Still insatiable hungry for monster movies I watch Black Lagoon
There are embarrassingly huge gaps in my cinema history, and The Creature From The Black Lagoon has been on my 'to watch' list for years and on my mind for the past few months. Finally saw it, and was surprised by how much I liked it. Great atmosphere, great monster, and an environmental subtext I hadn't been expecting. There's a shot where the leading lady tosses an unwanted cigarette into the creature's lagoon, and the camera moves below the surface to the face of the creature, who watches silently. Thanks to how it's shot the cigarette becomes invasive, and, more importantly, insulting. This is some of the earliest environmental awareness I've seen in a Hollywood film, sci-fi fear of toxic waste and nuclear war aside. There's a scene where poison is dumped into the lagoon to force the creature out of hiding, and the comatose fish that litter the water's surface highlights the disregard for the natural world that the scientists, behaving more like hunters, are exhibiting.
The creature itself looks awesome, and the amount of understanding and sympathy we find in him makes for great monster cinema.
Fangoria Magazine's foray into horror film production is a welcome experiment. Of the handful of films they've produced so far, I've only managed to see Pig Hunt because I was drawn to the dark and epic boar on the cover.
I'd heard it said that with Pig Hunt, the filmmakers realised that having a giant boar as a nemesis makes for demanding special effects, so they decided to throw a bunch of other dangerous obstacles in their way. Rednecks. Dangerous hippies. Lesser boars. This is for the most part effective, but in the end I found myself wanting Moby Dick in the forest far too much to reach any full appreciation.
The soundtrack is pretty nifty thanks to it having been partially composed by slap-bass demi-god Les Claypool, of Primus fame. He's also in the movie, as a violent redneck priest. The only kind of redneck priest, I suppose.
The giant pig, once it hits, is puppetous and satisfying for it. In general, if you've got the choice between low-budge CGI or low-budge practical effects, you'd better pick the latter. At the very least, your actors have something physical to contend with. Who doesn't want to watch a giant and slimy pig puppet crunch into a human being?
So: Has its moments, but the characters are mostly boring. This one's a maybe.
This BBC series apparently five years in the making is narrated by none other than the nature doc legend himself, David Attenborough. His wisened voice has lent itself well to the nature documentary for some time, and does no disservice to the sea. If you haven't treated yourself to a lengthy and thoroughly entertaining series like this yet, you better get on that while there are still animals in the ocean to appreciate.
As you'd expect, you'll be given stunning footage of the intricacies of undersea life, running through the various kinds of sea environments that the world has to offer. You'll be given footage and information that might even turn off the squeamish - nature, children's stories tell us, isn't exactly nice, or unfalteringly pretty. Easy to forget, but the series will offer up some firm reminders that majesty is a thing of power, and power is very often a thing of violence. When you're not seeing amazing beauty, you might be seeing killer whales play tennis with a baby seal, or the eggy, undulating jangly bits of lobsters ready to give birth.
So: Awesome. An emotional roller coaster at times, but in the healthiest way.
I'd heard about a handful of documentaries that have popped up over the past two or three years tackling Norwegian black metal and its turbulent history as their subject. When one actually appeared in front of me after I drew a pentagram in ketchup on the floor and lit some scented candles, I decided to give it a watch. Being big on Norwegian black metal myself, I was wary of being sold a cheap hunk of fan-service meant to do little more than nod in my direction for an hour and 20.
Opening up the DVD package I found a pretentious little booklet with a glowing review, an essay by the directors telling you what theoretical approach to use while watching, and a Fredric Jameson quote. Huh. Unexpected. But I should have expected this - with black metal having become a satanic farce, there's been a real push among aficionados to re-contextualise the subgenre and understand it as a clear instance of youth culture. And, moreover, as punk did before it, be recognised as a viable movement with an ethos of its own.
I'm happy to report that Until The Light Takes Us doesn't hammer that notion down into your skull as fiercely as the booklet does. Instead it follows the daily lives of four or five key figures in black metal history - of special note, Fenriz of Darkthrone and Varg Vikernes of Burzum, the latter of which was, at the time of filming, still in jail for murder and the arson of historic church sites. Other figures from the metal scene of the period pop in and out of the film, but the most engrossing portraits are found in those main two. They are old friends and they haven't spoken to each other in years. They don't come together in the film, as there is a palpable sadness that forces them to leave it all to time. It culminates during a scene where Fenriz is shown footage, shown earlier, of Varg speaking well of him and his music, but Varg, as always, is possessed by a persecution complex, and you can hear the accusation of abandonment in his voice. Fenriz actually holds back tears and laments over the past with little word.
There's a lot of psychoses on display in the film. His obsession with persecution aside, Varg hints at anti-semitism, Hellhammer explicitly approves of the killing of homosexuals, Fenriz tries to figure out where it all went sour, and a younger black metaller takes part in an ultra grim performance art piece proposed by a local painter. All reflect on what the genre is supposed to be about, and their points slowly converge. When all is said and done, we've been given a look at the really interesting and sympathetic people that invented a new mode of metallic expression, and the really interesting and awful ones that are an inseparable part of it too.
For black metal fans, you'll get the bonus of seeing intimate interviews with people you've probably mostly read about, and rare rehearsal footage you might have never seen before.
So: Surprisingly good. Worth a watch for fans and non-fans alike.
Apparently Santa was not in high standing in Mexico in '59. El Santo certainly was, but Santa and Christmas were, it was felt, a distinctly American tradition that had little place in the imaginations of Mexican children. How best to sell the Santa meme to Mexico? Why, the only way to properly bridge the gap is to put Santa in the service of god! You know, make him lock horns with satan and his minions! Kid movie stuff. The MST crew have a field day.
Santa lives in a cloud fortress made of crystal and filled with surreal anthropomorphic contraptions that monitor Earth. These contraptions were made by none other than fucking Merlin. Merlin lives in the fortress with Santa. Oh, and an army of 6 year old toy-making workers from every nation on the planet. These must be the purest child-souls to be found on Earth, to be working for god's newest general in a magic cloud city. The elves are nowhere to be found, and this will be a strange movie indeed. I can only assume that they, like the angels before them, grew jealous and rebelled and were cast down amidst the fire.
Soon enough we get a bizarre sequence with Santa playing organ and singing along with each nation's representatives in turn, and let me tell you, it is a badly dubbed buffet of racial stereotyping.
I'd have to say this episode possesses one of my favourite MST3K moments to date, a moment where the clockwork reindeer, having just been awakened from their year-long slumber, begin to laugh along with a merry Santa. Now, the reindeer's jaws open and shut in a jerking, string-pulled fashion and they can never blink. Their laugh grows into what I'm sure is an unintentionally disturbing cackle, a cackle the guys of course are compelled, in the evil spirit of Christmas, to join in on. It then becomes an unholy chorus of laughter akin to the scene in Evil Dead where Ash has his first true mental breakdown.
It's possibly the most offensive MST I've seen, and certainly one of the darkest. Given the subject matter of the film in front of them, the boys aren't afraid to make fun of every national culture they can think of in the name of fairness and in step with the flick, and poke fun at the rammed down your throat religiosity and fear of hell that this film tries to install into children.
So: Pretty damn awesome. Still with a bit a Hallowe'en in the brain yet ready for Christmas, this might be perfect for you sinners.
Continuing my march into monster movie mania, The Mummy's Hand!
A lot of light comedy and not as much hammy horror as I had hoped. You do get a bit of it though - the sort where there's a slow-moving monster creeping closer and closer to a half-asleep love interest and EEEEEEEEK other love interest bursts in and BLAM BLAM but too late! Her dad is maybe dead but no he's just knocked out cold and she's gone! Oh noes! If only it had more of that and the lurchy dusty mummy responsible for the whole mess it might have been worth sitting through. We've seen the mummy before, we don't really need him saved up for a big reveal or final act. Turn it loose. Let the new Egyptian empire begin its ancient reign of terror anew! Bricka bracka firecracka' siss boom bah! Go Mummy Go, Amun-Ra-Ra-Ra!
Instead you'll have some dull character set-up that ends up accomplishing little by the time the curse hits home. A good chunk of the movie is spent on a magician character's various parlour tricks, or rather, the edits that make them work. A buffoony support character practices one of tricks throughout the first half of the movie so he could, I thought, use it at an opportune moment and save the day later. Turns out it was just filler. Like the stock footage they used from the first movie with Boris Karloff edited out.
So much is different from the original story that comparing the two is a pretty good waste of time. This film exists as its own entity and really has a life of its own. Of the classic monster movies I've seen to date on my Hallowe'en trek, this one is by far the best. I daresay it's a masterpiece. At its heart it contains a 'who is really the monster' dynamic that has since become awfully trite, but in its original form still potent.
As if the hints of German Expressionism wasn't enough to catch my interest, much of the acting is actually pretty good, which, given the other classic Universal horror films I've watched, was a total surprise. Boris Karloff is fantastic as the monster, and it's easy to see how, I think after this film, he became a household name. His monster is incredibly sympathetic. After a sheltered and grim life filled with torture, the monster frees himself and escapes into the woods. There's an amazing scene where he finds a little girl. The little girl hands him a flower, and they sit down by a pond. She shows him how you can throw a flower into the water and watch it float gently along. The monster is so overjoyed to find something kind and delicate and beautiful in the world that it is genuinely tear-pulling when something goes wrong. He gets up, trying his best at laughter, and throws the little girl into the water because she's like a flower too. She drowns, and it's genuinely disturbing to see the monster's panicked reaction when he doesn't understand what's happened. I hadn't felt that stirred by a movie in a long time. I was really bothered by the moment.
Made before the motion picture code was actively enforced, you get some cinema that's not afraid to upset you. While the edges will sometimes show, the violence is shocking when it wants to be, and I found myself continuously surprised by what the film was prepared to do. The film bubbles with potential violence, and by the time the mob lights their torches, the loss of control that you didn't realise was creeping into your brain reaches its apex. People shout through the streets, dogs yelp, women and children cower on the sidelines, and the beast has been loosed on the monster. It was a torch that was initially used to torture the monster, and it's unsettlingly fitting that an army of them tries to flush him out of hiding, trap him, and set him ablaze. Karloff's thrashing screams while the flames rise about him will stick with me for awhile.
Also surprising, I'm noticing that the female characters in these early monster movies aren't as helpless as I expect them to be, and I wonder if that had anything to do with the code as well. They're not neutered characters, and rigid gender roles don't seem to have been installed as safety mechanisms yet. The women in these films are just as sensible as the men, and they aren't afraid to speak their mind. In the years to come, that wouldn't be the case for quite a while. Hell, it's mostly not the case in films today.
Despite all of the injustice in the film, it's hard to really hate anyone in it save for an annoying comic relief character I'll just ignore. The monster is understandable, Dr. Frankenstein is understandable, the angry torch-wielding village folk are understandable, and even the abusive Fritz is understandable. He's a deformed hunchback that Dr. Frankenstein treated like shit. Of course he was going to whip the monster and burn him when Frankenstein wasn't looking. Nobody's really to blame in this film, which makes it so remarkable. It ends off remarkably too, with an an ironic ending that presses home the severe tragedy at the centre of the film.
So: Fantastic. I expected an iconic cheese-fest and got a dramatic masterpiece that probably made it to my list of favourite films.
Still going on my Hallowe'en kick and finally getting around to seeing the great monster classics of film history. I had decided a few weeks back that I was going to go for a classic costume this year, and I settled on the one that (I won't call the Invisible Man a monster, he was just a big jerk) is probably talked about the least: the Mummy!
You're probably familiar with the Brendan Fraser Mummy from 1999. I'll pause to shudder for a sec. It lifted some elements from the original Mummy, namely the fact that there's a guy named Imhotep that fell in love with the Pharaoh's daughter. She died. Then his love drove him to seek out forbidden rituals and raise her from the dead, but he was caught, and soon sentenced to be buried alive and partially mummified. A terrible curse was laid down upon his tomb.
Made a year after the success of Dracula and featuring much of the same cast and crew, The Mummy doesn't possess the same magic but manages to be a pretty cool flick for a number of reasons. I guess I'll tell you what those might be, since this is a review and I only get fed my fish heads if I write a review. I also might get my beloved red bouncy ball back.
For starters, I saw this film before I watched the historic Frankenstein, and this was my first run in with the real Boris Karloff. I find that I love Boris Karloff. He's starring as Imhotep, and his rigid creepiness, sullen voice, and gaunt face have all been parodied so often that I felt immediately familiar with him. It was a treat to finally see the icon at work.
Secondly, like with Dracula, I was surprised to find an interesting female character, this time one both alluring, evasively clever, and amazingly unafraid to refer, just once, to sex. She's played by Broadway actress Zita Johann, who was actually seriously interested in the spiritualism of the occult and took her role perhaps a little too seriously. There's a famous scene in the movie where she dies in a past life. She reportedly fainted for real in that scene, after a strenuous day of filming without much food or water thanks to the director's cruel and ridiculous feud with her.
Now, the plot is almost identical to the plot of Dracula. We get the dude who played Van Helsing playing Doctor Muller, who is, like Van Helsing, a master of occult lore and adept at fighting the supernatural. He helps everybody out when shit hits the fan. Like Dracula, the Mummy seems to be after a young woman in Muller/Van Helsing's care. Imhotep also seems to be able to control people's minds, like Dracula could, by staring hard at them. What makes him different, though, is motive. The man isn't entirely evil, he's just obsessed with a love he couldn't attain. That's all. Leave him alone, you guys.
I was hoping, especially for my costume research, to get some serious dusty cloth-wrapped mummy action. Sadly there is virtually none in the first Mummy. Instead you get a slightly wrinkly Boris Karloff, who has inexplicably been restored to much of his living health. There's no lurching violence, but there are a few ancient Egyptian spells used to wreak some havoc.
So: A cool piece of monster history, if not as great as other first monster appearances. Certainly better than most Monster Movie sequels to come. The Mummy manages to hold his own. Also, look at this:
On a whim yesterday I googled "black surf rock," hoping that someone, somewhere, had also thought that a fusion of Norwegian black metal and surf rock would be a music to end all musics. Though I hoped, I expected little. I didn't think anyone would have actually bothered.
I'm sorry I doubted you, internet.
Some geniuses (perhaps the same one) have put up a handful of surf rock covers of black metal essentials, by the likes of Burzum, Emperor, and Darkthrone. I present to you, then, The Burzums! The Emperors! And The Darkthrones!
(Just a heads up on the first vid - it starts with a few seconds of footage featuring a bird getting swatted from the air by a desert wind turbine, in grim California style)
These are all done by MrMeddled, and there's more cool stuff on his youtube channel. Do check out his write ups for each video, since they're wildly entertaining reads. Here's a sample: The Burzums was the musical project by Varg "Charlie" Vikernes. It began during 1961 in Bergen, California and quickly became prominent within the early Californian surf scene. During 1962 and 1963, The Burzums recorded four albums; however, in 1964 Vikernes was convicted and imprisoned for stealing a box of matches, stealing a box of matches on a Sunday, siphoning fuel from a parked Studbaker, posessing a guitar amp rated above 10 Watts (the upper threshold of human hearing in 1964) and protesting loudly about how much of his hard earned money was creamed off and wasted on that joke of an airplane known as the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. While imprisoned, Vikernes recorded two offensively bad albums in the dark ambient surf style.
Hilarious, given that Varg "Count Grishnack" Vikernes was in fact the guy that unwittingly put black metal on the map by burning churches and getting convicted of murder back in the early 90s.
And on a side note, a little band called Hurtigruten. Their track 'The Black Surfers' is another cover of Emperor's 'I Am The Black Wizards,' a title I never get tired of saying aloud.
Black metal riffs lend themselves surprisingly well to surf guitar, given both genres insistance on tremolo picking. In some cases it sounds like you could pretty much just slow down a black metal riff and take out the distortion for instant and eerie surf rock.
How I wish these were real bands, and their tracks available in album form. I would pay good gold for these items. What a grim black metal beach party I would dance in.
If you don't see the vids, they'll be on my original blog post here.
I've probably made reference to MST3k in other reviews and explained its basic concept, but now that I finally come to review one of their many, many episodes I'll give your lovely heart a refresher.
Dr. Forrester is an evil crazy-go-mad scientist who has decided that he wants to rule the world. But to do that, he is certain that he must break the will of earth's populace. The most obvious way to do this is to force them to watch the most incompetent, most embarrassing, most boring films ever made by their own feeble human hands. Naturally, this procedure should be tested first in a controlled environment. So Dr. Forrester kidnaps his laboratory janitor, Joel, and jettisons him into the seclusion of his secret space station, the Satellite of Love. He sends Joel awful movies and monitors the man's brain - but what's this? He manages to stay sane somehow! The key to Joel's survival is that he makes fun of the cinematic shit he's sent with the help of two robot friends he constructed from satellite parts. In the series, you get to watch the awful films Dr. Forrester sends with Joel and the bots riffing and cracking jokes all the while. Its like watching a terrible movie with some hilarious friends, the sort that makes any movie experience ten times better.
There's tons of episodes, and each one is an entire film minus the 15 or 20 minutes trimmed for the sake of the MST3k sketches that pepper the show. Some episodes are a great success, some are not, since some films just are so terrible that the MST crew can't win. Night of the Blood Beast, though, is fantastic. It comes from season 7 of the series and is probably one of the best episodes I've seen. Night of the Blood Beast is a Roger Corman wonder, filled with lots of dull walking scenes, awful dialogue, sci fi pontification, and rubbery alien monsters. The boys are in great riffing form, and I ended up laughing out loud, or LOLing if you will, more than once. I tend not to LOL when watching comedies, and usually just smirk and chuckle ever so slightly. This is due to the terrible burden I carry, the alien shrimps gestating within me. I identified with the astronaut in Night of the Blood Beast completely.
So: Wicked-awesome. This one features Mike instead of Joel, who is, I think, my favourite of the two Forrester victims.
I'm sure some of you know this series well. It's a TV series that's held in pretty high esteem by a great many, myself included.
This review will be for two sorts of people. One is the sort that has seen some of the first season and said to themselves "this is a piece of shit and I hate your guts J. Michael Straczynski" and stopped watching. The other is the sort that say to themselves, every year or so, "I should probably get around to watching that crazy Babylonia 18 show that my nerd friends talk about too often."
The concept is this: Babylon 5 is earth's greatest achievement - a massive space station in distant and neutral space built to function as a centre of commerce and diplomacy between the various alien races of the galaxy. Lots of politics, fantastic character drama, and, about 2 seasons in, grand and poetic space opera of the best kind. Probably 70 percent of the series was written all at once as what creator Straczynski calls a telenovel, and benefits greatly from having had a start and finish already intricately planned by the time the pilot hit the airwaves.
Babylon 5 tries very hard not to be Star Trek, and does pretty damn well in its goal. B5 isn't afraid to give you alien races that are much more alien than your average Trek alien. Communication between alien cultures is often very strained. There's a large mantis-like insect that's top gangster in the shady areas of the station, and a tentacle-faced Cthulu-type alien that only eats decaying food because they evolved from a scavenging animal. In general, the skull shapes and faces of the alien races are a bit more varied than you're used to in other shows.
This doesn't always make for a good first impression however. You have to get over your initial knee-jerk this-is-not-like-startrek reaction and adapt to the different flavour. Star Trek has had a monopoly on sci fi television for so long that any series that isn't Star Trek wears its invisible shackles. If you had caught any episodes of the series during its run in the 90s, you probably saw a dude with hair like a paper fan and changed the channel. On its surface, and because of season 1's terrible budget, the show can look pretty silly at times. The CGI stuff didn't look good, and the sets looked dreadfully cheap. Michael O'Hare's lead act as Captain Sinclair is embarrassing, and he manages to ruin almost every scene that reaches for emotional force. Once he leaves in season 2, the series takes a serious upturn. So season 1 is pretty terrible, but there's enough important information and character set-up that unfortunately makes it necessary to watch. Now and again you'll get a winning episode, one that hints at the bigger picture to come in later seasons, but for the most part season 1 is comprised of forgettable little one-offs.
So: Placing the 'recommended' tag on this review was a strange decision, but for the awesomeness of what is to come, it must be so written. And the fan hair will grow on you once you realise how fucking awesome Londo Mollari is.
This wildly entertaining sword and sorcery flick, like most of them, comes to us from the dark and time-fogged forests of the 1980s. Under the supreme command of dread mogul Roger Corman, a screenplay was commissioned to Charles Saunders, who based his script off a short story he wrote for an anthology called, coincidentally, Amazons!. So that Amazons! was apparently the first significant anthology of fantasy works using female protagonists and written by a mostly female cast of authors. You'd expect, then, that the Amazons under review is an interesting feministical text where warrior women fight for equality and independence in a harsh and largely masculine world, right? Well yeah you get that. Only with boobs. Lots of boobs. This is a film, after all, and it is common knowledge that only films with boobs do well. I remind you of Titanic.
If you've seen as many 80s sword and sorcery movies as I have, you might recognise these common links:
There will be a scene where a woman takes off her top.
There will be a scene where women are swimming naked in a river and are being watched by drooling pervs.
There will be a scene with sex in it.
It is made in Argentina.
We will not be given armour or be clothed against the elements.
Amazons is of course about a tribe of warrior women. They are under the command of a queen who rules over a kingdom currently under siege by an evil wizard named Kalungo. When I hear the name Kalungo I can't help but imagine a cute baby elephant, a born in captivity type that's maybe the result of a worrying but in the end rewarding pairing. Not so much a demon-enslaved lightning-throwing sorcerer. After doing some quick online digging, however, I find to my shame that a kalunga, or calunga, is a Brazilian descendant of runaway slaves. The word can mean many things, and is oddly enough used both as a derogatory racial label and as a byword for someone who is famous or important. Go figure. Charles Saunders is African-American, and I wonder if the link here is merely coincidence or some interesting subtext.
Oh, right, the movie. So anyway the amazons need to quite obviously find a magic sword since it's the only thing that can stand up to Kalungo's evil magic. Two amazon babes are sent on the quest, and it's hilariously wonderful. It's great fun to watch people use prop weapons they've never handled before. Especially when they haven't been given much supplementary training. You're basically given a bunch of calendar models who drill practice their spear maneuvers with 'What if I really hurt someone?' hesitance. A real winner's attitude on the mock-battlefield. Sword duels can sometimes look half-decent, but largely possess a 'What am I doing?' grace that lends the whole production metric ass-loads of charm.
So: A fantastic watch with friends. Can't get enough of this stuff.
Since it's the season for witchery and other assorted evil delights, I decided to check out the Dracula Legacy Collection, which collects the classic Dracula films done by Universal Studios, the set of films that laid out the iconography of the vampire. Empty castles, long candles, winding staircases, cobwebs, capes, heavy accents. All the campy Count Dracula signifiers we now pick up from saturday morning cartoons came from that first Bela Lugosi hit.
And it's cool. It has some really memorable moments - great lines, great visuals, and some pretty engrossing scenes; my favourite being a scene where an aged Dr. Vanhelsing is visited by Dracula and told to leave. Their battle of wills is timeless, and most of it comes through in their almost archetypal posturing, a posturing that has the ring of the silent film era.
Since Hollywood really started flexing their sound film muscle in 1927 (The Jazz Singer being among a host of big '27 releases), in 1931 'talkies' were still a new art. Dracula director Tod Browning, also of Freaks fame, was pretty uneasy with sound and was one of those silent directors that kind of petered out after sound came into the picture. He had thrown in the towel by 1936.
His Dracula seems to forget that it's a sound film at times. I say his, but allegedly Browning's set presence was at near zero and most of the directing was done by the cinematographer, which might also account for the persistence of silent image over sound in the film. There are long stretches of dialogueless silence, and an insistence on capturing strong facial expression and holding the shot for emphasis. The make-up work is pure silent film, with its heavy whites and dark lips. Also, apart from the brief and orchestral 'come out to the movies' style opening credits sequence, there's no soundtrack. Not one shred, not a hot lick of music to be found in this film. While it gives the film the sensation I imagine the fish that chokingly set a first flipper on land had, it's a strangeness that works. It creates pools of tension and atmosphere that might have been ruined otherwise with unnecessary dialogue or the emotional imposition that music carries.
So: A classic treat and a fascinating look at a silent film probing into the world of sound.
I resume my journey into the biopic'd life of El Che!
Che: Part Two has a different flavour than Part One. Where Part One uses broken narrative, Part Two is linear and straight-forward. Since Che's character has been established already, it pulls few obvious cinematic punches and focuses simply, and still satisfyingly, on Che and his comrades' struggles against a hostile Bolivian government and its impossibly isolated and un-revolutionary populace.
While I detected a Soderberghian flatness in the first part, Part Two feels a bit more intimate now that the frenetic narrative style has calmed down. It's just as well shot, though there is admittedly less in terms of captivating imagery, thanks to the constantly dense, dry bracken of the Bolivian forests. It is, like Part One, engrossing and unique in its tone and sensibility. Despite knowing my history enough to know what would happen by the end of the film, the finish is perfect, and I suspect that it will stay with me for a long time.
So: It's a moving look at the way ideals don't always work out, and the very man that has come to represent that problem.
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