Frezno's Criterion Challenge: May 2023 Trip Report

(TW: brief discussion of actual murder, suicide)

You know the drill by now, I hope. Another month done, and another handful of cinematic hors d'oeuvres with eclectic tastes and vibes for my sampling and horizon-broadening. Where were we? Ah yes, last month we went on a little silent kick, ending off with a bit of gothic horror in black and white. That was wild, but what can we follow that up with? Let's find out.

17. Branded To Kill (1967, dir. Seijun Suzuki)

So this right here is a very well-regarded film, if Letterboxd is to be believed. I just did some number crunching and there are over 170,000 reviews of it that give it over 3 stars out of 5. It's a very competent film with strong themes and a powerful atmosphere and mood. That fact I cannot deny. Yes, it's very good at what it's trying to do. The problem is that I kind of don't like what it was trying to do. Its opening 20 minutes are really impressive film noir as Japanese cinema, almost giving me Cowboy Bebop vibes as we dive into a world of professional assassins who are suave and cool and get into exciting gunfights. It's really cool shit. It is also the type of movie to pull the rug out from under you, because the rest of the movie is a condemnation of the kind of man who would live that kind of life.

The contract killer in this movie fucks up and becomes a target of contract killers himself, the hunter becoming the hunted. The rest of the film holds an unpleasant and oppressive atmosphere as the abject misery of this kind of life is shown on full display. The sower now has to reap, and it fucking sucks. He becomes the target of the #1 hitman in Japan, and the way the #1 hitman in Japan kills you isn't just by killing you; he wears you down and never gives you a moment's respite, and then he kills you. Something like the last third of the movie is set while our protagonist is this man's prey, and you begin to feel it as well. It is unpleasant, and I do not like it, but there is a deliberateness to its unpleasant nature. I can almost admire the sheer craft of it, and the skill and boldness in what it has to say on the miserable life of someone who takes life.

Then you get to how the movie treats women, which is badly. As sex objects who spend half the movie in the nude, or as objects of peril to be mistreated to either make men feel powerful or to hurt other men... it ain't great. It adds to the pile of unpleasantness you are supposed to feel, but it just crosses the line to me from stylistic unpleasantness to actual unpleasantness. My mind goes back to my guy, David Lynch, and even though terrible things happen to the women in some of his films, they are given strong agency and focus. Not so for the women in this film, whose hurt is there to further the misery of the miserable men in it. It's a film which has strong style and atmosphere, and I can understand why many like it... but it is not a film for me.

18. The Times Of Harvey Milk (1984, dir. Rob Epstein)

Now this, on the other hand, is quite the film. A documentary about the late Harvey Milk, an openly gay man who was elected to public office as a city supervisor in San Francisco in the 70's before both he and the city's mayor were assassinated. I knew the broad strokes of Harvey Milk's story before going in, but the documentary really painted a lovely picture of the type of man he was and the type of city San Francisco was back then. Honestly, Harvey Milk in life was the kind of man that more of us should be. He was constantly on the forefront of pushing for material social progress for the gay community in San Francisco, knowing full well that he was making enemies in the process. He had no doubt that he could lose his life in battling for social justice in that time and place, but he nevertheless kept going because it was the right thing to do.

We know how his story ended, of course, and he was right. He did lose his life fighting for what was right, and his friends and coworkers in this documentary both celebrate his life and mourn the loss of it. It's incredibly moving to see Milk's friends mourn his loss, as well as see the candlelight vigil that the citizens of San Francisco held for him. It's absolutely beautiful, and Milk is an inspiring individual. This is where the nice part of the film ends, and where my affection and melancholy is replaced with an incandescent rage. The last third of the documentary, you see, is focused on the trial of Dan White. Dan White snuck into City Hall with a loaded pistol and extra bullets to confront his former boss, mayor George Moscone, about not getting his job back after he threw a tantrum and resigned. Dan White then got really steamed and shot George Moscone several times and killed him. Dan White then reloaded his pistol and walked across City Hall to just have a little talk with Harvey Milk-- OH WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT HE ALSO SHOT AND KILLED HARVEY MILK.

There was a pitiful defense where Dan White cried a bunch and blamed his stress on too much junk food, and a jury wept for him. He got off with manslaughter, and was out of jail by the time this documentary came out. This is supposed to be a capsule review, so it would take me several paragraphs of screaming to adequately portray the ire and bile I feel at this injustice. Let's just sum it up like this. Fuck Dan White, and fuck that jury. Justice was not served that day. Indeed, history seems to be repeating. There's a lengthy bit in the documentary about Proposition 6, where conservatives had concerns about gay men being teachers because think of the children. The same shit is happening today, but the pearl-clutching is about the trans community this time. Now, more than ever, we need the moral conviction and determination that Harvey Milk let burn brightly in his life. We can remember him, and follow on from his example to fight for social progress and trans rights. Rest in power, Harvey Milk. What a film.

19. Carnival Of Souls (1962, dir. Herk Harvey)

I would like to pull back the curtain a bit, and go back in time to December 2022 when I was selecting what movies I'd do for this thing. Category 29 was Allison Anders's Top 10, and part of her entry on Carnival Of Souls intrigued me, and I shall quote it here:

"This film taught me how to watch Mulholland Drive . . . which is to say, if you stay with the mood, without fighting it, your intuition will serve you far better than the plot and structure and logic your brain is craving. Because essentially all stories are simple; what isn’t simple is the underneath of it all. And that’s more rewarding in the end."

This is a skill that I wanted to hone in December of 2022, a skill of seeking out vibes over plot. In hopes that I could learn this skill, I selected Carnival Of Souls as the film for slot #29 of this challenge. Astute readers of the blog over the past five months may have noticed something, though. In diving into the works of David Lynch and all of Twin Peaks, I have already taught myself this skill. Even more so than being able to analyze an offbeat film, this realization was its own reward. I didn't need Carnival Of Souls to teach me this, because I already knew it.

If I hadn't, though, the film would have made a great teaching tool for it. Allison Anders is understating things. This film doesn't just teach you how to watch a Lynch film. It feels like the prototype for one. I would not be surprised if it was an influence on Lynch. Its mood and atmosphere are suitably offbeat and eerie, the black and white mixed with some industrial elements giving me a little of those Eraserhead vibes. The entire tone of the film itself calls to mind Twin Peaks and Laura Palmer. The protagonist, Mary Henry, is a woman haunted by specters and terrors as the nature of her very soul seems to be up for grabs. Through it all, she exudes a confident self-assertiveness that makes you like her. 

There are some incredible setpieces of atmospheric horror, like the scenes where Mary appears to become an invisible ghost to the world around her, everything silent except for her heels clicking against concrete. The film's open-ended enough that you can come up with your answer for why this is happening to her. Is she already dead, a ghost haunting this world? Is it a hallucination? It's up to you and how you interpret it, and how you flow like a leaf on the current with the vibes that the film gives you. That's the Lynchian ethos, and the lesson that not only his films but this one can teach you. Try it for yourself, and just float along with its ethereal strangeness. Let it teach you, as I have been taught.

20. Jellyfish Eyes (2013, dir. Takashi Murakami)

Oh boy. So, pulling the curtain back again, the category for this film was "a film rated 3.0 or lower on Letterboxd". As of May 31st, Jellyfish Eyes has a rating of 2.4 out of 5. I do like to be a contrarian and like things that are unloved (I adore Castlevania 2 and Zelda 2, for instance.). Unfortunately I have to agree with the consensus here. Jellyfish Eyes is a bizarre bit of Japanese cinema, with muddled tonal whiplash and a story that's all over the place. Oh, and some real jarring CGI. That too. If I had to describe it, and I kind of do since I'm writing about the damn thing, it's a mix of a Spielbergian childlike wonder/supernatural friend film like E.T. with the ever-popular battling monster partner genre which Pokemon popularized (though the F.R.I.E.N.D.s in this film, with their digital nature, are more like Digimon).

There are glimmers of it trying to do something, a story about living in a post-Fukushima disaster world of nuclear danger where grief and loss loom over the life of a child. Where fundamentalists pray for the natural order to be restored and protest scientific hubris. Where science is also bad because a group of black-cloaked people want to bring about more cataclysm by harnessing the negative thoughts of the children living in a post-Fukushima world to create a giant monster that will just wipe the slate clean and let them be the alphas of the new world order. They make it look like the protagonist's scientist uncle has taken his own life, and we see that happen. Yes, it turns out it was faked and he's alive and well, but to see a man fling himself off of a roof and take his own life in a children's film about funny CGI monster friends is such tonal whiplash that it hurts.

It is not a good film. It is far from the worst I have ever seen, but I did not really enjoy my time with it. Honestly, you can do much better. If you want a Japanese film that's a coming-of-age tale about a Japanese child navigating the complexities of the real world and growing up a little along the way? Just throw on a Miyazaki film like Kiki's Delivery Service or Spirited Away. You will have a much better time because those films are much better than Jellyfish Eyes. 

21. Scanners (1981, dir. David Cronenberg)

Going into this I only knew one thing, and I bet you all know the very same thing. Yes, it's Scanners, the source of that infamous GIF where a man's head explodes. You almost wish it hadn't become a meme, because it must be a real shock of cold water to see it happen ten minutes into the film. Still, there's enough here to keep you awake and entertained. Cronenberg is not a director I've seen much of, though I do have a fondness for his adaptation of The Dead Zone. What's he doing here, then? Well, he's doing a lot of things here. Some of them are going completely over my head, but I was able to ride the vibe waves regardless.

This movie touches on everything from the military industrial complex to the magic of computers to revolutionary counter-culture to the Thalidomide disaster. It's wild how many things Cronenberg is doing here, even if I do not get all of the things or how they resonate. They're in there, though, all tied together in this gonzo story about telepaths on the run from murderous conspiracy and factions which wish to exploit them for their own material gain. It's a strange movie, not helped by the way its protagonist acts. I don't like to shit talk acting in these, but he just acts a bit wooden with all his deliveries. In one way, it adds to the strange atmosphere. In another more practical way it isn't that great.

It's a good film, though, and any disappointment at being spoiled by the psychic viscera of the head blowing up is made up for in the final confrontation, which is a gruesome and disgusting thing with veins bulging and bleeding and all kinds of other gross shit. It's an incredible special effect for 1981. I also have to give props to the whole scene involving making telepathic contact with a computer system, on the logic that a circuit board is just a computer's nervous system that can not only be telepathically joined with, but that the shutting down of the computer would then hurt the person who's linked to it. That's such a glorious 1980s understanding of computers as basically magic boxes, and I'm kind of here for it. That's Scanners, and that's the month of May done. Next time, we're halfway finished with this project! Exciting, huh?