The Films of 2023

[Mr Sausage]

Caligula: the Ultimate Cut

Just caught a screening of this. The restoration is something of a miracle: not a moment of footage used from the original, much or all the original onset dialogue cleaned up by AI, so little to no dubbing, unobtrusive CGI backgrounds and other additions to mask cheap sets or open up backgrounds and landscapes--it's a completely reimagined experience. Everything is improved, from the rhythm of the cuts to even the shot selection. The new cut takes some of the film's blandest moments and opens them up. The scene where MacDowell chooses his new wife among the worshipers of Isis was originally just a mash of cuts to various girls walking, frolicing, or having sex without much rhythm or logic. Here, the editing turns the whole scene into something of a round, with the camera panning in a circular motion among possible choices, the whole thing having a particular style and point. Another is Tiberius' poolside conversation where he asks and then commands Caligula to do his little childhood dance. In the original, this moment of humiliation is for some reason shown in a long shot with the performers' faces obscured (O'Toole with his back to the camera, MacDowell bent over, showing the top of his head). Here, it's all closeups to register the performances. There are many moments like this, with clunky or weirdly shot bits given a fuller, more comprehensible presentation, and the editing showing more logic and motivation. And everything just seems to have more breathing room.

I noticed what's cut isn't just Guccione's porn inserts, but a lot of the most unpleasant violence. All the torture shots following Tiberius' orgy are absent; Proculus' murder and castration is gone; Caligula's child is no longer murdered in a leering closeup, but a wide shot; and even the moment where the wine-inflated guard is 'popped' is done in a wider shot and lacks the closeup of his innards hanging out. As for the sex, many of the shots of the weird sex toys, and all the shots of animals during Tiberius' orgy have been cut, as well as moments like Tiberius' 'stallion'; and scenes have fewer unmotivated closeups of genitalia and fewer cut aways from dialogue scenes to show irrelevant sex montages. The result is a less repulsive, more watchable movie. It's still grotesque and unpleasant, no question; but the offputting mixture of ugly sex and brutal violence is less constant and oppressive, less pointedly exploitative. Guccione's sensibilities, such as they are, have been scrubbed from the experience.

The above, plus the serious and moody score and the new historical text crawls and animated prologue, makes me suspect the principle idea behind this version is to turn this notorious shocker into an Art Film. There is a concerted attempt to make this a more serious, less exploitative experience, as tho' it were a lively, phantasmagoric historical drama about a seedy man. And, crazily enough, it does partially succeed. This version has more claim to be a legitimate movie than I thought possible.

But no amount of massaging and finessing could ever save this movie from itself. Even with the greater breathing room, proper scene ordering, and increased editing clarity, there's no hiding that, as shot, the movie is a collection of set pieces without a narrative throughline, little sense for the passage of time (we leap forward in time constantly and unexpectedly), and nothing but loose connections between them. There are a lot of moments, but no real movie to speak of. And these moments are always the exact same thing, over and over. There's no variety to them, just the same cruelty, venality, and excess played again and again, sometimes in different environments, usually not. The film is obviously uninterested in either politics, history, or psychology. Its one and only interest is its own prurience, which it indulges at length. Caligula is dull. After an hour, you've seen everything; after two, you're wondering how much more there could possibly be; and by the end of three you're begging for everyone to get butchered and the credits to roll.

Not helping is the lack of energy to the thing. As wonderful as the sets and costume designs are, and as loud and game the performances, everything is held back by the clear lack of talent in Tinto Brass. Brass is a sexploitation hack who by accident managed to be mistaken for an art house film director like Luchino Visconti, almost entirely because people mistook Salon Kitty for The Damned. His direction in Caligula is pure euro-sludge, that stiff, creaky style that lumbers awkwardly through space and time familiar from so many Italian productions from the era. Brass is unable to bring anything to life. Nothing is sexy, exciting, or especially interesting because the director is poor at building emotion and has only two or three effects in his pocket. Even the amazing sets he prefers to film as though they were backdrops under a proscenium arch, so the movie feels set bound and stagey. Rarely do you get a sense of a living, breathing environment the characters are inhabiting. Rather, each scene is artificial and restrictive, the whole thing a shouted performance. The visual style is also clotted, full of veils, and smoke censors, and bric-a-brac crowding in. It makes for a heavy, tangible atmosphere, but contributes to the lack of momentum. Every so often there's a shot or a sequence that springs to life, like this one terrific shot of MacDowell springing from behind a low-angle camera and traipsing into a court yard, or this or that high angle shot of people arranged geometrically, that suggests what the film could've been if helmed by someone with a more vital shooting style. So while the improved shot selection and organization certainly helps the movie feel more alive, it can never solve the essential fault that Tinto Brass had no idea how to helm this movie. Hence the 90 hours of footage that allowed for a totally different cut to be assembled without a single repeated shot or piece of footage. That doesn't happen under a director with a clear idea of what he wants to achieve. This very cut is a testament to Brass' lack of vision.

As for the performances, they are better accounted for, and not just in the editing. The recovered audio gives a depth of tone and colour that the dubbing was just not capable of. These are richer performances, for sure, but just as overblown and wild as ever. None of these performances are impressive or especially good, but they're more watchable now, and the actors' choices are easier to appreciate. The cast no longer feels as stiff, especially the big names, and that does a lot to help this otherwise very stiff film.

Caligula is not a good movie--is really just a filmic curio that you're astonished ever got made. The Ultimate Cut can't hide that fact and ultimately fails to transform the thing into a serious Art House picture. But it has produced the most watchable and interesting version of this movie that's ever existed. This is as close as the movie's ever been to being a proper film.

[Boosmahn]

re: Robot Dreams

A word of warning for you (and anyone interested in the film): the new US BD release by Decal is apparently quite bad. Someone on the other forum made a couple of comparisons, and the banding is worse than on an Amazon streaming copy. (That source has its issues too, with a clearly unintended green tint.) The UK release isn't any better, as it seems to have worse banding than Decal's.

No clue on the French, Italian, and German releases.

Very disappointing, as on a rewatch this became one of my favorite movies, period.

[The Curious Sofa]

I watched this on streaming and the banding was bad, especially during the flower Busby Berkley scene, where it couldn't keep up with the details at all.

[The Curious Sofa]

Speaking of Robot Dreams, yesterday I watched The Wild Robot, the second robots+animals movie I've seen this the year which is getting rave reviews. It's still a DreamWorks animation movie through and through though, so the character designs are too cutesy, the animals too wisecracking and the studio demanded robot battle climax too bombastic for this too feel anything other than mechanical when it so desperately wants to tug you heart strings. That it tries with a syrupy score that keeps telling you what to feel at any moment and the usual DreamWork pop song montage sequences. The concept that this time a robot becomes socialised among animals and "learns emotions" through them falls flat when the animals behave and talk exactly like humans and its take on the ecosystem is a cheat.

Spoiler

Ultimately the robot teaches these animals not to eat each other which should leave half of them starved to death soon after the movie ends.

[jazzo]

We’re of similar mind. Here are my thoughts from letterbxd, although this should probably be in the 2024 topic:

I’m always happy when a film touches the masses on an emotional level as this one has, but (like with Frank Darabont's entire filmography or Inside Out or the Avatars), I just can’t muster those same feelings that The Wild Robot seems to have stirred inside everyone else on the planet. Where most find heartwarming and sincere, I (perhaps too cynically) see storytelling shorthand and easy emotional manipulation of its audience. Where most see wholesome family entertainment and profundity, I see only an empty, wasted opportunity to do something truly interesting.

Full disclosure; I haven’t read the source material, but my wife and children have, and even without their confirmation, I could tell the decision to anthropomorphize the island’s inhabitants into severely-caricatured versions of those creatures, and define each of their personalities with the same goofy cartoon character personalities we’ve all seen a thousand times before, was not author, Peter Brown’s, but a corporate studio committee one, clearly made to broaden the film’s appeal to the widest, youngest, and most profitable audience possible. But it all seems so boring and unnecessary. This film would have made money no matter what, so why not actually try to engage its young audience on the most instinctually primal level, and introduce pantomime storytelling to them? Imagine the magical picture this could have been if every frame of it didn’t talk down to its audience, or explicitly spell out every character trait or theme, and instead trust its young audience enough to come to those same conclusions on their own? Or if, instead of resembling every other cartoon animal from the last century of animation, the characters actually resembled and behaved like mammals from the real world? But when it comes to profits, adorably goofy always wins.

Much has been made of the film’s design choices, and some of it must absolutely be commended. The movie makes the bold decision to illustrate its landscapes in impressionistic blotches of seasonal colour, which I love, not just because it’s the most interesting visual trait in the whole picture, or that it, at times, almost seems Group of Seven(ish), but because it seems to be acknowledging the revolutionary work of animation designers, Mary Blair and Eyvind Earle. But, then the film makes the obtuse decision to portray every creature other than Roz in exaggerated, caricatured linework, and I found the two design philosophies constantly at odds with each other; together, antagonistic failures even though, individually, they are successful. They just don’t belong in the same movie.

Director Chris Sanders, unlike his and co-director, Dean DeBlois’ exemplary work in the original How To Train Your Dragon, also decides to shoot the film with the now sadly standard-issue free-floating animation camera; a camera that never seems to be bound by the mise en scène of the film’s world or any actual law of physics, and I found myself continually disengaged, if not out-and-out lost by any sequence with action, as the camera wove and swooped, and did things no actually camera could possibly do. Like almost every modern action movie, this technique renders every single thing and every single character within the frame weightless and hollow. And when the need to impress with craft becomes more important than the telling of the story, or when an element within the picture starts behaving in ways that simply isn’t possible, including how those things are “recorded”, I stop believing in the truth of that world.

The most incredible moment in the entire film, for me, came when (SLIGHT SPOILER) the geese flew over the submerged Golden Gate Bridge, and I realized that I was actually watching a far-flung-future, post-apocalyptic science fiction film, and not just a children’s picture, and I found myself wishing the rest of the picture was as brave or surprising.

A lot of love, time and effort clearly went into the making of this adaptation, but much of that love and many of those efforts were also just as clearly lifted from its influences. In the end, The Wild Robot has none of the nuance and emotional weight or jeopardy of The Iron Giant, E.T. (or even the director’s own How To Train Your Dragon), none of the character depth, sly satire and worldbuilding of Zootopia, and none the formal experimentation, innovation, and beauty of Wall-E. It manages to sift fragments of these elements together, and it squeezes and kneads them, but it never lets them properly rise into a satisfying whole before baking. You get a sense that The Wild Robot was a story its makers genuinely loved and wanted to share on a larger scale with the world, but somewhere along the way committee decision-making and corporate requirements for large profit-margins eroded anything too individual or personal in the translation from book to film.

The Wild Robot is certainly not a complete failure, it’s just also nowhere near a success. It just, sadly...is.

[The Curious Sofa]

Well said, you really know your animation.

[jazzo]

I am looking forward to Robot Dreams, though. Sara Varon’s original graphic novel has been a favourite of our household since my kids were little.

I’ll check it out soon!

[Finch]

I loved Robot Dreams and also would be interested to hear if any of the European discs lack the banding exhibited in the US and UK discs on top of the annoying censoring of the middle finger gestures on the latter.

[swo17]

Fantastic Machine (Alex Danielson / Maximilien Van Aertryck) – Very smart and very snappy essay film about the history of image making and faking.

Just caught up with this and thought it was fa...irly great! Stick through to the end and you'll be treated to a forum favorite YouTube video. I also thought I'd mention that this got a DVD release last year from Strand, which is better than nothing I suppose

[colinr0380]

I am looking forward to Robot Dreams, though. Sara Varon’s original graphic novel has been a favourite of our household since my kids were little.

I’ll check it out soon!

I loved Robot Dreams and also would be interested to hear if any of the European discs lack the banding exhibited in the US and UK discs on top of the annoying censoring of the middle finger gestures on the latter.

Well, I caught Robot Dreams on the TV over the weekend and liked it, though with some reservations. I actually thought the censoring of the punks giving the happy robot the finger and then the robot giving random passers by the finger in greeting with a giant black box over the top of it may have made the moment play funnier! I really loved the homage to silent cinema with all the episodic skits and especially the trip to Coney Island feeling very reminiscent of Harold Lloyd's Speedy (which has Lloyd flipping the bird briefly in it as well!)

But this film may have made me more anxious that almost anything else I have watched in a while, as after the gloriously fun opening section we get to Dog having to leave the seized up Robot on the beach for months until the beach reopens and he can reach him again. I guess I may have been approaching the film in the wrong mindset of wanting a grand friendship against all odds, where no barriers are left overcome between our two friends getting back together again. That is there to some extent, but the great bulk of the film is about both Dog and Robot having to fend for themselves (which even before the Aspen ski trip was making me think of the main character from that Michael film just trying to take their mind off things and move on with new relationships before eventually reluctantly going back to collect their abandoned original object of interest) and the grand reunion at the end comes about more through happenstance and pure luck rather than a grand project paying off. And with both characters having found new substitute companions in the meantime, that makes things a little extra awkward! Like two old friends meeting up again by surprise long after they gave up thoughts of ever seeing each other again: older, somewhat wiser, and with one having had a heck of a lot of plastic surgery done on them in the interim!

Whilst I loved a few of Robot's specific situations (the time taken over the birds being born and learning to fly, to leaving the nest of Robot's body behind) and dreams (the Wizard of Oz into Busby Berkeley musical number one), I found the continual drifting off into reveries before re-setting back to 'what really happened' of being stuck back on the beach to become rather frustrating! I guess there is only so much that you can do with a static character, I suppose! But then having Robot being dismembered and scrapped for parts was rather rough as well, and just made me more annoyed at Dog for seemingly forgetting about Robot in the interim to go make 'real' friends flying kites in the park and suchlike! (Implicitly raising the idea of having to grow up, put away childish toys, and the sense of inevitably growing more distant from friends upon getting a girlfriend/partner)

Sure, Robot may 'just' be a robot, but there was a responsibility to at least take care of his (sentient) property (and of not littering!) there that Dog should have had that would have overruled any closed gates, court orders and barred entrances to the beach in order that he could get his stuff back. That may be the main point of the film, in the sense that Dog was always playing it safe when everyone else in the world is just doing their own thing rules be damned, whether for good or ill (see the way that we get the question of whether Dog could have hired a boat and reached the beach from the sea answered with the first group of people who find Robot and set about removing his limbs. But Dog never really appears to have considered that as even an option), but it still had me constantly on edge and wanting the situation of Robot on the beach to get resolved properly so that then we could move on and have fun with the story! So to find out that it was the entire story more or less, was a little aggravating!

But again, I did love the commitment to silent film style, the animations were very cute and I agree on the capturing of New York in the 1980s as being one of its strong points (the regular hoving into view of the Twin Towers seeming especially pointed every time it occurred). The name of the director also rang a small bell and I realised that they also did the 2012 Snow White silent-style film Blancanieves, which felt a bit Quay Brothers-esque!