millionreasons | Film Round Up

Blood The Last Vampire

Or, Buffy-san, the half-blood vampire. Bloody buddy movie as Japan meets the US during the Vietnam war on an airbase. Saya, the half-demon Vampire slayer with a backstory that's perhaps more interesting than the main narrative, battles against Onegin (the Dark Mother), the US military and the council that is supposed to protect her, with her side-kick Alice, daughter of the US General. Character development is under-advanced in favour of action, and martial arts action/stunts is under-used in favour of not very good CGI. Still it knocks Twilight into a cocked coffin.

Also features one of my favourite Corrie characters, Gay Ted, as a council elder.

Heathers

Swatches, scrunchies and slushies.

The first subversive teen movie which made room for Buffy, My So Called Life, Donnie Darko, Veronica Mars, and Ghost World (the date rape and Aids line seems to be stolen from Heathers). It's rarely shown on TV – it's a bit too close to the bone with its teen school murder plotline.

Veronica/Winona has found an answer to problem of mean girls Heathers - accidental assassination – but this solution proves worse than the problem when she discovers her badly hair-dyed boyfriend is a bit too much like Harris and Klebold, determined to off everyone who fills the vacuum left by a dead Heather. The likes of Buffy TVS were kinder to their Heathers/Cordelias, when talked into coerced into a sex act with a college boy, we see Heather 1 spitting at herself in the mirror. Cordelia would have spat in his face.

John Waters would have killed to make such a deadly dark camp classic with lines like this: “My teen angst bullshit has a body count”.

Get a gun and kill yr boyfriend

The Human Jungle

Police chief Danforth vows to clean up the mean streets of NYC with zero tolerance, Giuliani style (people are arrested for drawing on bill posters and loitering outside a cafe). The attempt fails when a bystander is shot by a cop, messing with the murder case Danforth's determined to solve by fair means or foul. It's rather like an ep of The Wire in 1954, although it seems 5 or 10 years earlier than this with its focus on moral certainties (Danforth is particularly keen on cracking down on punks and creeps and juvies, despite the real crime being run by aged career criminals) and its paternalistic view of the world.

Although not in the official noir canon, we have double crossing dames and bent cops, with dark alleys and mist giving it a traditional shady feel.

The Lives of Others

When I went to Berlin last year several people told me: Oh you must see The Lives of Others, which led me to conclude that yes, it was a film about spying and involvement/alienation and humanity vs political authority, but that it was also a movie about the city. Which it isn’t. There’s a shot of Karl Marx Allee and the area where Georg and Christa live looks like Friedrichschain, but the wall, the Brandenburg gate and even the TV tower are absent.

I was surprised the film had a happy ending; what struck me most was that in the epilogue, it didn’t really matter what had gone on, the tension had gone, the politics no longer mattered. I was also interested in the idea of spying being an end in itself, not a means to an end, the product of a corrupt system. No-one had really lost or won and the only casualty had been the deceitful woman - male film makers have lost the virgin/whore view of women and invented a new trope – either the elfin saviour muse or the betraying woman who is too weak to behave nobly (i.e. like a man).

Goodbye Lenin’s darker brother.

Film Round Up

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