I don’t care what anyone says, the line “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K” from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is one of the best from any film.
The movie itself is super fun but doesn’t hold up today, really. You had to be there in the late 1980s to really understand where it was coming from and what it was doing. With modern eyes it seems tone deaf or weirdly stilted, but it did not then as the entire mode of the late 1980s and early 1990s was that way in reality. To us now, though, it all seems affected and overtly, almost suspiciously, sincere.
And to Gen Z, the film would be utterly incomprehensible.
I love this entire set of scenes; a masterclass in filmmaking. And it’s all so nasty. You feel kind of dirty after watching it. Which is, of course, the point.
But it’s all so perfect. Juliette Gariépy just nails the creepy psycho vibe (very hard to do for an exceptionally beautiful woman, by the way!) and the music intensifies the feeling of dread that is and dread to be. I also like it because the director (et al.) made sonic and blocking choices I never would’ve considered — and these made the scene so much better than my tendencies here would have. (And yes, the entire film is in 4:3 format. It’s not some YouTube upload issue.)
Apologies, this is all in French with no subtitles and I’m too tired to translate, but the visuals, music and non-speech here are what really matter anyway.
I watched Les chambres rouges. It was quite good, and sneaky in an audience-respecting way. That’s hard to pull off, being a bit devious but not insulting to your viewers. Warning: spoilers will follow if you read beyond this point.
The film manages this rare feat in two ways. First, it casts an exceptionally beautiful lead, even by Hollywood standards1. Most people equate beauty with goodness, kindness and even intelligence so that is tier one of the film’s strategy to deceive you. It usually bothers me when someone one out of a million attractive is the star, but in this case it works. The second bit of the film’s approach to throwing your judgement off balance is having another person who is obviously delusional for the putative protag, Kelly-Anne, to play against. It unites the viewer with Kelly-Anne against someone who is obviously a bit nuts and who is not composed, not that intelligent, and who is not emotionally stable. Only later do you realize that Clem is little more than Kelly-Anne’s pet that she is toying with for amusement.
Clementine is a perfect contrast to Kelly-Anne, who is more tightly-wound, far more intelligent, but is also the kind of crazy that Clem’s more mundane tendency to believe the best of even clearly-demented people cannot even begin to touch. The movie does an excellent job of seeing the world mostly through Kelly-Anne’s eyes, and any time a film manages that you start to empathize with the viewpoint even if the person whose eyes you’re seeing through is not really worthy of that.
Laurie Babin as Clementine
Kelly-Anne is not violent. Or at least that is not shown. But she is certainly a psychopath of some type. She enjoys watching snuff films and spends over a million dollars to obtain one. That it is used the solve the case is only incidental to her goals. Her real motive in purchasing the killer’s “lost” footage was the thrill of being able to view it and then to use it to inflict psychological torture on the parents of one of the murdered girls.
(And note that this isn’t a horror movie. There is never any violence shown and you only hear some screams and a saw or something at one point in the background, but never see any violent acts. This is a psychological thriller. A very dark one.)
And kudos to the movie to having one of the most intensely fucked up scenes in film history that involved no violence, no gore, no blood, and barely any movement at all. And that’s when (again, spoilers!) Kelly-Anne reveals by removing her overcoat in the courtroom that she has dressed up like one of the murdered girls in an effort to connect with the killer and to further antagonize the family. When she puts in the blue contacts and applies those fake braces…dang.
I recommend the film. It’s one of those that gets better the more you think about it.
Yes, I know this is not a Hollywood film. But Hollywood sets the standard for all film, in a sense.
I know it makes me an Evil and Bad Man in the eyes of many women, but the dialogue in Pulp Fiction is just so spotless. It’s an unrelenting stream of the most brilliant patter written for film.
I think I know why there is such deep hatred for Pulp Fiction among so many women1. That’s because it is probably the most masculine movie ever made. And I don’t mean the jock-y frat boy masculinity many men (and women) mistake for masculinity. No, I mean, it’s all about and based on how the masculine psyche actually functions. Exaggerated a little, sure, as all movies are. But basically correct.
Many women say to men, “We want to see how you really are.” Or, even more ludicrously, “I want to be treated just like a man.”
And to this I say:
1. No you don’t. 2. No, you really really, really don’t.
Pulp Fiction demonstrates raw masculinity and its concern for power structures, the casualness of violence in many men’s worlds, and that nearly all men care far more about what you actually do rather than what you say, or claim, or how you look, or seem to be. This is very different than how women relate, which is more often based on social presentation and though it involves just as much (arguably more) competition, their terms of the social contract are much more subsumed in obfuscation and plausible deniability.
So I can understand why women strongly dislike the movie. It must be for many of them like watching a scrambled film in a foreign language where scary people do bad things for unclear reasons. I would not like that either, to be fair.
Though not all women hate the work. A friend of mine was goofing around with the remote in a hotel room and turned the TV on. Pulp Fiction happened to be playing and she sat rapt watching it. “I’d forgotten how damn good this movie is,” she said.
I wish it had more actual “behind the scenes,” but Sophie Thatcher has a brain in her head so she’s worth watching in interviews. Incidentally, Companion is my favorite movie of the past couple of years.
One of the outfits Sophie is wearing isn’t in the film so that must’ve been from a deleted bit. And she does such a great job with the German scene.
That is amazing, but every one of those frames is hand-painted. That scene is 94 seconds long, so that’d be 2,253 frames. 2,253 frames x 30 mins animation etc. per frame = 67,590 minutes. Which is 1,127 hours or just under 47 days.
In other words, that scene alone would’ve taken just under 47 days of animator time to produce1. There’s no way CGI would take that long. A comparable scene with CGI would take a day or two of animator time. Big, big difference.
Of course, multiple animators worked on it. The actual scene probably took a week or so to make once filming and editing was complete.
A silent film still well worth watching today. It was the precursor of and a massive influence on nearly all filmed scifi that followed and had a huge effect on cinema in general.
Even though it’s silent and in black and white, it feels like it could’ve been filmed today. It shows how much 1927 was like our current era.
Good grief, what the fuck was that? Did they try to make a French surrealist film in American horror movie form? Consistent tone? Consistent anything? Who needs that? It was like a Twilight Zone episode blended with Evil Dead II combined with Top Secret.
I have no idea what to make of that film. It made me laugh a few times. It made me cringe a few. I have not the first clue what the filmmakers were trying to achieve there. It feels like a story told around a campfire except by someone mildly drunk, but you never see the fire nor the raconteur.
All I can say about it is that I don’t feel like it was a waste of time to watch it, but I also can’t really recommend it to anyone else. Its rating is “what in the hell.”
One of the reasons I liked Companion so much is that I lived a lot of my early life like Iris, with people not wanting me around, treating me strangely or with barely-concealed scorn. All with me having no idea why. Yes, I was an unkempt weird kid with no social skills. That’s what happens when you’re raised by fucking wolves with parents who don’t do anything to help you. It just seems like people could’ve been a little easier on me? But they weren’t. At all.
Anyway, the dinner party scene in Companion with poor Iris doing her best to fit in, to smile, to listen attentively and tell her own stories while everyone treats her disdainfully or barely acknowledges her — sister, I’ve been there. And it really sucks. It crushes your soul little by little. That scene reminded so much of my childhood and adolescence. I got that very same treatment if I wasn’t actively getting punched, kicked or otherwise beaten down.
Luckily (unluckily?), it wasn’t because I was an automaton, though I certainly wasn’t treated any better due to my humanity.
I mean, the whole point of Companion is that Iris acts with more humanity and compassion than the narcissistic, bumbling bio-humans all around her, even though she’s literally being used as a tool for some harebrained scheme. I think I did my best to do the same growing up in rural North Florida.
I liked the cinematography of Companion in general, but I really thought this shot of Sophie Thatcher’s Iris showering and looking at her burned robot hand was nicely done:
The sterile but slightly-glowy off-white combined with almost-amniotic wetness nods towards a rebirth, an emergence. Remember, everything in a (good) film is deliberate.
Wow, Companion is much better than I expected! Good film. A dark comedy take on what the world would look like if tech like in Ex Machina were to be commercialized.
Best line:
“I am not robo-shaming you!”
Spoilers below.
Such a clever, clever film. There’s a cute part in the beginning. If you go in cold you don’t know the protag, Iris, is a machine. Of course, she does not know either. When the two main characters are exiting their self-driving car, she says “thank you” to the car and won’t let them get out of the vehicle until her human partner does the same thing. This implies that she somehow intuits that she shares more with the car than she consciously knows. Great little detail.
Second favorite line that one of the robots says of his implanted, artificial memories in a more serious moment: “I mean, it may have never happened but my memory of it’s real.”
The movie is actually a better and more incisive critique of “nice guys” and the incel phenomenon than any feminist has managed to come up with. Sophie Thatcher as Iris is perfect, too. Without her, the film would’ve been not nearly as good. The scene where she realizes she’s artificial is particularly affecting.
