Too Many Movies: The Swedish Robot Invasion

This week, Joe McCulloch claimed You, The Living for Spain while Tucker tried to make sense of the emotions caused by Terminator: Salvation.

You, the Living
Directed by Roy Andersson
Joe McCulloch

Generally, I’d say there’s only a couple hundred or so people in the English-speaking world up for a feature-length Swedish sketch comedy/anti-comedy assemblage that plays like a self-devouring story suite of Joe Sedelmaier commercials culminating in the Where’s the Beef lady beholding Armageddon, but it looks like 36 of ‘em were every movie critic that bothered, ‘cause this thing’s currently logging a perfect score at Rotten Tomatoes.

Obviously that’s not an ironclad criterion of appeal -- Netflix users have it ranked at 3.2 stars, 0.1 below Broken Lizard’s The Slammin’ Salmon -- so let me assure and caution you that You, the Living is the kind of movie where an executioner steps into the electric chair chamber and notices a spark leaping as he absently turns a dial on the death panel, causing him to intently consult the user’s manual as the chaplain wanders in and, possibly unaware of the situation, starts leafing through his Bible, both men reading in awkward silence until the screaming prisoner is led in. This is part of a larger series of segments initially depicting a man driving in slow traffic leaning out of his driver’s side window and telling the you, the viewer, of a calamitous dinner party dream, then playing the same dream out at tremendous length but focusing only on inessential details, such as the man’s attorney softly weeping at his sentencing.

There’s a lot of tears in this thing, enough to dampen the edges of takes so they’ll stick together - an early diptych of scenes involve an elementary schoolteacher attempting unsuccessfully to not cry in front of the class because her husband called her a hag, immediately followed by a carpet salesman navigating a mild screw-up on the floor and then erupting into tears because he called his wife a hag, even though she called him an old fart to begin with, thus prompting a short debate between the story’s only two customers as to whether it’s worse to be called a hag or an old fart, while an oblivious window shopper only catches on a second before the scene break. Games occur: ‘wacky’ Dixieland music starts to play out a tortured boyfriend reluctantly abandoning his exhibitionistic self-pitying lover, except she then starts to speak-sing along with the soundtrack and it’s subsequently revealed that the music is played diegetically by other characters, interspersed all throughout the movie, even in people’s imaginings. Another trick: a woman is shown pressing her senile mother to tell us about her childhood but only grows more and more desperate, the joke being it’s actually not in any way a comedy skit, just a nice woman getting really upset over her mother’s dementia in the midst of more direct humor.

This interplay of comedy and anti-comedy vis-à-vis deadpan absurdism as performed by nonprofessionals isn‘t unfamiliar -- indeed, the picture’s a quasi-sequel to Andersson’s vignette-based prior feature, 2000’s Songs from the Second Floor -- but the contrast also functions as a segue between Acts I & II. Soon a big storm breaks out to temporarily link some characters via sound design, and the comedy/anti-comedy balance reverses so that sketches become mostly blunt depictions of anxiety inhabiting the exoskeleton of comedy. I mean, even more so than straightforward comedy - you never can tell what’s beneath all that armor, but you generally reach viscera once you dig enough. Regardless, the film becomes still and laden with portent (“tomorrow is another day” is uttered several times), and, for most of us, a focused struggle over the course of several scenes (deliberately hanging too long after their punchlines) between reading a lot of maybe-comedy through subtitles and taking in Andersson’s disarmingly visual direction, blending funny mise-en-scène, a terrific eye for faces and ultra-beige production design.

Luckily, someone then drops dead in the middle of an especially extended scene series -- I’m told there’s exactly 50 scenes in the movie, so multiple viewings may reveal a more delicate, determined tonal structure -- leading us into the aching, elegiac Act III, anchored by an absolutely bravura stretch wherein a young woman, one of the saga’s recurring faces, fantasizes about her wedding night with a rock singer husband playing guitar while she unwraps kitchenware gifts and everyone applauds as their room floats by like a hotel that’s a train. It’s startlingly rich, revealing, funny, heartbreaking, and softly ominous, leading into a brassily ominous finale reminiscent of A Serious Man, an even more excellent comedy that’s even less of a comedy than this. And just as the Coen Brothers summarize their film ahead of time with a handy fable, Andersson helpfully tells you what’s going to happen right up front in the form of a sleeping man awakened by a rushing train and addressing you, the viewer, the living, before the main titles. Life is but a dream, and these are only sketches.

Terminator: Salvation
Stuff? There's stuff in it, 2009
Tucker Stone

The first Terminator film is one of my mother's favorite movies. When I was very little, watching it with my little brother while she surreptitiously distracted us during the nipples-out sex scene, she explained to us that the reason she liked it wasn't because it was a great action movie--which it was, and still is--but because it was a love story, and a very good one at that. Whenever I see one of these films, I still hear her voice in my head, talking about her favorite scene, when Kyle Reese tells Sarah Connor how he came across time for her. When I miss her, and I do, I think about those moments.

This film, the fourth installment in one of the most financially doomed ones in film history, served as an attempt to restart the machines after the dull cash grab of Terminator 3. It was supposed to be the beginning of a trilogy, one that would be set in a post-apocalyptic world ridden with robots and death, a long-form version of what Terminator 2 had only shown glimpses of. It was supposed to succeed without Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was supposed to make as much money as Iron Man.

It botched the landing on all of those.

The time travel paradoxes in Terminator were never that problematic, even when they didn't make sense. (In the first film, the best response to an audience attempting to read-for-logic comes via Reese, when he hurriedly responds to a question regarding the future by saying "I don't know tech stuff.") Being a James Cameron film, specificity and intricate comprehension isn't the point anyway--moving forward is. McG seems to have grasped that concept--don't worry so much about explanations, just keep going--but he did so without ever coming up with any particular story in the first place.

The plot of Salvation works out like this: there's a guy with amnesia who is pretty tough, and he meets up with a couple of kids, one of whom is a little girl that freezes like a startled deer whenever an evil robot is about to attack, the other of whom is the young version of Michael Biehn's character from the first film. Across town, there's John Connor, played by Christian Bale's version of Batman with the suit on--and if you couldn't stop smirking at that gravelly Batman voice, you'll bust your sides when he does it without a mask--and he's hanging out with Common and shooting robots during the day. On his downtime, he gets on the radio and makes cryptic promises to whoever is listening about how they're part of the resistance merely by being alive. (And somebody needs to tell Lil' Kyle Reese that, because one thing that makes Kyle Reese really mad is when people wear red armbands--the sign of the Resistance--without "earning" them.) After some action scenes, Kyle gets kidnapped, it turns out that the amnesiac guy (Sam Worthington from Avatar) is some kind of proto-Terminator cyborg, robot body over human heart and brain, and John Connor convinces everybody in the Resistance to put all their faith in a magic radio signal that he and Common have only tested once. And then they put all these things together in a building where a naked man with a digital version of Arnold's face attacks Connor and Sam Worthington gets in a big argument with a television screen. And then a nuclear explosion goes off while a helicopter flies 300 yards away from it unscathed. And then open heart surgery in a desert tent (not sanitary!) with a former veterinarian doing the deed. And then Christian Bale repeats more quotes from the previous movies on the radio.

There's plenty of other stuff that happens, including one scene where a motorcycle Terminator gets fooled by the old "play some Guns n' Roses and stretch a rope across the road" trick, despite multiple earlier scenes where the motorcycle Terminators are shown to be really nimble and totally capable of spotting and reacting in milliseconds to road hazards. There's also a scene where they finally put a face on the machine so that the machine can explain, in explicit detail, how they planned for all of this random shit to happen just so they could Kill John Connor. Even dumber, the face of the machine is Helena Bonham Carter, because amnesiac cyborgs can more easily relate to Helena Bonham Carter. (This is what the machine said.)

So the whole movie--the entire time you watch it--is about killing John Connor. Here's the thing: the machines could have killed John Connor about 800 different ways, in this film, before they get anywhere near the end of the film, which is when they finally try. And they try by sending one naked robot after him, and they don't even give the robot a weapon. Remember the deal with the first three films? That part of the conceit was that these solitary human beings had to fight an unstoppable naked robot, and their only weapons were handguns and shit that didn't work? The machines know this, and yet they send a robot--the same robot that failed to work before--against an adult John Connor who has all kinds of badass sci-fi future weapons. And where do they try this shitty, horrible attempt?

In a factory that makes robots.

You can't make fun of this shit. It's like saying you want to beat up Rocky, and you've always wanted to beat up Rocky, and now you've tricked Rocky into coming inside your Ivan Drago factory where you have thousands of Ivan Dragos, all of whom are armed with futuristic gatling guns, and sure, Rocky has some guns as well, but fuck him, you've got the element of surprise on your side. And then you send out one Ivan Drago, with no guns, to do the deed. And then you lose. And then, even though you've got all these other robots in your robot factory, you sit around and let him set up bombs inside your factory, and then you sit around and watch him leave in a plane that you could easily shoot down with any of the hundreds of gigantic gun robot planes that you also build inside your factory, but you don't. Even though he's weak and nearly dead from the piece of metal that was shoved through his beating heart. Nah, fuck it. You tried your best, even though you didn't. Let him blow the whole factory up with a nuclear bomb. You can try again later.

Except you can't, because this movie actually was so bad that the production company is going to have to auction off the rights for less than they're worth. You fucked it up that bad!

I take it back. This movie is kind of impressive.

-Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, 2010

Comments

[Sharif]

"The first Terminator film is one of my mother's favorite movies."

Sounds like you had a great mom, Tucker.

[Tim O'Neil]

I have to admit I have a soft spot in my heart for Terminator 3. I didn't see it until a few years after it was released, but for some reason it seemed like a really nice capstone (tombstone?) to a whole generation of 80s and 90s action films. It was slight but it definitely had an elegiac feel to it, sort of - like this is the last of a dying breed, we shall never see its like again. Arnold's performance, with that in mind, was actually very good.

[AComment]

Man, Sweden is a pretty awesome place to live in, given the right attitude.

[Matthew J. Brady]

You've sold me on that Swedish shit, man. That sounds pretty nuts. I did see Songs from the Second floor; I liked when they made the little girl jump off the cliff for no reason. Ah, Scandinavia! Land of crippling depression, even with the hot women all over the place.