April 16, 2008

• Movies!

  Rented the proverbial shitload of movies a couple nights ago, and I’ve been watching them.

  ‘Birdy,’ which started the career of Nicholas Cage, was kinda meh. I’ve had the soundtrack since it first came out, because Peter Gabriel did it. The soundtrack was really big-time ground-breaking at the time, or at least it seemed that way. It was mostly sort of ‘ambient’ remixes of Gabriel’s songs, with help from Daniel Lanois. But of course, the movie is supposed to be set in the mid-’60s, with flashbacks to the ’50s, and somehow ambient electronic music featuring African drums and electric piano don’t seem to fit. Anyway, I never saw the movie until just now.

  Beautiful cinematography, OK writing, and terrible editing. So much lives just outside the reach of these filmmakers, it seems. Cage’s character is stuck saying, “BIRDY!!!” all the time.

  ‘Quilombo’ is the semi-mythical tale of escaped slaves in the mid-late 1600s in Brazil. They formed their own communities in the mountains, which purportedly still exist, but I haven’t looked it up. Their story of dealing with the Portugese empire is basically that of the Native Americans in the north: Fight, make deals with white people, deals are broken by white people, fight some more, etc.

  ‘Quilombo’ is beautiful in so many ways, but it’s a narrative driven by a historical need, rather than for any kind of insight. It’s like sitting down with someone and having them tell you the history of these communities, rather than the characters that inhabited them. So much of it is one- or two-dimensional.

  It also has a certain Fellini/Jodorowski feel to it, and if you like those cats, you’ll dig this. Kind of surreal, and blessed with a certain stylized theatricality.

  ‘The Fury.’ You remember ‘The Fury?’ I remember when it came out, it was a big deal, because my friends said there was a guy in that movie who explodes from inside out. In 1978, that was huge. It had never happened on screen. Now it’s almost expected.

  Anyway, I like this movie, despite its unevenness, and perhaps because of its unevenness. It might be a psychological thriller, or it might be a horror movie, or it might be a slice-of-life meditation on lower-middle-class Chicago. It has people exploding, but it also has the mother-in-law scene, the cop-with-a-new-car scene… And a VW Minibus, which makes me happy.

  Basically, the plot goes like this: Kirk Douglas works for a ‘government agency you’ve never heard of,’ and his son is psychic. So his protege kidnaps the son because ‘the Russians have one, and the Chinese have one, so why shouldn’t we?’ It’s up to Kirk to save his son from the agency he once worked for, and he enlists the aid of another psychic youth, whom he finds because his lover works for the school for psychic youth where he was going to send his son before he was kidnapped.

  And stuff like that. Plenty of scenery for everyone to chew, new-at-the-time special effects, secret government agencies, and psychic warfare. Such fun.

  Still in the queue: ‘Dreamer and the Dreamtribe,’ about a tribe with a lot of cultural space for dreaming.

  • 10:27 pm
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