RATE or REVIEW The Last Movie You Watched.

Sunshine - 8/10

An overlooked space thriller/horror(?) gem from 2007. I'm amazed at what Danny Boyle and company achieve with what seems to be the smaller end of a midsize budget. Great cast, outstanding cinematography, and a novel premise with its own unique sources of tension. If you enjoyed the mysterious first half of Event Horizon and were let down by the reveal, I recommend giving Sunshine a look. Smarter and better executed IMO.

Recent progress on a big stack of blu rays that I’ve put off watching but I’m finally delving into. These are films that I’ve either intended to rewatch or simply haven’t gotten to yet.

Ben-hur (1959)

Although on a 1080p blu ray format for the restoration the film stock was scanned in 8K, reduced later to 6K for the transfer. I’ll certainly take a 4K version one day if one gets made, but the standard blu ray version looks sensational. This movie is in a three-way tie for most academy awards of all time with 11. Absolutely gorgeous cinematography. Every shot is beautifully composed. The reds and purples of the capes and robes of the Roman military and rulers, the soldiers’ ornate silver and gold breastplates, and pretty much all the other visual details of the ancient world look stunning. Simple, direct storytelling in the classical Hollywood style with some great actors of that era. Chartlon Heston is pretty much at the peak of his powers. This was on TV a lot when I was a kid and it was in 4:3 pan-and-scan format. Such a pleasure to finally watch it in the full aspect ratio on a really good home theater setup.

One-eyed Jacks

Finally got around to watching this. This is the only film that Brando directed and he hit a home run. Martin Scorsese loves it and he was heavily involved in the film’s restoration and transfer to 4K. Scorsese points out that One-Eyed Jacks merges Old and New Hollywood. And he notes that its cinematography is really masterful. Brando’s eye for composition, color, costuming, and use of light and shadow is indeed gifted. Old Hollywood is the classical studio system that reinforces genre conventions that in turn confirm traditional myths about Americanism. New Hollywood also known as Renaissance Hollywood uses more naturalistic dialogue and acting, and it very actively questions and explores the values system of the American myth; and perhaps more importantly it celebrates auteurism, the director as an artist and creative force in his or her own right. In this film I think there’s a metaphor for the sherif representing Old Hollywood and the roguish ne’er-do-well hero Rio representing New Hollywood.

Barry Lyndon

So glad that I finally watched this film! Stanley Kubrick is always full of surprises and I really had no idea what to expect. Bear with me on this… What struck me is how our species has shifted from pure, raw physical survival in the wilderness as hunter gatherers to more complex social survival in human civilization. I can’t say if that is what Kubrick was consciously going for. But at least to my (probably over-creative) mind the film (unconsciously?) forms a kind of commentary on that… Anyway, it’s clearly a tale of survival in a downright ruthless class system. I watched the Criterion Collection 4K remaster, and it’s a beautiful transfer. Barry Lyndon is an absolute feast for the eyes. This film deservedly won Oscars for best cinematography, best set design, best costumes, and best score. All are superb. This movie features some of the most subtle and brilliant non-verbal acting I’ve ever seen.

Watership Down

The animated film doesn’t do justice to the book, which I absolutely adored when I read it long ago. But it is still quite worthy in its own way. There’s a sense of both enchantment and a kind of… well, realism, I suppose… to the fantasy of rabbits having a sort of sophisticated animal intelligence in this tale. It works much more powerfully in the book, but this movie more or less pulls it off too. It’s a perspective that once I immersed myself in it, I could never again look at wild critters in my yard quite the same way. So it’s sort of neat to go on the odyssey of imagination about what rabbits sharing the countryside with humans would be like. Artistically and visually speaking, the painted backgrounds and the basic animation style work for me.

Chronicles of Riddick (director’s cut)

I love this movie. Some feel the script is a convoluted mess. But I LIKE that it throws us into the deep end of the pool for its world without explaining or setting up what a lot of things are. We have to sort of piece together what the various factions and interpersonal relationships are. I had never seen Pitch Black when I first watched it, but it was obvious that Riddick had a past with Jack/Kira and the Imam. I didn’t care that I didn’t know that backstory specifically. I probably watched this movie a half dozen times before I finally got around to watching its predecessor. I can draw inferences from all sorts of meta-contextual clues what the mercs, Necromongers, Elementals, and Furyans are. This is inspired by Vin Diesel’s home brew D&D tabletop campaign, and he created the setting and characters for it. For me, the move resembles the experience of a player at a tabletop D&D game in having to make sense of a world that he or she finds themself in and is continually learning about, discovering, and making sense of as they go. The 4K transfer looks great. 14:32 of footage was added to lengthen some scenes and add more dialogue to flesh out various arcs. The footage was added using a technique that makes some brief interstitial sections appear slightly distorted in time, not exactly sure why. The speed distortion is not super distracting for me. But maybe one day if AI/CGI can make it appear seamless I’d be happy with that. This is a case where the theatrical release might well be the best version. It also comes in an open matte version. I’ll get to both eventually.

Cloud Atlas

I had only watched this movie once before via streaming and I was deeply intrigued by it. I later learned it was based on a book. I’m aware that the book is very highly regarded. But anyway I clearly got the basic gist of the story and could tell that the same actors were reappearing in different lifetimes. It was obviously a movie that calls for repeat viewings—probably a great number of rewatches in fact. On the first watch some years ago I felt a little disquieted by the use of prosthetics and makeup to change the race of the characters/actors. Normally, changing race in such a way would be offputting. But for this story it is actually required. The movie more or less pulls it off. It works well enough. Didn’t bother me at all for this rewatch. There is as yet no 4K version for Cloud Atlas (at least on disk), but nevertheless but the transfer for 1080p blu ray looks gorgeous. The audio transfer is also excellent. Nevertheless I still found myself needing to switch from soundbar/woofer to AirPods so that I could clearly catch everything that is spoken in hushed tones, and in the dialect used by earthlings of the future. I was especially struck by how the tension in the story progressively ratchets up to a crescendo with the suspenseful and powerful action scenes. I still haven’t traced out the interrelationships between various characters as the reincarnate, and reflected on that. But I love the gestalt that this film gives me. It seems to me like the “block universe” conception of time in which all things that have ever happened or will happen are simply ‘one big thing’; and therefore all the past and future lifetimes in this story are connected on that level as a kind of symphony. This watch cemented for me that I love this movie. I’m very sentimental, so this isn’t that hard to do: but it made me cry several times. There are so many powerful emotional moments towards the end of the movie, but in particular the way Meronym looks at Zachry in their old age hits me like a ton of bricks.

I’m going to try to watch one film per day for the next 10 days. The remaining movies in the blu ray pile:

Oppenheimer
The Last Emperor
Malcolm X
The Revenant
Kingdom of Heaven (director’s cut)
Atomic Blonde
Tenet
The Northman
The Woman King
Pacific Rim

I watched Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven for the first time last night, the director’s cut. I respect certain things about the film and feel I’m better in some ways for having watched it. But it didn’t strike a deep chord with me. I can’t say that it’s a film that I’ll likely watch again. (On second thought perhaps. To be totally fair to the film: sadly due to gradual hearing loss with some movies I now need to listen to with AirPods or headphones or else I’ll miss a bit of dialogue when speech is at higher pitch frequencies and/or accents are strong. I couldn’t be bothered this time and I kind of regret it. I clearly got the gist throughout though.)

There’s a lot of romanticism going on by Scott about the historical events of the Crusades during that time. I can live with that as a work of art. But this story is basically screwed whatever it attempts. If it remains historically accurate that’s just depressing. And maybe boring in that it probably won’t give us familiar tropes, arcs, and plot beats that we’re accustomed to for a historical epic. So understandably Scott chooses the romantic fantasy direction. But I think trying to capture some sort of heroic moral center to all that brutality and the moral convolution that rationalizes it is bound to end up disappointing. In all of that chaos and insanity Balian displays humanistic values that I’m pretty sure as far as we know do not really begin to take shape until the European renaissance. Could someone in those times maybe have been able to think outside the box at place the highest value on human life, and perhaps then too implicitly some sort of decent quality of human life? Basic human empathy, respect, and even love for other human beings? And beyond that to make their code of honor as a knight to chivalrously protect that? In theory perhaps. I’m no medieval historian. But based on what I do remember from history courses in college it doesn’t seem likely! (I found an interesting article by a history professor on the subject of the movie’s historical accuracy for anyone interested: https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/kingdom-of-heaven-what-parts-are-real.)

So what Kingdom of Heaven seems to give us is a modern sensibility of what “a perfect knight” arguably means to us today more or less from the vantage of our modern humanistic society, and it superimposes that upon the medieval world of the Crusades. Well… okay… I guess. But then what are we to do with that emotionally and psychologically? I suppose the fantasy at the heart of this movie can inspire hope that whatever form of cultural brainwashing and propaganda exists at any given time and place in history, the human spirit can in principle still somehow nevertheless maybe arrive at more transcendent truths through sheer force of will. That’s the humanistic form of faith.

Super Mario Bros. 10/10
Entertaining and fun all the way through. No political crap, no agendas to fill. Just fun.

Salem's Lot (2024) - 8.5/10

I know this may seem like a high rating but after a second viewing this evening everything suddenly connected for me. I just realized that while this movie was made only a couple of years ago, it's still somehow meant to have been seen back in the eighties. If you can, like I did, give your undivided attention to every single beat of this movie and dig deep into your 80's sensibilities, you're in for a most wonderful retro horror experience. Salem's Lot is now officially my personal favorite of the year, together with Furiosa...

I watched the Revenant last night. First time I’ve seen it. Wow.

It’s a bit of a throwback for me, as I grew up captivated by movies about raw survival in the wilderness like A Man Called Horse, Jeremiah Johnson, Hell in the Pacific, and The Naked Prey. And here is such a tale in modern cinematic expression.

The story is great, castings are outstanding and the performances are all excellent, and the cinematography is just off the chain. The shots of the wilderness are breathtaking. The action in all the native-American attacks on European fur traders, the bear mauling scene, and the final battle between Glass and Fitzgerald are all incredibly intense and graphic.

In contrast to more classical feeling Hollywood movies about the frontier wilderness The Revenant uses a kind of hyper-realism—which now that I think about it, is a form of stylization all its own. The movie brooks no romanticized fantasization about what the culture of European descendant settlers was like and what that lifestyle out in the wilderness was like. I have no earthly idea just how savage, brutal, racist, lowbrow, feral, and so on it was, but the movie goes a long way to show how gritty and at times horrifying that life perhaps was. On the other hand it does show that the noble and prosocial instincts are struggling for survival as well in the social environment as well, as we see in Glass and his son Hawk, the native that helps Glass, the Captain, and Bridger.

Evidently the character “Bridger” must be a nod the famous mountain man “Jim Bridger.” The story for this movie is based on a true event with which Jim Bridger may have played a role similar to the young man in the film.

This is based on watching survivalist shows that were popular about one to two decades ago, so take with a grain of salt: But one slight criticism on the realism of the film is that in a climate that far north to be getting wet by wading in water would have risked hypothermia. There’s a just a lot of scenes of people getting their clothing wet! In reality they would have had to dry the clothes out by the fire. It’s fine the movie chooses not to show that, but it’s a slight break with the otherwise brutally frank realism.

Anyway this movie is a banger. I’m not sure if it’s a film that I’ll want to rewatch a lot like I would Jeremiah Johnson. But it’s definitely a great film in subgenre of historical epic for the American frontier. Which is a subcategory of western as well.

Wild Bill 1995.....9/10
Impressive portrayal of Jame Butler Hickok from Jeff Bridges.

I watched Atomic Blonde last night for the first time. The 4K disk looked great to me. There’s a lot of bright saturated colors in this movie and it all popped visually.

I definitely had a good time with this flick. I mean this in a good way: it’s a fun mindless actioner.

When I popped it in I wasn’t aware of when the exact year that the film was made—and for that first watch stylistically speaking I would have guessed it was earlier than 2017. Although in hindsight based on the physical appearance of the actors it couldn’t have been too old, either. I can’t quite place the time period for the style I’m thinking of, but the use of flashback narration reminded me of something like maybe Ocean’s Eleven?… there must be specific spy films that have done this too… But anyway that except on steroids for the action scenes.

All the castings are great and the performances are wonderful. Theron, McAvoy, and Butella all shine brightly. The story and dialogue is well written.

The final fight scene is pretty damn riveting. This is the second night in a row that I’ve watched tremendously graphic, intense, savage, brutal fight scenes to the death. Last night it was The Revenant. (And tonight I’m watching the Northman for the first time.)

But anyway the realism of the last fight contrasts the sleeker, smoother superhuman fighting machine style that Lorraine displays for most of the story. And it’s satisfying as heck to watch a woman fight smarter, harder, faster, and dirtier than the enemy (nearly all men) to the point that she almost makes it look easy. But the sheer animalism and grittiness of that last fight scene counterbalanced that. I recall that sort of raw emotional “here’s what a fight to the death looks like” energy in Three Days of the Condor when the CIA hitman disguised as postal server attacks Turner in Three Days of the Condor. But here it does that plugged into 3 kilowatts.

I had a slightly mixed reaction to use of the 80s hits soundtrack. I was a young man during the time the film is set and I remember those days well. The song selection is good. But there’s something that feels just a smidge over-the-top gimmicky to me about it. I’m not particularly nostalgic about a lot of that music, so perhaps that’s mainly a personal issue.

And that I guess leads me to a final observation. The 80s did have its own unique style for sure. But for the most part it was as grounded in the ordinary things we take for granted today. In my opinion it was about as cynical a time as it is today, for example. There’s a lot more through lines than things that stand out as different, to my mind anyway.

When we appreciate a past decade it’s through pop culture iconography that was notably different. You see differences in stuff like TVs, phones, cars, music, dress style (counter culture-wise punk rock and new wave was big). And a film like this one takes those things and saturates and amps them up. Which is a fun time.

Anybody see "Tár?"

It was good. I don't think it was a masterpiece or anything, but it was a breath of fresh air in the sense that it was a very unique approach to telling the story. Cate Blanchett's performance is other-worldly. I thought she was good in Blue Jasmine, but this was next level.

I'm a huge fan of the director, Todd Field. His 2006 movie "Little Monsters" is also highly recommended, but the 2001 drama "In the Bedroom" is an absolute masterpiece and it's on my personal list of best films of all time.

I watched the 4K disk for The Northman last night. This was my first time watching it, and maybe the only time although it’s a well made, interesting film.

The 4K disk looks great. I’ve got an OLED TV which helps make everything look gorgeous to begin with. Visually speaking this film is really rich. The natural environment, the sea, and village life, set design, costuming, and makeup, etc, are all captured rather intensely. I listened via AirPods and the sound mixing seemed excellent.

To provide some context: I had accumulated a pile of blu rays, most of them 4K, with the majority being films hadn’t gotten to yet and few that I have intended to give a rewatch. I’ve been watching one per evening recently. The reason I mention all this is that many of these films prominently feature the human capacity for violence, cruelty, and even outright savagery and brutality to one’s fellow human being. This is the fourth film in a row where that’s been the case: Kingdom of Heaven (director’s cut), The Revenant, Atomic Blonde, and now The Northman.

We all know that American cinema glorifies violence. Portraying violence creatively in film has become an art form almost in its own right. And I’ve always been a fan. But this recent run of films that go so hard and graphic with it is wearing me out.

I’m a little more than halfway through. The movies I watched thus far are Ben-hur (1959), One-eyed Jacks, Barry Lyndon, Watership Down, Chronicles of Riddick (director’s cut), Cloud Atlas, Kingdom of Heaven (director’s cut), The Revenant, Atomic Blonde, The Northman. The remaining ones are Pacific Rim, The Woman King, The Last Emperor, Oppenheimer, Malcolm X, and Tenet.

The films I’ve enjoyed the most by far have been among the least violent ones: One-eyed Jacks, Barry Lyndon, and Cloud Atlas. Those movies have considerable violence too. But it’s not so extreme and in-your-face most of the time like the most recent ones I’ve watched. For those three it’s more like the violence simply punctuates the story.

In any event, the Northman is all about savagery. It does tell an interesting enough story about that though, I would say. The film made me care about the protagonist, a Viking prince who swears an oath to avenge his father’s murder. And I come to care about his mate as well, a peasant sorceress.

To the film’s credit, the human relationships in the story are given a fair degree of depth and complexity. But even so, everything in that social world is organized around the primitive animalistic instinct to control and dominate others—and the use of violence in the cruelest of ways to do that. Like that drive energy is relentless. Their shamanic and spiritual practices and beliefs, and the ancient Norse mythology, are essentially a means of attempting to harness it. The Vikings invented a belief system that warriors go to Valhalla if they die in battle to rationalize early death from that warring lifestyle.

An interesting theme in all of this is that the two women in the hero’s life, his mother and his bride, while obviously subjugated as women are also like puppet masters to the men. They too show a fierceness to achieve their goals, but they must use psychological manipulation to wield power.

Tonight as I continue through the pile of disks, I’m planning a double feature of two rewatches, Pacific Rim and The Woman King. That should give me a break from extreme violence.

I want to believe that the human species is working through the problem of finding a way to have shared social existence without violence at the core of it. To evolve past that. That we can become intelligent and mature enough to do that. Maybe the fact that we’re so heavily obsessed with it in this most powerful of shared art forms, cinema, reflects that.

Addendum: I forgot to add that there’s an interesting tension that occurred to me the next day. From the vantage of modern day western humanism this story is essentially a tragedy. The hero, Amleth, is so brainwashed by his culture, conditioned to bloodlust, and hellbent on revenge that he is unable to make a life for himself as his own person, taking freedom to choose what that will be. He has an opportunity to walk away with Olga, but he can’t. On the other hand, from the perspective of his own culture he dies a glorious and honorable death, fulfilling his destiny. That’s a bit difficult for us to relate in our present day culture.

Brick: 8/10

One of those movies you rewatch every 5 years and forget how good it is.

Joker 2,

well it’s been four days
since I’ve seen it and wish it’d been ten.

Beetlejuice 2 - 7/10

This turned out better than I thought it would. What was the point of the ex-wife plotline though? I kept waiting for it to pay off in some way, but they could have cut that out of the movie completely and it would have changed nothing.

Pacific Rim

What a treat for the eyes it is to watch Pacific Rim via 4K disk on an OLED TV. It looks absolutely sensational. If ever there was a movie that shines on home theater I would say roughly twenty story tall robots duking it out with kaiju is hard to top.

Story-wise this movie is so much fun. It’s fun fantasy. There’s no reason to read anything into it, but I seem to be unable to resist doing that…

The story does intersect with some real world UAP phenomena and lore regarding how the kaiju access our planet. It reminds me of USOs and the concept of interdimensional portals which seems to be getting increasingly serious attention as actual military intelligence and military industrial complex whistelblowers are increasingly coming forward.

The idea of a hostile species of ETs coming to earth to terraform it and exhaust its resources is not at all fanciful from the vantage of how Darwinism has worked out on this planet. We all hope that any NHI that can make it here will have evolved past animalistic drive energies and territorialism. But if we are to use earth as the one concrete example of biological evolution that we have, then the odds of that are extremely poor, frankly. (Granted, on the other hand a sample size of just one planet is obviously too small.) So to whatever extent such a concern as decidedly dominant and/or hostile ETs coming here to basically end the current human control of the planet—or even to exterminate us—could theoretically have a reality base, a movie like this offers an escapist fantasy to help assuage that sort of worry.

There are of course many skeptics of the subject and understandably so. Many people don’t believe in UAPs and NHI to begin with. It looks to me as though most skeptics lump UAP/NHI in broadly with paranormal phenomena being simply the human brain playing tricks on us. But consistently in recent polling the majority of Americans now say they think it more likely that there is something in actual physical reality going on that the government is keeping secret.

An interesting side note to this is that per Jungian theory fantasies like kaiju lore arise unconsciously at the collective cultural level but there is some sort of real world problem that the fantasy symbolism is attempting to address.

Starting with Godzilla there is of course a reality base to fears about misuse of nuclear power technology, and all the catastrophically bad things that can go wrong with that. Similar to that, another possible interpretation is that kaiju represent the existential threat to the environment from rampant industrialization and technological advancement gone wild (beyond just nuclear, to pollution resulting in irreversible climate change). These actually are not necessarily mutually exclusive with the fear of what happens if ETs do eventually show up unmistakably—and if and when that happens will they be monsters? Both can simultaneously be at work in the collective psyche imho.

Anyway, to return to the movie itself, it’s just flat out good cheesy fun. It’s a pure popcorn flick. Charlie Hunam as Raleigh reminds me of a young Steve McQueen. Rinko Kikichi almost steals the show as Maki. The acting by the two leads is for the most part understated and very relatable. The other characters throughout the movie are much more heavily stylized and exaggerated. I’m fine with that overall, and can go along for the ride. But for me it can be just a smidge distracting when characters are blatantly cartoonish. But again, it all pretty much works in this movie at the end of the day. And the extravagant visuals—the Jaegers and the kaiju—are the true star of the show anyway.

The Woman King

This is my second watch of The Woman King. My wife and I saw it in the theater and loved it at the time. This was on home theater via 4K disk on OLED TV. The transfer looked terrific to me. I’m not a keen enough observer for my eye to pick up the difference between something rated at 4.5 stars or 5 stars. It looks amazing to me.

I really, really like the cinematography, set design and art production, costume design, and score of this movie. The color palette and dynamic use of light and shade are wonderful. The film is simply beautiful to look at. I love the atmosphere that it creates visually.

There are historical inaccuracies, yes. The movie is not a documentary of what happened in Dahomey in 1823. But it does directly deal with African tribal participation in the slave trade. And it’s a Hollywood adaptation designed to deliver an adventure tale, a hero’s journey for both the main character Nawi, and the Woman King, Nanisca. I was genuinely moved by it. Sometimes I’m able to roll sentimentally with whatever vibe the story is working with, and this is one of those cases.

Pretty much all of the the actresses in this movie depicting the Agojie, the Dahomey’s elite force of Amazonian warriors, give superb performances. Thuso Mdebo as Nawi gives a gem of a performance with her sincere down to earth naturalistic emotions. There’s such an emotional honesty to her. She commands the screen every moment she is on it. Viola Davis is one of our greatest living actors in my opinion, so I expected nothing less than a great performance by her. In this case a strong script and sound direction supported that.

But that being said, it’s not a perfect film. There are some somewhat cheesy subplots and moments here and there. And there are as well a fair number of two-dimensional characterizations like King Ghezo, his most favored wife, the enemy Oyo chieftain, and the two Portuguese slave traders. But the movie somehow makes all that work so that I still ended up earnestly rooting hard for the heroes in all most suspenseful action scenes. It’s Hollywood!

This is a movie that I will end up giving a good number of rewatches I think. It’s got something special for me personally. There have been some very fine films about the black experience in recent decades. This counts as one for me. Again, it’s a Hollywood film not a historical docudrama. That’s okay with me personally. I can always study the real world history. And indeed, a movie like this gives me incentive to do that.

I watched Oppenheimer last night for the first time. First regarding the 4K blu ray quality, the transfer both visually and for sound is basically stellar. It’s gorgeous.

This film is legitimately impressive in so many ways. It’s a fascinating story, and obviously an important one. So of course I would recommend to anyone that they watch it. For all the standard objective reasons I can think of it’s a great film.

But I’m now going to deviate into a more personal reaction and explore it to hopefully learn something useful (?).

As mentioned it’s easy to see why someone might even rhapsodize over this objectively exquisite film. For example, the one film critic that I follow on Twitter, Darren Mooney, loved it and he makes some great observations about it: 1) he feels it is a deconstruction of the “great man in history” biopic, and 2) that it takes us into fundamental human psychological and existential themes related to opening the Pandora’s box of harnessing the atom. I can easily place a checkmark next to both.

This is a film that should be right up my alley! But honestly I really struggled with it greatly in terms of relatability and likability. My relationship to a film in some ways reminds me of relatedness to a person. It’s probably wisest and most mature of me to accept other people in their full depth and complexity, warts and all, enjoying things I like and accepting and tolerating things I dislike. And to maintain good healthy boundaries with! But as with people, with a film sometimes you resonate and connect, and sometimes you don’t.

I guess it’s what Mooney means by deconstruction of the “‘great man in history’ biopic” genre, but Oppenheimer is pumped full, and inflated with, a kind of an anxious and self-important emotional energy. I get that that mirrors both the personality of “Oppy” and the feelings elicited by subject matter of creation of the atomic bomb. The film does repeatedly show what I’m on about here in the scenes where Oppenheimer becomes immersed in his own internal thoughts—which is a highly energized and hyperbolic internal experience—and then he snaps back to the more mundane, low key reality of the actual moment in physical reality. And the entire film is infused with a sort of frenetic energy that I suppose must represent Oppenheimer’s internal efforts to wrestle inwardly with his own conscience—and in the immortal words of Linkin Park to try (in vain?) to make peace with “what I’ve done.”

Oppenheimer’s personal vanity serves as a metaphor for the mythic hubris of Prometheus, and the film shows that clearly. But frankly it’s still exhausting! And it’s actually pathetic, even. He’s not a very stable genius in the way that apparently Einstein was. Empathically getting into this guy’s head and walking a mile in his moccasins is challenging.

All the details to the story had me feeling at some level that hey, I’m sorry, but I’m just finding myself not at all gripped and absorbed by this. Especially the minutiae and Machiavellian plotting of his and Strauss’s Senate hearings (one closed, one open).

I usually love films with long run times. I generally prefer the cinematic long form of story telling. But this is a rare case where about halfway I was just wanting the movie to end already. That in itself compounded the weirdness for me, i.e., I felt slightly discomfited by that, again because the film is so well made and dealing with such important issues.

I remember trying to watch David Lynch’s Eraserhead many years ago, and I was simply unable to get through it. I jetted after about 10 minutes. It was just flat out bizarre unpleasantness. (Which was probably the point.) Oppenheimer of course doesn’t elicit that sort of stark uncomfortability reaction at anywhere near that scale. But personally I did find it to be a more low key, modest expression of a similar sort of energy. I was feeling that I really ought to stick this out for a variety of very sound reasons but honestly I’m actually not enjoying myself!

So what did I learn? I guess it is that at the end of the day I can’t deny that when I sit down to watch a movie, I fundamentally seek to escape comfortably into the fictional world of that film, of its story. And yes, I want for that immersion to come easily and effortlessly. The epitome of that to me is the experience of watching the Lord of the Rings. Not only do I love entering that fantasy headspace, I don’t want to leave it!

Strictly from a personal standpoint for me individually, I think I’m better off reflecting about the story of the creation of the atom bomb simply reading up on the subject as a student of history. Versus taking this film’s journey into the head of Robert Oppenheimer. And I do have mixed feelings about that! But that’s where I was left by it.

I watched The Last Emperor last night. It was via 4K disk and I picked the Arrow release versus Criterion. I was not disappointed. The transfer looks absolutely stunning. As does the cinematography itself, of course.

This is one of the most beautiful looking films I’ve ever seen. The Forbidden City itself and how it evolves over the years, the set and art design and amazing costumes for the different cultural eras and locations from 1908 to 1967, and use of extras to give scale is mesmerizing. The use of color, light, and shadow is masterful. The Last Emperor is about as painterly a film as one could ever hope to find.

The performances of all the actors are wonderful. Those performances all underscore the sadness of the journey of Puyi, the last emperor of China. John Lone in particular as Puyi delivers a great performance in that regard.

Possessing a rich, unearthly beauty but also deeply sad. When Puyi is told he can no longer enjoy his wet nurse he laments “but she was my butterfly.” That really captures the entitlement of that ancient monarchical system. A butterfly is not a hardy creature. How could a system like that last for so long?

I would suppose that’s Bertolucci’s commentary on both the sheer extravagism of the ancient Chinese monarchy, and its demise to authoritarian communism. Amazingly it lasted for millennia. But it could not survive our present age of scientifically based thought and technology. It seems remarkable from today’s standards that entire cultures (not just the ancient Chinese of course, it was all over the world) embraced the concept of human divine rulership, with all of the mystical beliefs attendant to that.

And here in my humble opinion one delusion is replaced by another. My own personal association is that the obliteration of the monarchy by communism is like the Jungian Shadow for that ancient culture that eventually came a knockin’ if denied. And the same will happen for the brutal, ruthless, austere idealization of collectivism spawned by Mao Tse Tung eventually. If Jung is correct anything psychologically extreme in nature is going to invite its Shadow to attempt to balance the psyche out eventually.

This movie makes me want to rewatch Empire of the Sun which I haven’t seen in many decades.

One final observation. This film was made in 1987 and it looks like it could have been filmed yesterday.

Last night’s watch was Malcolm X via 4K disk, Criterion Collection. First time ever that I’ve seen it.

The transfer looks outstanding. Visually speaking, Spike Lee made a beautiful looking film here. All the things I look for to create the film’s setting visually are top notch, i.e., cinematography (framing and composition of shots, dynamic use of color, light and shadow, camera angle, etc.), set and art design, costumes. And the script, castings, acting performances, and score are all similarly excellent as well. Malcolm X is a great film. This is the second to last disk in a pile I intended to watch over a roughly 10 day period and I saved one of the best for nearly the last.

It may just be my own associations, but I felt that in this movie the experience of racial identity is treated mythically. Malcolm is on a hero’s journey. It is a story of individuation. Malcolm X sacrificed his personal life, in a sense, to live out a myth for the sake of his ideals and the greater community he dedicated himself to serve. He probably didn’t set out to do that with conscious intent. But I would imagine that he came to understand it as such in his own way.

My guess is that nearly all of the 17 stages of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth (aka “hero’s journey”) can be identified in the film, even if not in a perfectly linear sequential way. Here Spike Lee may have consciously considered the story that way formally, or it may have arisen unconsciously.

Either way, I think most if not all of those steps can be found. This is all constellated around Malcolm’s identity as a black man: He leaves the world of what is for him “the known” by going to prison. Up to that point he has been unreflectingly living in a world imposed by the society and culture, unable to think and live independently for himself. A male mentor figure shows up in his life. He leaves the (self-destructive) familiar world and crosses into the unknown, which is the world of potentially transcendent, liberating, and empowering big existential ideas. There in prison he enters the belly of the whale and faces his own demons. He receives “supernatural aid” which I would identify as the experiential growth benefits of the big ideas. A healthy female figure appears in his life. He certainly encounters “the road of trials” along the way! He internally faces up to, confronts, and frees himself from the controlling father or authority figure. He establishes his own mosque and travels to Mecca to experience a transformation of his faith—and he obtains the boon or elixir as such. I think for the most part he realizes while there are principles to live by that help guide and strengthen our growth, we are continually learning and growing during our short time on this earth, and that remains a work in progress throughout. The return to normal everyday life after that transformative adventure, and the challenge of integrating the boon into daily existence, is fraught with difficulty. And upon return to the everyday with the elixir he achieves freedom from the limitations imposed by the fear of death, or at least with as much acceptance as much as anyone can reasonably muster. It seems that he realizes that he personally has become a transcendent symbol or vessel for the mythic themes that his life has embodied. And he manages that with grace and maturity.

So the film is beautiful to look at. And it is a beautifully told story.

A final tangent: I missed this in the theater, and I’m sure I would have enjoyed it on the big screen. But I’m also still kind of blown away by how good both 4K disks and high quality blu rays usually look on an OLED TV. I will always enjoy the ritual and communal experience of the movie theater. But for visual experience itself, I think… ?… I think I actually may prefer home theater now. I can’t honestly say that the larger scale of the big screen at the theater is better than what I get at home. In both settings when sitting in the dark my brain adjusts the size of the screen to make them roughly the same. At home I’m able to appreciate every nuance of the visual aspect of the movie with a depth and richness that a projection onto a screen can’t quite achieve. I can at least savor the film more at home.

Penitentiary II - 3/10

Terrifier 3 - 7/10

Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein - 3/10

Hellboy: The Crooked Man - 5/10

The Psychopath - 6/10

Alien Hunt - 4/10

Joker: Folie à Deux - 6.5/10

How to Make a Monster - 5/10

It's What's Inside - 6/10

Blink Twice - 6/10

The 27th Day - 6/10

The Wild Life - 5/10

Azrael - 6/10

The Laughing Dead - 5/10

Frankenstein's Daughter - 4/10

The Crow (2024) - 5/10

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice - 6/10

Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze - 7/10

Last Stop on the Night Train - 7/10

Salems Lot 2024 1/10

Awful

JAWS said:

Salems Lot 2024 1/10

Awful

Click to expand...

Accurate. The reviews were not wrong.