Movie notes

Usually, if I'm still thinking about a movie the next day, it's because it had a strong effect on me - emotionally or intellectually - but in the case of this movie, I'm still thinking about it because I haven't yet figured it out.


I don't generally read a lot of reviews before going to see movies - I prefer to view them without the filter of someone else's opinions. But in this case, perhaps I'd feel less confused about the story if I had gone into the theatre knowing a bit more about it. The more I think about it, the less confused I get, but in the theatre, I found myself sometimes struggling to follow character motivations.

Part of what was most distracting was the stylistics of the movie - as you can see in the photo, this is not a realistic setting or world. A voiceover before the credits, after them, and at the end of the movie repeats the message "this is not a world you would recognize" which of course begs the question of just what is the relationship between that narrative voice and the audience? A question that is never satisfactorily answered - sometimes it seems we are looking at a future world, sometimes an alternate universe. Sometimes even, it seems the world we are allowed a glimpse of belongs to a different kind of universe - a comic book universe, for example - which is the only explanation that also accounts for the episodic nature of the fight scenes and their emphasis on looks over a sense that the character is at risk of losing the fight. The movie is "anti-Kill Bill", as one intelligent person described it.

A thoroughly different take on vampires is Lifeforce, based on the novel Space Vampires, which pretty much says it all. It's also rather bloodless, like Ultraviolet but in this case, it's because the space vampires don't survive on blood, but on life energy, which leaves their victims looking like mummies until they manage to steal away someone else's life energy and so on. It's a cheesy, but fun movie, with some bad acting and bad sets, but a convolutedly fun sense of its own marginal position between horror and space opera.

Now, a horror movie that took itself a bit more seriously, and mostly convinced me of its sincerity as a horror movie was Creep. I do have a soft spot for stories that take place in the London Underground, so that kept me going through some of the rougher spots. There was one scene that was really implausible, and the main character sometimes had very little sense, though at other times, she showed a great deal of foresight - she was inconsistent, but you're set up to think her so when she teases a fellow partygoer, then blows him off for the chance to meet George Clooney. Franka Potente does a lot of running in this movie too, in fact, I think I've only ever really seen her act like a runner. The director, in commentary said that he tried to make the audience feel sorry for the 'creep' of the title, though I never really felt much sorrow for him - he was a pitiable character, but I did think he got what was coming to him, whether he was aware that what he was doing was wrong or not. Even though it failed in a few places, it was the kind of movie that stayed with me for a day, and not in the bad I-can't-figure-it-out way that Ultraviolet did, but in a interesting-how-they-did-that kind of way.