily made film for certain, which I can excuse to an extent due to the crew pulling something from practically nothing given what they had, and also because the main character dynamic is quite a lot've fun.  Jo Mousley runs away with the film in her part as Alice, the medium possessed by murdered criminal Frank, spitting out foul-mouthed lines and getting across a nice sense of tension through her bodylanguage throughout.  They've got nothing but profanity and damnation for anyone around them when provoked,  and time spent in a more amiable mood sees her playing well off her costars.  Sid Akbar Ali and Jamie Cymbal make a good teaming as well-to-do Tariq and Northern fuck-up Boxy, trying their hardest to sell jokes the editing is determined to ruin, and bouncing against Frank's disdain for his murderers in an enjoyable manner.  Mousley and Cymbal get a few quieter scenes together round the middle, and I start to feel there's more going on beneath the surface here than "funny bad men do a funny bad thing."  Give it a few passes in the writing room, and Polterheist could make a reasonable play for being about guilt and reconciliation and whether that's all possible in a criminal enterprise.  Elsewhere in the film, though admittedly completely contrary to the point I just made, Pushpinder Chani is capital A Acting his ass off as deranged mob boss Uday, and gets me really excited to see what happens when this absolute vicious maniac comes into contact with the main trio and learns what they've been up to behind his back.

Alack, Polterheist lets us all down.  The conclusion takes some turns regarding a hidden cache of diamonds and Frank playing Tariq and Boxy against one another, which seem fine on paper, but rely on the film's main enjoyable dynamic falling apart and vanishing for the final ten minutes.  What should play as a satisfactory revenge twist lacks the time and focus necessary to make it land, for Chani also drops straight through the floor, rendering all our cutaway to his goings on a pointless drain on the central trio's story resources.  Instead, Mousley shifts from Frank to Alice for these final movements, and despite Alice only appearing in a restrained, almost demur performance for a brief period towards the start and a briefer reprieve from possession round the middle, she has total command of the last several scenes, and drives them with a personality wholly unlike the one glimpsed before.  You could possibly construe it as possession addling her brain or an additional layer of revenge against the morons who used her as a meat puppet, but her actions are both far too vindictive and far too contrary to what our understanding of her place in the midst of a sea of angry dead would indicate should happen.  Yes, I am going to out and out say the ending is bad because she abandons a dog in the middle of nowhere, and no, I am not going to apologize.

Jackie, John, Connie, and myself all agree - Polterheist is a film with a lot've potential and a solid core dynamic that stood a chance at becoming good if more care were paid to its story.  The technical stuff, I don't think you can do much without the funding to hire a better crew or the time necessary to get this one more experience, but the premise and its main characters interactions are worth enough as they appear here to justify further attention and development.  Even if it doesn't become much more than more consistent, satisfying schlock, I'd still appreciate it more if they got it working by giving us a little more Alice and having the villains properly factor into the finale.  Hell, it's already a black comedy: maybe instead of stopping with someone on top, just have everyone keep screwing each other until they're all ghosts and can't be rid of one another.  That's a solid punchline to build towards.

2/5

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