Recent Viewings, Part 2

[FatFreddysCat]

"Thank God It's Friday" (1978)
A variety of characters have a wild night in and around L.A.'s hottest disco nightclub, "The Zoo," in this kitschy Motown/Casablanca co-production that was obviously meant to ride the coat tails of "Saturday Night Fever." The cast includes a young Jeff Goldblum as the club's owner, a then-unknown Debra Winger, and Donna Summer as an aspiring singer (her song "Last Dance" won an Oscar for Best Song). Harmless fluff.

[M.10rda]

LA FOLIE DU DOCTEUR TUBE (1915):
This odd short comedy was directed by Abel Gance, who later made the infamous 26-hour (or however) long Napoleon biopic, which cannot possibly be anything like this. Figurative and literal egghead "Docteur Tube" is a mad scientist who looks like a Conehead from Remulak. His absentminded goofing-around the laboratory causes an explosion which appears to result in huge clouds of cocaine (!) that intoxicate everyone who enters the laboratory, including two dapper couples on a double date. Much madcap frolicking ensues, with Gance playing around with fish-eyed lenses and distorted reflections, so the audience understands that drugs are craaaaaaaazy, man. Among the puzzling elements of the film: the Docteur's assistant (who also gets dosed) is played by what looks like an 8-10 year old person of color, which seemed a little problematic but hey, at least he wasn't played by a dwarf in brownface.

3/5: Overall an okay way to pass 10 minutes.

[Rev. Powell]

LA FOLIE DU DOCTEUR TUBE (1915):
This odd short comedy was directed by Abel Gance, who later made the infamous 26-hour (or however) long Napoleon biopic, which cannot possibly be anything like this. Figurative and literal egghead "Docteur Tube" is a mad scientist who looks like a Conehead from Remulak. His absentminded goofing-around the laboratory causes an explosion which appears to result in huge clouds of cocaine (!) that intoxicate everyone who enters the laboratory, including two dapper couples on a double date. Much madcap frolicking ensues, with Gance playing around with fish-eyed lenses and distorted reflections, so the audience understands that drugs are craaaaaaaazy, man. Among the puzzling elements of the film: the Docteur's assistant (who also gets dosed) is played by what looks like an 8-10 year old person of color, which seemed a little problematic but hey, at least he wasn't played by a dwarf in brownface.

3/5: Overall an okay way to pass 10 minutes.

Saved to my shorts folder for future review.

[M.10rda]

Well here's another one to consider for future review...

THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII (1908):
Sometimes I forget why I'm compulsively watching a certain type of film in huge waves - recently silent films, such as D.W. Griffith's overlong, dull, and smug THE AVENGING CONSCIENCE. (Actually, those three adjectives could describe every Griffith film I've ever watched.) Then I hit a gem like OUT WEST or THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII, or at least the end of LAST DAYS OF POMPEII, and I re-commit to my warped mission. TLDOP's intertitles weren't translated into English so parts of the plot confused me. It's also possible that this print is incomplete: though there seems to be a beginning and there's definitely an ending, potentially elaborate subplots appear truncated....... then again, I guess that's what happens when a huge volcano suddenly erupts next to your criminal conspiracy...

My admiration for this film is really due to two consecutive long takes in wide shot that happen right before and at the climax to the film. The first one plays out in the sort of locked-down, stagey fashion that we're familiar with from multitudes of movies made in the first half of the 20th century. It's not bad, just fairly routine, though I admired that the director choreographs a crime, the discovery of that crime, and the criminal's successful framing of a patsy all in that one shot.

Then the next shot starts, and this shot is really a marvelous thing of cinematic beauty. I'll keep things vague in case Reverend Powell or anyone else wants to watch this. Generally, the Patsy and two other characters we've never seen are in the foreground. Meanwhile, separate clear action is going on in the midground of the shot, which gives us an idea of what's in store for the Patsy, and then waaaaaay in the background there's clearly also some stuff happening that (the longer I stared at this shot) was really mysterious and impressive to me, production-wise. Eventually the Patsy and the other two characters move to the midground of the shot while the camera remains locked down inside the room that they just left. After some action, the film's protagonist appears, and $#!t Happens, and many extras begin to enter and exit the midground of the shot... and in a single three minute or so take, a lot has happened, all of it makes sense sans dialogue, and the fact that it played out in one static perspective makes the action mean a great deal more than it would have in montage or even in a tracking shot. (It's kinda' like a Roy Andersson shot, only usually his shots just have middle-aged businessmen walking around defeated.) If I had to film the last day of Pompeii today, I'd probably shoot it the exact same way.

4/5 Maybe my film school professors were right - sometimes one great shot does make for a great film.

[M.10rda]

BARBARIAN (2022):
This was a solid 4/5 for me until the last 20 minutes or so, thus I'll spare any detailed discussion for anyone who has yet to see it and may enjoy its series of legitimate surprises. Alas we felt it left the rails significantly at the end, following a few rounds of that hoary old horror movie party game "Why do you keep setting down/losing your cell phone when you constantly need a light source and also for that matter couldn't you just call an ambulance right now...?" In spite of those criticisms, BARBARIAN did the "elevated horror" thing (whatever that actually is) better than many films of the past decade, and I'll try to concisely state Why (below) w/o actually compromising any twists et al.

One of the flavors of Horror that's toughest to evoke well or compellingly is small-l "lovecraftian" horror - not the capital-L cosmic-monster-that-drives-mad-all-those-who-behold-it variety that we know and love from THE THING and CLOVERFIELD, but the more subtle kind where you're bumming around some place that seems familiar and innocuous and then you accidentally uncover heretofore unknown aspects of that location that are sinister and so distasteful as to be borderline unholy and also probably an existential threat to your concept of reality (as well as to your safety). That kind of "l"ovecraftian horror is essentially at work in BLUE VELVET (and in fact in several of David Lynch's films) but though countless horror movies seem to function in generally the same way (where characters scratch a surface to find unknown horrors beneath), it's difficult to think of many that successfully discomfort the viewer and reveal such unsavory truths about The World or Humanity in the way BLUE VELVET or a good Lovecraft short story does. BARBARIAN, at least for the majority of its running time, does small-l lovecraft very well. Brilliantly, it locates its horror not just specifically in a plain-looking AirBNB cottage but generally in an otherwise altogether blighted neighborhood in Detroit: exploited to exhaustion (literally, in fact, r*ped) by unseen white guys, so entirely stripped that Realtor Karens will disregard your complaint calls and even non-white cops won't bother to respond to enforce laws there or acknowledge your pleas for help. BARBARIAN recalls another (popular) horror film from the past decade that was set in Detroit iirc and so similar that even mentioning its title is a major spoiler for this film. I think BARBARIAN is a much stronger (and more lovecraftian) horror film, though, because unlike its predecessor, its horrors do actually evoke often-unacknowledged horrors IRL through a grisly looking glass. I found it all very uncanny/unheimlische!

3.5/5 And then the ending is just kinda' goofy.