#747: Fellini Satyricon

(Federico Fellini, 1969)

When I watched Amarcord, I thought it was an enjoyable distillation of Fellini's unmistakeable style, the concept of "Felliniesque" taken to its logical conclusion. One of the reasons I didn't truly love the film was that I thought his excesses of style and aesthetics were taken to such an extreme that the movie lost its grounded intentions amidst the surreal and flamboyant visuals. I assumed Fellini would be well-served (as he had been in his masterpieces from the late 50s and early 60s) by taking it down a notch.

Little did I know that Amarcord had already come down a substantial notch from the pinnacle of Fellini's Felliniesque period two films earlier. In fact, Fellini Satyricon likely represents a stratosphere several notches above Amarcord, at a height where only Fellini would dare to Fellini. I said in my post on Juliet of the Spirits (a film I have come to regard very highly since my mixed initial response) that that may be the most Fellini movie Fellini ever made. I was deeply, deeply mistaken. Here is Fellini in all his Fellini glory, when a director has produced so many masterpieces and establish such an identifiable style that he becomes a brand, applicable to whichever genre he deems Felliniable.

How you feel about Fellini Satyricon will largely depend on how nice of a TV you have. Ideally, you don't own a TV but have a really great repertory theater near you that will play whatever you want; get them to run this one through their projector. Fellini Satyricon is a visually awesome experience. The sets, production design, and cinematography are gorgeous and surreal. They reminded me strongly of Jodorowsky's work of the same era both in terms of basic beauty and surreal depth (though El Topo is probably one of the few films I've seen that would make this movie seem downright commercial).

The story of Fellini Satyricon is less exciting. As a serial, I found it fairly uneven, with a success rate of about 40% and no strong connection to carry me through the stories that were less compelling. I think seeing this movie in a theater would improve its value tremendously, but I don't know if even this extra effort would propel the movie, as style-heavy as it is, into the upper tier of Fellini's work.

#787: Jellyfish Eyes

(Takashi Murakami, 2014)

Jellyfish Eyes is one of the few unique films in the collection, a pop-tribute guerrilla blockbuster that hovers between so many worlds it's almost impossible to pin down. My interest in the film overshadows my affection for it, as some of the filmmaking falls very short of the excellence typically seen in a Criterion film. Still, it's a fascinating risk on the part of Janus - and therefore Criterion - and it will be interesting to see if it pays off.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's start with the basics. Jellyfish Eyes is built out of four main influences: the Japanese kaiju tradition, pop anime like Pokemon, the family friendly blockbusters of Spielberg and Hollywood, and the high-art world of director Takashi Murakami's day job. All four are almost equally present in the film, but the most obvious to any film fan that approaches the film without any information will be the kaiju grounding of the film's structure. Although it establishes the creation of the monster in a decidedly anime fashion, melding secret society visuals with pop-spiritual mumbo jumbo, and frames the story around a child, the connections to Gojira are immediately apparent, even before the lumbering giant monster appears on the scene ready to destroy the city. The Fukashima disaster stands in for the atomic bomb, while Mr. Potato Head stands in for Godzilla, and there's a palpable sense of loss in both films, not just for an individual (in this case a dead father, an approximation of the absent father in E.T.) but for a way of life.

This kaiju connection is quite easily tied to the basic framework and visual aesthetic of the Pokemon franchise (and other similar Japanese anime and video games), which is similarly easily linked to "kids with buddies" films like E.T. (and less fantastical films like Shiloh or other kid/animal movies). The idea that Jellyfish Eyes was conceived as a live-action anime is not novel, and in fact the film was originally conceived as an animated movie before Murakami shifted to live action. Indeed, the movie cribs camera angles, sound effects, and quick cutting techniques in the action sequences almost directly from the low-rent anime he is intending to mimic. These connections are almost as obvious to even a casual viewer of the genre as the clear influence of the Pokemon creatures on the F.R.I.E.N.D.s of the story. In fact they are even more specific, considering the idea that each protagonist would have a protector or kindred spirit is a timeless archetype of literature and film, from the spirit animal of Native Americans to the patronus of the Harry Potter books.

The biggest problem with the use of this style is that, from a technical and critical perspective, it isn't especially good - particularly when incorporated into a real-life (low-budget) format. A good comparison film here is the Wachowskis' hideously underrated Speed Racer, where a similar transference from cheap Japanese anime to live-action kids movie met with success purely because they were able to pour lots and lots of money into the outcome. Without this opportunity to deliver anime-perfect compositions in a real-world playground, part of the presumed ambition of the film collapses before it can even get off the ground.

Despite this fatal flaw in the film, there's a really good argument to be made that all of this was intentional - that Murakami didn't especially care that his film was not shot well and came across as a bit stilted and underbaked. This is where the director's art career comes into play and debating the merits of the film must be done on several levels. Is Murakami as conscious and in command of his style behind the camera as he is in front of the canvas? Is the low art of Jellyfish Eyes intended to match disjointedly with the sophisticated social commentary of the film's politics? If you believe Murakami that he was indeed making a kids movie, does this negate any attempt to judge the film on a deeper level - especially if that level demands a rejection of the movie's effectiveness on its most basic surface?

These issues may have all been considered when Janus purchased the North American rights to Jellyfish Eyes, but I could just as easily see someone in the company respecting the film as an oddity impossible to deconstruct. The essay Criterion includes in its package for the film spends a great deal of time talking about Murakami as an artist, and less time evaluating the film itself. This doesn't mean that Criterion doesn't value the movie on its own, but I think it's safe to say they wouldn't have given it a second thought had Murakami not been attached. Still, its mere inclusion in the Collection demands a higher level of examination than it may get otherwise, and I do think there's a good case to be made that this isn't just a genre exercise.

Along with the tsunami references, the elements that hint that Murakami might have had something deeper and more subversive in mind here primarily stem from the iPhone-like devices each child is given when they receive their F.R.I.E.N.D. and the ominous Christian cult Saki's mother belongs to. The former is perhaps more congruent with the presumed intention of producing a movie accessible to kids, but it's impossible to let the latter slip by without pointing it out. This aspect of the story will supposedly play a bigger role in the future films, which indicates its importance in the larger story, a profile that seems totally incongruous with the family movie genre. The satire of this element is at the very least a nod to the adults dragged along to the movie, but it seems much more likely that it is just the most obvious aspect of the film that keys in viewers to the larger plan, that the movie was made more for adults who like these kinds of movies than for the kids these kinds of movies are ostensibly for.

So what to make of the devices and the religious material? After a first watch, I don't know if the themes are that compelling, and like a lot of the movie, their executions feel underbaked. Like so much of Jellyfish Eyes, the conceptual underpinning is very strong, but what ends up on screen feels a bit like some smart talented kids dicking around. The devices are not developed beyond their initial introduction, and only serve to highlight the division between Masashi and the other kids. Similarly, the church seems like the most basic of contrasts with the main conflict, and any potential social satire that might come in subsequent installments would not have much to build on here.

Of course, the one immediately appealing aspect of the film is one I have yet to discuss: Murakami's creature designs. Although the film doesn't exactly impress in the effects department, the basic designs of the creatures and their personalities are highly appealing and enjoyable. Although I am partial to Saki's Ludo-like F.R.I.E.N.D., the smaller Pokemon-style majority is also a step above most of what we see in this kind of film, and it makes the movie pretty consistently fun to look at.

Still, you can't help coming away from the movie with the idea that there wasn't anyone who knew how to make a movie in a position of power. According to many stores about the movie there were massive reworkings after an initial screening for friends was deemed incomprehensible, and I dont know that they turned it around in subsequent versions. In a lot of ways, this feels very much like an experiment from a talented artist that lacks the technical know-how to implement his vision. Most movies of this nature are seen by only a handful of people, and almost never seen by the wide and discerning audience Criterion has at their disposal. But because Murakami is not the average just-starting-out filmmaker, that circle of potential viewers expanded significantly, and the movie's reputation has suffered because of it.

There are a lot of arguments for why Criterion shouldn't have released Jellyfish Eyes, and unlike Tiny Furniture I definitely don't have a spectacular reason for dismissing all of them. As I mentioned in that post, I'm not one to argue that Criterion shouldn't release a film because they could have released other better films (though recent releases slates have me concerned for lesser-known older foreign films). That's like arguing the Academy got every Best Picture wrong because the best movie of that year wasn't even nominated - there are always amazing, better movies out there to be discovered. And I don't think every movie they release needs to be a masterpiece - only about a quarter of the films I've posted about here would I consider to be five-star masterpieces, yet I could count on both hands the films I would say don't deserve to be Criterion films with room to spare.

I do, however, think that Jellyfish Eyes feels more like a pick made out of aspiration and association. Murakami might very well turn out to be an impressive filmmaker with a uniquely odd eye for family cinema. Similarly, this might be the best chance Criterion gets to bring anime into the family, considering how difficult it is to license the best of that genre (Akira was released on Laserdisc, but will almost certainly never see the light of day on Criterion blu). These two facets of the film certainly have the potential to improve with sequels and other projects from Murakami, which makes this a bit of a bet on future returns. That's a risky proposition, and it's likely there were some detractors within the company on this choice - the film currently sits at 18% on Rotten Tomatoes (though it has just 11 reviews) - and their concerns were certainly echoed by the vast majority of Criterion fans, making this one of the most controversial releases of last year (though for my money Mister Johnson is far more unwarranted). But I think the best reason for this movie to be included in the Collection is more simple than the tangential connection to anime or high art: there's simply nothing else like it in the Collection.

#718: Donkey Skin

(Jacques Demy, 1970)

Demy's career took another quick turn with Donkey Skin, a film that preserved his musical ambitions but settled into a sort of fractured Disney structure, matching a somewhat straightforward telling of a classic French fairy tale with both parody and adult-friendly winks at the camera. Although it doesn't reach the heights of any of the previous films in the Demy boxset - especially not those of Lola or Umbrellas, the two classics - it manages enough charm and visual vibrancy to carry it through its brief running time.

Of course, Donkey Skin can't be discussed without a mention of its rather distasteful main conflict, which revolves around a princess being forced to avoid her father's desire to marry her. Rather than being repulsed by the idea, the princess is dissuaded from the proposal by her fairy godmother, who sings her a happy tune about how fathers and daughters really shouldn't marry. Of course, the godmother has her own reasons for turning her friend off of the whole incest thing, which is a nice distraction from the fact that this is all a bit off, and anyway this is all just a French fantasy so lets just dismiss the whole thing.

Two things won me over during my viewing of Donkey Skin. The first, and most obvious, is the production design. Demy by this point was virtually identified by his technicolor palette, and Donkey Skin would not change anyone's mind about this characteristic. Everything from the impressive way he pulls off the various dresses made for the princess to the blue/red themes of the two major kingdoms in the film (horses, men, and various objects are covered in the respective colors) creates a fantastical universe to explore and get lost in. Demy takes a similarly liberal approach to cinematic tricks, deploying slow motion, rewind, and various other tricks whenever the urge arrives. It matches the film's imaginative story and playful tone nicely.

The second thing that got me wrapped up in the film was the wink Demy turned toward the audience. At one point, the princess's fairy godmother explains that her powers can sometimes run low, "like a battery," to which the princess quickly replies "what's a battery?" In the final moments of the film, the godmother and the princess's father arrive at the wedding in a helicopter Walker-style. In other moments, the film isn't as anachronistic as it is knowing, like in the cake-baking scene where Deneuve's performance nearly bubbles over, threatening to spill out of the pot into the fire of parody. I don't think the film needed these moments to carry it through, but in the same way that a Pixar film is bolstered by jokes that only adults will understand, Donkey Skin is a better movie because of this added layer.

There are definitely parts of the film that don't come off cleanly. The shifts in perspective are a bit frustrating, as the prince lacks any real charisma and even Marais as the king is fairly unlikeable (not only because he wants to sleep with his daughter), though the actor's presence links the film eternally with Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (the director's films are referenced throughout the film, as pointed out in the accompanying essay). So the film doesn't come off as well as the previous four films in the set, but it's nevertheless a fun ride and one that I imagine would reward multiple viewings for the production value alone.

#234: The Tin Drum

(Volker Schlondorff, 1979)

I had the opportunity to see The Tin Drum on the big screen this month as part of the screenings of the new director's cut that Criterion just put out. Although I am very happy I went, I didn't love the film as much as I hoped it would. Though I haven't read the book, my suspicions are that The Tin Drum is a good example of the difficulties that come with adapting books for the big screen. The  story is obviously meant as satire and allegory, but what reads as lyrical on the page must be rendered literal on screen. The film then has been drained of much of the humor that would make it more appealing and believable, and the end result is a very strange film indeed.

I haven't been especially taken with the other Schlondorff films in the Collection. Young Torless was disturbing and worthwhile - and I liked it much more than Coup de Grace - but I wasn't especially moved by it and it didn't stay with me especially long. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is a masterpiece, but it was co-directed by another significant voice in German cinema, Margarethe von Trotta. The Tin Drum, then, is Schlondorff's true stand-out, the film for which he will be remembered. And it's certainly big in scope, stretching over a number of years and even generations, told from the perspective of a boy who chooses not to age and lives through World War II as an eternal toddler. The film is strongly sexual, especially with the scenes that have been added into this edition which involve Rasputin and an orgy. But this sexuality's ties to its historical and political commentary seems muted without the novel's prose to ostensibly guide the way.

The film has fleeting moments of real impressive cinema - and despite its long running time, I was never bored - but I just ultimately don't think it comes together as a clear and compelling fable. I had a lot of high hopes for this one, but it was a bit of a letdown.

#586: Island of Lost Souls

(Erle C. Kenton, 1932)

Island of Lost Souls is perhaps the best example of just how much sci-fi and horror have changed from their original talkie incarnation in the early 30s. While films like King Kong and The Most Dangerous Game are arguably better movies, Island of Lost Souls is more provocative, at least in its time. This makes it not just an old-fashioned adventure movie like those mentioned above, but a movie about taboo subjects that pushed the envelope for audiences upon its initial release. While a movie like King Kong is best compared to something like Avatar - a blockbuster adventure film with a relatively gentle social message - Island of Lost Souls was its era's House on a Haunted Hill, a chilling message about man's potential for evil.

What's funny about this characterization is that the film itself is incredibly tame. The creatures, ostensibly horrifying in 1932, border on parody, while Charles Laughton's Dr. Moreau (a character who would be mangled by Marlon Brando in the 90s adaptation) is more reminiscent of Sidney Greenstreet's character Ferrari in Casablanca than of any evil genius in later horror films. It's hard to think of any other film that was so controversial when it was released and so tame now. This separates the film's intellectual and historical appeal almost entirely from the experience of watching it, with a few exceptions. The most notable is the scene in which Parker kisses the Panther Woman before realizing she is an animal. His anger at himself, which he then directs towards Moreau, saying he could forgive him everything else but not this, makes for a chilling moment of man's ability to compartmentalize tragedy and injustice.

Mostly, though, Island of Lost Souls is a pretty good time at the movies. While I enjoyed watching it, I doubt I'll ever need to see it again, something that sets it apart from The Most Dangerous Game, a far superior early 30s horror/adventure film, and a Criterion release long overdue for an upgrade.

#404: Robinson Crusoe on Mars

(Byron Haskin, 1964)

It would be easy to compare Robinson Crusoe on Mars to similar dated sci-fi in the Collection like Equinox and the Monsters and Madmen boxset. And in many ways, this would be an apt comparison: there is low and high art in all of these films and the passion of their creators shines through very clearly. They all work on two levels, since they could just as easily appeal to an eight-year-old (at least one whose senses haven't been dulled by the modern bend towards bright flashing lights and non-stop inanity) and a thirty-year-old cinema nerd - though of course it's arguable if these are different people I've just described.

Yet Robinson Crusoe on Mars, despite its creaky name, is something different from those other films. In fact - although its plot is directly cribbed from a well-known and very straightforward story - its visuals and pacing are more reminiscent of a different kind of sci-fi film made just a few years later: 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although that film's technological predictions turned out to be wishful thinking, this film's visual palette has only been surpassed by the reality of what we've seen beamed back from light years away. Robinson Crusoe on Mars is a small movie in human emotion and scope - a tale of one man and his loneliness. But visually, this is one of the great epics of sci-fi, a stunning and cannily re-imagined portrait of space and the red planet for the technicolor era. There are moments here that took my breath away, in all that phrase's purple glory.

At this point, Robinson Crusoe on Mars is the final movie of this type that I have to watch in the Collection (though Island of Lost Souls hails from a related genre). The inclusion of such films makes the Criterion umbrella both broader in scope and more legitimate as an arguable "canon" of film. It is films like this that had  a direct influence on the filmmakers who transformed American cinema in the 80s and 90s (for better or worse), but they also stand on their own as works of art. Robinson Crusoe on Mars is the best example of this in the Collection. This is a must-watch for any lover of the visual spectacle of cinema.

#594: Godzilla

(Ishiro Honda, 1954)

Godzilla might be the most famous movie that most people who have heard of it have never seen. This is because the character of Godzilla has become ubiquitous, and is undoubtedly one of the most successful movie creatures in history. There have been countless sequels and relaunches of the franchise both in Japan and here, while Godzilla itself ranks alongside icons like Dracula and King Kong as characters that transcend their medium and have long ago seeped into the culture. In fact, another Godzilla film is going into production in Hollywood as I write this, and Godzilla will continue to be remade and sequelized as long as movies are being made.

This all made the announcement that Godzilla was coming to the Criterion Collection a pretty big deal, despite the fact that the movie itself is only so so. In most regards, the film would sit very comfortably next to the films in the Monsters and Madmen boxset - though the scale of the effects here leaves that of those much lower budget films in the dust. The human-level story is typical melodrama for the era with a half-baked love story and some various professional quandaries made a bit more compelling by the presence of Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura. Meanwhile, the music is pretty damn cool, and it's always a pleasure to watch effects that required a lot more ingenuity than a simple point and click.

But the real thing that sets Godzilla apart from similar monster movies is the clear and inescapable nuclear metaphor of the film. This is tightly woven into the main plot of the movie (most obviously by Godzilla's origin and the technique that destroys him) but it is most interesting in two smaller moments. The first happens in the early acts of the film, as a group of people ride into the city on a train. One woman declares that she barely survived the bombing in Nagasaki, and now there's this... The second is even more intense, and comes during the core rampage of the monster. As Godzilla stomps on buildings and sets Tokyo aflame, a woman cowers with her children and tells them they are all going where Daddy is. This latter scene is a real "holy shit, this country is only nine years on from the most significant and indescribable series of destructive attacks the world has ever seen" moment (don't forget, along with the military deaths from the war, bombings on Japanese cities were not limited to Hiroshima and Nagasaki - traditional weapons were used on more than 50 other population centers). It makes the rest of the film take on a much greater significance than the typical monster or disaster movie ever could.

Godzilla, then, is more than anything a movie about loss - crippling loss that sets back humanity in both intellectual and moral ways. Perhaps the film ignores for a moment Japan's own role in its fate, but I would argue that the film is an emotional metaphor for the country that doesn't shy away from its own potential for destruction, even as it attempts to come to grips with its own victimhood. All of this feels like an intellectual exercise from the comfort of 21st century America, so it's hard to imagine what it must have felt like to see this movie in theaters in Japan in the mid 50s. Its wild success speaks to cinema's - and horror/thriller films' in particular - ability to transfer complex dark feelings into symbols of a cultural sickness and exorcise them collectively. That such a powerful representation of a global tragedy has long since been divorced from its true meaning is a reminder of both film's superhuman reach and the limitations of that reach, the moment when fact becomes legend.

#626: Les visiteurs du soir

(Marcel Carné, 1942)

Though he has other widely well-regarded films, Marcel Carné is famous for one film, 1945's Children of Paradise. That film, released just after the Occupation in WWII, has long been in the Collection, is often cited as the greatest French film ever made (I'm not a huge fan - it's a mime thing), and will almost certainly receive a blu-ray release from Criterion in the next year or so (a restored version of the film has been touring the US). Carné also has another film in the Collection, along with a fourth in the Essential Art House series, which I have yet to see. So when Les visiteurs du Soir is released later this year, it won't be the first film by this legendary director to have the C grace its cover.

However, this film is the first Carné with a spine number that was made during the Occupation, making it immediately rich with subtext (whether Carné admits it or not). Like Clouzot's best film under the Occupation, Carné's work isn't explicitly intended as a condemnation of their oppressors, but instead has the contemporary relevancy at the core of its story. It obviously doesn't take much of a stretch to equate the devil here with Hitler, and the final idea of statues with their hearts still beating is a beautiful metaphor for the French under Vichy rule.

But if you step away from historical context, Les visiteurs du soir is a quaint, unambitious love story/fable. It's hard to ignore Carné's flashes, though, most notably the moment when the room is frozen and the condemned walk freely around posed figures. It's moments like this that make the movie clearly Carné's, and while it might not be entirely my kind of film, it's nice to see a director who has been somewhat forgotten in the US (at least in comparison to fellow Frenchmen like Renoir, Clouzot, and Bresson) gain another high profile release.

#598: World on a Wire

(Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973)

The Venn diagram on the cover is profoundly appropriate: World on a Wire straddles multiple worlds just as effortlessly as its story does. At once b-grade sci-fi and a highly sophisticated view of both the future of technology and the past of cinema, the film manages to pack deep philosophical questions into a slick and sly package. It evokes The Twilight Zone just as much as it does 2001 - Last Year at Marienbad nearly as often as Invasion of the Body Snatchers - but its gaze is mostly cast paradoxically deep into the near future. This is moviemaking at its most exhilarating: tongue in cheek, intellectual fun that wants to drag you through the funhouse.

Since its theatrical release stateside and subsequent Criterion release over the last few years, Fassbinder's TV miniseries has been unfailingly linked to The Matrix, which almost certainly took a cue from at the very least this film's source material, a book written about simulacra in the 60s. This is a great entry point for the contemporary viewer, but it does a disservice to the film's standalone merits. I happen to think the Wachowskis are often misunderstood, but Fassbinder is the ultimate in offbeat directors and World on a Wire is his most literal look at his slightly askew perspective on reality. Centered around a company that has been commissioned by the German government to construct a huge simulation of reality with a town of 10,000 "people," the film follows one of the scientists in charge of the project as he searches for the truth not just of his project's true purpose but of his reality itself.

Fassbinder's real accomplishment in World on a Wire is to construct a visual style that is just as layered as his plot. The frame is packed with geometric illusions, multiple mirrors, and shifting perspectives - just as his characters slowly descend down the rabbit hole. By slightly tweaking his contemporary reality, Fassbinder avoids dating his production in a negative way - this is still essentially the 70s, wide lapels and all. But his surreal staging and slowly evolving camera movements evoke dream sequences from Fellini, and the film's slow boil of a plot turns up the paranoia until the movie's final act seems almost revolutionary. Like The Matrix, World on a Wire depicts waking up as an act of rebellion, and illusion is the power holding us back. The paradox of a film about the oppression of illusion must not have been lost on Fassbinder, and his gleeful ironic touch makes the movie more than just a clever tall tale. Essential viewing.

#571: Black Moon

(Louis Malle, 1975)

One of the difficult things about consuming so many movies in such a short span - particularly films that are often singular or at least unconventionally noteworthy - is that a movie like Black Moon doesn't seem quite as strange as it might in the context of normal, everyday moviegoing. One need not look further than Malle's own catalog to find a stranger movie, but if you were so inclined, there are plenty of Sweet Movies and Antichrists to go around.

The irony of this whole argument is that Black Moon isn't especially weird when you consider the large debt it pays to Alice in Wonderland. That story, so ingrained in our collective subconscious, seems perfectly normal for some reason. Yet something about this grown-up version that lacks red queens and talking rabbits (though what's wrong with a giant rat and talking unicorn?) makes it feel stranger. Certainly there are odd elements - the near absence of dialog (badly dubbed when it happens anyway), the lack of any real plot, and an abrupt freeze frame finale that had me checking my TV connection like the Sopranos finale. It just seems like those elements are so woven into the fabric of the film's technique that things stop feeling strange fairly quickly.

That's not to say Black Moon is a boring movie or a bad one - and it's certainly not a safe or conventional movie in any respect. I actually rather loved the film once I adjusted to its rhythms and almost playful insistence on defying expectation. And while those other films are equally strange (or more so), they are not actually similar to this film, and in this sense it is a unique entry in the collection, and sticks out as a fresh approach to cinema even among hundreds of other films.

One thing that was interesting about the creation of Black Moon was that it was apparently inspired by an actress suggesting to Malle that he make a movie entirely without dialog. This is an extremely hard thing to do - after all, even most silent films have dialog! So I don't mean to discount Malle's accomplishment when I say that even apart from the fact that people do speak in the film he kind of cheated by making a fantasy/stream-of-consciousness film rather than a movie set in the real world. Has this challenge ever been accomplished? Could it be? If so, how? If not, why?

#304: The Man Who Fell to Earth

(Nicholas Roeg, 1976)

I'm starting to feel like Nicholas Roeg shares more in common with Stanley Kubrick than he does with any other filmmaker. Exhibit A is The Man Who Fell to Earth, a sci-fi movie that's totally unconcerned with being science fiction. Roeg's film is about isolation, but it's not a rejection of modernity in the way films about isolation usually are. The movie's core message attempts to speak more to humanity in its inherent nature, something with which Kubrick was constantly engaged, from his first masterpiece, Paths of Glory, to his last, Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick famously said that editing was the only artform unique to film, so I'd be curious to know what he thought of Roeg's work, much of it made parallel to Kubrick's own most innovative and iconoclastic output (ironically, Roeg was briefly tapped for the adaptation of A Clockwork Orange that Kubrick eventually took on). Certainly both directors had a unique style that was impossible to mistake for someone else's, though Roeg's was the most consistent and blatant.

Roeg's aesthetic - established in so many other films in the director's career - is intact here, with wild temporal and perspective shifts and avant editing that leaves the viewer unsteady. But I still maintain that Bad Timing is a more effective (and affecting) use of his skills. The Man Who Fell to Earth is a very cold movie, or at least that's how it seemed to me. This is something Kubrick's films were often wrongly accused of, but I've never had the problem with Roeg's work until now. There's no point in the film where you aren't aware you are watching David Bowie, and Roeg seems too hung up on interacting with the science fiction genre he is skirting around to bother creating a cohesive whole. The message of The Man Who Fell to Earth is an intense and complex one, but the presentation gives the viewer the same sense of distance from the film that Roeg is arguing we all share with each other.

#366: The Atomic Submarine

(Spencer G. Bennet, 1959)

This was a real surprise. After two okay inclusions in the Monsters and Madmen boxset, here's a really spectacular film. Shot in an astonishing six days of principal photography, The Atomic Submarine is just as low budget and makeshift as First Man into Space, but crackles with the kind of imagination and subversive filmmaking that film didn't provide.

The two big standouts here are the effects and the music. The former are alternately hilarious and incredibly inventive, though often both. The submarine itself is so obviously a model that you keep expecting to see a hand holding it as it floats through the water, while the alien itself was clearly more of a substantial undertaking that certainly never feels real but is so appealing constructed that you hardly mind (it was also clearly the inspiration for the aliens on The Simpsons). Effects like this remind you what has been lost with the adoption of computer generated images. Instead of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and cunning, all you can see in effects now is work. You would never go to see Spiderman and ask, "How did they do that?" because the answer is now always "Computers." This has ideally benefited the storytelling by preventing you from being taken out of the movie - and in some instances where the effects are seamless, it certainly has. But in movies like The Atomic Submarine or The Thief of Bagdad, these effects had to be made on the fly, often by people who had never encountered these issues before. Part of this is that cinema was still relatively new in the 1950s and part of it was the lack of modern technology. But what it adds up to is an extremely entertaining experience. Then there is the music, which is played over most of the moments featuring the effects. This is some strange music, certainly of its space-age time but also somewhere between the most psychedelic 70s porn music and the laid-back cool of that era's Jazz. It's mindbending and totally awesome, the kind of score that reminds you how many buried treasures there are in films like this.

The story of The Atomic Submarine is no more impressive than the story of First Man into Space: a bunch of military guys and scientists go to the north pole to find out what is preventing ships from passing through, only to find an alien intent on colonizing the earth. The narration is done in a newsreel style that reminded me of Fishing with John more than it did newsreels. But the acting is actually not too shabby and the film is bursting with so much love for film and creativity despite its low-art origins that I don't think it's possible for even the most jaded viewer to avoid its spell.

One last thing, a character here is put on the submarine because a close family member was unable to go and he is the only other person who can operate a highly technical piece of machinery, so he goes reluctantly. Remind you of anything else?

#431: The Thief of Bagdad

(Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell, and Tim Whelan, 1940)

I have a lot of Michael Powell movies left to watch. The British director is most famous for his collaborations with Emeric Pressburger, and those collaborations are in turn most famous for one of Martin Scorsese's favorite films (actually, correct me if I am wrong, but I think it is his favorite film). I've seen that film a number of times, and I actually own it, but I haven't seen many other films directed by the pair, who have a number of Criterion titles.

The Thief of Bagdad is a children's movie, the kind of big budget, effects-laden spectacle that people pretend didn't exist before the 1980s. The plot is extremely similar to Disney's Aladdin, since they are both taken from Arabian Nights, but here the thief is not also the princess's love interest who becomes the king, but is instead merely a friend to a banished king who must reclaim his throne from the evil Jafar (pronounced differently here).

There's really not that much to this movie; if you like adventure films from the 30s and 40s, you'll probably like this. If not, well, it's fun to see the special effects - which pre-computers were both more clever and less convincing - but beyond that, this seems like a case where Powell's name helped this gain the Criterion label more than anything else.