Tilbury (1987)

Director: Viðar Víkingsson

Screenplay: Þórarinn Eldjárn and Viðar Víkingsson

Cast: Kristján Franklin Magnúss as Auðun; Helga Bernhard as Gudrún; Karl Ágúst Úlfsson as Tilbury; Erla Skúladóttir as Sigrún; Róbert Arnfinnsson as Rev. Thorfinnur; Aðalsteinn Bergdal as Barði Kemp; Bryndís Pétursdóttir as Lilja; Magnús Bjarnfreðsson as Gen. Tilberry

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Explained in the opening voiceover, an Icelandic production with a British voiceover for this opening to befit the importance of the British characters in this story, the “tilberi” is a witchcraft creation, born from a human rib taken from a grave and kept by a female creator’s breast. Fed on communion wine, it stole milk from other peoples’ cows unless caught and uses it to create “tilberi butter”. This TV movie takes this mythology, and creates a complicated horror period story, in less than an hour, dealing with a changing Iceland during the early 1940s when World War II is in full swing. On the 10th May 1940, the British and Canadian militaries invaded Iceland in 'Operation Fork' due to the concern German forces would take over the country. By 1941, as the film ends its own narrative on, the defense of the country was given to the United States in agreement by Iceland itself. The country was officially neutral during the world, but cooperated with British, Canadian and American military¹, but through this supernatural story we see how this would drastically alter Iceland when forced to open up to the new influences.

Auðun (Kristján Franklin Magnúss) is a young man training to become a swimmer and is asked by a priest to talk to his daughter Gundrun (Helga Bernhard), who was caught taking an excessive amount of wine during communion, and fears she has fallen from her religious upbringing. Because they grew up together, in the same church, the priest naturally thinks Auðun is a more appropriate person to win her own from what are her perceived sins of drunkenness, when it is obviously set up that her story is connected to the tilberi. Set in the capital of Reykjavík, with members of the public working with the British soldiers, the tone is grounded and keeping with the period, but also emphasizes the circumstances is their strangeness. In evoking the period with this grounded nature, we see the banality of the scenario without the glamour of the war, with the male soldiers cavorting with the local women. There is a possible flaw with the film that, at less than an hour, it fudges the complexity, such as having Gundrun come off as a stereotypical femme fatale in the midst of this, or demonizing the Allied forces whilst having one of the characters Auðun encounters being a literal Nazis they have captured. Particularly with that one scene character that yet has a major scene, that tries to throw in anti-Jewish beliefs in his explanation of what a tilberi, you can easily see flaws in nuisance here lost in the storytelling. There is however the sense that Tilbury the film is about the chaos of all this period, which influences the storytelling.

Isolated until this war, this is an Iceland being abruptly thrown into the cultural exchange without a knowledge, from how director/co-writer Viðar Víkingsson depicts it, of how bad the Nazis were, instead that a war is apparently happening but feeling like a place of banality. There is no combat, just sights like seeing a British soldier having sex with a woman at one point, possible a sex worker but at least with an older male driver as their cab waiting with them in the driver’s seat during the act, which completely undercuts the sense of historical importance of all this as the days pass. With soldiers occupying the place, everyone is however just floating along. Trucks drive around and mortar firing practice is done completely isolated from the real war, as despite all the sandbagged protective walls built. The soldiers are mostly comparing condoms (and laughing at the local guy who thinks its chewing gum), cavorting with the local women or at the parties at night, whilst the local women like Gundrun link up with said soldiers. Even if there is a sense of corruption from the Allied forced, it is not as if Iceland, as represented by Auðun, is a noble figure, instead a little naïve itself when the world around them has grown and become more complicated.

Within this sense of stagnation is the mysterious British colonel Tilbury who gives the TV movie its title, a young actor clearly in old man white makeup and a fake nose who is clearly unnatural. Among the British soldiers coming off more as nuisances, or arresting random locals who may be Nazi sympathizers, Tilbury is just hiding among them without anyone questioning his involvement as a general, who is connected to Gundrun. This does lead to Tilbury being a revealed as a goblin-like entity puking green goo, but Gundrun’s relationship to his is interesting as it is clearly weighing in on Iceland’s relationship with the British and how complicated it clearly became, such as the fact that this is shown as a very religious country. Thrown into a relationship to foreigners of the island who will undercut this in their relationships, when not on military drills, the world cannot go back to the perceived morals of the past as now the 20^th century has fully arrived, and it seems neither that the old Christian ideals are celebrated because they were merely what the likes of Auðun were raised with. Spirituality did not really form him for the better as his involvement is less for saving Gundrun, but as a fawning crush from her past that cannot get past her. Central to this is Tilberi butter chocolate disguised as Cadburys chocolate; as symbolic of Britain’s status to the Icelandic as with the Americans, when they appear in the last moments appear with their Hershey’s chocolate bars, there is definitely a negative or at least concerned view of what had possibly been lost due to this occupation over time.

At the same time, however, even Gundrun’s plan for this chocolate, which is not recommended to eat due to it causing seizures, whilst a negative on the types of influences on Iceland from the bigger countries is undercut (even if the script being vague) by her being on her own unknown mission. Tilbury the goblin-creature intends to influence Iceland with these chocolate bars, and it is important to remind one selves that, whilst World War II had clear-cut villains that had to be defeated in Nazis, it was still a morally complicated war where the Allies were not clear-cut themselves at times. It was not a good idea, in the moments where the film undercuts itself, to have Tilbury depicted with the fake nose, which unfortunately throws up anti-Semitic stereotypes. There can be arguments to be made that the film needed a lot more time to really explain some of its content to avoid these unfortunate aspects, like presuming that since he is helping Auðun, the openly fascist person who the soldiers arrested would be viewed as virtuous when he is forced into a hole in the soldiers’ camp like he deserves. I will give the film and its creators’ the benefit of the doubt as, in this war depicted onscreen, the severity of its fight is lost to this world, Iceland shown oblivious and just going off these soldiers, on the outskirts, who don’t present themselves as a positive but something even frightening. They treat the locals like crap despite being there to protect them, and the locals just get on with life. Tilbury comes off less like a problematic dog whistle stereotype but a strange creature of misfit whose chocolate, even if contaminated, is never shown in its full effect, likely more a comment that, even if they were fighting this major war, the British and American soldiers to the locals were less than graciousness in spite of the Icelandic people contributing to them helping the war. Even if the heroes, this presents that, as in the morally complex reality, that didn’t mean ever British soldier and general was exactly a bastion of virtue, cavorting and partying at night, even with a joke later on that one or two are doing inappropriate things to local farm animals.

Auðun himself is also a complicated lead. His love for Gudrún, including intonations that he had relations with her when they were young teenagers, the barn where this transpired to haunt him as he literally sinks into the hay in the last moments, is less a virtuous hero than a putz being dragged along. He comes along not really as a person who deserves pity, but a version of Iceland which will be obsolete and left out, mad, at the end whilst the influence of the other Western states come to Iceland. He is naïve to what is going on and that, whilst horrified by Gudrún’s openly promiscuous ways even before he learns the truth of Tilbury, he comes off less a bastion of virtue himself, but a naïve figure who can’t really talk as he has unfulfilled urges for her that were suppressed. His views of her open sexuality in the cold light of the modern day, decades after the film was made, come off as a prude or just clueless with hindsight. The most overtly elaborate scene, a sudden dance sequence with Gudrún and Tilbury, is clearly his jealous imagination, literally filtered in a green light, with them separated from the world and presuming he is an emotional vampire on her when she is clearly the one in control.

He is an appropriate figure in a world where the less likable people can still help him, but can’t be trusted. There is a joke that even the minor Nazi sympathizer is revealed to have been kicked out of the Olympics, as a swimmer in the Nazi held one, due to accidentally splashing Hitler’s personal viewing box, so there is even in the cynical humour the sense he too is just among a bunch of drifters, losers, also-rans and very confused Icelandic people just living through a major war. Iceland did lose casualties as a result, including 200 Icelandic seamen who died from war related deaths¹, so the country was integral to the war, but as we see in various works of various tones and realities on World War II. Its lasting shockwave on the world includes all the banal moments where things awkwardly transpired, like being stuck with numerous British and Canadian soldiers initially on your soil without warning, and the complicated relationship this would have caused.

Viðar Víkingsson’s film does had a greater sense of complication to this all. You can make the argument, for Tilbury’s biggest flaw, that it could dangerously flub some of its themes, in terms of the fact that less than an hour may be enough to examine some very significant historical themes. However how much it managed to depict, with the matter-of-fact naturalism undercutting any glamour to the proceedings, is still to be acclaimed. [Huge Spoiler] In the end, due to the lore of the tilberi, Auðun gets Gudrún killed by her own creation, so he is not a noble white knight rescuing the local maiden from the invading British, just a man lost in this goal to find her, lost in his madness at the end with the only lingering thoughts left rekindled when he realizing Tilbury is now just posing as an American soldier with Hershey’s chocolate with his own special ingredient added. Nothing he had done was helping at all, and he is a confused Icelandic man just seeing the world turn. [Spoilers End] For its possible flaws in not getting a clear message carefully out, this strange and fascinating folk horror work still comes off as very cynical about this major part of Icelandic culture on both sides. I’m not Icelandic, ironically British like those invading soldiers, so the irony is not lost if I stupidly presume to know what it would have been like for that generation when Operation Fork happened, but in spite of the fact that the UK military were on Icelandic soil to fight the Nazis, there is a greater sense of weight in how this depicts it almost as a farce, a stop gap where bars of chocolate are likely to have a more lasting influence than the biggest conflict on the 20^th century.

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1) The Occupation of Iceland During World War II, written by Sunna Olafson Furstenau and published for Icelandic Roots on May 25th 2023.

Tokyo: The Last War (1989)

 

Director: Takashige Ichise

Screenplay: Kaizo Hayashi

Based on Teito Monogatari by Hiroshi Aramata

Cast: Masaya Katô as Yuko Nakamura, Takeshi Kusaka as Fumimaro Konoe, Brian Matt-Uhl as Wagner, Kaho Minami as Yukiko Tasumiya, Kyûsaku Shimada as Yasunori Kato, Tetsurô Tanba as Kanaami Kohou, Yoshio Tsuchiya as Dr. Mizuno

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

1945 Japan - after the 1988 adaptation Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, adapting Hiroshi Aramata's multi-volume novel Teito Monogatari, we return to a later period, following after the main antagonist Yasunori Kato (Kyûsaku Shimada) having attempted to destroy Tokyo in the Meiji and Taishō era the final curtains for the Pacific War and Japan's defeat. In the final years in this story, Japan has a secret governmental group combining Buddhism and science by way of black magic to defeat the Allied forces. Contrasting this, there is the thousand years of accumulating dead, angry and vengeful, which resurrect Kato.

It is a fascinating production which strangely never came to the West, with Ngai Chai Lam as assistant director, the Hong Kong director of Riki-Oh (1991) and The Seventh Curse (1986), and Screaming Mad George on practical effects duty, all for a story which is more overtly horrific in content but is tackling a really difficult historical period. This has to find a balance between the issue that the deaths that happened in Japan for their populous was horrifying, but contrasted by the fact Japan's military did align themselves with the Nazis, the existential contrast even making Kato, despite wishing to just destroy here, almost a true anti-hero finally. A transmission tower is what the plan is, able to channel legendary actor Tetsurô Tanba's will to kill Churchill and Roosevelt with black magic, which General Hideki Tojo thinks is embarrassing and also leads to the question whether it would be enough to actually win a war Japan is in the sliding loss of. The last heir of the previous family who fought Kato, Yukiko (Kaho Minami), is a nurse we follow, and fully emphasises this film dealing with what is still a controversial part of Japanese history, as she is an innocent bystander, there trying to help those maimed in the combat of war, and it is befitting when, traumatised by the history of Kato, he looks like one of the Japanese military on the streets in the uniform as he begins to stalk her and stalks the plan to use the transmission tower.

There is also Yuko Nakamura (Masaya Katô), an assistant to Tanba's Kanaami Kohou who was experimented on as a child to fully cultivate his psychic powers, finding himself in the midst of a plan with the transmitter tower even other Buddhist monks find against their faith, and woefully underpowered against Kato, who could likely twist him like a towel as one unfortunate soldier endures. This is significantly more violent than the previous film - including the soldier unable to throw a grenade due to magic - and Screaming Mad George earns his pay check with skin peeling of the cheek, or a chest mid-operation opening the stitches by their own, or the nightmarish experiences Yukiko has of Miyo, a girl who lost her eyes and mother due to US fire bombings, having a bug body and a human head, or Kato headed children. In contrast however you have the film taking its subject seriously, in that whilst its leads are important, Yukiko the last member of the family who stopped Kato last time, and Nakamura risking his life to stop Kato, ultimately this entire story is about the acceptance of Japan losing the Pacific War.  It balances carefully between its more explicitly horror tone with the severity of its subject.

Yukiko for the most part is a nurse trying to help ordinary people harmed in fire bombed Japan, with Nakamura the result of a child being experimented on by the military against his will, a film really emphasising that it is not looking at Japan with a pro-military stance but stuck in its doomed outcome of the Pacific War, even nodding to the atomic bombs in reference. It says a lot that the comic relief squeaky voice nurse dies, and not in a cheap way but credible to the real conflict this is set in, so The Last War does manage to deal with history carefully. Hitler does make an appearance - which is apt as he was an occultist in real life, approving the killing of Allied leaders with black magic - and it is potent how the outcome even if it drastically changes history before Inglourious Basterds (2009) deals with him. [Major Spoiler] That, realising the doomed nature of the war, figures decide to try to end it quickly, force the curse on Hitler instead and kill him instead, even if real history sadly lead to Japan feeling the effect of two atomic bombs. [Spoilers End] With the hope that Japan, as it did into the fifties and sixties onwards, could rebuild itself from its past and destruction, the film does leave on a bitter sweet finale as a result.

In terms of Teito Monogatari, it does strip back a lot of the historical and occultist content, which may make it a disappointment, where Kato is literally a super powered juggernaut rather than a figure with a symbolic complexity to him. Nods thankfully still exist, such as an entire scene evoking Kwaidan (1964) of monks with text painted on their bodies and face to protect the main temple,  and by its end, the tonal change for Tokyo: The Last War allows it to deal with its subject matter well and stand out by itself. How this never found its way to the West, as it came under the guide of its producer Takashige Ichise directing the film, I cannot say barring pure bad luck, as next to Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis this would have been the more readily accessible of the pair you could get with greater ease. It is, together with its prequel, worthy of critical reassessment.

War (2002)

 

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

Screenplay: Aleksey Balabanov

Cast: Aleksey Chadov as Ivan; Ian Kelly as John; Ingeborga Dapkunaite as Margaret; Sergey Bodrov as Captain Medvedev; Evklid Kyurdzidis as Ruslan; Giorgi Gurgulia as Aslan

Canon Fodder

 

[Full Plot Spoilers Throughout]

Out of all his films, Aleksey Balabanov's War is pretty accessible as a film, in which this will turn into a war rescue film about freeing the fiancée of a British couple from a Chechen warlord's military group. In mind to this however, the pre-credits sequence, involving a group of people (including the British couple, a man and a woman) being dragged into the camp as prisoners, you do however have Balabanov make an exclamation point of this being his type of cinema, not something easily digestible, when one of the prisoners has their head cut off and presented to their captors.

Ivan (Aleksey Chadov), a Russian soldier who starts the film as a prisoner here, narrates the film in the future of how, in the midst of the Second Chechen War, Ivan will help John (Ian Kelly) rescue his fiancée Margaret (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) from this group ran by Aslan (Giorgi Gurgulia). The immediate concern with the film, a more pulpy war film in the end, is how this treats this history, especially as the depiction of the Chechens within this film at first is very one-dimensional, capable of murder, death and a threat of sexual violence over Margaret. Balabanov was entirely interested in the issue, over how prisoners were treated and killed during this turbulent conflict¹, yet also has the Chechens played by actual Chechens, as the federals are actual soldiers and officials, and with scenes partially filmed in Chechen lands¹. Including the First Chechen War of 1994 to 1996, this is a history which feels it requires an entire text to go through, rather than try to sum real life conflict and death for a film review, but in mind to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia, one would come to a production like War with a lot more caution of the message it wishes to tell, something which does have to be considered with not just a film like this, but also North American films or any from countries which paint a war with a likelihood of a simplistic black-white morality and jingoistic undercurrents. Aleksey Balabanov even if this was to be argued was the case here does however undercut this potential factor with an aspect that soaks through his films, even if unintentionally, that War is thankfully more complicated due to how cynical his worldview is. For all the concerns I have had with how Balabanov has included content and sentences spoken by his characters which are discomforting, a film which could be very nationalistic like War is a lot more cynical as it goes along even when it gets to the tropes of an action war film in the second half's rescue mission.

For starters bureaucracy procrastinates here even to help free Margaret or the prisonsers. This can be read with a very right wing, conservative message, this a Rambo film of two men, Ivan mainly, being a one-man army against Aslan's group, but War complicates itself, including the sense that any government body including Russia's is not reliable in the slightest for this mission imposed upon two people. At the same time, the negotiations John and Ivan, who is later brought in as a paid mercenary, to even begin this missions has to involve a Russian gangster trading heroine with Chechens. Aspects like this in the plot does mark to War's favour that this film, even if it plays as a pulpy war film, has a very misanthropic take on conflict, that this quest to rescue someone is marked by a lot of dirty business, by a lot of sides playing off each other, and Ivan not necessary a good person, just a young soldier who decides to go into this as a paid mercenary.

Ivan is not even hailing directly from Russia itself but from Tobolsk in Siberia, from an environment away from the central urban cities like Moscow, with its boats to travel about and small community in what we briefly see. Ivan is disconnected from civilian life, and for him, this mission he ends up with is part of what he can be, rather than pretending who he is not. Alongside the ending ultimately a cynical one, where he is talking of this mission from a prison cell charged for war crimes, he will continually tell John, who follows with him, that war is not heroic and even shooting bystanders, even by accident, is part of it. Considering bystanders, including women, accidentally are killed, once the rescue mission starts in Chechnya, emphasises Aleksey Balabanov not taking a noble viewpoint but something closer to his gangster films.

Not even John is noble either. Alongside the fact, off-screen, Margaret will have fallen in love with a wounded soldier she will be stuck with in a pit at Aslan's base, but John does not go into this mission with a nobility either. Channel 4, the British free-to-air public service television network, get a kicking as John is paid by them to film the rescue of his fiancée, strapping a camera to his head eventually and trivialising the life of Margaret. His act, which he films purposely as he goes along, is as much making this significant journey to save Margaret one for his financial benefit, eventually even getting a film adaptation in the epilogue to really dig in the lack of honour here.

Even if the Chechen characters are one dimensional, which is a critique worth having, Aleksey Balabanov also introduces Ruslan (Evklid Kyurdzidis) halfway through. A shepherd Ivan takes hostage, Ruslan is a begrudging ally even if forced to at gunpoint, and eventually even he complicates the black-white morality in that, due to tribal differences, even he is against Aslan and becomes a willing participant even if Ivan has been pretending he has soldiers threatening his family. This undercuts a simplistic take of painting the Chechen characters by having one who is likable and reveals Ivan's ruthlessness, arguably being more progressive even against what Balabanov may have intended because of his clear pessimistic ideals of human beings in general.  

It is a hell of a lot more worthwhile for Aleksey Balabanov to have this pessimism, because it at least means that, any concern one could have with the film, or a lot of content I have seen in his films, he yet was constantly undercutting it with a world weariness suggesting we were stuck with these figures trying to survive in a hostile society. He still has to be taken to task for the moments he had crossed a line into glamorising problematic characters, including ones spouting racist and homophobia ideas, but his nihilism even paints potentially glamorous characters with the same grimy brush, even Ivan here, more likable, stuck having to be a ruthless soldier to kill because he is stuck with no options aside from this. Far from self defeating and accepting it, it feels begrudging, especially as War is an action film eventually, one with the beats and energy of one that is exhilarating, but contrasts this with the punch line of the bookending narrative. That being that Ivan will not be celebrated, and even if not a good character, his role is proclaimed fully criminal by lies as much as what actually happened, with someone taking the fame from the moment. In many ways, whilst it can be read as a problematic message, a pro-lone wolf mentality, it feels instead like sod's law instead, befitting Aleksey Balabanov's worldview from the films before and only streaked with greater melancholy after this. War is, personally, not as meaningful a production in his career, clearly the biggest film in scope in his career, especially next to some of the smaller productions from this time, but it still has a lot to say.

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1) Aleksey Balabanov's film "War" is released in Russian cinemas, published on newsru.com on March 14th 2002.

Labyrinth of Cinema (2019)

 

Director: Nobuhiko Ôbayashi

Screenplay: Kazuya Konaka, Tadashi Naitô and Nobuhiko Ôbayashi    

Cast: Takuro Atsuki as Mario; Yoshihiko Hosoda as Shigeru; Takahito Hosoyamada as Hosuke; Rei Yoshida as Noriko; Riko Narumi as Kazumi Saitō; Hirona Yamazaki as Kazuko Yoshiyama; Takako Tokiwa as Yuriko Tachibana; Yukihiro Takahashi as Fanta G

Canon Fodder

 

Don't we all love Tarzan?

Labyrinth of Cinema has a lot to unpack, the last film of Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, a film's whose tone is immediately set up when Hinton Battle gets a name check in the opening credits for not able to be involved with the production, the gentle heart shown already in the film's chest in name checking the veteran Tony Award winning American actor, singer, dancer, and dance instructor who was unable to even provide in-film support or assistance to the production, even if it does have musical numbers. We have not even gotten to the spaceship with floating fish floating inside, and pianos and nude people passing by outside its windows, the ship belonging to Fanta G (Yellow Magic Orchestra member and musician Yukihiro Takahashi), travelling back to Japan and explaining to the viewer how we descend into war before he reaches a small cinema in Onomichi. A city, called a shore town in film, within the Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan, facing the Inland Sea, that in itself will be significant as Labyrinth of Cinema will go through Japan's military history, as is the fact (brought up in the film when establishing the setting) it was not bombed due to having a prisoner of war camp during the Pacific War¹, unchanged as a result from the forties through Fanta G's narrative. (That the location also features in Tokyo Story (1953) as a key setting, the most famous film directed by Yasujirō Ozu, is important to mention when Ozu himself makes a cameo).  On its last night, the cinema is screening a night of war films; there a film buff, a film history maniac, and a wannabe yakuza and debt collector who is a son of a monk, coming together only find themselves entering the silver screen after Noriko (Rei Yoshida), a teen girl working there is sucked in abruptly, aptly just after thunder and lightning outside mid-screening.

Nobuhiko Ôbayashi managed to have two last films. He was diagnosed with stage-four terminal cancer² before he set about directing Hanagatami (2017), based on a 1937 novel by Kazuo Dan, a war drama set in the dawn of World War II about a group of youths in a seaside town at the period. On Hanagatami, Ôbayashi was a veteran director, famous in the West for the delirious House (1977) but prolific in his home country, who was making the film aware he had a terminal illness. Including its ending, cutting to Ôbayashi himself talking to the viewer, he had the perfect last film in Hanagatami. How befitting he managed to live long enough to have a second film as good as an ending instead, and before the film's plot even properly starts, Labyrinth of Dreams burns in style. Title cards, coloured borders, repetition of previous fragments of scenes, even the obvious CGI and super imposition of modern 2010s cinema aesthetic clearly deliberate as tools for a man whose used artificiality as back in House, showing he never shied away from this.

Subtitled "A movie - To explore cinematic literature", the film when it begins properly suggests a wholesome farce with a musical, only for this type of cinema in Japan to have originated for propaganda reasons at the time, or was a film made after Japan lost the Pacific War, made during the period in occupied Japan where the US army would have censored content, which they did. Underscored with poetry by Chūya Nakahara, whose poem calling modernism a new form of barbarism is the most evoked, Labyrinth of Cinema over nearly three hours does not hide with how Ôbayashi, especially in his later films, was a man born in 1938 coming to terms with the horrible destruction of the Pacific War and World War II caused. He is not hiding either his view Japan's own government was as responsible for this and taking the side of humanity over the blind militarisation that led to this history. The film, truthfully, refers to content that may not be as widely known overseas unless you have a lot of knowledge of Japanese cinema or its culture, Labyrinth of Cinema a history lesson on its nation's path and its cinema in a dense yet playful form, the history of Japan intermingled with their history of movies and art, such as the silent film naturally having intertitles, even with dialogue, when the leads end up within one.

Japan here is a history of civil war, strafes of radicals against the establishment, samurai made obsolete by foreign imported guns, nationalism, and Japan's relationship to other countries. Everyone is explained even if a figure a Japanese viewer would know of. Sakamoto Ryōma, for example, was a samurai and is one of the many who wanted to interact with the likes of North America but died too young when assassinated. Miyamoto Musashi, the legendary swordsman Toshiro Mifune played in film over a trilogy between 1954-56, is here as an old man, and cinema is evoked in Yasujirō Ozu, the legendary auteur, making a cameo alongside Sadao Yamanaka, the director whose Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937) was tragically one of the only works from a creator whose life was cut short before his time in the Imperial Japanese Army when drafted. Yamanaka's tale is more tragic as his work has been mostly lost in cinema due to this time period - the Japanese government burned many of his more provocative films and then years later Douglas MacArthur, the general of the American Army during the Pacific War, and the US army during the occupying era destroyed others among other filmmakers that were considered anti-democratic in view, leaving only three of Yamanaka's films left in existence³. Even John Ford makes a cameo, played by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi himself who also plays the mysterious pianist we cut to through the film, the American director famous especially for his westerns held in admiration as he admires Japan's spirit here. With Frank Capra held up too, dubbed "Franz Kafra" and It's A Wonderful Life (1946) admired as the failed production that nonetheless became legendary, this is a work championing humanity over the brutality of war, aptly so when Sadao Yamanaka was a cineaste who admired American films from the period of his life including Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934)⁴.

Labyrinth of Cinema under the weight of its own subject, trying to deal with the 20th century by way of Japan's history, dances a very precarious line between the severity of the material and a lighter touch, the film able to get away with fart sounds for humour even in serious moments. The three leads, following Noriko, witness the battle of Wakamatsu Castle in 1868, when a troupe of women and children had to fight to defend the grounds, or appearing among the Sakura trope, an almost all-female acting group, in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped. The film takes a more universal approach to the causes of war, as you follow people who served in the Japanese army in the Pacific War, and for everyone who joined under the desire to invade, and one sadist notwithstanding, others are stuck in other countries and trying their hardest to help the locals. Even if Noriko's actress is Japanese, it is poignant when she plays a Chinese girl, in a Japanese invaded Manchuria with the horrors of this explored, one which is a controversial subject still in Japan to discuss.

The film as well, if it does demonise an entity, shows the horror of war and blind nationalism in general, evoking an entire sequence in Okinawa when even Japan's own civilians were murdered by their own army in their ever closing defeat. With his last film, Ôbayashi's playfulness from the years before comes with a jest for humanity, for Doctor Muddlehead the empathetic animated character, or for a macabre turn on a famous scene in House when "bullets are playing the piano". When it cuts to a story of how, when Chopin's music was banned in Japan under nationalist laws, deemed enemy music, a school of young teenager girls protected a C. Bechstein piano that the Japanese army was to dispose of. (That the film subtly references the term "enemy language" throughout the dialogue for certain non-Japanese terms emphasises this sense of Japan entirely isolating itself during the war). The call for humanity over the evil force of war and might is felt for Ôbayashi's own call. In the Sakura trope's segment, before the tragedy of horrors of the atomic bomb, this is evoked in how their play is Ricksaw Man, a work censored by the Japanese army in the narrative; this went as far in real life for Hiroshi Inagaki's 1943 cinematic version of the story to be censored, severe censorship cuts by both the wartime Japanese government and post-war US occupation forces, a story he remade in 1958 with Toshiro Mifune⁵. The mindlessness of war, to conqueror and devour rather than create and inspire, is Ôbayashi's real enemy here.

As his own final film, the actual final film, Nobuhiko Ôbayashi went perfectly. As his career is slowly growing reputation in the West, becoming more complex as we learn he went from spectacles based on manga, from Kazuo Umezu to even Osamu Tezuka's Blackjack manga, to more intimate dramas over the decades, the films slowly being made available in the West. As much of this, to be honest, is from them being bootlegged by people just wishing to see the director of House's entire career, but as the official releases are being released and are appreciated into the 2020s, the promise was so much in mind to this that Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's reputation will grow and grow over the decades. This film lightly ends with a song, one made post-war by a comedian criticising the point of military might whilst you could have funded places for him to cuddle with his girlfriend, at a point Japan was rebuilding itself and would become affluent again; even in just that, Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's choices for how to criticise the worse in humanity with the most tender of touches is perfect.

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1) For reference, Onomichi site serves as POW memorial, published on the 15th April 2013 on the DVIDS (Defense Visual Information Distribution Service) website, written by Cpl. Kenneth Trotter Jr.

2) Tokyo Film Festival: Nobuhiko Obayashi Re-enters ‘Labyrinth of Cinema’ by Mark Schilling, published on Variety on the 27th October 2019.

3) Director Profile: Sadao Yamanaka (1909-1938) by Andrew Bacon. Posted on the 8th April 2016 for The Projection Booth website.

4) Fleeting Glimpses: The three-film universe of Sadao Yamanaka by Chris Fujiwara. Posted the 11th September 2009 on the Museum of the Moving Image.  

5) A documentary short Wheels of Fate: The Story of the Rickshaw Man (2020) even exists in regards to this, as Masahiro Miyajima, the camera assistant for cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, made it his mission to restore The Rickshaw Man even if it was his last task in life.

Blubberella (2011)

Director: Uwe Boll

Screenplay: Willam Belli, Uwe Boll, Michael Christopher and Lindsay Hollister

Cast: Lindsay Hollister as Blubberella; Brendan Fletcher as Nathaniel Gregor; Michael Paré as the Commandant; Willam Belli as Vadge; Annett Culp as Magda Markovic; Clint Howard as Doctor Mangler; Uwe Boll as Hitler

Ephemeral Waves

Smells like pubes and cheese here.

Well, inevitably the conversation would move to Uwe Boll. He would have to be talked about in terms of unconventional filmmakers, or those will outsider reputations, and fully forming my interest in cinema during the mid-to-late 2000s, Boll was a notorious cult of personality at the time. He has vanished, making an official retirement in 2016 due to difficulties to fund his films. He is evidence of cinema's curious nature that, for every auteur who struggled to get films made of their ambitions, figures as long as they worked in the medium as a business (or just made them off their own backs, medium to micro budget) could have long filmographies.

Blubberella (sic) and its production narrative could have been something legendary producer/director Roger Corman might have done himself to cut costs, namely that Uwe Boll whilst he was making BloodRayne: The Third Reich (2011), the third in a series based on a videogame franchise he made the trilogy of, decided to make a shot-by-shot parody with almost the same actors and the same resources. Considering that the film was set in World War II, with period accurate designs and sets, Corman might have been proud of someone else not letting the production go to waste.

Like the original, this follows a half human half vampire, only know she is Blubberella (sic), switching original actress Natassia Malthe for Lindsay Hollister, who in the middle of ninety forties Europe is found in a modern colourful bedroom with an internet connection, angry her dating life on "HebrewHookup.net" is being undermined by the Nazis. As much as the film is made on ingenuity, it was for me also a terrible viewing experience. It seems pat to have a review of a film by a director who kept having to fight off negative reviews become a negative review, but we are stuck in position especially with how he treats the material, and how sadly this is, rather than an excuse to mock his work, this is a film that clearly came in with an idea, only to stumble immediately into an ill coordinated mess.

Humour is subjective, which proves an issue whenever one is attempting to critique of at any level of scholarship on the subject. Uwe Boll's attempt at a parody, which was co written with cast members like Lindsay Hollister herself, can be split into three divisive categories - 1) that it has a lot of pop culture references from this time period including an extended parody of Lee Daniel's Precious (2009), a film I wonder if it still has any cultural memory of after the acclaim it had back then; 2) some absurdist humour, mainly a lot of anachronistic details or details like placing Hollister's face on old vampire film posters in her bedroom; and 3) and the most divisive content, a lot of deliberately offensive humour for bad taste. The last can be described in how, in a scene where Blubberella (sic) and a group of resistance fighters find a Nazi train, only to find onboard who are explicitly Jews are being shipped off rather than the weapons they were expecting. They all at first consider helping them, reconsider it as the stereotypical gay character in the resistance argues their fashion sense is dreadful, then reclose and lock the train cart door.

Yeah, Uwe Boll is playing a deadly game of irony throughout Blubberella (sic) that has not aged well. His comedy here is as deliberately broad as possible and very much signposted all the way through, takes Bloodrayne 3 and very much leaves the barest of structures to throw jokes at, that when the heroine accidentally leaves a Nazi victim alive, the Commandant (Michael Paré), with vampire abilities he hopes to exploit this with the help of mad scientist Dr Mangler (Clint Howard), but never progresses this beyond the jokes.

The resistance is only presented by two figures - their leader Nathaniel Gregor (Brendan Fletcher), who starts to fall in love with Blubberella (sic) only to have the sexual performance of an awkward teenager, and Vadge (Willam Belli), who minces, is explicitly gay, and whose entire stereotyping is softened when I learnt Willam Belli is a drag performer, brought in by Lindsay Hollister when Boll wanted her to come up with jokes for this parody². This does however leave me in a worst, more conflicted pace as the humour in the film did not work for me and strays into some eye brow raising territory. It is not even out of political correctness - but instead rolling my eyes at this all.

Here is the thing with Uwe Boll: I never considered him "the worst director ever", as subjectively that is a nonsensical title to bestow on anyone, as it takes one person to admit they liked House of the Dead (2003), his first notorious film, even as a guilty pleasure to undermine his candidacy. Even by this time, with Blubberella (sic), the likes of Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010) were lowering the bar further in technical and production quality beyond him. Boll reminds me instead of his fellow countryman Roland Emmerich. Two German filmmakers who clearly wanted to make Hollywood films, Emmerich getting the blockbuster budgets whilst Boll had to be resourceful, both wanting to do spectacle, both wanting to innovate¹, both wanting to also make serious films, Emmerich among his even tackling the Stonewall riots to divisive attitudes as Boll among his did a film inspired by the Columbine High School shootings. Both have been dogged by negative critical opinion. Emmerich however has never challenged film critics to boxing fights as Boll did, with some accepting and footage recorded in a documentary.

Boll for me also, and I am fully aware of the dangers of armchair psychology especially when it will anger the creators of a film, has also been someone clearly rattled by those film critics, hence he buries them in dialogue here by a comparison to a vampire. Boll has by this point juggled between anger at his critics, making a film like Seed (2007) meant to unsettle, and playing up to his reputation with deliberate bad taste and irony, be it the comical reinterpretation of House of the Dead for DVD release, or Postal (2007), where adapting a notorious PC game franchise³, he also played himself as a bastard who funded films with Nazi gold. Blubberella (sic) is neither as subtle, clearly with the attempt at not necessarily provocative, but the same attitude of eating with one's mouth open to deliberately put someone off. He also continues this self mocking nature, or is willing to be a sport, but playing Adolf Hitler. Blubberella (sic) tries to convince him to not be evil, becoming friends, only for him to still show himself as a little dictator when he is losing at the board game Risk. It would be a funny scene, baring the fact he also has actor Brendan Fletcher in full blackface, to the point it could have been applied with burnt cork as minstrels used to use for the makeup, playing the stereotype in "urban" speak, which as a phrase to have to use to describe this already makes me uncomfortable to use.  

Boll will shoot himself in the foot for a film like this, his reputation to be effects by the fact that, in a time irony was considered a free pass, he has not one but two blackface performances alongside various other deliberately offensive jokes which are exceptionally broad and, in those two cases, never making any sense anyway to why they are there. The first makes even less sense, closer to the school of parody filmmaking of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, behind films like Disaster Movie (2008) which were critically drubbed and they themselves falling out of the limelight as Boll did by the late 2010s, a parody of the Oscar nominee film Precious. Change the lead character for Blubberella (sic), and her abusive mother Willam Belli in blackface playing to a stereotyped voice whilst hurling abuse at the protagonist, and you get...well, something that recounting in memory a part of me thinks of wanting to sink my head into my hands, wondering why no one reconsidered this before putting it to film . Even as part of dream sequences, alongside the Adolf Hitler one, they do not really stand out aside from two really poorly considered attempts at humour.

Aside from this, which has never been flagged up since the film's release in 2011, also likely to haunt the production is the gay humour, which even in context of them likely to have been penned by Willam Belli, come off as a subtle blow with a sledgehammer to the back of the head, the jokes about the lead being fat and eating, Hollister which are worse knowing Hollister, trying her best, took this role because of the stigma against larger women, and the issue that, even beyond this, that Blubberella (sic) feels lacksidasical, as the umpteenth pop culture reference appears and hits like a snowball with a rock inside.

The production is striking for a comedy as, borrowing sets from another production, it was a very realistically depicted form of World War II Europe, probably one of Uwe Boll's highest budgeted films in terms of appearance. With the accurate costumes and props, the one joke I had initially rolled my eyes at but, in hindsight, I find funny shows what the film should have been. It is when, with the resistance fighters are introduced, walking through snow covered countryside as a unit, you notice that one of the grunts is an actor in a cumbersome yellow-orange fish costume. Maybe the soldier wanted to stand out, or there is a bipedal walking fish fighting Nazis, but they are encumbered on land as they flop over in the snow and are ignored as they lay there on manoeuvres. That - contrasting a serious war film with this surreal farce - was what Boll could do and clearly could. Instead, he is not subtle and more interested in provocation to a detriment.

Or give Clint Howard more scenes. Most of his lines are terrible, but the other Howard brother, even over director Ron Howard, is practically bullet proof when it comes to all the good will he gets as a figure. Whilst Boll himself awkwardly, and uncomfortably, adapts himself to this comedy and creates something miserable, Clint Howard as a mad German scientist can overcome even an onscreen caption, which everyone gets and are usually terrible alongside the chapter cards, that he was Michael Jackson's doctor by being so gleefully evil as he dissects a vampire whilst he is still alive. Whilst Michael Paré, as the main Nazi villain, is maniac and even turn to Marlon Brando mushmouth levels of acting, probably on purpose, Clint Howard has always been providing this type of role and becoming beloved regardless of the quality of the films he has been in. Everything in the film is, personally, terrible, with actors like Lindsay Hollister sadly left hanging, and myself being left with a bad taste so bad that, when the film ends earlier than I presumed and that the last fifteen to ten minutes are outtakes, I had to abandon it and run even as someone who has been a mad completist of endurance cinema.

It may seem an odd way to end this review, but aptly Clint Howard himself has the right way to describe Uwe Boll and the entire problem with this production. ”[I’ve] said, ‘Uwe, spend more time on the material...Certainly I wish he was a little better filmmaker. I wish I could hit a ball a little straighter. Life’s not perfect, but I like Uwe.”² I do not mind Uwe either, having even found in the past that when he made a film like Rampage (2009) he suddenly surprised people with a film many actually liked including me. Unfortunately, when there was such an apt opportunity for a funny World War II parody, and a way to have a very positive role for an actress of a larger weight, that faltered because Boll did not think through the material, made some egregious and offensive choices, and lost a good opportunity when it was for the taking.

In fact, reading upon the way the film was being made, as well as the fact Boll was planning a third film with the same sets, the completely serious and dark drama Auschwitz (2011) which dealt with a study of the concentration camp, there is a wonder if a lot of the film's haphazard and ill thought-out pacing was due to the ambition hitting a roadblock that shock it from being properly produced. The result instead proved, tragically, unbearable for me.

 

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1) House of the Dead, for its notoriety, had Boll use a turn-table rig that spun a camera around his cast as if they were rotating characters in a video game select screen. It was never seen after as, spinning at a high speed, such a rig would be too dangerous.

2) A fascinating article on the production here.

3) Specifically Postal 2 (2003) - where you had the ability to urinate on people, fight the former child actor Gary Coleman, and could place cats anus first onto one's guns as improvised silencers.

Welcome to Marwen (2018)

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Director: Robert Zemeckis

Screenplay: Robert Zemeckis and Caroline Thompson

Cast: Steve Carell as Mark Hogancamp / Cap'n Hogie; Falk Hentschel as Captain Topf / Louis; Matt O'Leary as Lieutenant Benz / Carl; Nikolai Witschl as Rudolph / Rudy; Patrick Roccas as Stefan / Stevie; Alexander Lowe as Werner / Vern; Eiza González as Carlala; Leslie Zemeckis as Suzette; Merritt Wever as Roberta; Gwendoline Christie as Anna; Stefanie von Pfetten as Wendy; Janelle Monáe as GI Julie; Leslie Mann as Nicol; Neil Jackson as Kurt / Major Meyer

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

In 2010, a documentary called Marwencol was made by Jeff Malmberg, one I saw many years later, taking a while to reach the UK (taking nearly the whole decade for a proper release let alone a mere DVD). It's subject Mark Hogancamp, after a violent beating by multiple men at once, lost most of his memories and found solace in creating a fake town in the midst of World War II with one male doll representing his idealised heroic self, many female dolls openly based off women in his real life the main populous of the town alongside Nazis as the villains. His tale is fascinating, and he became an acclaimed artist/photographer as his photographs of Marwencol, as the village was christened, became better known. As material for Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis though, considering the additional details of Hogancamp's life and how Zemeckis tries to convey it, makes Welcome to Marwen such an odd mainstream production to ever green light.

It's also Zemeckis after, weirdly, adapting the central material from documentary Man on Wire (2008), about Philippe Petit's legendary high wire stunt between the Twin Towers, into the fictional film The Walk with 3D scope. In general Zemeckis has had a curious history since the late nineties of pushing himself further into new technological potentials with cinema; hell, arguably Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) was too in combining two dimensional character with actors like Bob Hoskins. In-between this he's made dramas (Flight (2012), Allied (2016)) but also had his history with full motion captured characters with the likes of Beowulf (2007). In many ways this feels appropriate as, to depict the world of Marwencol (Marwen here at first), Zemeckis' first idea is to have his cast (including his real life wife and scholar Leslie Zemeckis) contrasted with versions of them with their faces digitally placed onto dolls. That's just skimming the top of what idiosyncratic (to say the least) decisions he took.

Openly, the idea of adapting Hogancamp's life into this film is problematic for myself, to condense a very difficult subject, but I came into the film with this moral standpoint on the artistic endeavour in mind, so took the decision to view this movie as a fictionalisation in its own world. As a result, the tears and awkward nagging strains of the film, under it's apparent and clichéd tale of overcoming one's burdens, makes it also one of the few legitimately interesting adaptations of a real figure I have seen. Most biopics or inspirations tales taken from real life, even those acclaimed, are usually simplistic and reduce the virtues of heroes to trivialities, hard work of creators to mere motages, or make material up. Welcome to Marwen has an issue that its subject is idiosyncratic (at least in the version depicted) that would raise questions without additional context.

He is a sympathetic figure, though there is an innate difference between the real man and his stand-in in Steve Carell which without the original source is a curious character to depict to say the least, someone who has built a WWII town where he is on man in a world of sexy dolls, figures openly based on real women even in his town that, whilst strong fighters, still wear fetishized clothes. That Hogancamp in real life, as told here, was violently beaten up (while very drunk) for confession his interest in wearing women's clothing does complicate this in a lot of ways, but this is still a character in fictional form, without the original context, that will elicit a lot of complicated reactions from viewers. He's sympathetic because he was discriminated against, because he was once an illustrator who lost most of his memories (as the real Mark Hogancamp) and reduced in this version to a disabled state, and because here he is depicted in Carell in having traumatic PTSD that is subconsciously drawn into Marwen(col), the Nazis obvious surrogates for the transgressors who hurt him. But still, this is still a curious world of fetishishtic female dolls and one man's boy's own adventures that occasionally burst through with stark death and with people in fictional Hogancamp's lives directly interacting with him outside of Marwen. It's not easy material and Zemeckis seems to obfuscate and load it to be much more difficult to digest, something as much to pin on co-writer Caroline Thompson, whose career between Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands (1990), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)) and films like Black Beauty (1994) really emphasises the schism on hand and that partially this was deliberate.

This was meant to be a big hit for Universal Pictures. Yet the sexual undercurrent, for a twelve certificate film in the UK (allowing twelve year olds to see it), is laced in so much complexity on the subject its incredibly adult, raising an obvious discrepancy between mainstream culture and art which transgresses this especially from outsiders like Mark Hogancamp. Mark Hogancamp's original work wasn't as exaggerated as this depiction, which in itself leads to a drastic change of tone as the production both adds more artificiality to the material and, with the hyper sexuality of plastic dolls, raises the undercurrent to a jarring level. Whether it's Roberta (Merritt Wever), the employee at the model store who clearly loves Hogancamp, who even comments about the absurd amount of times her doll has her shirt ripped off, or  that one of the dolls (played by Mrs. Zemeckis) is based on a porn star (allowing Leslie Zemeckis in none motion capture form to play her as a French maid bursting out the seams in a film-within-in-a-film) there's a lot of baggage about gaze and eroticism, not the stereotypical male gaze but a complicated form. That, "complicated", is an understatement in this fictionalised Hogancamp's gaze and how he has tried to cope with his trauma by interweaving women in his life through dolls but with an erotic side to it. Even without details from the original Marwencol, (no mention of catfights in the fictional version), this still means you have a muddy morality to deal with and, by accident and also deliberately prodded at in the script at the same time, any side able to be hit even in the same scene, you have to digest it whether you like it or not.

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The film thankfully doesn't try to hide this. It may seem odd how some of the women are more than happy to be figures in Marwen - something which Marwencol the documentary went out its way to deal with but interviewing them - but that entire section of the fictional Mark Hogancamp is where some of the most compelling aspects come to play, The film takes it time to depicts the steady friendly relationships of these women and how for Hogancamp now, life is merely getting by, frankly coping with buried trauma, whilst merely being able to talk to these women, completely empathetic to him and always wanting to know how their doll forms are, is as much them doing as much as they can to help him as it is part of being in a small town where everyone knows everyone, from his Russian caretaker Anna (Gwendoline Christie) to co-worker at a bar named Carlala (Eiza González).

Some aspects however will stick out with an uncomfortable jagged edge, that being the burgeoning relationship between Hogancamp and his new female neighbour Nicol (Leslie Mann) who he develops a crush on, but with a discomforting obsessive edge to it with her doll stand-in being his counterparts beloved, something which the film openly deals with. As much as this world has figures like G.I. Julie, a small role for singer Janelle Monáe, based on a former war veteran who helped Hogancamp overcome his initial physical trauma in hospital, this subplot with Nicol does actually get to the stage it feels like it's going to turn into a Todd Solondz film but suitable for twelve year olds, something utterly unexpected and jarring for this mainly light hearted film meant to be inspirational.

Knowing how and why Hogancamp's work came to be also makes Zemeckis' creative decisions with Marwencol itself even stranger but clearly deliberate. It's fascinating, actually praiseworthy, in spite of the divisiveness of his run of motion capture films how his decision to motion capture the dolls to the cast, and embrace the artificiality, is inventive and has a lot of additional weight to the various quirks on hand. Hogancamp's own world was unconventional already, not wanting to forget Deja Thoris (as played by Diane Kruger here), a blue haired witch who (in the documentary and here) eventually brings in a time machine and was the figure looming over Hogancamp's stand-in doll, here a crux to Hogancamp's anxieties and the weight pressing him down alongside the Nazis, here never actually dying truly as they are merely dolls who get up a while later. Zemeckis may sanitise some of the details, but he still stages the Nazis whipping the male doll in a fetished way, an icon photo that is recreated with as much a sick humour here, able to get away with a lot for this film because the action is entirely done with fake dolls but still containing these emotional splinters.

There are also moments which are entirely subjective in whether they are meant to be sincere or unintentionally more muddied. Hogancamp's speech of the "female essence" he finds in owning and wearing women's shoes does have an oddness to it, whilst later his comment about women being the strongest of all is undercut in an action scene involving a Delorean stand-in time machine and a doll getting a stiletto shoe to the neck.

Does Welcome to Marwen work? I'd say yes, if that I'd suggest the film only starts to slip in how hastily it tries to wrap everything up for the ending in spite of the psychological baggage making it impossible to, the story (in lieu to Hogancamp's real life alcoholism before his assault) about this version eventually having to overcome addiction. Aside from this, the tonal shifts and conflicts the viewer will have is a lot more credible in dealing with such a subject matter than trying to be morally sanitised or judgemental. It cannot hide the darkness of what Mark Hogancamp suffered through, and even the kitsch of the CGI doll village scenes, because it completely exaggerates what were a form of psychological diorama into an exaggerated boy's own adventure, has a strange effect particularly as a) the melding of real actors with these dolls is eerie if visually incredible, and b) the artificiality at hand even being part of its world is weird to say the least. What the real Mark Hogancamp created with his camera and his town was profound, whilst this is an odd work we see onscreen adding new layers even when it fucks up the tone badly at points, an expletive I feel if appropriate language to use as this film is still a mess, but a compelling and ambitious one, spoken with love rather than to offend anyone in this production (including Steve Carell who, bless him, actually gives a great performance) who tried their best.

Robert Zemeckis to his credit does his damndest in terms of high quality of Hollywood production and, if anything, to use it for a much more complex work even if sometimes unintentionally is a far better use of such production. I've found myself drawn more to these "divisive" works which usually are slaughtered critically in film publications or newspaper reviewers, though Welcome to Marwen has its defenders, as the moments which cause issue are usually the most interesting and more layered details. When a film is praised to the hilt there 's a danger, proven too many times, that it's just heading for obvious details which are copied, always evoking for myself an off-the-cuff comment made by a character in Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls about how easily manipulated viewers are when emotions and an audience's moral righteousness are exploited for drama. Here however, even if at times there are clear moments as here which do need to be questioned as creative decisions, there's a risk at hand that is so much more interesting, the moments of something tonally amiss getting an actual reaction from myself and forcing me to have to think of what exactly my opinion is. It at least offers more to talk about after a viewing.

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Waltz with Bashir (2008)

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Director: Ari Folman

Screenplay: Ari Folman

Cast: Ari Folman as Himself; Ori Sivan as Himself; Ronny Dayag as Himself; Shmuel Frenkel as Himself; Prof. Zahava Solomon as Herself; Ron Ben-Yishai as Himself; Dror Harazi as Himself; Mickey Leon as Boaz Rein-Buskila; Yehezkel Lazarov as Carmi Cna'an

Synopsis: Filmmaker Ari Folman is encouraged, after a discussion with a friend about a dream based on his military experience, to investigate his own time serving in the Israeli military during the 1982 Lebanon War, realising that he cannot remember a single memory from the period barring what he believes to be a dream. Waltz with Bashir, an animated documentation of his investigation - interviewing fellow soldiers from the war, psychologist Prof. Zahava Solomon and TV reporter Ron Ben-Yishai, whilst weaving in recreations of both events and dreams experiences - is the result of this search.

With Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman documented his own suppressed trauma, only able to remember a fantastical dream of his time serving in the military only to realise he witnessed the events surrounding a violent massacre, the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982. To document this, he created an animated work which intertwined documentary as he talks with friends, fellow soldiers from the same war, one news reporter who was in the war zone and a psychologist, alongside interpretations of both real events that took place and, the fantasies during and after. Reaching its ten year anniversary, Waltz with Bashir was one of the first world films I ever took interest in, and it still stands out because Folman used animation to vividly depict all the emotions bottled up in himself and others. Whilst this exact animation, which looks like rotoscope (the drawing over of real actor) but is actually carefully put together by other means, struggled with his follow-up The Congress (2013), it felt right here. Appropriate for its personal connection to what Folman allowed to be included in this film.

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The suppression of trauma, and how it grows to overcome this, is an inherently abstract notion which stands one foot between the conscious and subconscious, one which does not exist tangibly yet has incredible potential for physical harm as well as mental for a person who must deal with a traumatising event. It envelopes emotions, based on an experience that takes place, exists in the mind, and can lead to harm for someone. Folman depicts the genesis of his search from a friend recounting a dream of being tormented by a pack of dogs in the streets, the exact number of the guard dogs he had to kill during a night raid as a soldier. Folman's own reoccurring dream, naked in the ocean overlooking the Lebanese city of Beirut, is itself suppression of within the area of the infamous massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiite civilians. One documented in the final chapters as a retaliation by the Lebanese Christian Phalange for the assassination of Lebanese leader Bashir Gemayel, Folman one of the unwitting Israeli soldiers around the refugee camp where their allies committed the atrocity within. How the film builds to this discover is of the greatest weight, documenting the war and revealing how black and white morality was a non-entity when, in the position of Folman as a young man alongside other Israeli soldiers, they found themselves in a conflict that made little sense day by day when within the Lebanese conflict.

This becomes more pertinent as an Israeli film. Israel is a country with a very complex military and political history, especially with the controversies with their relationship with Palestine. One however which is oversimplified, one which from outsiders can become pure misguided anti-Semitism and does not reflect that Israelis' own views on their country's history being ambivalent and with regret (such as Israeli documentarian Avi Mograbi's Avenge but one of my two eyes (2005), which directly documents the moral issues of the Occupied Territories between Israeli-Palestinian areas). Waltz with Bashir is not the only film by an Israeli filmmaker who served during the 1982 Lebanese war to look back with critical reflection - Samuel Maoz's Lebanon (2009) depicts events entirely from within a tank - and Folman's film significantly denounces no one on any side barring the Lebanese Christian Phalange for the genocide.

From https://cps-static.rovicorp.com/2/Open/Sony%20Pictures/Waltz%20With%20Bashir/
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His and other Israeli soldiers or the Lebanese, through the recollections, are seen within usually chaotic. Israeli soldiers forced into horribly ambiguous scenarios between being killed even if that includes facing a child with a rocket launcher, the kind of scenarios which would traumatise any sane person, and is one of the recollections specifically brought up. Aware of civilian casualties, aware that the nobility of war is merely a presumption rarely with the clearly defined villains and heroes. Even if there were heroes or people within the war who merely wanted to serve their country, as Folman  and the other formers soldiers he interviews were, they still suffered through sights which few would ever want to relive. Even World War II, with clearly defined villains in the Nazis, was steeped in such horrifying mass death that would traumatise many. That reference is not incongruous to this review as, chillingly, one of the fellow Israelis Folman interviews speculates that his own guilt of having witnessed the Sabra and Shatila massacre had deeper subconscious agony, as a Jew, connecting back to when his own suffered the horror of one of the most inhumane atrocities to ever take place in human history with the Holocaust. There is something in particular, especially as its visualised in the animation, documenting how a patch of field was turned into an abattoir of inhumane mutilation which would have been painful for Folman to depict onscreen, especially as he goes as far as evoke the atrocities committed to Jews, a reference point which could be risky to include but feels like when Waltz with Bashir fully reveals its humanity against the horrors its being honest of.

This is more braver from him as, before he deals directly with his realisation of the genocide that took place, the first three quarters of the film has a very black sense of humour permeating throughout it. It's a humane film, but humanity if spiked with the blackest of humour. Willing to accept the general mindlessness of horror, that the Israeli forces were as likely spending hours sunbathing on Lebanese beaches mindlessly as much as they were being shot at. A punk song spits out how civilian casualties are likely over animated bombs being unable to hit a single enemy car but destroys the rest of the street. Commanders in their own forces spending time fast forwarding through porn films just to get through the best part. Folman briefly includes his moment returning back to his homeland before returning to the front, a sad look of disconnect where his break away from conflict is too short to heal him, merely showing an alienation especially from his own girlfriend.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1uYuAWDrwDk/maxresdefault.jpg

Production wise, Waltz with Bashir is stupendous. The moments of pure fantasy themselves are beautiful and eerie. The Congress, Folman's ambitious adaptation of a Stanisław Lem sci-fi novel, felt like a failure which due to the mainly fantastical nature of its narrative showed severe limitations in the same animation style. Bashir in contrast is a realistic document which can use its style to depict the realism, adding to talking head footage a greater weight as a result especially as he weaves in the little details surrounding meeting some of the people he interviewed. It also allows the sight of a giant nude woman carrying a soldier off a boat to safety to become profound in contrast among the other phantastical moments. Animation's virtues, that it can show both real life in incredible detail but also allows reality to be bend to whatever the animators can pull off with their skill, is to be found here. Particularly with a film this personal, it is accomplished perfectly.

The decision to end on real footage of the genocide's aftermath was seen as unnecessary for some film critics back when first being reviewed - Mark Kermode at least criticised the choice - but for me now it's necessary. The suddenly awakening realisation for Folman, when he realises the truth of his suppressed memories, is shown to us in the sudden shock of reality. Away from animation, away from the subconscious, the sudden awfulness of death as the footage does include sight of the bodies of real human beings who did not deserve to die. The clarity is awful, agonising for only a few minutes of a film that is entirely animation elsewhere. But Folman rightly decided to visualise the sudden awakening to what he had to accept and force himself to contemplate decades later as a filmmaker looking back on the incident, forcing us to see real news footage with the same bleak clarity.

From https://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/
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Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Expressionist/Introspective

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Personal Opinion:

A film which has always stayed with me since ten years or so ago. Even if Ari Folman never made another film, let alone one as good as his debut, he deserves canonisation because of what Waltz with Bashir achieved. Profound, moving, capable of humour whilst never losing its seriousness or the severity of the material, and something which provokes a deeply emotional response to its story. The most personal of projects.