2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Directed by: Stanley Kubrick
Written by: Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C Clarke
Starring: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester

I love that local cinemas are showing prints of old movies. I got to see the 4k transfer of 2001: A Space Odyssey yesterday. My only criticism, the volume in the cinema was too loud. It helped in places, as the classical music soundtrack was all the more powerful when you're in the middle of its bombast, but two sequences in particular almost deafened me. One was when HAL disables the life support systems of the crew in hibernation, and the other was when the Monolith on the moon transmits its message to Jupiter. It certainly made me sympathise with those poor spacemen.

2001 takes its time. Everything moves at a slow and deliberate pace, and it never becomes boring. Even the black screen before the film, after intermission, and after the end credits is made tolerable because of the music. The long sequences of spaceships travelling and docking is made passable by the music, and the "tripping balls" sequence as my friend put it is such an affront of image and sound, that you can't help but be mesmorised.

Even though the majority of the film feels slow, it astonished me how quickly the HAL story moved. We meet the crew of this Jupiter mission, HAL discusses some concerns about the mission before mentioning a malfunction in the craft. The crew go to fix it and it turns out there is nothing wrong with it. Frank and Dave believe HAL is a danger and talk about disconnecting him. He turns on both of them, and Dave barely makes it back to the ship to disable HAL. It speeds along into the final sequence.

I thought about the hero's journey. That if HAL had knowledge of the Monolith and its purpose, perhaps humanity had to prove itself before reaching Jupiter, before unlocking the secrets of the universe. The final shot of the film, the "space baby" returning to Earth makes me think of Dave being completely reborn and ready to lead humanity on its next step (how the Monolith appears to the apes at the start of the movie and inspires them to use tools). When he's in the room at the end, time works in a strange way. It leaps forward in chunks with him in two times at once before fully committing to the future. Whether the old man to space baby transition is a metaphor for the afterlife and a new state of being, or the Monolith is telling Dave that he can jump back in time as well, I don't know.

What I do know is if you have a chance to see 2001 on the big screen, please take the opportunity. 

Personal enjoyment: ★★★★

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

Directed & Written by: Martin McDonagh
Starring: Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell

As I was watching Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, I felt that the film had no characters that I could get behind. While I could understand their motivation, it didn't excuse their behaviour, and often their behavior was unconscionable. This changed for me at the midway point when Chief Willoughby takes his own life, leaving letters for his wife, Mildred, and Dixon. I had seen Willoughby as an antagonist because Mildred is the protagonist. She feels that the local police aren't doing enough to find her daughter's killer, and the purchase of the three billboards is what kicks off the story. Even without the billboards, Willoughby would have still taken his own life, but perhaps the events that directly follow the suicide would not have happened. Dixon's violence, firing, and redemption.

Dixon changes more than Mildred. It's fitting that the end of the film is the two driving to Idaho to murder a man who they are not quite sure is a rapist. It's as if their anger and vengeance is dissipating. Whether it's because of their close proximity to each other or just what they've gone through, I am unsure. I think Mildred is so twisted up inside, that the only person who can be near her without setting her off is someone like Dixon. That's why the dinner with James is so depressing. James comes across as a good man. Mildred is too damaged for a good man. Maybe she always was, considering her ex-husband. I wonder about him, for the ditzy 19 year old he's parading around doesn't seem to set off his rage like Mildred. He even says to her at the end that anger just begets greater anger. Mildred is like a radiator, her anger glowing even in the one scene we get before the death of her daughter.

There's an undercurrent of black humour. The previous film by Martin McDonagh was Seven Psychopaths. While violent, it was funny. Three Billboards has humour, but it feels sub-textual. Like the whole story is a farce. For instance, in the letter Willoughby writes Mildred, he mentions that a lot of these types of crimes get solved by the killer being overheard in a bar. Sure enough, Dixon overhears someone discussing a similar crime while drinking, gets beat up in order to grab his DNA, and when the tests come back, it turns out this guy wasn't even in the country when Angela was killed. The scenes between Mildred and Willoughby or Mildred and Dixon in the police station have a fencing quality to them as barbs are tossed back and forth. Dixon for all his violence and racism is a joke of a man. The film is telling us to laugh at him. That the ending leaves things unresolved also feels like a dark joke. That this is just how life goes. It sucks doesn't it? Maybe if someone learned something, than it makes things a little better. Dixon gives Mildred some hope at the end of the film, just as their doubt in the excursion to Idaho gives the viewer a little hope that maybe things won't get worse by seeing this through.

Personal enjoyment: ★★★★

Nanook of the North (1922)

Directed by Robert J Flaherty

I am unsure if Nanook of the North is the first ever documentary, but I thought a lot about the creed of the documentarian to not interfere with the subject matter, at least when it comes to nature documentaries. Here we're tracking the survival of an Inuit family in the arctic circle. The film opens up with screens of inter-titles explaining Robert Flaherty's history in discovering the power of documentary, and then creating one around a person. It also lets the audience know that his subject Nanook, died of starvation during the time Flaherty was back in Hollywood putting his film together. It lends a grimness to the capturing of this jovial and accomplished hunter on celluloid.

This family goes days without food. Fish, Walruses, Seals, these are scarce, especially during the winter months. The pelts that Nanook and his family wear are from arctic foxes and polar bears. The kayak and sleds are stretched from seal skin. Everything that keeps these people alive is taken from the land, and is dangerous to acquire. There's a long sequence of Nanook and his fellow hunters sneaking up on a family of walruses. They're so hungry when they finally capture one, that they carve it up and eat the meat raw. Near the end of the film there's an extended sequence of Nanook pulling a seal out of a hole in the ice. It takes the strength of everyone to make sure the creature doesn't escape. When describing Nanook, the film tells us that he has killed many polar bears with nothing more than a harpoon. I gained a huge respect for the skills of the man.

One of the most impressive sequences was how quickly they built an igloo on their journey through the wintery wastes. The inter-titles tell us that it takes about an hour. Nanook licks his ivory knife so the saliva that freezes instantly into ice will add to its cutting power, creating blocks of snow. Nanook cuts a sheet of ice to use as a window, and uses snow to reflect the sun through it. There's a separate igloo for the husky puppies so the larger dogs who are just as hungry as Nanook and his family don't eat them.

It's the dogs that hurt the most. In the final shots of the film, Nanook and his family sleep in an abandoned igloo while a winter storm rages. The dogs left outside are pelted with snow and lie in small, frozen looking clumps on the ground. Asking a friend about this, she told me that huskies are built for this sort of thing and the dogs were most likely fine. This leads back into my original thought of the role of the documentarian. I have a feeling that Flaherty and his team were not going cold and hungry. They were never on camera so must have taken care of their own survival. They must have arranged matters with Nanook as to this being the case and Nanook sounds like he was happy about the film. I guess it sits a bit sour treating another human being like any other documentary subject, especially when life in the arctic cicle is so unforgiving.

Personal enjoyment: ★★★

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)

Directed and written by: Christopher McQuarrie

Starring: Tom Cruise, Rebecca Ferguson, Jeremy Renner

The draw of the Mission Impossible movies is that you watch them to see Tom Cruise pull off ridiculous stunts. The stunts are real, and the names have been changed to protect the innocent. Wrong TV series. The film opens up with Ethan Hunt hanging off the side of a plane as it takes off, and then keeps upping the ante with one meticulously put together action set piece after another. Ethan has been after a group called 'The Syndicate'. They're an anti-IMF (impossible mission force). Meanwhile the IMF is shut down because Alec Baldwin as head of the CIA thinks that Ethan has made up The Syndicate to excuse his reckless behaviour. Can Ethan uncover and stop The Syndicate while keeping one step in front of the CIA, and why do both sides keep giving Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) so many second chances?

I'll be interchanging the names of the characters with the names of the actors that play them. As stated above, I'm here to watch Tom Cruise pull off ridiculous stunts while Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner, and Ving Rhames support him. The highlight of Rogue Nation is the opera sequence. There's an assassination planned. There are three shooters to make sure the job gets done. The hit is going to be masked by a crescendo in the opera, and the use of the set, the editing, and music are used to not only increase tension, but so we know exactly where every player is and wonder how such a plan is going to be thwarted. Ethan's decision, and how it later ends up not mattering doesn't lessen the sequence in any way. It was the stand out of the entire film for me.

It's also rather early on, yet the action sequences that follow aren't diminished for not living up to it. The true impossible mission in Casablanca works because of the ridiculous technology, and timing required to pull it off. I will admit I rolled my eyes when Ethan was about to insert the chip into the computer that would allow Simon Pegg access to the facility, and then a rotating winch clocks him in the stomach, causing him to drop the chip. I was disgusted with what I felt was the artificiality of causing a hiccup in the plan. 

The final sequence almost rises to the brilliance of the opera but in a different way. The opera was a lot of moving pieces that we were able to follow. The ending is a classic "how are they going to get out of this" scenario. Sitting down at a table in a crowded restaurant with a bomb strapped to Benji, Lane (Sean Harris, the leader of The Syndicate) tells Ethan that he foresaw this ending from the moment he trapped Ethan in the record shop at the start of the movie. It becomes about motivation and character behaviour. Ethan as our hero is so much better than Lane. His outmaneuvering allows defusion of the literal ticking time bomb. They escape, Ilsa has a brutal knife fight, and Ethan traps Lane in a box. I don't understand why at this point Lane wanted to kill Ethan rather than capturing him because of the information in his head, but it was a satisfying conclusion nonetheless.

Personal enjoyment: ★★★★

Spider-Man Homecoming (2017)

Directed by: Jon Watts

Written by: Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley

Starring: Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Robert Downey Jr.

Spider-Man Homecoming is an example of how it's important to go into any movie with little or no expectations. Not only were the Sam Raimi films on my mind, but also the lukewarm critical reaction to Homecoming. Nothing negative, but not really any praise either. It seemed a middle of the road Marvel entry. Imagine my surprise when I had a smile on my face for all of Act one, and the Act 3 reveal and build up both shocked and excited me. Shock because I didn't see Toomes' reveal as Michelle's dad coming, and excitement for how the story built to its finale from that reveal. My only real complaints are that Act 2 kind of dragged (especially leading up to the Ferry action set piece), and some scenes of genuine emotion were undercut for a joke (the most egregious being Happy with Peter in the bathroom at the end of the movie).

I like that Homecoming didn't bother with an origin story. Tony Stark finds Peter Parker during the events of Civil War and at the start of this film gives him the Special Stark Spidey Suit™. When his best friend Ned finds out that he's Spiderman, we get a brief exchange about how he was bitten by a radioactive spider, but the rest of the story is implied by small details like mixing his web solution in chemistry class. Incidentally, as a Spidey fan (he's always been my favourite superhero), I prefer when he creates the webs naturally from his body, but I appreciate that this detail explains what version of Spiderman we're dealing with in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

I'm less sure about Karen. That's the name Peter gives to the Stark suit's AI when he gets Ned to unlock the training wheels protocol. There's some fun moments with Peter not used to everything the suit can do (including its lethal and interrogational capabilities), and it gives him another personality to quip back and forth with during the action scenes. It comes in handy too, but I think it plays into the larger theme of the movie, that Stark and the Avengers are not what Spiderman is. While the suit is useful (just like how Peter's desire to help on a greater scale with The Avengers is useful), by relying on that power, things can get out of hand. Maybe it's the finale with the Vulture on that airplane that cements this idea in Peter's mind that the risk versus reward is too great, especially when his duty as an Avenger clashes with his desires as an adolescent in high school.

I've always liked The Vulture as a villain. When I was collecting comics, he was a decrepit old man dying of cancer, but his flying suit, evil gaze and remorseless attitude stayed with me. Keaton imbues the character with a cocksurety and cold calculation that feels like it shouldn't work. He's a working class guy who's all buddy buddy, until he kills you. The best part was his speech to Peter before he brings the roof down. It's similar to Killmonger from Black Panther in that The Vulture isn't wrong in his motivation, but he's wrong in his actions, or at least he's wrong because he's in direct opposition to our hero. I also appreciated that he didn't die at the end of the film. Spiderman saves him, and the first of the post-credits scenes show him in prison facing off with a character who I assume is going to be The Scorpion. I wonder if we'll get a build up to a Sinister Six movie.

Finally, I think the post-credits sequence of Homecoming is my favourite post credits sequence in any Marvel movie.

Personal Enjoyment: ★★★★

Broken Blossoms (1919)

Directed by: DW Griffith

Written by: Thomas Burke & DW Griffith

Starring: Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, Donald Crisp

I had some reservations about Broken Blossoms during the intro credits as one of the main characters was called 'The Yellow Man'. The film starts off in China, and while it casts Asian actors to play Asian people, I was unsure of The Yellow Man. At times he looked Asian, and at times he looked like a Caucasian playing an Asian. He's also referred to as a "chink" after moving to Limestone, in London. Even Lucy, the girl he nurses back to health says to him, "Why are you so good to me chinky?". I was shocked by how casually the slur was thrown around. Especially because The Yellow Man is technically the hero of the story, and the film sympathises with him. Perhaps "chink" was not a slur in 1919, or perhaps racism was less of an issue for audiences. 

A point of interest in regards to this idea is that when Battling Burrows discovers that Lucy has been staying with The Yellow Man (Burrows is a drunken lout of a boxer who found Lucy as a baby and has been raising and terrorising her), the film tells us that there is nothing he hates more than people who weren't born in his country. This reads to me as motivation for him to assault The Yellow Man rather than getting the audience to sympathise with the villain in any way. Although I felt that his anger towards Lucy at the end of the film was because he thought they had slept together and he had sullied her, rather than him just hating foreigners. 

This is the third movie by DW Griffith I have seen (The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance being the other two), and I have a general feeling of his aesthetic as a filmmaker. His inter-titles have a poetry to them. He names characters after archetypes or characteristics and uses the text to talk about their yearning or internal motivations. Broken Blossoms helped me see one of the strengths of silent film. Using the inter-titles, you can set up a scene with the emotion and action you are after and then let the moving image pay off what you have set up. What the actors are saying to each other doesn't matter because the audience knows what is supposed to be happening. The tragedy of this story is amplified by how lovingly Griffith talks about these characters as the events are playing out. It also helps that the cinematography is excellent in capturing the emotions of our main three characters and the interactions between them.

Donald Crisp who plays Battling Burrows is a magnetic screen presence. His rage is palpable. You would think a boxer would be able to get rid of his pent up aggression, but no, Lucy faces the brunt of it, even after a match. She lives in constant terror that this man will kill her, and sadly that's exactly what ends up happening. That The Yellow Man kills Burrows almost means nothing because the horrible death of Lucy has already happened, and a swift death for Burrows doesn't feel like justice. Even worse, before the police arrive, The Yellow Man commits suicide next to the body of Lucy, who he loves. The film ends and makes one wonder what was it all for?

Is it meant to show us just how unfair life is for so many people? How even someone with such beauty, or a man trained for peace in the ways of the Buddha can be knocked around by fate and meet a sad and untimely end? Is it showing the horrors of abuse and racism? Is it meant to show that even through tragedy love between two unlikely people can blossom? There's a line in the film about The Yellow Man's love being so innocent and pure that even his enemies have to admit to it. Is it a film about naivety? The Yellow Man seems to be adrift in life, having lost his way after moving to Limestone. Lucy is a teenager and has nothing that brings her joy. Burrows despite being a good boxer is nothing but a personification of rage and terror. I wanted to cheer for Lucy and The Yellow Man but it's not like they have a relationship so I don't see comparisons to Romeo & Juliet and the idea of star-crossed lovers. When the film ended I was shocked and saddened by the outcome.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the more confused I am about what Broken Blossoms is actually trying to say.

Personal enjoyment: ★★★