The context of a city and FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (92)

I've been living in San Francisco for two and a half months now and I'm slowly, oh so slowly, starting to feel like I actually live here. I've never really moved to a city I've had so little contact with before. I lived in Portland, briefly, but I'd spent weekend upon weekend there learning the layout, the neighborhoods, the "scene" so when I got there everything was already established in my head.

San Francisco on the other hand is a placed I've moved to with almost no concept of these things. I moved here on a beautiful, amazing whim, and have been, in a wonderful way, forced to to discover the workings of the city on my own. Or to some degree on my own, my knowledge of the city has been filtered through Alex's knowledge of the city, as she's been my most constant companion, and to many degrees my guide in the city, giving me spots to eat at, or ideas of things to do.

What I find the strangest about this sort of move is that with no context I really have no preconceptions of the area. I walk around in this city as if every neighborhood is the same, each and all blank slates that I'm just discovering. I was thinking this morning about my recent trip to the courthouse, going over in my head why I didn't bike there, and then thinking to myself that maybe locking up my bike outside the courthouse might be a dangerous thing for the little yellow fellow. But, I have no idea. The area of the city in which the courthouse is, because I haven't been here long enough to really grasp the areas of the city deemed "dangerous" by the population at large, is just as any other is, a spot of buildings and streets filled with people.

It's honestly, really refreshing. I'm actually being given the chance to create my own biases. Where in Seattle, I grew up knowing which areas were "cool" or "dangerous" or "ghetto" or what not, here, I've got nothing. Everything's new and I don't have to hurdle my own mental roadblocks to appreciate or accept anything.

Just a thought.

I'm tired of 1950s horror films. Perhaps I've always been tired of them and this recent one-two punch of Criterion sponsored '50s horror schlock has dredged those feelings up to the surface. Not to say that watching brain-stemmed monsters hanging from trees, flying in to broken windows and devouring people's spinal cords wasn't entertaining, I'm just sick of innocuous dialogue and the sort of lightness these sort of films embody.

And I'm not saying that I don't love horror movies and all their gory tomfoolery. No no, it's a favorite genre of mine, I just like my blood-soaked massacres with a little more vim and vigor.

Fiend Without A Face (92) was certainly interesting, but I just sort of blanked out on the last forty minutes. Looking up from whatever else I might've been doing to chuckle at an old man getting brain-sucked by a mental vampire cerebellum complete with antennae eyes and gruesome sticker things. After the realization that film was about nuclear fear, and the Commies, and all that good natured 50s paranoia, I just sort of fell in to a bored stupor while watching the film. Maybe it's the fact that films like Sisters (89) and Kwaidan (90) set the bar exceptionally high for smart, innovative horror, and these films just come across as tasteless blobs of sugar.

Regardless, I'm happy to be moving on.

Friday: Black Narcissus (93)

A few more thoughts on UP and the beautiful horror that is SISTERS (89)

I'm ashamed of my Up review from yesterday. I was tired and feeling rushed and I just sort of spat out a load of words that only barely touched on both the quality of that amazing film and my thoughts on it. Thus, I'm going to do a little bullet point touch-up to see if I can save my own intellectual keister with you, my most beloved and toughest critics.

- For a long while Disney, and most modern day animation studios, were given a lot of shit about the way they rarely featured characters of different ethnic backgrounds and when they did, they usually added certain characteristics to the animation that made them look, well, white. It was annoying, and it was an unattractive trait, and a lot of people stopped giving Disney the time of day because of it (and a plethora of other reasons). Russell, the enthusiastic scout boy in the film, is a perfect example of how Pixar is changing this. Russell's character, I believe, is Japanese, but the film never makes any blatant point about it. It isn't something that effects his character, or that's discussed in a lesson-learning sort of way. Nope, Russell, and his ethnic background, are just a part of the tapestry of the film. We look at the film and we see everyone not as racial stereotypes, but instead just as characters in an amazing film. Russell is just a kid like every other kid, racial background be damned, and the way Pixar represents him is really quite nice.

- I said this yesterday, but Up is a fantastic film. Heart-warming, HILARIOUS, and breath-taking in the skill used to create it, I implore you with all of my animation-loving heart to get out there and see it on a big screen, 3-D or not. Hell, bring a kid, or your lover, or your family, everyone and anyone will enjoy this film. Unless their heart is a chunky piece of coal, and well, nobody likes a card carrying grinch.

You know what movie you, you mature adult, should see and not bring any child under the age of 16 that you aren't trying to subversively corrupt is Brian DePalma's twisted conjoined twin thriller Sisters (89). This film is 70s horror at its most psychological, the tale of a murder and a cover-up and the very, very fucked up people who play a part in it.

DePalma is a fascinating director for me. He's famous for The Untouchables and Carrie (and rightly so), to most people, and for and the string of awful films he's shat in to cinemas in the last five years or so (The Black Dahlia and so forth) but in the 1970s DePalma was an on-the-fringe innovator of horror films. He made movies outside the grasp of the studios, that played with camera techniques to better exemplify the twisted psychological studies he loved. Sisters (89) is a prime example of this, as the main character in the film, Danielle (Margot Kidder, the future Lois Lane) is a formerly conjoined twin, split from her sister, Dominique, and as mentally unstable as one might be. When Dominique murders a lover of Danielles, a deliriously twisted version of A Tell-Tale Heart begins, with a nosy neighbor/columnist seeking answers, and everyone trying to hide something from everyone else. It's creepy and sick and Seventies in the most enjoyable way.

The director uses a variety of editing effects (split-screen, films-within-films, 8mm black and white) to showcase the world these people exist in, and I couldn't have enjoyed them more. There's a body-hiding scene that's split-screened with the nosy neighbor (Jennifer Salt in all her mulleted-glory) and the police zoning in on the apartment that had my skin crawling. Hell, the terrifying last hour and a half of this film had the hairs on the back of my neck standing up and my t-rex like arms wrapped around my girlfriend.

This is a great flick, a delightful slab of gory, psych-horror from the 1970s that has me scrambling to my Netflix queue to find a few more gems like this.

Friday: Kwaidan (90)

UP!

This is probably going to be a short review as I have almost nothing but positive things to say about Up, don't fault me for an inability to shower things with praise. That said, Up, as I'd read many times before actually seeing the film, is one of the best animated films I've ever laid eyes upon. I thought Wall*E was one of the best animated films I've ever seen, thought that The Incredibles (still my favorite Pixar) film was the best animated film I'd ever seen. And certainly couldn't think of a better pair of films than the companies one-two punch of Toy Story 1 and 2.

Thus, claiming that Up is one of the best animated films I've ever seen is quite a hefty compliment. The film, as you've probably heard by now, is about an old man, Carl (Ed Asner) literally shuffling in to the end of his life, mourning a wife he's lost and a sense of adventure that's faded like pictures on the wall. When his house, "Elle", as he refers to it, is going to be put up on the market, Carl flips out, assaults an innocent man with his tennis cane, and has one day to pack his belongings before being shipped off to an old person home. Carl, intrepid former-adventurer that he is, instead rigs his house with balloons and floats the whole damn thing away, finally pursuing the adventure he's always yearned.

Unfortunately, he drags a ten year old Adventure Scout with him, runs in to an old hero turned bad guy, befriends a rainbow bird and talking dog (both of these characters brilliant in there simplicity and humor), and well, I won't say any more. What I will say is this, the film is touching and funny and literally crackles with adventure. There's a sense of silliness and wonder and the bizarre that doesn't punch you in the face, but is rather just accepted from the beginning. Films about houses that float away on balloons and sails made of quilts don't do it for you? Well, don't watch this film. This is a film about the adventurer inside all of us, that little person who makes you want to swing out over the water on a fraying rope swing when you're younger, but seems, as this movie claims, to get pushed to the side as we get older.

At the end of the film, I was happy, I was a little sad, and most of all I was excited, as Up seems to say that you can be an adventurer your entire life. You don't have to say goodbye to the dreams of floating houses and giant birds, those things are all there, you just have to find them.

I also wanted to write a quick word on the usage of 3-D in the film. I've never seen any of the new wave of non-cheesy films using the technology and was actually shocked by two things:

1. 3-D kind of makes me nauseous. There's a lot of blurriness and a lot of strange movements and vaster plains and I sort of felt sick.

2. It's really amazing what they're doing with it, but I still found myself wanting a crisper image. Something more clear and sharper, but alas, at least I got to see mountains jump off the screen.

I just finished watching Sisters (89) and can't wait to write about it.

Thursday: Sisters (89)