Hey folks, Harry here... Ol Augustus Gloop here saw several things that I missed today and one that I caught. Of the films - I'm most looking forward to seeing MALEFIQUE, which is being remade in English. And then there's the one we both saw - though I saw a completely different film in the film he reviews. I won't debate his review, but rather I'll say that HERZOG'S WILD BLUE YONDER is a conversation with a jealous bitter alien that is doing his best Bukowski on the big truth of it all. I found humor, beauty, wit and one of Herzog's best mixture of abstract poetry and found footage. As a result, it isn't for everyone, but it is for anyone that finds that interesting. Here ya go...
Hi Harry,
Fantastic Fest Day 2 brought several more interesting films, as well as some memorable shorts. It all started at 1:00 while most good people were still at work. I barely made it to the Drafthouse in time to sit down and enjoy:
Herman, The Legal Labrador
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This was an animated short that could be an episode in a TV series about a dog that wears the pants in the family. Herman has a limited vocabulary, but everyone seems to understand him, and he appears to speak Spanish, too. He is a defense attorney and has taken on the case of a young man who is framed for murder. He manages to track down the real killer with the help of his owner, and then has a legal chitchat with his bulldog buddy.
This didn't stick out as a particularly great piece; the jokes were obviously centered around dog humor, like when the judge can't get Herman to quiet down until he yells 'Sit'. I should have prefaced that by saying, however, that I am really a cat person. Others in the audience seemed to enjoy the jokes. I found the animation style to be original, with hand-drawn characters on top of backgrounds that look like they were blown-up color photos from a newspaper. I was ready for it to end though, so we could get on to the feature:
Hakugai, The Legend of Moby Dick
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This wasn't actually a full-length feature, but instead four episodes from a TV series that will be coming to the states in the early part of next year. It is set in the far-flung future (4699, if I remember correctly), and details the adventures of Captain Ahab and his whaling crew as told by a young teen who wants to join the crew and become a whaler, himself. It seems the star system that serves as the base of their operations has a powerful magnetic field which pulls in space trash from light years around, and that includes very large derelict vessels, which the 'whale hunters' scavenge for plunder. Captain Ahab's team is the best and consists of only 8 highly-trained and specially-qualified members, while other whaling teams may have up to 200 members. The first episode deals with introducing the team and setting the scene. The second episode covers the pre-hunt party and the hunt, itself, where the team discovers a mysterious corpse. In the third episode, the corpse comes to life, and they learn that it is actually an android. And at the close of the fourth episode, the team has only just learned of the existence of the great white whale, Moby Dick.
I'm not familiar with more than the Cliff's notes of Moby Dick, and I can't tell if this is really trying to be a faithful adaptation of Melville's classic to space. It is a pretty good story, but I wonder if American audiences aren't going to have some political correctness issues with all the talk about whale hunting. Japan's position on whale hunting has been a bone of contention in recent years, and they have been stepping up activity. Parts of this series almost could be considered to look like a recruiting tool for the next generation's whaling fleet. I think if that manages to not be an issue, or if they could just go back and re-dub the soundtrack to change all references to whaling to 'piracy' instead, it could be fun... but space pirates have already been done to death. Also, the shots of giant space-ships overlaid with images of whales is not too subtle.
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After Hakugai, I was set for the Making of Narnia panel, but there was quite a long wait until its 5:00 start time. So, I thought I'd duck into a 4:00 screening and see how it looked, and could escape just before 4:00 to catch Narnia if I didn't like it. Unfortunately, I was harpooned by:
Domoi, The Voyage Home
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Domoi appears to be a Russian short (I say 'appears', because the spoken lines were definitely in Russian, but the credits appeared to make it out to be a Finnish movie). Regardless of the origin, it was a very enchanting film. The only spoken words are from a narrator, who is telling the story to a group of very intent children. He narrates a line or two, and the rest is visual, as we see the story of a knight, the last survivor of his army, who makes his way through the woods until he comes to an enormous deserted castle. Inside, he encounters a lovely ghost in white who leads him to a sort of tomb. He opens the sarcophagus he finds there and has a flashback where he recalls his own birth and the death of his mother in childbirth which we saw in pieces at the beginning of the narration. He has a vision of blood on his hands, which would make you think he blames himself for the death of his mother. But, he has another vision which shows his father burying something. He then goes to the spot and digs up his twin, which it would appear was the actual cause of his mother's death. Returning to the tomb, he places the bones of the infant in the casket with his mother. In a brief flash of light, he then sees the ghosts of the mother and child reunited as he falls into his own endless sleep.
For such a short (maybe 20 minute) piece, this was very impressive. It tells a simple, poignant tale, elegantly. The scenery creates a very unique mood, and the artwork is stunning. It's all rounded out by a score that could be considered worthy of Howard Shore.
Malefique
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I was shocked to learn this film was produced in 2002. A grainy film quality and minimal set design lend it a look and feel like something out of the late 70's or early 80's. The rubbery look of the talking vagina also adds to that impression. When Carrere is thrown into prison for a crime he didn't commit, he is confident he'll soon be out on bail. Inside his cell, he encounters his bunkmates, Lassalle, an aged bookworm, Marcus, an iron-pumping transsexual who resembles Meatloaf in Fight Club, only prettier, and Daisy, a waifish youth who likes to eat anything that can fit in his mouth. The film centers as much around the interplay between these people as it does around the strange events that happen when they discover a necronomicon-esque book of spells left by an earlier inmate, a master of the black arts. They begin to experiment with the magic inside, calling on the ancient gods Hastur and Yog-Sototh, and you just know they are not in for a smooth ride. The effects take 'The Exorcist' to a new level as the characters all work their way toward their unique deaths. The final fate of Carrere is very Twilight Zone or Tales from the Dark Side, and you'll probably see it coming well before the end. Still, it's the journey that is important, not the destination.
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Following Malefique was my final FF screening for the day, one that I admit I was really anticipating. Unfortunately, Harry may not want to post my thoughts on:
The Wild Blue Yonder
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Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance. I've been wanting to use that quote for some time now. Unfortunately, this movie has offended me with both style AND substance.
Let me begin again with this preface. I am not a fan of Werner Herzog. I have never seen any of his films. I had no idea what, exactly, to expect. This is coming from a total non-initiate, and if you're into Herzog, go read what Massawyrm has to say, because you're in the 1%. For the rest of you, what I *am* is a huge fan of NASA. I grew up dreaming of being an astronaut. I collected articles from the paper. My parents bought me prints and posters of shots made by Voyager and Viking, and I put those into a scrapbook along with my autographed picture of Neil Armstrong. I drew starships and could tell you all about how the Enterprise could achieve faster than light travel. I knew what Planck time and the Big Bang were in 3rd grade (1983). I could detail for you the life cycle of stars. I was the 1/2 of 1% of the people that this movie was expressly NOT made for.
Let me also say that I worship the fucking dogshit that Brad Dourif steps in, for he makes it holy, and the Cello is my favorite instrument. I also wrote a high school English essay on Jacques Cousteau and SCUBA and how he invented the regulator that makes it work. My best friend works at JPL with the scientists who are depicted here, so believe me when I tell you that I am completely into every individual element of this movie.
Yet Werner Herzog has managed to put them all together in such a way as to make me hate them all like the sound of a cat puking in the middle of the night and knowing that I'll step in it somehow, no matter how hard I try to miss it, before I can clean it up. I hate it all, at least for the two or three hours I had to sit through this. Yeah, I said 2 or 3 hours. It's actually only 81 minutes, but Herzog has mastered time dilation, and I would've believed you if you told me it was 4 hours. The Wild Blue Yonder has managed to supplant The Truman Show as my least favorite movie, EVER.
The movie, itself, is simple. K-Pax is at it again. This time, he is standing around somewhere in the desert in the middle of a deserted town that was going to be the population center of his people's colony on Earth. (No idea why they'd come from a planet made of frozen helium and settle in the fucking Mojave, but let's not nitpick). So, K-Pax tells us all about how his star was dying and how his people set out in all directions to find a place to live and a few of his friends made it to Earth about a century too early due to some problems with time dilation. The journey took them 50 generations, but they're still going fast enough to suffer time dilation, oh shit, I'm nitpicking again. Anyway, we're treated to some old footage of what looks like the Wright Brothers and a few other old planes. He then goes on to talk about Roswell and how it was really his people and that he was involved. Next, he tells us about how the government hid the probe they had discovered, because they didn't really know what it was. But after a time, they managed to release a microbe that had piggybacked and determined it would make the Earth uninhabitable. Up to this point, it's OK, a little slow, but not too bad. We're enjoying more footage from NASA including what looks like preparations for the moon launch at Kennedy Space Center.
From this point on, though, I would have had more fun peeling sunburned skin from the inside of my eyelids. The humans sent astronauts to explore and find other places to colonize. We get about a sentence or two of dialog explaining this, and then we get 10 minutes of some of NASA's most boring footage from inside STS-34, a space shuttle mission. Somewhere in here, he tells us how our big mistake was breeding pigs. Dogs are OK, because they will travel and hunt with us, but breeding pigs leads to a sedentary domestic life which brings society and all its evils, but of this, most interesting and thought-provoking idea he's yet given us, he says "but I digress". Really, the astronauts' journey is the tedious part of the film that ruins it for me more than anything. We have one or two lines of dialog followed by minutes on end of the same footage of astronauts in their underwear. We don't see them in spacesuits, doing anything. We don't see them at the controls, checking computers, etc etc etc. They're just sitting around floating in their tin cans while their tin cans take them somewhere else. The music throughout this and to the end of the film is absolutely grating diatonic cello with disharmonic chorus of men wailing in Sardinian with an occasional jew-harp thrown in. I'm OK with a film trying to not be Kubrik. I get it. But for god's sake, don't make me sit through ten minutes straight of that same arythmic discordant noise. It set my teeth on edge and ruined any chance of me enjoying what was to come, which was... more of the same!
To get on with the story, K-Pax delivers his longest monologue on how utterly hopeless it is to try and find another world. It would take hundreds of thousands of years just to reach Alpha Centauri at our current top speed and take more than all the mass in the visible universe to accelerate to just a fraction of the speed of light, and even then, it's 200 thousand light years to the nearest non-deadly star. Fuck it, I'm going to go balls to the wall with the nitpicking here and ask just where the hell does he get his figures? This galaxy is only 100 thousand light years in diameter. To say it's 200 thousand light years to the nearest habitable star means there's not one in all the million billion suns of the Milky Way.
He talks about how his people took generations to get here, but due to one of our scientists discovery of orbital highways, we are able to get to the Andromeda galaxy and back in only 15 years time to the astronauts, but it's really taken 800 years here at home. Again with the nitpicking, I say, if we can travel anywhere at speeds in excess of thousands of times the speed of light, and further, your star began to die when you departed hundreds of thousands of years ago, why would we go visit your homeworld, the 'Wild Blue Yonder'? This is only the beginning of the inconsistencies that make it not even fun to pick this shit apart. The long and short of it is that we went to his world, pissing him off, because we could do it so quickly. We wandered around for a bit, managed to ignore or damage the wildlife that miraculously still survived on his homeworld, and then found a wormhole we could travel through to return to Earth. However, when we return home, over 800 years has passed, mankind has died out, and the world has returned to a primeval state of beauty. The narration of this simple story takes 81 minutes to progress in one and two-sentence pieces scattered among clips of footage from the following three sources: 1) NASA training facilities 2) Inside the space shuttle 3) Antartic ocean SCUBA diving footage. There are a few clips at the beginning including the early airplane tests, footage of Brad Dourif in the deserted town, and at the end, the only really stunning shot of the film, some high mesa with jungles on top and waterfalls shooting out the sides which represents primeval Earth. The only original footage would seem to be that of Brad Dourif walking around a deserted intersection. The rest of the footage is simply drawn out WAY too long with the same stuff repeated over and over. We see the same astronaut curled into a ball and being spun around by another astronaut four or five times over. The underwater footage has a few precious moments of interest, like the wayward jellyfish that comes by, but most of it is just dark shapes of scuba divers outlined under bluish greenish ice. You can't make out anything but shadows.
Now, setting aside my nitpicking inconsistencies and innacuracies as well as my opinion of the footage and the music, let me address the story itself, the film as a whole, or the message Herzog is trying to get across. The people who liked this film said afterwards that it was poetic, a way to just sit and meditate on life, the universe, and everything. I found it to be more a failed attempt at the total perspective vortex. It didn't work as a sci-fi narrative, because nothing much really happened. It didn't really seem to have a clear message about environmental impact, because nothing seemed to really impact the environment for the worse. It seemed for a while that it was trying to hit home the utter futility of space exploration, but then it says "aww fuck it, you can zip around using New Math to get there lickety-split". So, finally, all it seems to be saying is we're gonna fuck up the planet, but it'll keep going and be a beautiful, pristine place once again, and it'll only take 800 years to happen, and if you're very very lucky, you'll be an astronaut that gets to come back and see it.
To address the question of poetry and meditation, I first say that I would have a much easier time meditating if not for that god-awful grating discordant arythmic chanting. Second, there is a quote from Herzog, "Astronauts lost in space, the secret Roswell object re-examined, an alien who tells us all about his home planet - the wild Blue Yonder - where the atmosphere is composed of liquid helium and the sky frozen, is all part of my science-fiction fantasy." He's not talking about poetry or meditation. He's calling it a science fiction fantasy. I wonder how much science fiction he's exposed himself to. I've read Niven, Pournelle, Asimov, Philip Dick, Silverberg, Heinlein, Cherryh, Ellison, Stanislaw Lem, Ben Bova, Bradbury, Burroughs, and Mary Shelley among others, but Wild Blue Yonder doesn't compare to any of them.
I wish I could admit to being a bit harsh. All I can offer to soften the blow is that I'm in that 1% that absolutely should NOT be exposed to this film. It offends my sense of style, it offends me with its substance. It got on my nerves by pushing the futility of space travel with inconsistent and incorrect facts, and as harsh as I may be, it's just a very, very boring hour and a half of film. I wish I'd gone to see G.O.R.A.
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I had to pass on additional FF screenings so that I could get across town to the penultimate night of AGLIFF for the regional premiere of:
Hellbent
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Not much to say on this one. It's a slasher flick with some good kills. There are a couple of really cool shots involving a character with a glass eye. Oh, and it's the first gay slasher film. If that interests you, go see it. If you're the kind of person who posts in talkbacks about how everything is gay, this one might not be for you.
-Augustus Gloop
