Reviews

In Terrence Malick's world, the Earth - broadly, nature - is its own being in which we exist. His traditional philosophical definition of hard work (harvesting, making your own life in nature) initially explored in Days of Heaven has spotlight again here. Peace and happiness, love, the plentiful bounty of the Earth for humanity's taking and rejoicing within and without. And somehow, in just as breathtaking of a display, in just as lyrically romantic a form as Days of Heaven. Here we see the wide angles close to the characters face, the edges of the lens curving the character into their environment which immerses, withholds them (and us). Its ways, its energy is written in the DNA of Franz and Fani, their own morals and way of life--a loving relationship, a happy home. Pure presence in living. A true Christian existence if there ever was one. The characters' voices, so poetic and visceral as the speak their letters to each other, their emotions: "We lived above the clouds." More than anything, A Hidden Life is about the eternality of feeling heaven and maintaining it--if impossible without (as it was not in the beginning), then keeping it within. For it is an eternal experience, as Franz finds in opposition to the Nazis, a truly free one, to surrender to his own nature and what feels right to him. He narrates, "Once you give up surviving at any cost, another door opens..." The weight is lifted. Faith, an other-knowledge, the sun which still shines behind the tempest. Though utterly painful and ripping in every way possible--physical, mental--Franz knows his sentiment of love and life and literally acting this out--not cowardly holding it within while your conscience eats away at you--is one that can never die, for it speaks to nature itself. We see this reflected in the joyousness of Franz and Fani's love and family. When the Nazis come in, when the darkness takes over, the Earth itself changes. The clouds swirl and blacken, lighting strikes, thunder sounds. Though nature does not alter itself to humanity's choices, its indifference is a harsh one which allows humans to face the darkness their species has created. It is an all-knowing indifference.

The real historical footage of the Nazi movement in the beginning--later cross-cut with Franz's dark dreams and transportation--cuts like a blade to the heart. No wonder Malick spent years editing this film. He slashes at the purity of Franz's love with a terror of black and white, of evil. The helplessness of it. The darkness and unconsciousness also written in human nature (Days of Heaven echoes again). And even as the fearful Austrian community ostracizes Franz's family from not volunteering or answering his call to the Nazi military, even as they take him away and attempt to manipulate, torture and destroy his will, Franz looks up to the sky in his unbroken--but tested literally as far as it can be--faith.

My favorite scene in the movie is when after Franz is sentenced, after he refuses to sign the oath to Hitler that would let him go back, he is able to see his wife, Fani, one last time. Initially, in order to save his life, she asked Franz if he could answer the volunteer call - perhaps, if not to fight, then maybe he could work in a hospital, for example. For everyone knew what Franz's objections would bring--when the letter comes that he's been condemned to death, its shocking for Fani, yet in a way still not a surprise. But due to Fani's nature, the holy goodness she knows in Franz's heart, she cannot help but stand behind him. This is unspoken between them until she sees Franz before he's about to die. I want to cry just writing about it. Never before have I weeped so many times as I did at this movie. Anyways, amongst the Nazi lawyer and people still trying to convince him astray, Franz and Fani look at each other, meet each other like two reflected rays of sunlight concurrent against each other and Franz asks, "Do you understand?" Fani looks down, she looks back in his eyes, she nods a little, she says: "I am always with you. No matter what happens." For with the connection the lovers are a part of, the freedom they know within and without, they have found the timelessness of existence. And the further transcendence in Franz's pain, his dignity, highlights this to the extreme, when they are faced to lose what they always loved and they know they have never, will never lose it.

The heaven written in us and what we are connected to is love's manifestation in spirit. That is there without Franz and Fani and in them. And it is in the hills, the mountains and their serene, powerful curves of emotion. They are the mote and not the mote.

Franz and Fani's voices reading their letters back to one another during his incarceration serve the poetry in the martyrdom of the film--Jesus' real struggle, even though the Nazi's perpetuate Christianity, a very interesting statement which Malick makes through his characters of the church followers getting 'sympathy' from their religion without following the teachings. For if the townspeople understood the responsibility of uncowardly preserving love wherever they can, deciphering what has happened to their world, they would know the struggle of Jesus and Franz. In his hushed conversations with the other objector in his village, Franz's parallels of Hitler to the antichrist and of the Nazi regime of the beginning of the Christian-prophetized end of the world are interesting--it is a direct statement from Malick of God's, of nature's will broken, of a virtually unstoppable evil rising on this planet. Yet the freedom of resistance. These pressures--however little each of them, however massive--of conformity through fear, of anti-consciousness on Franz and his family's happiness, love and free will are all too real to human life then, now and much before. Look at how when Franz gets to higher and higher officers that try to convince him to fight, they are still plagued by the questions Franz is asking, what they--if they're being honest--initially felt and still feel. Unanswered questions that never stop biting deep inside. They have no answer, they cannot compute the will of Franz beyond them, they become frightened, they ask, "What good are you doing? It doesn't make a difference you resisting, does it? It doesn't help anyone?" Just as the Nazi mayor of the town became frightful of how the Nazis may punish him for allowing the breeding of a consciencious objector in his sect.

A Hidden Life includes us in its undying beauty, begs us to feel our own nature through Franz's family's love and peace in those lush, vivid green hills in their fog below the mountains. "We lived above the clouds," is perhaps our most direct parallel to heaven in the film. Franz's narration in the beginning mentions how he thought they could live in the isolation, the seclusion of the mountain and be untouched by the encroaching evil. Yet, Malick forces us to catharcize the ongoing failure of humanity to live in peace, and makes us realize something greater in nature: that every heaven will be ripped away somehow, in sometime, that perhaps the greatest part of being alive is to know how to not die in living--to transcend. In love and in pain. Malick speaks to the painfulness of the heaven you can feel of being alive on this Earth--this rare, rare, precious condition in space--and the hell of what this species has created for itself. The animalness of it.

I am an emotional wreck after seeing this movie. It rips my heart out in conveyal of the immortal peace I know, then repeatedly and fittingly so attempts to take it away--as the Nazis to do Franz in--and gives us the courage to hold onto it in onslaught of those painstakingly real omnipresent dogmas and pressures that destroy peace in existence by their perpetuation. The resistance, the fight, is our struggle and our duty to ourselves as it is to what made us--the powers of creation. In the expression of free truth there is no dying, only returning, ascending back to this for it is what we are. Like how the orthodx Hindu considers the experience of 'Self,' the spirit, a mere extension and direct inclusion of the timeless natural creator, both beyond and within us--only of the 'one breath' this film refers to. Our morals, ideals are written in our nature as humans just as our body is. A Hidden Life evokes something that I feel as deep as possible in my body, from my feet to my mind. Something body and mind create and share together in this unique experience. Both preserving and acting upon this is the purpose of life, a drive with no fear of death and no end--for it is for something much greater than a single life. And it is the greatest solace in a plight-filled, degrading world to be able to continue to feel this. It is feeling God and reflecting Heaven back onto Earth. Though we must remember that beyond any ideal, beyond any human construct of thought, Christ's mythical/legendary dilemma on the cross was to fight for who he was: God's son, though asked to renounce this. Like Franz, he was utterly free in his action from what he continued to feel, to protect inside. A Christian understanding that speaks much more to a faith bigger than any single religion, to the experience we know by being alive, that we hopefully continue be true to with the strength of whatever you call it--God, Brahman, etc. The force of the eternal, the creator within, who in life giveth and taketh away.

Silence is a beautiful, yet grueling story about a priest going through great trials of pain that test his faith. A search for a apostatized Father turns into a search for God that transcends religion due to how personal Scorsese portrays . The hope and faith that the Japanese people show towards Andrew Garfield lets me feel the beauty of being and warmth of being alive. Yet the impossibility of the task of the Japanese to truly understand the religion and the hatred shown towards priests by the Japanese rulers shows the division between what is felt within the self and the reality of the external world. Recognizing this division and accepting it is a maturation that Neeson and Garfield's characters had to go through hell to understand.

The worst parts of life on Earth consistently cause doubt in whether or not the most nebulous and beautiful tendencies of being human are real or not. Such concepts have definitely been explored before, but never as organically as with the pious manner in which Silence is portrayed. Before viewing Silence, I didn't know it was really possible to so subtly and wonderfully tell a story transcendent amongst all religions and all people around the world through religious figures, but Scorsese did it. The film's setting swims through bouts of fog, warmth and cold nothingness, mystically affecting the mood of the film.

Silence is a challenging film to watch, but pays off like nothing else. The struggle of Andrew Garfield's character through the brutality of Japan is an extreme representation of the burden beared being a human on Earth. Witnessing death for ridiculous reasons, pain, starvation and distance all due to such trivial desires and misunderstandings. In God's Silence throughout the Fathers' immense struggle, they found their Lord within them the whole time, but absent externally. This discovery was a haunting reckoning, but it showed them how no one can carve the world in their vision, and that in doing so will drive a person mad.

However unfortunate, the aspects of existence as shown in Silence are a part of human nature, and the kind of silence that Garfield and Neeson's characters maintain throughout the rest of their lives is the human equivalent to the burden Jesus bore on the cross. It's carrying the pain that's inherently going to be felt by traversing life on Earth, and realizing all that can be done is to keep what is felt within them, and express it in whatever ways possible.

When I heard that a sci-fi by the writer/director of Ex Machina starring Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac was coming out, I was immediately excited. Then when I saw the trailer, it was the majority of what I talked about for upcoming movies this year.

When I saw Annihilation, I was hooked by its mystery. And as the fascinating events progressed I became more and more invested in the narrative, a story about how an inexplicable, supernatural event directly relates to the relationship between two people.

Usually cutting back and forth from the present to the past story is completely unnecessary, but it really aids Annihilation with its introspective tone. It also lets the pace flow, which mirrors the film: a vivid recollection of a fragmented dream.

Regarding the content of Annihilation, I'll start with its inciting event - "The Shimmer". This is an otherworldly event that goes beyond the logic of the human mind, delving far into the experience of life through a moment in time.

"It's not destroying... It's creating something new..."

Annihilation is a metaphysical movie. For a lot of people, it doesn't compute to much. However, I really connect to the content, what happens to the characters, and what they learn.

Change is a big part of it. The shimmer, in a very raw manner, is basically just energy bringing change. Immediately I thought of Dune during Annihilation: "Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens... The sleeper must awaken."

And what they learn isn't anything set in stone either, which is part of what's so great about it. When Lena is asked at the end what her pure mirror God-self wanted, she admitted she didn't know.

Annihilation chalks everything down to energy.

The interior of the shimmer and all that takes place in it feels like the randomness and the inter-connected, yet apathetic hostility in how energy brings change into people's lives in moments in time. It taps into the unknown of what is felt in life; how it progresses, evolves and expands.

While the entire lighthouse scene is so amazing, specifically the part where Jennifer Leigh's character spits out a universe in its own is my favorite. Lena stands there, watching, and then it all becomes clear for me as a viewer. In and because of the shimmer, her character is allowed to experience the natural beauty, the infinite possibilities and wild hostility of the random, ever-changing universe. This is the essence of the shimmer, and the entire film. Everything it creates, and everything it destroys.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is all about the evil that lurks. The weird house deep down off the Texas mainroads, or the odd looks from a strange local at the barbecue gas station unearthed. It is a certain energy of irreconcilable insanity and feral madness at the very core of being an animal. The characters don't matter, and this movie is all about the death.

"Who will survive and what will become of them?"

The madness of the killers have no order, yet they have a sense of regularity and chilling animalism to their killing. Rape would be easy, rape would be a normal human tendency. But they do not do this, as they are complete animals absorbed in the killing and the meat itself. This family, absorbed in the madness of their Texas isolation, has made it so killing is simply an order of business: there is a butcher, head of the house, a businessman and a scout/helper. However, due to their environment, all are incredibly stupid, a part of what lets her get away at the end. The fact that this movie was marketed as a true story (and people believed it) further cements the reality of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - a reality simply composed of killing.

The budget for Road Warrior was higher than the first Mad Max, but almost all of the money is spent on cars and locations, so the gritty spirit of Mad Max remained. The higher budget ends up being a huge plus; it was Miller's vision of Mad Max with the limits cut off. It is also a complete abandonment from the old Max. The first Mad Max revolved around an attempt to live peacefully in a world gone mad, whereas The Road Warrior is the wasteland itself. The Road Warrior feels like an insane, yet godly, fuel-injected nightmare. It is a place Max did not choose to be, but embraces as his reality, for after the death of his wife and child, it is all he knows. It was in this blighted place that he learned to live again.

Anyone who had the privilege to see this film in theatres knows that Aliens is one of the funnest rides in film history. "Alien" was a great accomplishment and a very good movie as well, but its horror and suspense takes a long time to develop. It centralizes on weak, pretentious characters that make it so you don't care whether they live or die, taking away from the potency of the film. Aliens cuts all of the *beep*. In Aliens, Weaver essentially acts as a female "Rambo". The badass weapons, set design and crazy, previously unthinkable action sequences make Aliens the insane roller-coaster ride through monsters in space that it is.

Dune retains the Lynch feel in another completely different world. Even his trademark white noise even makes appearances here and there. The concept of time-folding that Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLaughlin) eventually discovers is actually very similar to the concept of transcendence, a state of being involving a release of the soul in acceptance, involvement and participation in the present moment in the universe. The spice is also a wonderful concept: the universe in Dune runs something cultivated by people at the bottom of their space society. It took Muad'dib, the Fremen's prophetic leader to break them free of their chains, taking the spice away from their rulers and Dune for themselves. Paul Atreides became the messiah, the Kwisatz Haderach through his self-discovery of unprecedented power, causing rain to fall on Dune for the first time ever. Dune is a fun, fearless, no-holds-barred sci-fi about control, power and energy in the journey through space and time.

After seeing "Eraserhead", it seemed impossible to me that David Lynch could make a better or more unique film. Yet he did. The Elephant Man is a dark tale of the human spirit through prejudice and hatred. Perfectly cast, it features jaw-dropping performances from John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft. It is the most emotional film for me.

Every time Lynch uses white noise, it is more effective than most soundtracks for me. That, and the seemingly random scenes of machine-men, sent me on a journey straight into my very existence, into my own emotional reality. The dark, dehumanizing parts of The Elephant Man and the eerie white noise are used as a contrast to the pure, humanistic moments. This dehumanization made the emotional moments of the film so effective for me because it forced me to feel the lack of humanity that John Merrick, The Elephant Man, had experienced his whole life. It took John Merrick 27 years. 27 painful, humiliating years where the only people he knew bought and sold him for entertainment because of his disfiguration. This is why The Elephant Man is so powerful to me - it is an exaggerated version of my own being, one that lets me feel all of the self waiting to be shared and the torture within. When I saw John Merrick finally be treated kindly by a beautiful woman for the first time, he bursts into tears, and I had a tear running down my eye. The Elephant Man lets me feel everything I would ever want to feel in my life, while showing me the stark contrast of what surrounds me.

Beyond Thunderdome is the most expansive and broad Mad Max film. It goes from a cut-throat capitalist society to a far-off place where one group has no knowledge of the complete obliteration of civilization. Also, Beyond Thunderdome has different action scenes than just chases (i.e. the Thunderdome where two men enter and only one man can leave). And yet again, another insane chase scene exists at the end, this time between Entity (Tina Turner) and Max (Mel Gibson). However, Beyond Thunderdome has the least amount of action than any Mad Max. It's action is intense, but contained until necessary for the plot. Therefore, the action enhances the plot rather than being the central focus. This is unique for Mad Max. Beyond Thunderdome is the most layered of any Mad Max story, while retaining the crazy action and insane post-apocalyptic characters and environments. While it is such a different Mad Max movie, it continues the story of a man who has nothing left inside but anger and an instinct to survive.

A priest (Jason Miller) in doubt of the existence of God struggles to remove a demon from a young girl (Linda Blair) when satanic horror brings out his own personal demons.

A priest is someone who devotes their life to the faith. The dual aspect of the priests within The Exorcist is between Jason Miller and Max Von Sydow, the latter being a balance to Miller's doubtful younger character - an old priest who has dedicated his life to fighting Satan. Though the story is based so heavily on Catholicism, it displays the two sides of being connected to any energy: doubt due to inexperience and assuredness from continuous reckoning. The terror is character-driven within their relation to the world within and around them, which transcends the movie beyond religion.

Horrifying experiences in life, whether they're places, people or events, often disprove previous beliefs within the person. In this manner, darkness is endless. This is the essence of The Exorcist. It is a reconciliation of the unknown. Bringing the dark to light. The very core of horror.

In an onslaught of ultra-violence, including rape and murder, Alexander DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) is finally caught and "cured" by his authoritarian government.

It took Stanley Kubrick for a movie like A Clockwork Orange to be done right, and help film openly evolve through the years like it did. It took his classical music, and his bitingly humorous, bleak visual representation, for general audiences to even consider the content.

Kubrick's genius in A Clockwork Orange lies in his willingness to throw everything that few prefer to talk about onto the screen. A Clockwork Orange is disgusting, but wonderfully so. It lifts the cover on the dark part of human nature that people tend to sweep under the rug every day of the week. If "2001: A Space Odyssey" largely displays the beauty and wonder of human existence, then A Clockwork Orange is its counterpart. It shows what humanity seems to be unable to accept about themselves, and it is a domineering part of life on Earth. Clockwork reached across the screen and dared me, begged me to admit and see the darkness within me and around me. This his how self- understanding and acceptance can flourish. If not, those evil impulses will not only exist but operate. A Clockwork Orange is an exercise in human horror, and displays an insanely large part of my existence.