Netflix Nexus
Tonight I discovered that when you devote an evening to watching a few movies and unwinding a bit, you really need to really look at which movies you watch in what order. I will present my review of each of the three I watched tonight in the order in which I watched them.
The first movie I watched was Speed Racer. I always liked the animated series from Japan, so I decided that it might be one of those things that was fun if only for the nostalgia. You see, as a kid I watched every Japanese anime I could find from Mazinger Z to g-Force/Gatchaman/Battle of the Planets to Robotech/Macross. With the exception of the classical music in Tom and Jerry cartoons, I found them in every way more appealing than US branded toons. I generally still do. The 2008 movie does a really good job at capturing both the look and feel of the old cartoon. Morality is presented as very important, but not overly complex. Action scenes are fast. No, actually really fast. Be fair though, what did you expect from a movie titled “Speed Racer” anyhow right? I really enjoyed the fact that the crazy robo-cars were played up as extremely high tech. In fact, I loved the high tech aspects of the entire metropolis; they serve to make the outlandish buzz-saws and such more believable. The fact that the casting and makeup departments went out of their way to find people who didn't so much look like the characters from the anime as ones that easily portrayed anime stereotypes (Ricci in particular has big luminous eyes to start with, and the makeup enhanced that greatly here). The plot was a rip off of every third speed racer cartoon, which was in some ways pathetic, but brilliant as well.
When I rented Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay, it was really an accident. Initially, I was looking for a movie with a title I remember as similar. It was an entirely forgettable low budget flick about some amazons lead by Morgana who use magic to crash planes on Avalon to gain slave labor and such. When I first started watching the movie, I really vacillated between contempt and reluctant enjoyment. While there was no lack of sexual oddities hinted at in this film, they were handled tastefully (unlike many films of this nature), and even the profusion of obviously heterosexual actresses in 70s style lesbian scenes was only a little over done. Of course it was the premise of the movie I suppose. The acting was, in general, not exceptional, but ended up being more than balanced out by excellent props and a few interesting location shots, but it was really the screenplay that caught my interest most. Much of the language is as beautiful, though I feel I might have enjoyed it as much (or more) as poetry than dialog. The plot appeared relatively thin (though it might have made a very reasonable hour long show), and the pace agonizingly slow at times, but I personally found it was worth sifting the dross to get to the poetry.
Holly was a different class of movie all together. Not exactly “based on a true story,” I was initially afraid that it would be sort of a “very special movie” if you follow me. The film tackles a number of tough issues, which I won't get into here, because they are frankly too fresh for me to want to really write about. Initially, I stumbled on the movie because of Johnny Mnemonic. You see, Udo Kier (the German actor who plays Ralfi and gets taken apart by the yakuza guy with the mono-filament wire) was of interest to me, and after figuring out that I also knew him from Shadow of the Vampire (which was brilliant by the way), I started looking into his films. As so often happens when I am on IMDB for more than five minutes, I filled up my Netflix que directly after, and one of the titles that popped up on my suggested viewing list was Holly, which I recognized from his IMDB page. Thus, I rented it not knowing much about it apart from that Udo was in it.
So it turns out that Udo's role was very small, but somewhat complex morally. He serves, like many of the characters, to show that there are more shades of gray to human morality than I often like to think about. The other major supporting character, perhaps the closest thing to a hero this movie has, was played by Chris Penn. He is sort of a middle management criminal, mostly working with smugglers, but he does seem to try to do what is right within the guidelines of what won't get him killed. Thuy Nguyen was startlingly believable as the title role, a child kidnapped for the sex trade. Her performance was inspired, and I will be surprised if she isn't asked to audition for other parts in a few years. Ron Livingston portrays a quintessential loser who is inured to the rough life of the streets. Even when he is being heroic, he is at best an apathetic anti-hero. This fits the general malaise that is generated by the visual theme of the movie. Speaking of the visuals, there are no cool ancient temples, beautiful wilderness trails, or stylish Hollywood-oriental buildings; the “richest” looking set on the film was an inner city slum. The dark visuals (and surprisingly unobtrusive camera work) are mere framework to support a simple tale of exploitation and slavery which starts out so bad that it inspires murderous thoughts of righteous wrath, and then spirals down into even worse territory. Suffice it to say that while the film never even approaches the graphic, it is certainly not one to let your children see. For most adults though, what was probably intended by the director as a tear jerker will more likely be a haunting and potentially infuriating tale of real life horrors. This is the kind of tale that most people do not want to see, but that they really ought to.
So overall, Speed Racer is not deep or meaningful, but it was a heck of a lot of fun, Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay probably isn't a good idea for anyone who is normally a fan of the horror genera, but I do believe that it is entirely possible that some others (particularly writers and English majors) may be intrigued, and Holly was the first really horrifying movie I have seen in a very long time