Movies
Would have vastly preferred the version of this story in chronological order, but even then, I don't think there's a whole lot to this movie, which makes the nonlinear storytelling feel like an attempt to cloak a lack of ideas. Too bad, too, because "possession movie in the Wild West" feels like a real winner of an idea. Grade: C
For the majority of the movie, my main thought was that the animation hadn't aged particularly well—it's literally Flash animation, and although it's probably the most technically sophisticated Flash animation I've ever seen, it's still got that uncanny, floaty quality to it that always feels flat in Flash. But then that cut into live-action footage in the movie's final minutes hits, and it's one of the most devastating, damningly anti-war things I've ever seen in a movie, all the more so because the the preceding 85 minutes had established a false normality of this artificially smooth, poorly aged style that just shatters when confronted with the final reality—the literalized mechanism of a brain that refuses to admit culpability in a massacre. Nobody ever thinks they're culpable in a massacre. I'm sure I don't. Grade: A-
This movie does a fantastic job of evoking the alternatingly intoxicating and frustrating feeling of digging into a research project and pulling on loose thread after loose thread. I really dig the ingenuity with which this research project is constructed, too—until the credits told me so, I didn't realize that the "Watermelon Woman" that the protagonist researches here is a fictional figure invented by writer/director/star Cheryl Dunye for this movie, which means that all the primary sources the movie shows are invented, too, so mad props for the dedication to do all that. I just wish this movie were better on a character and screenplay level, though—the dialogue is pretty flat, and the central romance that gets so much attention ends off-screen for reasons I don't fully understand. A fascinating, flawed project that feels ripe for a remake. Grade: B
This movie has a lot of competition within my immediate film-viewing context, and it's losing: I've recently seen a much better Charles Laughton movie (Ruggles of Red Gap), and I've recently seen a much more entertaining movie in which a group of scrappy upstarts overthrow their terrible boss (9 to 5). But it's a lot better than the other Frank-Lloyd-directed movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture during the 1930s (Cavalcade, bleh), and I did have a pretty good time here, so here's a positive review. Grade: B
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