Words are inadequate

Anton Corbijn (dir.), Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) (trailer)

Look, I'm a compulsive reader. As a teenager that meant I read CD liner notes, and I remembered things like the album artist credits on Pink Floyd albums for "Storm Thorgerson" (Lapse of Reason) or "Hipgnosis" (Dark Side, Wish You Were Here). At some point I learned that these were pretty much the same person: Hipgnosis was Thorgerson's design studio, specializing in album covers.

When I heard that there was a documentary on Hipgnosis I said "huh, might be interesting" and pulled it up. I hadn't realised it was done by Anton Corbijn until I saw his name in the opening credits. It took me a bit to remember where I knew his name from, too: photo credits for U2's The Joshua Tree.

Most of Squaring the Circle consists of filmed interviews with a couple dozen people who were involved with Hipgnosis. They're shot exactly like the Joshua Tree photos: black and white, high contrast, skillful use of shadow and light sourcing. I adore chiaroscuro so this is entirely my jam. The parts that aren't interviews, or sometimes archival footage, tend to be Ken-Burns-effect pans and zooms over Hipgnosis's psychedelic artwork, and that's pretty great as well.

Storm Thorgerson's been gone for a decade now, so most of the history's filtered through his co-designer, Aubrey 'Po' Powell. Po's interview clips are interspersed with folks like Paul McCartney and the extant members of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and occasionally other folks Hipgnosis worked with. Noel Gallagher of Oasis turns up as well, gushing about how awesome records in the sixties and seventies were.

It's all a bit ridiculous: the sheer amount of money being thrown around rock stars, and Po and Storm's savvy at putting themselves in the way of it. Which isn't to say they weren't making some stunning artwork as well. But the wild scale of the whole thing, tens of thousands of 1970s UK pounds, all for a twelve-inch-square image. Amazing.

The documentary closes with this classic exchange:

INTERVIEWER (offscreen): Why didn't you use Hipgnosis for your album covers?
NOEL GALLAGHER: (laugh) I couldn't afford them.

Visually stunning, occasionally hilarious, and overall a fascinating angle on the UK music industry. Recommended.

Billy Wilder (dir.), Sunset Boulevard

The noir film fest is back at the Cinematheque, my favourite of the two film-festival-type theatres in the area. Friday night I caught a couple of showings.

Force Of Evil had moments of gorgeous cinematography and good dialogue, wrapped around a plot that was by turns impenetrable and nonsense. I don't regret going to see it, but I wouldn't go out of my way to see it again. It's sort of what I expect when I go to see movies at the noir festival. Sometimes things are forgotten because they just weren't that impressive to start with.

And then there was Sunset Boulevard.

I knew the director's name, Billy Wilder, as attached to some of the best-regarded comedies from classic Hollywood: Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, especially. But I didn't think I was personally familiar with his work at all. Turns out I've seen a couple of his pictures before: Sabrina, which I didn't much care for partly because I imprinted on the 1995 version with Harrison Ford; and Double Indemnity, which is one of my (everyone's) absolute favourite classic films noir, up there with The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep.

Sunset Boulevard is ... it's not not a noir, I guess. But it's not about someone getting drawn into a life of crime, or discovering the seedy underbelly of the city. If film noir didn't exist I'd call it a gothic. It's about a down-on-his-luck screenwriter who's taken in by an aging silent-movie star who didn't make the shift to talkies, and how she entraps him and he becomes a willing partner in his entrapment.

I enjoyed the movie for the first, oh, twenty minutes or so... and then Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond came on screen and I was entranced. "Hey, you're Norma Desmond! You used to be real big!" "I'm still big! It's the pictures that got small!" It would be so easy for that to tip over into ridiculous, but between the acting, the direction, and the set design, it works perfectly. Swanson is over-the-top enough to be believable, and grounded enough to be effective.

All the characters are, really. They're not-quite-grotesque not-quite-caricatures: the mouthy hack writer, the stuffy devoted manservant, the bubbly sharp-witted ingenue, the overly cheerful friend. In a less good screenplay they'd just be types, but here they've got depth and emotion.

And sure, the plot's got some twists and turns, but I wasn't watching for the plot. I was watching in fascinated horror as Joe the screenwriter dug himself deeper and deeper, occasionally trying halfheartedly to turn himself around. And when he does, at the end? Justice. The poetic kind, too.

"Mr DeMille? I'm ready for my close-up now." Chills.

Gonna have to dig up some more of Wilder's movies now.

Greg Berlanti et al, Legends of Tomorrow (S1-S2)

I got interested in Legends of Tomorrow when I saw the first trailer. (Contains no spoilers; in fact, contains very little footage from the actual series. Apparently it was shot entirely as a promo reel during an existing Flash shoot.) I was mostly interested because I'd just finished watching Alias and enjoying the heck out of Victor Garber's Jack Bristow, and because I'd heard that DC's TV shows were pretty good. Then life happened and I never actually watched the show.

But it kept getting more seasons, and it kept looking like goofy time-travel fun. And there's a plague on so I figured, what the hey.

I've now blasted through the first two seasons in, mm, about a month? Sounds about right, I picked it up right after Kipo's mildly disappointing third and final season. (Kipo S3, incidentally, is still worth watching, and still relentlessly upbeat which is a Good Thing these days. But the third season shifted from "Kipo and company explore this awesome world" to "Kipo vs the Big Bad," which doesn't fit nearly so well with the emotional tone they're trying to hit.)

( Spoilers )

"Blink" (Doctor Who S3E10), Steven Moffat

Sally's friend vanishes while they're exploring an abandoned house. It turns out she's vanished into the past, kidnapped by statues that move when you're not looking at them, and if Sally can't figure out what's going on with these weird DVD easter eggs she might be next.

Okay, so, I liked Blink less than most people seem to, and it took me a bit to work out why that was. The Weeping Angels are great: inventive and successfully creepy, and I love love love the bit where the TARDIS vanishes from around Sally and Larry, surrounded by Angels. Sally's a decent enough character, and while we don't see much Doctor or Martha what we get is perfectly fine.

My first thought was that it's a puzzle-box story, and that's just not what I'd expect to see from Doctor Who. But that's not really accurate: a lot of episodes have been "here's a weird thing, what's going on with it," layered throughout the story. It works well. But here I could see the gears moving, and that made the difference.

Specifically: I didn't ever get a sense that Sally and company were solving the thing, were figuring out what was going on. Instead they were just following a trail that had been laid down for them, by the Doctor and Martha, and by Kathy and Shipton. There wasn't any joy in the discovery. It was all "Oh, the police box. Oh, the list of DVDs. Oh, you know what I'm going to say. Oh, we shouldn't blink."

(It didn't help that Larry, Sally's most constant companion, is a slacker dude with no particularly redeeming features. That she takes his hand at the end of the episode is just insult to injury.)

Well-constructed, neat ideas, execution left me cold. If I hadn't seen other Who, if I hadn't known how much heart this show can have, I expect I'd have been more favourably disposed towards it. But it could have been that little bit better, and I would have liked it so much more.

Luke Scott (dir), Morgan

Hanna crossed with Blade Runner, with the atmosphere of Alien. Those latter two shouldn't come as a surprise for the first film from Luke "Son of Ridley" Scott. I wouldn't call it a horror movie but I wouldn't necessarily disagree with someone who did.

The plot revolves around a bunch of scientists who've created an artificial young female human named Morgan. Morgan has poor impulse control and nonstandard thought processes. Lee has come from "corporate" to visit the remote lab and decide whether the Morgan project should continue. As you might expect, Things Go Poorly.

I liked it pretty well. I found Morgan's disconcerting affect and Lee's iron-clad control entirely believable. The setting (Northern Ireland playing upstate New York) is gorgeously green and foggy, and adds to the melancholy-ominous atmosphere. The only character who does something unforgivably stupid (psychiatrist Paul Giamatti) is established immediately as a pompous idiot; everyone else's stupid decisions are justifiable.

Here there be ( spoilers )

Also, a strong Bechdel pass. In fact, I believe it may fail the reverse-Bechdel, as I don't think there are ever any conversations between two male characters that aren't about a woman.

J. Michael Straczynski (dev.), Babylon 5, most of.

General: Groundbreaking but flawed. Fatally hamstrung by attempts to tell a single story over five seasons through the loss of actors and network sabotage. (Full disclosure: I also despise bound book-fragments and have trouble reading individual issues of comic books rather than full storylines.) I don't regret having watched B5 but I doubt I'll go back to it.

S1: Occasionally cringe-inducing, but decent. I'm enjoying Sinclair, and the Sinclair/Ivanova/Garibaldi triangle. G'kar is a jerk and Londo is mostly kinda sympathetic. Delenn needs more to do. Vir and Lennier are great. Needs more Kosh, and more Morden.

S2: Sheridan feels like a nonentity; half his appearances make more sense if I think of them as written for Sinclair's background instead, and the other half lack personality. Londo's transformation to jerk is complete and I find myself sympathising with G'kar. Needs more Kosh, and more Morden.

S3: Looks like Londo will suffer no consequences for committing fucking GENOCIDE at the end of last season. On the bright side, Sheridan developed a personality! Also the return of Sinclair, who... I can understand why the actor had to be replaced. On balance this is probably my favorite season. Needs more K-- DAMMIT.

S4: Meh. The conclusion of the Shadow War feels rushed. The quick and easy resolution of the civil war even more so. I cannot believe that the people of Earth just said "Oh, we've been duped into believing the xenophobic crap Clark was selling us, our bad" and embraced Sheridan with open arms. I also disapprove strongly of G'kar suffering for Londo's sins.

S5: No Ivanova. No real point to the story. We abandoned ship not quite halfway through. I've been meaning to at least watch the Neil Gaiman episode and the closer for over a year now and haven't managed to work up the desire.

(Currently watching Futurama, which holds up surprisingly well.)

Final count: of seven movies, one I very much enjoyed, one I enjoyed well enough, two that were alright, two that I disliked, and one that utterly baffled me. Down from last year, which had two I liked a lot, one that was alright, and two that I disliked. Oh well.

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( Zero Motivation, Ow, Elephant Song, Libertador )

Ben Wheatley (dir.), A Field in England

I saw this movie over a month ago. I'm still not entirely sure what it was I saw.

The plot, such as it is: in the midst of a battle in the English Civil War, Whitehead the scholar has been tasked with arresting a man who's stolen some valuable documents from his master. He falls in with two soldiers, one a drunkard and the other a fool. The three of them are accosted by Cutler, who lures them on with promises of an alehouse. Cutler turns out to be an assistant to the alchemist O'Neill, the very man Whitehead is meant to be arresting. O'Neill forces Whitehead to use his psychic gifts to locate a treasure that's been buried somewhere in the field they find themselves in, and the others to dig it up.

From there things get weird. (Ha.) There are hallucinogenic mushrooms, there's a broken scrying-glass, there's what might be a wizard's Certamen or might be simply a bad trip. In the end Whitehead may have grown into an acceptance of who he is and the life he's been born into. Alternately, everyone may be dead. It's hard to say.

The movie's been advertised as a horror movie, which is almost entirely inaccurate but no more so than any other descriptor I can think of. It's less disturbing than, say, Jacob's Ladder. It may be the most sui generis movie I have ever seen. It's funny and visceral and beautifully shot and on rare occasions oddly touching, and sometimes very difficult to watch. The scene of Whitehead and O'Neill in the tent had me wincing-- and all we see is a tent, and all we hear is screaming.

It is an Experience. Had I more film vocabulary and inclination/ability to dissect visual arts, I could have a field day working out what it all implied and suggested-- not meant, nothing so direct, but how it worked and what exactly 'worked' means in this case. As it is, it washed over me like an unexpected ninety-minute ocean wave, leaving me shivering and wide awake and pretty sure I'd just been hit by something I couldn't describe.

I think I'd recommend it but I'm not sure who I'd recommend it to.

(Trailer. Other, more coherent, opinions: Greer Gilman, whose brief review put this on my radar some months back; Sonya Taafe.)

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Jim Jarmusch (dir.), Only Lovers Left Alive

I confess, I was sold on this from "Tilda Swinton as a vampire." Indeed, it has that, and Tom 'Loki' Hiddleston as her vampiric lover, and John Hurt as a vampiric Kit Marlowe, and Jeffrey Wright as a human doctor who seems to have wandered in from another type of vampire movie entirely.

This is like no other vampire story I've ever read or seen. Unsurprising; it shouldn't be my kind of thing. The lighting, the camerawork, even the dialog, all feel slow and langorous. Images, ideas, pop up because they fit and then are discarded: the wooden bullet, the mushrooms, even Ian. This is a movie that is very much in love with being a movie, and is taking its sweet time about it. If it were in prose I expect I would find it deathly dull; on screen it's absolutely perfect for what it's doing. (Jeffrey Wright's character seems to think he's in Dracula, or maybe Interview; he doesn't seem to grasp that they just don't care about him. This is, as you might expect, hilarious.)

I think (he said, reflecting on the movie and on rushthatspeaks's review) that this is in part because it's Adam's (Tom Hiddleston) movie, and Adam is overcome by ennui. Tilda Swinton's Eve is clearly still having a lot of fun with her life, but she also cares for Adam, and so she travels from Tangier to Detroit. (Side note: early 21st century Detroit is an amazing, amazing setting for a vampire movie.) And then, for reasons which aren't exactly plot-related because the movie doesn't have a plot as such, only characters and events, the two of them are forced to flee back to Tangier, where perhaps Adam will learn to enjoy unlife again after all.

Visually stunning, very funny, and some amazing acting from everyone involved. Highly recommended.

One of the 101 things I'd like to do over 1001 days is to see ten movies at the Vancouver International Film Festival. As noted elsewhere, due to poor scheduling I've only got two VIFFs before the end of my thousand nights and a night are up, so that's five films per year. This year due to various scheduling difficulties (Farthing Party, work, other commitments, not bothering to pick up a film schedule) I didn't start looking into this year's movies until Wednesday night, and the festival closed on Friday. Luckily I found five I was interested in, and the scheduling worked out.

These two were from Thursday. I'll write up the three from Friday later.

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( Ludwig II )

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( Grigris )