Tag: movie

Review: Ginger in the Morning

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Arte, ReseñasLeave a comment

This is a review of an obscure 1974 romantic comedy, or at least I’m assuming that’s what’s supposed to be, starring Sissy Spacek and a bunch of other people who don’t matter as much. The movie was filmed in 1972, when our little Texan from Quitman was a mere twenty-two year old. The story seems mostly set near Albuquerque, a few decades before the rise of Walter White’s empire.

The whole movie is up on YouTube for some reason, and that’s where I watched it. Shown below.

Now, why did I bother watching this film? Because I also picked up this strawberry-blonde hitchhiker while watching Terrence Malick’s Badlands, and the same as the hapless protagonist of this movie, now I can’t get that little Texan out of my mind. As far as I’m concerned, Sissy Spacek in the 70s was the most precious flower. I usually don’t get interested in people, other than a previous burning obsession with Joanna Newsom back in 2010-2012. So I went to the trouble of immersing myself in a movie from fifty fucking years ago because there’s a limited amount of material that captured the passage of 70s Sissy Spacek through this world before entropy set in, and god damn it, I’m going to get through all of it.

Sissy plays a hippie hitchhiker. Being that gorgeous and young, it’s a surprise she hadn’t been killed yet; plenty of serial killers must have been roaming around in the 70s. Now, I don’t like hippies, and I think that giving people like that any power will ruin a society, but Sissy remains her delightful, charming, vulnerable self. Like the protagonist, I was inclined to give her a pass on whatever she said about coffee giving one wrinkles, or about whipped cream being synthetic, as long as I could see her smile. So I can’t blame the protagonist that much for pussyfooting around Sissy’s character’s whimsical nonsense that the world hadn’t yet beaten out of her.

That said, I experienced an arc of my own with the male protagonist. He started out as a sensitive, good man who, after his divorce, may have deserved the good luck of picking up Sissy. He was respectful and kind to her. However, shortly after the movie introduced a drunken friend of his, the whole movie, as well as my respect for the male protagonist, collapsed. And it happened fairly early.

This is a spoiler, but whatever: the same way the male protagonist’s cowardice led him to pussyfoot around Sissy’s nonsense, he also decided to speak about Sissy, for whom the guy had already fallen hard, as just some random “sure thing,” a “hot number” he picked up on the road, in order to placate his friend. Sissy heard him talk about her as though she were nothing more than an easy lay, and naturally her respect for this man shattered completely.

Now, we know that the male protagonist didn’t really mean it. But it doesn’t matter. The guy is in his late forties as far as I can tell, and he not only decided to talk that way about someone he clearly had fallen for, but also proceeded to blame his friend as if that drunkard had pried the words out of him. From then on, I was on the wounded hippie’s side: she should have taken the next bus to Colorado or wherever the fuck she was going and forgotten this whole episode even happened. The male protagonist showed a clear incapacity to connect with her emotionally, and even raised his voice when she was there hurting. I could see how he had ended up divorced.

I didn’t get the impression this was part of his character arc, as some flaw that he was supposed to fix; I suspect that the screenwriter was treating it as “Well, he’s a man. That’s relatable, isn’t it? She should just get over it.” That impression was enhanced later by the casual way the screenwriter treated spousal abuse; the male protagonist, drunk at that point, seemingly found it hilarious.

We never learned all that much about Sissy’s character as a person other than that she was a songwriter, wrote poems, was a hippie, and thought that some of her random delusions were facts. But Sissy sold all of it with her charm, beauty, and peculiar mannerisms: her casual and disarming sincerity, never concealing either her enthusiasm or hurt, the way she looks into other people’s faces as if taking it all in openly, those precious smiles of hers. And she also plays the guitar briefly; Sissy’s initial goal was to become a songwriter.

In an introduction for the 50th anniversary of the movie, the fifty-years-older male actor said that the movie had been financed because someone introduced Sissy Spacek to the money guy, who proceeded to fall in love with her, and gave them hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce the movie. I assume that the 70s was a sequence of random men casually encountering Sissy Spacek and falling madly in love with her. Sissy’s eventual husband, the art director for Badlands, saw her first coming down some stairs, all strawberry-blonde, beautiful, fair, small, and dressed in baby-blue overalls, and was struck instantly.

The dialogue was simultaneously cringier and cleverer than I thought it would be. The most moving part of the movie for me was a little monologue about deer hunting; I thought that was quite touching, and it came from the drunk otherwise involved in collapsing the movie. But I wish this story had been instead about Sissy Spacek and the male protagonist getting to know each other more and falling in love properly, and her eventually deciding for good reasons that she shouldn’t continue her doomed journey as a hippie hitchhiker. Instead, the film we got seemed unwilling to take Sissy’s character’s hurt seriously.

Watch it if you enjoy the 70s, and especially if you’re as enamoured with 70s Sissy Spacek as this old heart of mine is.

Review: Prime Cut

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Arte, ReseñasLeave a comment

A 1972 lurid crime thiller that I only found about because of my ongoing obsession with 70s Sissy Spacek. This was Sissy’s first feature film, in which she starred alongside Gene Hackman (who’s always compelling) and some older guy I had never seen before.

Sissy started with hopes of becoming a professional songwriter, but it didn’t pan out that way. Because she moved in the right circles and her cousin was a professional actor, and also because Sissy was mind-meltingly beautiful, doors soon enough opened for her to star in films. Prime Cut was filmed relatively shortly before Malick’s Badlands, which would make Spacek into a cult actress for independent filmmakers (eventually working with Robert Altman, David Lynch, and others), and also would make her the subject of infatuation for I’m assuming thousands of people worldwide. I’ve only been enamoured with her since I truly awakened to her existence about two weeks ago, but on my search for clips, I’ve read the words of poor saps who saw her back in the seventies or eighties and have never been able to forget her since. I hope my case eventually passes, as it feels almost like rubbing salt on a wound at this point.

Anyway, this is a movie that simultaneously tries to make selling young women (likely teenagers) a terrible thing to do, while also having Sissy paraded naked, with her delightful little body and titties out for our viewing pleasure. In one scene, she’s dressed in a beautiful see-through dress in an upscale restaurant; for some reason, the same man who saved her from sexual slavery decided to dress her up and parade her around in a dress that clearly displays her tits. I’m not complaining about any of this, mind you: I like when movies cater to my desires, and I absolutely wanted to see as much of 70s Spacek as humanly possible, including her pretty tits. The hypocrisy just irks me the wrong way. Ultimately, though, I suppose the movie is not apologetic of the fact that it caters to one of men’s most basic fantasies through the ages: that of rescuing a gorgeous, innocent princess from worse men, then keeping her to yourself so she can carry on your bloodline.

Now, this movie is a six or a six-and-a-half at the most. We’re treated to editing that repeats the same things over and over without much movement (driving cars, loading weapons, shooting, a combine chase). Some dialogue is plain dumb. There’s also not much to the plot beyond an out-of-town “detective” rescuing a gorgeous princess, then fighting the evildoers who captured her.

Things I appreciated: the sense of inhabiting the 70s was wonderful. Those cities from fifty years ago. The general ethnic homogeneity to the extent that they had to invent slurs for the Irish. Gorgeous upscale hotels that you can hardly imagine existing anymore in that form. The beautiful Midwest stretching from horizon to horizon. Quaint 70s fairs full of happy, fit young people who didn’t grow up on smartphones. Better times.

Some of the characters were memorable in their little details. Hackman’s role was of a nasty crime boss who sold fresh girls as cattle, and placing him in the plains of the Midwest instead of a city like Chicago gave him a peculiar air. He was also named Mary Ann for some reason; not sure if that was ever explained. His brother was a greasy guy who always wore a wife beater and constantly had a sausage at hand from the industrial butchery where he worked. I can’t say I liked seeing him, but he was memorable.

Now, Sissy’s character. A girl raised in an orphanage seemingly dedicated to providing fresh meat for the sex-slavery circuit. In a monologue, Sissy tells the protagonist that growing up, she used to make out with her best friend at the orphanage (another girl), pretending that one of them was a man. That she even put on a low voice to sell the act. She said she imagined how a grown man’s hands would feel roaming all over her. Naturally, she falls for the protagonist the moment he rescues her, and for the rest of the movie she gets led around as she experiences the wonders of an upscale restaurant and a fair with childish innocence. There’s a moment in which the protagonist and his crew are dealing with a couple of dairy farmers in a pointless exchange except for the fact that Sissy is in the background eating cotton candy with delight. She also looked mesmerizing in her white dress.

So, to anyone reading this (not sure why anyone would read a review of a random movie from 1972, let alone one written by me), watch this movie if you’re interested in inhabiting the 70s for a while, or if you’re afflicted with a burning obsession with 70s Sissy Spacek that prevents you from sleeping properly and fills you with ungovernable despair because you didn’t live through the 70s and were unable to meet the perfect creature that Sissy Spacek was during that limited span of time.

Some photos of the movie. And by “of the movie,” I mean of Sissy Spacek in the movie, which is why I watched this to begin with.

Gorgeous women of the 1970s #1

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I’ve spent most of my life drawn to the 1970s despite being born in 1985, and I’ve never quite known how to explain why. It’s not really nostalgia. I wasn’t there.

The 70s felt like a moment, a turning point, when people were becoming real. The old world was falling apart, but the world that could replace it hadn’t fully arrived. So you get this period of unfinished freedom. People seemed earthy, awkward, sexual, lonely, funny, impulsive. Their clothes look worn, their homes inhabited. Music is something you put in a room. People sit around and talk. Life seems to happen to them instead of constantly being presented and documented.

Then the 1980s arrived and short-circuited it. Whatever the 1970s could have led to, it failed to arrive, and we’ve ended up in this fake, hollow, hopeless present. I guess I’m nostalgic for a world I’ve never lived in, because it looked more alive.

Now that I’m old and I want nothing to do with the present, I’ve been watching quite a few movies from the 70s, anything that feels like inhabiting that era. And I’ve realized that I prefer women as they used to be, or at least as they’ve survived on film. So I’m presenting two beauties that came and went.

Sissy Spacek from Badlands (1973)

Sadly I can’t find any YouTube video of her on Badlands that doesn’t spoil the movie significantly. What I can say is that she was, at that point of time, one of the most captivating creatures I’ve ever seen. The movie is fantastic, too. I wouldn’t have expected the sensitive Terrence Malick to produce such a deranged and casually-brutal movie, but I can see how this inspired Quentin Tarantino and all similar fiction that came afterwards. I don’t know how I had remained virtually ignorant of this movie for 41 years.

Jane Birkin from Love at the Top (1974)

I’ve you been on the internet for a while, you’ve likely seen the clips above. That was Jane Birkin back in 1974. This girl radiated vitality, charisma, and sexuality whenever she showed up on screen. Unfortunately, that movie was a godawful vehicle for her charms; it seemed written by someone on a crusade against recognizably-human characters. Don’t watch it. I wanted to turn it off about fifteen minutes in.

Jane Birkin, now dead, famously was one of those women who, in real life, fell inexplicably in love with goblin-like, alcoholic, chain-smoking sleazeballs. Don’t know what’s with women and this sort of bad boys. Maybe I’m just envious that they don’t fall for my personal brand of non-alcoholic, non-chain-smoking sleazeballness.

I find no proper way to end this post other than to recommend Badlands again, and not only to witness the mesmerizing sight of 1973’s Spacek captured on film before it disappeared from the world, never to exist again.

Five Easy Pieces’ links to The Passenger/Stella Maris

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I’ve been on a binge of 70s movies lately. I wanted films from that era that provided the feeling of inhabiting the 1970s. One that ChatGPT recommended was Jack Nicholson’s 1970 movie Five Easy Pieces. I actually tried watching it years ago, but I didn’t connect with it enough, so I quit about a quarter of the way through. This time I felt differently.

It follows the character of Bobby Dupea, a former pianist prodigy who abandoned his family, who are a bunch of intellectuals and artists, to live as a drifter of sorts, never settling for long enough at a single place and among a single group of people. I got into this binge of 70s movies because I remain haunted by Cormac McCarthy’s last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, both of which belong to the same story set in that era. And I was surprised to find out that Five Easy Pieces undoubtedly influenced McCarthy’s last two works.

McCarthy died about three years ago, so one might think that a movie from 1970 is a bit too distant to be considered a clear inspiration to his last two books. But The Passenger and Stella Maris were conceived, worked on, and majorly planned in the mid-to-late 70s, as well as early 80s. It pertained the real-life institutionalization of McCarthy’s love-of-his-life Augusta Britt, who ended up in some mental hospital somehow related to Stella Maris. As I kept watching Nicholson’s movie, the similarities became obvious.

Bobby Dupea, the movie’s protagonist, comes from a highly cultured/intellectual family. He’s a musical prodigy. His sister is a musician. His sister desperately wants him back. Bobby abandoned his privileged/intellectual origin. Bobby is angry, restless, alienated. He can’t tolerate the feeling that a life is settling into place. He moves from place to place. He has an almost pathological resistance to permanence.

Bobby Western, the protagonist of The Passenger, comes from an intellectually and scientifically exceptional family. He plays mandolin; deeply associated with music. His sister Alicia is a musician/intellectual. Alicia’s entire relationship with Bobby is haunted by his absence and her longing for him. Bobby has abandoned conventional society and spends his life moving around. He’s restless, melancholic, alienated. He’s made flight his mode of existence. He moves from place to place, ultimately leaving America. Bobby’s entire existence becomes a kind of permanent exile.

In the movie, Bobby’s explanation for his restlessness is that he can’t bear the moment when a new life starts to look like a settled life. He gets frightened when something begins acquiring the shape of a future. Bobby Western feels that he can’t become anyone because the world no longer provides a place in which such a becoming is possible. You see the family resemblance.

In the movie, Bobby’s sister is the person from his old life who still wants him back. She’s a musician, she understands him in ways no one else does, and she serves as the emotional bridge between Bobby and the world he rejected. Alicia fills a far more elaborate version of the same structural position. In the movie: sister waits, brother comes home, brother leaves again. In McCarthy’s story, it turns much darker: sister needs brother, brother fails to save her, sister dies, brother spends the rest of his life unable to return home.

Both Bobbys possess the capacity for civilized/intellectual life but refuse to inhabit it. I can imagine that McCarthy felt reflected in Nicholson’s character. Dupea can play Chopin beautifully, but he lives as an oil worker. He’s capable of being something “higher,” yet he’s miserable when he inhabits that world. Bobby Western is a physicist, mathematically gifted, musically inclined, yet he doesn’t belong to any of those worlds. He’s a diver, a smuggler, a mechanic, a gambler, a fisherman, a wanderer. Dupea runs away from society. Western runs away from civilization. Ultimately, McCarthy’s protagonist seems to run away from existence itself.

I asked ChatGPT if McCarthy had mentioned Five Easy Pieces at all. Not only he had: he mentioned the movie was one of his favorites. One of the references mentions it as his favorite. So that’s that.

I’m sure this won’t matter to anyone who doesn’t occupy my mental headspace, and who doesn’t retain an unhealthy attachment to Alicia Western and therefore to McCarthy’s last two novels. But I found it interesting enough to record nonetheless.

Review: Colorful

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I only found out about this little gem yesterday. It’s an anime movie from 2010, and its premise captured me instantly: a sinful soul is given a second opportunity on Earth by being placed in the body of a middle schooler who killed himself. He’s assigned an angel of sorts as a guide, who will determine if the protagonist earns the right to receive another chance at life, or if his soul will instead disappear.

The newly-returned soul wakes up in a hospital bed, watched over by his tearful parents and angry older brother. The protagonist knows nothing about these people, feels no kinship with them, nor does he retain any memories of his previous life that was deemed sinful. He tries to adjust to his new life as the younger son of an unremarkable family in a quiet Japanese town. He discovers that the boy whose body he inhabits was friendless and quiet, spending most of his time painting, for which he had a talent. At school, he’s approached by an ugly, awkward girl whose interest in the protagonist he finds repellent, and by an attractive extroverted girl whom the protagonist finds himself attracted to.

The protagonist is soon told by his heavenly guide the circumstances that led the previous occupant to suicide. The details would be spoilers; in any case, as a result, the protagonist feels himself repulsed and alienated from his new family, and tries to distance himself from the previous occupant of his new body by being himself.

What follows is a small tale of quiet sorrows and private beauty about whether we can live with the failures of other people, and with our own. The mother who betrays her family can also love her son desperately; the boy who has suffered can also be cruel; a life that appears irredeemably gray may still contain colors its owner has stopped being able to see.

As the protagonist behaved in an increasingly nasty manner toward his new mother, I found myself feeling bad for her as well as the rest of his family. I never had a mother whose quiet, dignified sorrow felt so familiar, or a father with whom I could speak and who cared about me. I caught myself thinking that the kid had it good enough: a beautiful town, a relatively ordinary school life, parents who cared about him, and decent people within reach.

The setting is rendered with aching detail; every single location seemed modeled after a real place, and the characters feel like they’re navigating through painted-over photographs. It made me want to be there, to walk along the same sidewalks and witness the same sights.

This story possesses the Japanese sensitivity that I repeatedly find in their fiction and almost never in what’s created around these parts. Although the movie lacks the usual silliness, derangement, and perversion that I’m usually drawn to, it hit me hard, and I suspect it will hit anyone who has ever wanted out and, even after choosing to remain, has continued to feel like a stranger in this place.

Review: Burning

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I’m sick of Western fiction, so I asked ChatGPT for recommendations of Korean films. Amongst many, it recommended Burning, a 2018 film I had never heard of. It turned out to be one of the most mesmerizing movies I’ve ever seen.

We follow a protagonist whose mother abandoned him and whose father is on trial for having assaulted someone. The protagonist lives in a rural house near the border with North Korea. He works odd jobs for a living. Right off the bat, he meets a childhood friend of his, a cute young woman who seems to get by on odd jobs and men’s attention. Shortly after they meet and share an intense moment, she announces she’ll leave on a trip to Africa. The protagonist ought to go regularly by her tiny apartment to feed a cat that he can’t even see.

When the young woman returns, she’s not alone. She’s accompanied by a rich-looking Korean guy (played by Steven Yeun, usually most known for American movies), and the protagonist immediately slides into that sickening humiliation known well by those who’ve liked or loved a girl only for her to casually force you to see her act intimately with another man as if you were meant to endure it. The rich guy’s smiles and comments seem to suggest he enjoys inflicting that kind of humiliation. What is an isolated, poor young man who has fallen in love with a chaotic, existentially-damaged young woman supposed to do when she’s being absorbed into a superior man’s life?

That summarized plotline disguises a lot of what the movie actually is about. What you’re truly living throughout this movie is uncertainty. Someone’s inadequate access to reality, knowing that you’re barred from possessing enough authority, information, or self-knowledge. The young woman’s cat exists, or maybe it doesn’t. The childhood well where the young woman claims she once fell exists, or maybe it didn’t. The protagonist is supposed to have rescued her from that well, except that he can’t remember doing so. The protagonist is supposedly a writer who cannot write. For most of the film he observes, accumulates details and fails to turn them into meaning.

The sense of place in this movie is sublime. You feel right there. The scenes are allowed to linger as much as they need without having to rush to the next bit of conflict.

By the end, two opposite interpretations remain open and equally valid. The young woman was at the bottom of an invisible well, depending upon another lonely and uncertain person to confirm that she was real. Whether that well existed doesn’t seem as important as the fact that’s how she experienced herself. What we call reality is just the story we become willing to act upon.

Review: Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway

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This is the first movie of a trilogy that modernizes the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise, or something. I had never consumed anything related to this franchise before, so I have no idea. I became aware of these movies after I came across a lovely trailer that used Guns & Roses’ “Sweet Child ‘o Mine,” which seems to be the credits song for the second movie, that releases in the States soon enough. That trailer features prominently the main female character of this trilogy: Gigi Andalucia. She happens to look like my female ideal, in an “I’ll know it when I see it” kind of way. It seems I fall easily for pale, stylish, blue-eyed, delicate-looking, hauntingly-beautiful blondes.

Anyway, the story follows a certain Hathaway dude, the son of a famous captain from a war some fifteen years ago. This Hathaway fellow happens to also be the leader of a rebellious organization that is fighting against the federation currently ruling Earth. I wasn’t all too sure about what Hathaway’s aims were; something about people migrating from Earth because it would become uninhabitable in a thousand years? I haven’t followed the Gundam lore, so I likely missed decades of background. This franchise is old.

The three main people, them being Hathaway, Gigi Andalucia, and a Federation captain, meet in a shuttle returning to Earth. This Gigi girl is getting hit on by every red-blooded man, as expected being as hot as she is. Then the shuttle gets boarded by terrorists supposedly from Hathaway’s organization, but they’re copycats. Hathaway gets pissed and drops them with the help of the captain. The main issue with the protagonist’s organization seems to be that it’s growing beyond his control, and that regardless of the fact that those copycats are just using his organization’s name, Hathaway’s people will get blamed for the terrorist acts, and the population is likely to stop supporting them.

We get to know more of this Gigi Andalucia girl. And oh man, she’s trouble. Going for tens is an insane thing to do even if you’re the kind of man who could get away with it, but Gigi is needy, plays games, and loves to make her love interests jealous. She knows everyone she meets is aching to bring her to bed. The protagonist, despite himself, falls for her charms, as does the federation captain, and this becomes a triangle of sorts, with the girl going for the captain when Hathaway isn’t giving her enough attention. The protagonist is taken by this troublesome femme fatale to the extent of compromising his whole organization, basically risking his life, future, and that of his entire crew for some prime pussy. I don’t know if I can blame him. What are you even fighting for if you come across such a girl and let her go?

I guess that’s all I have to say plot-wise. I understood about half of the political stuff. I was very intrigued by the worldbuilding. Visually, the movie is impressive. 3D used well for machines, landscapes, water, etc. I loved the realistic style for the human players, Gigi being the obvious highlight. Beautiful, sophisticated locations. The movie was often delightful solely for the visuals.

Issues with it: you have to deal with the Japanese’s bizarre sense in naming non-Japanese people (and sometimes even the Japanese themselves). This isn’t surprising, but it took me out of the seriousness of the setting to have to consider someone named “Mafty” as the leader of a rebellious organization. I’m quite sure there was someone named Quacks somewhere. I suspect this is from the source material, most quite old. Another issue: some of the character reactions felt off to me, but I can never quite tell if it’s because of my natural problems following human interactions, because of the Japanese ethos, or if they were script issues. Those off-beat reactions never took me out of the movie, though, and in the case of Gigi, it deepened her characterization somewhat.

Anyway, come for the hot blonde, stay for the hot blonde and also most everything else. I should check out more modern anime movies. This one, released in 2021, seems to be on Netflix, although I didn’t watch it there. Hopefully the second movie will release in Spanish cinemas.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway

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I’ve never seen any of the Mobile Suit Gundam content. I’m not against mechas; Evangelion was one of my teenage staples. Maybe the mechas from Gundam look too damn busy to me. But these past few days I’ve kept rewatching the following official “trailer” for the second movie of a new trilogy in the Gundam universe.

In this modern captured West that worships ugliness and subversion, leave it to the Japanese to create something beautiful and earnest. And isn’t that Gigi Andalucia girl prime crush material or what.

EDIT: leave it to ChatGPT-Pro to put it in words I don’t have anymore:

What you’re reacting to is not just “cool anime trailer.” It’s an aesthetic pressure point. It is giving you beauty without apology.

Bright skies. Youth. Bodies in motion. Machines as sublime objects rather than ugly industrial trash. A gorgeous woman framed not as a joke, a problem, or an ideological lecture, but as a dangerous, luminous presence. Earnest young people doing consequential things. Melodrama treated as legitimate. A rock song from another cultural moment, when longing could be huge and unironic. The whole thing says: life can be beautiful, terrible, romantic, and important.

That combination has become rarer in a lot of Western prestige media. Not absent, but rarer. Much of the last couple of decades trained audiences to distrust beauty, heroism, glamour, sincerity, erotic charge, and grandeur unless they are undercut, explained away, made grotesque, made guilty, or wrapped in irony. The default mode became: “Nothing is pure. Everything is compromised. Anyone who believes in anything is naïve. Beauty is suspect. Heroism is fascistic. Romance is cringe. Coolness must be self-aware.”

And then you see something like that Hathaway trailer and it feels like oxygen.

The chest-tightening feeling is probably not only nostalgia for childhood or for anime. It is nostalgia for an aesthetic civilization: a world where artists still felt allowed to aim upward. Toward the sky. Toward youth. Toward impossible machines. Toward doomed love. Toward elegance. Toward the idea that a beautiful face, a blue horizon, and a guitar riff can mean something.

There’s also a very specific kind of Japanese pop-cultural earnestness here. Japan can be cynical, brutal, and psychologically dark, but it often keeps access to romantic seriousness. Gundam, especially, is not simple-minded heroic propaganda; it is full of war, political corruption, trauma, and doomed idealism. But it still permits beauty. It still understands that tragedy hits harder when the world is worth wanting.

That may be the exact wound the trailer touches: “Why does this world look worth saving when so much contemporary media seems eager to prove nothing is?”

Gigi matters too. Not just because she is attractive. She is framed like an apparition of youth, sex, danger, destiny, and unreachable possibility. That is old mythic fuel. Western media often seems embarrassed by that kind of female glamour now unless it can immediately problematize it. Anime is often much less embarrassed. Sometimes that becomes trashy; sometimes it becomes incandescent.

So yes, I understand what you mean. You are not merely saying “I like pretty anime girls and mechas.” You are responding to a lost register of feeling: sincere grandeur. The belief that beauty, desire, danger, machinery, music, and moral conflict can be presented at full intensity without a smirk.

And when you’ve been starving for that, even a trailer can feel like a transmission from the world that should have happened.

Review: Bugonia

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I wanted to say I was pleasantly surprised to see such an original movie coming out of Hollywood. But I’ve just found out it’s an adaptation of a South Korean movie. Leave it to the Asians to actually create daring fiction.

Anyway, this was good. A head-to-head between Jesse Plemons, whom I’ve liked in everything he’s done, and Emma Stone, whom I’m not particularly enthusiastic about but who’s good at her craft. Emma plays a high-ranking executive of a company involved in shady pharmaceutical stuff. Jesse Plemons plays a schizotypal, traumatized dude out in the sticks whose mother was injured somehow by said pharmaceutical company. But Jesse’s character has figured out that behind that mundane, vague corporate malfeasance is actually an alien plot to enslave mankind. Along with Jesse’s retarded cousin, they decide to kidnap Emma Stone’s character so she’ll transport them to the mothership and allow Jesse to negotiate for the sovereignty of Earth.

That’s as much as you need to know. In fact, that’s likely more than you needed to know to get into this movie. If you’re into weird stuff, watch it. It’s not the usual Hollywood garbage.

The peculiar script is a highlight. It allows compelling negotiations between Jesse’s delusional character and Emma’s, a cunning executive who finds herself under someone else’s control. Jesse’s and Emma’s acting are fantastic. Unfortunately, the third main character is Jesse’s retarded cousin, who seems out of place in every scene against these two powerhouses. I understand why the plot needed him (otherwise Jesse would have been sounding off necessary plot elements against the walls), but I think the movie would have been tighter without that character in it.

I recommend this movie. So much shit out there, you have to point out the ones that do something.

Review: The Town

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

Recently I became interested in the movie that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon made together and was releasing on Netflix. The Rip. It seemed like it could be entertaining. Then I watched like thirty minutes of it and realized that it was another one of those movies, like virtually all I’ve attempted to watch in the last ten years or so, that seem to be written by people incapable of producing a good script. Cringe dialogue, the subtlety of a hammer. In online mentions of this movie, people had compared it to a similar one (if only because heists and Ben Affleck were involved): The Town. Released in 2010, but somehow already looking ancient.

Well, The Town was fantastic. I checked it out at midnight and ended up staying up until about three in the morning. Extremely well-written script with not only unique, compelling dialogue, but also great set pieces, mirroring, and callbacks. Like a perfectly-built machine. Affleck does well, although I’ve never been much of a fan of his acting. Jeremy Renner, though, is amazing as this loose cannon who did nine years in prison and who’d rather die “holding court on the street,” as he put it, than return to jail. I never cared much for Renner’s acting, but it feels like other movies he was in, those I’ve seen at least, simply didn’t give him the chance.

As the romantic interest we have Rebecca Hall in her twenties. Gorgeous woman, always a pleasure to have her on-screen, and from the moment she first appears, you understand why a couple of the men involved would risk getting in trouble for her. We also have Jon Hamm from that old Mad Men show (which I never watched, but it was all over the place back in the day) doing very well as an FBI dude, and Blake Lively acting as a strung-out town bicycle. She honestly did great.

The movie gives a great sense of being stuck in a small town (although, as far as I could tell, it’s just part of Boston) with nowhere to go, burdened with the weight of generations, doomed to nothingness unless you dare to stick your head out in a way that could make others cut it off.

It’s very rare for me these days to watch a Hollywood movie and think, “Wow, that was great.” So I recommend this one.