Boy Kills World (2024)

Bill Skarsgard gives an expressive physical performance. His character in the film was formed with two core memories, he wants revenge for his loss of his family at the hands of a paranoid lady dictator and he is particularly haunted by the memory of his fearless younger sister.

Also, his character can neither speak nor hear, so Boy relies on reading lips and his internal monologue is narrated by a arcade fighting game announcer. He constantly trains in the jungle with a lean Asian guy in his 50's called "Shaman," who alternately spars with Boy and blows smoke in his face while laughing. Boy's world is small and limited in the forest, and he hallucinates his younger sister as a child who talks to him and gives commentary on his life and circumstances.

The circumstances could be bleak, but the film's two commentaries of internal announcer narration and sweet childish defiance provide lightness in contrast.

On a trip to the dictators' city, the annual Culling event's preparations are happening, where the streets are raided by the dictatress's foot soldiers to find pockets of unrest and keep the family in power. The dictatress's family is also going slightly insane in their own ways as there has not been serious opposition in years. Hilda is the dictatress matriarch of the family, but her paranoia has caused her to be a hermit in a bunker within her compound, so she is an unstable figurehead. Hilda's younger sister, Melanie, is a marketing obsessive who is having to spin the family's continued justification narrative to the masses and engage in brand partnerships to the Culling, a gladiatorial exhibition televised like a Hunger Games media capital event. Melanie married a photogenic pretty man, Glen, to mold into the face of her marketing announcements to the masses. Hilda & Melanie's brother, Gideon, is a man built like a boxer, but with the soul of a thespian, and Melanie tries to humor his aspirations to keep him in line for his enforcer and interrogation duties for the family. Also, there is a younger woman who is an elite soldier for the family, who wears a daft punk helmet and is dispatched to forcefully pacify of larger groups of unrest.

Boy decides that today he is ready to have his revenge and sneaks into the family compound in the trunk of Glen and Gideon's car after they fumble the public square announcement for why they are taking 12 people from the streets for "crimes against the peace" and therefore deserve to be executed on television.

The action in the movie's fight sequences is fluid and outrageous in its overkill, with many looking like elaborate Mortal Kombat fatality sequences. Boy's fighting skills are tempered by his general anxiety and hyperawareness of having to navigate a hostile environment of his own aggression while deaf. Also, having insane hallucinations of his eight year old sister who is fearless and appears to wander through this environment with fearless abandon like a giant adventure.

I rather enjoyed this movie for leaning into its instability and leaving the audience off balance as to how Boy's simple quest for revenge will be resolved. I especially liked the reminders that he is relying on his vision for his awareness. There are scenes in which he cannot successfully read another character's lips and is "hearing" all kinds of gibberish and imagining what a "guitar robot time dance with a hill farmer" means in an elaborate infiltration plan.

It was goofy, it was gory, it was tragic, it was heartfelt. Bill Skarsgard does an excellent job of portraying naive, traumatized, and determined. He is trapped in being a boy, with idealistic dreams of absolutes and simple love of family being everything. Anything in his way is an obstacle which must be overcome.

Don't say much do ya?

Body communicates pain

From Boy to his world.

Challengers (2024)

Very short review as I just finished watching this in the theater on a discounted ticket promotion. It was very funny to see this movie in a nearly empty theater. When I stood up to leave, I learned that the only two other people were a couple in the top row, the woman of which noticed the other two audience members other than me ditch the movie before the end. The guy and I were too focused on the screen to see that exodus and we both had the same reaction to the film's effective point.

I had a great time watching a tennis version of "ball is life, life is ball." And how, at a level of competition, the participators in the sport see it as duel and dance, transcendent in the flow and the externalities become interwoven into the thread of the moment as fuel.

The framing of the film was other than I expected from the marketing, but it was effective in showing off the style and flair of the subject. The soundtrack and cinematography really sell the substance and excitement of the film's pacing and stakes.

Break point setting up

The advantage of seeing Love

All passion and pride

The Beast (2023)

This movie haunted me.

Yesterday I learned a friend was interested in seeing this French film at a local independent theater. It was a nice day outside, so I took a walk through the neighboring area. Outside the theater there was a local culinary street fare with small plates. I went to a local bakery instead and bought two croissants, a cinnamon roll one for myself and a chocolate one for my friend when he arrived.

I knew very little about the film itself, but my friend is extremely good company to watch a film. He is very excited about details, themes, motifs and even the legacy for how a director tends to execute his or her vision.

I didn't even remember from the trailer that the movie was French. The logline about a woman in the future cleansing her DNA of trauma didn't clarify either

The movie begins with a woman set in a green screen to the left, being given directions for how to block her steps for the later post production. The camera follows as she centers in the space, then gradually focuses on her face, getting intimately close to it, but the score is not alarmed, so the audience is not signaled to find this uncomfortable. But the direction off screen tells her that eventually she will notice a Beast to her right and to react to it when she realizes it has been there, waiting.

The scene switches to a different setting. The actress is wearing fancy clothes from a much older period where etiquette was armor. This shot tracks her through a cocktail party, looking for her husband and instead finding a stranger she met once while abroad, in whom she confided. This confidence was with the freedom of believing that she would likely never meet him again, and her secret would be like telling the wind. There are times where it is easier to tell a stranger something than a friend, for the stranger is a blank slate upon which you can plead your case for human sanity and they do not have a vested long term interest to hold you accountable to it later. Except this stranger has reencountered her and has follow up questions as to why she felt trapped since childhood with a sense of impending doom and desolation not only for herself, but for all whom she loves. How it will come in one fell swooping stroke and only then will her fears become realized into reality.

The rest of the film proceeds in much the same manner, as details of the woman's life and motifs are told over time and space. The audience too is waiting to see if her fears will be proven true. And the film's score heightens the anticipation. You wonder if you can truly trust it to signal you for the event or leave you to figure it out yourself visually without accompaniment.

Eventually, the logline of the movie comes into play. There is a technology to cleanse people's DNA of generational trauma. The process gradually neutralizes triggering effects of irrational and unstable emotional twitch instincts. Maybe this will be the answer to our heroine's dilemma. Whether it will vaccinate her from living with the burden of dread or even allow her to react more decisively when the key moment comes rather than be frozen and helpless in the face of fate.

The movie being primarily in French made me reflect on a passage in the science fiction Culture novel "Master of Games" by Iain M. Banks. How language makes certain frameworks of understanding and thought processes. It is not only an organizational method of concepts, but influences how to think about things. Our relationships to objects and emotions can be nuanced by what paths we know for how to think about them and how much they are given consideration in the language for variations on the theme. And from the French movies I have seen, the translation is not only of the language, but the concepts underlying and overlaying it. I think Iain's series is well named, because his books often wrestle with the inevitable clash of philosophies and cultural traditions which are rigid and flexible in incongruous ways. And how one of them will find others to be intolerable and feel the need to fix the other by diplomacy or force, because if that other school of thought is allowed to survive, it is a danger to the continuance of their tradition.

This film made me confront the question in my mind. What if my anxieties could be cured? Would I be willing to pay the cost? Even if it advantaged me to be divorced from my worries and stress, would I feel the loss of those traits like the removal of my wisdom teeth? Or would it be a deeper ache like I have lost my soul and the ability to truly enjoy the success, like Captain Barbossa with his apples in "Curse of the Black Pearl"?

And what if I seek the wisdom of the scientists and mystics, and their best efforts are not enough to correct what is within me? Is it better to live in the dread of the unknown, or be trapped in the confirmation that there is no salvation on earth for that which ails me?

Paralysis weight

An anticipation waits

Music of Tom Waits