The Red Shoes

Most movies try to make you believe that you’re watching reality.  The Red Shoes tries to make you believe that you’re watching a stage production.  The sets obviously look like sets.  Players wear so much powder on their faces that we can actually see the line where makeup ends and flesh begins.  Things seem heightened, theatrical.  And that’s before the music starts and the dancing begins.

Here’s the setup:  it’s Europe, in something approximating the ‘20s.  The Ballet Lermontov has just hired a new composer who’s a genius.  Now, it needs a new prima ballerina because the previous one got married.  I guess that’s just how they rolled in the ‘20s.  The composer (Marius Goring) belongs in front of an orchestra.  The new prima (Moira Shearer) belongs onstage.  They belong together.

Here’s the execution: heightened, dramatic, delirious with aestheticism and creativity, The Red Shoes doesn’t care if you suspend your disbelief.  It just wants to blow you away.

It succeeds, through an audacious combination of dance, theatricality, set design, and special effects.  It doesn’t just show you what a ballet looks like, it shows you what’s happening inside the minds of the creators, the performers, and the audience.  Its music is extraordinary, its dancing is fantastic, and I found myself swept away even though I knew I was watching a show.

What a movie.

House

You have never seen a movie like House.  Director Nobuhiko Obayashi made sure of it.

It was the early ‘70s and Jaws had just hit.  Toho studios, looking to capitalize on the horror market, asked commercial director Obayashi for a script.  Obayashi thought, ‘If Jaws is a success, what’s next?  Movies about bear attacks and bee attacks and ant attacks.  How boring.’  He talked over the project with his ten year old daughter, talked about what scared her.  He wrote down her ideas as scenarios including mummies, skeletons, ghosts, vampires, hungry pianos, murderous reflections, demonic cats ,and much more.  He gave the scenarios to his writing partner and told him to have at it.  The result?  A film that processes a little girl’s night terrors through the sensibilities of the men who made the classic Charles Bronson “Mandom” commercials.

The result is a bold, creepy, and funny horror fantasy.  It gathers seven young women whom the camera will love, fetishisize, and terrorize in combinations that’ll alternately make you smile, squirm, recoil, and guffaw.  It sends them to a spooky house on a hill.  It introduces them to a friendly old woman who may not be friendly at all.  Before long, the flying head of a decapitated Japanese girl will take a bite out of the rear end of one of her former classmates.  And away we go.

Ok, so far so good.  But you’ve seen Sam Raimi pictures and you’ve seen early Peter Jackson flicks.  What makes House so very different?  Execution.  This horror fantasy luxuriates in the fantastic.  It uses every imaginable camera trick to focus the eye, to leap from image to image, and even to play within an image to give the impression of a story told by someone whose mind is racing through and among characters and events faster than she can get the words out.  House’s sets, including deliriously colorful matte paintings and generous helpings of cobwebs, heighten the sense of unreality.  Its use of color, music, and editing make it feel like it has so much story to tell, that it wants to pile on so many ideas, that it can’t squeeze them all into 90ish minutes of classical narrative film.

In other words, House stands as a delirious exercise in excessive, feverish, joyfully weird and innovative filmmaking.  It’s the most fun I’ve had at the movies since Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and I can’t wait to see it again.

And the second time through, I’ll still have never seen anything like it.

Colombiana

Colombiana’s tagline is “Vengeance is Beautiful.”  I’d have made it, “You’ll believe a 115-lb wisp can kick a grown man’s ass.”

The film begins in Bogota, a hot, dusty, and overcrowded series of favelas in which sweaty, grimy men kill for a dollar.  Coincidentally, I’m in Bogota as I write this.  As I look out my hotel window in this city at 8600’ above sea level, I see pines and walnut trees, green grass and a park.  It’s 68°.  The people are better-dressed than the average American.  So really, the film doesn’t begin in Bogota at all.  It begins in the Scary South American Drug Haven of Euro-American imagination.  That’s fine, because the film exists in the world of imagination.  It imagines that Zoe Saldana, an attractive and athletic woman who looks like she never ate a cheeseburger in her life, can deliver a punch that’d actually, y’know, hurt.  It imagines that a villain sophisticated enough to pull off a $50M Ponzi scheme would be a Z-grade vulgarian willing to blow his entire take in the first five years, going by his choices in housing, entertainment, and personal protection.  It imagines, well, it imagines a lot of things.  Your enjoyment of this film will hinge upon your willingness to imagine along with it.

Are you willing, for example, to imagine that a parkour-inspired chase sequence actually happens, since the film cuts so quickly from shot to shot that we never actually see any of the stuntmen do anything?  Are you willing to imagine that Zaldana is capable of learning and performing a fight routine, since the film never actually shows us one?  Are you willing to imagine that a top-notch revenge thriller is unspooling before you?

Me, I’m willing.  And not just because Saldana looks great in a catsuit.  I’m willing because Saldana sells it.  She sells smart and menacing and deadly so well that I didn’t even consider the film’s implausibilities until I sat down to write this.  When Saldana declares her need for vengeance (yes, this is just another revenge thriller), when she chaos-cinemas her way through an army of bad guys, I believe it because she believes it.  This woman’s gonna be a big, big star because if anyone can make an audience believe that a 115-lb wisp can do whatever she damn well pleases, it’s Zoe Saldana.

So enjoy your trip to Fantasyland and groove on the ‘splosions and dig the gunfights and all that.  Let your imagination run wild.  Zoe Saldana will help you believe; and it’s beautiful, man.