Night of the Comet

Regina: No, I didn't make it with him last night. Why you so weirded out?
Samantha: Alright Reg, why should I be weirded out? My sister, who swiped every guy I ever had my eye on, has now swiped the last guy in the whole freaked-out world.

Hector (Robert Beltran, Raoul from Eating Raoul), the last guy in the whole freaked-out world

Night of the Comet is a teenage fever dream from 1984. A fun Saturday afternoon kind of movie. Its ingredients are: teenagers, neon, pop music, montages, shopping malls, the apocalypse, comets, government conspiracies, bad guys, Mary Woronov, light social commentary, and some other things.

It's a high-concept movie light on its feet. An update of Cold War era sci-fi movies that exist purely in an imagination.

It's a solid movie to watch with a group of friends in a shopping mall or multiplex across from a shopping mall. It gives moments to chat about. Some lines you'd maybe want to quote.

Willy: I'm not crazy, I just don't give a fuck.

I enjoy movies like this because they seem honest about their agenda to entertain, and the main theme is the joy of cinema. Everything feels good and nothing hurts. Quite charming.

It's the story of a neon-kissed apocalypse in Los Angeles and it happens before your eyes, there on the screen, and the laws of reality are damned by the truth of a cinema that makes shit happen.

This movie could have been even crazier and cared even less about reality. It's weird that Hector checks on his family in San Diego -- the journey addresses the issue of apocalyptic loss and grief, without dealing or growing. In a movie like this, maybe it's best not to address emotional issues at all. Strikes me as kind of insincere and cheap, maybe. I'm not sure.

When Hector visits his mother's house a child mutant comet zombie chases after him, and Hector says something like "it's a good thing I like kids", while he runs out of the house (although he has a gun), and that poses the universally relatable dilemma of anguish and its battle with the potential to shoot a mutant comet zombie that was once a child. Come to think of it, I like the San Diego sequence, and also I was sort of touched by another narrative strand concerning the unfaltering principles of scientist Audrey (Mary Woronov!).  She chooses self-sacrifice over self-preserverence, because the latter would come at the cost of others. Cool. Woronov, cool to the core.

Darkness and light, right. Does Night of the Comet give juices to the audience -- juicy questions about personal recovery and possibility? It doesn't have the attention or patience to work these things out, sure, but they're not meant to be worked on, that's not the design. Anyway, we're the architects of our thoughts and can continue the conversation for ourselves.

If you can buy that, you're fine. I don't think the questions are captivating -- yeah, the apocalypse would be lonely, yeah, it'd be tough to shoot a thing that was once a child, yeah, stealing life from others is a shitty thing to do. Easy questions, easy answers. And the emotional beats are too light to be meaningful. I think it burns fuel in these moments. One should be allowed to forget the troubles of reality when one enters the imagination.

Still, pretty cool. Nice job everyone.

Time of the Wolf

A captivating aspect of Michael Haneke's art comes from his reluctance to offer audiences answers and solutions, and the way this works within his films to embolden instances of mistrust, uncertainty, fear, and violence. He keeps hidden the interior world of antagonists (Funny Games, Code Unknown), who can also be self-harming protagonists (The Piano Teacher, Benny's Video, The Seventh Continent), and/or the identity of antagonists (Caché, White Ribbon), to motivate us, with a high degree of success, toward self-analysis, and to omit shortcuts for reducing the film to a dramatic presentation.

Time of the Wolf is a curious film because the fact that a catastrophe occurred before the film began is undeniable, as is its secondary importance to the aftermath. The catastrophe's nature is neither investigated nor explained in order to fix the film in a world of total uncertainty. This is how it differs from other Haneke films, which are usually about disruptive or injurious acts puncturing otherwise normal existences. In this one, massive uncertainty is the only narrative certainty.

Although this one giant mystery seems to engulf tinier, more specific mysteries present in many of Haneke's other films, it also emphasizes Haneke's perennial theme: the grand mystery of the human spirit. When people group together in Time of the Wolf, so too do their flaws accumulate, and Haneke illustrates through his blossoming narrative the exponential complexities of justice and fairness. Here the reasons behind characters' actions are often painfully clear, motivated by ideas about self-preservation, and used to investigate protean tolls of human imperfection, the way each person carries baggage of selfishness, pride, greed, and other obstructions of communal bliss. Questions are raised about mankind's ability to function in harmony.

It's significant that would-be hero figures embody conflicting characteristics as well. The mother's (Isabelle Huppert) timorous frailty impedes her maternal goals, Koslowski's (Olivier Gourmet) leadership is based on rules he alone makes and enforces, and the leaders of the group who join later deflect interpersonal retributions for the sake of protecting the group as a whole. And ultimately, don't each of them rest their priorities on foundations of opportunity for personal, more than communal, self-preservation? This suggests that people cannot live alone, and they cannot live together.

The sentiment echoes from the movie's first scene. Recall it now: one family encounters another in a village house and a gun is fired.

Recall, from the same first scene, the screaming baby in the mother's hands. Remember their later (but not so much later) arrival at the train station. What happened to the provisions and car they stole? And where has the baby gone?

In the final scene the young boy is held in the arms of the nightwatchman who stopped him from throwing himself naked on the fire by telling him hopeful wishes about a man in a sports car arriving to announce that everything bad is over, everything is fine now. He feeds the boy wishes to encourage him, but we know they're lies, the boy must know they're lies, and the final, horrible mystery seems to be: why keep going? Why not throw ourselves in the fire? It must be to follow a great lie.

That then is the reason to respect and admire Haneke, because although he knows we each carry within ourselves catastrophes and raging fire resolutions, he refuses to lie to keep us from them, and asks that we encounter the ugly places in ourselves, so what we may return to the world with newfound awareness. And hopefully some kind of strength to endure.

The Hole.

What's alluring (what's revolting?) about romantic comedies is their emphasis on possibility and fate, chance occurrence, and romantic destiny; the films run on dream currents, idealistic wiring; they propose the existence of a tender, passionate architect who manages the lives of romantic hopefuls, and constructs future events that bring together compatible and needy lovers. Their need is the desire for something beyond the quotidian, separate from the individual self and external to the standard. Their narratives seek out the special, intangible dimensions of love.

Tsai Ming-Liang's The Hole is titled after this need, and covers basically the trajectory of a romantic comedy. It begins with a television reporter commenting on the outbreak of an epidemic that transforms people into scurrying cockroach-like scavengers of darkness and solitude; and from this announcement (over white text credits on a black screen), the film opens onto the apartment of Hsiao Kang. Kang is the Typical Romantic Lead: the disorganized bachelor riddled with bad habits and single-male tendencies. We first see him asleep on a couch late-morning, a mess in front of him, clothed in tight white underwear. He opens the door, dressed as such, for a plumber. The plumber, in this movie, is destiny incarnate.

The literal hole the plumber leaves in Kang's floor is the first visual motif established in the film. Much of the romantic development relies on the audience interpreting these visual motifs and applying them, projecting them, onto the protagonists. This is Ming-Liang's forte as a filmmaker, his visual starkness and accompanying acumen over the domain of symbolism. I don't know if anyone has counted the total number of spoken lines in his first eight films, but hyperbolically I imagine the number is something like 20-25. He's a true filmmaker: he builds and sorts his characters with visual cues and photographic tension.

The woman and Kang are indifferent to the Taiwanese pandemic, and though I'm not knowledgeable about the specific value of this metaphor to the Taiwanese or its exclusive properties within the culture, the idea is nevertheless universal: she and Kang refuse to become a part of the sickness, or to even invest fear in the sickness. Their lives are free of the prevailing disease, and this is why they will stay in their apartments, and this is what will allow their love to grow.

Part of the genius, absolute genius, of the film is this encompassing doomsday metaphor. It casts deep shadows over the love affair, and somehow nears a trueness absent from most romantic comedies, which are often filled with similarly lovable characters, often falling in love themselves (reminder: I'd like to write a 100 relationship romantic comedy. It'd be a cinch. One true one? Jeeesus that's tough). The Hole seems to say that a love affair will work not because of the rest of the world but in spite of the rest of the world. It paints the treasure of love as truly unique and truly nourishing.


Love approaches from the distance, and Ming-Liang portrays the ascending romance through a series of endearing musical sequences (Ming-Liang pays direct tribute to the songs of Grace Chang at the end of the film). These daydream music numbers interrupt the ceaselessly rain-drenched lives of the protagonists; they're staged within the apartment complex the film is set. Gorgeous people in beautiful clothes under ravishing light and entrancing choreography dance and sing amid concrete stair cases, upper-level banisters, and mostly unadorned environments. Again the point: they are their escape. Within themselves they can escape where they are, and who they are environmentally forced to be. This is a key difference between The Hole and some other romantic comedies: no one in the film is forced to become another person in order to obtain the person they love. The collision of chance and romance is a matter of patience, obstinacy, and honesty.

Kang widens the hole in the ground; she dreams beneath him. The bizarre, the dreary, and the ordinary blend with romantic energy. Kang pisses in a sink, the woman has a dream telephone conversation with Kang while rubbing t.p. over her body: somehow these things add up, somehow Ming-Liang makes them really count. He imbues not just the everyday with the idea of love, but even the tragic, even the end-of-the-world atmosphere.

I won't tell you how it ends. I'll tell you what it meant to me: it meant so much. It's common for a romantic comedy to make you love certain ideas, and it's very rare for a romantic comedy to make you fall for the movie itself. The film has Eisenstein's visual specificity, Wai's romantic intensity, and a modern filmmaker's sense of the everyday. Film as dreamweaving? Tsai Ming-Liang's The Hole. A woman in a white-colored air-filtering mask should never mean the same again.

Teenage Caveman.

Teenage Caveman is surprisingly another Larry Clark film in which teenagers take drugs and have sex with one another. In fact, Teenage Caveman is basically Kids in a sci-fi context, genetic mutations substituting for AIDS, a bio-tech complex instead of a random apartment, and rebel teenage outcasts from a small, post-apocalypse Seattle-based primitive-like culture as an allegory for bored, restless, fearless NYC kids. I admit the dramatic impact of Kids is far greater, specifically the now-famous AIDS revelation, but because there's nothing really beyond AIDS, and because Clark wasn't ready to up his cinematic sexual perverseness until Ken Park, exploding chest cavities work fine intermittently.

Because when you fuck in Teenage Cavemen there's a chance - a percentage - that your fucking will lead to your body twisting inward and all your viscera exploding outward. Not to mention the problem of an abundance of liquor (apparently stored for one-hundred+ years) and cocaine (one of the mutants synthesizes his own supply of cocaine). I don't know if I'm being straight faced here or not. I don't know if I really liked or appreciated this film or not. I know I liked it for a while, when I was simply processing everything I'm describing here. The problem is there's this long stretch after the introduction of these elements (and the actualization that not only is it a Larry Clark directed mutant-teenager film, but it's obviously a Larry Clark directed mutant film), and I mean after the group bath scene, the drug taking scene, the orgy scene, and the exploding body scene, after all that, in which you're meant to take the film and its plot and characters seriously. The film is front-heavy, save for the introduction of the monster at the end, which was about a five minute sequence.

As a remake of a Corman directed/Arkoff produced original, I admire the accomplishments of the film. It has a great degree of absurdity packed into a semi-coherent story (hell, the movie makes three times more sense than the other film I watched in the same day, Antoine Fuqua's Shooter), the dialogue is alright, there's narrative traction, and the characters weirdly, if illogically, develop. All the core ingredients are present.