Mars Attacks!

 Somewhere in depths of the Internet, a review exists of Mars Attacks!, Tim Burton's high-budget flop, suggesting that critics re-evaluate the universally derided movie.  On the strength of that review, I took a look at Mars Attacks!, a film that I probably had seen in fragments over the years, a scrap of footage here and there on the Cable, something glimpsed before I turned to another channel.  I'm as much influenced by reviews as the next person -- indeed, I labored for half my life under an idiosyncratic canon of movies imposed upon me by Pauline Kael -- and, so, I stayed away from the Burton picture.  In fact, the failure of Mars Attacks! was so spectacular that  it ousted Burton from his throne as post-modern King of meta-movies -- that is, pictures appealing the viewer's nostalgia for the guilty pleasures of their youth, bad movies, in other words, remade to have a patina of respectability.  With Mars Attacks!, Burton lost his cachet and became just another journeyman director, skilled enough but nothing special.

Alas, Mars Attacks! is not much better than it's reputation.  It catches a certain snarky Zeitgeist from the complacent mid-nineties, a mood best exemplified by a large-scale shot of downtown Manhattan with the towering hulks of the Twin Towers looming over the waterfront -- it's astonishing how big these things were and how utterly out of place they seemed.  Mars Attacks! channels low-budget 1950's horror films complete with the weird effect of devoting millions and millions of dollars to making itself look lamentably cheap, inept, and poorly made -- the Martians are depicted as giant brains with  glaring eyes and the bodies, when revealed, of shaved cats, are a particular example of a fortune spent to produce an intentionally unpersuasive and low-budget effect.  (The critters seem to be animated.)  The fact that the film harkens back to the 1950's micro-budget sci-fi features is diagnostic of the peculiar mood that the picture captures -- the fifties were complacent and conformist and, so, it seems, were the mid-nineteen nineties, everything becalmed under aegis of an unthreatening New World Order.  Burton manages to make1996 (I think the film is ostensibly set in 2004) look as retrograde and hapless as 1955.  

Mars Attacks! is inoffensive and mildly amusing.  It has a few interesting scenes, although the movie's nostalgia for the fifties genre films that it imitates flattens everything out and neutralizes the traces of satire in the picture.  Watching the film, one is struck by how mild it is -- this was before twenty years of the War on Terror, before the United States became the world's number one torturer (and was proud of that status), before the economic crash in 2008 and 2009 established our bankers and financial institutions were criminal, before prime-time TV shows like Succession used the word "fuck" in every single line of dialogue (Burton doesn't use the word at all)  and, of course, before Trump -- that is, B. T. a line of demarcation  in American politics that will stand as the 1914 of the new Millennium.   The film's satiric targets -- venal journalists, war-mongering generals, country-western music and Las Vegas -- are all broadly caricatured and easily mocked; we don't need a movie to make fun of Las Vegas -- it makes fun of itself.  Politically, the film's bugaboo is Ronald Reagan, surely a mild villain compared to Trump or, even, the dimwitted, and destructively inept, Biden.  As with the recent Netflix extravaganza, the film "virtue signals" (although no one would have used that phrase in 1996) -- this means that the picture is a little too smug for its MAD magazine style satire.  Just about everyone who had any pretension to be someone in Hollywood appears in the movie.  No one does anything much but "phone in" their performances"-- this is because the script is intentionally bad, full of shoddy, gimmicky dialogue.  There's nothing an actor can do with the stuff required of the players in this film.

The film's plot is rudimentary.  Thousands of Martian flying saucers emerge from scarlet crevasses on the Red Planet.  To the martial rhythm of a score that sounds Holst's Planets refracted through disco music, the saucers ("flying hubcaps" as someone says) make their way through space to Earth.  (Danny Elfman's exuberant score is the best thing about the movie.)  Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope, see the armada and report to the President (played by Jack Nicholson).  A suave scientist (Pierce Brosnan) assures the President that the space armada comes in peace -- he says that the Martians are an advanced civilization with superior technology and, therefore, peaceful.  (This syllogism is obviously flawed.)  The Martians land in the Nevada desert. They don't come in peace and start blasting everything in sight with their rifle-shaped phasers.  The plasma bursts from the Martian guns melt people's flesh away and leave them sprawled about as skeletons painted in various garish colors -- mostly blue and red.  The Martians who speak like ducks ("Ack! Ack! Ack! is all they say, although sometimes at length) seem to invite a meeting with a joint session of Congress.  Ridiculously, given the carnage in the desert, the President agrees to the session which results in all of the legislators being skeletonized.  (A computer translation system doesn't seem to work quite right -- at one point, it translates a speech by the aliens as having something to do with "suave shoes.")  The rest of the movie is a parody of fifties' monster films even to the point of unleashing Godzilla for some unknown reason on a city.  The Martians attack Las Vegas and Washington and bring their familiar monuments down; they even re-sculpt Mount Rushmore to replace the Presidents with their scowling bug-eyed visages.  There's lots of colorful mayhem that is not frightening or suspenseful in any way.  Pretty much all of the characters die.  As it turns out, the Martians have a vulnerability -- not the common cold as conjectured by H. G. Wells -- but an aversion to the yodeling of Slim Whitman, the country-western star.  As he croons, their bulbous heads explode into green goo and, so, Earth is saved.  In the last shot, a survivor makes his way home to a wrecked Washington D.C. where men driving front-end loaders haul away mounds of dead Martians. Burton doesn't know what to do with the premise and, once the Martians start killing everyone, the picture devolves into chaotic vignettes that seem totally capricious and whimsical.  At one point, the Martians can shrink people to bug-size and simply stomp on them.  A giant robot chases a pick up truck.  A group of heroic survivors, led by the pop singer and Las Vegas staple, Tom Jones (apparently Wayne Newton was busy) run around like chickens with their heads cut-off -- this subplot goes nowhere although it gives Jim Brown, the former football star (here an ex-boxer done up in a costume to make him look like an Egyptian pharaoh) and Mrs. Warren Beatty, Annette Benning, a chance to dash in circles while mugging fear and panic.  As in Dr. Strangelove, probably the most influential film of this sort ever made, Jack Nicholson gets to play two parts, President and a sleazy Vegas developer (married implausibly to Annette Benning playing a New Age adherent -- she meditates in lotus position as the aliens kill everyone.)  For some reason, the Martians like to perform grotesque experiments on captured humans -- they graft the head of her chihuahua on Sara Jessica Parker's body and preserve her head in a  jar; later the chihuahua now with Parker's head on it tries to make love with Pierce Brosnan's decapitated head -- trust me, it's not was fun as it sounds.  Slim Whitman's music is used in a derisive, patronizing way that would be offensive to many people if they recognized the sour condescension in this plot point.  Whitman's record with the yodeling is the favorite music of an old woman with Alzheimer's dementia -- the point being that no one would listen to this sort of music except those who are literally mindless.  Tom Jones is mocked as well but seems in on the jest.  At the end of the movie, he emerges from the Tahoe caves (!?) to see the lake full of wrecked space ships.  In a parody of a Disney film, all sorts of wild creatures flock around him (birds, deer, even a tortoise) while he sings "It's not unusual to be in love with anyone."  None of this makes any sense and seems purely arbitrary.

There's one short sequence that is actually funny and chilling.  One of the Martians made up like Marilyn Monroe with an enormous bouffant hair-do (hiding the creature's engorged cerebrum) slinks into the White House and seduces Martin Short (playing the President's press secretary).  She and her victim go into a fuck-pad hidden in the White House -- you access it by flipping up bust of JFK and pressing a red button.  The eerie-looking Martian sex-bomb is actually scary and this little bit of the movie, a throwaway like the everything else, has some of the creepy erotic charge of Scarlet Johansson's space-monster in Under the Skin.

The whole endeavor is questionable, along the lines of Burton's much better, if still pointless, Ed Wood.  Why spend millions of dollars to recreate bargain-basements films that were spectacularly awful, but, at least, weirdly appealing. Pouring millions of dollars into a "cult movie" just results in another failed Hollywood blockbuster and falsifies the entire project.  Vincent Price wasn't that impressive of an actor -- although he had his moments -- and he's nothing more than a nostalgic presence in Edward Scissorhands (also a much better movie).  What's the point in making something intentionally bad?  Badness if movies is easy.  It comes unbidden.

 

  

Wife of a Spy

 Wife of a Spy (2020) is strangely listless Japanese film, caught between melodrama and thriller and not persuasive with regard to either genre.  The picture has been compared with Hitchcock, primarily I think because the plot involves a woman married to a ruthless spy, the situation in his 1941 film Suspicion.  The comparison is invidious to the Japanese film.  Hitchcock's films of this sort (Notorious has a similar structure) rely upon real magnetism between the stars -- these pictures carry an erotic charge.  Oddly, Wife of a Spy features a married couple who purport to love one another but who seem desperately mismatched and lacking any on-screen chemistry at all.  This is curious because the director Kinoshita Kurosawa apprenticed making soft-core porno films and, therefore, should be well-qualified to insert erotic energy into this film.  But something goes wrong and the picture is very cold and abstract.  This is by design -- there's no question that Kurosawa is a gifted filmmaker; therefore, it seems that he has intentionally opted for an abstract, schematic, and stylized approach to this material.  The film's characteristics that I deem problematic are, in fact, purposeful alienation effects -- I just don't know why they are used in this picture.

Yusaku is a businessman in Kobe, plying the import-export trade in silk.  He has a large firm, seems to be wealthy, and has a trophy wife, the submisive Satoko.  As we gradually discover, Yusaku is using his business travel as an opportunity to conduct espionage.  He opposes the militarism of Japan in 1940 and, in fact, is scheming to procure evidence that will encourage the United States to intervene in wars then pending in Manchuria and southeast Asia.  For some reason, Yusaku is an amateur film-maker and he is  producing a picture starring his wife -- in the film within the film (one of two in the picture), she appears in a domino mask stealthily unlocking a safe and, then, as she tries to escape is gunned down by her husband who also stars in the movie.  (The film is highly self-reflexive, a movie about making and viewing movies -- this characteristic is evident in a scene in which someone discusses Mizoguchi and, then, Nikkatsu studios; Wife of a Spy is produced by Nikkatsu.)  When Satoko discovers that her husband is a spy and, therefore, traitor to the war effort, she is initially appalled.  But when she learns the stakes involved (the Japs are making bubonic plague in Manchuria and plan to unleash this baccillus as a weapon), she converts to  her husband's apparent idealism and, in fact, voluntarily becomes a martyr to the cause.  The MacGuffin in the film is a notebook full of medical diagrams and equations that documents the Japanese experiments with plague on prisoners of war in Manchuria.  There is also a film on a reel marked Pathe 9/5 that shows experiments with bubonic plague on POWs.  Yusaku is under suspicion by a childhood friend, Taiji, who has become a "squad leader" of Gestapo-like secret police.  In one scene, it is suggested that Satoko, who is miffed at her husband's frequent "business" travel (he's actually spying), likes Taiji and, perhaps, even attempts to seduce him.  But nothing comes of the encounter.  Fumio, an employee of the silk import firm, is also a spy.  He announces that he is quitting the firm to write a novel and takes up residence at  an Inn on the seashore.  In fact, he's translating into English the evidence of the biological warfare that the Japanese are developing.  A woman that he has brought back from Manchuria (she is apparently a witness to the war crimes in Manchuria) turns up dead, floating in the sea.  There's suspicion that Fumio murdered her.  But, more likely, she was killed by the Secret Police.  In any event, Fumio is apprehended by secret police under the supervision of Taiji who has the man tortured -- they tear out his finger- and toe-nails.  Yusaku recognizes that he must escape Japan and get to the United States.  By this time, Satoku is his enthusiastic partner in espionage -- she has discovered Yusaku's evidence of Manchurian war crimes, locked in her husband's safe at the import-export office.  (The scene in which she breaks into the safe recapitulates the home move involving her doing the same thing.)  Yusaku says he will meet her in San Francisco, telling her to stowaway on a ship headed for America.  He will travel separately -- and we see his ship, a little skiff, vanishing into the fog.  Satoko is locked in a crate in the hold of the ship.  But the Secret Police are on her trail and she is arrested with the canister of film showing the war crimes.  At the oddly ornate secret police headquarters, Taiji, who had a crush on her, now coldly punches her in the face.  The film is screened and, of course, it's the home movie and not the images of the war crimes.  There's a brief, highly stylized coda:  it's 1945 and Satoko has been locked away in a psych ward in Kobe.  She is considered particularly crazy because she hopes that the Japanese will lose the war, something incomprehensible to her fellow lunatics.  "They think I'm crazy because I'm the only sane one in this country," Satoko says, or words to that effect.  During a bombing raid, the asylum is destroyed and Satoku wanders out into a landscape of flames and some fallen brick arches -- this is supposed to represent the damage inflicted on the city during the air raid.  Satoko has been told that Yusaku was killed when the ship on which he was sailing  was sunk by a Japanese torpedo.  But a title tells us that the death certificate seems to have been forged and that Satoko traveled to San Francisco in 1946; it's implied that she meets Yusaku there.

Satoku's spying and, later, subversion seems masochistic.  (This is in accord with Kurosawa's resume which involves productions of so-called Pink or SM films.)  She's devoted to the callous and manipulative Yusaku like a dog is devoted to its master.  The home-made movie showing Satoku breaking into the safe is scored with a crooning love song that includes the words "This painful love is a one-way street."  The picture is mostly monochromatic, filmed in subtle shades of beige and khaki green.  MUBI is so negligent in the way that it presents its movies that I can't tell if the picture is shot out-of-focus or the transfer used by MUBI is poor and badly executed.  (Reviews indicate that the picture is very low budget and shot on some kind of digital camcorder with, possibly, poor focus and picture quality -- but not all of the move seems to be out-of-focus and so I suspect that this effect is an artifact of the haphazard way that MUBI streams its films -- the picture also buffered and had the weird effect of retaining the last subtitle on the screen, sometimes for a minutes at a time, before a new title appeared upon new dialogue occurring -- in some scenes, there was dialogue but no subtitles at all.  There really is no excuse for the way these movies are mutilated in their showing.)  The movie is unpleasant and not suspenseful.  It's interesting thematically -- the manipulative spy, Yusaku, is willing to mistreat his adoring wife  in order to accomplish his espionage objectives.  Clearly, he is no better than his adversaries in determining that the end justifies the means.  There's a scene in which the married couple go for a ride in the woods.  The movie uses horrible rear-projection as a homage, I think, to Hitchcock who's films are full of completely unpersuasive, if dream-like, rear projection sequences.  The movie is replete with imagery suggesting films and film-making -- when a co-conspirator knocks holes in the crate where Satoku is hiding the light streams through the penetrations like the ray of a movie projector shining in the darkness.  

Juke: Passages from the Films of Spencer Williams

Thom Andersen, a film historian and documentarian, produced Juke: Passages from the Films of Spencer Williams in 2015 as a commission from the Museum of Modern Art.  Andersen's magnum opus is, probably, his three-hour film collating and analyzing footage in Hollywood movies exploiting locations in Los Angeles -- this film is called Los Angeles Plays Itself and is wonderful, engaging, but abstract to the point that I can't recall many details.  Backgrounds are background and, although the film is revealing, I don't recall what it reveals.  (Early in his career, Andersen married the avant-garde to the public TV documentarian in his film Eadward Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, made in 1975 and a template for many later documentary films by others, most of them made for PBS.  Spencer Williams was an African-American director who made very low budget films for a company called SACK.  The pictures were shot in rural Texas and, apparently, involve lurid stories involving crime and redemption.  The movies were made between 1940 and 1949 -- apparently nine pictures.  Williams appears in many of the movies.  He was a large fat man who could play grotesquely stereotyped parts as well as comedy -- in one short sequence, he seems to impersonate Oliver Hardy, using pretentious diction as her berates an imbecile side-kick:  it's funny and disturbing at the same time.  Williams made his films as "Race Movies" for Black audiences and the pictures were probably shown in segregated theaters in the South -- in one shot, we see a movie theater in which everyone, including the usher, is Black.  Despite making films for exclusively Black audiences, Williams didn't hesitate to use aggressively caricatured African-American "types" in this movies --  stuff, offensive today, that  seems to be even more retrograde than the roles featuring Stepin Fetchit made in the decade before William's work as well as around the same time.

If you want to know about Williams and the weird sociology of his pictures, you will need to look at Wikipedia or some other source.  Andersen's concerns are not historical but aesthetic.  He wants to demonstrate that this is some kernel of truth concealed in William's idiotic scenarios and grainy, half-invisible pictures.  I'm not convinced, but some of the footage is mildly interesting as examples of what Manny Farber, the famous film critic, called "Termite Art" -- this sort of film is not intended as art but exploitation of  one kind or another; however, it inadvertently discloses around its margins truths and reality inaccessible to more prestigious, better disciplined and "artistic" films.  It's in this light that Andersen interprets Williams ' work.  (It's another question as to whether Andersen is, in effect, patronizing Williams by not taking his films on their own tawdry terms -- that is, as dramas about morality, crime, temptation, and redemption.  Thom Andersen, who can no doubt cite Walter Benjamin and Adorno with the best of them, doesn't engage with the films or their thematic purposes -- he treats them as artifacts, bits of "primitive" art that we have to re-arrange and isolate into fragments in order to understand (or, more likely, in order to find these things bearable).  After some explanatory titles, the film starts with congregations wailing gospel tunes while the camera jerkily tours neighborhoods that are obviously very poor and desolate.  The singing is not Gospel Brunch caliber -- instead, the congregations morosely chant the lyrics in a manner that is almost atonal.  We see some shabby genteel interiors.  A woman walks through a door.  Then, there's an insert of a suave hustler, a man talking on the phone who says "Okay, Judas, do your stuff!"  (Is this supposed to be God?)  There's a shot of a nondescript field with some folks sitting in a pickup truck; some of them may be playing banjos..  A man dressed in devil's costume prances around and, then, hops on the pick-up truck which lurches away.  This is followed by scenes in a primitive-looking Juke joint where some obviously non-professional dancers, skinny people with raw, angular faces, are dancing.  (Andersen slows their dancing to slow motion.) There are shots of trains that look like stock footage and, then, a funeral in which we see, by superimposition, a woman's soul rising out of her casket and ascending some over-exposed bleached white steps to Heaven.  A man named Jim, possibly the murderer of the woman, says that his conscience is  tormenting him.  He runs desperately through a series of mismatched rural landscapes.  There are more people dancing in a Juke Joint to tinny music.  One of the women is extremely emaciated and looks like a Black version of Popeye's girlfriend, Olive Oyl.  She has bony knees and elbows.  A sign stuck in a field has two arrows:  one points to Zion and the other to Hell.  A woman goes into a sort of tent in which Spencer, wearing a turban, looks into a crystal ball to read her fortune. "You don't wanna know the truth," he says.  "You've done something bad."  There's a fight, possibly the most incompetently staged in film history.  (The punches sound like hiccups as they land.)  Williams stands against the wall chortling at the violence.  When someone pulls a knife he crushes the man's hand under his shoe and takes away the weapon.  A woman gets shot.  A man dances like a turtle on his back.  Men play conga drums and the final scenes seem to be set in some over-exposed out of focus heaven where white columns and gates hang over the actors dressed in white garments that look like choir robes.  "This is the end," we hear, "the unjust have been struck down.  The Righteous have been treated with contempt."

The little 20 minutes film is showing on MUBI.  The images are of poor quality and the sound is hard to decipher.  There's no commentary by Andersen except a couple of  brief titles.  I looked at some of the viewer's notes posted to the movie.  Many of the people who watched the film apparently didn't really see it -- or watched it through some sort of prism of political correctness.  Several people noted that Williams was a great director unjustly forgotten because of his race.  And these commentators say that they will have to hunt down his films and watch them.  But the movies are self-evidently terrible in every respect -- Andersen isn't trying to rejuvenate the reputation of  Spencer Williams, a reputation that he never had in the first place.  Rather he seems to see the film's as accidentally revealing things about the way that Southern Blacks viewed themselves in the forties, something either deeply depressing or ecstatic depending upon your point of view.       

(Williams was born in Louisiana in 1893.  Interestingly, he studied at the University of Minnesota and served in World War I.  He appeared in several silent films including Steamboat Bill, made by Buster Keaton.  He also supervised casting of African-American parts for several studios.  SACK studios was located in San Antonio.  He is most famous for playing the role of Amos in Amos and Andy.  Apparently, he was a gregarious fellow who was always seen with his trademark cigar.  He died in 1969 -- periodically critics try to re-evaluate him as a film maker but, generally, come to the same conclusion:  objectively considered his films are abysmal.)

Don't Look Up

 Don't Look Up  (2021)is a brute-force satire produced by Netflix.  It's a prestige movie, populated with the likes of Leonardo di Caprio, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, and Jennifer Hudson.  Even the great Mark Rylance performs, impersonating a man-child Silicon Valley technocrat who is touted as the world's third wealthiest man and, apparently, modeled on the loathsome Elon Musk. The movie is long and elaborate, almost two and half hours, and it contains a variety of things, all of it intended as a savage Swiftian satire on Donald Trump and his followers.  The problem with this kind of film is that it is preaching to the choir,  Hollywood liberals satirizing conservatives for the benefit of other liberals -- and, of course, Donald Trump and his allies are, more or less, beyond satire:  their antics are already ironic in a sour post-modern way and much of what these folks say and do is already a kind of joke.  You can't satirize the "cry lib" provocations of Trump and his acolytes -- this conduct is already exaggerated and stylized beyond any rational politics or social commentary.  Ultimately, this very hard-working movie becomes less a commentary on our divided politics than yet another symptom diagnostic of the acidulous state of division prevailing in this country.

The film involves a young woman, a doctoral candidate named Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Hudson) who discovers one night a new comet.  The comet, which is named after her is on a collision course with Earth and, due to the asteroid's size, impact with be an "extinction event."  Kate confirms these dire mathematics with her mentor, Dr. Mindy, a astronomer from the University of Michigan.  (It's a joke in the movie that no one pays any attention to anything said by a graduate or instructor from Michigan until the same facts are confirmed and re-stated by a Harvard or Yale or Princeton grad.)  Kate and Dr. Mindy are whisked to the White House where the President, distracted by the implosion of her Supreme Court candidate's nomination by a sex-scandal is managing that crisis and quite willing to ignore the fact that the world is about to be snuffed out by a "meteor the size of Mount Everest."  Miffed at being ignored at the White House, Dr. Mindy and Kate get themselves booked on a morning talk show called "The Daily Rip", a sort of sex and gossip emporium that bears some resemblance, I suppose, to Fox and Friends or other TV programs of that ilk.  On the show, Kate gets hysterical and is disrespected by the hosts, particularly Brie, the attractive and fantastically self-absorbed female talk show presenter.  Dr. Mindy, because he is Leonardo di Caprio, is viewed as wonderfully telegenic and Brie and her Black co-host, a burly and humorous guy, like him; he's a ratings plus and, ultimately, Brie even has an affair with the astronomer.  (The casting requires us to regard di Caprio as spectacularly handsome and appealing to women, although, in fact, he's rather feckless and a hypochondriac -- put bluntly, di Caprio is no longer the handsome kid who starred in the Titanic a quarter century ago and it takes some suspension of disbelief to view him as the script wants us to.)  At first, the White House dismisses as hysteria the claim that the comet is going to smash into Chile and destroy the world.  In fact, the NASA chief, a woman who is major campaign donor to President Orlean and a former anesthesiologist denounces Dr Mindy and Kate's warnings as "fake new" and bad science.  However, when some Harvard and Yale astronomers confirm that the asteroid is, indeed, a planet killer, the White House takes note and, in fact, appoints Dr. Mindy to the commission tasked with saving the world.  Kate is regarded as too emotional and unreliable for a role in the government's mission and she is arrested by the FBI (for  second time) and simply "taken off the grid" -- she has to sign a non-disclosure agreement and ends up back in Michigan.  Meanwhile, the President (Meryl Streep) has organized a huge launch of space ships to take down the asteroid.  This mission is led by a crazy military hero, Benedict Drask played by Ron Perlman.  The mission is aborted suddenly.  The space ships turn back and parachute into the sea off Cape Canaveral.  The reason for the mission's retreat is that the autistic man-child and Silicon Valley mogul has discovered that the asteroid is made of rare-earths that he needs for his cell-phone empire.  This man, Peter Isherwell, takes over the mission and devises a flotilla of space craft that look like Transformers designed to land on the asteroid, blow it apart and, then, steer the fragments into the Pacific Ocean where they can be mined for their rare minerals.  Meanwhile, Kate is hanging out with some nihilistic skate boarders led by Timothee Chalamet; he  becomes her lover.  Dr. Mindy is engaged in a love affair with the beautiful and shallow Brie, the talk show host of "The Daily Rip".  Mindy's wife confronts him and throws his various pill boxes at him -- he's taking about a dozen different meds for his various psychosomatic ailments.  Isherwell's scheme, which is insane, fails.  The asteroid slams into Earth and everyone dies except for a tiny cadre of survivors who are blasted into outer space on one of Isherwell's space craft.  23,000 years later the space ship lands on another earth but it's inhabited by carnivorous monsters who eat all of the naked astronauts as they emerge from their cryogenically induced sleep.  In the final scene, we see Jonah Hill, the President's son and chief factotum, emerge from the smoking rubble on Earth.  He takes a couple selfies and, then, invites people to subscribe to his podcast hashtag @lastmanonearth.  But he is the last man, indeed, and subscribers are few and far between.

The film's general structure is cribbed from Dr. Strangelove.  There are the same motifs of wild-eyed lunatic generals, a military hero like Captain King Kong in Kubrick's film, here Benedict Drask who we last see blasting away at the asteroid with his machine gun as it falls to earth.  (We have earlier seen Drask at the head of the armada of space ships on the aborted mission -- he's singing some of kind of hillbilly patriotic song.)  The role of the sinister if avuncular Strangelove is played by Mark Rylance as the weirdly disengaged and soft-spoken Isherwell.  And there is the same motif of the privileged few escaping the holocaust.  It's apparent that the meteor speeding toward Earth is a surrogate for both global warming and COVID.  Right-wing news media claim the comet is a Liberal hoax or, even, some kind of Jewish space satellite.  Everything becomes politicized to the extent that many conservatives refuse to look up where the evidence of impending doom is emblazoned across the sky.  Meanwhile, the Left promotes benefit concerts, including a  huge show by Ariana Grande, called "Just Look Up" -- the show features Grande's pop tune to that effect.  Finally, at one of the Right Wing rallies someone does look up to see the night sky livid with the enormous fiery comet.  The people at the rally are horrified that they have been lied-to and begin throwing bottles at Jonah Hill, President Orlean's son and political advisor; hit by a bottle, he flees the podium muttering "the fuckin' hillbillies' hit my face and cut my eye."  (This is a deviation from reality -- the true believers on the Trump side are quite willing to be martyred before they will acknowledge that COVID, for instance, is real and a threat -- they go to their graves proudly proclaiming that the very disease that is killing them isn't real at all.)   Like most satire, the film doesn't have the courage of its convictions, and turns maudlin in the last twenty minutes as the world ends, not a flaw in the Kubrick film on which this picture is rather transparently based.  Dr. Mindy abandons the shallow and vicious Brie and returns to his family in Lansing, Michigan.  Kate is there with her skate-boarder boyfriend and the obligatory Black scientist hero.  Everyone makes small talk as the world ends.  There's an alarming shot near the end:  the comet has ripped into earth and killed everyone but we see an intact block of apartment buildings, delicately coated with snow.  It looks like part of the Earth has somehow been spared -- but, then, we see that the buildings are standing on an amputated chunk of the earth that is whirling through space with Louis Vuitton bags, half-incinerated cows, and the mutilated torso of a blue whale.  Just before the comet strikes, Dr. Mindy pronounces the film's effective, if simple-minded, theme:  "We really did have everything when you think about it" -- these words pronounced as tsunamis of fire whirl through the atmosphere.

The film is too angry to be funny and it's oddly (and disconcertingly) accurate about science denial on the Right.  The movie is also quite disturbing -- it's painful to see the world end and the final sequences are spectacular and horrific, footage that belongs in an entirely different kind of movie. (The ending of Dr. Strangelove with its black and white government films of nuclear blasts scored to "We'll Meet Again" is exemplary for how this sort of material can be tactfully handled in a way that is disturbing, but bearable.)  In fact, some aspects of the movie's last half-hour are a bit like Lars von Trier's depressing masterpiece Melancholia in which the moon smashes into the Earth with predictably dire consequences. 

Every card-carrying Liberal in Hollywood, apparently, wanted to be part of his movie.  Cate Blanchett plays Brie and the movie is packed with big-name bankable stars of all kinds.  (It's a little bit like Its a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World cast with a Who's who of mid-sixties comedians.)  The film directed by Adam McKay feels like "virtue signaling" in some respects although, in fact, the pathology that the picture depicts is depressingly accurate and true to life.  The fact that everything is now politicized is shown in awful and persuasive detail in the film.  But everything is colossal, too big for comfort, and film is too awful in some respects to be amusing.  It's an okay picture but strangely forgettable given its grandiose themes.  The best thing in the movie is a final scene the Brie and her  jovial Black co-host.  He says:  "What should we do? Fuck? Pray?" Brie says:  "No, no let's just get drunk and talk shit about people."  This dialogue occurs as the sky is literally falling.  

The Divas of Taquerabt

When The Divas of Taquerabt, a short documentary by Karim Moussaoui, ended, I immediately streamed the film again.  (It's on MUBI.)  Haunting and dreamlike, the little movie is completely mysterious.  The images in the film are very strange, but not in a showy or surrealistic way -- it's the mood, the ambience, the weirdly designed camera positions that create this effect:  there are no establishing shots and nothing exotic -- it's like we're seeing a grainy video of the content of a very peculiar dream, oddly familiar but inexplicable.

The movie begins with a strange-looking woman removing a book from the upper-shelf of a rather rudimentary book case.  The woman seems to be in her early fifties and has very dark skin under her eyes -- she looks like she's bruised or a racoon.  An off-screen voice asks her about an opera house built in Algiers with the assistance of the Chinese.  The opera house was constructed in 2016 but has not yet been used for a performance.  The man off-screen asks the woman "What opera would look like in this place?"  (What place? Is there no tradition of musical theater in Algiers?)  She mentions a work unfamiliar to me (La Nouba) and remarks that the programs in the opera house have been more a matter of "installations" than opera.  Then, she names a place and says that she was driven from the airport to a cave where women were singing.  This was in the early 90's.  The man asks if she thinks that these women (or their successors) are still singing.  "Why not?" she replies.  All of this is shot from about five feet from the oddly spectral woman.  We never see the interlocutor.  We don't know for sure what, if anything, the book has to do with the dialogue.  The woman is looking for a quotation, apparently, but why and what sort of quotation is never established.  The movie, then, cuts to very grainy images overexposed showing four or five men with sound equipment walking in the desert.  The desert is a blur and the shot is jittery taken from close to the men who walk away from the camera.  Next we see a man dressed in the turban and gowns of a Berber.  The man is working with a primitive hoe in a mysterious-looking flooded field.  The field is divided into little squares outlined in eight inch high embankments of wet sand.  When the man cuts through an embankment water floods the tiny patchwork field.  We see the man irrigate several patches of nondescript low-lying foliage in this curious garden.  The man is asked if women sing in caves.  (Again, it's the off-screen male interlocutor.)  The man doesn't know anything about this but thinks it may have been a concert staged for tourists.  The genre is described as Ahelli.  "I'm a fan of Ahelli," the farmer says, but remarks that he has never heard of women singing in caves.  Next, we see a man driving a Land Rover, filmed from very close.  He says Ahelli  songs are about "life, love, religion."  He recalls that a man with a Land Rover came once and collected the songs, possibly recording them. The driver says that the women, who were supposed to sing, "are not available today."  The men with the sound equipment stand shivering (it must be cold) in a totally barren desert.  Again the camera is very close to the men, not figures in a landscape because the landscape is merely implied -- again it's like the setting of a dream in which it doesn't really matter where things are taking place because characters and plot and scenery are all inside the dreamer's head.  A couple men are shown tightly compressed by door frames in some kind of structure, possibly a caravansarai.  One of the men says that he's exhausted with "driving through nothing at all."  His cell-phone rings.  In the next shot, the crew is in some sort of underground location, a big grey roomy subterranean space, possibly something like a salt mine although who knows?  Women are seated in an alcove eighty feet away, lit by flames and singing.  The film ends with a five minute montage of fairly short shots showing the women from various angles.  We have no idea why they are singing, what they are singing about, or what they are doing in this strange, gloomy cave?  A rhythm is pounded out by a woman striking a two stones on a sort of flat metate.  The women wear shawls and some of them have elaborate jewelry, bangles and big dangling necklaces.  They all have their eyes shut.  The music has a call-and-response flavor, a single voice performing the melody against a background of rhythmically chanting voices.  The women clap their hands in time with the music.  Some of the singers, in fact, are obviously old men.  When the song is finished, the matron who has been leading the performance starts another song.  The movie cuts to black.  

The film is very fascinating, a bit like a documentary by Jean Rouch but without any commentary or explanatory material at all.  The picture is made with the sponsorship of the Opera de Paris in was first screened in 2020 as part of a festival of short films commissioned by that institution.  The picture to which the film obviously refers is Werner Herzog's unsettling Herdsmen of the Sun, about Tuareg singing contests conducted by young men in elaborate make-up.  But this film is more pure, less about the performance and more about the difficulty of finding this music, buried, as it is, far underground.  Herzog imposes a European context on his spectacle -- he films the Tuareg men, swaying and dancing, but with music on the soundtrack of the last Castrato in Italy singing a sentimental aria from a long forgotten opera.  Here there is no implicit commentary of that kind.  The aura of mystery surrounding the images and performance, which is remarkable, remains impenetrable.  

Some internet research reveals that an allusion to La Nouba in the film's first sequence refers to a documentary movie made by an Algerian feminist and radical Assie Djebar (who is also mentioned).  Djebar was born in 1936 and died in 2005.  A "Nouba" is a five part song cycle performed by women in the Algerian desert.  The woman in the first part of the film says that opera in Algiers would have to be based on something like La Nouba, the documentary showing women singers, according to Djebar, people repressed and made voiceless by colonialism.  The off-screen male interlocutor has said that he doesn't exactly understand why the Chinese built an opera house in Algiers -- "it's not as if we're going to produce ten operas a year," he says.  "Timimoun" where the women singing in the cave are said to be located is a sparsely populated desert territory in central Algeria.  The people who live in this area are of mixed Sudanese, Berber, and Arabic origin.  They speak a language called Gourara (sometimes spelled "Gurara").  A "Taquerabt" is apparently a three-part performance of Ahelli music.  The performance customarily begins with a group sing-a-long that may feature as many as 100 people chanting and moving in a shuffling circle around the central singer who calls out the lyrics.  (Sometimes, a flute is played.)  The second part of the performance, which is customary at religious and civic festivals, is performed from late at night to dawn by more accomplished professional singers.  At dawn, the best and most experienced singers perform.  Apparently, this singing and chanting lasts for eight to twelve hours.  UNESCO is attempting to protect this performance-style as one of the "intangible treasures of cultural heritage" but the Gourara language is dying out.  The people associated with this tradition are oasis farmers called the Zanete.  The man described as collecting these songs is apparently Mouloud Mammeri, a controversial anti-government figure who died in a car crash.  The State opposed his public funeral but more than 200,000 people attended.  The filmmaker Karim Massaoui was born in 1976.  He is Algerian and has made one feature film and several shorts.  The Divas of Taquerabt is 15 minutes and 30 seconds long.  It's highly recommended.  

  

A Night at the Opera

 Sergei Loznitsa's A Night at the Opera is a 20 minute documentary produced under the auspices of the Opera de Paris.  It is part of a series of short films commissioned by the cultural institution and first shown in 2020.  Loznitsa is a great filmmaker -- his monumental and appalling State Funeral about Stalin's obsequies is unforgettable.  Loznitsa is a materialist film maker, at least when it comes to documentaries.  (He has made two dramatized feature films which I have not seen).  Loznitsa accumulates footage, edits it together without overt commentary, and lets the images and montage communicate the meaning of the material presented.  This technique makes his films susceptible to very different interpretations..  One picture that he directed, Austerlitz, showing tourists strolling the grounds of a German concentration camp exemplifies the ambiguity in his method.  One can interpret the film as evidence of callow disregard for human tragedy, as a portrait of how masses of people move through a landscape, as evidence of the limitations of memory or, even, as a joyous assertion of people's ability to entertain themselves despite the horror of history -- all of these meanings are demonstrably present in the film.

Ordinarily, Loznitsa works with duration and, often, makes his points by the sheer length, and tedium in some cases, of his material.  (State Funeral is about three hours long and hammers home its points by a sheer, mind-numbing accumulation of footage.)  A Night at the Opera is much more spritely, briskly edited to provide an abstract, as it were, of what it was like to observe people at an opera in the late fifties and early sixties.  With one startling exception, the footage is all newsreel material, black and white.  We see crowds gathered outside the Palais Garnier Opera house in a glistening film noir night.  Celebrities arrive to the music of Mozart's Magic Flute overture and ceremonial procession music from Aida.  We glimpse DeGaulle, Brigitte Bardot, Grace Kelly, Stravinsky and others.  These luminaries are shown in repeated shots decorously ascending the great steps into the auditorium.  Then, we watch them take their seats.  The Marseillaise is sung and the curtain open.  Maria Callas appears singing an aria by Rossini in recital -- the actual performance shown is not  from a staged opera and we have the sense that this gala, perhaps, is a fundraiser of some sort.  (In fact, the film compiles images from probably a dozen events.)  Callas' is filmed in a close-shot.  Of course, she's famously plain but her singing is hypnotic -- it seems effortless and weirdly unmediated:  for some reason, we have the sense that she is not singing but being sung, that is, that the music is flowing through her and animating her features as it passes from her.  The performance is astonishing and, probably, the main reason the film exists.  After Callas' aria, the movie indulges in a single color shot -- a great chandelier virtually quivering with light against a painted rococo ceiling.  The film ends with fireworks that are shown in black-and-white.

The movie is light and vaguely comical -- certainly, there is an intentional allusion of the Marx Brothers comedy of the same name.  There isn't much substance to the film but I think it's well worth watching.  

I lost my Body

 Jeremy Clapin's French language animated film, I Lost my Body (2020) is a puzzling movie that straddles several genres.  Apparently intended as a kind of fantastic allegory, the movie is too realistic in texture and detail to be conventionally surrealistic.  Rather, the movie suggests a sort of ill-designed parable, a Kafkaesque fable that is too improbable to be taken seriously, but that doesn't ever venture into really delirious or expressionistically adventurous territory.  The tone of the film is also uncertain -- the plot has a certain pervasive sadness and pathos, but the movie is a little too icy and indeterminate to maintain that mood. There's a love story that's too unresolved and abstract to be effective -- romance, as it were, without romance.  And, aspects of the short picture (it's 80 minutes long) exploit well-established horror film devices -- but, although a bit gruesome, the cartoon isn't particularly frightening.  It's hard to know what to make of this picture and, unfortunately, I think the movie is a little too slight, even, I dare say, twee, to encourage the viewer to spend much time trying to work out its mysteries.  In effect, the film is like its twin heroes, Nafouel with his missing hand and Nafouel's hand with a missing body -- there's something severed, amputated, missing from the story.  

There are three strands to the plot, all intertwined and presented with flashbacks and flashforwards.  The peculiar intricacy of the narrative suggests, I think, that the film maker is not entirely comfortable presenting events in chronological order and without mystifying shifts in time sequence and tone.  If the film were presented as a continuous narrative, I think the story's implausibility would overcome its dramatic interest -- we'd get bogged down with stuff that makes no sense or that we don't understand and would dismiss the film outright.  The dizzying shifts in chronology, sometimes signaled by changes in color (the remote past is shown in black and white) conceal problems with the plot.  

In the first strand of the film, an amputated hand escapes from a refrigerator where it is being cooled with a bucket of eyeballs.  The hand escapes its chilly prison and, then, sets off on an odyssey to rejoin the body from which it has been severed.  In this narrative, the hand darts around like a spider (or The Beast with Five Fingers in Robert Florey's 1947 horror move -- itself derived from The Hands of Orloc made by Robert Wiene in 1924 and Karl Freund's 1935 Mad Love, both films infused with German expressionism.).  The hand fights rats, gets half-drowned in an icy river, nearly is run over by traffic, is attacked by ants and flies, and, finally, wafts it's way over the city of Paris (I think), borne aloft by an umbrella.  At last, the hand finds its owner but the reunion is disappointing and amounts to nothing.  In the end, the amputated hand sits atop a ruinous warehouse building surveying the city.  But the term "surveying" and the bucket of eyeballs in the fridge embody a serious problem -- the hand has no eyes and can't see.  Therefore, how does it navigate all of the exciting perils that it encounters?  This seems like a trivial objection, but it's an important one.  Fantasy has to establish rules and play according to them -- here there are no rules governing the hand's adventures and, therefore, although these parts of the movie are thrillingly animated, we don't really have much emotional investment in them because the hand's peregrinations are simply too weird and mysterious:  why has the hand been stored in a refrigerator with eyeballs?  why doesn't the hand decompose?  how does it find it's way through the world?  And, when the hand is reunited with its owner, why isn't more made of this encounter?  (The hero is asleep and doesn't even know that his hand has come back to pay him a visit).  The film cunningly focuses on hands in all of its three strands and, at one point, a man says that the hand is what shapes matter into useful form. And, indeed, there's a shot of the hand rearing up over the city like a tarantula above graffiti that says "I am" -- is the hand supposed to be some sort of divinity?  It's impossible to tell. Certainly, animation has a "hand-made quality' and, I suppose, that the image of cunning, disembodied hand has something to do with the way in which the movie was made.  But again none of this is clear.

The second component to the film is the backstory of the hero Nauofel. We see him as a little boy with his parents.  His mother and father are gracious and kind.  There is discussion about how to catch a fly in your fist -- you have to aim where you think the fly will go when you sweep your hand toward it.  Apparently, the hero's family lives in Algeria.  On the way to a party there's an accident and Nauofel's parents are both killed.  Somehow, the child is sent to France where he seems to have been abandoned at about the age of 15.  This part of the film moves inexorably toward the climax of the car crash, caused, in part, by an aggressive fly.

The majority of the film involves Nauofel's adventures in Paris.  We find him working as an inept pizza delivery boy.  After his bicycle gets smashed up in a crash with a car, he delivers a pizza to a feisty girl who lives on the 35th floor of an apartment building.  He never sees the girl during the failed delivery but she seems to flirt with him and Nauofel decides to track her down.  The girl, Gabrielle, works at a library.  Naoufel, afraid to introduce himself as the voice on the other side of the intercom when he delivered the squashed pizza, meets the girl in the library.  He watches her, but is afraid to speak.  Later, he discovers that Gabrielle has an uncle who runs a decrepit word-working shop.  Nauofel finagles his way into the uncle's shop as an apprentice.  Of course, the shop is full of jig- and circular saws that cause the attentive viewer to shiver with dismay.  The girl has told Nauofel that she has a fantasy of living in a cozy igloo atop her apartment building.  Nauofel becomes friends with the girl and, in fact, builds a wooden igloo on top of an abandoned warehouse.  He invites Gabrielle to this hideaway and announces to her that he is the pizza delivery man with whom she flirted over the intercom.  Far from being pleased by this revelation, Gabrielle is appalled -- she interprets Nauofel's awkward overtures as "stalking" and angrily denounces him.  Nauofel goes to a party, gets drunk and fights with his roommate.  The next day, upset with losing Gabrielle, he takes some alka-seltzer and tries to catch a pesky fly while operating a circular saw.  We know the outcome.  After a brief hospitalization, Nauofel decides to take a literal "leap of faith" -- he climbs up on the abandoned warehouse and jumps onto an adjacent construction derrick.  Gabrielle has been looking for him, but she has missed him at his customary haunts -- he has given up his little room above the wood-working shop.  Having succeeded in his daring leap, the one-handed Nauofel sits on the crane (query? how is he going to get back to the top of the warehouse?)  Snow falls and he lays down, possibly to rest or, maybe, to die in the gently falling flakes  By this point, his poor errant hand is out of the movie.  I think the hand watches his leap, but, then, what?

I suppose the film is supposed to be about "amputation".  The idea of being alienated, cut off from one's home language and homeland is possibly thematic to the film.  Many of the characters seem rather truncated and detached and, probably, the movie suggests that the condition of modern city dwellers is to exist as "amputated" beings.  Certainly, Nafouel has been untimely severed from his kind artistic parents and the warm sunny palm trees in his native North Africa.  (For some unknown reason, the film makers represent Algeria, if that is Nafouel's home, in black and white -- it would seem to me more logical to show North Africa in color.  But this is merely one of the many peculiar and baffling decisions that characterize this odd picture.) 

As a side-note, the hero says that he admires Sergio Leone's movie The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly particularly Lee van Cleef's character.  If I recall properly, this character is a gunfighter so fast on the draw that he can catch a fly in mid-air in his fist.