Mysterium Delirium

Here's a fun one from our youth: Beat the Deva (1980). A wacky student film that combines noir, New Age, and the classical music of Scriabin.

Caspar J. Upanishad is a film maker who works as a private eye to make ends meet. But he's thinking there might be money in this New Age stuff he's been hearing about. His girlfriend is playing something odd on the piano, and he finds out it's by Scriabin. He learns that Scriabin, or Screech as they call him, didn't just compose pretty sonatas, but also saw music as colors, was ispired by semi-divine Devas, and planned an enormous festival of sound, smells, tastes, colors and peace and unity in the foothills of the Himalayas, called the Mysterium. But he died before he could make it happen. (BTW, the Scriabin stuff is legit - even the "Scrjabin" spelling.) But Upanishad realizes that he was probably bumped off because he was getting too close.

He goes to a professor at Harvard for info, and is warned about the danger or color-music theory. Indeed, some thugs beat him up outside to get him off the case. While he's unconscious, he is visited by a cute little animated deva, who lets him know that he, Casper, is the chosen one - the one who will trigger world peace by staging Scriabin's Mysterium.

But Upanishad's name is Caspar, not Casper. Could the Devas have made a mistake. And why was there a sore on Upanishad's lip, right where Scriabin had a carbuncle - that killed him!?!?

This is a super-low budget student film, under one-hour long. But it manages to be stylish, smart and funny. Some parts are filmed in noirish black an white. Some are even silent, with old-timey intertitles. The Devas and the info dumps about the Mysterium are all colorfully animated. Plus, it's full of dumb jokes and Upanishad driving up and down Storrow and Mem. Drive. Don't you love it when a movie shows someone driving somewhere you know, and it doesn't make any sense? Driving east, then west, then crossing the river, then east and west again, then back to where they started? OK, maybe that's just me.

Also, the soundtrack is all Scriabin, and he wrote some cool stuff.

We know about this because Ms. Spenser went to art school with one of the animators. We got to see it open with Suzanne Pitt's Asparagus, which is actaully on the Criterion Channel. But you can find Beat the Deva on YouTube and Vimeo. And I hope you do. 

Tron: Leto

I knew it was trash going in. After all, Jared Leto is in it. But I figured I might as well watch Tron: Ares (2025). For all its faults, it wasn't even as bad as expected.

The state of play: ENCOM, the good gaming and virtual reality corporation, and it's rival, evil corporation, Dillinger, are trying to bring virtual reality into real reality. Evan Peters, head of Dillinger, is demoing his latest line of 3D-printed war toys, including an artificial soldier, Ares (Jared Leto). When the impressed customers leave, the tanks, guns and Leto all turn to dust. As nepo-baby Peter's mom, Gillian Anderson reminds him, without the "permanence code", none of these constructs will last more than 29 minutes.

Greta Lee, on the other hand, is in ENCOM's secret polar lab, looking for the permanence code, supposedly left by founder Jeff Bridges, wayback in the 80s. Since ENCOM is having a big gamer's conference and the CEO (Lee) is out of pocket, things are getting dicey for the company. 

And Leto is back in the Grid, an artificial life-form back in Tronlandia. He is beginning to think Peters is evil, and maybe doesn't have his best interests in mind.

The rest of the plot plays out like you'd expect, with Grid creatures like Leto and crony Jody Turner-Smith experiencing the real world and becoming more human. No big surprises. But I was surprised by how good it looked. Director Joachim Rønning did himself proud. Many of the in-Grid sequences have more than a touch of 2001's slit-scan neon feeling. All in a palette based on reds.

Greta Lee did well in a sort of nothing good corporate boss as boss nerd role. Evan Peters was great as that contemporary type pf nepo baby, where lies are just alternate facts and consequences all fall on someone else. His mother, Gillian Anderson, plays the old-style evil - when she promises weapons of war, by god she delivers. She is very disappointed in her son.

Jared Leto is about as expected - he plays an artificial lifeform artificially. I wouldn't say he ruins the experience.

So, not a good movie. But I enjoyed it anyway.

Bullet Plane

When I got Fight or Flight (2024), the only thing I knew was that it was "Bullet Train on an airplane." I just didn't realize how literally to take that.

The premise is that an international hacker terrorist called the Ghost is getting on a plane from Bangkok to San Francisco, with a McGuffin. But the government doesn't have any agents in Thailand, so they can't get anyone on hte plane in time. They have to re-activate drunk, disgraced agent Josh Hartnett, by promising him a legit passport.

Recognize the setup? Female agent activates cute but unconventional agent for assassination mission? Hartnett is even styled to look a little like Brad Pitt. 

To cut to the chase, when he gets on the plane, he discovers that everyone on the plane is either the Ghost, or trying to kill the Ghost, for the John-Wick-style bounty. Mayhem ensues. 

I don't think I need to go into any more detail. You get the idea. It was a fun ride, maybe not quite Bullet Train level. If you loved that, you'll at least like this. 

Falcon Cresting

Working my way through random Michael Jai White movies, I came across Falcon Rising (2014). It it is set in Brazil and White has some capoeira-adjacent skills, I figured it was a good bet.

White is a troubled veteran. He plays a complicated game of Russian roulette, and survives. Low on liquor, he heads to a local party store, which inevitably gets held up. When confronted, he holds the robber's gun to his heart and demands that he shoot. When the robbers won't kill him, he gets impatient, beats them up, pays for his booze with their money and leaves.

He meets with his sister, who has been down in Brazil, doing social work in the favelas. A while after she leaves, he is contacted by old Army buddy, now State Dept guy, Neal McDonough (white haired baddy from Arrow), His sister has been beaten into a coma, and they haven't caught the people who did. So White heads for Brazil.

There he meets Millie Ruperto, a beat cop in the favela who uses community policing methods, and Jimmy Navarro, a tough talking officer who pledges to do whatever it takes to find White's sister's killer. In one scene, White's PTSD is triggered by a loud noise, and he gabs Roperto's gun, triggering an armed standoff between the police and the favela gangs. Navarro defuses it by offering to fight the biggest guy in the gang, one on one. Ths is a decent fight scene with a capoeira flavor. 

Unfortunately, there aren't as many of these as you might want. White has a number of fights, but I didn't find them to be his best. There were a lot of chases, some gunfights, etc. It was a fine action movie, and White's power and charisma shone through, but the actual fight choreography didn't impress me. 

In the end, Nick Fury Neal McDonough invites White to join the Falcon Project, to become a deniable loose cannon for the State Dept. This would set up a series of sequels. SPOILER - never happened. 

Haunting Presence

While looking for some other DVD, I discovered an unopened copy of The Haunted Palace (1963), a Roger Corman/Vincent Price movie supposedly based on an Edgar Allen Poe story, but mostly a version of Lovecraft's Case of Charles Dexter Ward. 

It starts in colonial days in Arkham MA, with Vincent Price using hypnotic powers to get young women under his power for some hideous purpose. The townspeople, including Elisha Cook Jr., and Bruno VaSoto, drag him out, tie him to a tree and burn him alive. He cursed the town and its people, unto the last generation, and promised to return.

One hundred ten years later, Price, a descendant of the burnt witch and his bride Debra Paget come to Arkham in a coach. They have inherited the great palace that the witch lived in - although it has been uninhabited the entire time (?). They stop in a pub where they meet some of the hostile locals, including descendants of the witchburners. They advise him to leave, then when they find out that he has inherited the haunted palace, they get really nasty. The doctor, Frank Maxwell, is at least friendly, but also suggests that they leave and don't look back. But Price refuses to leave without at least looking at his palace.

When they arrive, they find it in pretty good shape. That's because caretaker Lon Chaney Jr. has been alerted to their presence and has made preparations. It makes the creepy place a little homier. And the mad painting of the original owner is disturbingly familiar. Done in a vaguely van Gogh style, it had a bit of the Ivan Albright (Picture of Dorian Gray) creepieness.

At first, Price agrees with Paget that they should leave as soon as possible, but the place begins to grow on him. Soon, he is talking like the old witch reborn. And what is in the mysterious tank in the deep dungeon? Some ancient aquatic abomination? 

I felt like this is on of the best of the Price/Corman/Poe (?) pictures. The cast is good (Paget wasted?), and the sets/art direction as well. But after a few days, I wonder if this is recency bias - I guess I have to do a rewatch.

In conclusion, I was pleased that the evil Price never lusted after his good self's wife. In fact the only time he made advances was to terrify her into leaving him alone.

Vaguely Cool

I've mentioned how much of a French New Wave fanboy I am - our college film society had a couple of great series on New Wave. So of course I wanted to see Nouvelle Vague (2025), Richard Linklater's fim about the making of Breathless. 

It stars Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard, a writer for the French movie journal Cahiers du Cinema. He is watching a recent movie with a group of other critics, like Truffaut and Chabrol. Back at the office, he wonders why no one from Cahiers was going to Cannes to see Truffaut's first movie, 400 Blows. After some office banter, he steals some office petty cash and head off to Cannes. 

He becomes desparate to make his own movie. He can't get a producer interested in Une Femme est une Femme, but gets the go-ahead for a gangster film from a treatment by Truffaut. He casts Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) as the lead, and gets Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) to play the American girl he falls for. 

But his directorial style is more than peculiar. He likes to play pinball more than shoot, and days go by with only one take for one shot filmed. He just wants to wait for the perfect take, even if it isn't very perfect. He ignores continuity, eye lines, and the 180 rule. He films too many closeups and not enough coverage. It will be impossible to edit together. Belmondo will never work again and Seberg wants off the picture. Her last film was directed by noted sadist and perfectionist Otto Preminger, and this is a worse experience. Godard won't direct, except telling the actors to do less, or just do what they want.

The film is a rousing success. His fellow critics tell him, "Eh. It's no Citizen Kane." Then they heartily congratulate him.

This is a fun film for fanboys in a number of ways. First, it's in black and white and has a very New Wave feel. The actors chosen for the main roles, mostly unknown, are credible representations of the real life people they are portraying. I would have recognized Marbeck as Godard even if he wasn't labelled, and he isn't the most recognizable person. Dullin doesn't quite have Belmondo's swagger, even if he does have the nose (prosthetic?). Deutch makes a good Seberg, although I don't see the intensity I expected. I guess that's acting.

The range of characters from the milieu is enormous, and they are all labelled onscreen when they appear. So we get to see Truffaut, Chabrol, Agnes Varda, Jean Cocteau, Roberto Rosselini, and on and on. When Rosselini is giving a talk, the names in the audience just go on and on, ten or twenty of them. I can just here the applause each one gets in a movie theater (with the right audience). 

I'm not sure how non-fanboys would find this. Godard is shown as a major jerk, although maybe talented. The parade of historic New Wave personages would just be vaguely familiar namesWOuld the look of the film be beautifully nostalgic or just old and weird? Was the Dullin/Deutch connection strong enough to pull the viewer in, like Belmondo and Seberg? Was the tale of underappreciated genius compelling? 

I don't know - I'm a fanboy, and probably anyone who reviews this is too. So, enough for me. 

Battle Fatigue

As a Thomas Pynchon fan, of course I was psyched for One Battle After Another (2025), P.T. Anderson's adaptation of Vineland. Of course, like most Pynchon, Vineland is unfilmable - but he did a good job on Inherent Vice, so let's see how it goes.

We're thrown right into the movie, with an attack on an ICE holding camp by a group of revolutionaries who call themselves the French 75. Ghetto Pat, AKA Rocketman (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the demolition man, and lover of Perfidia Hollywood Hills (Teyana Taylor). Taylor is mad for this kind of action, taking every chance to fight, sling a slogan, and love up DiCaprio. It definitely turned him on. So when she finds Col. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), she orders him to stand - that is, get himself hard. 

In fact, they later hook up. 

Taylor and DiCaprio get married, and have a baby. DiCaprio wants to settle down, take care fo the kid, but Taylor is too much into the thrill of revolution. She kills a hostage in a bank robbery and is finally captured. Penn offers her amnesty for information, and when he threatens her daughter, she cracks. Most of French 75 are killed in a long montage. By the way, this is a comedy? Taylor goes into witness protection, but slips away to Mexico.

Sixteen years later, DiCaprio is living in a little northern California town (not Vineland, though). He lives in a shack, smoking dope and seeing feds everywhere. His daughter, Charlene AKA Willa (Chase Infiniti - how Pynchonesque!) is a fine young girl, active in high school and Benicio del Toro's dojo. 

Meanwhile, Penn has been moving up in the ranks. He gets an offer to join a secret, silly, Santa-worshipping white supremacist group. But if they find out that he had a black lover (Taylor), and maybe even a mixed race daughter (Infiniti), he would be cast out. So he starts looking for her.

Word of this gets back to DiCaprio through the remnants of the French 75 underground. While he tries to find out some info - and getting nowhere because he is too stoned to remember the underground codes and passwords. Maybe he wasn't paying much attention, anyway. OK, this is comedy. 

It ends up with a three-way chase and fight between Penn's forces, DiCaprio and the underground, and Infiniti, a very capable young woman. At least she remembers the recognition code, "Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillis, Hooterville Junction" - from The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. 

Parts of this movie were great, maybe all, but only in parts. It just didn't really hold together for us. Our main problem was that the comedy of very real repression and somewhat silly violent revolution was lost on us. Pynchon's message that revolution and repression are human, and therefore fucked up and fundamentally goofy is fine when the struggle is against, say, Reaganism. But we're living with immigrants and citizen being rounded up and even shot in the streets, and we just can't laugh at it. We don't see any armed struggle against it, not even one made up of sexed up thrill junkies. Anyway, the movie shows that most of them are only playing revolutionary. It left a sour taste.

Which is too bad, because many things do come across. DiCaprio's stoned dingbat trying to cope with an immediate emergency was actually comical. Most of the action was quite effective - the final car chase on long, rolling, empty California highways is pretty and thrilling, although maybe a bit long. DiCaprio did pretty well as a goofy stoner, and Penn was ... interesting as a swaggering bully. But he did a lot of mouth work - puckering, sucking his teeth, grimacing. It was a little overdone. 

One part I did like was that, like in Vineland, Taylor just sort of fades away. She isn't killed, she doesn't show up to save the day or otherwise. She's out of the picture, in the wind, a concept, a shadow, a myth, either idol or traitor. And Taylor sells the part so well that even her absence has a presence.