the ramble dump
Friday, April 30, 2010
Guilty Pleasures (I Like What I Like)
Our responses to things can be complicated.
I recently watched Casshern, a 2004 film adaptation of an anime I've never seen, for the third time. It is quite some experience. It's a film, though, that I might not so readily admit to my friends that I enjoyed, and I don't know if I could watch it in the presence of other people: if I'd sat with my friends when I first watched it, I know that their faces would have reflected and amplified my own scepticism.
There are more than a few reasons to scoff at Casshern. All the far-out premises, the dodgy neo-cell stuff, all the robots, and extreme coincidences, the hilariously stylish fight-scenes, strange costumes, bad effects and some cringingly overwrought scenes make it a lot to swallow. But I still enjoyed it, and unironically. So I have to rationalise...
If you let your mind go and don't think about the details too much, it all comes together. If there are overdone visual effects, there are also some very striking, beautiful scenes; alongside the melodrama there are some genuinely touching moments. And it's not just that there are a few gems that have to be unearthed amongst the rest of the rubbish: however much it might at times feel like an overbearing, messy onslaught, it's far from artless, or heartless.
A lot of concessions might have to be made on the logic front, yes, but it's still all in all an impressive experience, full of well-crafted sequences where even the heavy-handed metaphors pay off and the overly noticeable CGI seems almost dreamlike. It's not your average superhero flick, either. Kind of makes the philosophising of The Dark Knight seem like a plodding school textbook affair with a few explosions.
The onslaught itself is kind of mesmerising. It will extract tears from your eyes, though whether from genuine emotion or exhaustion or because your eyeballs are overheating is up for debate. I couldn't say it was a particularly great film without being willfully ignorant of a heck of a lot of things, but something must have worked. I've seen it more than once, after all.
There's a lot to admire about Casshern and I think I have very good reasons for liking it. But it still qualifies as a guilty pleasure, because if I watched it with anyone else I know I'd feel compelled to give a running commentary of excuses for the daft bits, of which there is no small number.
Another, even less excusable example: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Wait, wait... hear me out!
What I like about this film is something I've never quite been able to pin down. In many ways, it's standard Hollywood fare in the worst shallow, empty-headed sense that often means. The plot, what there is of it, is merely a means to the end of spectacle and doesn't exactly run deep; the villains are cardboard cut-outs, if that. I'd be extremely hard-pushed to call it a valuable or even particularly interesting experience, which can at least be said of Casshern. But despite all this, I find the film pretty likeable.
Why oh why? Well, it doesn't really have anything to do with being a fan of the games, because the appeal of the games feels almost wholly disconnected from anything I get from the film. The second film, it may also be worth noting, felt mostly lacking in whatever made me find the first enjoyable.
I could point out some things that I know I liked. Cinematically, it's a fairly slick film. I like the humour, which makes the whole thing much more acceptable and light-hearted without making it campy. I like the videogameish techno-modern feel (and I say 'videogameish' again not really thinking of the Tomb Raider games specifically, but of a certain quality of the action and spectacle that involves lots of noise and sparks and things coming apart in an audiovisual texture somewhat clean and free of the gravity of realism--as well as sequences that essentially play out like videogame levels anyway, including boss battles with Hindu statues and a fight with a robot that pretty much was a live-action videogame for the character). And I like Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft, who kind of pulls everything together through sheer charisma. The whole thing could accurately be described as an Angelina Jolie vehicle and it wouldn't be a criticism.
There's also this indescribable familiar feeling I get from it, which could be from something mentioned above, or could be that it somehow lacks the usual Hollywood gloss, or that the 'Britishness' of it (whatever that is) makes it feel somehow closer to home, or it might be something to do with lighting or nostalgia or I don't know what. Sometimes that's how these things work and we don't even know what we're responding to. In any case, all these things form an engaging world that, though flawed, makes a largely derivative film into a unique experience.
Then there's Hackers, a film whose use of Neuromancer-inspired cyberspace visuals would have seemed preposterous even to its 1995 audience (and is much derided on these grounds to this day). But I get a kick out of the quirky little retro '90s world it offers, and the fact that it knows how to have fun with it, however daft certain aspects may be (the bit with the spinning telephone boxes is my favourite part). Hackers is not a great film--aside from all the daft technostuff, it's pretty simple and predictable and the antagonist is your usual vapid Hollywood bad guy--but for me it holds some appeal (it's amazing how you can get nostalgia for a time and place of which you were never really a part) where it might not be saved by the obscure tastes of someone else.
Casshern is different from most films I'd classify as being personal guilty pleasures because it's something of an emotional heavyweight and it takes itself very seriously. It's a rare example of this perhaps working in its favour, if only by sheer force--films like Tomb Raider or Hackers work because they don't take themselves too seriously, which provides a lot of leeway so long as this doesn't get irritating.
But guilty pleasure can come in many forms. Often the end product has been built together kind of clumsy, flawed and ramshackle, but all it takes is one persistent spark to light the whole thing; to make something that, for whatever reason, you still find interesting or engaging on some level. You might have plenty of reason to call it a bad film, and yet... and yet...
...there you are sneaking in another viewing.
[Trailers on YouTube: Casshern, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Hackers.]
I recently watched Casshern, a 2004 film adaptation of an anime I've never seen, for the third time. It is quite some experience. It's a film, though, that I might not so readily admit to my friends that I enjoyed, and I don't know if I could watch it in the presence of other people: if I'd sat with my friends when I first watched it, I know that their faces would have reflected and amplified my own scepticism.
There are more than a few reasons to scoff at Casshern. All the far-out premises, the dodgy neo-cell stuff, all the robots, and extreme coincidences, the hilariously stylish fight-scenes, strange costumes, bad effects and some cringingly overwrought scenes make it a lot to swallow. But I still enjoyed it, and unironically. So I have to rationalise...
If you let your mind go and don't think about the details too much, it all comes together. If there are overdone visual effects, there are also some very striking, beautiful scenes; alongside the melodrama there are some genuinely touching moments. And it's not just that there are a few gems that have to be unearthed amongst the rest of the rubbish: however much it might at times feel like an overbearing, messy onslaught, it's far from artless, or heartless.
A lot of concessions might have to be made on the logic front, yes, but it's still all in all an impressive experience, full of well-crafted sequences where even the heavy-handed metaphors pay off and the overly noticeable CGI seems almost dreamlike. It's not your average superhero flick, either. Kind of makes the philosophising of The Dark Knight seem like a plodding school textbook affair with a few explosions.
The onslaught itself is kind of mesmerising. It will extract tears from your eyes, though whether from genuine emotion or exhaustion or because your eyeballs are overheating is up for debate. I couldn't say it was a particularly great film without being willfully ignorant of a heck of a lot of things, but something must have worked. I've seen it more than once, after all.
There's a lot to admire about Casshern and I think I have very good reasons for liking it. But it still qualifies as a guilty pleasure, because if I watched it with anyone else I know I'd feel compelled to give a running commentary of excuses for the daft bits, of which there is no small number.
Another, even less excusable example: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Wait, wait... hear me out!
What I like about this film is something I've never quite been able to pin down. In many ways, it's standard Hollywood fare in the worst shallow, empty-headed sense that often means. The plot, what there is of it, is merely a means to the end of spectacle and doesn't exactly run deep; the villains are cardboard cut-outs, if that. I'd be extremely hard-pushed to call it a valuable or even particularly interesting experience, which can at least be said of Casshern. But despite all this, I find the film pretty likeable.
Why oh why? Well, it doesn't really have anything to do with being a fan of the games, because the appeal of the games feels almost wholly disconnected from anything I get from the film. The second film, it may also be worth noting, felt mostly lacking in whatever made me find the first enjoyable.
I could point out some things that I know I liked. Cinematically, it's a fairly slick film. I like the humour, which makes the whole thing much more acceptable and light-hearted without making it campy. I like the videogameish techno-modern feel (and I say 'videogameish' again not really thinking of the Tomb Raider games specifically, but of a certain quality of the action and spectacle that involves lots of noise and sparks and things coming apart in an audiovisual texture somewhat clean and free of the gravity of realism--as well as sequences that essentially play out like videogame levels anyway, including boss battles with Hindu statues and a fight with a robot that pretty much was a live-action videogame for the character). And I like Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft, who kind of pulls everything together through sheer charisma. The whole thing could accurately be described as an Angelina Jolie vehicle and it wouldn't be a criticism.
There's also this indescribable familiar feeling I get from it, which could be from something mentioned above, or could be that it somehow lacks the usual Hollywood gloss, or that the 'Britishness' of it (whatever that is) makes it feel somehow closer to home, or it might be something to do with lighting or nostalgia or I don't know what. Sometimes that's how these things work and we don't even know what we're responding to. In any case, all these things form an engaging world that, though flawed, makes a largely derivative film into a unique experience.
Then there's Hackers, a film whose use of Neuromancer-inspired cyberspace visuals would have seemed preposterous even to its 1995 audience (and is much derided on these grounds to this day). But I get a kick out of the quirky little retro '90s world it offers, and the fact that it knows how to have fun with it, however daft certain aspects may be (the bit with the spinning telephone boxes is my favourite part). Hackers is not a great film--aside from all the daft technostuff, it's pretty simple and predictable and the antagonist is your usual vapid Hollywood bad guy--but for me it holds some appeal (it's amazing how you can get nostalgia for a time and place of which you were never really a part) where it might not be saved by the obscure tastes of someone else.
Casshern is different from most films I'd classify as being personal guilty pleasures because it's something of an emotional heavyweight and it takes itself very seriously. It's a rare example of this perhaps working in its favour, if only by sheer force--films like Tomb Raider or Hackers work because they don't take themselves too seriously, which provides a lot of leeway so long as this doesn't get irritating.
But guilty pleasure can come in many forms. Often the end product has been built together kind of clumsy, flawed and ramshackle, but all it takes is one persistent spark to light the whole thing; to make something that, for whatever reason, you still find interesting or engaging on some level. You might have plenty of reason to call it a bad film, and yet... and yet...
...there you are sneaking in another viewing.
[Trailers on YouTube: Casshern, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Hackers.]
Labels: films, i am the ramblemaster, neuromancer, rabbit-hole theory, tomb raider
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