Movie: Silk
Director: Chao-Bin Su
Writer: Chao-Bin Su
Cast: Chen Chang, Yosuke Eguchi, Kuan-Po Chen, Kar Yan Lam, Barbie Hsu, Bo-lin Chen, Chun-Ning Chang, Fang Wan,
I can honestly say that this is the first horror movie I’ve seen using fractals as the main plot device.
A modestly-budgeted Taiwanese film, Silk follows a team of researchers using a Menger Sponge in an attempt to trap a ghost, ostensibly as part of government-funded anti-gravity research. More specifically, they plan to capture the ghost of a child trapped in a single room in a Taipei tenement, repeating the same actions over and over again. Hashimoto (Yosuke Eguchi) is the crippled leader of the team with an ulterior motive, while Tung (Chen Chang, the desert bandit love interest from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is the “man of action” brought in because of his skills at keen observation and lip-reading. Naturally, as the research progresses, complications ensue. For one thing, the ghost really doesn’t like people looking at him, and he can reach into their chests and stop their hearts…
This harks back to a number of early SF works on scientific methods for capturing ghosts or the soul. The Menger Sponge functions as a sort of universal plot device: because of its ability to store different wavelengths of energy, not only does Hashimoto intend to use it as a ghost storage jar, but they also use special Menger Sponge film to photograph the ghost, Menger Sponge eye-spray to see the ghost, coat the walls of the room to prevent the ghost from escaping, etc. It has just enough of a veneer of plausibility to engage your sense of disbelief, and is certainly more plausible than the magic icky fluid in District 9.
This is a very solid, well-paced ghost story with some intellectual novelty, albeit one that owes a number of stylistic elements to recent Japanese horror movies like Ringu and Ju-On. While modestly budgeted, it doesn’t come across as cheap, and the special effects are simple but effective. (The only place where they fail is in the CGI for an SUV crash, which looks like it could have been rendered in the latest Grand Theft Auto. Even so, it’s still miles above the digital bloodshed in Ugandan action films.) Best of all, they’ve eschewed all the boo-shock scares that infest modern horror films in favor of a certain amount of depth and subtlety.
The DVD contains deleted scenes and outtakes that were properly excised. However, do watch the director’s original ending, which is considerably darker, more effective, and more appropriate than the one in the film.
Here’s a trailer:
Like all fractals, Menger Sponges engender a certain geeky fascination, so I’ve found a couple of videos that show various Menger Sponge animations and recursions.
Saturday night the SDC crowd watched Black Dynamite for our usual after-dinner movie, and it’s a hoot-and-a-half. A loving and extremely well-crafted satire of 70s Blaxpotation films, Black Dynamite manages to get just about everything pitch-perfect in an ultra-violent, ultra-improbable tale set in a world of big Cadillacs, big guns, and big Afros. Hats off to writer and star Michael Jai White for penning a constantly-entertaining parody where the laughs rarely flag, and also for having a totally bad-ass theme song play every time he enters a room.
The really amazing thing is that, for all the intentionally included boom-mikes, deliberate continuity errors, and obviously fake stunt doubles, the production quality is actually much higher on Black Dynamite than the real Blaxplotation films that inspired it. In particular, White is far better at kung fu than any black star was in the 70s.
In short, there hasn’t been such an awesome send-up of a movie genre since Hot Fuzz (which is still in a league all its own). This came and went so quickly that there’s a good chance you never heard of it, but it’s well worth seeking out.
So Howard Waldrop and I reviewed Iron Man 2 over at Locus Online. (Executive Summary for the tl;dr crowd: If you liked the first one, you’ll like the second one.) But one point I touch on, albeit briefly, is the question of just how far you’re willing to embrace the looser standards of scientific plausibility used in comic books in a movie that is (technically, ostensibly) science fiction. And frequently “looser” means “non-existent.” (Read the review for thoughts on Tony Stark’s DIY basement particle accelerator.)
The ground-rule of just about any genre work, and certainly speculative fiction, is internal consistency, i.e., the story must play by the rules, and make sense according to, the work’s own internal frame of reference. If it’s a work of science fiction, you can’t just have someone breath in vacuum just because it’s convenient for your plot, you have to provide some sort of mechanism by which they breathe so as not to violate the contract with the reader that the internal consistency requirements of science fiction will be maintained.
In most superhero comics (warning: unlike Howard, I haven’t read every damn comic in the world in my youth, so pardon me if my gross generalizations are gross and general), the scientific plausibility starts out a bit more loosely defined than in your average SF (or fantasy, or horror) story, and gets looser still as time goes on and our hero goes up against an ever-expanding array of villains with ever-more exotic powers. (Never mind the ever-expanding implausibility of that many super-powered individuals running around, the vast majority of whom seem to prefer fighting crime or each other rather than getting immensely rich or setting up their own countries.)
So one superhero is implausible enough. But then you get to something like the Marvelverse, where every possible combination of overpowered individual (Mutants! Aliens! Gods! Demons!) possessing every possible superpower (Magic! Time-travel! Teleportation! Mind-reading! Super-strength! Super-healing! Super-speed!) exist cheek-by-jowl with each other, then where are you allowed to draw the line on plausibility? “I can buy a super-smart billionaire genius building a tiny fusion reactor out of scrap, but living in the same world as a Norse god? Whoa, stop the ride, I have to step off.”
This is why the most successful of the modern comic-book adaptations (Iron Man and Spider-Man both come to mind) work so hard to establish their protagonist’s connection to every-day life (even if, in Tony Stark’s case, that life is pretty freaking rarefied), because without that grounding, viewers are hard-pressed to buy the comic book elements that would seem patently absurd in a realistic movie or novel. It’s also why comic book universes tend to have a giant retcon every now and then to trim the most unlikely branches off that universe (Crisis on Infinite Earths, anyone?).
Granted, the Hollywood standards of plausibility in the average science fiction film, and the average action film (the two genres superhero films drink most deeply from) has been steadily slipping, to the extent they were ever present at all. (Though I should point out that I’m excluding deliberately insane, over the top films like Crank 2 that make no effort to be realistic.) But the race for ever-more-insane set pieces to sate ever-more-jaded tastes must eventually reach the point of diminishing returns; if everything is possible, then nothing is interesting. Which is why superheroes are driven as much by their constraints as by their powers.
Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne are the most interesting subjects for movies because they have no traditional superpowers, owing their status to supreme intelligence, personal training, technological prowess and unlimited bank accounts. By contrast, Superman is the least interesting superhero, being able to do essentially anything he wants. And the Christopher Reeve Superman where he goes back in time (because, you know, Superman simply wasn’t powerful enough already) brings up the question: Why do we care whether Superman wins or loses, since he can always go back in time whenever he wants to undo the outcome?
By these standards, a tiny fusion reactor built out of scrap only slightly strains credibility, while a prism that bends particle beams (rather than light) gets fundamental physics so fundamentally wrong that it shatters it. I also think that you have to take a movie’s basic premise as a given. Now, I find it perfectly acceptable to draw your own line of personal disbelief at, or well before, miniature fusion reactors. But if so, why would you see anyIron Man movie in the first place?
Note: The Locus site is suffering from the side effects of switching to Word Press as their blog engine, so the review may not be available, or the have the link for it show up on the front page, at any given moment.
And here’s a list of the top 100 films of the 1990s compiled by something called “the International Cinephile Society.” Heavy on art house, light on crowd-pleasers (with some odd exceptions, like Starship Troopers). But it’s hard to take any list seriously that includes Julie Taymor’s overwrought Titus (as a director, Julie Taymor is an out-of-control set designer) and omits The Shawshank Redemption. (You can certainly make a good argument that it’s not the greatest film ever made, but it strains credibility to say it’s not even one of the 100 best films of the 1990s.) Also, much as I like Ed Wood, it’s hard to argue that it’s a better film than Schindler’s List.
Other puzzling omissions:
Fresh, one of the most underrated films of the 1990s.
Perhaps you’ve heard or read me mention how Exterminator City is the worst film ever made. (The preceding sentence has an Amazon link to the DVD, but you should not buy or watch Exterminator City. Trust me.)
But now that I’ve been hearing about it, could After Last Season actually be worse? Well, let’s take a look at the official trailer, shall we?
Wow. 93 minutes of footage to chose from, and that’s what they thought would entice people into theaters? “C’mon, honey, we have to see this! It has people talking about directions, a fake MRI scanner covered in paper, and bad CGI circa 1985! What are we waiting for?’
OK, maybe they just didn’t know how to make a trailer. Maybe some movie reviewers have found it an undiscovered gem.
Maybe not.
“This isn’t just the worst film of the year, this is the worst theatrically released film of the decade” raves Ain’t It Cool News’ movie critic Massawyrm. “I will even go so far as to say that it is the worst theatrically distributed film of the modern era. Terrible lighting and sound is just the beginning of this fetid, painful, epic wonderland of suck. A truly unbelievable experience. It’s almost adorable how hard they try to convince you that an unfinished basement, sheets, cardboard and printer paper is a medical facility of any value. It’s kind of like a kid wearing a towel and a bucket trying to convince you he’s a knight. If you watch this, and I know some of you will, do not, I repeat, do not watch it alone. Get friends. You’ll need them when the movie slips into screensaver mode. And beer. Lots of beer. Trust me. Sober is no way to experience After Last Season.”
“After Last Season is as bad as it looks,” opines Hammer To Nails’ David Lowry, “but its badness is of such a quizzical sort that it transcends mere incompetence. It is formally engaging, because it is so formally incorrect. It is not at all unlike its trailer, in that it primarily consists of a series of choices that seem to have been made entirely arbitrarily, in service of a plot that is buried in non sequitur. To watch the film is to take in the vision of someone with a severe case of disconnection: what is most consistently striking about the film is that the gap between conception and realization is irreparably wide. The most direct example (even moreso than the cardboard MRI scanner) occurs when a character reads a story in the newspaper – and that newspaper is represented by a piece of 8 1/2 x 11 paper, fresh from the inkjet printer, upon which has been printed the words ‘Morning News.’”
“From a technical standpoint, After Last Season is an abysmal entry,” says Picture Show Pundits’ Nate Zoebl. “It fails not just because of its lack of funds but it fails because [Director Mark] Region lacks any filmmaking ability whatsoever. Sure, apparently the man was able to pose actors, have them recite lines, and keep the cameras running, but I expect more from my movies than the same criteria I have for family vacation videos. Region’s directorial style is, ostensibly, to have no discernible visual sensibility at all. Actors will routinely be cut out from the camera frame or the spatial relations will be completely out of whack, allowing for tremendous space above heads or showing the actor’s complete body except the upper half of the face. Characters will be bunched in one tiny section of the screen, or Region will suddenly cut back and forth between two different shots that conflict from a geographic standpoint; they don’t visually match up. There isn’t a single shot anywhere in After Last Season that couldn’t have been credited to a tripod for complete creative inspiration….the movie is technically inept on every level of filmmaking with a bad script, bad actors, bad pacing, bad direction, bad sets, bad sound coverage, bad ‘special effects,’ and really bad editing. If Region was dreaming of creating a midnight-movie sensation like The Room then he missed the mark. This movie isn’t any fun whatsoever to watch because there’s not enough going on to laugh at. With The Room, every scene had like eight things wrong with it; that film was a 1000 brushstrokes of bad. With After Last Season, it’s the same forehead-smacking flaws repeated ad nausium. There’s no derisive joy to be had here, folks.”
And my favorite theory about the movie, from Nick Nobel at Your Stupid Minds: “My theory is that Mark Region was in group therapy for a mild social or psychological disorder. As part of his treatment, one assignment involved a creative writing project dealing with his disorder in some way. Region wrote a short screenplay and, compared to the others, it wasn’t too shabby. Ego boosted, he expanded it into a feature and spent the next 10 years hounding friends and family for money to produce it….The way the lines are written, again, feels like someone with a social disorder imitating how normal people interact. I’m sure that was part of the assignment as well.”
Need one final bit of evidence? On the film’s official site, the first favorable quote is from a random Amazon customer review, while second is from a random IMDB user review. (Danger, Will Robinson!)
For the record, for those of you I regularly view movies with (you know who you are), do not obtain this movie and inflict it on me. After Exterminator City, I’ve come to realize there are limits to how bad a film I’m willing to sit through. After Last Season sounds like it could very well exceed those limits.
On the other hand, reading about it did accomplish one thing: I think I may now be ready to see The Room…
And just for the sake of reference, here’s the robot swordfight scene from Exterminator City. Remember: This is the best scene in the entire movie.
