The header image is from Ne Zha 2, which came out a few weeks ago and is now the highest grossing non-English language movie ever. (It's the seventh highest period.) The movie is not bad. It's certainly better than the first Ne Zha. I don't have that much to say about it, and you've definitely seen similar movies before. But it's worth seeing.
What I find interesting about it is how similar it is to the other movies that made $2 billion. Its scale and spectacle put it in the same camp as the Avatar movies. What I wonder now, though, is if in ten years the list of highest-grossing movies will be dominated by movies like Ne Zha 2, mass market movies made for an audience of over a billion people. I'd like to see if it's the audience or the formula that made the difference.
A Touch of Sin (2013)
This film gave me a new appreciation for filmmakers who make similar films over and over again. Jia Zhangke isn't such a filmmaker, but the Zhao Tao character in this film could have been the one from Jia's Ash is Purest White, had she taken a different path in life. You can see a filmmaker's desire to perfect things, or to speculate about how similar things might go differently.
This is a film in four episodes, each about a different person; for three of them, it's about how different the world looks through their eyes when they get their hands on a weapon. The fourth character is a person who needs to see a new angle on the world, but can't. The characters include people who have been deeply wronged, people who make tragic mistakes, and one person who is simply, amorally thrilled by anonymity and the lethal power of a gun.
Apparently this is not one of Jia's more beloved films, but I loved it. More than anything it seemed like a follow-up to the final shot of his Platform, one of the best films I've ever seen. It's about the world Platform leaves us with, the erratic lashing out of the parts of humanity left behind.
Felidae (1994)
A truly bizarre film. A domestic cat and some of his stray friends try to solve a series of grisly murders. In the process, he discovers a cat suicide cult and a cat conspiracy involving evil human scientists, eugenics, and the ancient ancestors of modern cats. The main cat has prophetic nightmares of cat hell opening up and threatening to immerse him in the legions of the dead. The animation in these scenes is very impressive.
It imitates film noir: familiar character archetypes show up, and the main character maintains his pragmatic detective outlook even when he encounters the film's more shocking and surreal horrors. A friend of mine pointed out that one scene, where the cats sit in a sink and eat fish, looks like two men sitting at a bar like you'd see in a proper urban noir. But really it's a mix of genres, combined to sell you on the idea that past cruelties have created a moral rot eating away the foundations of the world--and to show you how this looks to a bunch of cartoon cats.
Nosferatu (2024)
In Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages of a Virgin's Diary, the foreignness and sexuality of the vampire become explicit instead of implicit; dialogue and action are implicit instead of explicit. Like in many silent films, it shows people talking without sound and only occasionally provides certain lines of dialogue in intertitles, leaving you to infer the rest of the conversation. Action scenes are staged as ballet dances, so the literal actions of the characters are implied.
Maddin's explanation was that the novel was boring, but the subtext was interesting. But we all have gone over the subtext of the Dracula/Nosferatu story multiple times already; Dracula: Pages of a Virgin's Diary's move is to alter the delivery, both to incorporate devices Maddin actually liked where before it was boring and to see how whatever is enticing about the subtext plays if you turn it into surfaces. Eggers's Nosferatu is definitely pushing the subtext, but he has not changed the mode of delivery very much. He has taken a very narrow approach to the novel and the eccentricities of the 1922 film, which means he is still working with extended--and I do mean extended--metaphor, so the way he wants to get at the subtext lands us with Interstellar-level lines like "I am an appetite!"
The same subtext was present in the 1922 film, but so were other things not incorporated here, things you could characterize as "subtextual" but which were also intuitive. That film was an attempt to remind a species which has gotten a little too comfortable at the top of the food chain what it's like to be a prey animal. The 1922 Orlok is much scarier. He looks a little goofy if you look at him longer than a couple seconds. But the very first time you see him in your life, there is a split second where some prehistoric alarm goes off deep inside your mind. He's the face you don't want to see in the dark. I did not get that with the 2024 Orlok.
Red Rooms (2023)
This is a film about a person with morbid interests, for people with morbid interests. You can easily find YouTube channels devoted to explaining the absolute worst things you can find on the internet. Some of these channels are exploitative or just edgy. But some are managed by people who seem genuinely offended by the content they cover. Exactly why they do what they do is hard to understand, on its face. This movie is about a similar kind of person, except her reasons for being like this are even more inscrutable than the YouTubers. This is a horror film, but we never see the horrible things we are told exist on the dark web. Instead, we get the horror of being seen by what is on the other side, of encountering it in real life.
There has been some debate about what the main character's final action in the film means. Some people think it's a Taxi Driver-style delusion. Others think it's a pulled punch. But there is a more interesting option: it's showing us a new kind of person, someone we need to become to face the 21st century. Tech savvy, fiercely protective of our privacy, unafraid of opinion and staring into the abyss--but, somehow, benevolent.
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