Star Trek: Deep Space Nine pilot episode (1993) (some spoilers)

I'm an avid fan of Star Trek TNG, and while it's a great series, it's far from perfect, often preachy and pandering but with a perfect send-off in all good things, a time jumping episode in which Picard is forced to give himself up and conform to a truth in order so that humanity and all that he loves does not cease to ever have existed, the ultimate sacrifice, leaving Star Trek Deep Space Nine to take the franchise and the ideas of the series so far further into the realm of the metaphysical, and Deep Space Nine is a marvel with great characters and ideas that explores ideas of faith, time, conflict and power on a galactic scale but all aboard one station under the command of Benjamin Sisko, the Emissary of the Prophets, a race of god-like being who exist beyond humanoid perception of time and space.

The whole pilot episode is about time and timelessness and the contradictory nature of time-continuing existence existing within timelessness and destiny, and the tightrope of faith.  Whereas the Enterprise is a perfectly oiled machine and the whole crew is pretty much perfect and know how to overcome all obstacles in a rigid, literary surface sense, Deep Space Nine is a broken space station abandoned and left in pieces by a totalitarian race of control freaks who oppressed the people of Bajor and committed atrocities against them for an era.  When they leave and Bajor is "free" under a provisional government, Starfleet steps in to help out and Benjamin Sisko reluctantly takes command of the station having lost his wife at the battle of Wolf 359 seen in TNG in which Picard was assimilated by the Borg and forced to assist them in an assault on Earth.  Therefore Sisko starts out with a resentment and hatred of his predecessor in the Trek story.  The way the pilot works as a continuation of the ideas explored in the best episodes of TNG, the final episode as well as the brilliant two parter in which Picard is assimilated, is poetic in the way it comes together and adds up as a profound demonstration.

As Sisko reluctantly arrives on the station struggling to deal with loss and carrying the baggage of hatred and resentment for the previous Captain incarnation of Picard, he unwittingly sets the stage for what is to come and puts the pieces in place.  As the episode begins it is far more of a slow burner, more mysterious and mystical than the fantastical and adventurous pilot of TNG, for this is a very different show and no one is eager or agreeable, every first encounter an argument or confrontation rather than a reunion or instant friendship, at least not on the surface, for these characters thrive on conflict, uncertainty and doubt, instead of the outward goodness and purity of the Enterprise crew, although that worked for a show that had only a partially continuing story but was for the most part an adventure of the week kind of thing.  Rather by having a continuing story the show unfolds and suprises you and tries the faith of its characters whose struggle is compelling and difficult but fits in place in a larger picture.  In this way the show combines religion and science as its foundation and achieves a grander scope than its predecessors.

In TNG's brilliant two-parter "The Best of Both Worlds," aptly titled as it explores the illusory conflict between the surface reality of culture, personality and freedom and the underlying cybernetic control structure which assimilates Picard in servitude to them as humanity is forced to fight in order to save their freedom.  In the beginning of Deep Space Nine Sisko is aboard one of the ships assaulting the Borg cube.  The ship is catches fire and begins to break up and in in the chaos Sisko loses his wife but saves his child.  This loss leaves him hardened but better for it, and three years later he is assigned to oversee the station as Bajor recovers from the occupation of a controlling occupying force similar to the Borg but less absolute and more reptilian and sadistic, a kind of lingering disruptive presence throughout the series, powerful but also deluded and arrogant,their rigid control and domination their downfall as with the Dominion allies later in the series.  Deep Space Nine is very much about power play both real and illusory.  As I've mentioned before there are races of varying levels of technological advancement and power in the Star Trek universe.  The systems at the higher end of the spectrum like the Dominion and moreso the Borg tend to be more rigidly controlling, systematic, invasive and powerful, or seem so, assimilating other cultures and civilisations or assimilating them so the Federation and Bajorans have to take leaps of faith and accept and overcome their flaws in the face of the ultimate power, the beings the Bajorans worship as gods, the prophets, which speak to Sisko after giving him his test in the pilot.

At some point Sisko and Dax get in a runabout to investigate anomalous readings in an attempt to find out more about mysterious orbs that have appeared in the skies above Bajor for millenia.  Suddenly in the same way a Bajoran pilot once described the heavens open up and swallow them, and they are sucked into a wormhole a folding of time and space, the celestial temple of the prophets in which they reside beyond time forever.  It is here that Sisko's time continuing existence is tested, and as he explains how he goes from one moment to the next in life as a human being, is is thrust into different meaningful events in his life, back and forth between meeting his wife, the death of his wife at Wolf 359 and playing baseball.  The prophets speak to him through figures from his life, from Picard, who in one shot appropriately as a borg stands alongside Sisko as the prophets deconstruct from within the mechanics that get Sisko from one point in time to the next, Sisko struggling to explain that he moves forward in time while he is repeatedly thrust back into the moment his wife died with the ultimatum from the prophets "but you also exist here."  They are learning one another in order for Sisko to become the emissary.  His being is deemed intrusive to them for trying to explain how he moves and how things are lost and his mortality, but as the prophets learn this Sisko also learns of timeless existence, of destiny, and so they are bonded forever by this and Sisko returns from his experience renewed as the emissary.  

At the same time the demonstration is taking place in the temple it is also happening on Deep Space Nine as the crew races against time to stop the Cardassians from staking a claim to the wormhole.  The tension lies in the fact that the station is barely functional and could tear apart at any moment, and the crew has to rely on blind faith to get them from point A to B.  At one point O'Brien tries desperately to get a computer console working before literally kicking it into action.  Everything seems to just happen instead of being controlled completely by the crew and as Sisko returns triumphant Deep Space Nine begins.  My favourite Trek series, fascinating.  

Die Hard (1990)

Die Hard is not only one of the best action films ever made, it's also a brilliant film of ideas, the skyscraper the setting for a climactic confrontation, the psyche of one out-of-place, everyday man who against the odds must reconcile with his estranged wife and defeat the evil Hans Gruber, a pretentious, materialistic thief and control freak.  When he invades the Nakatomi skyscraper it's time for John McClane to clean house, which he struggles to do but does so effortlessly in the fashion of the old action films which were less shallow and aesthetic, vulnerability and danger part of the equation rather than dispatching enemies with precision, dodging bullets and being a literal god-man.  There is no room for any of that in this film, John McClane is not a pretentious, insecure show-off like his nemesis Gruber who has to make big speeches and surround himself with a band of strongmen to get by, all that nonsense does is force him to rely on instinct and do what is absolutely necessary even if it means bombing out the building with C4.  He has no time, Gruber believes he has all the time in the world, and this is why Gruber, with his fancy suit and fancy watch, fails.  After rescuing the hostages and killing the terrorists he is forced into confrontation with Gruber who is  holding his wife hostage.  The final confrontation is brilliant, as Gruber is blown back out a window.  McClane's wife tries to save him, and is frantically holding onto the fancy watch, while McClane unbuckles it because Gruber must die.  Finally Gruber, out of time, his watch unfastened, falls, defeated all along by his own sense of himself as an autonomous, all-powerful mastermind with time in his hands, which he never was, and McClane and his wife, the male and female counterparts are reunited as the snow falls and Merry Christmas.  That is why it is not only a great action film, but a great Christmas film, and a great ideas film, and the same can be said for number 2 and Die Hard with a Vengeance.  Like many great films it's just another trip into the depths, into the infrastructure.  Blue Thunder is another film that comes to mind that does something similar.  

Die Hard 2 (1990)

A plane full of people blowing up is awesome.  9/11 ruined Hollywood action films because everyone became "sensitive" about it, when in fact watching anything blow up in a film, whether it's a building or a plane or a truck, is fucking great.  I mean even for 1990, when action films were really, really great, like Total Recall, a plane full of people blowing up, over time on the screen as it smashed to the ground was actually pretty heavy stuff.  The first Die Hard had nothing so catastrophic.  The film ends happily with snow and a nice christmas song despite the mass murder, so it's all good.

Fun film, just as good as the first Die Hard.  The villain is not so memorable, but the guns shoot and the plane blows up and John McClane is right when the fat stupid cop says he's wrong and he kills the terrorists and shows them all and wins.  I also like planes and airports, so that just makes the film even cooler.

Ride The High Country (1962)

One of my favourite westerns.  Pine trees, mountains, Warren Oates, gun fights, great score, Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, all mountains, raven, drink, gold mine, what a film, Heck Longtree don't stop at talkin.'

Mulholland Drive (2001) (spoilers)

Like Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive is a film about the creative process, although altogether different.  It's the best film I've ever seen along with Blue Velvet (tonally and stylistically quite different).  There's a lot to write about, but I'll try to be to the point.  Like Blue Velvet it's about the inner life of one being, Diane Selwyn, her waking life manifest in her subconscious and vice versa when she awakens (reawakens?).  I say that because I think the film implies that her "dream" (film really draws no line and there is none) is no less real and exists in eternity, despite being forgotten in her perceived waking state amid the destructive influence of the Hollywood film industry, which in her dreaming ideal really is a place of dreams in which her creativity and inquisitiveness flourishes against the odds, as opposed to the stifling, closed off den of prostitution we see once the key turns and she "awakens."  So if one were to put it in narrative order, Diane Selwyn went to Hollywood with dreams of becoming an actress, fell in love with and became obsessed with the ideal of the voluptuous, sultry film star Rita that she aspired to be and wished to possess (who she is also in a lesbian love affair with).  Diane hasn't much of an image, as she lacks charisma and is very confused and lost, but lives a rich inner life and has a great creative centre, which is the source of the great mystery dream that takes up most of the film, in which she is Betty, a bright, charismatic, confident newcomer, and Rita is an amnesiac who has been in a car accident who stumbles into Betty's new apartment.  The two form a bond and Betty tries to help her discover her identity.  In this state Rita as objectified in Diane's mind is totally at the suggestion and the mercy of Betty, Diane's sort of perfect inner-witch, who gradually moulds "Rita" into her own image.  This dream also follows the story of Adam Kesher, a hot shot young film director who is making some kind of weird 50s hot rod musical, but finds himself struggling not to sell out to the studio bosses under the influence of the mafia and their own falsely enthroned egos which are concealed without oxygen behind a glass case as a dwarf and a bodyguard.  It's the destructive process of Hollywood shown as a shadowy, secretive cabal of indecisive, crawling executives.

As Betty arrives in Hollywood with what I presume are her grandparents, leading her unwittingly to her doom, she is all confidence and smiles, completely hypnotised.  Unbeknown to her, she is being led on by the hidden hypnotist of her own psyche and her experience is her mind revealing itself to itself.  Things take a turn for the strange when she discovers amnesiac Rita in her apartment, who had just stumbled down from Mulholland Drive after a car accident in the night after stopping on the road.  A shell without an identity, Betty tries to discover one for her.  Rita is sort of like a sexualized imaginary friend to her, a real body but without an identity, leading Diane's psyche to become a sort of puzzle.  In one nightmare scene in the film, a man talks with his therapist in a diner about a dream he's had in which he finds a man in the back of the place who is causing all the fear he and his friend feel, and that everyone feels, a sort of malevolent force hidden and revealed without warning but ever present.  He goes out back to show his friend, who catches him as he falls from the fright of his encounter.  It's a sort of demonstration of the way fear reveals itself to us suddenly and without will, and how we are saved and returned.  He goes outside  Betty has to go to an audition for a second rate film produced by some guy named Wally.  The director is a half asleep hack who tells her and some old actor to "be with themselves, but not let it get real until it gets real."  This sounds like pretentious crap but has a ring of truth to it.  When she starts reading the lines, she automatically lets herself go and inhabits the role totally, in turn hypnotising the old Clint Eastwood looking guy, who himself turns in a natural, real performance.  I guess this goes to show that "acting" is just as real as anything else, a sort of mutual unconscious hypnosis that happens without resistance, hampered only by distraction and self-consciousness.  Having turned in the performance of her life she is quickly snatched by two "catty" casting people, who are quick to package the performance and make a "star" of it, by taking her to the studio where Adam Kesher is working on his...50s musical...thing auditions, where plastic looking girls and minstrels in frocks are singing 50s tunes.  Having arrived she immediately makes eye contact with Adam and the two connect as if by force, but Adam must sell out lest his life go to hell (a cowboy tells him he will have the "good things in life" if he casts a certain girl).  When he sees this girl audition, he reluctantly casts her in the part because he is forced to by the company boss and his shadowy conspirators.  Essentially he sells out and loses his best actress.  Betty and "Rita" continue to investigate her missing identity, going to the apartment of Diane Selwyn, a name they heard earlier, only to find her decomposing corpse lying on the bed.  This is Diane rotting away as she has this dream by what has happened to her in her "reality."  "Rita" runs out in shock and horror with her hands to her face, fading in and out of traces of herself while Betty reassures her.

Later that night, Betty alters "Rita'" and gives her a blonde wig and makes her look "different," but actually more like Betty.  She is moulding her in her own image.  They fall in love and end up making passionate lesbian sex together, but "Rita" senses something is not quite right, so she leads Diane in the middle of the night to some mystery club called "Silencio," which it turns out is a sort of stage demonstration of illusory power.  It is the innermost realm of the psyche that she can reach.  What is behind the curtains cannot be known.  There is some strange magician on the stage chanting "No Hai Banda" and making fire effects.  A trumpet player comes out and seemingly plays the trumpet, only to lift it away while the sound continues, the magician saying "it is all a recording."  Eventually a beautiful woman with orange and red eyeliner comes out and sings "Llorando," a beautiful song with moves the pair to tears, devastating them when she falls to the ground and the song continues.  The image is destroyed, the mask has fallen.  "Rita" finds herself alone in the apartment again with the mysterious blue box which was found earlier.  She puts her key in it, and the box falls to the floor from hands unknown and the dream is over.

Diane Selywn awakens to find herself in her apartment, only it is not the glamorous, luxurious Hollywood apartment of her dream, it is a dour mess of a place and the coffee is crap.  There is no longer some grand order of events like what was envisioned in the dream, she is now drifting in and out of different half remembered, bitter confrontations with her lover, who is "Rita," only not her, instead a dominant, powerful, manipulative woman who has the upper hand on Diane and hurts and humiliates her and makes her feel small every chance she gets.  Diane has lost something vital, but also discovered something divine.  She is a shell of her former self, a void in her heart from her inner revelation in Silencio.  The frozen death of her dream invades every aspect of her life, she is in a way "dead inside" and yet this black hole is really the source of all her creativity, which is at this point stifled by a Hollywood image factory that seems completely dead and worthless to her, a mere object that burns her whenever she touches it, and yet tragically she keeps pursuing it knowing full well that her creative paradise is within, despite its' dark secret.  Driven to despair by the scheming, crawling people she encounters she goes mad.  Adam Kesher is no longer a struggling director, but a hack sell out who got into the business through his actress mother and lives in a fancy house with Rita his hot wife who is banging everyone else on the side male or female and taunting Diane with it.  Diane has found herself in a hell where her doubtful, hesitant self image cannot compete with the confident models and pictures, and her creativity is locked away in a box and not even take into consideration.  Creative success cannot be had there and she is a starving artist, but instead of leaving or doing her own thing despite the great photocopier, she gives in and self destructs, a martyr.  The Hollywood ego is a photocopier of glossy images and this only degrades and kills true creativity.

There are many nuances to be found in the film, many details that make up the whole.  Really it's about identity and how identity is a prison, and yet only an illusion.  Below that, it's much softer and looser, and this is closer to the source of creativity, which is the source of everything, the blue lady and whatever lies behind the dark curtain.  Hollywood is an illusion, even films are a mere demonstration of this, like Mulholland Drive.  Egoic power is entirely illusory, and the real power lies below this in the waters of dream.  Diane Selwyn becomes a hapless prisoner of her egoic power and her strong identification with it, which causes her so much pain and torment and vanquishes her from the world, although as we see at the end, her spirit lives on.  She dies, the dream does not.  It is all a recording.  Silencio...

Blue Velvet (1986) (spoilers again I guess)

Blue Velvet is the best film I've ever seen, along with the handful of other best films I've ever seen.  It has this visual style that became David Lynch's signature for the rest of his career, although it was never quite so openly naked, clear and illuminated as with this film, which is like a noirish trip into the sleazy, wasted back alleys and hidden dens of a seemingly idyllic small American town.  All white picket fences, green grass and smiles on the outside, Jeffrey is sucked into the innermost void of his town after he discovers a severed human ear hidden in a field on his way back from visiting his father in hospital.  In the opening of the film his father is watering plants in his garden while Bobby Vinton's "Blue Velvet" plays.  The camera then descends to the ground and through the grass shows ravenous bugs consuming the decay and dirt that falls from above.

Upon turning in the half-decayed ear, Jeffrey is eager to know more so he goes to see the town police chief, who warns him away from the case but only feeds his natural curiosity.  He meets Sandy, the chief's daughter, who might as well have stepped straight out of Grease or something.  Like Twin Peaks, Lumberton is a town with one foot in the 1950s.  Together they decide to go sleuthing because they're youngsters with a lot of free time and why not?  Plus, as Jeffrey says, who would suspect two such outwardly innocent and well adjusted youths to sneak into a woman's apartment and dig for dirt?  They don't even question their intentions, they just want to find out, and the law is broken very easily by Jeffrey's intense inward curiosity.  He doesn't question his intentions so he can truly discover them, there's no second guessing or doubt so his foray into the underworld is complete and revelatory.  He crosses the line when he sneaks into Dorothy's apartment and hides in her closet, witnessing her get undressed and bow to the floor in distress.  He sees her at her most naked, but she finds him and and then he is stripped naked.  The nudity in this film is sexual but the sexuality is also metaphorical.  Jeffrey is no longer the observer but the participant, and his mere act of observance forces him into action seemingly against his will.  Naked and with a knife pointed at him he is no longer in the safety of his corner, and as events unfold he painfully discovers his own complicity in the cruelty and horror inflicted by the nitrous oxide huffing monster Frank, who it turns out has kidnapped Dorothy's wife and child so he can force her to do things for him.  Frank is a beast, but is he the devil?  Rather the opposite, if the film is to be viewed non-literally as I view it.  If anything Frank is the life and soul, unashamed and the great performer and demonstrator, totally humble and beyond all judgement, a god, or a part of it.  He is Jeffrey's inner doppelganger, the beast that makes the whole machine go, and as Jeffrey crosses that line further and further, he transforms more and more into Frank, though plagued by shame, doubt and fear.  He meets Sandy to tell her what he's discovered.  Shocked, she tells him about her recent dream in which she describes robins descending on  a dark and desolate world and spreading light and love.  If Frank represents the demon derailer of Jeffrey's subconscious, Sandy is the angel driver.  Whereas Frank is unashamedly evil, Sandy is unashamedly good.  He is Jeffrey's inner doppelganger, the beast that makes the whole machine go, and as Jeffrey crosses that line further and further, he transforms more and more into Frank, though plagued by shame, doubt and fear.  This is the real disease of Jeffrey's psyche, his denial and shame, not Frank's monstrous demonstration of power and control, although it is that illusory pride, vanity and desire for power that feeds his shame and keeps him weak and vulnerable to attack from Frank and his horde.

As though set up by Dorothy, Jeffrey is found by Frank upon leaving her apartment.  He refused to go for a ride with Frank and his crew, but Frank doesn't hear the words "no thanks."  They have no meaning to him.  "Ride" is all he does.  They take Jeffrey to Ben's place, a light purple lounge with green curtains that is sparsely populated with old ladies, hookers and beer bottles.  Jeffrey, afraid and hesitant, stands around confused and bewildered, allowing himself to freely be bullied by Frank's gang of misfits, who threaten him and tease him.  Ben is a weird looking androgynous curly haired man in make-up played by Dean Stockwell, the only man Frank seems to worship.  He holds a light to his mouth and mouths the words to "In Dreams" by Roy Orbison, until Frank has enough and takes leave screaming that he'll fuck anything that moves.  Frank hates the dissonance between the sight of Ben mouthing the words to In Dreams and the sound of the song itself.  It tears at something in him, and fires up his greed, his need for something vital, like destruction and performance.  Frank has totally succumbed to his own impatience and greed, his nitrous-oxide fuelled dissociative episodes only priming and strengthening it.  When Jeffrey feebly confronts Frank when he fondles Dorothy Frank makes an example of his weakness and takes on the role of the pretty lady of Jeffrey's desires and fancies, vaguely and grotesquely morphing into Dorothy, donning lipstick and kissing him, playing the mother Jeffrey still clings to, before finally destroying that image by beating him senseless.

Blue Velvet is of course very entertaining on a surface level, a great thriller, although on this level lacking in plausibility.  Delving below the surface I think it's an exploration of one man's psyche, Jeffrey being forced to confront his devil through a series of escalating situations.  All of it is plausible because it is all tied together by a strange psychic force.  Alan Splet's incredible ambient sound design intermingled with Angelo Badalamenti's great score gives voice to that.  Each character is a demonic or angelic manifestation of his psyche, and he is forced to reconcile them and finally come clean, which he does when Dorothy reveals how he "put his disease in her," before an appalled Sandy.  Dorothy appears to carry a lot of diseases, so it is only by becoming responsible and saving Dorothy from Frank that Jeffrey can cure his illness.  As the police raid Frank's place, Frank disguised as a well dressed man reveals himself and chases Jeffrey up the stairs to Dorothy's apartment for the final confrontation.  Finally Frank is killed when he opens the closet (Jeffrey opening the door to himself?) and Jeffrey and Sandy embrace.  He awakens out of the ear into a sort of unreal paradise version of Lumberton, a bright, vibrant surface full of animatronic robins devouring bugs and gawking old people.  Suddenly the ordinary life Jeffrey found so dull to pursue the bugs that tainted his eye is seen anew as a heaven.  Jeffrey redeemed from within and grown up is free and in heaven everything is fine, but the underworld still exists as we see mother reunited with child and hear Rossellini sing "but I still can see blue velvet through my tears, into the blue sky.

It really is a contender for "best film ever made."  That the medium can produce a work of art like this in an entertaining mystery thriller says something.  This was the first film I saw that showed me what the medium could really do at an age when 80s action flicks dominated my sight. 

Dune (1984)

Often called David Lynch's worst film, I might call Dune a confused, shoddily told story were it not for how awesome the film is.  Yeah the story is told through long scenes of plotting and exposition and through rushed montages but the great bits more than make up for it.  The sets look amazing, the effects are great (for the time), and there are plenty of great, surreal, dreamlike images.  It's also hilarious, especially any scene involving the Baron and his minions.  It features many of the actors Lynch would come to use in his later films, although aside from that and despite the great direction and an appearance from Lynch himself, I wouldn't have been known that Lynch had made it without foreknowledge, as it's just not in his particular style.  Kyle MacLachlan, sporting a mullet and glowing blue eyes is Paul Atreides, the saviour of Aractus (I think?) a planet full of mind-altering substances and the spice, a substance that makes interstellar travel instant without requiring movement by folding space.  When his people are sold out and betrayed by shifty eyed Dean Stockwell in a bid to get revenge on the Baron, Paul is forced into hiding with his mother and then is found by the Fremen, natives of the planet, who he ends up leading into battle against the powers that control the universe.  Or something.  The spice is the key to control of the universe so they destroy spice production, and then they defeat the Baron and the Emperor and Sting all in one climactic worm-riding battle.  The first worm-riding scene is one of the most epic things I've ever seen.  Apparently Frank Herbert, the guy who wrote the book, had a problem with Paul being portrayed as a literal god figure in the end, but looking at the story a certain way it makes more sense that he's not a literal figure but rather the logical removal of the false emperor of the known universe and his "plans within plans."  The way it's all put together it seems really rushed in places because the studio screwed with it, but it's still good.

Eraserhead (1977)

I saw Eraserhead for the first time several years ago in the cinema, as part of some David Lynch special for the birthday of someone who was a fan who worked at the local arty cinema.  It was one of the best outings to the cinema I've ever had, because it was packed with both fans and newcomers, so there was both hysterical laughter and people going "what the fuck???" in equal measure, the perfect mix of hilarity and repulsion.  And it was awesome on the big screen.  On a big or small screen the film is an experience.  

The film is unique for Lynch because aside from Dune it's probably the furthest removed from the "real" world.  Most of Lynch's films have some strong relation to reality, set in real places with real things and relatable characters, but filmed, acted and photographed in just the right way so that it looks and feels unreal...like most great films, though Lynch does it very well and in his own uniqe way.  Eraserhead on the other hand makes no effort to be half-grounded, its' world a claustrophobic industrial nightmare of undersized living edible chickens and mutant offspring that are apparently expected.  So it's the perfect midnight movie, funny, dark, and really uncomfortable.  It's also the most obviously metaphorical of his films, featuring abstract symbolic images like the man in the planet who controls the actions of Henry with levers beside cracked window, and the giant squishy sperm infesting his girlfriend, and the weird white shape that keeps falling into a bunch of holes and coming out again that never goes away.

The film is a sort of machine nightmare about creativity.  I don't think it's a literal tale about a troubled couple who have a mutant baby, I think the endlessly crying mutant baby is Henry's inner baby, his neediness, anxiety and confusion in bandaged bondage, only it is no longer needed and is starting to ruin him and his relationship with his girlfriend.  Jack Nance's performance as Henry is great and funny.  His terrified, awkward expressions are hilarious, especially when he has to cut up miniature chickens for dinner with his girlfriend's parents, and the chicken's legs start moving while it secretes a weird fluid.  It has to be seen.  The guy who plays the father is also brilliant, and after the chicken apparently craps on the plate he grins at Henry and asks "So Henry, what do you know?"  That was the cherry on the cake, and just slayed me.

One of my favourite parts of the film is the dream sequence in which Henry loses his head and it's taken to a factory to be made into pencil erasers.  I think it's Henry being given control, his mind erased and re-written anew.  One he has this, he kills his screaming child and the man in the planet loses control, his levers stuck and flinging sparks.  In that one moment after killing his imaginary second controller through his baby he is free.  It's a great sequence that has to be seen, because it's really a visual film.  Of course it's up for interpretation, but that's mine.  The film took 7 painstaking years to make, a real labour of love, and it all looks effortless on screen.  It was a creative process about a creative process.

Barton Fink (1991)

Barton Fink is a great film about creativity, or the enemy of creativity, which in this case is Barton Fink's ego.  He's basically a writer who had one success with a play about working man's struggles in New York and thinks he's the best writer ever and a revolutionary and a champion of the "common man" as he puts it and the greatest ever.  He makes big speeches to thin air about how theatre and movies should be about the "common man," and how the heroes and noblemen who are the subject of the old stories are basically false.  He's an awkward, image obsessed man who lives in his own big golden frame.  He believes solely in himself as the centre of his world and therefore feels he has the right to discriminate against everyone else.  The "common man" to him like to Charles Foster Kane, a similarly egotistical and self-centred character, is a precious gem, a trophy, and yet Barton Fink seems to despise the "common man."  He's a misanthrope who treats everyone awkwardly and can't warm up to anyone unless they sing his praises and put him on a pedestal.  When he's advised to talk to another writer, he accidentally stumbles across a famous novelist and grovels at his feet, and yet when it turns out said novelist is a raging alcoholic who beats his secretary and has her do all his writing, he jumps at the opportunity to condemn him as the devil and takes pride in considering a flawed man beneath him.  He also takes the opportunity to play white knight to his secretary and cosy up to her.  Barton Fink is the ultimate fraud.  He's a crawling, conniving opportunist with his nose in the air.  Which isn't to say he's entirely loathsome, when he's empty and real and reacting to real situations and not full of Barton Fink, great writer in capital letters.

His saviour comes in the form of an overweight insurance salesman who warms up to him right away despite his obvious egomania and offers him a drink.  This man, the perfect inspiration for the wrestling picture he's been hired to write, who even knows how to wrestle, is ignored completely when offers the great Fink some stories, and instead Fink ends up writing the worst, self-satisfied crap about his struggle as an artist fighting his demons in the form of a "wrestling" picture.  No one cares about his struggle.  Everyone shares the same struggle so what people want is to escape from it, and that's what his flamboyant studio boss wants to sell.  He doesn't even like wrestling.  He never listens to anything but his self absorbed inner chatter so he cannot fathom why anyone would want an escapist film about a great hero who defeats a bad guy.  The heroes and noblemen of legend he turns his nose at were in fact no less "common" than anyone else.  The big eccentric studio executive who gets up in his face and offends him is no less "common" than the bellboy played by STEVE BUSCEMI.  They all want the same thing.  Eventually the fat Goodman turns out to be a serial killer, or maybe the devil, who is trapped in hell forever.  He helps people, and he helps Fink by murdering the woman he slept with and forcing him to face who he really is and give up his tired, boxed in self image.  Eventually he carries his box to the sea and sits with it.  A woman passes and he says "you're very beautiful.  Are you in pictures," to which she replies "Don't be silly."  Finally after being completely destroyed he finds redemption in turning away from his frame, from his corner of the world and finding the ocean.  Creativity doesn't belong to anyone.  It's not a label you can paste onto yourself as if you're the ultimate creator.  To just be is creativity enough, and that's what Fink discovers.  He may write a great movie someday, or more plays, but it no longer matters whether Barton Fink specifically does it.  No matter what you do, someone has probably done it, no matter what idea you have it's shared, so if you're true to that idea, who cares if you take authorship of it or not.  True achievement is life as it is.  No longer trying to beat the clock, Fink is free.

Lost Highway (1996)

It's been too long since I watched this, or any Lynch film.  Seeing this again I realise just how different it is from the rest of his work.  I mean it still has that distinct visual style, that seductive use of lighting and colour to make his dreamscapes and nightmare corridors that I always found alluring, but it feels more modern than anything else he's done, whereas most of his other work has one foot in the 80s/90s/00s and one foot in the the 50s.  I never really connected with Lost Highway emotionally like I did Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and most of his work, so it was never my favourite of his work, but looking at it now, even though it still doesn't really hypnotise, it's still a really entertaining, interesting film and totally unique.

Essentially it's about lust, jealousy, identity and redemption, the tale of a weak-willed, impotent, awkward man named Fred Madison who enters into some nightmare, possibly in his sleep after making weird, whispery, clearly unfulfilling love to his wife Renee, in which he's forced to finally take control, assert himself and make his devil serve him through a series of temptations, confrontations and nasty situations.  In the opening he's told by an anonymous voice that "Dick Laurent is dead," and then he received several tapes through his door that show the inside of his house.  I think the anonymously video-taped house represents his mistrust and second-guessing paranoia about his wife's fidelity and well, things in general.  He knows there's an intruder in his house, but who is it?.  One night he looks at his wife and sees a ghoulish face projected onto it.  His devil is no longer on his leash and is being projected all around him, until in his nightmare he murders his wife and is imprisoned in a small cell, in which he is driven mad and tortured by his demons until he falls into their hell to confront them as Pete Dayton, an angsty, confused young man who represents both Fred's lost youthful drive and his childish emotional weakness.  Pete is a shy, meek young man who works as a car mechanic.  He is the go-to man for Dick Laurent, an ultraviolent gangster who hates tailgaters and beats one of them in front of him on Mulholland Drive.  This is a demonstration and provocation, and the site of Dick Laurent beating a weaker man pokes at Pete's own inadequacy, prompting him to try and assert his own masculinity by banging his hot wife and his own girlfriend on the side and trying to look tough.  His wife (Patricia Arquette, who also plays Renee, Fred's wife, they're all the same person anyway), manipulates him and leads him on into a series of encounters that test and resolve his weaknesses.  In one scene he questions her as she covers her face, showing off her green fingernails (colour symbolism everywhere in this film), over her past sexual encounters, her promiscuity and her line of work, which he perceives as a transgression.  She doesn't actually do anything except lead him to do increasingly stupid and violent things of his own accord, and when he says "we killed him" after throwing a man headlong into the corner of a glass table in a really funny death scene, she corrects him.

Eventually he comes full circle and morphs back into Fred again, who is confronted by the devil (mystery man) with the camcorder who asks him "who the fuck are you?" forcing him to finally decide who he is and get in his red hot car and own himself.  When he does this the devil becomes his servant and kills Dick Laurent for him, allowing him to go home and tell Fred through the speaker that "Dick Laurent is dead," and crucify his demons once and for all in a frenzy of speed and red and blue police lights.  Fred Madison is redeemed.

Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987)

I've this film probably over a hundred time since I was a kid and it never ceases to be funny.  I know everything that happens in it and every time I watch it all again it's hilarious.  It's one of the best of the particular kind of feel-good comedies of the 80s/early 90s, which were hit-and-miss, sometimes funny, sometimes crass.  I love a lot of those films, but looking back at them a lot of it's probably nostalgia because they haven't all aged well, although they're refreshingly un-pc, unclean and freewheeling compared with some of the glossier mainstream films I've seen since since the early noughts.  Planes, Trains & Automobiles is my favourite of those films.  Steve Martin and John Candy are a great comedy duo and they play great characters, wound up businessman Neal Page and travelling shower curtain ring salesman Del Griffith who never zips his mouth and lets all be known, even going so far as to take off his black sock and wave it in front of Neal's face on the plane.  They meet up when he Del steals Neal's cab and the flight is delayed.  Bad weather leads them to a motel room where hilarious hijinks ensue and their sexual orientation and masculinity is threatened.

One of the things I like most about the film is the photography.  Nothing is glossed over, the sun isn't shining and there's no beautiful scenery.  It never looks set up or faked, it's set in run down motels and bus stations and diners and small drive through towns and it all looks snowed in, dirty, muddy and grim.  It all looks natural.  All the extras look like random hillbillies, bums and runaways.  It all looks real.  It's like The Last Detail in a sense, another great travelling film.

Del and Neal are great characters.  Neal is an uptight, intolerant control freak who wants everything to go his way, Del is a carefree man who goes with everything and likes it because as is learned later in the film he doesn't really have anything.  Neal lashes out at him and Del can only reply that he likes himself and what you see is what you get.  Del seems to get them into dangerous and impossible situations and then gets out of them through sheer luck.  In one of the funniest scenes in the film and probably my favourite, they're in a car going down a  highway and Del gets his parka caught on the seat lever.  He wrestles frantically only to get the other side caught in a lever too, so he ends up steering with his legs until a stop sign forces his foot on the breaks and he goes spinning and stops safely.  He then drives on and two people shout at him from their car and tell them they're going the wrong way.  They think they're drunk, because how would they know where they're going, but then Neal realises and they end up jammed in between two trucks, before stopping safely, only to have the car blow up because of a cigarette Del threw away earlier.  Del Griffith is the ultimate agent of chaos, everything he touches goes wrong.  The rightfully frightens Neal, who seems too anxious to touch anything but ends up learning the value of what he really has after losing his credit cards and his self-image.  

The film has a happy/sad ending, as it turns out Del is a lost character, but Neal takes him in.  The finale is a bit soppy as are all the family scenes, but that's nothing because every scene in the film is one laugh after another.  Also, what the hell is in Del's big trunk?

Fateful Findings (2013)

The third film from Neil Breen is as weird as the last two films, better than I Am Here...Now, and mercifully modest, for instead of space jesus Neil Breen is now a bestselling novelist/hacker/magic ghost who survives a hit and run that should have killed him and finds himself suddenly compelled to hack into...government stuff and expose the lies and corruption of government and big business the world over.  Cos,' in case you didn't know, Neil Breen is the hero of the film, and he can do no wrong.  He leaves hospital looking like the elephant man, has hot bandagey sex with his wife and gets on with his work.  Interestingly his character, "Dylan" has some flaws in this film, like getting annoyed at his pill popping work-hating wife who he can no longer find time for because of his important mission.  He becomes obsessed, soul-searching and tapping away on his (must be seven now) laptops in his home office.  Unsurprisingly he's seeing two psychiatrists, and unsurprisingly one is urging him to take his medication because the other is a magic, psychic ghost.  There are more prominent supporting characters in this film, like the troubled, hard-working couple who own a ferrari.  The man is perpetually drunk and acts like an asshole, and she hates her job and gets mad at him for being a drunk asshole.  The daughter acts out her frustration by swimming nude in Neil Breen's pool and using his bath.  Can Breen save his pill-popping wife and his dysfunctional friends in time to save the world from evil politicians and bankers?  Truly Breen is a tormented soul.

                                                              "I am not an animal!  I am a human being!"

What strikes me as interesting is the way the film shows the complicity the average man has in the actions of both those around him and the world at large, and the struggle to do great good while loved ones destroy themselves.  Breen is a great magic world-saving angel ghost and yet he has to keep his bitch on a leash and stop the poor family who own a ferrari from being drunk and stupid.  Of course being rich doesn't solve problems but I really don't see how she needs to have that horrible job at the bank when they have a ferrari.  Of course the drunk sex-deprived husband lords over it all day until his wife shoots him out of boredom.  Misery loves company, so until Breen can solve all the problems of the world they meet up a lot and have dinner.  I can't stress enough how awkward, hilarious and surreal the social scenes are.  The weird thing is, there's a logic to it, the reactions make sense, but they're so weird it's like everyone's high on something.  When Breen and his wife call to arrange to meet up with them, they're happy about it, and yet instead of getting on with what they're doing until such time as they meet up, they stand in the kitchen and grin with wide eyes like they're on drugs.  Of course the film takes a hard anti-drug stance as does his previous film.  Or at least anti big-pharma.  Breen fatally quits his strong medication and his wife becomes addicted to it after eating it out of the toilet.  I can't believe I just typed that, but I  think this shows nicely how the success of one can be the fall of another.  Breen finds a new lease in life while his wife becomes more depressed, bored and disillusioned.  He must balance his great task with meeting the needs of his wife.  In one touching scene he pushes everything aside (literally) and rips her clothes.  So Breen cannot be satisfied with being a novelist and must do something big to change the world on a global scale, because he realises that small good deeds are always countered by bad ones so any change must be wide scale.  The film is about trying to affect change in hopeless situations.

Eventually Breen gets straight to the source, and in a scene reminiscent of the crucified gangsters and politicians in the desert in I Am Here...Now, he speaks before the press and exposes the lies of corrupt senators and businessmen, and in a hilariously surreal scene they one by one admit to their mistakes before killing themselves in various way.  One leaves a car running in a garage, two suddenly shoot themselves and one hangs himself.  Just like that, instantly, they all give up before Breen's mighty power and the world is made a better place, but not without sacrifice, for Breen loses his wife and friends to the corruption of the world.  It simply has to be seen.  It could be metaphorical, showing how greed, cheating and lying is inherently self destructive in any form, but we'll never know.  The film is on a par with Double Down for me.  Both are masterpieces, grand in scope and vision, and I can't wait for his next film "Pass Thru."  

A Matter of Life & Death (1946)

Probably one of the most uplifting films ever made, this surrealist fantasy film from Powell & Pressburger (makers of countless awesome films) is a love story set during World War 2 about a downed RAF pilot who falls in love with his radio operator at what are supposed to be the last moments of his life, but there's an administrative problem in heaven and he's left down below where he meets June and they fall in love.  He is visited by a conductor, a creepy French girly man in make up who carries a candy cane.  The conductor tries to convince him to go to heaven where he's supposed to be, but he wants to stay with the woman he loves so he makes an appeal and has to go through a judicial process to claim his life back, in which he includes an eccentric psychologist, his crewman Bob and June.  They have a battle of wits against some American judge guy from 170 years previously.  I love the sets in the film, they make today's CGI vistas look positively dull and crap.  Constrictions motivate invention, and the painted backdrops and camera techniques make heaven and Earth look awesome.  Heaven is depicted as a roof with holes on it that looks down on Earth, and it's a bureaucratic nightmare of red tape, forms and office blocks.  Truly wonderful, why would he want to stay on Earth?  Also the airmen who have just died don't seem to feel much awe at the possibility of an afterlife, nor remorse over the pain their loved ones are going to go through, and instead are enthused at the prospect of unlimited free coca-cola.  Because they're American.  It's just a fun film though and nothing to be taken seriously, one of my favourite classic films.

I Am Here...Now

The next film from modern master Neil Breen is an altogether more ambitious film than his debut Double Down.  Whereas in Double Down Breen played an all-purpose lone hacker agent full of torment and questioning, used by shadowy organizations for often dubious purposes, here he plays God.  Literally.  If he's playing God then he'd better have something substantial to live up to that lofty title.  

Neil Breen plays an alien planet/species maker who lands on Earth to check up on his creation to see how it's doing.  Not so well it turns out as people are knocking people with cancer in wheelchairs over, killing and torturing, and getting high in car boots on hard drugs in the middle of the desert for some reason.  Also, politicians are taking pay-offs from gangsters and stopping progress in solar energy research because they're only in it for the money, as they bluntly explain to each other and us.  So...Lord Breenus (he's never given a name as I recall) steps in to intervene and make things right, by temporarily killing two people who are taking drugs and firing off guns and being unconvincingly wild and crazy on the boot of a car, making the eyes of a man who pushes a guy in a wheelchair over bleed until he runs off crying, and crucifying all the corrupt politicians and businessmen in the desert, before making a Klaatu-style speech warning us that if we do not change our ways he will destroy us, hoping that the lessons he's taught to a small number of people in Las Vegas will resonate with the rest of humanity.  All powerful alien space gods rely heavily on publicity.  Those saved people have a lot of work to do if they're to stop humanity from being wiped out.  It crosses my mind that Breenus may have doomed them to extended stays in a mental institution, but I have faith that Breenus knows what he's doing.

I don't know what to think of the film because whereas Double Down was morally grey, this film goes straight for black and white morality.  Or at least Breenus does.  I'm not sure if it's reaching or not to say that the film is symbolic, that the crucifixion of corrupt, greedy, money-grabbing politicians is a metaphor for the cancellation of excuses and second-guessing, where money is a symbol for directing blame and moral culpability through a proxy in order to keep hands clean and preserve vanity.  Certainly the film seems completely sincere in it's declarations, even though the stark, blunt look of it suggests something more symbolic.  For instance all the gangsters and corrupt politicians and businessmen in Las Vegas have one single place in which they meet up, and for some reason it's a ruined, broken down old building that looks like it's been bombed.  Unsurprisingly one of them turns out to be a snitch because any group of people meeting at that place would seem instantly suspicious.  They all address each other as either gangsters or corrupt politicians who are after money.  It's so completely blunt and explanatory, so there's no mistaking who the bad guys are.  Interestingly there are characters who are not clear cut good or bad, like a couple who have both lost their admirable, decent jobs, sharing a joint on a park bench, with each toke coming closer to the conclusion that they need to go into a life of crime and lie to each other.  The film seems to be suggesting that corruption and egoistic self-serving preys on the weakened and desperate like a parasite, which is true.  By smoking pot and temporarily clouding their cognitive decision making skills the couple find themselves together again with the gangsters who kill the guy and leave the woman alive out of some unnecessary and unwarranted demand for respect.

In the end Breen's interventions, from curing the wheelchair man of cancer and making him twenty years younger, to resurrecting the drugged couple and telling them to contribute and do good, leave us wondering where we're going wrong and what to do now?  I don't love this film like Double Down, instead I feel divided.  On one hand, the black and white morality and Lord Breenus' police-state attitude to human progress makes me recall the same ideas of Klaatu in The Day The Earth Stood Still, and if the film is to be taken literally I do not agree.  It certainly is an interesting and enjoyable film, more chilled than Double Down, very ambient and ethereal.  Next up Fateful Findings.

Double Down (2005)

Without any irony I can safely say that Double Down by Neil Breen is a ground breaking masterpiece, and I don't dish out that word for many films.  Apparently it's been making the rounds online amongst the "so-bad-it's-good" movie fans, and that's perfectly understandable because at first glance I fell into that mindset, and there are certainly more than a few hilarious moments owing to the flatness of Neil Breen's central performance and lines like "I can't wait to be your wife."  But that's just it, this isn't a film trying to be a great film if you get my meaning, like all great films it doesn't have room for indulgence or fancy.  It has themes and ideas and it ties them together tightly, and in this way it reminds me of the work of Terrence Malick, which explores very similar themes and is similar in style and execution.  Antonioni's The Passenger also comes to mind.

The film is about a kind of freelance super hacker agent played by Breen himself.  In the film's masterful opening he awakens in the desert and introduces himself completely as a sort of omnipotent, reclusive shadow figure, free of all attachments, who has major world governments at the very tips of his fingers, and who cannot be touched due to his amazing foresight which allows him to take great precautions to preserve himself, like planting biological weapons under major cities in order to gain leverage over any potential threats to him.  He is the superhuman conduit who commands and cancels oppressive pseudo-control agencies from the inside by his very being, and yet with this power comes a great burden.  He is completely alone, although never lonely, beset by the demons of his past, struggling with longing, regret and self-doubt despite his cool exterior and effortless ability.  While everyone plots and schemes around him one can't help but feel that he is in control of it, and yet completely out of control, as befits the double-edged sword of power.

The film's brilliant narrative has a dreamlike fragmentation to it, mirroring the shattered identity of the lead character, who continually finds himself waking in the arid desert over and over, each time forced to relive old memories while being called back into civilization by shadowy agents with various menial tasks for him, from assassinations to shutting down Las Vegas to prevent a terrorist attack (menial because as he states he could rig presidential elections or cut off a nation's water supply).  Rather than give him authority, it seems this omnipotent power has merely imprisoned him in internal questioning because at that level right and wrong have gone out the window, and there is only possibility and cause and effect, which yet is cancelled out by a higher power, a destructive truth.  Rather than benefit him personally, it has instead made him the most easily used.  When asked to assassinate a couple in Las Vegas he accidentally drugs the wrong couple with a narcotic strawberry (one of the most surreal images is of him sticking a syringe into a strawberry).  Throughout the film there is stock footage of different war zones and military operations as he describes the nature of covert warfare.  He is the ultimate soldier, because he is the cause of all the wars in the world and war caused him.

In the first act of the film it goes into his past, into the life he once had with the love of his life he met at age 7, who is assassinated after he proposes to her in a pool.  This is his carefree innocence, his emotional life, and when she is shot, this becomes a necessary part of him, a void within him that fuels him and makes him ruthless.  In piece of brilliant symbolism he lies with his arms outstretched over her as she bleeds, floating in the pool.  She becomes a symbol of death to him, as with her his feminine, emotional side died and he became the lone man we see in the film.  In the end he drives away again into the barren, lonely desert from whence he came, just another lone wanderer.

                                                      And yes, that is his ballsack on display.  This f ilm is beyond shame.

I give this film my highest praise.  I don't know where this uncanny Vulcan film director came from but his work has been causing a sensation online, with comparisons to The Room among the so-bad-it's-good crowd, and yet while you could look at it that way from a technical standpoint if you wanted, I feel this film is so much more than that without reaching. 

                                                     Genius filmmaker and real estate guy.  No, what are you really?

The Thin Red Line (1998)

Terrence Malick's third film is the kind of brilliance you'd expect from him and more.  I never thought philosophy could be so visceral outside of drug trips.  Malick's philosophy is vital and far from ponderous, pretentious or tacked on, which is what makes his films so powerful.  He marries the subjective inner lives of his characters with the cosmic and objective, the average with the mystifying, the chaotic and confused with the harmonious and synchronous.  It's that contradiction that makes his work so hypnotic and mind blowing, why Kit Carruthers kicking a tin can around a dusty alleyway is so special.

The film begins with a shot of a crocodile (or alligator, whatever, I think it's a croc), submerging into a pool.  The birth of man's predatory nature?  Two men have gone AWOL and are living a carefree life with a group of natives by the sea, heaven on Earth.  Suddenly by chance a navy patrol boat appears off the coast and they're taken prisoner before Private Witt is reassigned to a company who then land on an island with the intent of securing an airfield.  Nick Nolte plays the one in charge who like everyone else is going to war for the first time.  In a quiet inner monologue that betrays his hard-boiled exterior it's revealed he's filled with doubt over his motivations and his role in the conflict, which is understandable given he's as green as the troops he commands.  The whispered monologues are a master stroke,  In a masterful scene the troops land on the island to find it deserted.  There is no music and the scene has an eerie, alien quality to it.  Not long in and the fighting begins out of nowhere, into a confusing but beautiful and horrific trip of fear, panic and decision beyond reason and time, of men falling into questioning and reasoning within and then forced to act as if by unseen hands.  The lack of reason or motivation with the clarity of the imagery and the free floating camera makes everything seem as if it's happening out of time, out of nowhere, manifestations of the void.

The film had a really strange effect on me that no film has ever given me before, and that is a kind of revelation.  As the camera seemed to fall down the hill and the men pushed up it I had this sudden sensation that I've rarely experienced sober and never experienced from a film, of time completely dying and the chaotic order of things attached to the very tips of my fingers, of existence itself emerging from me and yet meeting me at the very edge of my being.  The thin red line indeed.  Suddenly I had the strange sensation of floating in a fairground spinning cup in utter blackness and nothingness forever.  I felt the cause of everything that was happening on the screen, of the conflict inside and out, and yet at the same time tied up in it.  I could feel everyone standing in one another's light.  I experienced ego death watching a film.  I can think about that on an intellectual level watching a film, and I can think have a cleansing experience watching a film, but a film has never induced full blown ego death in me before.  It was only brief (yet eternal), but I'm still pretty mystified.  The soldiers themselves to come to terms with ego death in a way, as they're stripped of their identities as people and made into fighters and killers for a cause they thought they knew that eludes them in combat.

This film can only be described as "godlike" for the way it portrays both the physical horror and the existential horror of war; the doubting, the questioning, the disillusionment.  I don't think it's an anti-war film because I think it portrays war as just another part of the grand scheme of everything, and any judgement would ruin the experience.  The characters are great, from cool Private Witt who rides on faith to Nick Nolte's internally desperate and weak commander, to Sean Penn who is more cynical and hardboiled.  There is a whole host of characters played by stars in small roles, and yet they're all believable.  The film shows each of these characters' inner questioning and ideals which makes the sudden deaths particularly unnerving, and yet in the film's spiritual, metaphysical form one gets the sense that each voice in the monologue is one voice, and the death of one speaks through another.

Anyone, if there is anyone out there reading this, WATCH - THIS - FILM.

Days of Heaven (1978)

Days of Heaven in the second film Terrence Malick made.  It follows the same ideas as his brilliant first film Badlands but with a different story and a looser narrative.  Whereas Badlands seems hard and objective from start to finish, matter-of-factly showing two people destroy, murder and drift around a beautiful western landscape as if in their own private storybook, Days of Heaven almost entirely dispenses with story, and it's almost as if the film is directed by wind forever, which sounds like crap unless you've actually seen the film.  There are multiple beautifully photographed shots of vast fields, wheat blowing in the wind, a weathervane blowing.  The way it's shot too is less static and more free flowing and scattered.  I can't really describe it adequately but the genius of this film is in the way it feels like it's happening forever, beyond time and space.  It's set mostly in this vast field somewhere in America with a big house in the middle of it.  Having left Chicago, an itinerant trio consisting of a guy (Richard Gere), his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) who pretends to be his sister which raises eyebrows, and his young sister (Linda Manz, narrator) come off a train packed with people who all gather in this field to work for the rich guy (Sam Shephard) picking berries or something.  Everyone seems to drift in and out of the film like in a dream, and the narration (the young sister) tells how they just drifted around looking for nothing in particular and having adventures and entertaining themselves.  What people do basically, but like Spacek's cold narration in Badlands Manz' narration here is really flat, matter-of-fact and unpretentious so everything seems undefinable, cosmic and endless and yet confined to a child's perspective.  Malick's films are great for this kind contradiction, the small existing in the absolute and vice versa, and his artistry and eye makes it work, as does Ennio Morricone's great score.  

What story it has is simple.  The wealthy young landowner has only a year to live and the couple overhear this.  He takes a fancy to her, and hoping to get a stake in his fortune, the couple encourage his advances, until he takes them all into his home and they don't have to work any more.  He suspects the "brother and sister" of foul play at some point, but intervention in the form of biplanes puts it off.  It's like there is some tragedy in the film, but it's downplayed and takes a back seat for things to just happen which is more interesting.  Instead everything in the film is like intervention usurping the hopes and dreams of the characters.  The wealthy man is beset upon by the workers who helped make him, who hover around him like vultures awaiting his death.  His wealth is not in his hands.  All of a sudden a swarm of locusts eat all his crops.  All the crops end up burning.  He dies and the trio go on the run and drift again, before Richard Gere is killed.  Linda is sent to a school so she can build a better future for herself yet ends up running way down the tracks with a friend anyway.  Nothing in the film lasts and yet it has no time, and things just happen.

It's a great film with great, natural performances, and I love it.  It doesn't have the same haunting, uncanny quality as Badlands but it's still great and pretty amazing that someone managed to make a film with just people, land and wind.

X-Files Pilot In-depth analysis

                                                            "What the hell?"

                                                "Mulder...I have something to show you.."

The Master (2011)

What happens when a violent, alcoholic ex-marine drifter stows away on a yacht and is found by a charismatic, self-deluded cult leader?  The two become the best of friends of course, and form a symbiotic relationship.  The saint has found his sinner to cure, and the accident of it must mean that there are higher forces at work.  At least in the mind of the master, who has been chosen to do great work, and so the bond is forged.  Freddy undergoes "processing" a kind of suggestive hypnosis to recall past painful memories, some attempt to fix the present by changing the past in the mind...or something like that.  Getting his frustrations out with this guy over hard home-made booze makes him feel good and there's free food, drink and pussy all round so he sticks around and has a great time, belonging for a while.  His violent temper gives the master something to chastise, in turn giving the master opportunity to alleviate his mostly concealed anger, which he denies and covers up with pseudo-philosophical made-up ideas and rituals which only turn out to be self-defeating because they are simply denial, so when pesky critics start questioning him about his claims to cure cancer through mind time travel he hilariously loses his s--t, before quickly restraining himself, because he doesn't have the answers unless he's doing his song-and-dance and his followers are hypnotized.  Thankfully he has his beloved beast Freddy to go out and do the dirty work for him without tainting his reputation, roughing up the unbelievers.  He returns to tell the master of what he has done and is told off, giving the master his authority in a viciously logical yet kind of nice relationship.

If it sounds like Lancaster Dodd (the master) is a villain, fear not, there are no villains in the film, just humans.  He is a cynical charlatan, but like Freddy he's also basically trying to get by and survive, albeit misleading people along the way, or is he?  I think one of the ways to find some kind of truth within yourself is to exert yourself in absurd endeavours to the point of mad frustration.  And the rituals this group uses are indeed absurd.  In one sequence the cult tries to cure Freddy through a series of mind games.  Dodd's wife asks him what colour her eyes are, then commands him to "make them black," then "make them brown."  They're green, not any other colour, and yet they're also black, and brown because what is green?  He's asked to pace between a wall and a window and describe them in different ways, and he reaches a critical point of frustration because no matter how many different ways he describes them they are in fact just a window and a wall, because that's what he's been taught, and no matter what they might actually be beyond that, to him alone they are just a window and a wall.  The tree of possibility burns until there's just the trunk.  As he paces back and forth he posits that he could leave any time he wants, but he is trapped there because it is his choice.  His choice indeed.  And that's it.  Dodd preaches about rising above emotions, above the animal self, that we are not animals, but truly we are spirits exiting in eternity, and yet he cannot stop himself from lashing out when doubt and scepticism ruins his show.  Freddy improves greatly within the cult, and yet when out in public confronted by a naysayer he tackles him to the ground and slaps him around, and he's back right where he started, all over again.  So this cult is very useful indeed, if only to completely and utterly destroy all hope of being anything except what you are, which is a truth all spiritual paths can lead you to no matter how silly you find the practices.  Religion comes in many forms.  When a woman questions Dodd about his reasoning he can't say he doesn't have any so he loses it.  "Just because" is the answer but most people don't like that because there must be a reason.  He makes his own because he doesn't want to

I don't know whether this film is anti-religion or for, but I don't think it's either.  It's a double-edged sword for sure, on one hand Freddy is a martyr, whose very existence disproves everything that brings people and money to the cult.  He cannot be cured because there is nothing to cure and his life of hard drinking, scrapping and generally stumbling around being incoherent is holy and pure and needs no cleansing, so then what is organized religion for?  He could stay with the cult, and keep up the lie with the charade of trying to "get better," or he could leave and the cult would remain a charade.  What exactly is the cult?  For sure it does help Freddy in a way, by reassuring him that he's not wrong, and he even makes fun of the ritual in the end while screwing a prostitute.  In the end he's right back where he started, on the beach lying next to a pair of tits he's made in the sand.

The film is funny, compelling, interesting, and beautifully shot and put together, with loads of great images and ideas, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Jaquin (I don't know how to spell it) Pheonix.  I love it.  I'd forgotten that Paul Thomas Anderson makes great films.