A Collection of (Short) Reviews

Some short impressions / reviews / whatever, written between June 2015 and last week, all taken from my Letterboxd, and all revised to be a little less fragmented. I like them, and I'd rather they were all in one place — so here they are.

Autumn Tale | Eric Rohmer, 1998

The way Rohmer shoots conversations between two people in this is fascinating. Characters talk objectively about their love lives together in a two-shot, before, usually as one of them says something the other doesn't agree with or want to talk about, one of them leaves the frame. The camera stays as it is, leaving one character alone in a shot made for two, while Rohmer cuts to the other in a shot of their own. The conversations continue as if nothing has happened, cutting back and forth between the two shots, and the characters generally reunite within one frame after talking a little more, but the distance between them in these brief moments, however small, feels enormous, suggesting a divide between them that bubbles under the surface of every word they're saying.

An Autumn Afternoon | Yasujiro Ozu, 1962

Calendars and clocks, usually placed right next to each other, seem to take up space on the walls of every building. One of the clocks, in the eldest son's small, modern apartment, needs to be wound to stop it from stopping, and the calendar in the hyper-Americanised bar shows two months on a single page. Ozu isn't just making us aware of time and its passing, but also how indefinite and imprecise time can be. That clock could have stopped hours, days, even weeks earlier, and the date could be represented by any of the numbers on the calendar. The present becomes harder and harder to grasp — an uncertain period between the past and the future, tradition and modernity, men and women, East and West, the old and the young.

The Color of Money | Martin Scorsese, 1986

A retired pool hustler turned whiskey salesman drinks a can of Coca Cola in a practice room after working on his game, as if to embrace the new-school, sugar-rush attitudes that have made him obsolete. His maniacally arrogant new protégé values the short term thrill of a victory over the long term reward of making people believe you're a loser and taking their money when you show them that you're not. There's no time to wait for craft anymore. It's about the rush. Quick money for a quick game. Coca Cola sells by the can while his whiskey fills boxes in storerooms. It doesn't sell anymore.

Homework | Abbas Kiarostami, 1989

A series of very simple 1-on-1 interviews in which Kiarostami (wearing sunglasses indoors, sat behind a desk) asks several schoolchildren about their homework that, collectively, paints a picture of a generation of children failed by education, both in school and at home. As the interviews mount up, patterns begin to emerge: stories of violent schoolteachers, illiterate and impatient family members, the importance of cartoons; and the accumulation of these similarities creates a sense of universality, that education in Iran is failing not just at this school, but across the entire country. Away from the interviews Kiarostami observes life in the school: in particular, a school-wide religious ceremony of remembrance that quickly descends into chaos. The students are asked to repeat the words of a religious song the headteacher is singing, but their attention drifts. They talk among themselves and play with their friends, not because they're disrespectful, but because they have no comprehension of why this ceremony should be respected. Dictation and repetition does not create understanding. Kiarostami emphasises this by silencing their singing ("out of respect for the ritual", an adult perspective), instead focusing on the indifferent, unknowingly offensive behaviour of the students, while the teachers simply continue, seemingly oblivious to the problem in front of their eyes.

In The Mouth of Madness | John Carpenter, 1994

Carpenter's tight framing and slow panning offers a world of potential horrors offscreen, forever out of sight: an unfathomable danger that may not exist, emanating from a place that's impossible to accurately comprehend. A town, not on any map, and only found following a bizarre transportive nightmare, is the source of a demonic plague affecting the readers of a smash-hit horror novel, and viewers of the smash-hit movie adaptation (a lot of people across America (at least)). But is it really happening, or is it a fiction? Nothing is concrete. It's an illogical movie, or one that at least has its own logic: roads impossibly loop back on themselves, people disappear in one place and reappear somewhere totally different. Something is making people do crazy, monstrous things, whether it's real or not. Cultural hysteria or supernatural force: what's the difference?

Lady in the Water | M. Night Shyamalan, 2006

Shyamalan loves closed-off, self-sustaining communities (the farm in Signs, the village in The Village, etc), in which some kind of unfathomable alien threat is closing in from outside. Here, the threat is so strange: a fantasy in real life, but taken seriously to the point that nobody questions it. A water nymph appears in the pool of an apartment complex, and the concern of the characters isn't "who are you really?", but rather "why are you here?" and "how can I help you?" The entire community runs with it, and everyone in the complex has a role that they take without question. Total, unwavering faith. Hearing is believing. Action is never in doubt.

Loft | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2005

The stagnation of an award-winning author out of ideas, commissioned to churn out a generic, marketable romance novel and embroiled in a ghost story that may or may not be a fiction. "The eternal corpse," used here to describe a 1000 year old "mummy" preserved virtually intact by the mud of a swamp (mud that the author inexplicably coughs up, as if to reject the idea that preservation of past glories will be any part of her future), could be equally used to summarise a genre that, by 2005, had perhaps run its course for Kurosawa (his only other classifiable horror movie since then, Retribution, was released the following year as part of a J-horror series in the pipeline since 2004). A funeral of sorts, then, and what a send off it is — flitting gleefully between classic Kurosawa accretion of tension and an exaggerated, Twixt-like visual flare (swirling fog on a lake, cartoonish green corpses, incongruous whip pans and fade outs), this bizarrely constructed narrative, complete with flashbacks and dream sequences contained within blurred layers of fiction and reality, is significantly less concrete than its face value suggests. And then there's the devilish ending, only muddying the waters further. A bewildering line in the sand.

Masques | Claude Chabrol, 1987

Perhaps the quintessential Chabrol movie. Makes literal his interest in masks by presenting each character as a false version of themselves, generally used to hide their real, somewhat surreptitious motivations. The match-making for the elderly TV show, with its assertive "applaud!" signs and love-heart number cards being an interesting parallel to this idea of an ever-present falsehood clouding reality — although perhaps a more interesting one would be the game of tennis that the show's host and his biographer briefly play, if only because of tennis's unusual status as a sport in which a player can score more points and win more games than an opponent and still lose the match.

Private Fears in Public Places | Alain Resnais, 2006

Connections based on (literal) divisions: walls, windows, curtains, bars; relationships based on untruths: false names, sexuality, miscommunication, the difference between hearing and listening. If nobody is what they appear to be then nobody really knows anybody, and we're all doomed to be disappointed and alone, with or without another person.

PTU | Johnnie To, 2003

To equates respecting the police to respecting a violent gangster who could kill you for not bringing him a beer quickly enough in a restaurant — and why not, when the cops spend so much of their time covering up their own mistakes and incompetence by planting drugs on the innocent, stealing evidence from crime scenes, and torturing people for information, instead of what they should be doing: solving crimes, catching bad guys; all under a misguided code of brotherhood. The fact that the absurd conclusion is a triumph for some and an embarrassing failure for others is particularly damning — people who slip on banana skins are invariably clowns.

Ready Player One | Steven Spielberg, 2018

The gamification of culture is the death of culture. No new ideas in 30 years, just commodified nostalgia, malleable avatars and usernames; cross-brand fantasies played out ad infinitum. The Oasis is a desert, a cultural wasteland, a "place" that Spielberg seems to simultaneously be wary of and have deep reverence for. Specially designed game suits translate digital sensations to physical ones, but they don't cover mouths and tongues — nobody can tell what's real anymore. A race for extraordinary IRL power quickly becomes a URL war for freedom, fought by regular people wearing VR headsets in the streets of a city but lost in a fake world, going through the motions of punching and kicking and shooting each other without physically connecting with anything.

The Unknown Girl | Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2016

Indigestion and vomiting, the benefit of release. Haenel's doctor encourages confession: her patients speak and their illnesses disappear, her ex-intern speaks and becomes a doctor again; but she processes her own guilt in silence, embarking upon a frustrating investigation that she's not equipped to handle while the world around her gets smaller and smaller: a promising career and a dead-end job, a spacious flat and a duvet on an office floor, and a literal hole in the ground that she can't climb out of without someone passing her a ladder.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade | Steven Spielberg, 1989

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade | Steven Spielberg, 1989

Always | Steven Spielberg, 1989

Always | Steven Spielberg, 1989

“To us.” 
“Always.”

A lantern sits precariously on the edge of a table in a bustling dancehall. Two lovers, Dorinda and Pete, celebrate her birthday with friends. They’re both aerial firefighters, but she works ground control as he flies, dropping slurry on forest fires. Helium balloons float uneasily around the room, threatening to burst. They dance to Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. One false move knocks a lantern to the floor and the place erupts into flames — but it never happens. She wants him to stop flying and teach. He won’t give it up. Danger is everywhere but elsewhere. The forest remains on fire. All who love are blind.

And they continue to be. Time passes. Minutes, days, months, all at once. Dorinda dances alone to The Platters in the dress Pete bought her for her birthday as his ghost watches on. She looks right through him now, but he can’t resist dancing with her again: without sight, without touch. There’s nothing to see anymore, nothing to feel. Only memories. He’s the fire, she’s the forest. When a lovely flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes. Put it out and see the stars through the smoke. Treasure the past and live in the present. Find a new song with someone else.

Bridge of Spies | Steven Spielberg, 2015

Bridge of Spies | Steven Spielberg, 2015

American mirrors. The first, seen in the film's opening shot, is utilised for a self-portrait. There are two faces on screen, neither of them real, as well as the back of a man's head out of focus in the foreground. The painting is an impression of a mirror image, a copy of a copy. The man on the canvas wears different clothes to his counterparts. He's a faceless man, a construction of cold light, of dark paint. Every gesture studied and recreated. A Soviet spy.

The second mirror, from the film's closing moments, is in a bedroom. A woman checks on her husband, just returned from negotiating the release of two American men in East Berlin. He has collapsed from exhaustion. She faces him as he lays on the bed, unconscious, and her back is reflected in the mirror, invisible to her. No constructions, no copies. One face, a real one. A return to simplicity.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park | Steven Spielberg, 1997

The Lost World: Jurassic Park | Steven Spielberg, 1997

"We're here to observe and document, not interact"
"That's a scientific impossibility"

A small army of experts and local muscle hired to transport dinosaurs from the original park’s “site B” to San Diego are armed with technology: phones, guns, tranquilliser darts, cages and restraints, radios, cameras, trucks, boats, helicopters. Palaeontologists spew facts about the dinosaurs they look at disbelievingly at rapid speed, barely stopping for breath. Educated precaution. They want you to know that they know everything, that they have everything covered. That nothing can go wrong. But they have no control here. Their technology fails more than it works, and their words have no purpose in the wild. They’re emboldened, but they don’t know what they’re dealing with. At a distance, these dinosaurs are pixels on a landscape, weightless and unreal, but spectacular giants nonetheless, miraculous and impossible, demanding to be studied. But up close, these CGI creatures are puppets and models, awkward and ugly, still unreal but within reach. It’s easy to forget that these are wild animals, so they get too close, and the animals defend themselves. These dinosaurs are manufactured, but they've become natural. Technology can’t control them. Science can’t control them. People are killed by them. The events of The Lost World: Jurassic Park are hubris masquerading as curiosity. A human failure rather than a natural one. Survival of the fittest.

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial | Steven Spielberg, 1982

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial | Steven Spielberg, 1982

The difference between glass and smoke. Behind glass, sight is all we have. We can study, observe, hypothesise; but we can’t feel. Glass is cold, clinical. Glass is distance. A frog in a jar is a frog in a jar. It’s there. We see it so it’s real. But shrouding something in smoke creates doubt. Sight is unreliable, and rationality disappears. We want to believe so we do. Blind hope. A sound from the mist. It’s probably a coyote, but what if it isn’t? How can we find out? We have to look again. We have to look closer. We have to throw a ball into the unknown to see if it comes back. And what if it does?