In 2004, Bryan and I decided to write a little paragraph or two about every movie that we saw that year.  For Larvae, it was an attempt to keep fresh content on the site even when we didn't have music news.  For me, it was the start of a writing exercise that I've kept up with for a little over 200 movies.

I'm moving the Movies blog to Chud.com in an effort to focus this site back on Larvae and music.  I've been a regular reader of Chud for almost a decade now, and I'm glad to have a new outlet for these ramblings about films.  I'm not going to port all of this content over to Chud, but from now on, new movie thoughts will be posted on my Chud Blog. 

I'm starting with some touched-up versions of the Actionfest reviews but I've also just posted some thoughts about the expanding Marvel movie universe.  Please come on by and take a look.

Oh, and thanks for keeping up with this so far!

In 1999, a relatively small indie record label called Fat-Cat was about to release a split 12" between James Plotkin and Pole when they got wind that Pole's Stefan Betke wasn't happy about the release.  As it turned out, the tracks that had been delivered to Fat-Cat and then subsequently mastered and cut into 200 copies of the record were not in fact Pole's work.  The dominant theory behind the fake Pole tracks was that they were a prank perpetrated by V/VM, a musical outfit known for copyright mangling, crude animal humor, and just the sort of trickery that seemed afoot with the Plotkin/Pole record.  Fat-Cat recalled the record and issued a statement about the incident, V/VM (who also worked with Fat-Cat) denied any involvement, but the true story was never perfectly clear, and may never be.  The new Banksy film, Exit Through the Giftshop seems to share the same pedigree.

Though promoted as a Banksy film, Exit Through the Giftshop winds up being a film about Thierry Guetta--a manic Frenchman living in LA who parlays his tangential connection to the street art world into a street art career (of sorts) for himself.  It's a fun and fascinating story and at the center of it is Guetta, always filming, always appearing to bite off more than he can chew, but somehow always coming out the other end having more or less gotten what he was after.  Banksy paints Guetta as a goofy but enthusiastic guy who owes more to his unbounded energy and unwillingness to take 'no' for an answer than to any particular talent for art.  Though Guetta obsessively videotapes everything, he's not skilled as a film maker.  Though he accompanies street art luminaries on late night wheat pasting raids, he has nothing of his own to add to the body of graffiti and rogue poster-making.  When Guetta is ultimately successful at pulling off his own street art persona and one-man show, Banksy and others come across as a little perplexed and annoyed that such an obvious "hack" has made it.  But all of that is only part of the story.

At the film's turning point where Guetta finally embarks on his own quest for fame as an artist (at Banksy's suggestion,) things start to get suspicious.  Guetta's work as Mr. Brainwash is trite and derivative.  It appropriates the style and technique of street art but it's manufactured by hired artists and designers like a clothing line.  Mr. Brainwash is the idea man, but he's far from an artist, which leads to the obvious question of how he gets away with staging his own elaborate show and selling nearly a million dollars worth of mostly hideous art.  Isn't the art world supposed to be smarter than that?

Well they should be, but they are not.  That's the obvious answer that seems to come from Banksy.  When the film first introduces Banksy, he is caught by a spectator installing his own art in a prestigious gallery in a high-art version of a droplift prank.  Ever the graffiti writer at heart, Banksy puts his art on walls where it isn't invited and that's what makes his work so interesting.  His compositions are impeccable and his sense of humor manages to be both sardonic and whimsical, but the real power of his work comes from his brazen way of applying it where it isn't wanted.  With street art's monumental rise in popularity, there are now perhaps as many places that would invite Banksy work as there are places that would sandblast it.  Collectors now pay top dollar for sections of walls, trash bins, billboards, and anything else in the public space that Banksy has touched and his own gallery shows draw media and celebrities who don't want to miss out on one of the most buzzed movements in contemporary art.  It certainly seems possible that Banksy's reaction to all of this has been the intentional manufacture of Mr. Brainwash at the art world's expense--a live action and unpredictable version of inserting his own art into the landscape.

Whether Mr. Brainwash is in cahoots with Banksy, or he's Banky's unwitting creation, or just the goofy but enthusiastic guy that stumbles upon success as the movie on its surface portrays, we may never know.  But as with the V/VM fake-Pole debacle, the answer to that question isn't really important.  Whoever created those fake Pole tracks was pointing out that anyone could do what Stefan Betke could do, and in fact they succeeded enough in fooling the record label who, one would hope, could spot a fraud.  V/VM or not, the damage was done and people had to wonder if Betke's work and by comparison all of the click and cut, glitch-laden dub that came out in Pole's wake was really valuable.  The street art world grew out of a contempt for authority and of the machinations of high art culture.  Once street artists are embraced and consumed by that same culture (just as the Dadaists before them,) what's next?  How can that work maintain its urgency in a world that seems only interested in commercializing it?  Through Mr. Brainwash, Banksy has pointed out that the emperor has no clothes, and with this film, he's pulled another astonishing prank by subverting expectations and giving us all some questions that are interesting even in the absence of answers.

This is probably the better of the A-Team movies that you will see this year.  I mean, this isn't the A-Team, but it sure as hell gets set up the same way.  The Losers are a crack team of special ops guys who get set up by a shadowy figure and have to fight their way through one last mission to clear their names and help a woman who's got a problem.  There's no B.A., but I liked most of the Losers better than B.A. anyway.

Chris Evans steals the show as the geeky communications expert with a thousand funny t-shirts.  Evans has a real knack for comedy and he's built like a svelt action hero, so it's no wonder that he keeps getting comic book properties thrown at him.  He was great as the Human Torch, and while I think Captain America is a bit of an odd choice because it won't really use all of that comedic timing, I have faith that he's going to be good in that too.  Who would have thought that the guy who walks out with whipped cream on his johnson in Not Another Teen Movie would turn into a bona fide action hero?

Having just watched a festival's worth of action movies at Actionfest, I wasn't let down by the action in The Losers, but I did notice the things that Hollywood films like this tend to do well and the things they could still learn about from their foreign competition.  Namely, all of the hand-to-hand fighting in The Losers seems staged and it's all shot in closeups so that it's hard to follow.  The explosions and gags with trucks, bombs, helicopters were generally much better than the lower-budget effects in Thai and Indonesian films, but it's really clear to see how directors get more creative with the action when they don't have a huge budget.

The Losers isn't a perfect movie, or even a great one, but it did get me interested in the comic book.  It also cemented my faith in Chris Evans as a funny and charismatic guy, and it made me a little sad that we'll probably never see a sequel to the underrated Push.  Kick-Ass is still the comic book movie to beat so far this year, but The Losers was quite a bit of fun and it ended on a really satisfying note which is all too rare.

Nicolas Winding Refn's newest film is a brutal and breathtaking meditation on violence, religion, and the human will.  Though the film only contains a few brief moments of graphic horror, Refn is able to make the remaining 95% of his film gripping, tense, and full of dread with the power of beautifully-composed images and a striking soundtrack of drones.  The tension never lets up, it offers no safety for the characters or the audience as it hints that any one might be savagely destroyed at any moment.  Valhalla Rising is frightening in unconventional ways and it requires a lot of the audience, especially those lured in by the promise of Viking warfare only to be greeted with long passages of quiet, brooding reflection.  But for those willing to let the film work outside of its surface narrative, it has the potential to be a moving, transcendent cinematic experience.

The film opens with a series of brutal, bloody fights between slaves.  Clan leaders sit joylessly on jagged rocks and watch to see who's slave will win the most from wagers--think of it as a completely glamor-less, makeshift version of a gladiatorial arena.  Locked and chained in a cage or hooded and leashed like a rabid dog when on the march, the film's central figure emerges victorious in one bone-crunching fight after another.  He is a one-eyed slave covered in tattoos and he seems if not resigned to his lot in life, at least patient about his plan to escape.  He bides his time, looks for an opening, and when called to act, he lashes out with an almost inhuman fury.  Since he never speaks a word, what little we know about him comes from the matter-of-fact images on the screen and from the speculation and tall tales of his captors.  They say he came up from Hell, that he is not a man, that he's cursed, and the film is in some ways vague enough to support those conclusions.  But Refn uses those unreliable narrators in a clever way.  They paint a picture of a man who cannot speak for himself, forcing the audience to separate the superstitious narration from the spooky and often dreamlike imagery.

In one of the film's most disturbing scenes, One-Eye frees himself and slaughters his captors, saving the leader for last.  The only surviving member of the party is a young boy who follows One-Eye out across the mountain because there's really nothing else that he can do.  The boy is spared from the slave's wrath, but he has to keep up if he wants to survive.  The two eventually come across a camp scarred with the signs of a battle--a pile of burning corpses, blood-stained rocks, and all of a tribe's women huddled together, bruised and naked behind a large rock.  Throughout the campsite the victors have posted white banners with red crosses, and when One-Eye and the boy are asked if they are Christians, the boy answers "yes" out of an instinct to avoid confrontation.  One of the film's strengths is the way that it approaches religion, faith, and the brutal hypocrisy of crusaders.

The recently-converted Christians in Valhalla Rising live in a unique age.  They have adopted Christ and the Bible in place of their polytheistic and magical worldview not because they agree with Christ's message of love and forgiveness, but because they believe that the Christians' single God is simply stronger and greater than the many gods they have known.  The crusaders' actions repeatedly betray their lack of understanding of the faith to which they subscribe, and a rival band of warriors describes the Christians as barbarians for literally eating the flesh and drinking the blood of their God.  The film presents a fascinating look at the transition from one belief system to another in an age and place where technology, literacy, and sophistication have not yet allowed people to make the leap from myths understood as history to stories understood as parables.  At first, I thought that the film would be a harsh indictment of Christianity but as it moved on and the crusaders' moral bankruptcy was contrasted by One-Eye's harsh but unwavering consistency, I began to see the separation between the characters and the ideas.  Though there's no way to know why One-Eye chooses to join the crusade to Jerusalem, by the end of the film it's clear that he is on a spiritual path of his own choosing, not dictated by religious fervor or attachment to one side or the other.

On the surface, the film tells the tale of the silent warrior's ascent from slave to free man to warrior and then leader.  However Valhalla Rising works at a much deeper, almost primal level to reveal a story about the struggle of the human will and its power to transcend pain.  I was mesmerized by the film's truly awesome atmosphere, and while the story made perfect sense to me, I had the impression that I felt the film physically, somewhere in my gut, as if two hours of clinched muscles had left me sore and exhausted.  After we left the theater, I had a hard time verbalizing my reaction to the movie because it worked on such a non-verbal, and even non-narrative level, but as time has gone on and I've reflected on it a great deal the film's magic seems a little more digestible.  Like the "Beyond the Infinite" section of 2001: A Space Odyssey or the space travel sections of The Fountain or the long shots of nothing happening in Tarkovsky's Stalker, Valhalla Rising works on some level beyond the intellectual, so intellectualizing it only serves to explain part of the story.

There are perhaps many ways to read Valhalla Rising--as a myth about Odin (the All Father in Norse legend who gave up an eye so that he could have knowledge of all things;) as the story of a man transformed into a god through strength of will; as the condemnation of religion extended by force; or as a metaphor for the human struggle to find purpose and peace.  I prefer that last one.  Though it's impossible to make an argument that this violent nightmare of a film is uplifting, the final transcendent scenes where the struggle and pain finally come to an end feel like a genuine release.  As One-Eye and the remaining members of his party slowly ascend a mountain to the dissonant grind of heavy guitars, noise, and nearly-tribal percussion, the film itself becomes magical as the atmosphere creates something more than just the sum of the sounds and images.  There are very few films that have this hypnotic ability to linger for days even after the credits have rolled.  Valhalla Rising is one of them, and it's a tremendous example of what a film maker can do outside of the boundaries of a traditional approach to storytelling.  I imagine that stories like this would have been told around camp fires and in caves in pre-historic times and they would have inspired awe, fright, and wonder--the kind of feelings that made these stories legends.  In an age where media is consumed in 140-character strings and two minute clips, Valhalla Rising still invokes those feelings which is a mighty powerful accomplishment.

Why doesn't Indonesia produce more martial arts films?  I'm sure that someone with more knowledge of Indonesia's film industry and cultural history than I have can answer that question, but as a simple fan of Merantau, I cannot.  I've seen most of the well-regarded recent Thai martial arts films, and my share (although by no means a deep survey) of contemporary Hong Kong action films but I've never seen a film quite like Merantau.

On the surface, the story might look a lot like Ong-Bak, but there is a lot more going on in Merantau than a country-boy's quest into the city to fight for his village.  Yuda, a young man who has finished his training in Silat has to leave home to experience the world for himself so that he can return to his village and family with lessons learned and knowledge and perspective to share.  His older brother has already gone through this rite of passage, and we hear that his return home wasn't a warm one, but most of that back story was apparently removed from the international version of the film.  As Yuda leaves for Jakarta, we are keenly aware of the love he has for his family, and of the pride they have in him as he sets out.  He isn't sent out in the world to make trouble, right wrongs, or do anything more than grow as a human being and then come back to be with his family once again.

The slow and familial first 30 minutes of the film might bore people looking for wall to wall fighting, but they are essential to setting up the film as a real movie with a real story--something more than just a string of fights and stunts.  Yuda's relationship with his family is important because when he gets to Jakarta, he runs across a young boy and the boy's older sister who have been orphaned and who are struggling to get by on the sister's nightclub dancing tips.  Enter the Dragon is one of my favorite movies, but it's not because I feel a real emotional connection between Bruce Lee and his slain elder sister.  With Merantau, the relationships give weight to the story and they ultimately give the film value beyond its spectacular fight scenes.

And about those fights--they are indeed spectacular.  I've never seen Silat in action, but it's a quick and brutal form of martial arts that seems to place particular emphasis on snapping limbs backwards at their joints.  Yuda immobilizes most of his opponents with flurries of quick punches to the body and swift downward kicks to the shins.  He scales walls and train containers, he takes out thugs with segments of plumbing pipe, and he has a knack for knocking people backwards into hard objects like the edges of tables.  Newcomer Iko Uwais is a slight young man, but once he gets moving, you will have no doubt that he can kick serious ass.  The fight choreography is fantastic and the film is shot with a lot of wide angles so that it is easy to appreciate the action as Yuda takes on 4 or 5 attackers at once.  The music is also fantastic, combining the usually-generic techno of modern Thai films with better production and a flair of ethnic instrumentation that flows perfectly with the film's visuals.

The Actionfestprogram guide mentioned that Merantau is a rare action film with heart, and I couldn't agree more.  If you took out all of the fighting and replaced it with character drama, the heart of the story would still work.  Likewise, if you cut out all of the family stuff and left only the amazing action sequences, you'd have a wonderfully fun hour of chasing and fighting.  But Merantau does something pretty special by combining the action and the story perfectly, weighting them equally, and paying as much attention to the reality of men getting thrown through windows as it does to the moments where a proud mother wishes the best for her kids.