"Alphaville" - Film Review

Alphaville is a peculiar movie, to say the least. Unconventional, hard to follow, and a smorgasbord of this and that, the film is certainly not for everyone. For those interested in the work of seminal director Jean-Luc Godard, this is not the suggested entry point upon his unique auteuristic vision or his influence on the French New Wave and films more generally.

For starters, the plot in a nutshell: intergalactic detective and spy Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) infiltrates the futuristic, technocratic dictatorship Alphaville in order to dismantle it from within. Alphaville is run by a sentient computer Alpha 60 (flavorings of Hal-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey). Alpha 60 has banned all non-logical forms of thinking such as love and various other emotions, and breaks between sequences are filled with the odd, larynx impaired Alpha reciting bizarre, surreal poetry. 

Unexpectedly though, the film doesn’t feature any unwieldy sci-fi sets; instead the film was shot on real locations in and around Paris with more modern architecture standing in for futuristic designs.

Featuring Godard’s usual jump cuts and improvised dialogue, the film is tinged with a feel of the avant-garde and the experimental. More appealing as a sumptuous, gorgeous sight to behold than a satisfying narrative, the film is gorgeously shot and has beautiful use of lighting. 

Godard loved unconventionality, innovation, and experimentation, as much as perhaps his radical political views, and nowhere is that more apparent than in Alphaville. For the uninitiated, it might be better to start with Breathless (which is far better and far more influential), but it still represents much of why Godard was such a breath of fresh air in the 1960’s, just in mash-up form. 

Grade: B

How I Met Your Mother - "Bad Crazy" - Review

How I Met Your Mother is a case study in “stalling” tactics for a television series. I know I’ve reiterated this to the point of beating a dead horse profusely. However, it bears repeating simply for the fact that the show may finally have found a story that unlike many stories it’s done in the past actually works as a stalling effort. The Jeanette story is clearly a stall tactic but works much better than previous stall tactics because it feels like there’s real stakes and significance to this plot beyond it being something to distract us until we meet the mother.

Older Ted makes the claim that Jeanette is the last stepping stone that Ted needs to cross in order to be ready for the mother. In the flash forward, we even see Ted say: “No more dating. I’m settling down”. Whether this story will prove to be a plausible enough catalyst to lead Ted to want to cut ties with single life remains to be seen, but it’s a start. 

Though this isn’t exactly the most interesting story the series has attempted (and there's some leaps in logic), it’s still amusing and at turns charming, and the writers find nice ways to milk jokes (the Lily-Robin flash forward every few years plot started to grate but then they did the Mike Tyson reveal and it made it all worth it).

While the two plots of this episode clashed with eachother at times, both in terms of format and tone, taken on their own, they’re both two of the better plots the series has done this season. I wasn’t blown away by this, but like last week’s Robin Sparkles video (although to a much lesser extent) the series still managed to find some nice character moments and some good jokes (even if at turns both were a bit predictable).   

Stray Observations:

-The flash forward to the aftermath of Jeanette could be another one of those things the series never really pulls off that gracefully, but the writers have executed such things well in the past, just not in the last three seasons.

-The montage of Barney and Marshall bringing stuff to Ted’s apartment is clichéd but it gets in some solid jokes including Marshall leading in a horse, and Barney somehow defying physics and carrying both ends of the boat.

-Jeanette really likes Marilyn Monroe … so they had a séance … where they talked to her cat.

-Abbey Elliot is really great as Jeanette and she makes the character charming and sweet even as she’s threatening to kill a referee.

-“You’re the one who invited in the vampire”

-Jeanette’s apparently a cop. And cue more Departed references. They have not felt at all organically introduced even if it's fun to watch Josh Radnor and Jason Segel say "Cawp"

-Jeanette’s description of Lily is possibly the funniest line of the episode: “with her fancy medical degrees and her sexy southern drawl”

-Apparently Mike Tyson is a senator in the future.

-“We heard you screaming from three blocks away”

-One of the mysteries Barney puts out there as never going to get answered is his job.

-“Oh right. I’m a monster.”

-“May be the old lady with a face tattoo is right”

-“I think you’re a little crazy right now” – Lily convincing Ted to keep dating Jeanette felt like a really nice and true character beat. Even if I don't buy the rationale behind it.

-Lily on when things end up going badly with Jeanette: “And when things go up in flames, and I expect there to be literal flames”

-“I’m going to send Lilly a dead animal in the mail”

Grade: B-

What did everyone else think?

"Freaks" - Film Review

“Gooble-gobble! We accept her! One of us!” and so with that haunting chant, the good-natured, mocked circus performers of Freaks strike an odd chord with us. It’s one of those lines that has since blown up far bigger than the cult morality tale itself.

Though overlooked in its own time due to the "sensitive virtues" of theater goers, Freaks is a film whose success has grown with time. Much of what makes the film so great: it's shock value, it's many scares, and how genuinely touching it can be were discovered much later in midnight movie screenings in the 70's and 80's.

At the same time, Freaks is one of those Pre-Code Hollywood films that would never have gotten made after 1934. Once the Hays Code kicked in, some of the more objectionable material of the film would never have passed the standards test. As it stands much of the brilliant final sequence where the titular “freaks” take their revenge on the “normal” people, who turn out to be the real freaks, has been significantly cut for how graphic it apparently was. But it didn’t need to be any more explicit than it already was. We’re given an incredibly good sense of how far the justifiable vengeance sought upon Olga Baclanova’s Cleopatra and Henry Victor’s Hercules goes. 

Neither do I believe Freaks would get made nowadays; though it has some modern sensibilities to its narrative (it’s realistic, loving depiction of the circus performers feels like something films would shy away from until the breakdown of studio control in the 70’s), there’s still a fair level of quaintness to the film. A number of the film’s plots are just everyday occurrences, “slice of life” pieces about the performers that never go anywhere. Plus much of the film is blatantly black and white in its moral relativity. But that’s totally cool; we want to see the circus performers get back after all the jokes, criticisms, and eventually attempted extortion.  

Director Tod Browning (who directed the original Dracula) actually spent time as part of a traveling circus and drew upon his experiences for making the film. Browning went out of his way to hire real carnival performers and its part of the film’s charm. If the characters had just been actors in prosthetics it wouldn’t have the same impact. 

Though some of its execution isn’t particularly graceful, it’s still one of those oft-forgotten gems of the early years of Hollywood. Oh, and that final sequence where the “freaks” get their revenge still holds water; it’s one of the scariest and most memorable sequences in all of cinema. 

Grade: A-

Girls - “One Man’s Trash” - Review

Television series have to balance story-arc heavy episodes and standalone episodes. The standalone episodes may be informed by larger narrative, serialized elements, but anyone can come in and watch that episode without being unreasonably confused. Television viewers have become so literate with the medium and so used to serialized narratives that it’s easy to mistake a standalone episode as a bad thing. But on the contrary some of television’s best episodes are standalones. The episode that crystalized The Sopranos as the show we know it today was the standalone episode “College”.

Standalone episodes are frequently used to do structurally or stylistically ambitious or interesting things not normally done on a show. Many of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s best episodes including “The Zeppo”, “Hush”, and “The Body” work perfectly as standalone episodes while also breaking formatting and structural rules to great effect. 

“One Man’s Trash” is a standalone episode. Much like season one’s “The Return” (another, very good standalone), it cuts out almost every other major character besides Hannah. There’s no Marnie; there’s no Jessa; there’s no Shoshanna. Ray appears only briefly and only then to get the plot in motion. Otherwise this is a half-hour dedicated to the puzzling and often frustrating psyche of Hannah Horvath. 

When Ray’s neighbor Joshua complains about finding trash from Ray’s coffee shop in his garbage can he asks him to stop. Ray knows that this couldn’t possibly be true and so he begins to berate Joshua. Well, the garbage was from Ray’s coffee shop and Hannah is responsible. She goes to apologize to Joshua and somehow ends up spending the rest of the day and the following day talking, fucking, and hanging out with the forty something guy separated from his wife whose out in San Diego.

  

Here the meandering aimlessness of Girls (with massive hints of Louie) comes out in full force. It’s hard to read where this episode is going to go from one moment to the next. Hannah starts out the episode believing she invented the word “sexit” and ends up hooking up with a total stranger.

The total irony of the episode is that Hannah’s big revelation she has, breaking down in tears and confessing to Joshua, is that she’s tired of “having experiences”. And yet the whole episode is one of those bizarre series of events she’s been seeking to write about since the start of the series. 

Hannah’s adventure seeking has driven her to a point of desperation. She’s on the rocks with both Marnie and Elijah; she broke up with Sandy and she lost Adam who’s continually gotten crazier. It’s no wonder she declares “I’m so lonely”. Hannah is her own worst enemy and early on in the episode it almost feels impressive that Joshua isn’t felled over by Hannah’s narcissism. 

Lena Dunham’s storytelling suits itself well to this kind of wandering storytelling. Standalone episodes almost provide the perfect framework in which to tell such sorts of stories. It would be impractical for the series to do this in every single episode (at least as extensively as it’s done here), but it highlights many of the series best aspects: its wonderful character work (even from guest stars), its wry sense of humor, and its ability to set a tonality. 

Stray Observations:

-The weirdest part of the episode: The "beg me to stay" scene which is a line of pleasure seeking, self-satisfaction Hannah would totally go for.

-Urban Dictionary of course has tons of definitions for "sexit", none of which are Hannah's. 

-What are we to make of Hannah's bizarre garbage drop off fetish? Or better yet how the episode ends with her taking out the trash?

Grade: A

The Walking Dead - "The Suicide King" - Review

After an almost neckbreakingly fast first eight episodes, the mid-season return “The Suicide King” is decidedly slower than the previous episodes of season three. It’s not entirely unexpected, after tossing kerosene wildly on everything in its path, the show invariably needed to take stock of everything that had happened up to this point. Whether that calm before the storm ought to have been the mid-season return is a completely different story.

Walking Dead fans know from experience that slowing down can be almost unbearable. Season two was practically a case study in what slow pacing can do to this series, and that can be incredibly painful.

But the series makes the more cautious outing work (mostly) by filling it with character scenes that feel meaningful and often work either to advance current plots, or develop new or underdeveloped characters. Season two failed because it never used its quieter moments to either move the plot forward or tell us something interesting we didn’t know about a character. And with no real purpose, it became grating and frustrating. 

Now not every scene in “Suicide King” works. Beth has had so little in the way of development that when she starts espousing her opinions on what the group should do I had no clue how to feel. There had been almost no earlier scenes where we got a moment in which Beth went: “Hey, this is who I am and why you should care about me”. Similarly, Carole is practically a nonentity; so much so that it’s hard to feel bad for her when Darryl chooses not to come back (Better still: putting Carl and Carole together. It’s like the writers wanted to find the ultimate unengaging pairing). 

However, despite these few scenes that don’t quite work, generally speaking the stakes feel much, much higher. The mere fact that major characters (albeit ones I didn’t really care about) died earlier in the season has me nervous about nearly everyone. When Darryl was forced to fight his brother to the death by the Governor, I was at times both nerve racked and thrilled. Darryl is the character who’s arguably been the best utilized by the series. Enough groundwork has been laid down for him to be more than just a caricature redneck, and in the hands of Norman Reedus the character has become not just a total badass but the heart and soul of the series. The group’s rescue of Darryl comes off as a bit too easy considering how hard it was to get in and out in the first place, but it's hard to imagine a much nicer fix to that scenario.  

The show never would have been able to manage something that truly left me wanting more (i.e. the mid-season cliffhanger that left Darryl’s life in the balance) pre-third season. Sure, if the writers had done better character work and created more interesting conflicts perhaps season two could have, but besides Darryl, Rick, Maggie, and Glen, almost every character felt like simply zombie chow in the making. Now even Chad Coleman’s newly introduced Tyrese receives a couple scenes that endear us to him already. That’s a major step up from what the series has attempted in the past. While some of this still doesn’t work, it’s a vast improvement that continues this season’s great streak … just at a more deliberate pace. 

Stray Observations:

-The whole argument between the group in the woods outside of Woodbury was some great writing and acting. The cherry on top: Rick knocks out Merle.

-I’m interested to see the dynamic of Darryl and Merle; it seems good for now. I just hope they don’t contrive some terrible reason to bring Darryl back into the fold.

-Glen smashing the zombie head in was another great scene: It tells us everything going on inside his head, and Steven Yeun plays it great.

-The Governor meanwhile is losing his shit. He kills a dying man in front of everyone.

-The Governor admits everything he's been withholding from Andrea. Did not expect that but it makes sense considering how crazy the Governor has apparently become. Andrea seems to be stepping up into a leadership position. A.K.A. Andrea does something that makes her character less unlikable for once (too bad it’s undercut by the fact I know about only three other people in Woodbury).  

-The cut to commercial where it gets all wonky while Rick watches the baby cry was a weird editing choice.

-Written on the box the baby is in in: “Lil’ Asskicker”. D’Awww.

-Who wants to play: spot how they hide the fact that Hershel is missing a leg. It's getting pretty obvious.

-Admittedly, that ending was totally bizarre and I’m not sure I entirely like it. We’ll see how it plays out. 

Grade: B+

"Rope" - Film Review

Alfred Hitchcock always seemed to use every one of his movies to explore something different with the film medium. Nowhere was this ever more apparent than in Rope.

Rope is shot entirely long takes; it’s intended to make us believe the film is shot in one continuous shot, but there are some fairly obvious (occasionally awkward) cuts where the camera bumps into an object or the back of a person. None the less, these shots go until the camera reel runs out of film and thus many of these shots must have required impressive and lengthy staging.   

There’s a high level of theatricality; large portions of the film feel like an experimental play. Hitchcock finds interesting ways to make use of the limited space which only takes place in a compact apartment.

Based on the play of the same name by Patrick Hamilton, Rope tells the story of Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan (John Dall and Farley Granger) who kill their former classmate David Kently as a form of intellectual exercise. They then hold a party using the chest David resides in as a serving table, inviting guests close to David (including his father (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) and his fiancé (Joan Chandler)). They (particularly Brandon) find a weird, sick pleasure out of the excitement of trying to get away with being caught. Phillip, however, often seems to have been unwittingly drawn into the scheme and grows increasingly nervous as the night wears on. 

Though Jimmy Stewart is top billed as their prep school housemaster Rupert Cadell, the film is really a showcase for the talents of Dall and Granger. Dall is unimaginably slimy as he plays up the virtues of killing someone, and Granger plays off Dall’s beguiling straight charm quite well with his sweaty flustered anxiety. Stewart plays against typecast of the goodnatured everyman; it’s slightly bizarre to see him praise the notion of killing someone with his usual amiable drawl. However, Stewart does a fine job even if he doesn’t seem the best suited person for the role at times. 

Though perhaps unnecessarily experimental, especially for this subject matter, it’s still a fascinating story with strong performances.

Grade: A-

"Dead Snow" - Film Review

Nazis Zombies? NAZI ZOMBIES?! Yes, Nazi freakin’ zombies…

Now that we have that out of the way, Dead Snow is a horror comedy about a group of friends who travel up to an isolated, snowbound cabin. This cabin just happens to be located near the site of a gruesome Nazi burial site. And hence the film’s central gimmick: Nazi Zombies. 

Dead Snow is a concept movie. Concept movies live or die by their big central idea, which may be cool on paper but can fail disastrously when put to screen. 

Dead Snow avoids the pratfalls of the hokieness of its overlying premise, by doubling down. Yes, Nazi zombies are an almost stupidly ridiculous concept. It combines two of film's most notorious villains. But once you get past the initial intriguing-ness of this pitch, what else is there to tell?

Well, it’s to the credit of writer and director Tommy Wirkola that the film moves past its initial premise and succeeds by playing up its excesses to the extreme. 

Dead Snow is frequently scary. But it’s even more frequently hilarious. There’s a massive shock value inherent in the film going over the top at every turn. There are some wondrously disgusting scenes that have a feeling of gleeful reckless abandon. The special effects and the use of gore are used to drench the pure white snow with buckets upon buckets of blood. 

This isn’t the best film, or even the best horror movie. But it’s incredibly entertaining. 

Grade: B-