Quick-review: Strigoi

I have finally watched Strigoi. I have meant to since Netflix started bringing it up in my recommended movies area.

Netflix has two means of recommending movies: one is to take a film and lump it into every possible conceivable genre (quirky visually-striking intellectual thrillers anyone?) and insist that I must watch this movie because I love this genre that was clearly generated by Netflix solely to bully me into watching this movie. For me, this movie is Santa Sangre. Netflix has wanted me to watch Sante Sangre for what seems like years. I did, and we'll discuss that later.

The other way Netflix recommends movies is to very rarely bring a film up, as if to say "oh. also this movie exists. I dunno. No one has watched it yet, but you know. It could be ok. You're probably not interested anyway as all you ever talk about is how much you want to see Santa Sangre."

Strigoi is one of the latter films, and precisely because Netflix's recommendation was so non-committal, I watched it.

I love this movie. It is the only vampire movie I think I've ever really loved.** It's what I want vampire movies to be, and it's precisely what they never are. Twilight would have us believe that vampires tell us about ourselves, about our desires and about what it means to belong to a community. Twilight sits on a throne of lies. Strigoi does those things, and it does so well. It's funny, it's incredibly sad, it is without a doubt the only time I have ever seen a vampire drink another's blood, and I felt it achieved something emotional and true.

This movie is touching and distressing and if I were to write a full list of adjectives to accurately describe it I would sound like Netflix.

Which leads me to question: What if Netflix is an entity so advanced in its knowledge of one area of information that it is an intelligence unto itself, and because of its incredibly nuanced love for film, can never be understood by others?

What if Netflix is the singularity, and the singularity is simply an awkward movie nerd?

Recommended genres for me today:

• Visually-striking Chinese Kung Fu Movies
• Gritty Crime Movies Based on a Book
• Independent Road Trip Dramas
• Quirky Buddy TV Comedies

These recommendations don't sound like they come from a computer. They sound a lot like the people I used to work with at the video store, talking to someone about something they just returned: a movie they grabbed off the new releases rack without much thought for its book adaptation or the cinematography of the fight scenes.

I don't remember the genre Netflix used to recommend Strigoi to me, but I'd like to think that my max-star rating has prompted Netflix to design a whole new genre of recommendations for me. Something about Soviet Russia that isn't set in Russia. Something about communities and the social devastation of a million quiet betrayals. Something about the impact of land ownership wars that are waged entirely in paperwork, without any family ever moving from their land, without anyone ever really knowing who truly owns what. Something about coming home to find your grandfather has been drinking your blood and living with him anyway.

**EDIT: There is one other vampire movie I love, and I also compared it to Twilight, which is horrifying.

[photo: Thomas Wolfe was wrong: you can go home again, and when you do, you'll finally achieve all that you couldn't face in med school.] 

News about Oldboy is always interesting, but I'm fascinated by a couple of other things in this article:

1. Use of whom in the first sentence: "whom has been following this remake." It's a complex sentence, but still.
2. Martha Marcy May Marlene, Silent House, and Spike Lee's vision of Oldboy constitute a trend of "thrillers"? You have to make a pretty broad definition of genre to wedge those three movies into the same category. I guess it would be undiplomatic to say so, but I suspect what Elizabeth Olsen has an un-Olsenlike reputation for is "acting." Or more accurately, "not reminding me of Full House."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0KUUOWq3JA

The Westerfeld Effect

I had to look up this post again today, not for the last time I'm sure: http://scottwesterfeld.com/blog/2007/03/midi-nighters-on-tv/ .

Sullivan is really into My Little Pony right now. He says, "My little pony my best friend." So I was thinking, Sullivan is a brony. Only then I realized, Sullivan is two, so actually he's just a toddler watching a cartoon for toddlers.

brony tshirt

I'm always trying to express this thing, where you twist a thing too many times and end up with something very conventional, either the same thing you started with or something worse. I think Scott Westerfeld explains the phenomenon really well, and since I often want a name for it, I think we should call it The Westerfeld Effect. Right? 

It is. It is totally exhausting. 

Wanderlust

get it? michael sho-WALTER?

David Wain is like that weird cousin I used to see at family gatherings. Most of the time, I kind of try to avoid him. Most of the time, I don't get his jokes, and he makes me cringe a lot more often than he makes me laugh. But also, I feel a certain undeniable affection, like we have known each other for a long time. That's actually true, in a way--I used to stay up late watching The State after my parents went to sleep when I was in high school. And even then, I didn't get it, but I was fond of it. All of these shows--Wet Hot American Summer, The State, Stella, Wainy Days, Role Models--I like them even though I don't exactly think they are funny. At least, not most of the time. The occasional laughs are big laughs, but they are few and far between. Maybe it's a thing I have to be in the right mood for. If so, I was in the seriously right mood for Wanderlust, because I embarrassed myself laughing at it.

overreaction, pre-review, written in a big hurry, rushing to judgment

This is one of those movies I should just decide right now that I will never see because I already know what's going to happen, which is that I will sit there alternating between bemusement and rage, hating everything about the movie, and then later everyone will have thought it was cute or charming or sweet. I did not rewatch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I hated, for years, but it kept coming up on respectable smart film critics' best-of-the-decade lists, so I thought maybe I had been in a reactionary mood when I saw it. After all, it came out in 2004, and maybe I was still figuring out that it's not exactly fair that all the stories seem to be told by men for men about men and their desires. A discovery like that can make a person overreact for a while. So I finally went back and gave it another chance, just a few months ago. And I hated it, I hated it. It's so gross the way we watch this whole story that is not just theoretically told from his perspective, but literally constructed solely from his memories, she has no existence in this movie. There is no Clementine. And we're supposed to have feelings about their relationship, to care what happens to them, and never mind the fact that they are both so terribly unpleasant and unimaginative and ugly, they are also just one person not two. Just this one man, and his internal fantasy about a life. Note: I also find the movie impossible to follow from a plot standpoint, and not very pretty to look at, but I'm getting into the weeds now. I'm not here to talk about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, except in that it is sort of the quintessential movie in which there is a relationship between an ordinary man and an impossible imaginary fantasy girl.

But this movie. Ruby Sparks. Jeez. In case you don't have time to watch the preview, the premise is that Paul Dano's character is a writer, and he creates a flesh-and-blood woman out of nothing. He's the inventor of her. Sort of like Pygmalion, but less progressive. It's a cute idea, I get that. Except that it's deeply troubling--and also a massive cliche. Consider the idea that a woman's very existence depends on being the object of love. It's troubling and it's also so very very boring.

It's like Zoe Kazan (who wrote the screenplay, and also stars in the movie) read about manic pixie dream girls, and she thought: the trouble with every Zooey Deschanel character is that it's theoretically possible for her to express an opinion. What we really need is a story about a woman who is literally controlled, internally and externally, by the man at the center of the story. What we need is a movie about how fun and awesome it is to be the girl in that story, or in that relationship.

Watching the trailer, I felt sort of sick and gross, this dizzy feeling I get when I am forced to realize that people don't see things the way I see things. It's not unlike the feeling when I can't find my keys, even though I know exactly where I left them. Like the reality I live in is just not quite the same reality where anyone else lives. It's unsettling to know that people I can most of the time communicate with are loving the wit and/or charm and/or humor of a thing I find mostly baffling and sometimes outrageous.

From the trailer: "You can make her do anything you want. For men everywhere, tell me you're not going to let that go to waste." Ha ha. Get it? Men want women to do stuff that they don't necessarily want to do. It is rough for men everywhere.

I know, maybe the movie will redeem itself. I admit there is a possibility that the movie is not what I think it is, that in the end somehow it's a movie about female agency not a movie at the expense of female agency. I recognize that I am rushing to judgment.

I am trying to think of examples of stories in which a woman defines the fantasy, they must exist. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Stranger Than Fiction, and the thing is, that movie is still all about the dude. It's all about the experience of being fictional. So I don't think it works as a counterexample. Certainly there are movies by and about women, great movies that reflect experiences of women or tell good stories about women. But it's hard to think of any where she has all the power and his desires are just a reflection of her needs.