Pandora's Box (1929) Directed by: Georg Wilhelm Pabst

 

This one of my favourite films and one of the best films of all time. If that sounds over the top, watch this and see for yourself. Even today, the actions and personality of the lead character, Lulu, is iconic and unmatched almost 100 years since the film's release. Playing the lead, Louise Brooks created something unique... an image and look that survives to this very day. She is more than just one of the most beautiful women of all time... her character is so full of life and ch charismatic is just pouts out of the screen into the viewers eyes. He haircut and look literally influenced the entire flapper era and Lulu's lust for life and new experiences is infectious. Look toward almost any advertisement, decoration almost anything from the flapper era and Brook's image is on it. 

Pabst and his team took Brook's natural talent and brought it to life with amazing photography. Every frame could be a still photo. This is German film so it goes the way many did and have gone since...right into a nightmarish world of horror and depression but it's so well done and you are so caught up in the main character's story you just can't stop watching as it all starts going from fun to tragedy. 

The plot is complicated, involving a devil may care young woman who is basically sleeping wiht almsot everyone else in the cast including her fiancé, his son, an acrobat and some woman she knows. Somehow they mange to present this behaviour as freeing and endearing and beyond the prudishness of that and to be honest, this generation. Lulu isn't looking to hurt anyone... at least not at the start. 

It was inevitable that such a free spirit would get herself into trouble and boy does she ever get into trouble. Her fiancé is not happy catching her with so many people during their wedding reception and orders her to kill herself. They struggle with a gun and he is accidentally killed, the door to the room opens and the guests see her holding the smoking gun with his head buried in crotch - one of the most memorable shots in cinema history. 

Her dead husband's son helps her escape to London to avoid going to prison for murder with some of her other associates but it all goes down hill from there, leading her into prostitution and a shocking ending that even for a film this old, if you have never seen it, you won't see it coming. 

Anyone I can get to watch this movie finds it shocking and intriguing. Louise Brooks is mesmerizing. Too many people are unfamiliar with silent cinema to know it was not all Keystone Cops but often poignant, complex and talking about subjects that even today people find controversial and scandalous. I cannot imagine something this wildly free being made today. 

The Crowd (1928) Directed by King Vidor (updated repost from April 2009)

 

This film is one of the all time classics of cinema. Made in 1928, it follows the life of a «nobody» born on July 4 who has asperations of grand things in his life. Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he does not really distinguish himself from the crowd or society, which in this film becomes a character in of itself, always present and taking away his space, always surrounding him and restricting his movements in some way. The lead character is (played by James Murry) and, in fact, the whole story is morally ambiguous. He seems a total egotistical jerk, concerned only with his own delusion that he is better than everyone else - somehow... he has no clear idea why. His life is a mess and so tragic you can’t help but feel not only sorry for him but for yourself. Who amoung us hasn’t has big dreams only to find they were in fact, impossible to reach no matter what efforts made? He and us all have to learn to live in the world we get, not the one the one we wish we could live in. As a result, the film is thoughtfully indifferent to him all the way to the happy/bitter end. The last shot is haunting. It is at the same time hopeful and defeating as the main character start to put his life together and find happiness again we realize he will never differentiate himself from the crowd around him.

Visually, the direction by King Vidor is outstanding and the effects top-of-the-line. Some fo the images so powerful they stick on your head long after the film is done. For me the shot of the parents in the window watching helplessly as their daughter is accidently hit by traffic, the mother moments ago waving a doll he bought her now slumped against the window with the doll clutched in her hands show just how powerful silent films were and still are to those of us open enough to watch them. Director Jean Luc Godard was asked once why films about ordinary people were not being made. He responded with "Why remake «The Crowd?» It has already been done". The one terrible thing about this film is that, somehow, it is not on DVD.The lack of certain films updated and restored to the current format is, in my opinion, an abuse of the film going public. 

Indifference - short stories by no one in particular had been updated and price lowered!

 

 I recently updated the design and re-arranged the stories in my first book of short stories. I cut one and added a new one and also added illustrations for those that didn't have them the first time out. The story "The Face in the Glass" was a head scratcher in terms of what sort of image to make and I ultimately deiced something "punk-ish" might be good. Originally I was going to do a mohawk only from the side. I decided instead to really simply and stylize a photo of me from the 80s. So not sure it counts as a real self portrait or not. I wasn't really going for resemblance as much as I was going for a certain look - much like I was going for for myself in that era! It would have been cool to colour the make-up but the book is printed in black & white so greyscale had to suffice. 

The book is for sale on Amazon as a printed book and a Kindle book.

The new price is 5.99$ (CAD) and the print version should be updated in the next few days, but the Kindle version is ready now. 

Varan the Unbelievable (1958) Directed by Ishirō Honda

 

There might be several versions of this film but the one I saw was about 1 hour 7 minutes, making it about 40 minutes too long. The film was meant to be a USA/Toho joint production but that fell apart and the resulting English and Japanese filmed parts never mesh together. The Japanese sections don't even have subtitles. 

Some military guy and his wife are doing some sort experiments on a remote lake that will poison the water. The locals think a monster lives there who will destroy the world if the lake is threatened. Most of this film is the military guy trying to evacuate the residents while being as sexist as possible to his far too subservient wife who wants the villages to be able to stay in their homes. There is a ton and I mean a ton of expositional dialogue that makes the film drag and the clichéd plot doesn't help it much. I expected more with Honda as director. There are many references to Godzilla, including his theme song being snuck in at one point. 

Turns out there is a monster andit goes on a  rampage. Who would have thought? The wife blames herself because she wanted the villagers to stay and her brilliant husband states "this was no one's fault". Ummm... it was HIS fault 100%! He was poisoning the water and displacing an entire village for... reasons? 

The monster itself is a highlight. Not too badly designed and it moves well on all fours. The effects overall are pretty good for a film of this kind, era and budget but they can't save the tedium between shots of the giant creature destroying stuff. 

SHAZAM! (2019) Directed by David F. Sandberg

 I know it seemed impossible but this a very good DC superhero movie. Wonder Woman was great but faltered towards the end by going for spectacle over what could have been a perfect introduction to that character. SHAZAM! though lighter and filled with clichés of its own manages to own those clichés and give us something entertaining with good performances pulled out of what could have been bland characters. I do have questions as to what age this film is aimed at... it's funny and seems like an ideal children's film but the violence and killing in it, though not bloody is too intense for kids. I mean, a guy shows his brother out the windows of a high rise while a demon bites the head off someone else... not family friendly exactly.  So let's say teenagers were demographic. 

It's a rare comic book film where the characters motivations, including the villains, are so clear. It knows not to pull at the heartstrings too hard and brings the source material into today's world and what I would have to describe as a side-car film in the DC hero universe. It's too light and fun to fit into the other films and knows to not take itself so seriously, which is why it works. The plot points seemed earned, even the battle at the end is tapped down to a certain extent and comes from the events in the story and doesn't feel like a marketing excuse for a 100 million CGI battle. The movie gets into the action right away and doesn't waste time with a prolonged prologue. There is an end credits scene, of course, but for once I feel like... Yeah, I might go see that next one. 

The Midnight Sky (2020) Directed by George Clooney

Maybe it's just the result of the pandemic the world has been living through and how it has effected me, but I found this to be a little gem of a film. I like the slow pace some critics held against it and some of the plot elements are tropes but I thought they were well integrated and well done. 

After what appears to be nuclear Holocaust that is hinted started from a mistake, one man (Clooney) who is dying of an unnamed illness decided to be left behind at an Arctic station while everyone else is evacuated, knowing he will die there alone. While there he discovers he is not alone and a little girl had hidden herself away and he must deal with her. There seems to be literally no one on earth who can come and get her and her fate is as sealed as his in the long run. At the same time, a ship is returning back to earth from a  habitable moon the Clooney's character discovered as almost a second chance for earth. They do not know what happened but as they get closer to home with no contact, they are faced with a mystery of what could be going on. they get in touch with Clooney and he tells them to turn back and has calculated a route for them to take so they can start again on the moon. 

Since this is new and I really don't won't give away some of the plot turns, I won't say more. It's true at least of two of them are a little to coincidental for me but it still works. It's not hard sci-fi but it has the look and feel. It benefits greatly by not trying to explain too much. The holocaust, his sickness and the tech that takes them to another planet are all taken as fact without having needless exposition. I will say setting it in 2049 is a bad move, too soon and usually a bad idea to "date" a sci-fi film. Nice performances, nice effects and only what I would describe as a "soft" feel to the whole thing. A welcome change from movies that feel they need to overstimulate the viewer from start to finish giving no time to breathe. 

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) directed by Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada

500 years after all the dragons have been turned to stone by the evil Drunns who were in in turn banished by the a crystal welded bu the last of the dragons, humanity has turned against themselves and separated into tribes. One of the leaders wants to unite all 5 tribes but he is betrayed and the Drunns come back when the crystal is shattered and dived amounts the rides. The Drunns over the following years turn most of the population into stone but the daughter of the would be unifying leader goes on a quest to find the last dragon, bring the crystal pieces together and save their world. 

While not a life changing event, this is a pretty fun, beautifully animated and hits many of the right notes. there are cute animal sidekicks and other typical Disney tropes but if you are looking for something light you can do a lot worse than seeing this. The voice of the dragon was the only thing that didn't work for me and the modern day references and speaking styles were sort of out of place but there was some nice action that kept me from leaving the story being told. 

Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941) directed by Dave Fleisher

 

Fleisher Studios was Walt Disney's biggest competition at the start of the early cartoon era. In the end, the two became friends but they were fierce rivals for years. In may ways, the Fleishers out Disney'd Disney with animation and new techniques. The had parallax shots and filmed cels over 3D models to get depth into the cartoons. They invented Popeye and Betty Boop and were in many ways a more adult focused company. 

While many people remember Gulliver's' Travels as their full length feature animation, they did do another... Mr. Bug Goes to Town. Animation-wise its a tour deforce of smoothly moving characters and wonderful background pantings. It's close to 2 hours long... and eternity for even live action films of the time. 

The story is of a grasshopper returning to his little home (bug) town which has been under siege by the humans who walk through it destroying everything and setting things on fire with their cigarettes and cigars. There is a complicated plot involving the grasshopper's girl friend being pursued by the local rich bug who lives on higher and more secure ground. In the end, none of them is safe as the lot they are on is about to be used for a skyscraper. The grasshopper eventually leads the town, after lots of pitfalls and misunderstandings, to a new garden on the top floor of the building where they can be in harmony with the human couple who live there. 

In most ways the film is delightful... despite the racism that is sort of inevitable in a film, particularly animated ones, of this period. It's not close to worst ever seen, but it till does make one's teeth grind when you see it. Visually beautiful with endearing characters, I would say it's a bit too long and complicated, The Fleishers were ahead of Disney in many ways but story was a weak point and while never dull, it could move along a lot faster. 

(Also called Hoppity goes to Town)

Visible: Out on Television (2020) directed by Ryan White

 On Apple TV +

Spread over 5 episodes, this documentary details the presence and presentation of LBGT+ people from the beginning of TV to present. It is filled with interviews not just of actors, writers and producers but has some interesting political figure thrown in as well. The result is entertaining and informative and if you know someone who doesn't understand why representation in media is important for minority groups, particularly maligned groups, this might actually bring them around. 

The stories are deeply personal and the series skips over superficial career details and heads right for the meat of the theme of each episode bringing to light the story of LGBT+ people as they were seen in peoples living rooms across the decades, ties them to other groups and doesn't sugar coat the steps backwards it takes before you can go forward again in media representation. It ties political and news of the day with how gay people were forcing themselves in front of cameras to save their own lives at times.

There is some overlap between the segments but it doesn't get repetitive so that even someone like me, who lived through 90% of the time covered, can learn or be reminded of things forgotten in the still uphill battle for sexual minorities to be seen as real people. 

Soul (2020) directed by Peter Docter

Pixar is in top form with this film. Yes the animation is fantastic as it is with all Pixar films but I honestly barely noticed it as the story and characters rightfully took all my attention from start to finish. 

A musician (Joe) dies unexpectedly by falling into a manhole on the day of his big break to join a legendary jazz artist in her band and dies. That is the start of the story. On his way to the great beyond, he refuses to go there and leaps into space only to find himself in a place where souls are before they are born. He is mistaken for someone else and is charged with helping a reticent (to say the least) pre-born to find its purpose so it can go to earth. Joe uses them to sneak back to earth but he ends up n a cat while the other (22) ends up in his body. The film then turns to them trying to get Joe to his gig on time and back to his his own body. 

One thing I loved about this film was the design of the characters. There is often a tendency to try for "realism" in modern animations and this goes the opposite direction and avoid all the uncanny valley pitfalls and distraction "realism" can burden an animated film with.  Some compare this to another Pixar film "Inside Out" but it's truly it's own thing and a very mature project with problems dealt with a way anyone can understand. 

I don't think it's my favourite movie even in Pixar's history but I really appreciated the risks it took by making something so thought provoking and adult in nature. I really does not seem to be aimed at kids at all, in very good way. The end is open to interpretation, we are not sure what direction Joe is heading and that makes the film point... it's not what he ends up doing, it's how he ends up doing it and why.