"The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension" (1984)

Tens Items or Less

A new writing segment, "Ten Items or Less" is an attempt to consciously cutback and restrict how much I write. I get ten sentences or less to discuss a movie. That's it. Let's see if some genius comes out of working around my self-made obstacle.  

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is one of the oddest and most interesting movies. Telling its story with comic book grandeur and self-assured coolness, the film is essentially the hyper-imaginative, wish fulfillment fantasy for everything a geeky ten year-old could hope for in a film. Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller) is a hero of outsized proportions, a physicist, neurosurgeon, secret agent and rock star, who is followed around by his sidekicks/band who help him in his quest, which involves aliens and being awesome. The more we learn about Banzai, the more impossibly cool and accomplished he becomes. There's a built-in absurdity to the premise, but the film wisely chooses to do two things: play it straight and increasingly escalate the cartoonishness. It's an uneven and frequently convoluted movie but there's enough ideas, energy and generally fun vibe that the film passes on its charm and charisma alone, much like Banzai himself does.

Grade: ★★

"Peeping Tom" (1960)

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A new writing segment, "Ten Items or Less" is an attempt to consciously cutback and restrict how much I write. I get ten sentences or less to discuss a movie. That's it. Let's see if some genius comes out of working around my self-made obstacle.  

"I'm watching you watch me," Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) tells his next unsuspecting victim as he films her filming him, and in that line and moment is the thematic and visual crux of Peeping Tom, a film about scopophilia, or the act of taking pleasure in viewing something. Peeping Tom is a film steeped in metatextual commentary on filmmaking and asks us to question why it is we get such pleasure from film watching experiences and how strange and potentially troublesome the voyeuristic qualities of viewing a film are. It does this by making us identify with its unsettling protagonist and see events through his eyes. The film is a psychologically rich and disturbing character study. Mark is awkward and soft-spoken, which allows him to pass as a shy person rather than one who is on the verge of turning violent at a moments notice. He is the titular peeping tom, and he can't seem to meaningfully interact with anyone or get enjoyment out of anything, except for through taking photos and filming things, especially sexual and violent acts. He's living his life through the filter of the camera, and he doesn't know how to live any other way because he was raised by an obsessive scientist who filmed his son twenty-four seven and used the experiment to test the effects of fear on children. Beyond the fascinating ways the film calls attention to its questions about our film experience, there is simply the creepy story of Tom as he fights his baser impulses and kills women while filming them, in order to re-watch the footage later for the pleasure it will bring. But Tom is still very human in spite of how sickening and unbalanced he is, in part, due to a great performance by Boehm, but also due to Leo Marks' script and Michael Powell's direction allowing us to understand why Tom is as messed up as he is and sympathize with him even as we can't stand to look at him.

Grade: ★★★★

"Heavenly Creatures" (1994)

Tens Items or Less

A new writing segment, "Ten Items or Less" is an attempt to consciously cutback and restrict how much I write. I get ten sentences or less to discuss a movie. That's it. Let's see if some genius comes out of working around my self-made obstacle.  

These days Heavenly Creatures is primarily remembered for having the first featured role for Kate Winslet and being the first film that really put director Peter Jackson on the map, and that's truly a shame because the film is a dark, gorgeous, achingly real story about adolescent and female friendship, isolation and loneliness, and obsession and its cost. The film is based on the tragic real life 1950's story of social misfit fourteen year old Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) who found a kindred spirit in the far more upwardly mobile new student Juliet Hulme (Winslet). In her own way, Juliet is misunderstood, overlooked by her globe-trotting, detached parents, who are barely keeping their marriage from falling apart. The film uses its period setting to show how social constrictions slowly suffocate the growing affection between the two, and how it in turn causes them to escape into a dream world of their own making, beautifully portrayed through some nifty special effects. Their relationship is all very "innocent", as their parents put it, but the more societal pressures and their, mostly, well-meaning, parents push back the more they become invested in the relationship and shut out the rest of the world, ultimately to devastating effect (hinted at from the film's great opening moments that parallel the tragic reality of events with the fantasy world the two girls so desperately wish to be real). Jackson's direction is energetic but it's also great at conveying huge amounts of information through simple but inventive compositions, such as a number of montages that illuminate the growing relationship and demonstrate what each one of them is getting out of the bond. Pauline is more immediately infatuated while Juliet just wants someone who agrees with her opinions and notices her without expectations. The playfulness of the first third of the film slowly shifts as Jackson and Fran Walsh's great script pays attention to the contradictions between the girls' perceptions and the life around them, exposing the hypocrisies of their parents while also recognizing the lack of maturity of the two teens but also the earnestness and value of their relationship. It's a hauntingly beautiful film; tragic and heartbreaking not just for its ultimate consequences but even more due to how all of it could have been avoided.

Grade: ★★★★

"The Raid: Redemption" (2012)

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A new writing segment, "Ten Items or Less" is an attempt to consciously cutback and restrict how much I write. I get ten sentences or less to discuss a movie. That's it. Let's see if some genius comes out of working around my self-made obstacle.  

Cinema is a vehicle for spectacle and pleasure in a way few other mediums are, and when its executed as well as The Raid, it leaves you with your tongue down to the floor drooling with brain-addled delight. The film is essentially an hour and a half of really great, relentless, visceral action, but that ignores how well choreographed and planned out that action is. This a intelligently filmed movie that makes great use of space and camera placement. In its best shot moments, the movement of the camera follows along with the characters to make us feel as if we are there. In more than one virtuoso piece of kung fu meets 80's action movie sequence, there is a fantastic sense of showmanship. The film corners itself into tricky and difficult moments of intense action and finds clever and exciting ways to extricate itself from its SWAT team takes on drug kingpin story (That is action-wise but not necessarily story-wise whose minimalism would make minimalist films laugh). There is no shaky cams or rapid-cut editing as there is too frequently in American action films these days; the film lingers on moments to really show the physicality and brutality of the action taking place as well as to allow us to appreciate how exceptionally difficult many of the stunts are. The Raid is a thrilling movie but it also has an appreciation for the expertise behind the fighting it's displaying, like a Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee martial arts film.

Grade: ★★★

"I Walked with a Zombie" (1943)

Tens Items or Less

A new writing segment, "Ten Items or Less" is an attempt to consciously cutback and restrict how much I write. I get ten sentences or less to discuss a movie. That's it. Let's see if some genius comes out of working around my self-made obstacle.  

Producer Val Lewton's low-budget horror movies thrive on suggestion and what's not shown as much as, if not more so than, what we do, and I Walked With a Zombie is no exception. The film's tension derives from making us sit on the question of whether Paul Holland's (Tom Conway) wife Jessica (Christine Gordon) is or isn't a zombie; well, technically she's zombie either way, but just a sleepwalking vegetable in the less exciting of the possibilities. The film is Jane Eyre thrown into the West Indies and given a heavy dose of voodoo and a moody atmosphere provided by director Jacques Tourneur to match the Victorian Gothic story. So it's no George A. Romero or 28 Days Later, but Tourneur gives the story a strong bite by telling the melodrama about the Holland brothers, their never-ending, bitter sibling rivalry, the lingering damage of the past that won't go away, and how they're doomed to repeat the past. New plantation nurse Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), tasked with caring for Jessica, becomes torn between Paul and Wesley (James Ellison), who also previously pined for Jessica and still stews about it, descending further and further into alcoholism. The film never settles its central tension over whether Jessica is a supernatural undead being, and that's all for the better, leaving it to our imagination and making it far more creepy and strange.

Grade: ★★★

"Poltergeist (1982)

Tens Items or Less

A new writing segment, "Ten Items or Less" is an attempt to consciously cutback and restrict how much I write. I get ten sentences or less to discuss a movie. That's it. Let's see if some genius comes out of working around my self-made obstacle.  

"They're here," Carole Anne Freeling (a perfectly cast Heather O'Rourke) informs us in Poltergeist's most famous line. The moment rightfully deserves all the parody and recognition it has since garnered; it's a truly chilling moment, perhaps the film's most terrifying one, and it plays bluntly but primaly on our fears of not being able to protect our children. Poltergeist taps into real Reagan Era fears over the breakdown of the nuclear family and the home, putting a loving family to the test against outside forces that would tear them apart. Though this is essentially a horror movie, producer Steven Spielberg marks it with his signature brand of sentimental melodrama and cinematic wonder. The eventual explanations of the paranormal activity feel schmaltzy, but it does little to damper the film's final act which turns the film's slow burn into an explosion. Poltergeist is leavened with humor and good character moments, but it's also still properly freaky and unsettling: the face peeling, the static television sets, and all the wonderful craziness in its final moments that I wouldn't dare to spoil.

Grade: ★★★

My "Gravity" Film Review

Once again the Arts section of my school's newspaper, The Lafayette, let me write a film review for them. I'm really pleased with how my review for Gravity turned out with me giving a lot of, rightfully deserved, glowing praise. As always I'd like to profusely thank the editors for letting me publish my review, and to edit it so it's a little less laconic and rambly yet still stays true to my original intentions.