Words are inadequate

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 )

Ronald D. Moore (dev.), Battlestar Galactica, entire.

Executive summary: So. That happened.

A couple of weeks ago I noted elseweb that Based on how Season 4 has been so far, "on Sudafed" is going to be the ideal way to appreciate the BSG finale. I was totally right.

What I liked, overall: the vast array of well-developed flawed-yet-sympathetic characters. The smaller (1-3 episode) plot arcs.

What I disliked: Gaius Baltar and the fact that this turned out to be The Baltar Show. The Final Five. Any and all instances of "God/s did it." The larger plot arc, especially from late season 3 on.

Spoilers below.
( The Final Five are Keyser Soze, a man disguised as a woman, a guy who's been dead the whole time, and a sled. )

Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

A very modern novel, and very strange throughout. E.g.: the narrator, who for much of the book cannot recall his own name, spends a great deal of time in conversation with his soul, who has no name; "For convenience I called him Joe." Filled with bicycles, questionable metaphysics, and footnotes and asides about the nonexistent works of a fictitious philosopher named De Selby. It doesn't say a whole lot, I think, but the way it says it is at least entertaining. I could hear O'Brien's Irish brogue in my head the entire time I was reading the book. I think I would have loved it to death had I the good fortune to encounter it in high school.

Saladin Ahmed, Throne of the Crescent Moon

Fantasy derived from Arabic cultures rather than European, featuring an old wizard and his young paladin sidekick. Light and fun. It reminded me a great deal of the Master Li & Number Ten Ox books, and of Lloyd Alexander's The First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha. If you're in the market for a popcorn fantasy novel you could do a lot worse; if you're looking for something substantive, this is unlikely to do the trick. Unfortunately I'm mostly looking for substance in my fiction these days. I get all the fluff I need from television. Speaking of which...

Ronald D. Moore (dev.), Battlestar Galactica: Season 1

Military SF concerned with how the military system can coexist with the civilians it's there to protect. Individual episodes range from "okay" to "pretty good;" nothing's blown me away yet, and the things that I've objected to aren't so problematic that I'll stop watching. The humans and the episode-to-episode plots are good. Big problems that I can foresee include 1) the religio-mysticism is currently getting on my third-to-last nerve and seems to be growing more prevalent, and 2) I cannot see any rhyme or reason to the Cylons' actions. (As a friend said, "There are many copies, and they have a plan... but the writers don't.")

Links go to trailers:

• In Bruges: a heartwarming Christmas tale of two UK hitmen laying low in a scenic Belgian town after a hit gone wrong. Only for "heartwarming" read "dark and thoughtful and sometimes quite funny and always, always, dark." I enjoyed it, I think; would watch again but not for another year or two. (See also: F***ing Bruges, a 90-second clip of all the swearing in the movie.)
  
• Young Adult: a character study of the kind of woman who was popular in high school and never had to learn how to be an adult. Also funny but that's not really the point. I've enjoyed all of Jason Reitman's other films (Thank You For Smoking, Juno, and the sublime Up In The Air) so I figured, why not? Well done and discomforting and I'm not sure I'd see it again. (I didn't so much care for Juno either, which makes me think I just don't get on with Diablo Cody's scripts.)
  
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: a slow-moving Cold War espionage thriller starring an almost unrecognizable Gary Oldman. I loved it but I'm a sucker for twisty plots and watching people put pieces together, and this had those in spades.
  
• The Artist: there's really no point in making a black-and-white silent movie in 2011 unless it a) is about late-twenties and early-thirties Hollywood and b) uses its lack of sound as commentary. The Artist does both, quite well. I'm glad I saw it, and even more glad I saw it in a theatre: it seems the kind of thing that's a little pointless to watch in the privacy of one's home.

In front of those I got a bunch of forgettable trailers, plus one for Ralph Fiennes's modern-day Coriolanus which I will probably see, and one for a Margaret Thatcher biopic to which I said, out loud, "You have got to be kidding me." I really don't feel like I'm missing anything by not indulging in more pop culture, especially not at $13 a pop for a matinee.

Over Xmas I also read all of Azzarello & Risso's 100 Bullets because I never did get around to finishing it, and then for good measure reread Ennis & Dillon's Asshole Irish Vampire Preacher, neither of which moved me as much as I'd hoped. Cassidy's "Ye're a wanker, aren't ye?" is still the greatest thing one can say to a goth, and 100 Bullets has its own crowning moments of cool ("You can't feel numb. You can only be numb." Or, "...they'll tell you about some noble bullshit that killed her." "How do you know?" "I'm noble bullshit.") but ... I dunno. The glimmers of interesting depth are drowned in gore and patriarchial crap.

The interesting thing about the end of Preacher is that at the end of it... nothing's changed. Tulip and Jesse are back together, and Cassidy's out doing whatever Cassidy does. Sure, the Grail's broken, and God's been shot, but honestly? None of that affects the characters at all. We're /told/ that Jesse and Cassidy have grown up some but we don't actually see it.

I seem to be less impressed with comics than I used to be. I'm almost afraid to reread Sandman, it's been so long.