Bacurau (2019)

Impression:  Whoah! I am a bit speechless and unsure what to say about this one. Super violent and graphic. Two running themes throughout the movie are coffins and a mysterious drug people take when they enter the town. The film has somewhat of a post-apocalyptic feel. Like a Brazilian Mad Max but without the cars. The setting and the gritty portrayal of place also made me think of The Bad Batch. But I think this is a deeper movie, I think it’s saying something about community and identity, although I am unsure what exactly. Maybe something as simple as that when people come together they can defeat external threats. It’s definitely saying clearly and loudly that politics and politicians are corrupt, and that people can organize and make positive changes in their community much better than waiting for a corrupt self-serving politician who only needs them when he needs their votes. Maybe it is also saying that when dealing with violence from above, sometimes it may be necessary to use violent means to survive.

The film is set in the near future in a dusty town of Bacurau, somewhere in the wastelands of Brazil. The town seems pretty much abandoned to its own devices; you have to be tough to live in Bacurau. There is only one thing they want from the local politician, and that is to help them deal with the water supply they have been cut off from. But there is no help. The small town has turned the church into a storage space. Prostitution is rampant and out in the open. The town doctor is also the town drunk. Some local guys are holed up with guns in the abandoned dam out of town: it’s unclear if they have been run out of town, or they left on their own accord and what exactly they are doing out there. Something violent and sinister has happened here before, but we are never fully told what.

But this is all just the set up. The second half of the movie brings in a way more global commentary on violence, hatred, indifference, and I will not spoil it. A lot of things are never fully explained, so you have to be the kind of person who loves (instead of getting frustrated with) films that make you ask: “What is this movie even about?” until the very end. Any maybe after…

Facts:  Something weird is going on in a small dusty Brazilian town of Bacarau.

My Buddhist reading:  That violence begets violence and in general that causes create effects of a similar kind is pretty much a given in Buddhist teachings. And that violence is not good, not just for those who are on the receiving end of it, but those who perpetrate it either, is also clear. But maybe in some ways Bacurau can be read as a personification of samsara. People are mostly left alone to do what they want within the town, but these outside violent forces which they perceive as completely outside their control have actually been caused by their own previous actions? And at the end, putting aside their differences and taking care of each other is what saves them? Maybe.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

Impression: Oh, where do I begin. I like Charlie Kaufman‘s films. A lot! I’ve seen all the ones he has directed and all the one’s he has written. They are quirky and mindbending and definitely the most creative thing coming out of mainstream Hollywood. So, this movie. It’s a relatively simple set up, a woman is going with her boyfriend to his parents house for the first time. At first it seems like a fairly normal movie about 2 hipsters driving to a dinner, having some pseudointellectual conversations on the way. Slowly some weirdness creeps in. First she talks about a biology paper, then she’s apparently a poet, and recites a super long quite powerful poem, at some point she is a painter, then a waitress. Stranger and stranger things keep happening and you realize there is this dark undercurrent, but this is not a horror film, things are just off, and no one seems to realize it.

The point of the movie seems to be that it’s all performance: they are all just going through the motion (the dance?) of saying something to keep conversations going, and what they say is unimportant. Whether they are talking art or science or film, all that matters is that the other person doesn’t quite agree and keeps the conversation going. It’s a little weird to make a very talky movie where what they talk about is completely irrelevant. The characters never notice that their conversations are non-sequiturs or that the stories they tell to each other about themselves change or that who they are talking to ages or changes clothes or that sometimes they are a totally different person. They just keep talking. Sometimes the characters get emotional for no reason. Behind the endless talks there are possibly some truths about anxieties of modern life, but there might as well not be. It seems like none of that is the point.

After finishing watching the movie, I felt I needed to know a lot more about the musical Oklahoma (I know nothing more than it exists) to understand the plot. But instead I got sidetracked and read about the novel on which it was based, and it seems to have been pretty true to it, and there was no mention of the musical in the plot of the book, so maybe it’s not so central.

I don’t know, it’s a film that makes you think, and it looks good. But… did it really need to be 2 hours 14 minutes long to make you think about the purpose of conversations, about how we relate to each other and how well we really understand each other? I would argue it would have worked much better as a short film.

Facts: A couple on a surrealist road trip through snow and windswept Oklahoma.

My Buddhist reading:  Idle chatter is one of the 10 non-virtuous actions in Buddhism. The film uses a lot of idle chatter (which passes for deep conversation) to illustrate the pointlessness of it.

Dinosaurs in a Mining Facility (2018)

Impression: This one might seem completely out of character for the typical movies I see, but honestly I don’t remember the last time I had as much fun and laughed as hard as I did during a movie. It’s zero budget, completely campy, but so much fun. The idea is absurd, but I don’t want to get into the plot too much, because discovering it is half the fun.  It’s a movie that is very self aware and not ashamed of being a low budget sci-fi comedy about dinosaurs in a mining facility or pretending to be something else.

It’s also endlessly quotable.  Is Ian going to “make something of himself?” There is a guy dressed in leather carrying around a chainsaw calling people “pointdexter.” There is also a movie within a movie (or a commercial and newscasts within a movie). Which I love from early Almodovar.  The ads for WAMO soda sure give Ponte Panties a run for their money! Actually, in a lot of ways this reminds me of early Almodovar. That’s high praise, and I don’t give it lightly. Sure, it’s a completely different genre and aesthetic.  But Almodovar also took a number of years to finish Pepi Lucy & Bom while working a full time job.  It was a fun activity done with friends, and there is the same kind of zeitgeist of irreverence, and just pure fun, which I guess you lose when you start doing something for a living, rather than for the fun of it.

The end credits are incredibly impressive as they seem to go on forever, and list every single source material from the internet that was used to create the special effects. And the list in very tiny print is impressive.  No wonder it took 5 years to complete. I’ve now sat through two Q&A’s with the director, and I never cease to be impressed with the amount of dedication it must take to get something like this done.

Facts:  Why does a soda company want with a mine? What are they even mining down there? The answer just might have something to do with dinosaurs.

My Buddhist reading:  Other dimensions and portals seem to mesh well with at least the Vajrayana type of Buddhism. 🙂

Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Impression: In the new movie by Yorgos Lanthimos, Collin Farrel’s character (Steven) seems like a continuation of the part he played in the The Lobster. The acting is the exact same deadpan, no emotion with rapidly fired words said in monotone.  But it is more than that, the type of things he says are things that are just not said in society: people might think them, but they don’t say them.  Because they are uncomfortable and go against conventions about what is appropriate and what is not. Things like “Our daughter started menstruating last week,” are not normally said in small talk at a work function. Basically, his character is what would normally be seen as socially awkward. Except that the society which Lanthimos constructs has different rules than ours and there is no reaction to what he says,  just the audience’s laughter at the inappropriateness of the situation. In our world.

In the worlds Lanthimos constructs inside his films, there is actually no concept of inappropriateness. And this is the basis upon which he then builds situations which would otherwise be absurd, like the world in which you have to be coupled up or turned into an animal in the Lobster, or lack of knowledge of the outside world beyond what their parents make up for the kids in Dogtooth, or a teenage boy (Martin) constantly invading Steven’s family life in this film.  The smaller inappropriate behaviors are never questioned, and so the characters keep pushing against each other. But eventually, even in Lanthimos’ world, it does get to the point where it makes his characters uncomfortable. Because even without societal norms, on an individual level, there are lines that can be crossed.

In this movie, Steven is a surgeon with a seemingly perfect family.  He spends a lot of time interacting with Martin, who he introduces to his family. Eventually, the boy demands more and more of his time and attention.  When Farrell awkwardly starts avoiding him, things beyond his control start happening to his family, and the boy’s revenge plot is foisted on him.  Lanthimos’ previous films, just like this one, dealt with rules, and arbitrariness of rules. In Dogtooth, it was the parents who made the rules for the world in which they kept their children, in Lobster, the rebels made rules to rebel against the rules of the mainstream world. Here, Martin makes up his own rules about what is right and what is wrong and has the power to make others conform to his rules. Lanthimos’ films leave me with a sense of unease. Where do rules come from? Are all rules basically arbitrary? Must all human interactions be governed by rules? Even if we acknowledge them as arbitrary?

Facts:  Supernatural events start transpiring to Steven’s family once he refuses to have contact with a teenager who seemingly started out as a friend.

Extra: I saw this film at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. It was my favorite film I saw at TIFF this year.

The Bad Batch (2016)

Impression: I am not a huge fan of horror, and usually not a huge fan of ultra-violence in movies either. So there had to be a strong reason for me to get excited about a movie tagged a “dystopian cannibal love story”  and drive over an hour to go see it. And there was, it was directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, of  A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night fame. I loved her previous film, for its sensibility and just general sense of weirdness in an alternate universe she created. It was black and white and tagged as “the first Iranian vampire Western.” The Bad Batch turned out to not be a horror, but definitely a violent dystopia, produced on a much higher budget, with much higher profile actors (some credited, some not), and it’s own strange aesthetic and logic. I feel like her movies have to be taken the same way Baz Luhrman’s movies are consumed, not as a film, but an experience: there may be a plot, but it is secondary to the full world and atmosphere the director creates. Here the story follows a girl, who is literally broken and butchered, but does what she has to in order to survive, and find her place in a very brutal and strange world. Sure, the film can be read as a metaphor for life and surviving hardship, or choosing to build something new when faced with bad choices, but I think more than anything it is just a vision of an alternate world, and a chance to be transported into someone else’s vision. Keanu Reeves has never been creepier or better cast (and never worn a mustache in a movie before according to the director!) as a world creator and a cult leader of “The Dream.” And Jim Carey is completely unrecognizable in a silent role.  This is definitely NOT an action movie, it is slow moving and moody, much like her previous film. I think I still prefer her first film, just because I had never seen anything like it,  but this one is also very original and quirky, and full of creative energy.

Facts: A girl gets dropped off in a no-man’s land dystopian desert, where she is first faced with a brutal world run by bodybuilder cannibals. only to escape to a seemingly more  kind world of daily lazing about the desert and nightly rave parties. Soon, she discovers something nefarious is going on there too.

Extra: The fact that I got to see this film at a sneak preview, right after an hour and a half live interview with a very funny and entertaining Ana Lily Amirpour may  have made me like this movie more than, I otherwise would have. She was full of hilarious anecdotes, and very no-nonsense thoughts on life, and amazingly creative and badass.

The Dance of Reality (2013)

Impression: I think I saw another Jodorowsky movie, possibly El Topo 7 or 8 years ago and all I can remember is that it was set in a desert and it was very strange.  This one is also very strange. It’s a surrealist version of the director’s childhood told through a series of vignettes with a backdrop of politics of 1930s Chile and mixed with some commentary on religion. It’s impossible to extract what real event may have inspired each short story from the fanciful tale that he spins around it, but maybe that’s not the point. The point is maybe how our imagination influences memory and distorts reality. In the film, his mother sings all her lines opera style, and has magical powers. She is able to summon his father back from a quest where he has gotten stuck and lost his memory, by tying a rock to balloons which then track him down in a town far away, drop on his tin roof and return his memories. Unlike his mother with her magic, his father is a stoic atheist, who worships Stalin in an almost religious way. The young Alejandro faces a series of struggles to do things to win approval of his mother and father, but it’s a balance, and usually winning one, means losing another. A number of other visually stunning sequences stand out as well. As a boy. Alejandro likes to throw rocks into the sea. He is told this will kill all the fish, and soon after, a giant tsunami-like wave spits out all the fish onto the beach, the seagulls start eating them, and he is torn between feeling responsible for bringing a demise to all the fish and feeling good about feeding all the birds. What an awesome metaphor for how any action has ambiguous consequences?!  People’s motivations are also laid bare. In my favorite sequence, a group of diseased people is quarantined on the beach and given no food or water, and his father wants to use the situation to be a hero. He  breaks through the quarantine with his donkey cart full of water, which he passes out. Once they’ve had enough water they turn on his donkeys and kill them for meat. He is flabbergasted and yells out “But how will I bring you more water  tomorrow if you kill the donkeys?” to which they reply “But we are hungry today!” It’s one of those movies whose visuals and stories stay with you for days.

Facts:  The director recalls through a surrealist lense what it was like growing up in a small town in Chile in the 1930s.

The Lobster (2015)

Impression: The acting is as deadpan as it gets, the premise and situation absurd, yet there is some uncomfortable truth behind it all.  The authorities hunting down singletons in a shopping mall, the policing of all emotions and actions, the strict enforcement of all rules, and the existence of rules that govern everything.  It can be translated as a commentary to any set of rules we blindly follow as a society, or it can be read as a commentary on marriage as an institution. The best part is that even people who reject the mainstream, and live outside its rules, feel the need to set up their own rules. Which are just the antithesis of the main stream: everything the mainstream is, the rebels are its opposite. Yet, they are just as brutal about enforcing their rules, and in both cases violence is perpetuated by society on the individual. Any deviations from the rules, or even thinking about deviating from the rules, is strictly punished. This movie stayed with me for weeks. Yorgos Lanthimos is one of the most original thought provoking directors working right now. His other movie, Dogtooth was perhaps even more disturbing at creating a world with its own set of arbitrary but strict rules.

Facts:  A dystopian version of reality in which everyone who is not married is forced to do so, or will be turned into an animal of their choosing.

High-rise (2015)

Impression: Very, very odd. The 70s costumes, hairstyles, cars and furniture are all spot on and in full glory. In the intro scene you realize that something has gone very wrong in this building. The story then backflashes into a series of interconnected snapshots of inhabitants of the building interacting. The main character lives somewhere in the middle floors (middle class), there is one strong character in the  low floors (featuring a Che Guevara poster in his bedroom!)  and the ‘architect’ on the top floor (featuring a large garden with horses and goats in his rooftop garden). There are also more minor characters than one can possibly take in. Eventually it all descends into chaos, so that the goings on on screen resemble the scattered plot structure. As soon as the film ended, I had to read more about it, because it was just so strange, and I felt like there was something I must not be getting.  Once I learned it was based on a book, it seemed clearer that perhaps the movie was better understood having read it. While I am still not completely sure what it all meant, it’s definitely a film that visually stays with you for days.

Facts: Things go very wrong very fast in a London 70’s dystopian high-rise where the floor you live on is a very literal social status descriptor.

The Handmaiden (2016)

Impression: This movie ticks so many boxes for the elements I like in movies: beautiful people in beautiful places, unexpected twists and turns, funny and weird. During the first hour you think you know where it’s going: it seems like a very beautiful, but straight forward, and slightly cheesy period piece. Once part 2 starts, you realize that everything that just happened can be completely reinterpreted with a help of a few pieces of background information you’ve just been given and nothing is as it seems.  A sign of a great movie is when a run time of almost 3 hours feels like no time at all has passed. This is one of those movies.

Facts:  A Korean/Japanese period piece/comedy with unexpected twists and turns reminiscent of The Sting, but with a lot more explicit sex scenes and general weirdness.

Extra: I saw this one as well at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival. I  was sitting next to this Haitian couple and during the sex scenes only, the woman felt compelled to narrate and comment on what was going on in great detail, which made it a little awkward.