The Filmist: Dispatches #1 (Talk to Me & Oldboy

Hello, everyone. Coming to you live from somewhere.

I don’t think anyone needs to talk about Oppenheimer and Barbie again, so soon. Not that they’re not, in their own particular ways, standout works deserving of analyses and discussion, but there’s only so much you can say about a film, contemporaneously. And, with the rate of speed that conversations develop now, whether in earnest or memery, it’ll be a good year before there’s anything more to say about either of them (short of discussing Nolan’s inventive approach to screenplay formatting, which I’d love to read. . . or write). So, for my first installment here, I thought I’d talk about two films I saw in theaters recently that haven’t been exhausted completely, one an established classic in a new restoration and the other a minor-degree Ozploitation horror thriller. My columns won’t always be traditional reviews—occasionally, they’ll be long-form criticism, or interviews with people around the fringes of the Austin Film scene, or just a little bit of everything in one free-form, illegible multi-paragraph-long sentence, peppered with many, many references to Happy Feet. But, you’ve got to start somewhere. 

So, we’re starting here. 

Talk To Me

The debut film from the Brothers Phillipou, who came to prominence on Youtube as RackaRacka, is a modest success—one of another of a handful of horror films since last year that’s decided to cast all aspersions to high-mindedness and concrete literalism to the wayside and, here at least, in the best tradition of Ozploitation, work more through spectacle and action itself as metaphor. The central conceit being “spiritual possession is the new party drug among the kids,” while its primary goal to provide pure jolts of jangly energy takes precedence.

 To be sure, the film is somewhat less successful in the passages dealing (again) with capital-T “Trauma” and grief, because we’ve seen so much of it recently and the film has nothing that’s all that unique to say about it, but also because—even though it wasn’t produced by them—it fits so neatly into an image that A24 is trying hard to shed that it leads me to believe the Phillipou’s wrote their script with them as distributors in mind. But, that’s speculation.

 As I say, it’s successful because the Phillipou’s understand tension and tone in no small part, and have a control over rhythm that’s often missing in films like this—they find imagery that’s uniquely familiar, and mine it for resonances in a way that’s uncanny and startling. The cast, as well, is also fantastic, finding for each relationship dynamic something organic—the standout being Sophie Wilde as, appropriately, the main character, who’s electric and possessed (ha ha) of a certain magnetism that’s essential to keeping our fascination with watching her slowly grow more and more unsympathetic as the film progresses. 

 Good stuff.

PARK CHAN WOOK’S OLDBOY – THE NEON RESTORATION

I think I first saw Oldboy when I was maybe twelve years old. I have a cool older brother, the Mycroft to my Sherlock, who, at the time, got a kick out of exposing me to World Cinema of every stripe, and OLDBOY was, I believe, my first taste of Korean Cinema, and Park Chan-Wook in particular. It left an indelible impression on me—and it’s one of those films that, whenever I revisit it, I’m struck even more by its layers of bittersweet richness, its visceral, explosive dynamism and the dreamlike flow of its narrative. It’s also one of those films whose morality and sympathies seems to shift the older you get. It’s one of the most influential films of the early 2000s, and an immortal, pungent blend of Neo-Noir, Greek Tragedy, and Stylistic Extremism. You don’t need a guy like me to tell you what a masterpiece it is, with every adjective in the book—hopefully, you’ve seen it. 

 What you do need a guy like me to tell you is, whether you have or you haven’t seen it previously, to go see it in theaters while it’s there, now, immediately—in Neon’s new restoration, the film’s legendary lurid colors, an unexpected result of the bleach bypass process that give the film so much of it’s hallucinatory power, seem to vibrate and burn off the screen. It’s especially interesting because, while we can approach its look somewhat in the digital age, we can’t ever fully replicate it—it’s something weird and analog and organic and unwieldy, much like the film itself. Not surprisingly, the hallway sequence—a milestone sequence for filmmakers, cineastes and geeks of a certain age—remains one of those “holy shit” moments, and when the film thrusts you headlong into it, you can almost hear the gears turning in the heads of the fellow filmmakers in the audience as something that was long forgotten falls right into place.

 This is, by the way, especially a film to see with an audience because—depending on how packed the house is, you’ll get some big reactions. It’s just great.