Ten Days of Terror!: The Cars that Ate Paris

Film: The Cars that Ate Paris
Format: Internet video on various players.

There are times when you can tell where a movie is going to hit based on the title. The Cars that Ate Paris is not one of those movies. Based on that title, it’s going to look like something a lot more lurid than it turned out to be. Based on the title, this clearly looks like it’s going to be a spoof along the lines of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. It might just as easily have been a film along the lines of The Car or an early prototype of Maximum Overdrive. None of these are correct. This is actually closer to a movie like Peyton Place, albeit with a hell of a lot more violence.

What I mean by that is that The Cars that Ate Paris is a film that concerns a small town with a secret. In this case, the town is Paris, located in the Australian outback. The secret, which doesn’t take us that long to figure out, is that the townspeople regularly cause drivers going through the area to drive off the road and wreck. The townspeople then ransack the wreckage, taking anything of value from the drivers. Those who survive are quickly lobotomized by the local doctor and used for medical experiments. Honestly, that last part doesn’t play into the film that much, and it honestly feels like a lost opportunity.

Immigration Problems

Film: Green Card
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on laptop.

I seem to be complaining about a lot of the movies I’ve been watching lately. I’m saying this up front because that’s not going to stop today. The case for Green Card says “If you liked Pretty Woman, give Green Card a try.” Well, I didn’t like Pretty Woman. I thought it was financial porn and cheap fantasy, so I didn’t have really high hopes for this one. The one thing it seemed to have going for it was the presence of 1990-era Gerard Depardieu, the same year he was nominated for Cyrano de Bergerac. He was the one thing I had my hopes riding on.

The movie’s plot rests on a poorly-established initial premise. When the movie begins, we see the wedding ceremony of Bronte Parrish (Andie McDowell) and Georges Faure (Gerard Depardieu). This would be where most romantic comedies end. In this case, Bronte and Georges don’t even know each other; the marriage is one of convenience. For Georges, it’s a way to stay in the States since his visa has run out. Bronte needs the marriage to secure her dream apartment, since she is a horticulturalist and the apartment comes with a greenhouse. The two marry and go their separate ways and Bronte gets her apartment, telling the people vetting her that her husband is in Africa working on musical compositions.

Dead Poets Society

Film: Dead Poets Society
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

I’m a teacher and more specifically an English teacher, which means that I’m supposed to love Dead Poets Society. I don’t. I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it. There are plenty of things to like about it, of course, and there are a few important discoveries in this film, like the fact that Robin Williams can offer up a solid, restrained performance when under the direction of someone who keeps his manic persona under lock and key. But there are problems here, which we’ll no doubt get to as we proceed.

We’re set in the late 1950s at an all-boys boarding school somewhere in the wilds of New England. We are quickly introduced to our young protagonists, a motley assortment of the progeny of the upper crust of Eisenhower’s America. Of primary importance are Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard), who is bright and outgoing and suffers from a demanding and tyrannical father (Kurtwood Smith) and Todd Anderson (Ethan Hawke), who is ignored by his parents and living in the shadow of his graduated brother, which makes him shy and unsure of himself. Of secondary importance are the lovelorn Knox Overstreet (Josh Charles) and the wannabee radical Charlie Dalton (Gale Hansen). Rounding out the group are the suck-up Richard Cameron (Dylan Kussman), the nerdy Steven Meeks (Allelon Ruggiero), and the dorkish Gerard Pitts (James Waterston).

Witness

Film: Witness
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

A pretty standard trope of the crime drama is the innocent witness. Have something bad happen, put someone completely unconnected in the area, and drama just happens. How do you twist things up? In the case of Witness, you make the innocent observer of the brutal crime as innocent as possible. In this case, our titular witness is a young Amish boy named Samuel (Lukas Haas). That little twist is enough to have garnered Witness eight Oscar nominations.

For what it’s worth, though, it really is an interesting premise. On his first trip to a big city, the young Amish boy and his mother Rachel (Kelly McGillis) are waiting in a train station when Samuel wanders off to the bathroom. It is there he sees a man assaulted and killed by two other men. The responding police officer is a man named John Book (Harrison Ford), who stashes his technologically backward witness and his mother at the house of his sister. The next day, he helps the boy look through mug shots with no success. During a lull, the boy wanders around the police station and finds the culprit he saw. The problem is that the murderer he saw is a police officer named McFee (Danny Glover).

Watching Oscar: The Truman Show

Film: The Truman Show
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

I really love The Truman Show. It represents a particular example of what I think makes a film truly great and meaningful. First, it’s a great story, one that is engaging all the way through. It’s a unique spin on a story that I think everyone has had the feeling of at one point or another—that somehow everything is literally about us. It’s a masterpiece of solipsism, deceit, and paranoia. I love the way it works and I love the way it ends. While not perfect, it’s pretty damn close.

Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) has lived his entire life inside a television show. Literally. An unwanted child at birth, he was legally adopted by a corporation and placed inside the single-largest physical structure in the world, a massive enclosed studio with its own weather system, series of lights representing the stars, sun and moon, and ocean. Inside this massive structure is Seahaven, a small island community stuck in a vague memory of the 1950s. His life is broadcast 24/7 to the world at large. All of this is done completely without Truman’s knowledge. I think Seahaven is alleged to be in California (after all, the sun sets over the ocean), but every time I watch this, it has the feel of a town situated in Massachusetts. There’s something about it that feels like it belongs near Cape Cod.

Watching Oscar: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Film: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

Of all the movies I like a lot, there is none that I’ve gotten more grief for than Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. At least three other bloggers have metaphorically rolled their eyes and groaned when I have brought this up as a great film. I stand by my assertion that this is a film worthy of respect. I like it, perhaps more than I should, but I like it all the same. It’s the sort of film that I never get tired of seeing. Having watched it, I’d happily consent to watch it again immediately.

War movies are a genre I don’t love or hate, but I genuinely love naval warfare films. Many of my favorite films in the military genre are either prison films or naval films. Master and Commander (I’m shortening the title from here on out) takes place in the time of wooden ships and iron men, smack in the middle of the conflict between England and France, when Napoleon was in charge of a good chunk of Europe. With Europe under Bonaparte’s boot, the war became one of naval engagements far from home.

Dreamtime

Film: The Last Wave
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on rockin’ flatscreen.

I frequently comment on this blog about my own lack of spirituality. That perhaps is not a true or fair assessment. I consider myself a skeptic and I don’t have any firm religious beliefs (or, really, any beliefs in that line). If it’s something that I have to believe in rather than know factually, I figure it’s bunk. Belief often seems to me to be little more than wishful thinking. So when I encounter something that is explainable only through this sort of mystical sense, well, my reaction tends to be…interesting.

This is where I end up with a film like Peter Weir’s The Last Wave. This is a film firmly rooted in a sort of spiritual other world, but even that is selling it short. This film isn’t immersed in spirituality the way a film about religion tends to be—this is not about religion. It’s far deeper than that, posing a sort of metaphysical position obtainable only in glimpses, and then only really visualized out of the corner of one’s eye. This is a film about cycles occurring on the grandest of scales, a true sort of cosmology that incorporates life, time, and the universe.

The Charge of the Light (Horse) Brigade

Film: Gallipoli
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on middlin’-sized living room television.


World War I isn’t a big seller in American films. I think there are a few reasons for this. For one, we weren’t in the war that long. The U.S. didn’t enter until 1917, and the war ended in November of 1918. Unlike cinematic war favorites like World War II and the Vietnam War, our troops were there for a cup of coffee before the whole thing ended (and no, I’m not diminishing the sacrifices made. All wars are terrible, and almost all deaths in war are tragic). Essentially, if the war is looked at as a story, we showed up in Chapter 20. From an American perspective, there’s not enough there.

The other reason that World War I shows up rarely in American films is the nature of the war itself. The wars that followed the Great War were mobile affairs, with troop movements, air battles, naval engagements, tanks, pushes against enemy strongholds, and shifting fronts in all theaters. Certainly WWI had the beginnings of aerial combat, the first tanks, and its share of naval battles, but the bulk of the ground war was static. Men sat in trenches and rushed up over the side. The front didn’t move more than a few miles for months at a time. There’s only so much you can do with guys holding machine guns and staring at each other.

This is less true for other countries, who were more involved in the war, and thus we have Gallipoli, an Australian film about the soundest military defeat suffered by the Aussies in the First World War. As in most war films, the scope of the battle at hand or the war in general is far too big for us to concentrate on that. Instead, we focus on a small group of potential soldiers and follow their path as they go from joining up to the battlefield.

First among these is Archy (Mark Lee), who lives on a farm in the west of Australia. Archy is a sprinter, and a good one, trained by his grandfather, Jack (Bill Kerr). In preparation for his first major race, Archy takes a bet and damages his feet badly, but still goes on to compete, against the wishes of his father. It’s evident that Archy wants to join up despite being too young. Jack wants him to concentrate on his running instead.

We also encounter a quartet of youths, also in the western part of Australia. These are Dunne (Mel Gibson), Billy (Robert Grubb), Barney (Tim McKenzie), and Snowy (David Argue). All but Dunne are keen to join up as well—women love a man in uniform, and the Australians are currently in the war fighting against the German ally Turkey. With such glowing press, the three are ready to fight. Dunne, however, is a sprinter like Archy, and has other plans for himself.

Archy and Dunne face off at a race in which Dunne bets on himself and loses, leaving him without a cent to his name. He and Archy attempt to reach Perth when Archy is prevented from joining up. Archy wants to get in, and will fake his identification to do so. Dunne still has no real desire—his goal was to win his bet and open up a bike shop. However, down on prospects and hoping perhaps to impress a few saucy farmer’s daughters the pair meet along the way, Dunne attempts to join the light horse cavalry like Archy. Archy gets in, and Dunne, since he doesn’t know his way around a horse, does not.

Instead, he meets his three mates from back home, who drag him along into the infantry. We get a rush through boot camp, a quick reunion of Archy and Dunne, and a transfer of Dunne to the light horse at this late stage. And then all of them are shipped off to the Gallipoli peninsula to fight for real.

And here’s where the film takes a hard left turn. Up to this point, this film is fun, carefree, silly, even joyous. And then we get to the war, and the proposed landing of British troops on the peninsula. The Australians’ job will be to force the Turks to turn away from the beaches. They’ll do this by shelling the Turkish positions, and then charging the trenches. At this point in the film, we’re most of the way through. We get through the first hour and a half or so without anyone really being in danger of anything more than a venereal disease from an Egyptian prostitute during training. But suddenly, the war gets very, very real.

As the film tells the story, a British commander adamantly sends the Australian forces over the top and into the face of Turkish machine gun fire over and over, despite the fact that the Aussies are being almost completely wiped out on every assault. Most of them don’t get more than a few feet before being cut down, and yet the orders continue to come to essentially commit suicide in the face of the Turkish guns. I don’t know if this is historically accurate or not; frankly it seems far too “movie” to be anything less than an exaggeration at best. However, it is very powerful and moving here.

Eventually, it comes down to a foot race, like the start of the film. Dunne is working as a runner at this point, looking for a way to prevent the troops from being forced over the top to certain death again. As the time comes nearer and nearer for Archy’s turn up and over, Dunne races against time to get word back to halt the attacks. It’s a tense moment.

Is this an anti-war film? I’m not sure. Like many films that are ostensibly anti-war, it appears to me to be much more anti-stupidity. As such, it has a message that has not lost any of its value. If I do have a complaint, it’s the soundtrack. Gallipoli was filmed in 1981, long before Mel Gibson was anything like a true international star (and long before he became so publically anti-Semitic and weird). As a film of that era, it has a very 1981 synthesizer soundtrack that clashes (for me) with the time period of the film. The cheese factor on the music is very, very high.

Why to watch Gallipoli: It’s good to be reminded that stupidity and obstinacy are bad.
Why not to watch: The grating soundtrack.

Missing Persons

Film: Picnic at Hanging Rock, L’Avventura (The Adventure)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on middlin’-sized living room television (both films).

I’m not prone to gushing about products in general. Something has to be truly exceptional for me to get all mushy-headed about it. If I’m getting exactly what I’m paying for, that’s not really worth laudatory praise. I’m close to giddy with what I’m getting from NetFlix, though. Not only can I get about 80% of the remaining list on NetFlix, I can get a bunch of them instantly on the laptop or through our Wii. Even better, if the movie I want doesn’t appear on the queue for the Wii, I can place it in the queue on the laptop, then watch it through the Wii. Technology is great when it works. Many of the streaming movies feel like odd choices, which is great. It’s not just the newest and biggest—there are plenty of obscure gems on the streaming list. Yesterday, for instance, I watched pretty much all of the Firefly television series, followed by Serenity. This is why I did not update yesterday.

Seeing Picnic at Hanging Rock on the queue was a pleasant surprise. I queued it up while pairing socks, and after a time, I forgot about pairing the socks and instead concentrated on the film. This film is both a great example of a period piece as well as a disturbing mystery. The whole thing centers on the Hanging Rock of the title. This is a massive outcropping of stone vaulting several hundred craggy feet into the air in Australia.

At the turn of the last century, the students and some of the faculty at a British all-girls’ school in Australia plans a day out to visit the rock. They are warned not to get too near it as there are poisonous snakes about as well as nasty ants. Most of the girls go, but Sara (Margaret Nelson) stays at home under the guidance of the school’s owner and mistress, Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts). It becomes evident that several things are at work here. Sara is opposed to authority, punished because she refused to memorize a particular poem. Sara might be (read: is) rebelling against Mrs. Appleyard’s authority. It’s also quickly evident that Mrs. Appleyard dislikes the young orphan. It’s also quickly evident that Mrs. Appleyard dislikes the young orphan. The reason why is a little trickier.

It’s hinted in the beginning that Sara may be having a lesbian relationship with another girl at the school. This other girl, Miranda (Anne Lambert), is the school treasure, loved by one and all. While Sara sits punished at home and dreaming of her dear Miranda, Miranda and a trio of other girls—Irma (Karen Robson), Marion (Jane Vallis), and Edith (Christine Schuler)—go trekking up the rock, eventually followed by a teacher. Only Edith returns.

This sequence is to my mind the most puzzling as well as the prettiest in the film. The three disappearing girls—Irma, Marion, and Miranda—are all beautiful and depicted as ethereal, almost unearthly. All four of the girls fall into a swoon, but it is the three who, socks and shoes removed, wander away, leaving the pudgy, homely Edith to sit and scream after them.

What happens next is difficult to explain. Two young men who saw the girls walk by are questioned, and their answers feel suspicious, almost forced and badly memorized. One of these young men in particular is obsessed with finding the girls, notably Miranda. It’s notable that he walks off from his friend when the girls go past. Did he follow them? Did he molest them and/or kill them? These questions aren’t answered. Irma shows up a week later, in shock and dehydrated, but otherwise fine. She has no memory of the past week, has no idea how she got where she was found, and cannot recall what happened to the other girls.

What’s hushed up at the school is the fact that Irma returned without her corset, implying strongly that it was removed, further implying the possibility of molestation. Did the young man remove it? Did the other two girls?

The school begins to fall apart at this point. Not only are the girls missing, but many of the parents of the other girls have stated that their children will not be coming back after the end of the term. As her school crumbles around her, Mrs. Appleyard takes out her frustrations on Sara, first claiming that her tuition has not been paid, meaning she can no longer take classes like dance lessons. Second, she says that if the bill is not paid, Sara will be returned to the orphanage, a place that Sara speaks of only in hushed tones.

The end result of all this, in something that has seemed like a theme for what I’ve been watching lately, is a movie that presents a great number of questions and answers none of them. However, unlike those films that present dilemmas that can be discussed and social problems that must be solved, Picnic at Hanging Rock’s questions are simply about itself. Those things left unanswered are the unanswered questions of the mystery surrounding the disappearances. Like so much of real life, there is no resolution here, and the story doesn’t so much end as stop.

*** SPOILER WARNING ***

Miranda, Marion, and their chaperone are never found. Mrs. Appleyard decides that Sara must go back to the orphanage, and on hearing the news, Sara throws herself out a high window into the greenhouse below, killing herself. Mrs. Appleyard claims that the girl’s guardian came for her, but when told of the girl’s death, she is already clad in mourning attire. The film ends with a voiceover stating that Mrs. Appleyard’s body was found a few days later at the foot of Hanging Rock, with the determination that she slipped while climbing it. Did she? Or did she jump? Or was she pushed by the spirits (or reality) of the missing girls?

*** END SPOILERS ***

Ultimately, this is a film that is beautiful, but also frustrating.

We stick with a similar theme with Antonini’s L’Avventura (The Adventure). Two women are going on a five-day boat cruise with a group of people. Anna (Lea Massari) is meeting her boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), who she hasn’t seen for a month. Her friend is Claudia (Monica Vitti), who is going along for the ride.

Anna’s and Sandro’s relationship is troubled, mostly because of their month-long separation. Anna wants very much to be with him, but complains that she also wants to be alone and without him. Being apart for a month has gotten her used to being alone. In short, she’s confused and doesn’t know what she wants.

On the boat, the group goes for a swim, but one of their number spots a shark. Everyone makes it to an island. After a siesta, the group discovers that Anna is missing without a trace. They scour the island for her, but to no avail. It is as if she has simply disappeared completely.

What happens next is that Claudia and Sandro become intrigued with each other. While they both search for Anna, they discover a mutual attraction that both excites them and fills them with guilt. Claudia attempts to get away from Sandro, but they keep ending up at the same places with the same wealthy, banal people, and eventually, nature simply takes its course. Claudia spends the film happy and guilt-ridden, excited by Sandro and disgusted by his womanizing. She’s guilty not because Anna is missing, but because she is secretly pleased that now Sandro can be hers. At one point, she whispers “Mine…mine…mine…” in his ear as they roll about on the ground.

The biggest knock on this film is that honestly, not that much happens. Anna disappears, Sandro and Claudia attempt to find something together (and may by film’s end), and that’s pretty much it. This emptiness of plot seems to symbolize quite a bit, though, and was certainly intentional by Antonini. For a film that stretches nearly two-and-a-half hours, very little of import seems to happen.

However, this is symbolic of the lives of the people here. While they are all wealthy and seemingly happy, they are also all empty. All, including Anna, Sandro, and Claudia, are burdened with shallow, unfulfilling relationships. All of them appear willing, able, and ready to cheat at the drop of a hat or a skirt. On the surface, it appears like hedonism, but beneath, it doesn’t rise to that level. It’s more like they are all trying to fill up the emptiness of their lives with anything and anyone they can get their hands on. Anna’s disappearance, in fact, doesn’t give them much to live for, either. While Sandro and Claudia appear to be searching diligently for her, this doesn’t stop them from trysts at virtually every possible opportunity.

In short, Anna disappears, and the world of these characters is unchanged. The world would similarly be unchanged if any of these people similarly vanished and were never heard from again. Slow paced, but interesting almost in spite of itself.

Why to watch Picnic at Hanging Rock: Trancey, dream-like qualities and a great story.
Why not to watch: So many untied threads.

Why to watch L’Avventura: Metaphors abound
Why not to watch: Not much happens.