YOU CAN CALL ME HAL
Watching the right pair of movies back-to-back can
illuminate wildly different details, create a whole
new viewing experience and, just maybe, BLOW
your MIND. Plus, it's fun! Here's your monthly
guide:
On April 4, Captain America: The Winter Soldier
will snare delighted young men in almost 4,000
theaters, no small thanks to the scissor kicks
and dark-and-curvy costumes of Scarlett
Johansson, reprising her superhuman antihero, Black Widow.
That same weekend, however, on a fraction
of screens, way back at the lonely end of the
multiplex hallway, Johansson will also play a
dangerous extra-terrestrial visitor using a costume of human flesh to snare delighted young
men in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin, a scifi thriller that attempts to view our world
entirely through the eyes of an alien. The word
16 illinoisentertainer.com april 2014
By Rob Fagin
First up:
2001: A Space Odyssey (160 min)
Dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968
Availability: Blu-ray/DVD, Amazon Instant
Just about everyone who is somewhat
immersed in the world of pop culture can recognize the red eye of HAL 9000 and his infamous voice singing "Daisy" with a disturbing
melancholy; or mimic his line, "Just what do
you think you're doing, Dave?" with an insidious humanity. HAL didn't try to become
human; it was an accident of survivalism and
curiosity - mirroring the evolutionary discovery of blunt weapons in the film's prologue
about The Dawn of Man.
HAL is the fun part. Everything else seems
incomprehensible to anyone but film buffs and
stoners. I think what really makes the accessiKeir Dullea in 2001: A Space Odyssey bility of this journey so difficult are the personality-drained, almost mannequin-like, protagofrom the Toronto Film Festival last fall is that nists. We seem to be expected to sympathize
this enigmatic chiller divided audiences with with the bland good looks of these astronauts
as they approach an ominous signal coming
love and/or hate.
Director Glazer's 2000 debut, Sexy Beast, a from Jupiter. But instead, we are puzzled by
blistering and wily gangster flick became an the disconcertingly detached conversations
instant cult classic, while his 2004 follow-up, they have with each other and their families
Birth, was a quiet, somewhat uncomfortable back on Earth; we are driven mad in our helpfeeling misfit that was instantly dismissed by less seats as we watch them drowsily fend for
audiences and critics alike. Now, he returns a their lives.
It's easy to dismiss these wooden performdecade later - with a film notable both for being
even more experimental than his previous ances by Gary Lockwood and Keir Dullea (a
efforts, and for the bold, naked trust he earned pair of actors who were never destined to rise
from his lead actress, Johansson - to find him- from obscurity) as the flawed products of a
self being compared to the legendary director director more interested in technical aspects
Stanley Kubrick, with whom he shares a heavy than human ones. But let's just say, in the conuse of steady-cam, haunting atmosphere and a text of this Double Feature, that these two icily
fascination with watching humans behaving in calm know-it-alls are projecting their own civilization's ideal of the Advanced Human. When
not so human ways.
HAL challenges them, look closely and you
begin to see cracks in their plastic demeanor,
the panic and determination they try to conceal, the sheer awe and terror exhibited when
blasted into an epileptic light show of the
unknown.
Next:
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call
N e w O r l e a n s (122 min)
Dir. Werner Herzog, 2009
Availability: Blu-ray/DVD, Amazon Instant
The tropes of an alien/robot/toy/monster/appliance taking on human traits, or a
human taking on animalistic/demonic/bionic/god-like traits, are exhausted every year.
Jeff Bridges fearlessly gave a convincingly
bizarre impression of a peregrine entity barely
comfortable with its homo sapien vessel in
John Carpenter's sadly mundane and un-recommendable -Starman (1984).
Nicolas Cage balloons the idea of fearless
acting to Looney Tunes proportions far too often,
but sometimes his particular brand of crazy can
be wildly enjoyable, even compelling, as in
Werner Herzog's nut-job detective yarn with
the suitably ridiculous title, Bad Lieutenant: Port
of Call - New Orleans. Cage's character spends
the movie desperately covering up his own bad
deeds with even worse deeds, all while drinking, snorting, and sucking anything he can
grab. There's an incredible moment where he
has a hallucinatory staring-match with an iguana that seems to beg the question: should he
have ever been molded into a human at all?
In related news, Cage has a new movie, Joe,
coming out April 11, in which (according to
word from a couple recent movie festivals) he
reportedly succeeds in simulating the behavior
of an actual human being!