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DaveWilliston
Reviews
Superheroes (2007)
Breathtaking and Heartbreaking
This (recently added to Netflix) film was like a stranger in a crowd to me. I don't recall having heard of it, yet it's now over a decade old. The brief, quirky preview which Netflix automatically played prompted my watch of it on a whim.
It is now one of my favourite movies.
Superheroes begins as it's peppered throughout, with vignettes of seemingly disconnected footage of a delicate and scarred resting body, three female-presenting improvisational dancers, and a tranquil, natural world, in raw but vibrant grain.
What this movie tackles is deeply nuanced and profound. Its main characters, Ben (Dash Mihok), a disabled young war veteran, and Nick (Spencer Treat Clark), an even younger aspiring filmmaker, meet and approach one another under tense and uncertain terms. What follows is a remarkably beautiful, tender, horrifying (in moments), authentic, and existential-crisis-inducing portrait of human pain and connection.
Both actors play their roles with vulnerability and full commitment. While Mihok's traumatized war veteran is much easier to read, Clark's subtly reflective and lonely documentarian can be read as forever pacing between more thoughts than even his overly talkative character can put together. While the movie won't necessarily stand up to "queer themes", it can absolutely be viewed through a queer lens.
It's actually thanks in part to a lack of overt queer themes that this movie's messages can resound as more universally human than specific to demographics, when viewers may already have to reach to relate to Mihok's predicament. The lonely souls theme is strong, as is that of the difficulties of forming adult friendships. While some who have certain strong feelings about politics (war, specifically) may feel discrete moments of the film have an "agenda", this really isn't what the movie is trying to talk about. A broken and stranded person is the point, and the war veteran route is an effective analogue.
The psychology of the film is kept to a minimum, and its heart is what ends up on bare display. I can appreciate how some may feel Clark's character is bumbling, and amplifies some of the film's clumsier setups, but I believe this is intentional. This is not in any way meant to feel like a Hollywood movie, nor is it even supposed to feel like a movie. The presence of Nick's camera in most scenes subverts the very idea of this being "a film", with careful choices made whenever he chooses to let go of the device.
Superheroes is meant to be taken as a depiction of real complex suffering and love, that exists all around us, and runs wild when we don't come close to care for it. These aren't meant to be molded characters, the narrative isn't meant to follow a favoured formula, and the viewer isn't meant to have a fortune cookie answer to how it is they ought to feel about what they just witnessed. If you're looking for an easy movie with easy answers, keep looking. This movie is a treasure for those who aren't afraid to feel both horrible and hopeful for fragile humanity.
Hosts (2020)
An Unusual and Bewildering Piece of Human Interest
First off, this is probably not a film for people who watch horror movies just to be scared and see movie victims die. It spends a lot of time in both dialogue and quiet depiction of who many of its characters are as ordinary people.
Very quickly, I was unnerved by how sincere many characters were coming across in what felt like candid camera moments of relationship and idiosyncrasy... because I knew some of them would die in terrible ways.
A couple of the most shocking kills (and they are brutal and graphic) are layered with a consideration of whether or not our individuality even matters in a confrontation of something much more singularly-motivated as retribution.
The pacing is reminiscent of High Tension (2003) in how it presents you with imposing portions of experience and invites you to deeply sit into associated feelings. Again, this may not be a good film for people with ADHD or who want things to just keep moving along.
From the production company's own website: "Telling stories is what makes us human. It is how we define ourselves, our culture and our aspirations.
We take a narrative-first, character driven approach, producing exciting new content to engage and delight audiences across the globe."
No spoilers, I'll say, at the end of the film, I was left with a handful of questions. Some of those were about the plot and its implications. Some of those were about how I felt about some of the deaths and developments of the story (I kinda' wanna' just watch it again)... so I'd say the filmmakers were successful in their aim.
X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019)
Popular To Hate, But I Don't
What I feel most people are missing is that more mature choices were made for the material this time around. Character was weighted over action. Even the action was more nuanced. And it required a bit of patience to be able to connect a few of the dots.
With the characters, there were LITTLE moments everywhere... and it disappoints me that so many fans of action or superhero movies don't seem to have the sophistication to be able to spot body language, facial expressions, delicateness, and shaking.
Jean was shown to be bullied in the previous movie, afraid of herself and relating to Logan more intimately than anyone else. That groundwork is developed more, with a caution that demonstrates fragility. From the encounter in space, more layers of emotion are piled on her... leading to the breaking point. People who are saying she's two-dimensional or just acts out of anger are not paying close enough attention.
Raven is a balanced believable leader, and has a fantastic moment with Charles, giving a strong speech to him. So, people hung up on where her story arc goes are again focussing away from some nuanced storytelling.
The movie is not without flaws. That it was reshot extensively and rewritten on the fly is palpable. However, the heavy darkness of both the narrative and the visuals is punctuated with moments in which each character shines (even if only briefly). It reminded me of the 90s' animated series, and felt like an extended live-action episode of that (for better and worse). It just seemed like it was popular to hate on, and so many people did. But I love it. The very ending itself, not so much... but, the movie as a whole, for sure.