Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Dreams!

Article theme: Vincent (Starry Starry Night) by Don McLean

On the back of my Ran DVD, it states the master's King Lear adaptation was his last great film. Imagine making such a gaffe on so prestigious a release, when Kurosawa rang in the 90s with Dreams, a note-perfect encapsulation of the telos of cinéma whose premise seems born of divine simplicity: he made a film about his dreams.

No doubt some weeaboo can explain the complex colour symbolism and significance of the outfits and motions in this sequence. Fortunately for me, though, my own dreams hardly make any less sense to me.

Most episodic or anthology-style films suffer from the inclusion of weaker chapters beside the strong, but each of Kurosawa's Dreams (1990) is so hypnotically absorbing that it never loses steam, and the sequencing has a narrative elegance that ties the disparate entries together, from the devastating childhood opener through dark, apocalyptic territory to the final serene denouement. Perhaps one reason the master had such visually rich subject matter on which to draw was his wide range of interests, such as mountaineering:

Or the art of Vincent Van Gogh:

In the same way, my dreams have featured such highbrow artistes as Mötley Crüe and levels from Crash Bandicoot.

In my experience, keeping a dream journal and documenting everything as soon as you wake is quite effective in enhancing dream recall. Kurosawa claimed that the Dreams (1990) featured in this suite were ones he had multiple times, which never seems to happen for me, at least in my adult life. I used to dream often of flying, as a child, except instead of flying per se it was more like swimming through the air. I recall taking off over the playground of my school and propelling myself with breaststroke as the other kids shrank into the distance below. Perhaps I had these dreams because I used to go swimming a lot, but they never returned in adulthood. I recall a great sensation of reprieve and elation in the air. NPCs of the I-heckin-hate-Christmas variety like to bitch that people talking about their dreams is LE BORING, but, honestly, it's one of the few topics on which I like hearing oth*r pe*ple speak. Dreams have a way of bypassing ingrained circumspection to channel uncut mystery, wonder, and horror.

In this sequence, Kurosawa goes to Birmingham.

Structurally, Dreams descends into abyssal depths of anguish and despair before relieving us with an idyllic vision of an Amish-type village filled with green life and gently revolving wheels.

Knowing there was once somewhere this pretty to film this sequence should bring out your inner Uncle Ted.

There's an urgent throughline in these late chapters about the consequences of amoral technological acceleration. The A-bomb imagery is about as subtle here as in Godzilla, but why shouldn't such things cause recurring nightmares rippling across the psyche of a people, and thus find expression in the Dreams (1990) of their most famous filmmaker? While drooling Biden and his neocon cadres poke the Russian bear in the assurance that nukes don't real, and techbro douchebags seek to escalate the importation of the third world so line can go right up to Heckin Mars, a pointed warning such as Kurosawa's might not go amiss.

Remember the dream, anon.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Curse of the Cat People!

Spoilers for Cat People entailed.

Last time we checked in with Oliver (S.F. Guy) and Alice (Jane Randolph), they were fighting for their lives against the ambiguous feline menace of Irena (Simone Simon). Years later they're married, confirming, somewhat hilariously, her worst fears. But has Irena returned as a spooky ghost to haunt their autistic daughter? Despite the title, this surprising sequel isn't so much a retread of the original's classic-horror atmospherics as a charming, redemptive coda with a wholesome festive vibe, its horror elements played even subtler and relegated to the merest frisson until they resurface in key scenes. Yes, Curse is the first and last horror sequel to shift gears into Christmaskino.

"Happy holidays" sayers on even more suicide watch than usual.

But as the movie opens, Oliver and Alice are troubled over their daughter Amy's (Ann Carter) apparent fantasy life. Amy daydreams, posts letters in a hollow tree, hangs out with a weird old lady and her live-in carer daughter, and, most disconcertingly of all, announces that she has a new friend, who turns out to be Irena. Is she an imaginary friend, a real benign spirit, or a vengeful ghost posing as Casper to lure Amy to her doom?

Sorry WitchTERF4968, under Project 2025 all women will be required to wear these fairytale gowns with the long drooping wizard sleeves. I don't make the rules!

Of course, to answer would be to spoil. Perhaps because it veered so far from the perfectly judged horror template of its rightly esteemed predecessor, Curse was a commercial flop and remains largely unknown. But if you've exhausted your oh-so-nontraditional Christmas movie fare with Die Hard and Batman Returns, and if you followed my orders and watched the original this Halloween, Curse might be the seasonal gem to see you through your Christmas evening. Either that or revisit The Mothman Prophecies. Maybe make it a double bill.

Stop Motion Dreams: One Million Years BC!

Article theme: Back to the Cave - Lita Ford

Grugkino One Million Years BC opens with the cavemen of the Rock Tribe catching a wild hog in a pit trap. As they make off with their prize, an old grampa they brought along because ???? falls into the hole, and they leave him there for the vultures. This made me laugh for the rest of the movie.

"I've fallen and I can't get up!"
"..."

Upon returning to their home cave, some gruglennial yeets a rock at another caveboomer, making this the most brutal elder abuse kino since that Biden debate.

"Listen here, Jack, you just walk right in the front door, give the manager a firm handshake, and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Why, when I was at Woodstock..."

The remainder of the runtime is likewise comprised of random violence, partly because the characters can only speak in grunts and a handful of made-up grugspeak words, and partly because it was a Hammer production, and to Hammer everything looked like nails. Anyway, Tumak (our nominal hero, but it's a relative term) gets exiled from the tribe and finds himself wandering the prehistoric wastes, where he bumps into things like this:

Could be a dinosaur.

And this:

Oh come on, that's an iguana.

Eventually he makes it to the ocean, where he meets Raquel Welch (Fantastic Voyage) and her Shell Tribe. At first I thought they were all women, making them the Clam Tribe, but it turns out they have men too, meaning you can use that joke in your own parody.

The 1960s hairdos are so funny to me. If they remade this today, they'd all have those half-shaved cuts and the men would all have zoomer perms.

They take Tumak in and nurse him back to health, BUT MEANWHILE at the Rock Tribe cave, this dude seizes power by Mufasa'ing another old man off a cliff.

Day of the Pillow (1,000,000 BC, colourised).

This is a very important plot point, because when Tumak eventually returns to his home cave, he will now be fighting a different guy than the dude that exiled him the first time. IDK why that's important, but the screenwriter with Earth's easiest job determined that it was. Anyway, back at the coast, Tumak helps the Shell Tribe fend off a dinosaur attack by cleverly/accidentally causing it to impale itself on a large stake.

Harryhausen diligently animated the model with the stake still embedded rising and falling with the dinosaur's dying breaths, which is a level of perfectionism wholly out of proportion to the stature of the project, and that autismal refusal to phone it in is what made him the GOAT.

Sadly for Tumak, his popularity is short-lived, and he ends up getting exiled from the Shell Tribe too, prompting the audience to wonder whether he's the problem. Not Racquel, though, who chooses to accompany him back through the wasteland, during the course of which they stop off in a cave occupied by a family of sasquatches who beat one of their own to death and stick his head on a spike. This seems to get Racquel wet as fuck.

Really, babe? Sasquatch beheadings? I mean I'm not saying no.

Because it's a dinosaur flick, and for not a single reason more, they then witness a dinosaur fight:

As a kid I always liked the triceratops, and was mad as hell when it got merked in Fantasia and just lay in a field with a stomache ache in J*rassic P*rk. Well, here it is, tricerabros: /ourdino/'s turn to shine.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone famously articulated a rule of storytelling whereby plot beats should never be joined by "and then", rather, "therefore" or "but". In Harryhausenkinos, the line between "and then" and "but" is often gossamer-fine. Everything that happens might be rendered "and then a dinosaur emerges!" or "but then a dinosaur emerges!", with little causal infrastructure being laid. But Harryhausen could do what he liked. Does anyone complain when Rammstein just bust out a flamethrower in the middle of a set? Spectacle for the sake of spectacle is only rubbish when it fails to entertain. Audacity and raw talent separate the greats from the also-rans; one law for the lion and the ox is Oppression.

Anyway, Tumak and Racquel make it back to Rock turf, whereupon Racquel immediately gets into a sweaty, hairpulling catfight with Tumak's cave-ex (Martine Beswick, Thunderball) because she tried to take her favourite bone (not an euphemism).

Wow, that escalated quickly. I mean that really got out of hand fast.

The old geezer eagerly proffering a rock for Racquel to bash Martine's head in with made me bray like a fucking donkey.

Naturally, this brings the Rock Tribe together in a spirit of celebration, and Racquel is enthusiastically adopted and shows her new BFFs how to swim and/or bathe, which I think is supposed to be the kind of upgrade for them that those apes in 2001 received from the monolith. But then a pteranodon snatches up Racquel and takes her to its nest to feed its young. But then it gets mauled to death by a pterodactyl, causing Racquel to drop into the ocean. See what I mean about stretching the "but" (careful now)?

Knowing this was a real movie makes me feel much better about my shitty greenscreen skillz.

The pterodactyl then graphically eats the baby pteranodons. Holy shit, Harryhausen.

Is One Million Years BC high art? Yes, actually. For what deeper well of subject matter can be found than the eternal tug-of-war between the civilising impulse and the savage? Between the cold machines of techno-singularitarian utopianism and monsters from the id? Cave art predating any written script speaks more to us than any astroturfed Important Film or fart-huffing thinkpiece in the papers of note. Like Frazetta, Harryhausen mastered the technical wizardry of his medium to render archetypes from our profoundest dreams and nightmares. You will kneel to my elitist case for populism, and you'll like it.