Film Viewing

Yesterday I saw The Limits of Control, by Jim Jarmusch; a very memorable film, and one that resists analysis, one that has to percolate through the brain for a while without categorising or dissecting. It is dreamlike and intense, a film that can get away with having nothing happening for 90 minutes because that nothing happens so profoundly; per the article cited in the cinema magazine, it shows "a Zenlike awareness of the sensorial and auditory universe", a cryptic phrase which makes perfect sense once you've seen it. In less skilled hands it would have been a pretentious disaster. It is quite remarkable. I do not expect to see anything like it again.

(Jarmusch knows Tom Waits, so I wonder if the climax of the movie was inspired by that Black Wings song from Bone Machine.)

I also recently saw Terminator Salvation, but the less said about that, the better.

EDIT: Also saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. It was good. Although when I say "good", I mean "fun movie, good action sequences, plot that makes rudimentary sense" - all the things I hoped for from Terminator Salvation but didn't get. It helped that the movie didn't take itself too seriously. It's also been a while since I saw an American film that was so positive towards its own armed forces: despite the perversity of beaurocrats and politicians, American soldiers exist here to kick donkey, endure difficulty, and blow up priceless archaeological ruins in a good cause. This is what Hollywood does best and is entirely right and proper to a blockbuster movie, where worrying about the cycle of violence and the military-industrial complex is counterproductive. ("Look how bravely we're subverting the American crypto-imperialist hegemonic paradigm!" No. Shut up and gimme more explosions.) However, the portrayal of the military could have been thought through a little better - a lot of lives are wasted because highly-trained infantry are being sent up against Decepticons with submachine guns, which is beyond stupid.

Also I am not sure I approve of the scene which involves one character torturing another with a blowtorch, even if the torturee was a killer robot from outer space. That said, it was arguably justified in terms of subduing the robot, who was then (successfully) interrogated by changing tack and being nice to it - a degree of unexpected realism in such an action movie, where drugs, pain and fear are often regarded as more efficient (or, at least, more exciting) ways of extracting information than kindness and cunning.