if we may pause for 2 complicated reviews
All right, these two movies provoked such complicated responses that I had to wrestle with them in a separate post.
What they have in common:
- Alexander Skarsgard
- Total disarray
- General WTFery
- Experiences that make more sense if you know the director's body of work
- Compulsion to keep watching
Hold the Dark (2018)
A movie about wolves that steal children-or someone who frames the wolves for stealing children-or war in Iraq-or witches or dark wolf spirits or a cult-or tensions between white police and local Yup'ik residents-or the incredible violence that lurks just below the surface of any given townsperson-or an author trying to reconcile with his estranged daughter-or the thinness of the veil between civilization and death in the wilds of Alaska-or sibling incest. Or, like, all of these.
One baffling turn after another. First you're watching a mystery with supernatural overtones, then you're absorbed in a striking and well-directed but long and seemingly out of place scene where someone kills a lot of people with a machine gun set up at a high vantage point. The beginning and end of the movie suggest the author (Jeffrey Wright) is the main character, but we steer away from him to follow the stolen child's mysterious father for long stretches (Skarsgard), and there's another digression in which the story seems suddenly to be about the police chief. We are offered little insight into what's going on in ASkars' character's head, which is a problem.
I don't know what to do with this movie. So much about it is left ambiguous, in that way where you suspect the filmmakers mistook opacity for depth. I think I liked it, though? It probably hangs together better on a second watch? Like, I didn't pick up on the incest clues until I read a review afterwards. And I hadn't seen any of the director's other work, so I didn't know Jeremy Saulnier has a habit of depicting intense violence in close quarters. Also, you can tell in many places that it's a movie made by dudes based on a story by a dude, perhaps most notably a scene where an ~enigmatic pretty lady~ (Riley Keough) puts on a wolf mask and walks naked into the room, and then the bed, of a man she's just met.
Tantoo Cardinal has a small and frankly wasted part. Julian Black Antelope has a bigger, if still underdeveloped, role. There's an unremarked-upon conversation between him and another Yup'ik character in what I assume is the Central Alaskan Yup'ik/Yugtun language, which is cool. Better than the death of one Yup'ik character and the mass violence committed by another and the heavy implication that others are supernatural and/or touched by evil, anyway.
Warnings for graphic violence and a rape scene.
P.S. Masks continue to be scary yet fascinating. Here are some that look like what certain characters wore in the movie: one & two.
Mute (2018)
Whaaaaaaat was this movie.
A Blade Runner-style noir that… where do I even start.
(1) How about the main character? ASkars is a supposedly Amish guy, Leo, who took part in a wave of emigration from the U.S. to 2050-something Berlin. Why is he Amish? Possibly just so that the writer/director could orchestrate a childhood accident that left Leo unable to speak because his family refused surgical treatment. In what way is he Amish? Well, he wears suspenders and tries to treat others well and declines to use modern, a.k.a. near-future, technology. At least, until his manic pixie girlfriend (Seyneb Saleh) disappears, and then his values go out the window. He starts to use all sorts of devices, but not consistently, and he's a weirdly quick learner, like he's never driven a car before but he steals one and chases a flying car across the city at night without crashing it or killing anyone.
Despite not saying a word, ASkars is much easier to read in this than in Hold the Dark.
(2) How about how, as with Hold the Dark, partway through the movie it becomes confusing as to whether Leo is in fact the main character? You'd think it's him, since we begin and end with him, yet we start spending a lot of time with this guy "Cactus" Bill, a terrible human being played by Paul Rudd whom the moviemakers try hard to make us sympathize with. He and his pedophile buddy "Duck" (Justin Theroux) crack jokes while performing back-alley surgeries and/or tortures for the mob and tracking or being tracked by Leo. 'They're not nice guys, but you can't help liking them,' to paraphrase writer-director Duncan Jones in an interview. Wrong! And it's not a twist to discover they're "bad" at the end!
Did I mention they both have spectacularly bad hair and/or moustaches?
It sounds like I'm mad. I'm not mad so much as horrified at what Jones thought he was doing vs. what I saw on screen. He said he wrote Bill and Duck as Trapper and Hawkeye from the M*A*S*H movie, and that their constant chatter is meant to balance Leo's silence. First, Leo's silence is fine; second, the result of giving these dudes lots of lines and screen time is that it tilts the narrative in their favor, and the movie doesn't make me want to favor them.
ANYWAY, what I wanted to talk about regarding this pair of characters is:
(3) How about how Bill and Duck's relationship depicts a sort of homosexuality I've never seen in a movie before, but that resembles certain "we're not gay, we just love each other" fanfic tropes? Bill seems mostly straight, a frequenter of the local brothel, with some kind of ex-wife or -girlfriend in the background with whom he had a daughter; Duck is more effeminate and calls Bill "babe" on the regular, although the rest of his attentions focus on prepubescent girls. Whether they're bi or "straight, but" or something else, the fact is that partway through the film, they explain to somebody that they're the sort of friends who used to touch dicks while they shared a bunk in the army. Way to turn subtext into text! But also, why did it have to be such morally reprehensible characters? And what are we meant to do later on when they play up effeminate stereotypes to freak out a mall cop who catches them shoplifting?
Bill and his moustache and Duck and his wig, complete with rainbow lighting
(4) How about the warnings? All of the warnings. Predatory pedophilia. Graphic violence. Medical torture, including surgery without anesthesia, surgery without consent, and fingering of an open wound. Fixation on transgender bodies and transvestitism, and depiction of both as deviant or corrupt. Plot instigated by the fridging of a woman. Asphyxiation. Ableism.
(5) How about the visuals? Super referential to the point of being derivative, yet you can't say they're boring. Well, some reviewers said they're boring, but I liked identifying the references.
(6) And yet. And yet. I couldn't look away. I wanted to know the answer to the mystery. I was rooting for Leo. I liked random characters such as Florence Kasumba looking hottt as a sex worker in body glitter and a plastic coat (Blade Runner again) and random moments such as two sexbots programmed to mimic human intercourse with each other. As a supporter on principle of SF/F movies that aren't adaptations, I liked its originality, even if some of it involved familiar components, and even if some of the stuff I thought was original turned out to be references to sources I wasn't familiar with, like a video game called Syndicate.
Speaking of which: [SPOILER for the movie Moon] TVs and newspapers in the background of several scenes in Mute featured some kind of court case involving clones of Sam Rockwell. Though awesome, it seemed like an awful lot of work for a screenwriter to have put into an unexplored background plot. Things clicked when the credits revealed Jones as the director, since he made Moon, another body horror-heavy original SF film, which was about Sam Rockwell finding out he's a series of clones being exploited by a corporation. I really should have connected the dots sooner. He calls Mute a sequel to Moon, although they have little in common other than taking place in the same universe, and he says he's planning a third one as the conclusion to a loose trilogy. I confess that despite everything, I'd like to watch it. [END SPOILER]
(7) Which brings us to our last question: How about that thing where Duncan Jones has parent issues and tried to work through them in a mess of a sci fi noir? The closing credits reveal that he DEDICATED THE MOVIE TO HIS RECENTLY DECEASED FATHER (David Bowie) AND HIS NANNY, to which one can only say, y i k e s. If every character who interacts with a child in this movie represents some facet of those who raised Duncan Jones and how he feels about them, then I am very sorry about the deep conflicts roiling inside him.
tl;dr I cannot *recommend* Mute without a host of caveats, but it makes me want to talk about it, which I hope to do with some of you, as well as with my SF/F-fan coworker K., who listened to my ranty attempt to describe this movie and said he wanted to give it a go.
Originally posted at https://bironic.dreamwidth.org/385693.html, where there are
comments.
What they have in common:
- Alexander Skarsgard
- Total disarray
- General WTFery
- Experiences that make more sense if you know the director's body of work
- Compulsion to keep watching
Hold the Dark (2018)
A movie about wolves that steal children-or someone who frames the wolves for stealing children-or war in Iraq-or witches or dark wolf spirits or a cult-or tensions between white police and local Yup'ik residents-or the incredible violence that lurks just below the surface of any given townsperson-or an author trying to reconcile with his estranged daughter-or the thinness of the veil between civilization and death in the wilds of Alaska-or sibling incest. Or, like, all of these.
One baffling turn after another. First you're watching a mystery with supernatural overtones, then you're absorbed in a striking and well-directed but long and seemingly out of place scene where someone kills a lot of people with a machine gun set up at a high vantage point. The beginning and end of the movie suggest the author (Jeffrey Wright) is the main character, but we steer away from him to follow the stolen child's mysterious father for long stretches (Skarsgard), and there's another digression in which the story seems suddenly to be about the police chief. We are offered little insight into what's going on in ASkars' character's head, which is a problem.
I don't know what to do with this movie. So much about it is left ambiguous, in that way where you suspect the filmmakers mistook opacity for depth. I think I liked it, though? It probably hangs together better on a second watch? Like, I didn't pick up on the incest clues until I read a review afterwards. And I hadn't seen any of the director's other work, so I didn't know Jeremy Saulnier has a habit of depicting intense violence in close quarters. Also, you can tell in many places that it's a movie made by dudes based on a story by a dude, perhaps most notably a scene where an ~enigmatic pretty lady~ (Riley Keough) puts on a wolf mask and walks naked into the room, and then the bed, of a man she's just met.
Tantoo Cardinal has a small and frankly wasted part. Julian Black Antelope has a bigger, if still underdeveloped, role. There's an unremarked-upon conversation between him and another Yup'ik character in what I assume is the Central Alaskan Yup'ik/Yugtun language, which is cool. Better than the death of one Yup'ik character and the mass violence committed by another and the heavy implication that others are supernatural and/or touched by evil, anyway.
Warnings for graphic violence and a rape scene.
P.S. Masks continue to be scary yet fascinating. Here are some that look like what certain characters wore in the movie: one & two.
Mute (2018)
Whaaaaaaat was this movie.
A Blade Runner-style noir that… where do I even start.
(1) How about the main character? ASkars is a supposedly Amish guy, Leo, who took part in a wave of emigration from the U.S. to 2050-something Berlin. Why is he Amish? Possibly just so that the writer/director could orchestrate a childhood accident that left Leo unable to speak because his family refused surgical treatment. In what way is he Amish? Well, he wears suspenders and tries to treat others well and declines to use modern, a.k.a. near-future, technology. At least, until his manic pixie girlfriend (Seyneb Saleh) disappears, and then his values go out the window. He starts to use all sorts of devices, but not consistently, and he's a weirdly quick learner, like he's never driven a car before but he steals one and chases a flying car across the city at night without crashing it or killing anyone.
Despite not saying a word, ASkars is much easier to read in this than in Hold the Dark.
(2) How about how, as with Hold the Dark, partway through the movie it becomes confusing as to whether Leo is in fact the main character? You'd think it's him, since we begin and end with him, yet we start spending a lot of time with this guy "Cactus" Bill, a terrible human being played by Paul Rudd whom the moviemakers try hard to make us sympathize with. He and his pedophile buddy "Duck" (Justin Theroux) crack jokes while performing back-alley surgeries and/or tortures for the mob and tracking or being tracked by Leo. 'They're not nice guys, but you can't help liking them,' to paraphrase writer-director Duncan Jones in an interview. Wrong! And it's not a twist to discover they're "bad" at the end!
Did I mention they both have spectacularly bad hair and/or moustaches?
It sounds like I'm mad. I'm not mad so much as horrified at what Jones thought he was doing vs. what I saw on screen. He said he wrote Bill and Duck as Trapper and Hawkeye from the M*A*S*H movie, and that their constant chatter is meant to balance Leo's silence. First, Leo's silence is fine; second, the result of giving these dudes lots of lines and screen time is that it tilts the narrative in their favor, and the movie doesn't make me want to favor them.
ANYWAY, what I wanted to talk about regarding this pair of characters is:
(3) How about how Bill and Duck's relationship depicts a sort of homosexuality I've never seen in a movie before, but that resembles certain "we're not gay, we just love each other" fanfic tropes? Bill seems mostly straight, a frequenter of the local brothel, with some kind of ex-wife or -girlfriend in the background with whom he had a daughter; Duck is more effeminate and calls Bill "babe" on the regular, although the rest of his attentions focus on prepubescent girls. Whether they're bi or "straight, but" or something else, the fact is that partway through the film, they explain to somebody that they're the sort of friends who used to touch dicks while they shared a bunk in the army. Way to turn subtext into text! But also, why did it have to be such morally reprehensible characters? And what are we meant to do later on when they play up effeminate stereotypes to freak out a mall cop who catches them shoplifting?
Bill and his moustache and Duck and his wig, complete with rainbow lighting
(4) How about the warnings? All of the warnings. Predatory pedophilia. Graphic violence. Medical torture, including surgery without anesthesia, surgery without consent, and fingering of an open wound. Fixation on transgender bodies and transvestitism, and depiction of both as deviant or corrupt. Plot instigated by the fridging of a woman. Asphyxiation. Ableism.
(5) How about the visuals? Super referential to the point of being derivative, yet you can't say they're boring. Well, some reviewers said they're boring, but I liked identifying the references.
(6) And yet. And yet. I couldn't look away. I wanted to know the answer to the mystery. I was rooting for Leo. I liked random characters such as Florence Kasumba looking hottt as a sex worker in body glitter and a plastic coat (Blade Runner again) and random moments such as two sexbots programmed to mimic human intercourse with each other. As a supporter on principle of SF/F movies that aren't adaptations, I liked its originality, even if some of it involved familiar components, and even if some of the stuff I thought was original turned out to be references to sources I wasn't familiar with, like a video game called Syndicate.
Speaking of which: [SPOILER for the movie Moon] TVs and newspapers in the background of several scenes in Mute featured some kind of court case involving clones of Sam Rockwell. Though awesome, it seemed like an awful lot of work for a screenwriter to have put into an unexplored background plot. Things clicked when the credits revealed Jones as the director, since he made Moon, another body horror-heavy original SF film, which was about Sam Rockwell finding out he's a series of clones being exploited by a corporation. I really should have connected the dots sooner. He calls Mute a sequel to Moon, although they have little in common other than taking place in the same universe, and he says he's planning a third one as the conclusion to a loose trilogy. I confess that despite everything, I'd like to watch it. [END SPOILER]
(7) Which brings us to our last question: How about that thing where Duncan Jones has parent issues and tried to work through them in a mess of a sci fi noir? The closing credits reveal that he DEDICATED THE MOVIE TO HIS RECENTLY DECEASED FATHER (David Bowie) AND HIS NANNY, to which one can only say, y i k e s. If every character who interacts with a child in this movie represents some facet of those who raised Duncan Jones and how he feels about them, then I am very sorry about the deep conflicts roiling inside him.
tl;dr I cannot *recommend* Mute without a host of caveats, but it makes me want to talk about it, which I hope to do with some of you, as well as with my SF/F-fan coworker K., who listened to my ranty attempt to describe this movie and said he wanted to give it a go.
Originally posted at https://bironic.dreamwidth.org/385693.html, where there are
comments.