AccentedCinema

[Weekly Updates] August 1, 2021

Added 2021-08-02 18:35:05 +0000 UTC

It's August. It's summer. And it's like 15 degree here in Montreal.

Is the weather equally out of whack where you are?

CHANNEL UPDATE

Hope you enjoyed our last video on Eat Drink Man Woman. This is the first time I write about Taiwanese film, but won't be the last time.
For that video, I chose to approach the film via a auteur theory framework, analyzing the film through Ang Lee's personal experience. But the film is vague and dense, and it can just as easily be analyzed through political theory, cultural study, or feminist theory.
That is the nature of film analysis: there is no definitive answer. What a film means to a society is less decided by the director, and more so decided by the social collective. I hope my perspective can bring you not an answer, but the beginning of a long discussion.
For our next video: In case you haven't seen the community post. I'm having some intense side effects from my Covid vaccine, and have to slightly delay our next video.
Originally I planned to talk about Infra-Man and the new Dynasty Warriors movie. After watching both, I realize I have nothing to say about them. Surprisingly, these two films are similar in that they are not good enough for me to care, or bad enough for me to have an emotional reaction.
As a result, I moved my other topics forward. Next video will be about the career of Tony Leung, and examine some of his acting techniques.

ABOUT MEDIA

Now that I'm writing a cosmic horror script, it makes me realize how few cosmic horror films are really out there.
When talking about cosmic horror films, the first one that comes to mind for most, is John Carpenter's The Thing. It is certainly a great film, especially considering the budget. And it's most definitely inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, particularly At the Mountains of Madness. The setting, the hopeless ending, the uncaring unfeeling antagonist, and the general mood came straight out of a Lovecraftian tale.
But it always feel more "inspired" by cosmic horror rather than a direct adaptation of one. For me, the true antagonist of cosmic horror is never the old ones or the gods, but the mere knowledge of their existence. Be it the tale of someone unnaturally extends their lives through modern technology, or that human lives were created by aliens.
The knowledge of these events is enough to force us to confront the meaninglessness of our lives. The knowledge drives us into insanity. And that is rarely captured on film, certainly not by The Thing, or Alien. They are cosmic-like, but not true cosmic horror.
And since this knowledge is forbidden, and cannot be seen without people going insane, it is long believed to be unfilmable.
Bird Box decides to just not show the monster because of this. It is an obvious choice, but not particularly a clever one.
For a more clever approach, see The Cabin in the Woods, in which the elder being is implied to be... us, the audience. All the lives lost and meaningless death happened in the movies are explicitly made for the viewer's entertainment. It forces us to confront a similar question: Is there some other beings out there finding joy through our deaths?
For this reason, even though Cabin in the Woods may not have the mood of one, but it does have the horror of a cosmic one.
Another common problem for cosmic horror adaptation is the need for movies to be logical and make sense. Perhaps because of how much more abstract words can be, I find a vague and open-ended book to be much more acceptable than an open-ended movie.
Maybe because of this, Color Out of Space, a direct adaptation of a Lovecraft story, decided to add this unnecessary explanation of what the light is: A colonizing life form that is terraforming Earth into an Alien planet.
It seems filmmaker struggles to depict an antagonist without intention. Even Annihilation, which is a fairly excellent film, can't resist giving the alien force a physical form that the protagonist can struggle against.
It's easiest to struggle physically. It's slightly more difficult to struggle with emotions. But it's nearly impossible to make a movie where a character struggles with knowledge and its own awareness.
That's what makes The Lighthouse a truly one of a kind movie. I still don't know if it's good or bad, but it certainly captures that cosmic horror vibe. The film seems to be about two men living under the influence of luck, an unknowable, non-logical forces that dictates everyone's life.
Any attempt for the young character to understand this force leads to misery. Any attempt to fight against it brings misfortune. Yet after all that, no one really knows if luck really exists.
It doesn't have greater beings, or evil forces, or alien life. The movie's antagonist is just a law of nature that doesn't make sense. And the more you know about it, the less sense it makes. It's frustrating, and the film is also frustrating to watch because of it.
It captures the cosmic horror confusion, the "what the hell is going on" feeling. Sadly, that also makes the movie really hard to watch. It is the closest we have gotten to capturing the genre on film. But we still got a long way to go, it seems.