Alien Vs Predator impressed me. I expected something way more militaristic, rightwing, white sausage fest, but actually got a thoughtful, shadowy, ambitious and well-integrated adaptation of a classic cross-franchise comic book. It also succeeds as semi-sequels to both of the franchises' films which is transcendent. Seriously, the entire film is luxuriously paced, intricately lit and directed with some real modesty and sweetness. So much of this is the perfect casting of Sanaa Lathan who while representing a new kind of racial representation in not just this genre but ALL GENRES, she fits the type expertly. She merges the dainty heroine presence of the 1950s actresses with a broader command of herself. The film has a few unintentional laughs (and many intentional ones) and I thought it was perhaps too much fluffy spectacle and not enough character, but this didn't receive the major push and care that Prometheus or even Alien Resurrection did. Yet... I think AVP is better than both of those sequels and I'm sure it trumps the new Predator movies.
The actual message of the film is hazy and so my opinion on it is still out. The film's mythology casts the warring alien races as related to South American & African tribal cultures. In ass backwards fashion, AVP tries to sell some kind of apology or meditation on the savagery of slavery and the monstrosity of the slavemasters... by letting the slavemasters win and driving home the perceived beast nature of the "lower" alien race. Its offensive to me as a black person, as an animal lover and as a universal consciousness. The film is written by the director Paul W.S. Anderson who brings his usual Gothic visual panache & by the original Alien screenwriter Dan O'Bannon (an early collaborator with Carpenter and directed Return of the Living Dead). This lends the film a detailed sci-fi logic and all of the popcorn cues desired and it is progressive and enlightened in many ways, but it is also a bit meat-headed, warped and a tad trashy. Sanaa Lathan is the best part and gets decent support and I will definitely watch this again, but its not a great movie. But still important to analyze and refer to.
Liebestraum came out in 1991 - the height of David Lynch mania - and you can tell. Its made in the mode of Twin Peaks meets 1989's Sex Lies and Videotape. Its a jazz meets industrial erotic thriller in a film noir vein (or "vain").
I found the film to be quite a relaxing and pleasant experience. Its engaging intellectually as a demonstration of Freudian constructs of sex, neurosis & dreams, totally in keeping with Lynch and Hitchcock. Director Mike Figgis even casts Kim Novak as the archetypal mother. The acting is measured and textured, the naturalistic lighting is fresh and the subtexts are emotional and important enough. Except for a few brief glimpses, the film doesn't bowl you over. I mean once the mystery is unraveled, will you rewatch it for the aesthetics and will the themes ring louder? Doubtful.
The film practices the Early Remodernism I think Amos Poe originally intended. Its beholden to pre-postmodernism, the art and social ideals of pre-WW2 western thought. Its embracing enough of black music and highly critical of capitalism, yet still annoyingly, dogmatically conservative and its "retro" is an overwhelmingly artificial stylistic choice that undercuts the drama, not building it. Modern American cinema is steeped in this kind of indie filmmaking - sexually frustrated, European cinema-mimicking, nostalgic infantilized ego trips. Hitchcock, De Palma and David Lynch have sort of mastered this ethos and deconstructed it, so the remaining films in this genre are really just boring and predictable now, but Liebestraum does deserve a concentrated watch for unconscious reasons.
Why you should really watch the film is the curious amount of ideas borrowed by Lynch in subsequent films. The look, the sound design, the cast, even direct story arcs are taken. Lynch has used Alicia Witt, would cast Pamela Gidley in FWWM and Bill Pullman in the almost-remake Lost Highway. It demystifies and lowers Lynch in my eyes as he goes out of his way to rarely reveal influences and I didn't know he was copying contemporaries. Lost Highway is Lynchian and a more powerful experience, but essentially its the same script and production design as Liebestraum. Noticeably its the most hip and unusual style Lynch has attempted and you have to now give that credit to Liebestraum.
Besides that historical revelation, it is a competent low budget art film for its time and it holds up extremely well to today's predictable and even more gratuitously derivative crime/pulp/thriller/mysteries on TV and in theaters. Again, its a little too impersonal, leisurely and basic (which Lost Highway improves on), but maybe more authentic because of these limitations. Its not regressive but definitely old fashioned.
Its been over-exaggerated by a tiny minority of film fans, but The World's Greatest Sinner is a unique and bold touchstone in the history of early American indie filmmaking. It was directed, produced and written by the eternally struggling brute-characterized actor Timothy Carey as a kind of angry, perverted, manic, egotistical study of itself.
Carey plays an insurance agent who drops out of society, forms an atheist rock band, renames himself "God", runs for office and then has a moral breakdown about his own Atheism and quest to free mankind from God. Its a blunter version of Kane's study of populists, fascists, egoists and Western society's tools to produce them. But this is a much more cartoon and ignorant version. It still holds up as a mirror to people like Donald Trump and Adolph Hitler, but this was designed to bash Jerry Lee Lewis and Hollywood hipsters and not reveal the artist's own apparent shortcomings.
Like Welles, Carey wanted to prove that he was more than the big dumb oafs he played. Now the film is not great technically or morally. Its flatly a conservative Christian "scare film" that is anti-black music, anti-communist, anti-atheist, anti-Satan and anti-JFK. Carey comes off like the 60s' Alex Jones: paranoid, ignorant, childish and really disturbed in his self-worship. So its poetic that that is what he's showcasing. In many ways you can compare it to the self-destructive ego on display in Citizen Kane, The Room or Dennis Hopper's films. These guys made personally revealing, audacious "art films" but ruined their careers in the process. Carey is on the bottom of the list but he's still an early example.
Ichi The Killer - The Animation Ep.0 was the best watch of the night. It breaks from the original film's medium, tone, structure and messages, yet it achieves the same effect by building subtext for the first story.
Now the original film is a darkly funny study of the psychotic, sadomasochistic relationship Japanese men have to white supremacy and thus to each other. This is the underlying point that is really only revealed in the climax and lightly woven between key instances of each scene of a massive, campy pulp plot. With that revelation already in the Japanese fans' minds, the anime focuses on a harder boiled story with an even more surrealistic "ordinary" reality within the original manga universe that inspired the films. And it can also shave off the ornament, the aesthetic and the censored.
This film is allowed to explore the more extreme and horrific suggestions made by the original Ichi.
And at the same time, because it is done in a vibrantly expressionistic "limited animation" style (almost the virtual experience of reading a manga), this film is allowed to work on a deeper dream level. Its so unreal that it can say scarier things about reality or "realism".
Overall, you will love this if you love the first Ichi film. Its a proper, respectful and separate part of the mythos that opens up the parameters of the original and cleverly opens up possibility of more parameters to seek and not just in cheap carbon copy sequels.
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