Five At A Time #1: Things We Lost In The Fire

#1 Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain is an anime, which nothing about its reputation led me to expect about it. A supernaturally villainous albino teen backflips off a fence and does a 180 degree balletic twirl to shoot a different teen in the chest; at another point Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character is about to drown a slave he impregnated, and then turns into comic for the rest of his time in the movie because he has irregular shits. There are bad racial politics (although not as bad as they could be [although not like that’s a superb point of recommendation, not as racist as possible]) and battle scenes it seems like they spent the GDP of Crete on making as humongous and crazy as humanly possible. Cold Mountain is an anime.

There’s a part where the Union officers blow up the tunnels under a Confederate fort and we see this because Jude Law is running to catch a rabbit and as he’s running the earth literally begins to unravel upwards as he’s moving towards it, the planet shifts to a 90 degree angle as he’s moving on it. It’s a pretty incredible scene. Everything about the fights have a lot of care put into them. Jude Law ravenously eating live swamp crabs by the fistful while he’s on the run…there is some very good shit in this film. The best parts are like Metal Gear Solid 3 cut scenes, which, again: not something I would have expected.

Of course the good parts are good for those reasons and the bad parts are bad for the reasons most movies like this are bad, in that the characters are impossible to care about, people tell these nightmarishly long anecdotes that never amount to anything, Jack White is in it and you have to look at Jack White sometimes. Really awful shit like that. And then a hillbilly’s wife almost date rape’s Jude Law and there you sit, transfixed. Cold Mountain is hard not to recommend in some ways.

#2 Mother

Mother reminds me of an anecdote Milan Kundera told in The Art of The Novel. He’s catching up with a mom who spent a quarter century in the gulags — the Czech government tried to press a confession for some nonsense crime out of her and she wouldn’t give in for anything — and whilst they’re chatting she starts wailing about what a lazy sack of crap her son is for getting out of bed late. Kundera is telling her to cool her jets when the kid comes in and tells him that non, his mom is in the right, she suffered so that he could have a productive life, he needs to be a better son, etc. Kundera’s observation is that the state didn’t fail to break this woman after all; they simply transferred their oppressive agenda, through her, from a political framework into an interpersonal one.

Mother is sort of about this as well, about how wickedness and despair is in constant cyclical motion between people much in the same way that love is. It’s an incredibly meticulous mystery that also can’t help but be compared to Oldboy in many ways: jacked up Korean thriller with airs of Oedipal tragedy, a throttling reminder that the past never dies. I find that these Korean neo-noirs have an incredibly canny grasp of nihilism, in that they ultimately do believe in it but also don’t accept it unquestioningly. When does free will simply become an alternative lens for your own powerlessness? How can something truly be your fault if it only befalls you because you were following your inner nature? Can you believe this same guy did Snowpiercer? Isn’t that fucking horrible? I didn’t even dislike Snowpiercer but Jesus Christ.

#3 10 Cloverfield Lane

I think I know exactly what happened here: sometime between the script getting final approval and the beginning of principle photography J.J. Abrams played a Bethesda game and decided the farmhouse bunker i.e. the entire actual movie needed to be turned into the tutorial level. I know this because Mary Elizabeth Winstead kills John Goodman by pouring a vat of acid on him which is clearly a metaphor for her learning how to use VATS a la Fallout New Vegas so that she can drive to Houston and upgrade her tech tree enough to assist whatever rebel faction she ends up joining for the rest of however many of these stupid things they’re going to end up making. Movies: I hate them.

Anyway before it becomes pitifully, ridiculously terrible this movie is very good. John Goodman is horrifying, and the other guy she ends up having to share screen time with is just stupid enough to be believable and cause problems in a way that doesn’t feel overblown. The bunker has a very real sense of geography to it; it doesn’t seem implausible that the crew would’ve constructed a set that had real continuity from room to room, it feels that detailed.

Dan Trachtenberg directed a Portal short, which I didn’t know before I started clowning on the end of this movie for feeling like a video game, and now I feel even smarter. I get the feeling he’s going to be a Mark Romanek sort of director, good technician with a great intangible sense for a movie’s feel that’s going to end up mostly shooting TV episodes and movies that have kind of dogshitty scripts. I hope he gets to do something that doesn’t end up feeling like a waste of his time, because even though this movie was overall really good it does also feel like a huge waste of time, which is a confusing and unwelcome thing to be, critically speaking.

#4 White God

White God is a remake of Death Wish starring a dog. The dog’s name is Hagen. The best thing about this movie is coming up with alternate dog-themed titles for it, like Life of Hagen, or my own favorite, Beethoven’s Ninth: Roll Over or Die Hard.

#5 Cosmopolis

I think this movie is like the film equivalent of one of those 4th grade science fair experiments that’s made to prove people only like Godard movies because they’re in French. There’s not a whole ton that separates this from Vivre Sa Vie except that in this one you can count the threads on Paul Giamatti’s horrible towel and also Vivre Sa Vie is good and this isn’t.

Cronenberg movies vary in quality to a degree that is stupefying in its intensity and unpredictability. You can’t guess which ones are going to be good or not based on when they were made or what genre they’re in or even what the critical consensus might be. Maps to the Stars and Dead Ringers and Videodrome are god tier, this one and Scanners and eXistenZ live in the Shitbox. Crash wavers on the meridian. You’d 100% be forgiven for not believing any of your friends that told you Cosmpolois is awful because you’re never going to know what you think about Cronenberg until you see what he’s up to for himself. He’s up to a lot here and he doesn’t do a good job at any of it except for making the limo look cool.

Cosmpolois uses a lot of erudite, post-modern points of references to let you know that it’s okay that this movie isn’t about anything, the two major ones being Mark Rothko and Erik Satie. The problem here is that to let Cronenberg get away with this is to allow him to equate minimalism with shittiness, which simply is not on. Since there’s an extended digression in this movie wherein Bobby Pattycakes mulls over buying the Rothko Chapel it feels apt to use Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel” as a comparison. It’s a 25 minute ambient choral work that drones and regurgitates itself, expanding ever so slightly upon each cycle, until it crystalizes into a rather beautiful melody for its final 3 minutes. It only seems like nothing is happening if you are too impatient to stick around for the climax, but if you come into it with the right mindset listening to it is like watching a flower bloom in real time.

Cosmpolis is not like “Rothko Chapel.” It makes a point of not going anywhere, which even as “art” films go is not incredibly unusual in itself. What’s striking is that it is not only not interested in activity, but it also is not interested in subtlety or growth. The film is a series of conversations wherein characters blather their innermost thoughts and feelings as though they’re in a minor Frank Capra picture from the ’40s, back when screenwriters still felt constricted by the haunt of the stage. There’s no room for the viewer’s own beliefs or intepretations to maneuver, as everything you’re meant to assess is consistently being mentally jackhammered at you.

Actually, that’s another interesting comparison to Godard: he would have had the decency to frame all of these talks Rob has with these numbskulls as steadycam shots, whereas Cronenberg can’t even commit to having integrity in being a boring asshole and has the camera leap back and forth between the characters’ faces while they talk so that you’re manipulated into thinking you’re looking at something. It is too visually noisy to be an ambient film, too self-professedly disinterested to be…interesting. It feels strange to say that this film is less than the sum of its parts when there aren’t any parts to be observed in the first place. Somehow it’s even less than that.

It’s like…it’s like he wanted to make an Abbas Kiarostami movie, a structural homage to Like Someone In Love, except that instead of drawing on the innate sensitivity of his performers and the dense cultural history of his native home and its effect on art and social politics and love between individuals he instead drew on one Zizek book he skimmed at lunch. That’s a bit what it’s like, I guess. I did get up to do my laundry at the film’s climax, which in a perverse way feels like a victory for the film, that I became so disinterested that I left the room as it was playing. Maybe I wouldn’t have done so if it were in French.