Category: review

So ends my week of cleaning out the Netflix queue…and what a way to go. Dogtooth is a genre hybrid, a coming-of-age tale crossed with lingering, shivering horror. It’s a story told between extremes…one where we don’t know the beginning or the end, but whose middle is open to us and lets us know that its beginning and end are being withheld as an act of mercy.

The film is a relentless hour and a half of Hell. A family is held on some remote estate by its patriarch, who keeps his children in a state of fear so constant and extreme that they dare not set foot off their lawn for fear of being killed by creatures unknown.

Their mother is complicit in this scheme, though it’s unclear why. She has knowledge of the outside world the likes of which her children will never know, but agrees with her husband that it’s best to keep the children confused, ignorant, and in abstract terror at all times.

They feed their children misinformation to keep from developing as human beings. This ranges from lying about the simple definitions of words to larger, more loaded deceptions…such as when the father comes home covered in blood to report that their nbever-seen brother has been killed by dangerous creatures because he disobeyed orders. The children are forced to deliver eulogies for this boy who never existed, and learn — as far as their father is concerned — a valuable lesson in the process.

We encounter this cruel and unexplained social experiment at the very point that it begins to fray. The children begin to behave monstrously toward each other, lashing out with knives during minor disputes. The son spies a stray cat on the family’s property, and guts it with hedge trimmers in case it’s one of the dangerous creatures they’ve been warned about. And a woman who is brought to the home to service the son sexually inadvertently triggers something in t leads the children to explore their own sexuality with each other.

It’s unflinching and difficult to watch. The camera has a habit of lingering long after we’d wished it would turn away, but that’s an important part of the experience. Great films know what to leave to the audience’s imagination, but Dogtooth knows that these things cannot be left to the imagination. That, in this specific case, the imagined horrors can never live up to the reality. And so you see every last terrible thing.

There’s very little story to Dogtooth, but it’s a powerful and cohesive experience, one which raises a wealth of questions about parenting, about childhood, about family, about society, about truth, about perception, about relativity, about love, about responsibility, about identity, and about knowledge.

It answers none of those questions. In fact, that might be one of the film’s themes as well: questions are deflected, deferred, or answered with a deliberate lie. Like the nameless patriarch of the anonymous family, Dogtooth doesn’t want to give us answers. Unlike the patriarch, it can’t stop us from discovering them on our own.

Next up: Nothing. The series is over. My regular schedule of not posting anything ever shall now be resumed.

This is one I’ve been wanting to see for a while, and I definitely enjoyed it. Vincent Price is predictably fantastic as the titular Last Man, and it’s a delight watching him simply go about his day. Radioing for help, seeking out fresh garlic for the front door, clearing corpses from his yard and dumping them into a pit…post-apocalyptic New York is a lonely place, and Vincent Price has been trapped there, alone, for three years.

It’s taking a toll on him, but he moves forward. Humanity has been decimated by the very disease he was once working to cure…but now it’s too late. Even if he finds a cure, there’s nobody left to give it to.

Something keeps him going, though. Something keeps him broadcasting on all frequencies every day for three years straight, even though there’s nobody out there to hear him.

He spends his days collecting food and survival gear from abandoned supermarkets, but he’s careful to take only what he needs. Inside he still harbors the hope that somebody, somewhere, must have survived, and he doesn’t want to consume all of the resources himself. It is with this small act of self-restraint that he hopes to provide that phantom pocket of humanity some hope. What’s more, he even makes daily sojourns through the city, methodically slaughtering the deranged mutants as they sleep, just to make the streets a little safer for anyone else who might have to cross them.

If this sounds similar to Charlton Heston in The Omega Man, there’s a reason for that: they were based on the same book. The Last Man on Earth, however, is exponentially better. Granted, the mutants never register as much of a threat here, but the ones from The Omega Man were even less frightening, with their religious-cult overtones and and 1970s souped-up MonsterMobile. The same book was also adapted into Will Smith’s The Last Man on Erff…I mean I Am Legend. That’s a good number of high-profile adaptations for a single text, and in this case the first was probably the best.

For starters, it has a not unforeseeable but still quite brilliant (and Twilight Zone-worthy) twist to Price’s actions that The Omega Man doesn’t have, opting instead of a graphic interracial fuckfest because that’s definitely what we expect from a story about the last human being alive. I Am Legend ditches both of these developments…for all I know, as I haven’t actually seen it…presumably in favor of having Will Smith rap with some mutants, while they all wear nice suits and sunglasses.

The Last Man on Earth interestingly contains a flashback sequence of film-dominating length at its center, which shows Price and his wife and daughter living out the last days before the plague hits America. As might be expected, the death and devastation being felt by Europe at the time feels distant and impossible here in America…until we flash forward, and see his little girl and the woman he loves falling victim to it in turn. Price himself is immune, but all that means is that he gets to watch everybody he’s known and loved die before him.

There’s a particularly lovely moment in the film when Price comes across a stray dog, alive against all odds in the wasteland. He lets the dog into his house and is so excited by the prospect of company that he launches immediately into promises of all the fun things they will do together…only to find out that the dog has been wounded, and is infected with the virus. Cut to the last man on Earth burying a small figure in a shroud with a stake through its heart, and a figurative one through Price’s as well.

There’s more I could say about it, but I won’t spoil it in case anyone out there wants to watch it. It’s early-ish Hollywood horror, so don’t expect to have nightmares over it or anything, but there’s an enjoyable story with a wonderfully conflicted central character, and it outlines perfectly valid arguments about perspective and intent. It’s certainly better than watching Charlton Heston fumble with boobies, or Will Smith and the mutants teaching Carlton how to dance.

Next up: something is explained, a problem is encountered, the problem is compounded, and then the problem is resolved. Whew!

Richard Ayoade has been involved in some great stuff. The IT Crowd, AD/BC: A Rock Opera, and my probable candidate for funniest television show of all time, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. I was surprised to see that he directed a film, though, and would have been a bit apprehensive if the reviews didn’t all seem to conspire with one another to convince me that this was exactly the sort of movie I’d fall madly in love with.

And this was exactly the sort of movie I’d fall madly in love with.

Submarine plays games with cinematic grammar, with unreliable narration, and with basic plot and character development, but that’s not what’s impressive. What’s impressive is that it does all of these things in service of a sincerely affecting and bittersweet experience. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading endless volumes of modern and postmodern literature, it’s that absolutely anybody can subvert expectations. It’s a trick pulled so often that it’s no longer surprising. Not everybody, however, can utilize that game in the necessary service of a vaster emotional statement.

Submarine does this. And I don’t think I’ll be forgetting it soon.

The film is about Oliver, a teenage boy living in Wales, who finds himself drawn to the crude, nasty beauty of a female classmate as his parents’ marriage disintegrates in the background. But it’s not the plot that holds the film together…it’s the sensibility. It’s the appropriately confused nature of the film, which glorifies the enormity of youth while never losing sight of its fleeting, graceless unimportance. Oliver is prone to flights of internal fancy that border on outright hallucinations, muddling so often the line between imagination and reality that one of the film’s biggest shocks comes after a scene in which he reads aloud his suicide note to the class…only for us to learn in the following scene that, for once, this was not imaginary.

It’s a bitter film, but it’s an affectionate bitterness. It’s the affectionate bitterness that comes with looking a good friend in the face and telling him to fuck off, and meaning it, while still understanding him to be the best friend you’ll ever have.

The object of Oliver’s affections is Jordana, a dangerous and equally disturbed young woman who torments her peers and delights in setting fire to things. She brings out the worst in Oliver by mere virtue of existing, and an early, gorgeously-presented moment in the film finds Oliver bullying an unfortunate girl in order to impress Jordana and another friend of his. But then his friends leave and there’s just Oliver, his victim, and silence. Without changing a thing, the entire perspective of Submarine shifts, and it’s a perfect film-defining moment that haunts Oliver in ways he can’t ever understand.

As Submarine progresses Jordana finds her own life injected suddenly with a malign tragedy, and we see at times from that point forward an outward reflection of her own humanity. As we plumb the depths of Oliver’s problems and erase, letter by letter, our perception of his innocense, we find Jordana assembled, piece by piece, to something like a sympathetic human being. Both Oliver and Jordana are rich, challenging characters, but we start at the opposite end of each’s spectrum, and work backward toward the middle, where, with luck, they might finally meet, and be for the other what they each most need.

Submarine is an unquestionable delight. Beautifully flawed, and devastatingly frank. There are no good people, apart from Noah Taylor as Oliver’s milquetoast father…but he gets steamrolled by everything life puts in his path.

Adolescence is about learning to fight, because that’s the only way to move forward. And it’s also about learning to hurt. And learning to be hurt. And learning to heal. And learning to help others to heal. In short, it’s about learning why you’re never going to be up to the task of guiding your own life, and it’s about that last sunset at summer’s end, that sees you knee-deep in water and facing an uncertain horizon. At your back are all the mistakes you’ve made, and in front of you are those you’re doomed to make all over again.

It’s funny. It’s sad. It’s heart-breaking. And I loved it.

Next up: The one with that character who needs to accomplish something.