101 in 1001 - Watch 20 films: Selkies, Sexuality, and Synthetic Intelligence

As I mentioned a few posts ago, one of the goals on my 101 in 1001 list is:

• 020. Watch 21 films I haven't seen before.

Last time, I opted for a modern Japanese drama-comedy about a cellist turned funeral director, a 1980's US fantasy animation with an evil psychokinetic ice magician, and a 1920's Russian silent docu-drama about the October Revolution of 1917. So, continuing on with the theme of  "films that are nothing alike" - variety is good! - here are the next three.

Title: Song of the Sea (2014)

Director: Tomm Moore

Starring: David Rawle; Lucy O'Connell; Brendan Gleeson; Lisa Hannigan; Fionnula Flanagan

Cert: PG

Genre: Animation, fantasy, adventure, drama, family

Language: English (Gaeilge in song)

Plot: After the death of their mother, Ben, a young Irish boy, and his younger sister Saoirse, a selkie, go on a quest to free the fairies and save the spirit world, as well as their family in the process.

Best Bit: All of the Irish mythology included. Not only the selkies - humans able to transform into seals - but also fairies, Mac Lir (it means "son of the sea" and is probably loosely based around Manannán mac Lir, whose father is a sea god in myth), Macha (the name of an ancient Irish goddess) and the general merging of magical and human realms. Also, the great care taken with everything, from the gorgeous backgrounds, to the storytelling, to the names carefully chosen for each character, really makes this film wonderful. (If you'd like to read more about that, there's already a great explanation of it here).

Worst Bit: The animation style of the humanoid characters in the film was not to my taste, but that's just a personal preference. Also, I didn't like the way that Ben's father put so much importance and on his sister and somewhat neglected him, even though Ben was suffering from his mother's death too. However, it did make sense within the context of the plot, and I understand why the story was done that way. Other than that, sometimes Ben's running around exclaiming: "woo!" when he was having adventurous times became a little tiresome. I realise that it was probably put in to keep the younger audiences entertained, but, I'm a grumpy old person with no children, haha.

Overall: It wasn't a film I had originally intended to see, but someone asked me if I wanted to watch it with them since they know I like both anything to do with mythology and the sea. I wasn't disappointed - it was a wonderful film!

Watch it if you like: Irish mythology; animation; films with a similar feel to Hayao Miyazaki's animations.

Rating: 8.5/10

Title: Shake It All About [Danish: En kort En lang] (2001)

Director: Hella Joof

Starring: Mads Mikkelsen, Charlotte Munck, Troels Lyby

Cert: DK7 (It doesn't have a UK rating, but it seems like something that might be a PG or 12 over here?)

Genre: Romantic comedy

Language: Danish (English subs)

Plot: Jacob and Jørgen have been in a relationship for several years and get engaged after Jacob proposes.  Everything seems perfect, until Jacob falls in love with Caroline, the woman married to Jørgen's younger brother, Tom. Things get complicated and Jacob has to decide who he wants to spend the rest of his life with: Jørgen or Caroline.

Best Bit:  Jacob's purple shirt (it made me think of Violet). The ice skating scene. Oh, and the ending because it was so cheesy. Jacob driving, then running, then riding a horse to the airport to stop a plane with a bouquet of flowers was really silly and too much, but it amused me all the same! (There were better bits than these I'm sure, but I can't remember without watching it again).

Worst Bit: Some of the things Jacob did didn't make a lot of sense and his behaviour was pretty immature and selfish at times. Caroline too, but it seemed like she had more reasons than Jacob did. I understand that he was finding himself or whatever, but if your fiance's in hospital because he was upset that you had sex with someone else, got drunk and had an accident, you should probably not continue to have sex with said person. Just a thought. Ah, but it's a romantic comedy, so it all works out in the end!

Overall: A friend recommended this to me because it has an actor in it (guess which one :P) from some other things that I like and I hadn't seen it. Well, romantic comedies aren't my thing, but I chose it at random from my "to watch" list, and it did amuse me in places. It was a pleasant enough film.

Apart from that, I liked that it didn't suggest that Jacob just hadn't "met the right girl yet", and didn't explain his choice of partner that way. Jacob's behaviour seemed to be more about the fact that he was panicking because of the impending lifelong commitment to Jørgen. Also, he didn't really fit into the "gay community", he really wanted to have children (at the time of this film, it wasn't possible for a gay couple to adopt; it is now), that his parents didn't really approve of him being gay (though they never mentioned it until he was with Caroline), and then that he realised that he also had feelings for a woman and might be bisexual. 

Caroline too was unhappy with things about her life and marriage (to Jørgen's brother, a pilot), so the relationship was something of an escape for both. It's really just about Jacob and Caroline figuring out what they really want, but they hurt other people in the process, as a side effect.

Watch it if you like: Romantic comedies; dramatic relationships with happy endings; Danish language films; frilly purple shirts; guys riding on horses to airports to stop planes.

Rating: 6/10

Title: Ex Machina (2014)

Director: Alex Garland

Starring: Alicia Vikander; Domhnall Gleeson; Oscar Isaac; Sonoya Mizuno

Cert: 15

Genre: Sci-fi, drama, mystery/thriller

Language: English

Plot: Caleb, a 26 year old programmer employed by the world's largest internet company, wins a competition to spend a week at the remote private mountain retreat of the company's CEO, Nathan. When Caleb gets to the compound, he discovers that the real reason behind the competition was to find someone to interact with and carry out an extended Turing test on the world's first true artificial intelligence, housed in the body of a beautiful gynoid.

Best Bit:  Caleb's interactions with both Ava and Nathan. The similarities between Ava and Nathan that made them almost like an extremely dysfunctional father and daughter (Nathan even comments on him being "like her dad" at one point). The workshop Nathan built Ava in (the brains!). Kyoko getting to interact with Ava. The ending, because even though it seemed unfair to one - two if you count the events leading up to the very end - of the characters, as they didn't really do anything wrong, it actually completely made sense. (Also, if you go for Roko's Basilisk theory, then I guess it was inevitable at some point anyway). I liked that you don't get to see what happens to everyone once the experiment is over, as well. Even though it's pretty obvious what happens after the events of the film, it's left somewhat open-ended. 

Worst Bit: N A T H A N. I don't think I've disliked a character so much in a long time. But, that was the point really. He wasn't supposed to be likeable. Oscar Isaac did a great job of playing him though! And, maybe the worst bit is really that I started to understand his point of view by the end, whether I liked it or not, even though he just got worse.

Overall: This was one of the best films I've seen in ages and I wish it hadn't taken me so long to see it. It manages to balance hard sci-fi based in the real world, with entertainment, beautiful cinematography, solid effects, and an original take on the AI genre of film. Brilliant!

Watch it if you like: Sci-fi; artificial intelligence; gynoids; androids; robots; horrible "bad guys"; programmers who fall in love with robots; random dance scenes; Turing tests; technology; search engines.

Rating: 9

101 in 1001 - Watch 20 films: Cello-playing Morticians, Psychokinetic Ice Magicians, and The Russian Revolution

Goal number 20 on my 101 in 1001 List is:

• 020. Watch 21 films I haven't seen before.

So, here are the first three!

Yes, that is a child's cello

Title: Departures [Japanese: おくりびと] (2008)

Director: Yojiro Takita

Starring: Masahiro Motoki; Ryoko Hirosue; Tsutomu Yamazaki

Language: Japanese (English subs)
Cert: 12

Genre: Drama, comedy

Plot: Concert cellist, Daigo Kobayashi,  finds himself questioning his choice of career after his orchestra disbands. This leads him and his wife Mika from Tokyo, back to the town Daigo grew up in, and a to a new career as the assistant to a nokanshi (ritual mortician).

Best Bit: The way that each of the corpses Daigo and his boss prepared were all shown to be people, by giving little glimpses of their backstories via their family, friends, and the items they had with them at the funerals, and how their families finally said things they'd wanted to say before but didn't. Also, I liked the scene when Daigo goes to see his boss at his house and every available space is filled with plants - filled with life.

Worst Bit: The octopus & later the salmon (not entirely sure the salmon in the water were real though). Also, Daigo was a little overwrought and over-reacted to things at times, but another character mentioned that when he was a child he "kept everything inside, but cried when he was alone". So I just took his outbursts as being a result of bottled up emotions or something like that. Possibly it was just due to the actor not being that good. I still liked the character though.

Overall: It's a cheesy, feel-good, drama with comedic moments (AKA really not my thing) but I actually enjoyed it. Maybe I was just in the mood for this kind of movie, but I didn't even notice that the running time was just over 2 hours, or get bored by the end.

Watch it if you like: drama-comedies; films about life & death; morticians; funeral directors; nokanshi; cellos; light-hearted Japanese language films.

Rating: 6.5/10

Title: Fire & Ice (1983)

Director: Ralph Bakshi

Starring: Susan Tyrrell; Maggie Roswell; William Ostrander; Stephen Mendel; Steve Sandor

Language: English
Cert: PG

Genre: Fantasy, action, animation

Plot: The evil Ice Lord, Nekron, uses his powers to conquer the Fire Keep, a great fortress ruled by the good King Jarol. After Jarol's daughter Teegra is kidnapped by Nekron's forces, a young warrior, Larn, begins a quest to save her and avenge the people of his homeland, who were also killed by Nekron. 

Best Bit: This guy (Nekron), and his evil cackling and magic! 

Getting ready to throw an ice tantrum

His mother, Queen Juliana, was pretty interesting too. Oh, Darkwolf also amused me, but only because he reminded me of a fantasy version of Batman.

Worst Bit: It's pretty difficult to choose just one, but the Ice Kingdom's warriors made me cringe (the film was made 30 years ago, but even so, I don't know what the creators were thinking with these characters). Also, the fact that people from a Fire Kingdom never once think of putting on more clothing than loin cloths and bikinis when travelling to a frozen realm controlled by an ice magician with psychokinetic abilities. What could possibly go awry?

Overall: The rotoscoping was great, some of the backgrounds/scenery were beautiful, and Nekron and his mother were fantastic villains. It's just a shame that the script and certain other things about the film were so ridiculous. Still worth watching once though.

Watch it if you like: 1970/80's fantasy; rotoscoped animation; mind-controlling psychokinetic ice magicians; characters that look like Batman but in Conan the Barbarian; men in loin cloths; women in bikinis.

Rating: 5/10 (and two of those are probably just for Nekron)

Title: October (Ten Days that Shook the World) [Russian: Октябрь (Десять дней, которые потрясли мир)] (1928)

Directors: Grigori Aleksandrov; Sergei M. Eisenstein

Starring:  Nikolay Popov; Vasili Nikandrov; Layaschenko; Boris Livanov

Language: Russian (English subs)
Cert: PG

Genre: Docu-drama

Plot: Set after the forced abdication of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. It focuses on the subsequent Revolution of October 1917, which was led by the Bolsheviks against the Provisional Government. The film was made in 1928 to celebrate the ten year anniversary.

Best Bit: The often repeated line: "Peace! Land! Bread!" (a quote from Lenin) summed up the message of what the Revolution was about. People didn't want to keep fighting in the First World War, they didn't want to work the land for the middle and upper classes, whilst owning nothing themselves, and they didn't want to keep living in poverty, without food (bread). So the Bolsheviks' gave them hope and the push they needed to do something about their situation and make things better (well, supposedly). Unless you were one of the bourgeois, of course. Then you were shit out of luck, for a little while at least.

Worst Bit: It was all from the point of view of the Bolsheviks and obvious propaganda for the winning side. However, I suppose that's understandable for the time in which it was made. There were also scenes of a horse that I personally found disgusting, but again, that's just from my point of view, looking back at a film made in Russia nearly 90 years ago. Apart from that, the repetition of certain scenes for no apparent reason became a little wearing in places.

Overall: I enjoy silent films and 1920's cinema in general, but even if I didn't, this was an interesting chance to see something relatively contemporary to the Russian Revolution, made in Russia, in the original language.

Watch it if you like: 1920's cinema; Russian history; silent films; Russian language films.

Rating: 7.5/10